Is This Anything? 21
Sometimes I fall into patterns with other people where I keep noticing the choices they make violate my personal rules of thumb.
For example, a simple rule-of-thumb I have is "if asking someone whether they'd like to do something is costless, you should just do it rather than speculating what their answer would be."
That is: maybe you think so-and-so wouldn't do such-and-such because of thing-and-thing, but if it doesn't hurt to ask then you might as well just ask them and let them decide for themselves; any time you spend debating how likely they are to do the thing is completely wasted for everyone, you should just ask them and be done with it.
But this doesn't seem to be a common rule of thumb, and often when I'm organizing things with other people I'll say "should we ask Person?" and my interlocutor will say "Person will probably say no because of Reason," and I'm thinking sure, that might be true, but is there any reason not to ask them?
And this is not trivial, because there are situations where it is costly to ask someone about a thing, so in my head I'm like are you trying to tell me there's a cost to asking in this case? Or that you don't want them to do it, but you're pretending they wouldn't want to as an attempt to save face? Or do you just enjoy trying to figure out whether people will or won't do something, as a prediction? Or is there some mysterious other thing happening here?
And eventually, my thought is should I just explain this rule of thumb and then check whether you share it or not? But that part is costly to me, because I think people generally respond badly when you say "hey, I think you're making this entire category of decisions badly, here's an academic-sounding explanation of why there's no point in us continuing this conversation."
If anyone has advice on how to do this better I'm truly all ears. The above is just one example, it happens to me with various rules of thumb, so I'm looking for a solution in general.
Books newly in my pile, let me know if they're in yours:
Playing to Win, by David Sirlin
Reality, by Peter Kingsley (h/t reader J.)
The Design of Everyday Things, by Don Norman
This Is Your Brain On Birth Control, by Sarah Hill
Call Center Management on Fast Forward, by Brad Cleveland and Julia Mayben
Ten Nights in a Bar-Room and What I Saw There, by Timothy Shay Arthur
Natural Remote Viewing, by Jon Noble
Passage, by Connie Willis (h/t reader KL)
If your job was to bring together hunters from lots of different places, you'd probably get sick of having conversations at parties where you explain your work and then have to be like "no, I'm not that kind of hunter-gatherer...."