2010-12-01

Things to remember

1) People are not rational creatures. We like to believe we act rationally but we usually just use rationality to excuse us not thinking in the first place. The primary thing we use rationality is to say "I THOUGHT OF THAT MYSELF"

2) People are social herd creatures. We end up saving 'energy' by making decisions based on what other people are doing. When you see every other organization doing something your brain gets stressed about "WHY AREN'T YOU DOING IT TOO!"

3) Marketing and sales is all based on using 1 and 2 in conjunction to get someone to do what you want them.

You can have the best widget in the world, but if not enough of the Herd is using it.. then "no-one" will use it. Not sure what this means.. but it been swimming around in the brain all day so I am writing it down.

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

Yes, Aristóteles said that 25 centuries ago: "Man is a political *animal*". We use rationality more to justify our subconscious based decisions rather than actually invest "all that energy required to think by ourselves".

This said, that looks like the main reason we have still people attacking Fedora and RedHat based on its "corporative evilness", and then choosing Ubuntu or whatever Debian-based without realizing they are playing with the same tools (somewhat updated).

Misinformation and ignorance are not just "lack of information"; they are pure evil poisoning the water sources of the town. In the past it was called FUD.

wakko said...

I disagree with the sentiment on rationality.

We all can be rational. The problem is, rationality takes time. Whenever we need to react quickly or are in emotionally charged situations, we don't have the resources available necessary to be rational.

It's a higher order function that is easily overridden by more basic impulses and instincts.

Stephen Smoogen said...

@wakko. I was not clear in my meaning it would seem.

What I meant is that humans are not rational by default. They can work at being rational but most of the time when they think they did something for rational reasons.. it is more likely that they did something and then came up with 'rational' reasons to explain it.