Real life is full of Kaizo blocks

One technique I have to admit to developing for passing short periods of time is watching clips of skilled Mario players streaming on twitch/youtube (e.g. this guy is a good demonstration). I'm also a sucker for informational theories, in particular the asymmetry of knowledge: How you gain information ('learn') is very different from how you lose it ('forget'). 

At the intersection of Mario and Information systems is a thing called the Kaizo block. What is it?

For some background, Kaizo ('reorganized') Mario is a name that originated from an early hacked version of Mario that upped the difficulty substantially, and is now associated with many of the more complicated mechanics. One in particular can be seen above: a Kaizo block is one that starts off invisible, and only appears when you hit it. Often placed in the most inconvenient locations, they force much more precise movement, but also are very easily hit the first time through when its existence is unknown. While they are easier to skip on repeat runs, they still require memorization as they will be invisible.

What makes these interesting from an informational standpoint? A few things:

1) People will adjust their behaviour to avoid probable Kaizo block locations. 
Is there a single-block gap, or a question block to hit, or a ledge that you need to land on near the end of level? There's probably a Kaizo block just below it, meaning you need to jump a lot earlier and approach from the side rather than below. So rather than trying the easier 'normal' approach, and risk wasting a whole level's progress, many players will simply do the hard option by default. If successful, it's possible that there wasn't even an invisible block there, and players will take the harder option regardless. In this sense, the for more talented players, the possibility of a Kaizo block is equivalent to a Kaizo block, at least until the player does try the easy option (if ever) to actually check for existence. The worse you are, the more likely you are to try the easy option first.

2) In optimized runs, you will likely never see Kazio blocks and the difficulty they inflict.
Other than just playing difficult levels, another popular activity for these players is speed-running. This involves playing these ultra-difficult modified stages over and over again, practicing and learning how to complete them as fast as possible. The repetition helps: once you can find the location of the invisible blocks, you can learn to avoid them all. If a player then performs the run as fast as possible, they will miss every Kaizo block - none will be made visible. As a result, an inexperienced viewer will remain unaware: there is no easy way to know how many were avoided, where they were placed, or how much harder it made the run. The following is a good example:

    Same same...
Why is this important? I feel that Kaizo blocks are a good analogy for the small things people have learned to avoid in real life. Whether it be staying away from annoying co-workers, avoiding locations that are phobia-inducing, monitoring certain medical conditions, or even preparing contingencies for sick family members or pets, etc... there are a lot of times where people adjust their behaviour to avoid the possibility of a problem, even if one might not appear.

In these cases, the behaviour may look odd - why are they doing a complex jump when an easy one is possible? You might try to be helpful, suggesting that they take the 'simple' action because it's easier (walking under a ladder, working under a creepy manager, ...), however this is like asking them to jump where they think there's a Kaizo block. They can't prove there's something there, but they've taken that jump enough times on similar enough levels to make it not worth the risk.

What is more - you may never realize what people are doing to avoid the Kaizo blocks in their lives.  The party that they are 'busy' for but in reality are worried about another panic attack, or the new hit movie they don't want to watch as it might bring back bad memories - these reasons are rarely made apparent. Indeed, the better the person has become at living with their Kaizo blocks, the less obvious they'll appear. Hard jumps will be made to look easy, to the extent that you won't be able to realize that easy jumps are not being taken.

    ...but different.
There are differences between Mario Kaizo blocks and real-world ones though. For example, in the real world, you are always on your first run-through of life. While Mario can restart the level, most (potential) Kaizo areas you encounter in life will be seen for the first time. The natural strategy is to then be a lot more active at predicting the locations of invisible blocks, and avoiding taking the easy jumps that are even slightly questionable.

Secondly, and perhaps more importantly: Everyone has their own unique set of Kaizo blocks. In Mario, the Kaizo blocks are shared, making it easier to learn locations, and compare runs between players. In the real world, it is much more individual. There are people with lots of blocks to avoid, and people with very few. There are people with invisible blocks in standard locations, and others with blocks in really unusual ones. You can advice someone that a jump is probably safe because you didn't hit a block when you did it, but this doesn't always mean there won't be one there for them...

Some of the levels get crazy hard...

And that's it - in summary, people are probably avoiding real-life Kaizo blocks all the time. As a result, there are lots of behaviours that might look inefficient, but are done for a good, hidden reason. There's also stuff that is actually inefficient for sure, but keep in mind that someone might be avoiding their Kaizo blocks. (and in case anyone is worried: this wasn't inspired by anything other than watching Youtube videos. I just hadn't posted in a while, so forced myself to write about something interesting. Stay tuned for more!)