Comment by TeMPOraL

> after all, what’s the point of a giving someone a bunch of cheap flashy gifts for Christmas (instead of say, socks) either?

Making them feel good and "seen", obviously. This is perfectly expressible in "engineer thinking" (I won't say "quantifiable", because there's this meme that engineers see things in binary, whereas the reality is, math is perfectly fine with fuzzy ideas and uncertainty - it's the normies that can't handle those).

Hell, there are some game-theoretic approaches to maximize social ROI on gifts, but I won't go into those, especially that they tend to flip the sign on the return if the recipient learns about them.