I was thinking about this very topic the other day in the shower. I had a bar of soap that I wanted to lob across the bathroom into a small box I usually keep it in. Between the box and me was, of course, an open toilet bowl.
I felt that my natural inclination was to overshoot—to error on the side of safety. I realized this and thought that I should instead suppress my fear of failure to maximize my chance of success. I then realized that that is a popular meme in our culture, especially as it relates to athletic feats. Popular memes make me suspicious, so a second’s more thought convinced me that the correct path is to maximize expected utility, not chance of success, and that fishing my soap out of a bachelor’s toilet presented a rather negative value in that calculation. I concluded overshooting was best and noted that the natural, fear induced response was thus a well honed heuristic. I lamented, simultaneously, that the popular meme was probably far stronger in many people (particularly athletes) than the instinctual response, and that the necessary rationality skills to overcome this were probably lacking. I attempted to generalize my result to rock climbing, where the negative outcome is potentially death, but stopped when I realized I was about to conclude that my own rationality skills must be lacking.
Satisfied with my analysis, I then attempted the shot with the full intent of making it, the toilet be damned.
I was thinking about this very topic the other day in the shower. I had a bar of soap that I wanted to lob across the bathroom into a small box I usually keep it in. Between the box and me was, of course, an open toilet bowl.
I felt that my natural inclination was to overshoot—to error on the side of safety. I realized this and thought that I should instead suppress my fear of failure to maximize my chance of success. I then realized that that is a popular meme in our culture, especially as it relates to athletic feats. Popular memes make me suspicious, so a second’s more thought convinced me that the correct path is to maximize expected utility, not chance of success, and that fishing my soap out of a bachelor’s toilet presented a rather negative value in that calculation. I concluded overshooting was best and noted that the natural, fear induced response was thus a well honed heuristic. I lamented, simultaneously, that the popular meme was probably far stronger in many people (particularly athletes) than the instinctual response, and that the necessary rationality skills to overcome this were probably lacking. I attempted to generalize my result to rock climbing, where the negative outcome is potentially death, but stopped when I realized I was about to conclude that my own rationality skills must be lacking.
Satisfied with my analysis, I then attempted the shot with the full intent of making it, the toilet be damned.
Don’t leave us hanging!