Simple Prophecies & f07 schedule

What did I learn today? Not much really... but I relearned something and that's almost as good. Today's lesson was simple: nothing's simple. We'll start this with a case study and generalize from there.

I was playing a game of Magic (a nerdy card game with lots of strategy for those of you who are somehow interested in reading a blog by me and not themselves nerdy enough to know this). There were four players in the game and it was a free for all. I had a weak control deck (and I do love control). This means that I'm not actually capable of stopping people from playing effectively with the cards I have; this means I'd lose if people went ahead and played effectively. Here's the beauty: it's not that simple. While I can't win with my cards, I can almost certainly weaken someone enough for them to lose. One player developed an early strangle-hold over me, so I ended up helping them weaken the other two. Then I pulled a nice little switch, suffered heavy losses and caused the utter destruction of the remaining strong player. This meant I'd let the other two build up somewhat... Rinse and repeat. I ended up winning a game that should've been hopeless. There's more to the game than the rules. There's intimidation and diplomacy. And of course the power of a reputation.

Reputations are great. They work in everything. My reputation wins me games of Magic and Smash and wins me money in poker. It gets people to ask me for help with classes. I'm sorry to any who are getting this as news: I don't know any more than you do. I simply learn well by teaching, so I like having people ask me for help. Yay reputation!

I guess what I'm rambling on about is the idea of self-fulfilling prophecies. I claim to be good at poker, people are wary, I make off with their money. Human psychology is great.

The moral (?) of the story: make sure people think you are the kind of person that you would like to be. You just might find that they end up being right.

Quick update. The classes I'm taking next semester are: Anal/Dig, CompArch, aVLSI, Discrete Math, IME2 Economics @ Babson (micro), and Deviance and Conformity @ Wellesley (intro sociology). I guess I was totally lying when I said that I had "dropped the 24 credit idea at this point." Oh well.