You know the scene.
Han Solo is about to take the Millenium Falcon into an asteroid field to
shake Imperial pursuit when C3P0 chimes in:
"Sir, the possibility of successfully navigating
an asteroid field is approximately three thousand, seven hundred and twenty to
one!"
Han of course replies “Never tell me the odds!”
But in today’s information-saturated, over-metricized,
infographicked, post-Moneyball world, we are always told the odds.
And we are poorer for it.
Distilling all things down to algorithms and models and
stats is great for a lot of things. It’s
great for science and technology and sports banter, but there’s a cost to it as
well.
It kills the fun.
In an operations management class I took, there was a case
study contrasting Yamaha’s piano manufacturing systems with Steinway’s. The case study was written to highlight how
Yamaha’s use of automation, and standardization allowed them to produce a consistent,
high-quality piano at lower cost. This
was supposed to come across as superior to Steinway’s hand-made methods that
produced very expensive pianos that all sounded different from one another.
All of that is true. Democratising
music by making high-quality pianos broadly affordable to Tiger-moms all over
the world is surely a good thing.
But isn’t the thought that, somewhere out there, there is an
outlier piano tuned perfectly for your playing style and your living room, kind
of magical? That’s the essence of The
Human Factor in all things. You never
know when the laws of variation might give you an instance of transcendent
perfection.
This is where the 3-POs kick in: Problem number one – you’re
a crappy piano player. Problem number
two – you’ll never afford one.
Again, all true. But
why kill the fun?
Later today, a PowerBall jackpot worth around $1.4 Billion
will be up for grabs. And predictably,
the internet is already full of smug quants reminding all of us that we won’t
win, given that the odds are stacked 292 million to 1 against us.
Don’t tell us the odds.
We know the odds. We’ve always
known the odds, and when it all comes down to it, it’s not about the odds.
It’s about that magical possibility. That “1” in 292 million to 1.
Yes, our daydreams and grand plans for Porsches, Yachts, and
a University Cafeteria bearing our name are ridiculous. But they are also fun.
The gleeful thought of your entire department resigning en
masse after hitting it big, leaving only an odds-spouting troll and the boss
behind is kind of a terrible thing, but again, pretty damn fun to think about.
That narcissitic vision of starting your own foundation and (say
it with me) “making the world a better place?”
Yes, totally rote; yes, totally cliché.
But, oh, how much fun.
Yes, lotteries are, by and large, a tax on the ignorant and
hopeful. Yes, winning the lottery often
winds up being less pleasant than people think.
And yes, gambling addiction is a real thing, and can have some pretty
destructive consequences.
But you know what?
Screw all that. There’s $1.4
Billion out there with our names on it, and we’re in it to win it.
Just remember:
Never tell us the odds
