Because I have an ego unbounded by rationality, I've named a couple aphorisms after myself. The first one is Morrow's Corollary to Clarke's Third Law, and it goes like this:
Sufficiently advanced nanotechnology is indistinguishable from life.
The second one is Morrow's Theory of Business Regulation, and it's had a few different names and restatements, but probably the best version is this:
In the absence of appropriate regulation, some companies will not regulate themselves.
The third one is Morrow's Limit. It doesn't have a sufficiently pithy formulation yet, but it's more or less this:
A human cannot know an ordinary adult human so well that they cannot be surprised by them.
Posted by Greg at January 19, 2007 4:27 PM
A human cannot know an ordinary adult human so well that they cannot be surprised by them.
WTF?
What precipitated Morrow's Corollary to Clarke's Third Law?
Adrian:
Nothing specifically, just the fact that the insight could be put into a parallel structure.
Andy:
Morrow's Limit is based off this principle: To understand and anticipate other humans, we build mental models of them. A complete model of an ordinary adult human is larger than the space available to it in another brain. That is, a complete model requires essentially a 1:1 mapping.
Next comes the implicit observation that personality specifics retain detail a very far way down into the personality. You know how a fractal has the same complexity at any level you zoom in it? Personalities aren't fractal, but they do have deep complexity.
(Two comic book nerds might be similarly socially awkward, into geek culture, into low-achievement tech jobs, and the like, but you'll still find once you get into the details that they disagree about the best Iron Man armor.)
The consequence of that observation is that an incomplete model is very incomplete. Therefore the person you have an incomplete model for will be able to surprise you by revealing an aspect of personality unaccounted for in the model.
Therefore, since you cannot encompass a complete model, you can be surprised by anyone, no matter how well you know them.