Vsauce!
Kevin here, and I haven’t had food or drink in days.
I'm so hungry and I'm so thirsty... and I've got these Bagel Bites and this bottle of Mountain
Dew.
If I’m equally hungry and thirsty, do I eat or drink?
Eat or drink?
Eat or drink?!
Eat or drink?
And if I sit here paralyzed by indecision long enough, I will die of starvation AND
dehydration.
Well, technically dehydration first.
ANYWAY.
THAT’S NOT GOOD.
This classic decision-theory paradox was created in the 14th century by Jean Buridan involving
a famished donkey who dies from indecision and this whole thing is completely irrelevant,
absurd and has no bearing on our modern, sophisticated, 21st century lives, right?
WRONG.
We’re currently faced with one of the most important choices of our time.
EVERYTHING hinges on what we decide.
Your future is at stake.
And in this period of dissension, friction, and strife, and everything that’s going
on we need to band together and elect a President... of YouTube.
After months of debates and campaigning, the people have spoken.
Two candidates have emerged: the macabre internet archaeologist Whang! and the feculent animation
goblin PsychicPebbles.
It is a time for choosing.
Let’s meet our candidates.
Whang: As your YouTube President, I promise to restore this website to its former glory
days.
Its days of offensive, grotesque, brand-unfriendly wild west chaos.
“Malicious insults based on intrinsic attributes,” that's what this website was built on!
Copyright?
Shmopyright!
C’mon!
Making fun of *censored* is hilarious!
Vote for freedom and join the Whang Gang.
Kevin: ALRIGHT!
Uh.
Thank you, Whang.
Uh… let’s hear from Pebbles.
Pebbles: As your YouTube President, I pledge that every YouTuber with over a million subscribers
must compete in an annual no-holds-barred, thunderdome-style battle royale where the
winner keeps their channel.
And all the others are deleted.
So I ask you, for a vote for fairness and to join the Cult of Pebbles.
Uhhh y’know we have a great selection of imported cheese and that’s just one of the
perks.
I’m not even gonna go on.
But yeah, there’s a lot.
That’s just one.
Kevin: Fighting to the death sounds bad but I do like cheese...
I don’t know who to pick.
You though, you probably know right away whether you’re in the lawless Whang Gang or you
want to be lured in by the Cult of Pebbles.
They’re so different from each other that the choice is obvious.
Or you definitely know which one you don’t want.
Which is GOOD for the candidates!
No.
No, it’s surprisingly... not.
I’VE GOT GAS.
So I’m gonna open up a gas station.
Jake’s Pump ‘n’ Dump gas station already exists near the middle of town, it’s right
next to Taco Bell, obviously so.
I’ll open mine further away -- we’re selling gas, as long as the prices are similar people
are just gonna fill up where it’s closest.
Jake can have these customers, I’ll have these.
No problem, right?
...Wrong.
If the two are far apart, and we do pretty much the same thing, which we do, we’ll
be splitting the customers in that distance between us.
So… the smaller that distance, the fewer customers I lose to the Pump ‘n Dump.
I get everything on my side of town, and I don’t lose anything between our two gas
stations.
And hey, if I run some amazing gas station sushi promotion, maybe I can even pull some
customers from barely into Jake’s side of town.
The further I am away, the more people I have to convince to choose my gas station and not
his.
This is why McDonald’s and Burger King have basically the same menu with their own spin
and even their logos are both primarily yellow and red and why fast food places in general
are all typically located near each other.
It’s called Hotelling’s Law, outlined in the 1929 "Stability in Competition" by
economist Harold Hotelling, stating that it’s rational for two competitors to be as similar
as possible to each other while retaining their own distinct identity.
Cool.
TIME FOR WHANG!
Whang: As your YouTube President, I will bring back the old five star-rating system.
Pebbles: Well, as your YouTube President, I too will bring back the star rating system.
But there will be six stars.
Not five!
On this issue, the two candidates are… pretty close.
There’s a difference, but it’s not much.
Hotelling’s Law happens with voting -- it’s in a candidate’s interest to be pretty similar
to their opponent to minimize that loss in the middle.
HEY!
Do you want an apple or an orange?
Just pick one.
Yeah, that’s not very hard.
You probably like one fruit more than the other so it’s a simple choice.
But do you want this apple or… that apple?
How do you even make that decision?
You base it on the size of the apple?
The shape of the apple?
Its stem?
That’s Fredkin’s Paradox: the closer two choices are, the harder it is to choose.
So at this point I really start to analyze.
I dig deep.
I stress over little differences and can even see some that aren’t really there, because
to make a meaningful choice I need there to be a difference.
And now you’re thinkin’, “This is like a C. Northcote Parkinson problem.”
And you’re right.
In 1957, C. Northcote Parkinson proposed that the more you analyze something, the more obsessed
you become with the less-relevant details and… forget the really big stuff.
