Preferences
http://dilbert.com/blog/entry/preferences/
I strive mightily to be smarter than myself, but, sadly, tend to fail a large proportion of the time. For instance, last weekend during our pool/greenhouse construction, I was ‘persuading’ a spacer in between two rafters with a hammer. It was a tight fit (it is _supposed_ to be a tight fit), but part of the rafter started to tear loose and bind up making the spacer nearly immovable. Accordingly I backed up and swung my arm way back in order to bash the hell out of it. Naturally, I missed the spacer entirely and brought all that energy down onto the side of my knee. It was amazingly painful, though I am rather proud of myself for not tumbling down the 15 feet or so to the ground. Fortunately it seems I hit enough muscle that I didn’t break anything and after lying down for a few minutes (and catching my breath from all the cursing; I actually started to grey out because I was cursing so much!) I was able to gimp around. Clearly, the rational solution to the original problem was to shave a wee bit of wood off the spacer and then restart the install process in such a way that I didn’t get it bound up with the rafter (this is exactly what I wound up doing). Why did I find that approach impossible until after I had attempted to crippled myself for life? It seems I am organically wired to take the path of _greatest_ resistance no matter how insane that approach is upon reflection. I have occasionally been able to outsmart myself by steering myself around/away from provocation, but, strangely, I find myself incapable of doing so once I have gone a certain distance down the path of most resistance.
Interesting also was Scott’s description of little boy monkeys playing with trucks while little girl monkeys preferred dolls (not being euphemistic here, we are talking about non-human primates; go read his article!). Clearly there can’t be any cultural impact here, they are monkeys! The idea that we are actually wired to prefer certain activities is quite interesting to me (prior to reading Scott’s article I always felt that any bias that was found was the lingering results of culture), though I see it as a bit of a crutch to excuse my outlandish behavior. Of course, it is possible that by realizing that it is something organic, perhaps I can make stronger efforts to head myself off before I get too far down the path of most resistance. Though I feel I am worse at flying off the handle than my dad was, he was also noted for his ability to get quickly frustrated and react with ‘direct physical applications of force’ (beat the hell out of something). I don’t recall ever thinking my behavior was acceptable or permissible and I don’t condone my behavior to myself, yet it is very difficult behavior to avoid once it gets started. On the other hand, I know I have an addictive personality when it comes to video games (as a youth I spent a hundred bucks or more a month (this was 30 years ago, so much more in today’s dollars) on the old stand-up games (man, I wish I was rich enough to get a refurbished Tempest game!)), so when they became ‘free’ games you could play at home I steadfastly refused to pick up the controller because I was convinced I would never put it back down again. I guess I should give some thought to putting in some extra effort at being smarter than myself and not allow a life-time’s failures dictate the rest of my existence…
