“Buildings and cars, electricity and language–what a piece of work is man, right? What triumphs of rationality, you know? If you really take it all in, you can become enamored with a smug belief about how smart you and the rest of the human race have become.
Yet you lock your keys in the car. You forget what it was you were about to say. You get fat. You go broke. Others do it too. From bank crises to sexual escapades, we can all be really stupid sometimes.”
–David McRaney, You Are Not So Smart: Why You Have Too Many Friends on Facebook, Why Your Memory is Mostly Fiction, and 46 Other Ways You’re Deluding Yourself
Pretty ironic for a book about unconscious biases, huh?
You know, I have locked my keys in my car before. A couple of times. I have also been (and am still) fat. Maybe it’s just my fictitious memory talking, but I definitely perceive one as being way more worthy of chagrin than the other.
Seriously. I’ve done plenty of stupid things, but having more adipose tissue than average isn’t one of them.