One of my favorite episodes of 99% Invisible was episode 78: No Armed Bandit. In the episode Natasha Dow Schüll discussed the evolution of casinos and addiction psychology. At one point, she talks about how penny slots are very popular because people (a) can afford to bet many lines at once and (b) ‘win’ almost every time:
When you’re betting 300 pennies on 100 lines, you’re gonna win back a portion of those. For the first time in history, you’re not betting a token and then losing it all or doubling it tripling it. That’s a really volatile setup. This is much less volatile. You’re spreading your bet across a hundred lines and it’s really a lot safer if you want to see it that way. Because chances are you’re going to win something on some of those lines. And it just so happens that these machines are designed when you win back something to give you all the winning stimuli that comes along with a real win. And so one researcher has aptly called this a false win or losses disguised as wins. ’cause you’re putting in 45 coins and ‘winning’ 9 back, that’s a pretty radical net loss. But yet, there’s little diddies that are being played. It’s virtually no different than when you really do win.
I feel like false wins are a metaphor for much of life (and possibly for life itself if you’re feeling extra cynical).
But I also think this can happen on a group level. Consider the idea of ‘following your dreams.’ By this I mean when a youngish person invests everything they have into pursuing some long-shot goal. For example, maybe they drop out of college to try to become a famous musician, move to LA to try to get into movies, try to turn a casual interest in magic into becoming the next David Blaine, or try to become a best selling author. Think of every person who does this as a coin. If every person who did this had their story told, we would be aware of how often they failed to achieve their goals and how often they wished they hadn’t spent so many years ignoring the advice of people who told them they weren’t good enough. We would also be aware of the details of each success story. If it was a TV show and each episode was one person’s story, we might have to watch 1000 episodes detailing failures before observing one success (I have no idea what the true ratio of failures:successes is). In that case, we would be aware of whether each coin won or lost. We would feel these losses, and might not be so encouraging of mildly talented people pursuing their dreams. Alternatively, suppose pretty much the only stories we heard about were the successes. The famous musician is interviewed, looks into the camera and tells young people to always follow their dreams. The best selling author tells the story of how they kept writing no matter how many times they were rejected — and how it paid off. In this scenario, we have some awareness that there must be a bunch of people who didn’t succeed, but we don’t hear their stories. We only hear the winning sounds and flashing lights of the false win.
N=1 