{"id":589,"date":"2006-08-26T17:07:58","date_gmt":"2006-08-26T21:07:58","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.godofthemachine.com\/archives\/00000588.html"},"modified":"2007-02-21T17:27:06","modified_gmt":"2007-02-21T21:27:06","slug":"i-am-irrational-i-think","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.godofthemachine.com\/?p=589","title":{"rendered":"I Am Irrational (I Think)"},"content":{"rendered":"

I’m a betting man, and yesterday I was offered a betting proposition. The U.S. Bridge Championships<\/a> are going on now, and the great Nickell team, which has won the event eight years running, has a bye to the semifinals. My friend Justin Lall<\/a>, a bridge pro, offered me 6:1 odds on $50 on the field: in other words, he would pay off if any team but<\/i> Nickell won the event.<\/p>\n

Ordinarily I would accept happily. 6:1 is very long odds, and no matter how good Nickell is they still have to win two matches against excellent teams. Except Justin informed me that he<\/i> was getting 6.5:1 on the same 50 bucks from someone else. So taking the bet gives him a freeroll<\/a>: plus $25 if Nickell loses, break-even otherwise.<\/p>\n

I refused the bet, which, from a strictly economic point of view, is irrational. If I like the odds, then I like them. Why should I care if Justin is using me to hedge his risk?<\/p>\n

Anxiety mostly — anxiety, first, about one’s place in the dominance hierarchy<\/a>. One hates to be a pawn in someone else’s game, Es<\/i> to his Ich<\/i><\/a>, a means to his end. A moment’s reflection will convince you of the idiocy of this attitude, on which several moral philosophies, like Kant’s and Martin Buber’s, have been erected. Regardless of who initiates the transaction, Justin is just as much a means to my own end — obtaining a bet against Nickell at favorable odds — as I am to his of laying off his risk. Hasn’t he also earned a transaction fee for having done the work of negotiating the bet in the first place and then offering it, at a small profit, to me? I regard the philosophies as foolish and atavistic yet, in this case at least, persist in the attitude. If you want an instance of the dictionary definition of “irrational,” this will serve.<\/p>\n

Also involved is a related, slightly different form of anxiety which, for lack of a fancy psychological term, I will call shopping anxiety. Mencken defined Puritanism as the haunting fear that someone, somewhere may be happy: shopping anxiety is the haunting fear that someone, somewhere got a better deal. It is not clear to me why it should detract from someone’s pleasure in his new 56-inch plasma TV to discover that his neighbor bought the same model for $200 less. Neither is it clear why it annoyed me that Justin found a better bet than I had, especially since I hadn’t been out looking. But it did.<\/p>\n

Finally there is the fact that Justin is a bridge pro. He knows and has played with members of the Nickell team. He is, in short, far more competent than I to evaluate the odds, and he would rather freeroll than eat the risk. Perhaps the bet isn’t as good as I thought it was. This conceivably sound reason, I am sure, influenced me far less than the stupid ones.<\/p>\n

Nickell, as I write, has a huge deficit late in its semifinal match. Who’s sorry now?\n<\/p>\n

Update:<\/b> Despite a furious comeback, Nickell loses. I’m out 300 bones.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I’m a betting man, and yesterday I was offered a betting proposition. The U.S. Bridge Championships are going on now, and the great Nickell team, which has won the event eight years running, has a bye to the semifinals. My friend Justin Lall, a bridge pro, offered me 6:1 odds on $50 on the field: […]<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[18],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-589","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-heuristic","category-18-id","post-seq-1","post-parity-odd","meta-position-corners","fix"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.godofthemachine.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/589","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.godofthemachine.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.godofthemachine.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.godofthemachine.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.godofthemachine.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=589"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.godofthemachine.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/589\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.godofthemachine.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=589"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.godofthemachine.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=589"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.godofthemachine.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=589"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}