About the video: A short clip from 'Foolproof Equations for a Perfect Life' where Garth Sundem helps some engineering students calculate there chances of meeting a girl outside World of Warcraft.
GS foolproof from Science on Vimeo.
Human beings are endowed with the ability of decision making; they are capable of evaluating and rationally arriving at a decision. While this may have been the conventional wisdom, experts beg to differ. They claim to have proved via experiments that the majority of decisions made by human beings tend to be wrong. They say that decision making is a complex process and a whole host of factors need to be put into consideration before making a right decision. But before you think that everything is lost, researchers may have finally figured out a formula that assists in making the right decisions. As author and mathematician Garth Sundem suggests, there is an analogy between decision making and mathematics and we can solve practical problems using mathematical tools. In this video, one of a five part video series, Garth Sundem offers his services to four computer nerds in order to find them a girl friend and is quite successful at that.
Consider this: every year when the Discovery Channel broadcasts "Shark Week" visits to Florida beaches decline. Presumably, the network's programming makes the waters no less safe (assuming sharks are not, in fact, empowered by cable television). However, after watching a week of kicking legs seen from below, the idea of shark attack is refreshed in our minds and we choose not to offer ourselves as bait.
This phenomenon is known as an availability heuristic — a heuristic being a rule-of-thumb. Our rationality is subverted by easily available sensationalist images.
http://www.science20.com/geek_logik/geek_logik_the_science_of_decisions_and_foolproof_equations_for_a_perfect_life
On Discovery Channel's "Foolproof Equations for a Perfect Life," human decision making is challenged with a card experiment. Subjects choose between two cards and rationalize their choice even when offered the wrong card.
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