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Carrion Luggage  Native to the Americas, the turkey vulture (Cathartes aura) travels widely in search of sustenance. While usually foraging alone, it relies on other individuals of its species for companionship and mutual protection. Sometimes misunderstood, sometimes feared, sometimes shunned, it nevertheless performs an important role in the ecosystem. This scavenger bird is a marvel of efficiency. Rather than expend energy flapping its wings, it instead locates uplifting columns of air, and spirals within them in order to glide to greater heights. This behavior has been mistaken for opportunism, interpreted as if it is circling doomed terrestrial animals destined to be its next meal. In truth, the vulture takes advantage of these thermals to gain the altitude needed glide longer distances, flying not out of necessity, but for the joy of it. It also avoids the exertion necessary to capture live prey, preferring instead to feast upon that which is already dead. In this behavior, it resembles many humans. It is not what most of us would consider to be a pretty bird. While its habits are often off-putting, or even disgusting, to members of more fastidious species, the turkey vulture helps to keep the environment from being clogged with detritus. Hence its Latin binomial, which translates to English as "golden purifier." I rarely know where the winds will take me next, or what I might find there. The journey is the destination. |
| Today's article is old, ancient, even decrepit by internet standards. Nautilus dates it as 2013. But human nature hasn't changed much in 12 years, so here it is. To grasp how unlikely it was for Gloria C. MacKenzie, an 84-year-old Florida widow, to have won the $590 million Powerball lottery in May... I know you're thinking it. Okay, I was thinking it, and now you will be too: is she still kicking? The answer is no; she died four years ago, at the age of 92. That's a decent run; my dad made it that far. Well, there was the lawsuit she filed against her son for mismanaging the finances, but family issues are gonna issue whether you've got money or not; it's just that, with money, you get to hire the best lawyers and make your family dispute public. The news likes to latch on to reasons why winning the lottery won't make your life better, maybe because it fits the whole Puritan "you gotta work for it" mentality, but the truth is more complicated: some jackpot winners do indeed crash and burn, and some go on to lives of happiness and contentment, but most people just go on being people, and people's lives have their ups and downs. To continue from the article: ...Robert Williams, a professor of health sciences at the University of Lethbridge in Alberta, offers this scenario: head down to your local convenience store, slap $2 on the counter, and fill out a six-numbered Powerball ticket. It will take you about 10 seconds. To get your chance of winning down to a coin toss, or 50 percent, you will need to spend 12 hours a day, every day, filling out tickets for the next 55 years. Honestly, I didn't check the math, but that sounds about right. There was a thing in, I think, Texas recently, where a group managed to spend considerably less than 10 seconds on each combination, and basically brute-force hacked the lottery. That can work, mathematically, when the jackpot is high enough and the lottery commission, or whatever, doesn't have safeguards in place. I think they do, now. Williams, who studies lotteries, could have simply said the odds of winning the $590 million jackpot were 1 in 175 million. But that wouldn’t register. “People just aren’t able to grasp 1 in 175 million,” Williams says. This is not a slight on "people," any more than if you said "people just aren't able to fly without mechanical assistance." He offers up an evolutionary psychology explanation, which always turns me right off, but whatever the reason, very big or very small numbers just don't register on us emotionally. Also, very, very few people really understand probability or statistics, even when the odds can be counted on one's fingers and toes. It may seem easy to understand why we keep playing. As one trademarked lottery slogan goes, “Hey, you never know.” Somebody has to win. That's not strictly true when you're talking about lotteries with progressive jackpots. The whole reason they're "progressive" is that no one won the first round. But to really understand why hundreds of millions of people play a game they will never win, a game with serious social consequences, you have to suspend logic and consider it through an alternate set of rules—rules written by neuroscientists, social psychologists, and economists. Are we really suspending logic, though? Or are we looking at it logically from different perspectives? The bulk of the article indeed looks at it from a different perspective: that of marketing, which combines psychology, economics, probability, intuition, aesthetics, and probably a few other disciplines I'm forgetting. I don't need to quote much else, but to summarize, the gist of it is that the lottery sells a dream. What you're paying for is intangible: hope, wishes, what-ifs. That's not necessarily bad, even though one could argue that we should be experiencing these intangibles without having to exchange something tangible (money) for them. For instance, it can provide some clarity on who and what really matters to us in life. To be clear, though I know I've written similar things before, I'm not ragging on anyone who plays a lottery. That would be hypocritical of me; I haven't messed with a lottery in many years, but I do occasionally gamble. I do it for entertainment, and to me, a lottery is just not nearly as fun as blackjack or even shiny blinky noisy slot machines. Other people do other things for entertainment. Someone might spend hundreds of dollars on Taylor Swift tickets or whatever, but they don't get judged as much as a gambler who spends the same amount in Vegas; they're just doing what they like and, at the end of the night, all they have is memories and maybe a T-shirt. It's when you spend more than you can afford that the problem comes in, but that's a problem no matter what you're spending on. Still, it's worth reading articles like the one here, I think, because it delves into that psychology, and maybe helps understand people's reasons. Those reasons are, as I noted, not entirely logical. As remote as the odds of winning a lottery can be, there are odds even more remote. Practically no one blasts Rowling for being a billionaire (they blast her for other stuff, but that's irrelevant here), probably because the perception is that she "earned" it. She wrote some of the most popular books in history and, more importantly for the money angle, had them made into popular movies. But she happened to have the right idea at the right time and the capacity to execute it, the chances of which are roughly the same as those of winning a lottery. The only difference is she did more work than just filling out ovals on a slip of paper. I know, intellectually and emotionally, that I have a greater chance of winning a lottery jackpot than of hitting it that big as a writer. And yet, I still write, and I don't play the lottery. Other people have different talents and opportunities, and some have none, so the lottery may be their only recourse. It's just important, I think, to be aware of how we can be manipulated by marketing tactics. And by our own internalized thoughts about who deserves what. |
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