The Decision Strategist

I just wanted to let everyone know that I am changing the theme for The Decision Strategist. The old one is ok, but I’m looking to make it a little cleaner and increase the amount of space available for text. You’ll probably see it changing over the next few weeks. Feel free to comment on whether you like it’s current look more or less than the old look.

Thanks.

-zot.

Popularity: 33%

Vote for this post on: These icons link to social bookmarking sites where readers can share and discover new web pages.

It struck me recently that the life of a person can be related to the a complexity metaphor. In a human life there are distinct stages. When young we are actively forming connections, building emotional and reasoning abilities. As we become older, we reach a limit in the breadth of our complexity, but we continue to enhance the depth of our complexity. In other words, its hard to develop new capabilities, but we become better at the ones we already have. Then at some point, as we age, the complexity of our brains reaches a saturation point, and new information can only be added at the cost of losing old information.

I know this isn’t an exact fit. It is of course possible, as we are increasingly finding, to learn new skills and modes of behavior as an adult. But it is much more difficult.

The brain has a natural limitation in terms of it’s capacity, perhaps defined most literally as the number of possible connections between neurons. When we are young there are plenty of unused connections available to develop new capabilities.

But at some point, most of our neurons have been used in one way or another. We can still learn new things, but it is more difficult. It is easier to strengthen the connections already existing, and perhaps make new connections between existing groups of neurons.

Then, as we age, we reach the limits of our capacity and have to start re-wiring to make room for memory or any new skills we are still managing to learn.

I think its an interesting idea because it suggests that it is necessary that as we age we become forgetful and less mentally agile. Retaining the ‘youthful’ abilities of the brain would require giving up a set of previously made connections.

There is also the sense here of a neural network sagging under the weight of it’s own connections.

I mention all of this because, as an almost-thirty-undecided human, I am waiting to hear from the peace corps regarding an invitation and filling the time with thoughts of law school (and/or grad school) after the peace corps. But at what point does it make more sense to focus in on a subject I already know than to continue trying to learn completely new ones?

I like to think that we are free to pursue new avenues for as long as we like, but is there some natural limit in which the decreasing returns to scale yield increasingly small returns for my time? Or by learning new fields, am I keeping my brain agile and young just by virtue of exercising it?

I don’t know very much about neurology, so someone can probably correct some misconceptions I have here.

-zot.

Popularity: 24%

Vote for this post on: These icons link to social bookmarking sites where readers can share and discover new web pages.

I have spent the last couple of months incredibly addicted to this little game called nethack. It’s free and completely old school, and just terribly awesome. I have yet to beat it. Someday I’ll post a story of my exploits.

I was gearing up the other day to start working on new projects again, and went over my primary goals for 2007. It turns out I did ok. I was officially out of debt in November (not counting the dreaded student loans), made a lot of progress on projects, have been running, and maintained a pretty healthy diet. I could have done better, especially without the devil game referenced above, but I’m not as disappointed as I thought I would be.

Which brings me to two different but related thoughts. First, I feel like my life is composed of a number of cycles. It’s vary noticeable with respect to my work on individual projects. I tend to have a few months of hard work and extreme motivation, followed by a few months of a lack of enthusiasm. But there are other areas: exercise, games, jobs, etc… In fact, I’m starting to think that I only enjoy a particular job for about 2 years before I start to get bored. I spent two years at REMI, have spent two years at BBER, and am now looking at spending two years in the Peace Corps (by the way, I received my medical clearance the other day).

The second thought is about my expectations as I pulled up my list of personal goals for 2007. Why did I feel like I had failed? Are we predisposed to feel unsatisfied with our efforts? To some extent it seems like this is common-place, even in areas where other people think our work is spectacular. At work people and clients have been pretty happy with what I’ve done, but I tend to focus on the aspects of any given project that I didn’t explore fully, or had to make uncomfortable assumptions.

So is it just a difference of information? Clients have only the end results of my work to evaluate, and don’t see all the missteps or excluded possibilities. They don’t have access to full information. Is it yet another case of the signal to noise ratio?

