Confidently Up in Flames

Our daughter has been awesome the last couple days and since our plans for summer we had discussed for months leading in have changed so drastically, we are doing "surprise" things with her that she hasn't done before. Some of these things are really small and simple things, like having an ice cream and visiting a playground in a neighborhood we haven't been before and some of them are larger things.

Today was one of the bigger ticket items - a visit to part of an amusement park that is themed for younger children around the books of a local author. It has been open for several years now and had heard good things about it, so decided to check it out.

Okay, granted that this was a place for children to perhaps the age of seven, but no one in the place seemed to be having any fun at all, not the children and definitely not the parents. There was a little "town" of a couple houses selling over-priced nonsense that was mostly not even related to the place, there was one tiny and very amateur little show put on by three workers, who were also seemingly three of the total of about six working at the place, including in the cafes. They were heavily understaffed by the looks, even though some of the places that should have been available, were closed.

We spent about an hour there all up, milling about with others looking for something to do and not finding anything. My daughter, who is normally impressed by the simplest of things, was finding it hard to find anything too even talk about from the surroundings and seemed disinterested in pretty much everything, other than saying that the mini pig was cute. When my daughter is not saying much - it says a lot.

We were disappointed.

The "experience" that we never plan on repeating, cost us 48€ for tickets in and the crappy bowl of fries, a coke and a coffee that took 20 minutes to prepare because there was one person serving 40 customers, was another 18€ on top. As we left, we discovered that the parking (there was no sign saying it was a pay carpark) was 15€ more. So, for 81€ up in flames, we learned that the place sucked ass.

At least I got this picture of a peacock tail that I edited for this post.

What I wonder though is...

How come we have heard good things?

We are definitely not hard to entertain, but almost unanimously we have heard that this is a good place to take kids of our daughter's age. It has been hyped up and advertised in city guides and the like for ages and people we have talked to have recommended it.

What I think is that because they have been sucked into going to the place themselves and being forced to spend far too much for a very lame experience of anti-entertainment, they want to make others suffer too, so they don't feel like idiots who wasted their money. Rather than keep their buyer's remorse to themselves, or warn others away, they instead built up a narrative that made them feel better about their decisions.

I have a family member who is like this and pretty much everything he buys is the best and works hard to get others to buy similarly. However, when they do, he then starts to bring up all of the deficiencies the thing actually has. It could be a "misery loves company" kind of thing, or it could be that he likes to have the feeling that people follow him, as if he is an early adopter.

As far as early adoption and predicting the future is concerned, he doesn't have a very good track record, as the internet is a fad, digital cameras will never be good enough to replace film and electric cars will never be mainstream.

The latest prediction was that Bitcoin is a scam.
That came when it was around 1000 dollars.

But, this isn't about him, mostly, it is about people making recommendations so that they don't feel like idiots. I suspect that there are many, many people who haven't got into crypto because it would have made them feel like they were going against their peers and if they were wrong, they would feel like idiots and their friends would say "I told you so". Rather than face humiliation in the face of friends, they chose to go with the crowd.

Whenever the markets drop and the news is full of ridicule and the I-told-you-so-ers are out in force, they feel a sense of relief. But when the markets are up and new All Time Highs are being reached, they are jealous, bitter and hoping for a crash - because what if they were wrong?

No one likes to make decisions and then find out they were wrong in their choice and while this can be painful when there is a cost involved, it might be even more painful when the cost was an opportunity foregone. We see this all the time in the markets, where when it is high, people are saying how they want it to drop so they can buy more and when it drops, they don't buy. When it rises again, the same people will say that they should have bought or should have bought more, but they didn't.

I know many people who haven't got into crypto, even though the risk to them and their daily lives was negligible. I wonder how they feel now? Sure, some of them are saying "Taraz, Bitcoin is down 50% you fool!" but from when I first started telling them about it, it is also also up 3000%. *And they know it. I only have one friend that has been a little more openly honest and said that he should have listened to me, rather than a lot of people who he has since found out had very little idea as to what they were recommending.

This is not financial advice.

Isn't it interesting that it only goes in one direction? If someone says "Buy crypto" they feel like they have to give a disclaimer, but when the millions of people out there say "Don't Buy Crypto" it isn't considered financial advice. It definitely is financial advice though, as it doesn't matter what direction it is going. Not only that, the detractors are far more confident in their negative stance than the supporters are in their positive.

This is likely due to some kind of Dunning-Kruger effect, where the less someone knows the more confident they are that they know a lot, whereas the more someone knows, the more confident they are that there is a lot more they don't know, so are more cautious. There are a lot of people who know very little and are outwardly confident that crypto will fail, but they are far less certain when they see the price climbing. When it is climbing, they question if they missed something, that they didn't have all the information, that there was more to it than "Bitcoin isn't real" that they should have looked into before confidently making the financial decision not to buy.

No one can truly know what the market is going to do, let alone know all of the things that come up that can affect it in the future. My family member who confidently saw the internet as a fad, had no idea of what was already in development in the background. When he confidently said digital cameras were never going to be good enough, he had no experience or visibility on the technology to come and judged it on what it was in 1999. When he confidently predicted electric cars would never gain traction, he made the remark without knowing anything about them or the ecosystem they reside in at all. When it comes to Bitcoin, he has no understanding of the tech, economics, or social dynamics, yet can feel confident in giving people financial advice to not buy.

Confidence is a funny thing, as no experience is necessary to have it.*

Taraz
[ Gen1: Hive ]