Dealing with Johns way of thinking everyone uses the most efficient course of action to bring him to his senses : Charles tries to shake him up by yelling at him to just crack his head open, the girl at the bar slaps some sense into him, Dr Rosen uses shock therapy to bring recovery, Parcher presses him with threats when John starts thinking about quitting, Alicia uses touches to hands, face and heart to show whats real. Everyone is trying to immediately change the consequences his way of thinking brings by the most efficient course possible.
So i guess i am going with expediency.
Opposite expediency is need. Alicia doesnât slap sense into him, but kisses him meeting his idea of what he is lacking. Hansen gives him space on campus to satisfy what John feels he needs are to further his recovery. He is given the recognition he needs in the pens to see how he would respond when given the Nobel prize. Dr. Rosen and Alicia allowing John to stay home to figure himself out .These are possibly examples of when need, satisfying Johns subjective judgmentment of what he lacks, is the response of the characters to Johns way of thinking.
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I like it! Keep going!
Expediency was better when it stopped John from suicide. Expediency was brutal when it required so much shock therapy. Need was good when it brought him and Alicia closer. Need was bad when it made him miss speaking to Charles.
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Expediency was good when it helped him solve the problem of the blond by deciding everyone should agree to ignore her and go for her friends so all the guys win.
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Definitely ! Thatâs for sure
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I think you guys are really close now! 
Can hardly wait for you to get to the problem level. I think itâs time! 
Donât forget rather than facing the daunting âwhich of these many elements might be the Problemâ you can also look at an entire quad of four and say âdoes this feel right?â (And for both OS and MC throughlines, that quad will be the one under the Issue.)
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Take it away, @Rosie. What do you think the problem, or problem quad, is? What drives and pushes either John or everyone while also creating conflict? And what process wraps it up when John notices that Marcee doesnât age?
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These element level terms really trip me up, but I am working on it. 
Reduction is the process that wraps it up . Noticing Marcee does not age is just enough information to allow John to act with a great degree of confidence in the most likely conclusion Marcee is not real, neither are Charles or Parcher. So with Reduction as solution, production becomes problem.
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Thatâs really cool, @Rosie. Even not remembering the film I was going for Reduction as the Solution, mostly because a drive of Production fits trying to produce a new mathematical theory really well. It also fits the schizophrenia â producing the imaginary people and situations out of thin air.
Thereâs something else incredible about Reduction, kind of mind blowing in fact. But I donât want to mention it until Greg chimes in, as I donât want to overly influence your analysis with that idea.
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Thinks @mlucas! And thanks for adding examples for Production!!! Looking forward to hearing the rest of your input!!
So if you pick Doubt and Expediency, looks like it pushes Production and Reduction. I can kind of see Reduction as MC solution in that he ignores Marcee, Charles, and Parcher. But I have a hard time seeing his declaration that she doesnât age as a Reduction. It could just be that I need to understand the term better, but honestly I canât really point to a Problem/Solution pair iâd feel good about. This may be where I need to watch it again.
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It is worth another watch for me too. @mlucas are you ready to share your Reduction insight ?
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Another big moment in the movie that seems reductionist as to an Idea about Johns manner of thinking is when Alicia says Dr Rosen reduced the evidence needed to readmit John to if "John tried to kill her ". Prior to that Dr Rosen was ready to go back to shock treatments based on John stopped taking his meds and started gathering codes again. He went from making a mountain out of a mole hill to calling a,mole hill a mole hill unless evidence For calling it a mountain arises, as in âif he tries to kill uouâ. ???
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Okay, so realize Iâm not arguing for this at all since I havenât seen the movie since it was in the theatre!
But I thought it would be really cool if Reduction was the Solution because of the math! From what I understand of Nashâs contribution to game theory, he proved that for a very broad set of âgamesâ in which the players are choosing strategies to maximize their profit/return (while also considering the other playersâ strategies) there is something called the Nash Equilibrium. This is kind of a âstable stateâ that the game boils down to.
Note that although itâs talking about âgamesâ itâs not really just games itâs any non-cooperative scenarios with defined payoffs. A good example is a bunch of companies producing similar products, say wifi routers, and competing against each other. It turns out that even though theyâre competing, they will maximize their profits if they work together to create a standard for wifi, so that any computer will work with any router, instead of making the interface proprietary. (You can see both Production and Reduction in this example.)
So really a Nash Equilibrium is a solution that REDUCES all the possible strategies that players could use and all the ways a game could play out, down to one particular stable state (or a set of them I think). Imagine sitting at a table with 7 players playing some game, and somebody tells you that despite the big production of the game itself and all the possible ways it could turn out, the game is destined to reduce down to one scenario.
Definition of Nash Equilibrium (from Google dictionary):
(in economics and game theory) a stable state of a system involving the interaction of different participants, in which no participant can gain by a unilateral change of strategy if the strategies of the others remain unchanged.
Anyway, I thought it would be really cool if Reduction was the OS & MC Solution in the storyform because it would mean the writers sensed that dramatic force at work in Nashâs life and aligned the story to the math.
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What about the other items in those quads. Do you see Inaction & Protection in the OS, or Evaluation & Re-evaluation in the MC throughline?
One possibility, sometimes when the Solution itself is hard to see, it can turn out to be something like Re-evaluation or Reconsider. Those can be easy to miss as they donât always stand out as a dramatic thing on their own. The Marceeâs age thing could fit Re-evaluation really well. (But then youâll end up with the same storyfrom as The Princess Bride! LOL)
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So that would be pretty cool if a sort Nash equilibrium were written into the structure of the movie itself!
As far as looking at other elements, I may try to do that at lunch today so I can come back and play devils advocate against Reduction. Iâm not saying itâs not Reduction, by the way, just that Iâm not getting a warm fuzzy about any of it. Iâm definitely more comfortable working at higher levels of the chart.
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Considering the Os Problem quad with Production, how do you view Protection and Inaction as Focus and Direction?
How would you feel about the Certainty/Acceptance/Nonacceptance/Potentiality quad?