Brad's Great Leap Forward

An exploration into decision-making

CONTEXT

Chad Fears Brad

Ever since I saw the video of Brad’s jump on a random Sunday night, I haven’t been able to stop thinking about it or laughing about it. The more I watched it, beyond the utter destruction of the Darwin Award displayed, I felt that it was a great basis for exploration of decision-making, spontaneity in life, and the principle that “statistics don’t apply to individuals in a population.” Well, apparently neither do physics.

First, let’s take a formal appraisal of this video. We’re in a house party setting. For 7 seconds, Brad holds everyone’s day in the balance, while fate holds his life. He has assumed an incredible amount of variance in terms of his life and the lives of everyone attending this party. He ignores the panicked cries of “NO, Brad, NO”, and yeets.

The foam disguises the true depth of the pool, but his form is actually pretty incredible. He dodges the awning as he angles his way in the manner of a free-form dive.

Incredibly, he manages to enter the pool completely vertical, narrowly dodging the edge of the pool by what can’t be more than a foot. His drunken form is Olympic-tier.

After he stands up, the true ludicrousness of the situation starts to take hold. He nonchalantly stands in the pool, meaning that it couldn’t have been more than five feet deep. What in the ever loving fuck?

I genuinely don’t understand anything about Newtonian Physics, I guess, cause I cannot process how he emerged unscathed from the foam, unlike Marco Rubio. The probability of this dive occurring like this is so small that it’s not even worth calculating. I can guarantee that after everyone fully realized what they just witnessed, they raged. To this day, every so often, someone who witnessed the jump probably thinks about it.

Except for Brad. Do you think Brad thinks at all about what he pulled off? Almost certainly not. I cannot think of a single scenario where I, an individual who generally tries to fit my decision-making into a coherent philosophical framework and calculates accordingly, would make an equivalent leap. It’s the polar opposite of processing that anything can happen at the n=1 level and doing it without a thought. This level of innate spontaneity is astonishing. On some level, though I’m sure Brad has had struggles and bad moments like all of us, his quality of life is probably very high. Not being bound by the mismatch between what happens on an individual scale and what happens due to the law of large numbers is incredibly relieving. This is what “ignorance is bliss” truly means. It’s not a statement that “being ignorant means you are happy” — though I’m sure that’s correlated — but rather the observation that when you are in a state of ignorance, you have true agency over your own thoughts. Your mind is operating as itself, totally free from influence. It’s pro-free will, a small form of liberation and enlightenment that doesn’t require total devotion to solipsism. We have moved beyond Chad, beyond Sigma, to Brad.

Obviously I’m not suggesting that we all start throwing ourselves off of two-story houses into swimming pools or other reckless, foolhardy actions. But there is an element we can distill from the madness — getting out of our heads once in a while is a good thing. Make the effort to go up to that person you’ve been glancing at at the end of the bar and start a conversation. The probability that it goes anywhere is certainly low, especially when combined with the probability of matching interests, life paths, and long term goals, but who cares? People still manage to fall in love, right?

Being “Brad” is more than cold-emailing or networking — rather, it’s about putting yourself out there so that, no matter how small, there is a nonzero probability of something happening. It’s starting a conversation with a stranger sitting next to you on a plane that turns into a job offer. In this scenario, of course, that small probability was related to surviving, which is not exactly the ideal way to roll the dice on the craps table of fate. But so many of us get caught up in the pathways of credentialism and formulaic ways of “working your way up” that we overlook the fact that very successful people take roundabout pathways to become what they are all the time. Anecdotally, the most successful people I’ve met did none of the HYPMS to “big corp” to HBS to the boardroom to the Hamptons pipeline. Of course, I know plenty of successful people that did, but this is the core principle: statistics do not apply to individuals in a population. This is not to imply that we shouldn’t think statistically, but rather understand the limitations on our instant decision-making it places. This is also why the softest live poker games with meaningful stakes that I’ve ever played in (other than with pure fish, or low stakes fun games) are usually with quant types — generally, they can calculate variance, implied odds, etc. and play in a GTO style, but they don’t truly understand variance and that virtually anything can happen in a poker hand. As such, they tend to be some of the most predictable players on the planet. A statistically “bad” bluff can sometimes win you a hand you had no business winning. (To all of you who intend to interview for trading/quant roles: NEVER EVER EVER SAY THIS IN YOUR INTERVIEWS. Short of not asking any questions after the interview, this is the worst thing you can say about probabilistic decision-making.) The key takeaway is that the long-run statistics can only give you guidance rather than a guarantee on an individual decision. Your life is an n=1 instance. Allow the unexpected to happen.