some morning thinky

[coraa]

Today's XKCD made me laugh and laugh.

...And also wince, because I've been witness to conversations like that ("It'd be so much easier if everyone just did X!") where I silently cringed and thought, yeah, easier for you, because you just set up the rules to be easy for people who are like you. Sure the hell not easier for me. (Not always sex, either -- very often, social interactions in general. Like the, "It'd be easier if everyone just said what they meant and was straightforward about it!" Not for me it wouldn't. It'd be incredibly difficult.)

I think a lot of the bizarreness and complexity of social interactions is because they're a way of negotiating the fact that people are different. (Small talk, for instance, which many geeks that I know are downright proud of being terrible at, is useful as a way of testing the waters and figuring out which of several acceptable conversational dynamics is going to be most useful when talking to this particular person in this place at this time. It's also useful as a way of determining whether you want to continue with the conversation or just stick your nose back in a book. It's not airhead timewasting, it's more like initial field research.) "It'd be easier if everyone [did thing that makes sense to me]" assumes that it makes sense (emotional as well as logical) to everyone else, too.

(I'm sure I perpetrate this one myself, as well. In fact I know for certain I do, although I try not to. No high horses here.)

Comments

[tedeisenstein.livejournal.com]

In other words, it'd be easier if eveyone would stop staying "it'd be easier if...."?



:-)

[coraa.livejournal.com]

Oh, no, it wouldn't be easier.

It's never going to be easy. People are, after all, complicated.

:)

[thegreatgonz.livejournal.com]

The moment I saw that comic, I thought of that bizarre convention-breast-groping controversy you linked to a while back.

[coraa.livejournal.com]

Yeah, me too. (That one was pretty, uh, memorable.)

[ceph.livejournal.com]

Same here. Definitely an excellent example of the phenomenon...

[sartorias.livejournal.com]

During the seventies, a whole lot of the consciousness raising sessions were damage control after everyone had decided that Life Would Be Simpler If We All Agreed To {insert fine sounding but idiotic rule here}.

[coraa.livejournal.com]

Interesting! I suppose that's not surprising; the impulse to find a simple solution to a complex problem (even if the complex problem doesn't really have any simple solutions) must be pretty widespread, if not universal.

[sartorias.livejournal.com]

I think of it more as the tendency to find a simple explanation for major problems...I think back to various ones: "Our society is so phony, if everyone just told the truth rather than polite lies, think how easy life would be . . ."


"Things like marriage are all bull****; people should be free to come and go, no legal hassles, which only enrich lawyers . . ."

"Women should be completely natural--no more girdles, eyelash crimpers, permanents, high heels, etc etc . . ."

[ceph.livejournal.com]

That comic really struck home for me, too. I remember thinking like that a lot in high school.

After reading your post I thought of this Joel On Software article:

Back to that two page function. Yes, I know, it's just a simple function to display a window, but it has grown little hairs and stuff on it and nobody knows why. Well, I'll tell you why: those are bug fixes. One of them fixes that bug that Nancy had when she tried to install the thing on a computer that didn't have Internet Explorer. Another one fixes that bug that occurs in low memory conditions. Another one fixes that bug that occurred when the file is on a floppy disk and the user yanks out the disk in the middle. That LoadLibrary call is ugly but it makes the code work on old versions of Windows 95.

And it also applies to a lot of political arguments. "Let's just introduce a flat tax on everybody." "Leave everything up to the free market, it's way more efficient." "From each according to his ability, to each according to his need."

Definitely thought-provoking.

[coraa.livejournal.com]

Yes, exactly! The software parallel is very apt.

The other thing I thought, after having posted, was that saying 'here's a complex social problem, it's too hard, let's simplify it!' is sort of like saying, 'here's a calculus problem, it's too hard, how 'bout we make these curves into straight line segments so it's easier!' It's not just that one person's 'socially easy' is another's 'socially hard' (although it's also true), it's also that it just doesn't work. Some things are complicated because they're complicated, not because they're unnecessarily overcomplicated. You can't find the area under a curve by making it the area of a polygon, and you can't make people (sexually, socially, economically, politically) simpler by saying 'gee, it'd be nice if people were easier to get.'

(Caveat: am not a math major, haven't even looked at calculus since high school, I'm probably totally mangling the metaphor, but I think it's probably close enough that I'm going to let it stand.)