Optimizing Politeness

So we have this little thing called 'The Golden Rule' which saith: "Do unto others as you would have them do unto you."

For some things, it's a pretty good policy. I'd prefer not to have people eviscerate or defenestrate me, so I figure it's appropriate that I don't do those things to them, either. In some cases, though, it doesn't work as well.

One of the best examples of this is holding the door open. Now, I understand, if you're closely tailing some chap that it may be nice for him to perform this behavior, lest it fly shut into your face and give you justification for saying "Ouch!". However, this is usually not the case.

Often, when I am a significant distance from the aforementioned door, the human who is traveling through it decides that it's expedient to hold it open for me, anyway. I'll use math to demonstrate why this is bad:

If my current velocity and trajectory causes the door-opener to perceive that I would like to emulate him in traveling through the opening created when this door is ajar, he could run a rough mental calculation and determine the approximate time before I reached the door. If he, for example, estimated that it would take me 5.47 seconds to reach him, yet it would only delay my journey for 1.2 seconds for me to open the door myself, then we have a net loss of 4.27 seconds.

However, there are other complications. It is possible that I'm not actually heading for the door. Further, he has removed from me control over my environment. Last of all, common politeness obligates me to thank him, and the combination of all of these has far more power to derail my train of thought (which is always going somewhere weird like when I come up with these posts) than the instinctive act of opening the door.

Now, don't get me wrong, there are cases where this door-holding obsession that people have can actually be helpful. If I'm carrying a live salmon or have my hands glued together, the difficulty of opening a door is increased tremendously, and I'm grateful when somebody relieves me of this arduous activity. However, when somebody's thoughts are, "Hi, I'm going to burn 5 seconds and interrupt your train of thought because it will save you 1 second if I am correctly prognosticating your destination," I do find it slightly annoying.

Some day, I'll learn to be a jerk and make progress in optimizing the world. For now, I just thank them and move on.