Two reasons for crazy strategies.

People keep getting puzzled at unusual strategies, and sometimes with good reasons. Yet aside .. There are two reason people do NoT get

A. You need to understand the strategy and find it easy to implement, whereas most will not understand what you are talking about, and not have the emotional and cognitive tools to implement them

B. Sometimes you have some inner things that make it harder for o to u the usual normal ways. Thus, it is very rational to ua the tricks etc. The grandmotherly advice do it..... Is simony irrelevant. 

(other complaints include you have to civilize normalize yourself, ignoring the costs involved, both effort emotional and the dehumanizing effect of domestication. Also most believe in normalizing like in religion. Aside form being brainwashed it may be a result of them already being domesticated and enslaved. Sour grapes)

PS just realized i used crazy to name the strategies, implying i am also brainwashed in the propaganda. Alternatively, i perceive crazy as compliment.

Normalcy and other pop psychology concepts

Normalcy, emotional balance, relationships, etc. Have some usefulness. But that usefulness is ultimately limited and context delendent. Yet most people take these seriously in
an emotional way (like religion. It has advantages to believe in it, and for many it ismindeed better to believe in it and stupid to be "rational" and lose the utility of belief, like the sucker who maintains to remember in a movie that it is ketchup. With normalcy, too, it si good for many to tqke it naively and emotionally as important and crucial. Alas, usefulness does nit make for truth.


PS. Sour grapes cuts here both ways. Those lacking in the above prefermto think these are worthless. Those having, tend to over value them. A phenomenon call "sweet grapes" our tendency to think grapes are sweet just because we have them.

Where does applicability come from?

Everyone asks on sources of creativity.

What are the sources of application in reality?

Many ideas in science do not get applied. Many wonderful findings do not find their way to the actual reality. There is less glory in simply improvingbthe world. Or we are nor wired to get excited about that? No aesthetic?

??

Waiting for development and better understanding etc. Of sources of applicability

Unnatural strategies fir an unnatural world

Unnatural strategies (earplugs, wakeup clock for naps, following sophisticated advice, using mechanical tools to measure and guide various activities), are both unromantic (aesthetic problem) and are not part of our natural dynamic. We are wired evolutionary to a natural and Normal environment.

Actually, we live in this crazy unnatural world. With electronic connections, with big cities, availability of food etc.

There is no longer the ability to use natural for a living. We live inna distorted world. And there, maybe he best way is to use unnatural tricks.

Additionally, the default of nature as better (or less risky) is no longer there. We are out of nature love it of hate it. We can learn from nature, but in a so faraway environment and habituation of psyche, we cannot easily assume nature to be the default (althought one may think that with evolutionary psychology we have quite strong wired tedencies etc. That are there even with years of alienation from natural environment)


PS. There are claims that the last 10,000 years had much more selection of genes than before. Not sure the numbers but they say it is enormously more (pandora's seed book I now read). Thought provoking

of t nor the default that natural

The one side heuristic

In the introduction to fooled by randomness, nassim taleb handles the following question. He talks against people mistaking nose to signal, yet many times we mistake signal to noise. His answer is illuminating. Mistaking noise to signal is much more common. 

This insight is a great strategy to thinking and to deciding. Everything has two sides, making handling life confusing. But when you know where the usual mistake lies, it gives you a good heuristic to which direction you ought to generally bias your ship. 

It goes for thinking and it goes for deciding. You take it a default to move away from the common error. (as a general heuristic, though, you try to do the right thing rather than avoiding errors.....) 

Against "better solutions"

A common claim I hear when suggesting an improvement for someone is that " there is a better way" that the guy is not doing the better way either is a fact. Yet he avoids the practical improvement because he is deluding about the better way.

It has two sources. One is an excuse. The better solution is a great way to escape acting and changing. The second is a genuine thought that it is good to avoid the improvement until the better one is there. This is usually a practical mistake. The deeper source of this mistake is loss aversion, the possibility of a better way for doing instills a feeling of lose if one does the not so perefct way. And to avoid this imagined loss, one does nothing. Entirely irrational. 

Reatopnships are over and underestimated at once.

Because its value is extremely variable. Sometimes it is the deal of one's life, and people do not get it that it is worth everything. Other times is it entirely useless or too cpstly, yet people cling to the mistake that love is worth anything.