Humor

"humor functions in part to help us coordinate with close associates on what norm violations to excuse" - That's from Overcoming bias, the post is here.

I'd like to offer my own anecdotal evidence. I was at a bit of a dinner party last night. The group tended to grow as the evening progressed, and I didn't think of it at the time, but there was an interesting trend in the humor.

The group started small, and everyone knew, more-or-less, everyone's background. It was a very well educated group, and the humor was a sophisticated social-political-historical commentary. As the evening progressed, and more members joined the group, it became impossible to ascertain everyone's background, and there was clearly some political and religious variation. The humor progressively devolved as the night went on, though the members that were added to the group we no less educated or intelligent than the original participants.

The evening concluded with a bunch of lawyers and economists smiling at bathroom humor; the jokes that light up the room two hours earlier would probably have been met with blank stares or awkward seat shifting by the same people who had uproariously partaken.

Traffic heuristics

I walk ten minutes to work everyday. I've found that having a short commute is highly under-rated in popular discourse, though I guess it isn't in the happiness research.

I moved to a new city three months ago (my current city), and my first walk to work took at least 15 minutes. It has progressively gotten shorter - over 30% shorter. It is interesting to note how this happens. I've been able to shorten my route by:

-finding parking lots on the corners of city blocks and crossing them

-crossing on side streets to avoid waiting for lights

-following the flow of people instead of watching the traffic lights

So this last point gets to the heart of this post. I'm trying to figure out if not watching traffic lights increases my risk of an accident. I wonder if our risk of an accident over our lifetime is normally distributed given our behaviors/appetite for risk. If so, each of these people that I allow to be my "traffic heuristic" lies somewhere on that distribution - and if the way I pick these people is random, then their behaviors should cancel out, and I should be sitting right in the middle of the risk distribution. So I guess the question becomes - where did I sit in the distribution before my heuristic approach? My guess is that I was a higher risk than the mean, simply because I am not used to cities, and I am less adept to reading the flow of people and cars than the average person in the city.

So maybe not watching traffic lights does more than save time.