Little risks

Revision as of 18:17, 11 September 2011

Dating would be different if all dates were first dates. You can see it in the people who don't expect second dates: they have an immature perspective on risk, and how to understand it. This doesn't just apply to dating, but really any domains where enduring uncertainty gives a chance of lasting positive benefit.

If all dates were first dates---if a positive lasting connection with somebody was not among the possible outcomes of a night out---then the best way to date would be to imagine one thousand dates, good and bad, with a thousand people. If the average enjoyment of that three years worth of nights is less than the average joy of staying at home, you should stay home. In the psychology and economics of decision making, you are reasoning about expected utility in the context of uncertainty, and you get into risk. Some people expect the average turnout to be positive, but they stay home on the chance that a given date will go bad anyway. These people are risk averse. Some do the opposite, and gamble on a frump on the chance that the night will be magical. These people are called risk seeking. And the people who play it like they see it are called risk neutral. This is dating in a world where you'll never get a second date.

How do things change if it is possible to continue seeing somebody that you like? Before we were feeling out the average joy from a thousand dates, but the numbers change when you are playing for keeps. To simplify the game, we'll say that you get to try out the thousand prospectives, and pick who you liked the best. In this case we aren't comparing a night alone with the average date, but with the yet-unknown best date in the batch. You are playing against max instead of the mean. In this context, behavior that looked risk-seeking before is the most rational (and also the most likely to make you happiest in the long run).

Scott Page gives this toy example from his book Diversity and Complexity. Imagine that you get to pull blindfolded from two big bowls: one has black and white marbles worth 8 and 9 dollars respectively, and the other urn has ten different colors of marble worth 2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9, and 10 dollars. You can think of these as two dating pools: one has higher average quality (the friends of that one classy friend), and the second is a terrifying leery dive that somehow attracts this impossible invisible minority of perfect gems (the nines and tens).

You draw a dozen marbles and get paid at the end based on what is in your hand. If the amount of money you get is the average of the marbles in your hand, you should always draw from the first urn, because you'll tend to get $8.50 (instead of just $6.00). But if I offer to pay you based on the highest value marble in your hand, you should draw from the higher-risk urn. For more than seven draws (if you pull more than seven dates from the dive) you are likely to draw a $10.00 marble at least once. If you live in a world of second dates, you should date a lot and you should take your chances with the dive.

The same goes with any other gamble that rewards the max instead of the mean. Try cooking: You will eat better if you forego the same safe recipes and just start cooking wild crazy inventions. This is because in cooking we can learn and/or write things down. Junkyards, thirftstores, research and development, learning to walk, team sports, anything that hasn't been solved yet. You only need one out of a hundred crackpot ideas to pan out. And yet, most people tend to be risk averse---or exactly wrong.

Outside the laboratory and its isolated gambles, behavior that looks reckless is rational, and trying new things out is the way to lasting happiness.