All the same

September 4, 2008 at 5:16 pm | Posted in Uncategorized | Leave a comment

Well, I did get paid today.  But the tightwad in me can’t bear to part with that much money all at once, so I’m pacing myself with respect to application submission.  I used up all my free and cheap spots, and there are still about 30 programs I’m interested in.

I’m also still hoping not to have to apply any further.  Although as each day passes, it seems more and more imperative to hedge my bets.  And the amount of money I’m willing to spend to do so increases, the longer my uncertainty continues.  

It’s the typical risk/reward curve, with the added dimension of time.  Most behavior conforms to it. Over the years, I’ve found that if someone’s behavior appears not to, it’s simply because I’m not accounting correctly for that particular person’s perception of risk.

In fact, that particular universality is the reason I changed majors in college.  I had started as an economics major, mostly to game the system.  In reality I was undecided.  But being an undecided major at that time, at my undergrad, meant waiting in line for hours and hours to do any kind of academic paperwork: registration, advising, adding and dropping classes…all the lines for undecided students were ridiculously long.  And the quality of advising is always inversely proportional to the number of students requiring it.

Economics, on the other hand, had no lines for any of these things.  It also had the absolute fewest required courses of any major at the school.  I had checked into the matter pretty thoroughly, so I knew that it would give me plenty of room in my schedule to explore other things.

I did take a few economics courses to mollify my advisor, though.  One of them was international economics.  And I don’t know what possessed me, but one day I took out the book and just flipped through the pages like it was one of those homemade cartoon booklets–you know, the ones where you flip through the pages really fast so it looks like the figures are moving.  Anyway, when I did so, it struck me that every single graph in that book looked essentially the same.  The only differences were in the slopes of the lines and the variables they represented.  The fundamental relationship between the variables was identical.

I was so disillusioned.  The professor was making it all sound so complicated, when in reality it was just one fundamental concept, with applications that differ only in the details.  I decided to stop wasting my time with the social and behavioral sciences, and instead learn something real and useful.

So now I kind of look at everything in the social and behavioral sciences as some variation on a theme, and it makes a surprisingly excellent framework for understanding actions at the individual level as well.  The trick, as with any kind of math, is accounting for all the variables.