Perspective

One way to enjoy the TV show Lost is to imagine it's a thousand piece jigsaw puzzle for which you've lost the box. Each week, another few interlocking bits click together for you, sometimes to the point where you can start to almost make out what's in this section of the picture, or that one. If the thought of that sort of experience drives you crazy, you probably won't enjoy the slow and gradual reveal that is Lost.

Or, to put it another way: Imagine you got an e-mail out of the blue that claimed that the NFL games each Sunday are actually rigged, but only a select few insiders know about it. To prove its claim, it provides what it states are the winners (taking the point spread into consideration) of 8 games for the upcoming weekend. You laugh and then delete the e-mail along with the other spam you've received since the last time you checked your mail. Sometime during the next week, you get another e-mail from the same source, with another 8 game picks along with a recap of the games it picked last week. You think it'd be funny to compare the picks from the first e-mail against the actual results, but when you do you're shocked to discover that every one of the picks was right! You can hardly believe it but you decide to watch the games this weekend to see if the new picks turn out right, as well. And as hard as it is to believe, each pick is right on the money! The next week, you're actually waiting for the next e-mail. When it comes, rather than having 8 more picks, it indicates that more picks can be yours if you just send $1000 to a certain PayPal account before the weekend. You realize you could make a killing betting on games if you knew the outcomes ahead of time. What do you do?

Setting aside the moral dilemma (for those who suffer from such things, anyway), do you send $1000 off to PayPal account OneBornEveryMinute? Because if you do, you just suffered for a lack of perspective (and possibly excessive greed and a shaky moral foundation, but I digress!). Because if you'd been able to step back and see the big picture that you were a tiny little part of, you might've seen what was going on. Clearly someone had the brilliant idea of doing individualized mass mailings, with some software that would generate combinations and permutations of results on 8 NFL games each week. Since the chances of getting all 8 right are only 1-in-256, the overwhelming majority of the first set of e-mails got some (or all) of the results wrong. So the people who received some wrong results just ignored whatever came after it. But almost 0.5% of the recipients got an e-mail with all "right" results in them. If a million e-mails went out, all randomly generated, then almost 5000 people received 8 out of 8 right picks. In the second week, for those nearly 5000 people that had a perfect 1st week, another 0.5% of them managed to receive a second round of perfect picks! Granted, that's only around 25 people now, but that's more than 20 people (out of a million total recipients) who might just now be willing to pay $1000 for a completely worthless service that they think is the goose that lays the golden eggs. And if ten million e-mails went out instead of just one million, it's more like 200 potential suckers. (And if it were only 6 games picked, or even 4 games, instead of 8, the percentage with all right results goes up by a factor of 4 to 16). But the point is that you, as one of the lucky few, see exactly what the con artists want you to see, rather than the big picture. You're like those castaways on Lost, who see a polar bear on a tropical jungle island, and can't help but think something magical or paranormal's going on, when maybe it's simply escaped from an unexpected zoo on the island that they haven't encountered yet.

Just one more reason why I love Lost, and am patient enough to let the mysteries be solved at their own pace.