Comments on _The Choice_ by Goldratt, chapter 5

I read and took notes on chapter 5 of _The Choice (Revised Edition)_ by Goldratt.

> CHAPTER 5: Contradictions and Conflicts

The chapter starts out explaining "inherent simplicity".

> That's too much. "Father, I can assure you that there is no way you can convince me that people don't have conflicts."

People do have conflicts but any particular conflict does not need to persist. There's no law of nature causing the conflict to persist (or to start in the first place). The conflict can be resolved. The people involved can change their minds such that there is no longer any conflict. hmm, that logic is *simple* and it's *inherent* to human nature -- inherent simplicity.

I'm reminded of a time about 10 years ago when I thought I caught an employee in a lie. I was asking the employee questions designed to reveal the lie. After a few back and forth replies, my employee admitted his lie. Later that employee came to me expressing his amazement at what I did and asking me explain it to him. He wanted to learn what I did. 

From my perspective, catching lies is easy. To me it feels like a math problem with some equations and variables and all you have to do is find the unknown variable and solve the equations to find the value of that variable.

> In the last ten years I've gained a lot of experience, most of it successful, in using his conflict removal method. So I allow myself to take over. "In other words," I say, "when we face a conflict, especially when we cannot easily find an acceptable compromise, let's do exactly the same thing we do when we encounter a contradiction; let's insist that one of the underlying assumptions is faulty. If, or should I say when, we pin down the underlying assumption that can be removed, we remove the cause of the conflict; we solve the conflict by eliminating it."

yes! That's part of the Common Preference Finding method. Part of the method is the assumption that in any given conflict, one or more people involved are wrong -- in other words, one or more of the theories in conflict are faulty.

So like the existence of the conflict should be used as evidence that one or more of the theories in conflict are false. This is similar to what's done in science. So when there exists a conflict between empirical evidence and a theory, or between 2 theories, we know that at least one of the things (theory/evidence) are wrong.

> Bitterly Father remarks, "In academia we are encouraging that devastating mistake. Under the glorifying title of 'optimization' we invest considerable efforts to teach students, not how to remove conflicts, but how to waste time finding the 'best' compromise. What a waste of talent."

I don't know what the author means by this. And judging from the rest of the chapter, I don't think that he means to explain it. He was only introducing it. I think he intends to explain it in a later chapter.

I know that parents invest considerable efforts to teach their children, not how to remove conflicts, but how to waste time finding the "best" compromise. They focus their effort on trying to get kids to accept things they don't want. They focus their effort on fluffing theories so that they are more palatable, without working to fix the conflicts. They focus on adding social vibrations to their theories (or rather to the exposition of their theories), again without working to fix the conflicts.