The location of students in a classroom. It’s been a few years since I sat in a classroom regularly, but I remember people sitting in the same seats each class, sometimes exactly, sometimes coarsely (e.g. friends sit roughly the same set of seats, with a mostly-random permutation among the group of friends). Perturbations like a one-time guest sitting in someone’s seat or a chair being broken for a week will disrupt the seating arrangement, but people will return to their old seats if it doesn’t last too long.
Sleeping patterns. I tend to sync up with sunrise or my work schedule, but if I stay up late or wake up early or sleep poorly or something, my sleep will out of sync and eventually find its way back to where it was before.
The messiness of my apartment. Sometimes I’ll put in a lot of work to make it very clean and sometimes it will get very messy for some reason, but it tends to return to a relatively stable level of a little messy. Notably, the equilibrium for this has steadily shifted toward less messy as I get older.
Bonus exercise:
My guess is that this is a combination of actual preferences for particular seats (close to the front vs close to the back vs close to the door, for example), a clustering effect from people wanting to sit near friends, and a desire for stability, predictability, and not taking someone else’s seat. Changing which seats are desirable according to various criteria seems hard, but you might be able to overcome the desire for stability by rewarding students for sitting with different people or in different parts of the classroom for several lectures, then allowing them to do whatever they want.
Now that I’m thinking about it, this is a big topic for people, but I’ve had luck with shifting it using melatonin and changing my evening/evening lighting.
I think the equilibrium point lives where the marginal (perceived) effort of cleaning is equal to the marginal (perceived) benefit of having things tidier, minus the marginal (perceived) cost of having everything put away where I can’t find it. One possibility is to change my perceptions, though I’m not sure how to do this. Another is to reduce the cost of cleaning or grabbing something that’s not already sitting out in front of me, and I think having better organization can help with both of these.
The location of students in a classroom. It’s been a few years since I sat in a classroom regularly, but I remember people sitting in the same seats each class, sometimes exactly, sometimes coarsely (e.g. friends sit roughly the same set of seats, with a mostly-random permutation among the group of friends). Perturbations like a one-time guest sitting in someone’s seat or a chair being broken for a week will disrupt the seating arrangement, but people will return to their old seats if it doesn’t last too long.
Sleeping patterns. I tend to sync up with sunrise or my work schedule, but if I stay up late or wake up early or sleep poorly or something, my sleep will out of sync and eventually find its way back to where it was before.
The messiness of my apartment. Sometimes I’ll put in a lot of work to make it very clean and sometimes it will get very messy for some reason, but it tends to return to a relatively stable level of a little messy. Notably, the equilibrium for this has steadily shifted toward less messy as I get older.
Bonus exercise:
My guess is that this is a combination of actual preferences for particular seats (close to the front vs close to the back vs close to the door, for example), a clustering effect from people wanting to sit near friends, and a desire for stability, predictability, and not taking someone else’s seat. Changing which seats are desirable according to various criteria seems hard, but you might be able to overcome the desire for stability by rewarding students for sitting with different people or in different parts of the classroom for several lectures, then allowing them to do whatever they want.
Now that I’m thinking about it, this is a big topic for people, but I’ve had luck with shifting it using melatonin and changing my evening/evening lighting.
I think the equilibrium point lives where the marginal (perceived) effort of cleaning is equal to the marginal (perceived) benefit of having things tidier, minus the marginal (perceived) cost of having everything put away where I can’t find it. One possibility is to change my perceptions, though I’m not sure how to do this. Another is to reduce the cost of cleaning or grabbing something that’s not already sitting out in front of me, and I think having better organization can help with both of these.
All strong examples. Reading the bonus exercise answers, every single one sounded like an interesting model with some nontrivial insights.