I like your style

Many of us have had the experience of being in a close relationship with someone for whom we could hardly ever do anything right, and also being with other people for whom we could hardly ever do anything wrong. Yet both kinds of people are likely to think about what they value is what really should be valued in an interpersonal relationship.

Often, the difference in what they value is question of style. People tend not to recognize this fact, however. They confuse what they value with what is “right.” 

One person may feel very comfortable with someone who is highly organized, whereas another person feels bored and cramped with the same highly organized person. One person may love to interact with someone who flits from idea to idea and can never finish a sentence, while another person may feel highly frustrated by the same individual.

One person may like someone who is evaluative and often points out the strengths and weaknesses of friends, while another person feels threatened by the same individual. Compatibility in relationships often means finding someone who appreciates not only who we are, in general, but the styles we have, in particular.

Robert Sternberg, Thinking Styles

The Optimization Mindset

When developing an algorithm, computer science courses often define the goal as providing an optimal solution to a computationally-specified problem. And when you look at the world through this mindset, it’s not just computational inefficiencies that annoy. Eventually, it becomes a defining orientation to life as well. As one of our colleagues at Stanford tells students, everything in life is an optimization problem.  

The desire to optimize can favor some values over others. And the choice of which values to favor, and which to sacrifice, are made by the optimizers who then impose those values on the rest of us when their creations reach great scale. 

Rob Reich, Mehran Sahami and Jeremy M. Weinstein, System Error