[Phil153]

I'm disagreeing that their stupidity or laziness or lack of information reveal their true preferences. People are subject to numerous fallacies and irrationalities.

Let's take a few examples.

Lack of insight
- Nerd wants to get laid before he's 20. This is really, really important to him. However, he never approaches girls or tries to improve his social skills, because he's unable to understand the solid empirical link between doing this and getting laid.

Lack of information
- A mother really doesn't want children to work in factories. If she saw children working, and knew the name of the company, she would be appalled and never buy their products again. However, she is unable to get information on any products produced in another country as they go through several sets of hands before ending up in her Walmart. Companies don't voluntarily disclose this information (or do so fraudulently) because it saves them a lot of money (which their shareholders want).

Poor assessment of risk
AJ Green (part owner of Absolute) wants to be very wealthy and live an awesome life. He already has millions, and thinks he can get away with cheating people on his poker site which is worth hundreds of millions of dollars over the next ten years. The maximum profit he can gain from cheating is a couple of million. Yet he cheats anyway. His desire for security and profit would make the rational choice not to cheat - and yet he did because of his terrible assessment of risk.

There are heaps more.