Unequal information and the signal to noise ratio have something to do with it, but then why was I convinced of my own failure to achieve my goals? My perfect information of my own thoughts and actions should have kept me online with how I was actually doing. Of course part of feeling like I didn’t do well has to do with the non-trivial impacts of environment and my state of being, which could be related to any number of factors.

But a bigger force was at work. The major source of my disappointment came from my work on launching decyder. I had hoped that by the end of 2007 I would have a working framework for group decision-making, not to mention well-developed web application development skills. In reality I have only a basic framework, and though I know much more than I did at the beginning of 2007, I still have a long way to go.

This means that one goal, ‘launching a decision-based startup’, overrode my other goals and became a proxy for my success in 2007. Why is this? If you asked, I wouldn’t put it above my other goals, especially ‘developing stronger connections with the important people in my life’. But I think there are several reasons why it naturally rose to the forefront:

• It is measurable. My success or failure can be easily discerned by the health of the project, especially in metrics like number of users (0) and income generated (0).
• It has glamor. The idea fits into a society-wide story in which a lone person creates a business with spectacular success.
• It is perhaps most closely related to my future career (in my mind at least). If ultimately I’d like to be more involved in creative idea implementation, this is a good building block for my development.

The other possibility is that we, or at least I, are inherently optimistic about what we can achieve, and pessimistic about what we have achieved. Most people, programmers especially, have a terribly difficult time estimating how much they can accomplish in a given amount of time, often largely overestimating their abilities.

The key for me was that I realized that even if I didn’t accomplish all of my goals, I had made some fairly significant strides in all of them. Perhaps then the point of goals isn’t so much to accomplish them, but to give you something to work towards if you are floundering.

Baby steps

-zot

Popularity: 46%

Vote for this post on: These icons link to social bookmarking sites where readers can share and discover new web pages.

It’s funny how much of a role movies play in affecting our imagination. Last night I was thinking about some new projects at work and how I was excited to work on them. That I actually had work, especially exciting work, made me pretty happy with the idea of walking in to work on today.

But in my imagination I wasn’t walking in to my actual office. It was in the same spot, but it was much more high tech, much like the scene of any movie involving the government trying to stop a terrorist. There were several people who worked for me, and I walked in saying “Alright, what have you got for me?” in a very self-confident and assured manner. I was wearing a suit.

In reality, my office is shared with a co-worker, my furniture is modular, and though my computer is pretty high end, there are no write-on screens or anything like that. No one works under me and I am generally the first person in the office. I also biked to work and walked in wearing jeans with my pant legs rolled up.

So my first thought was that it is pretty funny how different my imagination of what was going to happen was from how it actually happened. But then I got to thinking on how a lot of disagreements and disappointments happen because we envision a situation one way and it turns out to be completely different. I was inevitably setting myself up for disappointment when I imagined walking in the door to my office.

I wonder if visual media, particularly movies, have affected our imaginations so that they tend to vary greatly from real life, or if human imagination has always differed greatly from reality. Indeed, that is essentially the definition of imagination. Are romantic movies responsible for encouraging our imaginations to create scenes wildly out of proportion with reality? Do the thrillers make everyone imagine a job that is more intense and exciting?

While the link between violence in media and actual violence is tentative at best, there is some pretty strong evidence that inaccurate portrayals of car driving make people more risky drivers. In other words, visual media affects, at least temporarily, the models of physics in our heads.

Consider our imagination of how a punch actually affects someone. In movies it takes a fifteen minute fight to knock someone out, but most fights are over after only a few strikes at most. I don’t have a lot of real world experience with fights, so perhaps it’s natural that my imagination would take after the movie version.

The same is true with how a car responds when you take a tight turn at high speeds. Generally it flips over, but in movies a professional driver and special effects ensure that the car screams around the corner perfectly.

On the other hand, my girlfriend thinks I have the causality backwards. Maybe our imagination influences are visual media to be more unrealistic, rather than the other way around.

Most likely it’s more of a give and take: the imagination informs the media and vice versa. But if movies inform our imaginations, maybe that explains why homeland security is so keen on movie script terrorist attacks and why economists are so bad at forecasting.

Just some food for thought. What is your perspective?

-zot

Popularity: 48%

Vote for this post on: These icons link to social bookmarking sites where readers can share and discover new web pages.