Sunk cost fallacy math failure.
Sep. 6th, 2018 06:58 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
dreadedcandiru2The interesting thing about the return of school is the return of Mike being the Platonic ideal of the writer who cannot do math. He hit the ground running howling about the stoopid math that he hated because it brought structure to his aimless life and is probably as I type this being paid an allowance by his brother in law because he could no more budget his money than he could fly to the moon by flapping his arms.
While I once speculated that there was something in the brain of an arts major that made mathematics completely indecipherable, it's not a wiring failure that is actually the problem. Lynn gave the game away when she had Elly lecture Mike about doing his homework early only to put off the ironing that she herself hated off until the last second and when she had her get pissed off at John for wondering why she balked at such a wonderfully mechanical task. In both cases, the two of them prove their similarity by having a bit of a problem at first and essentially giving up because hard things aren't worth doing. If Mike were to admit that the math his dad said was easy, he'd have to admit that he wasted his life being pointlessly upset because he wasn't instantly good at something and he's spent too much time doing it to let it go to waste. It would be like Sideshow Bob admitting that trying to kill people whose primary crime is reminding him that he's not the centre of the universe has only made his life worse and we know that the dumb son of a bitch can't do that.
While I once speculated that there was something in the brain of an arts major that made mathematics completely indecipherable, it's not a wiring failure that is actually the problem. Lynn gave the game away when she had Elly lecture Mike about doing his homework early only to put off the ironing that she herself hated off until the last second and when she had her get pissed off at John for wondering why she balked at such a wonderfully mechanical task. In both cases, the two of them prove their similarity by having a bit of a problem at first and essentially giving up because hard things aren't worth doing. If Mike were to admit that the math his dad said was easy, he'd have to admit that he wasted his life being pointlessly upset because he wasn't instantly good at something and he's spent too much time doing it to let it go to waste. It would be like Sideshow Bob admitting that trying to kill people whose primary crime is reminding him that he's not the centre of the universe has only made his life worse and we know that the dumb son of a bitch can't do that.
