STRAIN GAUGE

More often than not, games are not what they initially seem: chess is not a game of pure skill, nor bingo a game of pure luck. A game is essentially an exercise where success is dependent upon the probabilistic exploitation of the parameters of its rules.

The great game of poker is no exception: it is not a card game so much as a betting game played by people with cards. What makes it an especially attractive activity, in contrast with other forms of gambling, is how it elegantly allows a person to be hostage to their own vanities. If I win, it's due to my skill, and if I lose, it's due to bad luck. I'm safe in the knowledge that my performance can't reliably be measured because, since cards are only rarely required to be shown, not only is most of my decision-making invisible, everybody else's is too, thereby eliminating any form of comparative yardstick, by them or by myself. It's this lack of a visible performance indicator that allows me safety in my self-delusion: I'm a 'shark' while the other players are 'donks' and 'fish'.

Poker's invisible performance index is a powerful metaphor for many other major fields of human pursuit where an unjustifiable arrogance is the net result.

TEACHING
The autonomy granted in the classroom is a seductive cocktail to teachers, trainers, instructors, lecturers, and professors. They represent containers of precious information and the students are grateful empty receptacles ready to be filled, or at least that's the mirage - and teachers proceed to take full credit for the results of the learning process. The academic profession is one that naturally encourages self-delusion, the entire model implicitly constructed with the aim of endowing each teacher with illusory feelings of success.

MEN AND WOMEN
So wont to blatant obfuscating and lying with one another regarding our intimate relations with women, men are thus enthusiastic practitioners of self-delusion. When a woman says that men are stupid and useless, in this sense, I can see where she's coming from. She does have a visible comparative gauge to performance: her own experiences in addition to reliable detailed feedback from her girlfriends. We men can be eternally grateful that, for the sake of our fragile egos, the female gender only rarely give us negative comparative feedback - and, at least partly, that may be because the bar is set so dismally low.

ADVERTISING
I'm convinced this is what ultimately conspires to get even talented advertising executives so up themselves. The presence of the invisible performance index is a temptation to take full credit for the content of their graphic designs (CD and book covers, movie and theatre posters, political campaigns, commercial logos, and so on) yet none of the responsibility for failure. The effects of advertising and graphic design (as opposed to what they're aiming to sell) are extremely challenging to reliably measure. It's not that it can't be effective or ineffective, it's that it doesn't merit the revelling in reflected glory inherently encouraged. It's the food that counts, not how the cutlery is laid out on the table.