Facts Can Save Your Life

This chapter was interesting because there wasn't a section in it where I couldn't think of an example of how these ideas play out in many aspects of everyday life.

Money:
The chapter began by talking about an orthopedic surgeon who got scammed by a guy promising to help him avoid paying his taxes. Because of his lack of research, he ended up in jail and in debt. The first thing I thought of when reading this was how many emails I get from the "princes" and "princesses" of Nigeria wanting to be my business partner and send me a bagillion dollars for who knows what reason. Now, where most of us can see through this get-rich-quick scheme, there acutally have been people that reply to whoever really sends those emails, gives out all their information and find themselves at the bottom of the debt barrel (I'm not sure exactly how the faux banking on those email things work...).

The "Grey Goose Effect":
I am a bartender at a snooty, old-money country club in the area, and I can completely see where this "effect" comes from. The book talks about how more expensive products are generally regarded as better quality, when in reality, it is opposite a lot of the time (citing vodka as one of their examples). Out of the 50-or-so liquor choices we have at the bar, we rarely use more than a certain 5 or 6--which are the most expensive ones. When someone comes up to order a drink and don't have an exact preference of liquor, they make sure to tell me that they want the most expensive one; they don't know what they are drinking, but because of the price, they think its better.

Selling False Hope:
This section is about a man who had cancer and took an "optimizer" given to him by shady man hoping to improve his level of health; his body shut down and he died 2 months later. I immediately thought of the huge diet pill market and how many stories you hear about people who died from taking them. You would think after all the information warning us about things like this, people wouldn't fall into the trap. However, the shelves are overflowing with diet pills that supposedly help you lose 400 pounds overnight, or diet drinks that will shrink your waist by 75 inches. I don't know if I think of it differently, but shady medication from shady people would be the LAST thing I'd want to under-research.