I was caught in the act of love.
I was caught in the act of love.
I was caught in the act of love.
I was caught in the act of love.
I was caught in the act of love.
I was in a meeting with a writer and an editor the other day. It was a business meeting. I was there in my capacity as an investor, not a writer. The writer had some books she wanted to publish and the editor said she would like to publish them but didn’t have room in her list for both. She asked the writer which one she’d prefer to do first, and the writer said “I don’t know.”
“You don’t know?” exclaimed the editor. “How can you not know?”
“I love them both so much,” said the writer.
That’s when I started paying attention.
To be caught in the act of love is something most of us hope for; it is a secret dream of mine. Most of us spend our days trying not to be caught in the act of anything, especially at work; we want our colleagues to think we’re there for more serious reasons than that we enjoy our jobs.
I had just cashed a check for about $10,000 and was getting into my car in the parking lot of the bank when I noticed that my rear tire was almost flat. So there I was, on a Saturday morning, with a car full of cash I couldn’t put in the bank because they were closed and a car that wasn’t going to get me very far. I found an open gas station and pulled in. While the mechanic was changing my tire, he commented on the size of the check I’d been carrying.
“Yeah,” I said. “That’s what happens when you sell your company.”
He looked up at me. “You sold your company?” he asked.
“Yep,” I replied nonchalantly, as if this happens to me every day.
“Wow,” he said. “How much did you get?”
I told him. He whistled and went back to work without saying anything more, but after a few minutes he said: “If you don’t mind my asking, what are you going to do with all that money?”
I didn’t really want to tell him that I planned to spend it all on drink, women, and fast cars (not necessarily in that order), so instead I explained
The number of people caught violating the terms of service (TOS) by having multiple accounts is much lower than the total number of people with multiple accounts. We expected this to be true, since we also expect most rule violations to go undetected. However, the proportion is surprisingly low: less than 1 in 10,000 players with multiple accounts have ever been caught for it.
We use a variety of automated and manual methods to enforce our TOS, but we cannot catch everyone. This raises the question of why more people don’t cheat if they can get away with it.
One possibility is that most players do not want to risk losing their account even if they think they won’t get caught. While there are certainly players who are willing to take this risk, this does not seem sufficient to explain our data.
A second possibility is that most players have moral qualms about cheating, even if they believe no one will find out. This may be true for some players, but again it seems unlikely to be sufficient to explain the low incidence of caught violators.
The third explanation is that most players don’t know they can get away with cheating. This may seem surprising given that there are so many articles on the Internet which give explicit instructions on how to cheat
