Emotional Mathematics:
Any time you interact with anyone, whether you realize you’re doing this or not, you make a mathematical prediction of how the other person will react to you. You go into the interaction wanting the person to react in a certain way, and you use your emotional communication to try to evoke that reaction from them. That’s the definition of beat playing I’ve talked about so much already. You decide to play your beat according to what type of emotional communication you perceive to offer the most effective means of preserving the survival of your DNA.
When people use statistics to try to predict other people’s behavior, in order to try to make as much money or win as many votes from the people as possible, they make these mathematical predictions intentionally and consciously. When people make these predictions in everyday life in interacting with other people, they make these predictions passively and subconsciously.
As I’ve said so often, now that the people who turn other people into statistics intentionally and consciously have gotten so good at it, if the people who don’t want to be statistics want to keep from being controlled by those people, they’ll have to learn how to do what their enemies are doing well enough to level the field. In the last book I talked a lot about learning to predict your own behavior better than anyone else could, and about learning to predict what other people want well enough to help them get what they want as a result of your interaction, so that you’ll both find the interaction beneficial. An interaction that all parties find beneficial is the definition of cooperation, while an interaction that some parties find harmful is the definition of conflict. Cooperation creates, while conflict destroys.
As you can see, despite what a lot of people think at first, predicting other people’s behavior can have a positive result, because if you can eliminate conflict from both of your lives simultaneously by cooperating somehow, the two of you can work together instead of against each other, and keep conflict from spilling over into other areas of your lives.
And that benefits the survival of your DNA for both of you.









