negotiation

it looks like i’ll be in new york, specifically williamsburg/brooklyn, for february and march, and either home or some other place from april to may. i spent a few weeks looking for other mit students to live with in the cambridge area, but for one reason or another they all either decided to stay home, live in dorms, or exclude me from their plans ):< anyway, it’ll be an ~8 person apartment with a mix of new people and people from the truchas house. i’m not sure how this will go or if it’s a great idea safety-wise, but i was even more uncertain when i made housing decisions last fall either so i’m pretty much okay with the risk being incurred 🙂 i think if i am at home i will end up doing internship-related stuff for 12+ hours per day like what happened last summer, so the hope is that being with other people and having a roommate will help remedy that

the drp on prediction, learning, games is almost over and i liked it a lot! my favorite math textbooks are ones that change how i view life beyond math, and this book definitely falls under that category – it’s supposedly about ml and game theory but i don’t think it’s a stretch to say that it provides a perspective for thinking about regret and decision-making in general, which i will write a post about later. the only other math textbooks i’ve read which i’d put in the same tier as this one are the aops calculus textbook and half of linear algebra done right, which shaped how i think about limits/change and vectors/linearity, respectively. this isn’t to say other math textbooks were bad at exposition, just that i didn’t find them particularly influential

i watched tenet this weekend and was expecting to only understand 2/3 of the movie because everyone told me it was super confusing, but i think it basically all made sense upon first viewing? while the concept of time inversion was new, all the other time-travel dilemmas felt pretty familiar if eg. you watched interstellar or prisoner of azkaban so a lot of the “big reveals” were fairly predictable. but it was seriously impressive how they edited ~half the scenes to have onscreen objects moving both forwards and backwards in time simultaneously

iap negotiation class was 8 hours of zoom per day on monday-wednesday this week, which was extremely exhausting but a lot of fun! my brain is a bit of a mess because i just finished reading the difficult conversations book from the previous post, which stresses being honest about feelings and letting go of the illusion of control and etc. much of which is antithetical to negotiating strategy (though of course there are many similarities too eg. being a good listener) so i’m still sorting everything out. that being said the professor did mention that difficult conversations was his favorite negotiation book, so i guess the two topics may not be as far off as i think. anyway here’s a rough overview of the class; i’m just going to name a lot of terms without defining them since i’m assuming a lot of you aren’t very interested in the details

on monday:

• we played some games and then talked about basic game theory. but the lecture came after the games and i forgot how much of a total headache it can be to play prisoners dilemma-type games with people who haven’t thought about this stuff before
• we learned about distributive bargaining, which felt good, and then talked about influencing people, which felt a lot less fine, in the sense that there were some vaguely unethical psych hack principles that i’m probably not going to adopt, though being aware of them is good. the prof didn’t endorse unethical behavior, but he did introduce some techniques and essentially said you should do things if they’re legal, helpful, and you feel good about doing them, which i’m pretty sure equates to an endorsement in most peoples’ minds
• we then talked about cultural norms and went over the results of a personality survey everyone in the class took. most of it was what i expected, eg. i already knew i have less confidence in my negotiation skills, am more future-oriented, and place more weight on communication phrasing than most people. but there were also some axes i hadn’t given much thought to, like monochronism vs polychronism — apparently i am high on polychronism, which i am not super surprised by, but since this is literally the first time i’ve been exposed to the concept i just assumed everyone operated similarly to me in this regard
• we did a house-selling negotiation that i failed because i forgot the relevant numbers (oops) and a car-buying negotiation that i did not fail because i did research beforehand

on tuesday:

• we learned about value creation and collaboration in negotiation, especially in regards to compatible vs distributive vs integrative issues, all of which was interesting and seems very reasonable
• we discussed objective vs subjective value and how the latter is more important for long-term relationships, which i found mildly surprising, but the prof had well-controlled studies to back up essentially all of his claims, which i appreciate a lot. according to exit surveys in class negotiation activities i actually kind of suck at creating subjective value though and that’s probably my single biggest issue to focus on
• we touched on the negotiators dilemma, which is like the prisoners dilemma but in the specific context of negotiation, and how tit-for-tat works pretty well if you do it without being a jerk, which is probably true in a lot of other contexts too
• we covered 7 main pre-negotiation topics to focus on, which i don’t feel like listing, but i guess the idea is that explicitly thinking about certain topics before a negotiation helps prevent you from defaulting to your usual habits, which is good if you’re like me and have lots of habits that negatively affect negotiations
• there was an employment negotiation that i did okay on but didn’t behave very rationally in (again, due to lack of thorough prep) and a business deal negotiation that went alright but took forever because each side of the negotiation had 3 representatives

on wednesday:

• we talked about psychological barriers to negotiation like the perception of equity, egocentrism, etc. 
• we explored what happens when the number of parties is large, how that affects perception, the presence of spoilers, and different kinds of coalitions that form when there are lots of parties. of course multi-party negotiations are objectively harder to navigate in the sense that they are more complex, but i think i am better at them because other people generally have a more severe drop-off in ability than me (which may have to do with the polychronism stuff mentioned earlier? or just my reluctance to antagonize parties)
• we talked about other barriers to negotiation, like when someone uses difficult tactics eg. arbitrary deadlines, stonewalling, threats/insults, and how to deal with those tactics without escalation. depending on your position there often isn’t a way to actually get them to stop employing those tactics though
• there was a cute review session at the end oof i’m actually going to miss this class + prof
• we did a 3-party money negotiation exercise which was alright, and then a 6-party business deal negotiation that went really well for me. it was a lot of fun in the sense that the landscape was constantly moving, and this was the first negotiation i felt fully engaged and invested in

of course this is still on small sample size but it’s funny how the iap classes i’ve taken (weblab, negotiation) have been as good as my favorite mit classes and much better than the average mit class so far. i think this is largely due to greater self-selection as well as iap classes being more hands-on