The Men I Love

I don't tell men I love them.

But there are exceptions.

Herb Cohen, Don Norman, Daniel Kahneman, Hermann Simon.

To these four, strangely, I can say it. Haha.

What I love is probably not their names or their fame, but the way they look at the world. Cohen finds options in the gaps of the relationships and rules people accept as given; Norman observes, relentlessly, how people actually interact with the real world; Kahneman exposes the cognitive structure hidden inside the judgments we believe are rational; and Simon explains how people and organizations actually choose under limited information, time, and ability.

They started from entirely different fields, yet the question I keep finding in each of them is remarkably similar.

How do human beings actually think, choose, and act? And what is the structure that produces those choices?

So when I read their books, the feeling is less that I have gained one piece of knowledge, and more that the resolution at which I see the world has gone up. A behavior I would have walked past looks different again; a rule I thought was obvious becomes a question; and the information, costs, constraints, and environment hidden behind a person's choice start to come into view.

It happened again today, reading Herb Cohen.

It was a trivial scene: a nine-year-old throwing a tantrum at their parents in a restaurant. But Cohen does not stop there. He watches how the child secures one option, gets it accepted, then presents a new option, and in the end raises the cost the other side must bear until the desired result appears. And that way of thinking extends beyond individuals and families to negotiations between organizations, governments, and nations.

In that moment I felt I understood again why I like these people.

I am drawn less to grand theories than to people who discover the enormous structure hidden inside a small scene.

People who see negotiation in a child throwing a tantrum in a restaurant; who see in a single signpost not an absolute order handed down from heaven but a structure of choices that someone built; who see, at the very moment a person believes they are judging rationally, the cognitive apparatus producing that judgment; who see that organizations do not make optimal decisions with perfect information but make realistic choices under limited conditions.

They are not the people who explain the world to me.

They are the people who make me see the world again.

So I don't often tell men I love them, but to these four, I can say it.

Herb Cohen.

Don Norman.

Daniel Kahneman.

Hermann Simon.

I wonder if more will be added.

Hahaha.

Perhaps what I love, in the end, is the kind of intelligence that lets me understand people more precisely.

And when I meet that kind of intelligence, strangely, even after I close the book, that person's sentences keep living and moving in my head.