Tuesday, February 04, 2003 :::
I seem to have misled Kate Malcolm with my reference, below, to "foreign, unlabeled faucets". I didn't mean to suggest that the convention is necessarily international -- I used "foreign" to mean "unfamiliar".
These sorts of conventions can be handy on an international basis, but much less so than domestically, since people (still, though decreasingly so) travel more within their country than between countries. Or at least Americans do -- I'm sure this is less true of Europeans (though probably more true of those in developing countries).
It's like driving on the same side of the road. Everyone on the right is okay, and everyone on the left is equally okay, but if you don't follow the local convention, things get unhappy. Being able to stick to one convention everywhere in North America is handy. It would be convenient for me if I could go to the UK without having to remember a different convention, but I don't go to the UK as often as I go to New Hampshire or Iowa.
As long as I'm on the subject: I had a professor once who pointed out that flipping a coin when you encounter someone, and picking a side of the road based on that, is also a Nash Equilibrium, since failure to conform with convention doesn't help you avoid a crash. It's not a stable equilibrium, though, or a very good one.
::: posted by Steven at 5:09 PM
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