[MUSIC] So now we've made it to a certain part. Okay, so now every time I hit go, I simulate that I went on a date or I got a job or I took a class. But I'm getting tired hitting go all the time, generating these random numbers one by one. So now we're going to go into, we know, because we know, because I know how NetLogo works, I know it has something called n values. That's another function. What it does is it take some number, let's say 10. And then it takes any code I want to put inside of these little blocks right here, which I'm going to put random. 10, plus 1, now when I run that instead of having the head go 10 times, I get this list of 10 things. because what I want to know, I don't just want to know each individual outcome. I want to know my average experience over many days, over many job interviews. So here's what we're going to do. After getting that list, I'm allowed to take the mean of all the numbers in that list. Okay, so I'm hitting up, I'm hitting Enter, and I'm rerunning that every single time. Now that's different every time, but if I made the list really long, like 1,000 numbers long, I'm not going to show you that. We're just going to take the mean. I'm going to show and they become, the numbers become really similar to each other. The average of all the numbers 1 through 10 is about five and a half. So, let's let's type that up in our code right here. I'm going to take risky bet, I'm going to put it in these blocks, I'm going to take n values,just like we saw, take the number, I'll say 100. Okay, and we're going to take the mean of that. We're going to find out, what are we going to find out? We're going to find out that the mean riskybet is always worse than the mean safe bet. If you were to go on 1,000 interviews, then you should really get jobs from your friends. The number of risky bet is always lower than the number of safe bet, very consistently. All right, so that was all when we're playing for the mean. So let's surface from the code. We had two piles of numbers. We had a jar full of the numbers seven, eight, and nine that I'm picking randomly. And we had a jar full of numbers one through ten that I was picking randomly. And what did we discover? Well, it's no surprise, with enough draws, if I'm always taking the average of the numbers that I'm getting, and this is my average experience going out, this is my average experience at my favorite restaurant, this is my average experience doing job interviews or trying jobs out. The average of this safe bet is always going to be higher than the average of the risky bet. So you should be risk averse, you should avoid risky bets. When you're playing for the mean, you when you're playing for the average over many experiences, you should play it safe and not take any risks. Now, that's not very exciting, that's not very interesting, and it's not very surprising, certainly. I mean, you might have seen it coming before we did. Why did we have to write four lines of code even to learn this new thing about ourselves? Did I really gain new insight? Well, now we are going to make a distinction. We had a distinction between the safe bit and the risky bit. Now let's make a distinction between playing for the mean and playing for the max, okay? Playing for the mean, maybe I'm not looking for a career,, I'm looking for a bunch of gigs. I just want to have the best average gig. Maybe I'm not looking for a long term relationship, I'm just looking for a bunch of dates. And I just want to have my average quality of dates be high and so on. So those are all playing for the mean. Playing for the max is okay, I'll start over. Now we have this distinction between playing for the mean and playing for the max. No I already introduced. >> Well and so on and then you go to the max again. >> And so on. So now for the max. Wait okay, let me just think for a sec. Okay, that was all playing for the mean. If you're just trying to get the best average experience, but not everything in life is playing for the average. If you think about it, sure your GPA is the average of how you did over many classes, but your GPA is different from your education. Your education is really about your best experiences over many classes combined. Your long term relationships, they're not drawn, they're not the average of all the dates you went on. They're really you taking the very best of those dates, taking the best person over a number of dates. Your favorite restaurant is the max over all the restaurants you've tried. Your career is the best over all the careers you've tried. For the most important decisions in our lives, more often that we're playing not for the mean, we're playing for the maximum over a big list of numbers, over a large number of draws from these piles of numbers. And playing for the mean is fundamentally different from playing for the max in your life, and it requires a fundamentally different approach to risk.
