alpo

Hello? Complaints department? Why is it that every time I go out for a nice walk these days, there are dozens of people with buckets and jugs picking blackberries a month too early? Duh! Don't they realize they taste a zillion times better when they're ripe? Unripe blackberries don't even make good jam or pie. How can anyone not know the difference?

This is my theory: The unripe-berry pickers are a living, breathing embodiment of a kind of prisoner's dilemma. They're thinking like this: I want to pick some ripe berries. But if I wait too long, someone else will pick all the good ones. So I'd better pick them sooner---maybe about a week before they'll be ripest. But everyone is thinking this way, so I'll go get them sooner than that or they'll all be gone---two weeks before they're at their best. And so on. Obviously if everyone follows this chain of reasoning, it'll lead to all the berries getting picked when they're hard, green, and completely inedible. The UBPs realize this, but rather than (like sane people) concluding that it's better just to wait until the berries are actually ripe and taking the chance that there won't be enough to go around, they instead decide that unripe berries are better than no berries, and go charging out with their buckets to yank them unwillingly off the vines.

Well, OK, it isn't much like a prisoner's dilemma, but it's still specious reasoning that leads to nobody eating any ripe berries. I refuse to accept this kind of no-way-out situation---I'm like Captain Kirk faced with the Kobayashi Maru training scenario. I'm going to buy my blackberries at the farmers' market instead.