He wrote that, ‘The time spent on any item of an agenda will be in inverse proportion
to the sum of money involved.’
“WHERE SHOULD I GO TO COLLEGE!?” is a question I put some thought into and it cost
tens of thousands of dollars.
“WHAT VIDEO GAME SHOULD I GET?!” is a question I OBSESS over and that’ll cost
60 bucks at most.
I’m trapped in the “Tyranny of Small Decisions” -- What economist Alfred E. Khan called that
hyperfocus on the tiny details that actually gets you further from the overall outcome
you wanted in the first place.
And then Sayre’s Law knocks on my forehead and says "In any dispute the intensity of
feeling is inversely proportional to the value of the issues at stake" -- like a couple who’s
constantly fights over whether the toilet paper feeds from the front or the back and
never discusses the mounting credit card debt from buying old PS1 strategy guides off eBay.
I just beat Legend Of Dragoon recently…
It was awesome.
So.
HOW’S THAT PRESIDENT OF YOUTUBE CHOICE GOIN?
Now that I’m in the weeds, I don’t know who to choose, I’m emotionally invested
in figuring it out, I go deep on less-important details, and I’m kinda starting to lose
my mind.
So Alright Alright Wait wait wait.
How about this?
Maybe this election is not even about me.
Maybe I want to do what’s best for the world around me.
Think about a bored family in Texas!
It’s Saturday, no one’s doing anything.
The dad suggests they all take a trip up to Abilene an hour away because he thinks the
family will enjoy it.
He knows the drive sucks and he’ll sweat the whole time, so he’s not too excited,
but his family?
They’ll love it.
He asks his wife and she’s happy to go to Abilene because she thinks the group wants
it, too.
She asks their son, and he says yes because he doesn’t want to disappoint his parents.
Their daughter doesn’t want to be the only protest vote, and at this point she would
lose 3-1 anyway, so she enthusiastically says yes, too.
And that’s how a family of 4 unanimously voted to take a long, hot trip in a car full
of sweat and Dad’s farts that NONE of them actually wanted to take.
That’s Jerry B. Harvey’s “Abilene Paradox” -- and voting for what no one really wants
happens a lot in selfless democracies.
But here’s my question: Is that just a function of having only two choices?
Whang or Pebbles, stay home or go to Abilene?
It’s got to get easier when you have more choices, right?
Wrong!
Arrow's impossibility theorem shows us that when voters have 3 or more different options,
there’s just no way to get exactly the right community-wide outcome even if we rank candidate
preferences.
We’ve got Whang and Pebbles, and we could throw in SmarterEveryDay and Lindsey Ellis
and Marques Brownlee and Ssoyoung and preferentially rank them all 1 through 6, and we still would
not get the YouTube government we all wanted.
SO WHY SHOULD I EVEN BOTHER?
And how much do you or I count, anyway?
In 1793, French philosopher Marquis de Condorcet’s wrote that, "In single-stage elections, where
there are a great many voters, each voter’s influence is very small.
It is therefore possible that the citizens will not be sufficiently interested to vote."
Look at my plate of sand!
One single vote is really the inverse of the Greek Sorites paradox where you remove grains
of sand one by one from a heap.
Here we go.
Removing grains.
One at a time.
Grain two here we go.
Grain thr-- alright y’know what this is gonna take forever.
Look.
At what point does the heap stop being a heap?
At what point does your infinitesimal vote add up to actually mattering?
PARADOX LIGHTNING ROUND.
If a rational voter relies on their self-interest to make their choice, the costs of that vote
are usually greater than the benefits -- Anthony Downs’ paradox of voting.
Adding a new state can reduce the number of Congressional representatives in another state
-- apportionment paradox.
Or a state with a fast-growing population can lose representatives to a slow-growing
state -- population paradox.
Want to reduce the use of fossil fuels?
Green policies can incentivize a short-term rise in consumption: Hans-Werner Sinn’s
‘green paradox.’
It’s so hard to make sense of all this.
When I add up all the logic traps and complexities of something that SEEMS so simple…
Drink or Eat?
Apple A or Apple B?
Hypothetically make my family happy or tell the truth that I don’t want to Abilene and
neither do they?
The more I think about it, the less I’m sure I know.
Every time we make a choice like Whang! v. Pebbles, or vote for a real president, we’re
subject to all of these hidden consequences of decision theory -- and mine are different
from yours.
You've got to think about all the options.
All the scenarios.
All the contradictions and all the fallacies.
But ultimately, it's MORE important that you don't get stuck in a cognitive web of indecision.
Psyching yourself out from making a choice at all.
Or you'll end up staring at Bagel Bites and Mountain Dew until you're a dead gamer donkey.
And as always -- thanks for watching.
I was gonna eat this but it’s freezing cold so…
I am gonna eat it I’m just gonna heat it up,