Frazz by Jef Mallett for October 22, 2021

W/ running it is a positive feedback cycle: Stronger you are, the more you can exercise your muscles to make you even stronger. Not so much with the lottery.

My nose was running the other day but it did not feel strong!

Survival bias is annoyingly hard to see at times

So one can deduce that news doesn’t make you smart, you have to be smart to listen to the news. What about Fox News???

Watching the news doesn’t make one smart. It only gives one a chance to exercise one’s brain in getting past the well-known news bias to find the truth. Education doesn’t make one smart. It only provides a basis to exercise one’s natural intelligence. Some use it better than others.

Playing the lottery is an example of ‘availability bias.’ It’s the human tendency to think that what we immediately recall is the best context for future predictions. We see lottery winners on the news and thus believe that winning is accessible.

The lottery is a tax on people who didn’t pay attention in arithmetic class.

That saying is SO wrong. Running does make you stronger. It’s called training.

It’s the same way with most things that scare people (shootings, kidnappings, etc.) The news reports it because it is uncommon (and gets ratings), yet because people see it in the news everyday, they think it is far more common than it really is. Violent crime has declined significantly over the last 30 years in the U.S. (there were a couple increases in the last 6 years, but it is still less than it was 10 years ago), but if you watch the news, you’d think we were at an all time high.

What’s news?

38,680 people died in traffic collisions last year, and even those who heard about it simply shrugged.

2 guys get shot by a prop gun in Hollywood and it’s splashed over every headline in America.

“News.” LOL.

News hasn’t been meant to make people smart in decades.

Can anyone find or explain the saying about running? Google was no help.

“If it bleeds, it leads.”

There’s a difference between news and “newsertainment.”

Mister, we could use a man like Walter Cronkite again…

There’s a difference between being smart and being informed. It’s like the difference between your computer’s processor (what does the work) and its hard drive (what it works with). Ideally you’ve got lots of capacity for both, but it doesn’t always work out that way.

Yes a common refrain even to reading. Short attention spans leave people barely educated.

I wish Jef would make that kid more a part of the strip. Does she even have a name?