Hundred Mile Enron

The Hundred Mile Wilderness, ME
Mile: 2152

Given a certain number of hours bog-hopping, any person will get his or her feet wet. Jet Li may take a thirty hours, Deputy Colchrane of Hazzard County may take thirty seconds. It takes me three hours or so of solid root and rock hopping before it happens. Bog jumping is like dodging bullets: you only need to make the mistake once. One slip, your foot is wet. And what the hell, if one foot is wet, why not both? Then you can just tromp through the bog and stamp out miles, instead of mincing about on rocks and roots and trekking poles.

But then we have a quandary: why not just stomp into the bog at once and make the miles from the get go? Because we do not know where the bog begins and ends. When we start bog jumping, we are doing it in the optimistic hope that the bog will take less time to traverse than we can expect our reflexes to hold out.

This hooks into an interesting study on loss aversion I alluded to a few weeks ago. In it, we see people turning down a 50/50 $100 bet that offers 150 on a win and 0 on a loss. Well, it's easy to criticize people for turning it down, but maybe their intuitive distrust of the situation is a good survival strategy.

For example, the game assumes the odds stay the same throughout the play time. What if they don't? What if the odds improve later, or start bad and get better? Then other players "in the know" get ahead, which brings in a whole lot of other very unscientific feelings.

Or say that one player has 200 to start the game, and another has a grand. The guy with a grand has a much better chance of not being shut down, where the guy with 200 could get shut down after one bad break. This is why you distrust fund managers who advise retirees to take risky investments. The retirees have no more cash coming in- if it's all or nothing and you go broke, you are done.

And if the client is also your employee, you open up a whole other set of risks. Like them wanting to kill you. Slowly.