The Future, The Past and The Present

I got back into reading stoic philosophy lately, and it helped me realize an interesting fallacy of my brain. If I think of my brain as an optimization solver, its objective function is to maximize my chances of survival. Time flows in three distinct categories of past, present and future, so my brain applies a separate logic to each of them.

Future is considered as the most important piece, primarily because main objective is to see as much of future I can. Therefore, in a particular day, most of the thoughts and emotions generated are about how I can conserve my future. Naturally this means, present and past are relegated to play supporting roles. For example, two main concerns of my future are how my career will pan out (considering the changes in tech due to AI and a fickle visa situation), and if I will be alone for the rest of my life. Most of my present is muddled by the worries about these concerns, which are not in my control.

Past is a whole different story, because while my brain intends to learn from past to solidify my future, it also ends up ruminating on things that happened. This makes it difficult for me to actually stay in present and move ahead into future. The mechanism that was intended to conserve my future is so flawed that it ends up sabotaging me.

Stoic wisdom has a rational way of dealing with this. It is primarily dependent on the fact that our brains always require something to pay attention to. If we don’t consciously feed it one particular subject, it will fall back to its primitive wiring. Therefore, if I always try to focus on what’s in my control at this moment, it overrides my worries about past and future, and stops clinging on to things that are out of my control in the present.

In my case, this requires that I bring all my attention to important aspects of my life at the moment - running, work and reading. And this also has this beautiful side effect of protecting my future, because focusing intensely on my work has been helping me learn new things, which secures the next few years of my career despite all the chaos of AI. If I keep doing what I have been doing for next five years, I am confident I will survive to see my retirement. Running and reading have been helping me become content with myself, so they are rewiring the way I see loneliness.

This stoic idea of regularly asking “what’s under my control at this moment?” is a life saver, and I give it five out of five stars.

Comments

What is SUTVA for A/B testing?

Imagine if person B’s blood pressure reading depends on whether person A receives the blood pressure medicine in a randomized controlled trial. This will be violating Stable Unit Treatment Value Assumption (SUTVA) SUTVA states that the treatment received by an individual should not influence the outcome we see for another individual during the experiment. I know the initial example sounded absurd, so let me try again. Consider LinkedIn A/B testing a new ‘dislike’ reaction for its users, and the gods of fate chose you to be part of the initial treatment group that received this update. Excited after seeing this new update, you use this dislike reaction on my post and send a screenshot to a few of your connections to do the same, who are coincidentally in the control group that did not receive the update. Your connections log in and engage with my posts to use this dislike reaction, but later get disappointed as this new update is not yet available to them. The offices of LinkedIn are tr...

Solving Customer Churn with a hammer!

Learning when data should take a back seat and give way to domain knowledge is a valuable skill. Suppose you built a machine learning model on the data of your customers to predict churn risk. Now that you have a risk score for each customer, what do you do next? Do you filter the top n% based on the risk and send them a coupon with a discount in the hopes that it will prevent churn? But what if price is not the factor driving churn in many of these customers? Customers might have been treated poorly by customer service, which drove them away from your company's product. Or there might have been an indirect competitor's product or service that removes the need for your company's product altogether (this happened to companies like Blockbuster and Kodak in the past!) There could be a myriad of factors, but you get the point! Dashboards and models cannot guide any company's strategic actions directly. If companies try to use them without additional context, more often tha...

Curing writer's block with sunk cost fallacy

I paid $20 to renew this blog's domain in July. But the truth is, I had been suffering from writer's block ever since the start of this year and hadn’t posted a single thing. At one point, I was ready to give up on the blog altogether, but a voice in my head kept reminding me of all the time and money I’d already invested in this blog. So, this week, I sat down to write this imperfect, patchy article—about none other than that voice itself. Let me start with a classic scenario where you might have also encountered this voice. Suppose you’re at an Italian restaurant and ordered some pasta and tiramisu. After finishing the pasta, you realize you’re full, and there’s no way your stomach can handle that delicious tiramisu sitting right in front of you. But then, that beautiful brain of yours reminds you that you’ll be paying for the tiramisu whether you eat it or not. In a desperate attempt to avoid wasting money, you reluctantly eat two quick bites. And just like that, my frien...

The Dumb Datum

Search This Blog