Quote of the Day: Dan Airley Edition

But is this really the case? Before you make up your mind, let’s see what the empirical evidence shows.

Dan Airley in his new book, The Upside of Irrationality. How sad it is that he (rightly, I think) has to remind readers not to make up their mind before seeing the evidence?

Update: Another quote from a discussion of why we care more about things "we make" as opposed to just buy:

A would-​be baker would hardly be willing to consider herself (or publicly admit to being) someone who makes birthday cakes from “just a mix.” Not only would she feel humiliated or guilty; she might also disappoint her guests, who would feel that they were not being treated to something special.

This is probably an example of how I'm a hyper-ratonal person. I'd never want someone to bake me a birthday cake instead of buying a better tasting cake. I'm also not sure why people assume baking a cake from scratch takes more effort than baking a cake from mix: the time it takes to mix the ingredients and put them in the oven is trivial compared to other circumstances. For instance, if you don't have the mix and you have to walk through the rain for 30 minutes to get it (true story, that happened once) then all the sudden making a cake with a mix is vastly more time-consuming. Or suppose that someone's birthday is on Sunday and you spend a few hours baking a cake before church. Compare that with a birthday on Friday where you spend Thursday night (when you have something due the next day) baking from a mix. Most people would say giving up the time on Thursday night was a bigger sacrifice.

Sport Demographics

I found this map on ESPN.com. It tells an interesting story about sports demographics.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The blue states considered Brazil's outser from the World Cup the bigger upset of the year while purple voted for Kentucky's quick defeat in the NCAA basketball tournament. (Ohio is green because it voted for Cleveland loss in the NBA playoffs and the D.C. metro states are red because of a similar loss in the NHL playoffs. Gray states had ties.)

So what separates the purple from the blue? Since the majority of states are purple I think it's easier to ask what sets the blue states apart?

Well, we'll start with a theory, based on the "ambiguity effect," that says people discard options where it's hard to assess the probability. That means I'm assuming basketball fans will vote for the NCAA upset while soccer fans will tend towards the World Cup upset, because it's easier to put in perspective.

Under this theory, blue states should be states with lots of soccer fans. And who likes soccer? Yuppies and Latin Americans. Indeed, it turns out that the Yuppie states (Northeast, but notably not Maine) and the states with large Hispanic populations (Florida, border states) voted for the World Cup upset.

But what's up with Georgia and Louisiana? They don't have large Hispanic populations. Perhaps they don't care much about NCAA basketball either.