Friday, October 02, 2015

This Week in EID - Episode 74



This was a very challenging week for me, for reasons I will spare you.  But it meant I was not able to share the EID articles during the week.  Far be it for me to deprive you of the opportunity to experience the wonders of EID, especially for those of you who don’t subscribe to the feed directly (you do know you can do that, right?). 

The article I want to bring to your attention is the one on football fans. You probably don’t need me to tell you that football fans are overly optimistic. No matter how good or bad their favorite teams were the season before, they overestimated how well they would do the following year.  But the opposite turned out to be true also. We are vindictive.  For our team’s rivals, we predict they will do worse than the evidence tells us.

Why is this important? This can manifest in many other contexts outside of sports.  You might think your own sales pitch is better than it really is and that your competitors pitch is worse. That could lead you to lose the sale.  I am sure you can imagine dozens of similar examples.

The tiny screen article is also worth reading.  This is another example where there are dozens of applications. 

The other two are not bad either.  But sadly, I am out of time.