Wednesday, July 23, 2014

Breaches in the matrix

So last Saturday ColumbusGal and I visited good friends in Cincinnati who just bought a house, to help move some furniture and have a nice dinner in their newly remodeled kitchen with them and some other friends.

The conversation turned to buyer beware, and remarkable though it seems we couldn't remember the Latin (hard to believe but bear with me), and someone brought up the Brady Bunch episode--but we still couldn't remember it.

So Sunday, ColumbusGal is lounging around, like Peggy in Married with Children, eating bonbons and watching METV, and lo what comes up but an episode of the Brady Bunch, and guess which episode it is?

Go ahead, LAGuy, tell me that's recency bias.

Today I'm needing some utility blades and some orange juice so I walk up to the hardware store and handy mart, and on my way back, I notice a new food truck. We have a longstanding food truck nearby, one of the best in the city, but he works only Friday to Sunday. A bit worried about the interloper, and worried that I might waste away if I don't eat something, I buy a couple of sliders (pretty good) and pay with my bank card.

This is my only contact with them, and they accept payment on some Ipad or another device, and the first words out of the girl's mouth are, "I sent your receipt to your pajamaguy address." (Okay, she didn't say pajamaguy, but she gave a unique domain with which I am associated.)

So their only contact with me is my bank. So my bank gives out my email address? Pretty creepy. Facebook, of course. If I'm dumb enough to use that I get what I deserve. But my bank? (Unless Facebook bought my bank . . .)

2 Comments:

Anonymous Anonymous said...

if you are signed into Google, the whole skynet is talkin bout you

5:00 PM, July 23, 2014  
Blogger LAGuy said...

I don't know if I'd call it the recency illusion. It's more the Baader-Meinhoff phenomenon, also known as the frequency illusion, which is related to do with the bewildering array of potential coincidences out there.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_cognitive_biases

But if that's what you're selling, then caveat emptor.

6:17 PM, July 23, 2014  

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