Dan Gilbert: people are terrible at figuring out what makes them happy

From his TED talk:

if you were to go into a wine shop and you had to buy a bottle of wine, and you see them here for 8, 27 and 33 dollars, what would you do? Most people don't want the most expensive, they don't want the least expensive. So, they will opt for the item in the middle. If you're a smart retailer, then, you will put a very expensive item that nobody will ever buy on the shelf, because suddenly the 33-dollar wine doesn't look as expensive in comparison.

 So in price sheets we should put some outrageously expensive option for private training.

Another, bigger issue for a future blog:

Well, the question with which I'd like to end is this: If we're so damn stupid, how did we get to the moon?Because I could go on for about two hours with evidence of people's inability to estimate odds and inability to estimate value.

The answer to this question, I think, is an answer you've already heard in some of the talks, and I dare say you will hear again: namely, that our brains were evolved for a very different world than the one in which we are living. They were evolved for a world in which people lived in very small groups, rarely met anybody who was terribly different from themselves,had rather short lives in which there were few choices and the highest priority was to eat and mate today.

The issue is that many people will screw up in figuring out their priorities in diet, training, etc. because they will underestimate the value of doing so for the future, and overestimate the value of eating that pizza or brownie today.

Bernoulli's gift, Bernoulli's little formula, allows us, it tells us how we should think in a world for which nature never designed us. That explains why we are so bad at using it, but it also explains why it is so terribly important that we become good, fast. We are the only species on this planet that has ever held its own fate in its hands. We have no significant predators, we're the masters of our physical environment; the things that normally cause species to become extinct are no longer any threat to us. The only thing -- the only thing -- that can destroy us and doom us are our own decisions. If we're not here in 10,000 years, it's going to be because we could not take advantage of the gift given to us by a young Dutch fellow in 1738, because we underestimated the odds of our future pains and overestimated the value of our present pleasures.

Just as ppl underestimate the odds of getting cancer in the future and overestimate the value of junk food today.