The Happiness-Accuracy Tradeoff and the Limits of Rationality

Learn to live with contradictions.

I made this meme a few years ago in college.

It was for a short paper I wrote in a history seminar taught by John Lewis Gaddis. Students were instructed to compress what we had discussed, read, and learned into some kind of visual aid, such as “a metaphor – perhaps even a meme, that…must be sufficiently clear and captivating as to require no further explanation.  Or, to put it in another way, you could make a cartoon or a caricature out of it.”

I used the Virgin/Chad meme, which at that point in 2017 had probably reached its peak popularity. My guess is that my octogenarian professor had never encountered it before. My essay discussed the meaning of my version of the meme. His feedback to me:

“Robert—

No two ways about it:  this was brilliant.  Just what I wanted, even though I couldn’t have explained it when I sent out this crazy assignment.”

I recently revisited this paper. After a making a few modifications, I figured I’d share it here.