The main page of a Kindle Fire has a similar arrangement. On it, on a helpful-susan, on a merry-go-round, a revolving disk houses items and they can ride in a circle round and round. The point of a helpful-susan is that a seated person can rotate the center and bring the various sections or pockets to the front for selecting. However, the center wheel needs to be the right size, the joints need to allow for the right speed and the pauses to allow actual selection need to be long enough. A wheel that is too small allows for too few sections of too small a size. One that is too large would take a long time to circulate and might be too heavy to move easily and with finesse.
Like life, it seems best if there are several choices, each a helpful, practical, or tasty one. Like life, one has to exert some effort to rotate the susan but not too much. The three-year old approach of actually putting a vigorous spin on the wheel will result in centrifugal force strong enough to spin everything off the wheel and make a mess. One has to make a choice, not dawdle forever over a single section. There is a famous paper in psychology that supports the notion that humans can select from 5 to 9 alternatives comfortably and consciously. Just one or two means that more can be considered if there are any. But 50 or 100 would crowding what might be called the mental "choice space" and merely confuse and exhaust our minds.
Buddha recommended the "eight-fold path", his idea of life's important variables, like effort, rotation speed and decision speed in the helpful-susan model. Using the linked page, I find the components can be grouped into
- motivation
- conduct
- mind
- knowledge
--
Bill
Main blog: Fear, Fun and Filoz
Main web site: Kirbyvariety
