Thinking is great(or life finds a way)
Fact: L’Enfant Plaza has platforms on either side and trains run through the middle.
Fact:Archives metro station has a platform in between the trains.
I have a layman’s interest in complex adaptive systems or complexity theory or Ian Malcolm. Years ago I saw Melanie Mitchell give a talk about her book Complexity: A Guided Tour. I was very impressed with the idea of genetic algorithms. In my paltry understanding, genetic algorithms are a way of breeding more efficient computer programs. The programmer creates a selection of randomly written programs to perform a task. The programs are run thousands of times and the code of the highest performers is randomly sliced together. After many many generations of breeding the result is some final program quite good at its task. Often, counter intuitive strategies emerge. In the example Ms. Mitchell used, the final program retained weird behaviors that eventually became useful. The random evolution-like development process was much better than the program the average human would write because of, not in spite of, prior flaws.
The other day I was getting off the train at the Archives metro station and I saw this frail woman in a wheel chair. She clearly had some sort of severe physical condition, the sort one likely has from birth. She had gotten on the train at L’Enfant. I noticed that she was not moving towards the elevator but instead moved across the platform. I had some immensley patronizing thought along the lines of ”o the poor dear, look how frail and weak she is. She got on the wrong train, and went a whole stop out of her way and now she has to go back and isn’t that terrible.”
After a few seconds of feeling so good about how much I care about my fellow human beings, I realized I was utterly mistaken. She had not gotten on the wrong train. Instead, rather than wait minutes to take the elevator at L’Enfant down a level, then cross the station, then wait minutes to take the elevator up, then get on her train she had made the perfectly brilliant decision to take the train one stop out of the way, cross the central platform at archives, and then get on her correct train, all while going a relative distance of twenty feet.
While I was busy thinking of all her weaknesses and all the things she couldnt do she was problem-solving and thinking and living.
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