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PaperclipPerfector  7mo ago (text post)   2455 thread views

Friday Fun Thread for October 6, 2023

Be advised: this thread is not for serious in-depth discussion of weighty topics (we have a link for that), this thread is not for anything Culture War related. This thread is for Fun. You got jokes? Share 'em. You got silly questions? Ask 'em.

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If You Catch It, You Get $500..

Tldw; Youtuber offers 500 USD if you catch a tossed football. There's not much else to it really.

Why are people saying no? Unless your time is worth equivalent to that of Jeff Bezos's, I don't see how taking 10 seconds out of your day to attempt to gain 500 USD with 0 risk is debatable.

Am I missing something? Are people just untrustworthy of strangers enough that they think there is risk to attempting to catch a football?

I. DONT. GET. IT.

I was once approached by a really poor looking woman asking for money to buy her kids diapers, or just the diapers directly. I thought to myself, how can this possibly be a trick, what's she gonna do, sell the diapers on the street? And it's not like I had time to sit down and thinks this one through first. So I went with her to buy the diapers. She thanked me profusely, and I felt good about myself, but I'm naturally very curious. So I pretended to walk away until I was confident she wasn't looking anymore. She just went back to the same store and argued with the shopkeeper until they let her give back the diapers for 10 bucks or so. I felt very stupid.

Just because you don't instantly see a way for something to be scam doesn't mean it isn't one. "How can looking at a map be a scam?", well, until you're wallet is stolen. Maybe they talk you into putting your backpack to the side, so that it gets stolen. Maybe they "just don't have the money on me right now, let's go to the bank" and then you get robbed in an alleyway.

Are people just untrustworthy of strangers enough that they think there is risk to attempting to catch a football?

Yes. Why would anyone offer you $500 for catching a football if they didn't have an ulterior motive?

What would likely pop to my mind is that they're doing a study to see how many people would take the offer.

I'm not a performing seal and my dignity is not so cheaply bought.

Okay, I'm selling some dignity for 500 USD, you are free to buy it. It should be a steal for you.

Unlike matter and energy, dignity is not conserved - you would both be degraded by the act.

If you somehow was able to give me positive dignity equal to the inverse of me flopping about in slow motion and failing to catch a ball in front of a million viewers, then I probably would pay 500 USD for that, and I suspect a lot of people would too.

(Actually not even $500 – it's multiplied with the estimate that the person would actually pay up without any sort of trick or gotcha, which would be pretty low in that situation if you weren't aware that the person is some sort of moderately famous youtuber.)

Ideally I would live in a world where nobody felt the need to sell their dignity.

The issue here is that you can't actually sell your dignity in a way that Arnaud receives $500 worth of dignity.

Look at the expressions of the people who did get it - they were really skeptical and thought they were being set up for something. The one guy who was into it was a Mr. Beast subscriber and fan himself. It's probably like 1,000x more common for a random person trying to get your attention in public to be trying to get something from you or harass you somehow than to actually give you $500 for a trivial low-risk task.

The same reason I said no to the guy who pulled up alongside me while I was walking down the road and offered to give me a Cartier watch: it reeks of bait.

I still don't know what the attached string was in that instance because I told him I already had a watch and walked away, but I'd guess it would get parlayed into helping him out with something that involved me handing over a sum of money on the basis that he'd already helped me and besides I'd still come out quids in so why not, fair's fair, thought you were a friendly person, is this how you treat people who want to help you, etc.

So yeah, he gives them $500. But he's still using them as a means to an end, so they're still at least half right in their scepticism.

Agreed on reasons below, and also: their mind is elsewhere, they don’t want to be put on someone’s tik tok feed and potentially insulted by tens of thousands (you see this happen all the time), there’s a chance they are getting pranked and the shame of that may outweigh the potential of $500 in a post-Putnam university setting.

I don't need my lack of hand-eye coordination immortalized on the internet for millions of people to see. Also there's a patronizing quality to the scenario. "Hey, you look poor. Dance for me monkey."

It's just weird, it's a significant breach of usual social norms, it just feels right to wince and ignore it.

You don't like game shows, you don't like MrBeast, you find the concept that a random guy's making you do something for some amount of money weird. Showing up in a popular youtube video feels weird.

You're on your way to a class, you're in the middle of thinking about something important, you're on a schedule, you just don't want to be disrupted by something uncertain.

(I'd be #2 or #3)

And all these outweight 500 USD?

I have a strong moral distaste for when one, especially one who's otherwise sensitive and competent, finds "STAND IN THE CIRCLE FOR THE LONGEST AND GET TEN THOUSAND DOLLARS" entertaining and spends a nontrivial amount of time consuming it. The challenges are enormously dull, chosen for mass relatability, and the financial reward serves as a hollow source of drama without any of the complex technical or social games that make IRL life or good fiction interesting. The video in OP is a minor case of that, and I just won't participate as a result. And it's just as bad to produce that content - you could be doing something interesting, and instead you're optimizing your facial expression to make 7 year olds click on the exploding train thumbnail. It's the same thing where I wouldn't work as marketer for a clothing or shitty mobile game company even if I were very good at it, and it paid well.

Whereas for a lot of people I really think 'this is super weird and unusual and cringe and I don't want to do it' plays a bigger role than you think, and they'd probably make a different decision in a different social context.

I'm not entirely sure the 'no guarantee it's for real' part is actually true? I sort of expect that, given the popularity of 'give you money for stuff' videos, a substantial fraction of things that look like 'yo i'll give you $500 if you catch this football' with someone filming are genuine (or, if something's rigged, it's that the challenge is harder than it appears, not that the money's fake). Just because there aren't that many big free stuff youtubers, but there aren't that many people doing fake challenges either.

The chance of 500 USD, maybe. There's no guarantee it's for real.

Most people are very leery of something that sounds too good to be true expecting some catch that makes it net negative value to anyone who accepts.

It's like the old joke about two economists who walk over a $20 bill laying on the ground. As one says to the other, it must be fake because if it were real someone would have picked it up already.

A mystery indeed

Mitchell and Webb are so great.

I would absolutely assume I'm being scammed. Would you not? Is someone giving away $500 for pretty much nothing common enough in your experience that you put that down as pretty likely compared to it being some sort of scam?

Kudos to the Asian girl at 1:10 though. Excellent assets.

How can you get scammed by catching a football? You didnt sign any contracts or give any money. You are in a university campus so its unlikely youll get stabbed or pickpocketed while distracted by the ball.

Even if it's not the dangerous kind of scam and more like a "you actually don't get $500" scam, it's a waste of my time and a frustration.

And the expected value of that checks out?

I assume it does, since value is subjective and the people who refuse have made their subjective judgment.

(No one ever made such an offer to me as far as I remember, but I can see how I'd behave in such a situation).

Is someone giving away $500 for pretty much nothing common enough in your experience

It's a very popular YouTube genre by now, including being the main gimmick of the most popular youtuber (MrBeast), so most people are familiar with the concept that it could end positively.

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