One of the heuristics we talk about on this show, very often, is that context is critical. We use this heuristic to inform us of another topic that we talk about quite often on the show, which is that our perspective and our perception act as lenses, lenses that we can't really remove. Sure, we can look through other people's lenses or try to at least, but at the end of the day, there is no way to take those lenses off. This is important because the lens itself kind of feeds back. It ends up changing the way that we see experiences and because of the way that we see those experiences, we will now filter future experiences based on that given all of this context. How do we make decisions differently from each other? That's what we're going to talk about in today's episode. My name is Jonathan Cutrell, you're listening to Developer Tea. My goal on this show is to help driven developers like you find clarity, perspective, and purpose in their careers. I want you to imagine two painting palettes. If you can visually remember the kind of old school circular palettes where you would put some different colors onto it and then use those, maybe mix them on the palette as well. Which would imagine two of those. On one of them, you have a limited set of neon colors. You can imagine these are glow in the dark, very vibrant. On the other, you have a set of pastel colors, the kind that you might find painted on a wall. Now, if I were to give one of these palettes to a group of five people, and the five people have the same kind of language and understanding and context and culture, and those five people can see colors perfectly fine. They're not colorblind. If I were to give each of those palettes to a group like that, and tell them to pick out the green. Interestingly, both groups would probably be consistent within the group. But if you were to compare both groups, they're going to pick different greens. This seems obvious at first glance. Of course, they're going to pick from the available colors that they have on their palette. And green means a lot of different things. It doesn't mean one very specific shade. And there's no way for these people to try to kind of scientifically scrutinize whether or not this particular shade of green can be called green accurately. They're going to pick out something that falls in the most accurate range of green that they can find. Now, if I were to look at one of these groups and say that that particular group, well, you're wrong. You chose green that is different from the green that the other group chose. And for whatever reason, maybe we can say that the other group's green is closer to true green. Maybe the neon green has a little bit more blue in it, or maybe it's lighter or something. While the pastel green is a little bit closer to real true green, or the kind of flip-flop of that, the vice versa of that could just as well be true. We have two different greens and we scrutinize one group's choice of a green over the other. This seems absurd. If I were to ask you, which group is right? Which group chose the correct green? It's easy to say both. Both groups are correct. And the important distinction here is that both groups are correct within their context. We're going to call this concept for the sake of this episode local rationality. We're going to take a break and talk about today's sponsor. And then we're going to come back and contrast local rationality to global rationality. And we will also kind of apply this to real life scenarios. But first, let's talk about our sponsor remote works. Whatever you're doing right now, unless you're driving or something, I want you to take a moment and go on your podcast player of choice. Whatever you're listening to this episode with, go and find remote works and subscribe. I realize that's a hard sell, but this is the final episode that remote works as a sponsor. And I think this is such an excellent podcast. And I think it's worth your time. In season three of remote works, you're going to hear host Melanie Green tell an insightful story about how people and companies are adapting. And it shouldn't come as a surprise that season three covers adaptation related to the pandemic and beyond. A recent study found that 75% of workers have experienced burnout, for example, and 40% said that that burnout was a direct result of the pandemic. But what if we can't see the signs of burnout? If you're a manager that's a terrifying prospect, then you might have a lot of turnover from that. You can learn about those signs. We hear firsthand from someone who has been through burnout, as well as expert advice on how to recognize it and what can be done to prevent it from happening. In other episodes in season three, you can look at, for example, the major league baseball, the MLB for a glimpse of how America's most beloved pastime is working remotely. We'll hear about how the MLB has had to adjust just about everything they do from new rules about how we gather to virtual fans and stadiums. We've probably seen those. There's a lot behind that. So we'll look at how they've embraced this new world of flexible work in season three. That's the first episode of season three. The episode that I've mentioned on the show before I'll mention it again here is the one about your desk. Believe it or not, your desk says a lot about you and you don't have to feel bad about having a messy desk. Go and check it out. Head over to any podcast app that you use or wherever you find podcasts. We will of course include a link in the show notes. My huge thanks to remote works for their support. So we're talking about this idea of local rationality versus global rationality. In our previous example, we talked about these two palettes of colors. And these two palettes represent our different contexts, the fact that we have two different ways of seeing our reality. Of course, in this case, we have very constrained inputs and outputs. We have these colors to pick from and we're asking somebody to pick a color. Our context and our perception is far more complex than that. All of our experiences, we can kind of treat in a similar way to this query of finding a color. We take in some information and our brain uses that information. All of our experiences, all of our kind of sensory inputs and our brain makes sense out of it. And we decide what to do based on these experiences. Sometimes deciding what to do seems inconsequential and other times it seems absolutely gravely important. But the critical takeaway here is that we can make decisions within the context that are rational because of the context. The rationality depends on the context. Let's imagine that your perception is like a location on a map. In one perception, you live in, let's say, a mountain town that has a river running through it and mountains surrounding it. And in another location on the map, you're living right next to the beach. In both locations, if someone was to say, let's go to the water. One group would go to a river, well, the other group would end up probably at the ocean. And what you'll notice here is that so much of this depends on the semantics of the situation, which as it turns out, is true in our lives and our perception as well. We make meaning out of the world and we try to map words to that meaning. But sometimes that mapping is a guess. Incomplete, it's a leaky abstraction of reality. And so when we say water, let's go to the water in one town, that might mean something very different than what it means in another town. If I were to instead zoom out, zoom out of that map or provide those color picking groups with every possible shade, what would happen? Well, we would probably have people trying to find exactly which green is the correct green. We would have a lot more variation even amongst those same five people that were once all in agreement. If they had more options, we might see more variation in what they believe is the closest to true green. And so this is instructive to us because global rationality, having some perspective that is as complete as possible, that escapes context. Again, this is not possible. But as a thought experiment, what this would allow us to do is create meaningful differences, meaningful differences that are not rational based on our locale. It's not rational based on our limited perception. Instead, we have to collaborate to understand rationality better. And so this is what happens when we try to break down our walls and work within each other's context. And by the way, this goes beyond just our individual perceptions. It goes into our actual work as well. The concept of local rationality versus global rationality might make sense in your project decision making processes. What is right for this particular line of code? Well, as it turns out, there's context involved there as well. Often one of the biggest mistakes we can make as engineers is to try to provide a local rationale, a local perception on a project problem. In other words, we are answering the query of let's go to the water with our beach. We don't have a beach in this town. We don't have that context truth that you're bringing to the project. And so when you try to apply a rationale that is not local, right, it doesn't make sense in this particular context. Often you can do the wrong thing. In fact, your decision may actually be irrational, even though it feels rational based on your personal context. The important thing to notice here is that there is no right place. There's no right context. There's no correct level of context or no correct level of globalness that depends on where you are, depends on what you're working on. And if you're able to use this concept, this model as a tool of thinking, and sometimes you might be able to reason about why two very skilled engineers or why two groups of people, skilled groups of people, are actually not an alignment. They disagree. It's possible that one of them is plainly wrong. But what happens most often is that each group is arguing from a local rationale. Thanks so much for listening to today's episode of Developer Tea. Thank you again to Remote Works for being a sponsor of this show. For the last couple of months, go and check out Remote Works season three, wherever you listen to podcasts, probably wherever you were listening to this episode. If you enjoyed this episode, I'm going to ask you to do a favor for this show and possibly for yourself. Go and leave a review and rating in the podcasting platform of your choice that has reviews and ratings. This is the lifeblood of any given podcast. The reason this is for yourself is that by leaving this rating and review your helping other engineers find the show. And that is how we keep the show going into the future. Thanks so much for listening. And until next time, enjoy your tea.