Very often I see people with some arbitrary conceptions. May it be the language war, or adaption to a new technology. It does make me wonder why people behave this way. I have been trying to figure this out for quite some time now, and, thus far, I have been able to make some observations based on the interactions I have had.

The farmville theory

There was a time when people were crazy about farmville, my facebook inbox was literally filled with farmville requests. It was so bad that I had to eventually block all the notifications from that application. However, this incident sparked an interest on why people are so crazy about farmville. One theory is, farmville could be sending notification without user’s knowledge. Other theory and the more interesting one, is people want to show off their progress in farmville to their friends.

Dissecting this situation led me to two conclusions. First, people feel just because they spend time in some activity, it must be important. As a consequence, when someone puts money in farmville (an arbitrary in-app purchase), the feeling of importance boosts up. Second, self satisfaction is not enough. As humans are community creatures, they need appreciation from peers.

False pattern recognition

This one turns out to be one of the classic mistakes people make. Our brains are wired up to make sense out of incomplete and partial data. Pattern recognition is a two way sword, it is the prime reason why humans are at top in foodchain, but false pattern recognition always takes us to a de-tour from facts and real world truth.

This ultimately leads to flawed reasoning. This situation could be related to certain situations in technical world, such as yo! raising a funding of $1M. Nothing personal in this case, but it is funny when folks come up with arbitrary reasons to support their work.

I am a big of the awesome series cosmos. I would like to quote three rules it puts forth in the very first episode.

1. Test ideas by experiment, take the ones that pass, reject the ones that don’t
2. Take the evidence wherever it leads, and
3. Question everything.

I feel reasoning should be based on tangible evidence. By following above rules, there is a high chance you might end with good reasoning!