Follow us on Twitter
Follow us on FacebookIn search of stupidity
@ 2004/09/17Why are people so stupid?
By "people", here, I don't mean the great mass of folk who, unlike us, lack perfect knowledge of all important things. Like what CAS latency is, and how low to aim for the maximum chance of a sustained-fire headshot from the Counter-Strike MP5.
No, I mean all of us. Me, you, him over there, your Member of Parliament, Stephen Hawking and Gore Vidal. We all do cretinous things, at least some of the time........................
For this reason, lots of game theorists today are working hard on figuring out why people so often make lousy decisions. The results of this work are finally starting to give us real predictive power over things like stock market bubbles (and other forms of gambling...), riots, and mass hallucinations. We're still a long way away from Isaac Asimov's "psychohistory", but it's looking a lot less ludicrous today than it did 20 years ago.
By "people", here, I don't mean the great mass of folk who, unlike us, lack perfect knowledge of all important things. Like what CAS latency is, and how low to aim for the maximum chance of a sustained-fire headshot from the Counter-Strike MP5.
No, I mean all of us. Me, you, him over there, your Member of Parliament, Stephen Hawking and Gore Vidal. We all do cretinous things, at least some of the time........................
For this reason, lots of game theorists today are working hard on figuring out why people so often make lousy decisions. The results of this work are finally starting to give us real predictive power over things like stock market bubbles (and other forms of gambling...), riots, and mass hallucinations. We're still a long way away from Isaac Asimov's "psychohistory", but it's looking a lot less ludicrous today than it did 20 years ago.
