MitD XIX: The Potted Plant Is Starting To Look Reasonable

[Crusher]

Did the people driving the conversation stop talking because they didn't know it was off topic until then?

I can't speak for everyone who stopped posting, but imo people generally stop posting because they don't care enough to respond.

People don't *have* to logically work the arguments through to a solution and then respond commenting about it. People only do that if their interest in doing so exceeds their interest in doing anything else at that moment, more or less. Different people are interested in different things, but generally speaking people have finite interest in any particular thing. If the discussion (or whatever) around that topic is particularly interesting or funny or whatever, they'll hang around longer. If the discussion is less aligned with their personal interests, they'll leave sooner. Usually when people stop talking, they're just some combination of bored and busy with other things and only rarely because they disagree.

Food for thought: a story on how Crusher figured out how he thinks people (including him/me) think.

In grad school, I took lots of interesting classes but the one that had the most lasting impact on how I thought was Linear Optimization Modeling. The classic example being, a farmer is trying to feed his 20 cows as cheaply as possible. He knows each cow needs a specific mix of ~20 nutrients every day (calories, vitamins, roughage, etc in various amounts) to grow optimally and avoid being sick/unhappy/whatever. The farmer has found ~50 different things sourced from the store, on-line vendors, feed distributors, etc he can feed the cows. The 50 different things cost different amounts and have different combinations of the 20 nutrients. How do you figure out the cheapest mix of things for the farmer to feed his cows?

The answer, in a nutshell, is big spreadsheets and Monte Carlo simulation. It was fun and interesting. Great professor.

But I also decided that people's brains are basically gigantic linear optimization models. Everyone is the hero of their own story and (almost) no one ever thinks they're the bad guy, they're just trying to be happy and are making the decisions they think will get them there. But everyone's brain is wired a little differently.

Not just "you like vanilla ice cream, I like chocolate, and GW prefers sorbet", the more fundamental differences are things like preferred time frames: I enjoy an anticipated reward as much *or even more* than immediate gratification because I really enjoy looking forward to things (if you give me a birthday gift today, I will put it in a prominent place and look at it every day for weeks or even months while actively fighting off attempts to get me to open it early. As it happens, my birthday is next week so its not a great example, but the point remains). My wife, as with many things, thinks I'm insane and will open any gift instantly when you give it to her, regardless of when the occasion is because she wants it now and hates surprises.

People have different levels of tolerance for things like risk and interpersonal conflict, and varying degrees of anxiety from things like public speaking and financial security. People are really, really complicated (though if you found someone who was super honest and couldn't form new short-term memories I think I could chart it out in a decade or so), but you don't have to solve all the way down, because you can just simplify it to "People just want to be happy, and they're doing it mathematically whether they realize it or not."

The point is, when people have trouble finding common ground in discussion I like to trot it out as a discussion point to think about *why* people do things like "try to figure out what MitD is on a forum" or "are demanding a seemingly unreasonably high price for something we're negotiating over". there's lots of different ways to think about it and, if your mind works that way, people can be solvable (and you can figure out the "why?") if you *realize* they're solvable and really try.