If the Human Mind was Simple Enough to Understand

"...we'd be too simple to understand it"

That quote is attributed to Emerson Pugh. But, so what?

The so what could be answered with; why bother? If we can't understand then just give up. Most days that's how I feel. On other days I keep look for the model that let's me understand what I experience when I interact with another brain.

What am I talking about? At this point I'll lean into my academic roots. To do a lot of chemistry you just need to know what chemicals you are dealing with because you know how they'll behave. There are models that explain why they behave like they do, but only need to know how they do behave.

And that means? In short, I don't have to understand how the brain works, or even why it works (in detail) but I can understand how it behaves and a simpler model of why it behaves as it does when you put it inside a person and interact with it. That's why the Blue4 model works so wonderfully well.

In the Blue4 model there are two dimensions. One, "getting stuff done" which ranges from directive/proactive to passive/reactive and the other "caring about people" which ranges from concerned to indifferent. And of course, we can arrange this into the classic Boston Square:

This simple model covers all the ways you see people behave, if a little bluntly. But what is really interesting is that if I know how one person is behaving I can have a good guess at how someone else is going to behave/react. That is a conversation for another day.