Irrationally long thoughts

I was actually planning on having a little night off from Steem tonight and get some rest, yet plans have changed. My daughter fell off a chair at daycare and bumped her head quite hard and could be slightly concussed, which means that we have to wake her up a couple times during the night. Well, my wife has her last weekend day of study tomorrow so when I say "we", I mean "me". Much like when "we" renovated our apartment.

Well, I guess I get some time to myself to write a little more as it feels weird to only have posted once. I am going to attempt to make my posts a fair bit shorter, even if I have to post more often so that people can pick or choose without having to invest so much time into them as I feel that with so much going on, it is less likely people will be bothered to engage if they have to spend too much time. I see this as a bit of a shame , but I also understand it as I am crushed for time more often than not too.

I am not sure what a good length of content is as I tend to be wordy in conversation also but, I am not very good at focusing on one topic. This is fine for me as I have said before but, frustrating for others. I think in general though, writing forces me to slow down a fair bit and attempt to stay more on the rails of the topic, though I do tend to fail often at this too.

I have had some interesting discussions of late but many of them are blurring into each other as my memory is very poor when it comes to these kinds of things. It is funny though, as in one conversation someone was talking about knowing the right way and then acting upon it. The discussion tonight went into rational or irrational actors and they think that good decisions depend on rational action, but I think that there is very little utility in the conversation as rational decision or not, people behave as they behave in the moment.

One of the things that people don't seem to understand (in my opinion) about blockchain is that it doesn't require rational action to work, it just needs actions to be recorded upon it. Once the information mass builds and the feedback starts making loops both statistically and in culture, people start to change their behaviors and will justify the changes in whatever way they must or, be completely oblivious to the fact they have changed behavior at all.

I would suggest that most of our personal changes are far from our awareness for most people, even if they are fundamentally shifting the way we think and act. Our environment influences and shapes us and while we might notice some factors, most pass us by even though we start to break traditions and adhere to new paths. Human thinking is far from perfect and no matter the information available, we create various heuristics that take a "that'll do" approach to life yet do not notice even as the that'll do shifts for the better or worse.

The reason we create habits is because we are lazy and don't have the energy available or attention span to continually evaluate and process every decision we make. Essentially, we farm our decision making out to a personal algorithm we have developed so we don't actually have to make a decision, just recognize familiar and act according to the rules. We have made the habit, an imperfect and generally circumstance insensitive rule, our authority - even if it isn't in our best interest to do so.

The idea of rational decision making is that we act on what is in our best interest yet, are you or do you know anyone who acts completely rationally? Everyone knows, that smoking, junk food, sugar, various drugs and a host of other things are bad for us but it doesn't stop us from our vices. We all know that we should be investing something, yet most of us justify not doing it, even as we partake in vices that take away investment opportunity. So, are you a rational actor - are you acting in your best self-interest?

Most likely like everyone in this world who has limited knowledge, we narrow our immediate conscious decisions down to the information we have easily available, then temper it with our desires and wants, and finally allow habit to make most of the decisions for us.

Was this too long?
Habit.

Taraz
[ a Steem original ]