Why is this slightly calvin but not quite

sometimes i think about that kid in the experiment
who was sat down and told to wait some time
before eating the sweetness put in front of him

that his patience would bring a reward

and i think about how they laughed when he didn’t succeed in waiting and instead
crammed the entire gummy bear into his mouth the second they left

looking so guilty afterward

the way they gloated and collected data and prognosticated about his future job prospects and potential success-
certainly not as good as those who waited, they said

it was something about self-control

i know all too well that when he got home
there were probably no sweets
or if there were, they were there for a moment only
before being snatched away by either cruel hands or circumstance
no guarantee that promises meant anything, much less that they were kept.

if it had been me in that chair
i’d have eaten it too.

Itt:
People not seeing the marshmallow speak, or bite the kid. Or the horrified look on the kids face.

Turns out the test is only a good predictor of “how well you can trust the adults in your life to keep their words”. Which tells more about the envirement than about the kid.

I’d have the one just so I don’t have to wait 5 minutes to get out of that weird ass test.

This experiment was not specifically about whether a kid would wait for the second marshmellow or not (which would be delayed by 20+ minutes), nor whether they would play with the roomful of toys, but to see how they grew up. The real test was to catch up with the adults and see how ‘successful’ they’d become. The experimenters found that those children who waited for the second marshmellow achieved higher grades and had more ‘successful’ better-paying careers.

It’s the concept of delayed rewards vs immediate rewards and is prevalent in the world of machine learning.

Ain’t no marshmallow worth waiting 5 minutes for.

Store-bought marshmallows are one of those things where I only really want one.

There’s an ice cream shop few towns over that makes fresh, exotic flavored marshmallows, depending on the day they’re better than sex. But even those are about the size your fist and honestly two would be a little bit too much.

Such a silly experiment. You’re gonna make them sit and be bored for five minutes with nothing else to do besides thinking about two marshmallows?

Hobbes will avenge him

The best play is to eat the marshmallow immediately so that the experimenter moves onto the next test.

….will there be a new one every 5 minutes?

A shower thought about the original experiment:

It may have only measured how effective “waiting for future gains” was, as a strategy, for each child, in their circumstance.

So the real discovery may be only that the children already had a pretty good idea how promising their own futures were. :(

The original experiment boils down to being a zip code test anyway

I don’t get it