Difference between revisions of "592: Drama"

Explain xkcd: It's 'cause you're dumb.
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:Cueball: Guys
 
:Cueball: Guys
 
:Cueball: People are ''complicated!''
 
:Cueball: People are ''complicated!''
 
==Trivia==
 
*[[Randall]] also covers similar ground in comic [[1124: Law of Drama]].
 
  
 
{{comic discussion}}
 
{{comic discussion}}

Revision as of 07:05, 4 September 2014

Drama
This happens in geek circles every so often. The "Hey, this is just a system I can figure out easily!" is also a problem among engineers first diving into the stock market.
Title text: This happens in geek circles every so often. The "Hey, this is just a system I can figure out easily!" is also a problem among engineers first diving into the stock market.

Explanation

Two men and a woman discuss how irrational society's interactions about sex are. They decide to throw out all these silly societal rules to end drama forever and spread this philosophy to everyone they know, which immediately leads to a huge increase in drama.

As one of the men in the comic states, people are indeed complicated and—crucially—what seems intuitive and rational to one person might seem completely crazy and irrational to someone else; so throwing out all the rules one person thinks make no sense isn't going to mean the world suddenly makes sense for everyone else. Instead, everyone who understands the old rules, whether they like them or not, will suddenly find themselves in a completely alien world to which they have no idea how to relate.

Furthermore, any one person's sense of what seems rational is based on incomplete information. The three people are trying to change all the sex rules—like the engineers referenced in the title text who thinks they can "solve" the stock market—can't even begin to conceive of all the chaotic factors affecting the system they're trying to fix, so they have no way of knowing which rules are truly crazy and which rational.

Geeks often fall prey to the fallacy that human interactions can be easily simplified if only a group of sufficiently qualified geeks put their minds to it as laid out in The Geek Social Fallacies and The Geek Social Fallacies of Sex.

Transcript

[Three people are sitting together.]
Megan: Man, sex has all these crazy social rules. They just create drama.
Cueball: Let's agree to change them, and make sex simple!
Friend: Okay!
Cueball: Hooray! We've solved the problem of drama!
Cueball: I'll go tell everyone!
[Cueball opens a door.]
[There is a graph, showing time vs. drama. A vertical dotted line indicates the rule change. Drama is low before the line, then sharply increases afterward and continues to increase.]
[Cueball closes and leans against the door.]
Cueball: Holy shit
Cueball: Guys
Cueball: People are complicated!


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Discussion

All rules changes ever anywhere will cause drama. This is inevitable. -Pennpenn 108.162.249.205 03:11, 19 January 2015 (UTC)

Is it bad that my first thought on reading the comic was to assume that the moment Cueball1 left the room was the moment Cueball2 and Megan started having sex, and they didn't stop until he got back?