Stochastic processes

The snacks I consumed at work yesterday:
* 4 Nutter Butter Cookies ^
* 6 Peanut Butter Sandwich Crackers ^
* 4 Nature Valley Peanut Granola Bars +

That’s over 1000 calories of peanut-based food. Now, granted, I like peanuts, but this is just too much. Sadly, it’s simply another result of my deterministic tendencies.

Not sure if I’ve described this phenomenon before, but it turns out that I have too many green shirts. It so happens that I like the color green slightly more than I like other colors. So you might expect that I have slightly more green shirts than shirts of other colors. But noooo. Instead, when I’m thinking of buying a shirt, the green one always looks slightly better and so I often (but not always) end up buying it. That is, my slight green preference manifests itself every time I buy a shirt, rather than just in aggregate. The result: I have more than twice as many green shirts as shirts of any other specific color, even though I only like green a little bit more.

Similarly, with snacks. The peanut butter snack always looks just a bit better (especially when I’m at the grocery store, where I got these snacks on subsequent trips, and I haven’t been gorging myself on peanut stuff recently). Oof. Now I’m paying the price. Next time, I’m going to make decisions probabilistically.

^ (“Made with real peanut butter!”)
+ (“Dipped in peanut butter coating. Bursting with peanuts!”)

This entry was posted in Uncategorized. Bookmark the permalink.

11 Responses to Stochastic processes