Divided by zero - Living in a stochastic environment

The skinner box is a psychology experiment that further explores operant conditioning. Simply put: Behave well and you will get rewarded, choose the wrong option and you will get punished. Be it humans or animals, any entity would always seek to maximize its utility function. Honestly I wish this analogy was used in the artificial intelligence resources that I used. This goes true on the surface, though you might realize that ultimately everything goes back to Maslow's pyramid of needs, which adds even more depth to the complexity of what makes a human being.

As we grow up, we shape our knowledge base and keep learning to enhance our future interactions through the experiences we gain. Part of the learning process is to make mistakes (Or watch people do mistakes), since they lead to nothing but punishment, as rewards feel cheap in comparison to the pain attached to choosing the wrong dialogue option.

As far as interactions go, I like to picture them as branch and bound models, where each root node has up to N options. If you overthink much, chances are, you tree will be transformed in a non-tree graph where some decisions might lead to a loop. Having trees with a high number of options might lead to decision fatigue, extending all the way to decision avoidance A.K.A. I ain't doing that. Having anxiety may also lead to the latter in a way that hinders your calculations, heck it might even introduce some negative weights to the reward associated to the option that is, in practise, the most rewarding one.

Each node in the graph denotes the state of the situation, whereas the edges represent the decisions. Each state has an objective function that is to be maximized, or minimized; this function can quantify anything (Ex: Patience, love, strength, energy...etc..), it all comes down to your imagination.

Negotiating a trade, yes I usually give up easily, hence why my tree's depth is short.

Everyone loves smooth and swift communications, navigating decision trees is a daunting task, it prompts me often to rely on muscle memory and instinct, something which I usually train by creating simulations in my head, hoping that their interactions will be 1:1 with what I picture. I often envy those who can quickly sort themselves out with little to no effort. One way to heuristically deal with this is to reduce the amount of options that you have to deal with, each experience that you gain acts as a cache in your memory, allowing you to reduce the length of the tree by seeing patterns in your daily life, though at some points it might introduce new complexities depending on the topic. Paradoxically enough, with experience, you end up learning new branching paths and new options to choose from. Skilled manipulators tend to have intelligently designed trees; psychopaths however tend to have multiple trees instead, one for each profile.

After all, I find it crucial for every human to learn and gain as experience as they can. I observed that the punishment factor of taking the bad options tend to be lighter the younger a human is; as you grow, people would often presume that you are capable of measuring and designing good decision trees. It's an important skill that some people make money off of nowadays, most departments have an advisory bureau, ready to enrich your trees with all the solutions you can afford. This is important as life is filled with many surprises that you can't really quantify. It is expected of an adult to be ready for the many possibilities that they may encounter. If at any time frame my actions contradict the knowledge base of any other party, the first assumption that I receive questions the cultural gap between us; some may even call me insane.
I don't possess the skills nor do I qualify to say the following statement, but I believe communicating has a huge search space that I would deem it \(NP-hard\) if that's what it takes. With everything discussed so far, I would require a mix of emotions and intelligence from my end in order to achieve my goals, both of which can be trained by engaging with society.

Having a streak of unsuccessful deals can lead to phenomenon called loss aversion, a state which is often interpreted as desperation. What's funny is that this emotion is not human, even apes may feel it. It's a feeling that makes losses have more painful effects than the joy when making a gain. This tendency slowly impacts the objective function as the person keeps making less victories, in other words, they would keep reducing their standards and lowering the bar as time moves on. As the standards keep going low, the human becomes blind against the potential red flags.

Is stochasticity beautiful ?

Real life is filled with randomness. In such environments, it becomes harder and harder to calculate your moves, let alone set a proper objective function as the number of dimensions grows exponentially, which is why some people study psychology.

Growing up in Morocco offered me an environment with tons of variables to deal with. On top of reacting to what I would see. To ensure my survival, I would still require something beyond the so called sixth sense. This is one of the reasons that motivate my coming to Germany, yet still, Germany also has some RNG to fight against but the probability range is a bit slim in comparison to my country. This is alluded by the fact that the law governs over everyone, however, humans are not perfect as entities, they might make some exceptions if they feel the need to.

As human beings, we try to minimize the luck factors by tackling the many situations using logical connectors. Initially, when dealing with randomness for the first time, the set of possibilities is \( \Omega = \{G_1, G_2, B_1, B_2.....G_n, B_n\}\) where \(G\) and \(B\) are a depiction of the positive and negative consequences respectively. Each element of \( \Omega \) has its own chance that ranges from \( [x, X] \) where \(X\) is an unknown upper bound to the possibilities that can occurs. As we keep learning about the variables, the \(X\) gets minimized, though it can never reach \(x\), one might think that they are safe, but you can never predict a wind blowing from somewhere and taking your most important piece of paper. Due to the unpredictable nature of living on earth, \(\Omega\)'s set is always subject for changes. Altering the RNG range challenges the intelligence of the human. As they move forward, it slowly reshapes their problem solving, risk management and strategic planning...

One strategy to fight against the RNG is to join a community. People commit to build small communities where they share their experiences and expand each others' knowledge base, which is often to be archived for existing and passed to the next generation. But what if those communities pretty much have no knowledge to back you up ? Job searching is one environment where you will often hear people say "Just try your luck! and see if you can land a job".

Job search, also known as: Recruitment hell, for a reason.

Job search is an environment where you can't concretely state a chain of moves that you can follow in order to reach your goal. It is subject to competition, the state of the economy, your expertise and even sometimes the mood of the HR...And many other corners that I am failing to perceive as we speak.

Oddswise, the RNG set can be reduced to \( \Omega = \{Refused, Accepted\}\), this is true because of how imperfect the recruitment processes are, as you can't objectively make a guide that leads you to victory. Getting accepted would have you flip a coin against every obstacle, fail once and you're out, and thus the following describes the odds of both outcomes, where \(n\) is the number of the \(n\)th job application obstacle (First meeting, Interviews...etc..) that the applicant has to deal with and \(P\) is the probability chance, namely \(P_{r,n}\) is the probability of getting refused at the \(n\)th round: \[ Refusal = P_{r,n} \quad \forall \quad n \in N \] \[ Acceptance = \prod\limits_{n \in N}{1- P_{r,n}} \] \[ \quad n > 0 \]

Because of how limited our POV, as job seekers, we would prefer to hear the opinions of a professional, since their reputation is often succeeded by cutting down the RNG upper bound by a huge margin with their advices. One such problem that encourages this behaviour is how obscure the floodgates that everyone has to deal with when applying for a job. The strategy is then to not only decrease the chance of not being picked up by a company, but to also turn the acceptance equation into this:

\[ Acceptance = \sum\limits_{k = 1}^{K}\prod\limits_{n \in N}{1- P_{r,n,k}} \] \[ \quad n > 0 \quad k > 0 \]

Verbally, this means to flip the coins at various companies up to a number \(K\) of companies, where \(P_{n,r,k}\) is the failure probability of obstacle \(n\) at company \(k\). As long as one has the resources to keep flipping, these statements still hold.

Due to the stochasticity of this whole endeavour, sometimes you might receive opinions that might damage your RNG, what's worse is that you can't really tell. Like when someone told me to remove the picture from my resume, saying that it's unnecessary. While the latter is true in the US, I was later told by many experts that this is not the case in Germany.

It sucks that the orthodox ways of sending an application nowadays tend to lead to bad results from what I heard. This sadly impacts the mental health of anyone outside the loop. As people become slowly desperate, they slowly discover new tactics to add to their action set, like reaching out directly to an HR, or getting connected through a network.

As the duration of unemployment persists, you might feel a sense of financial urgency, which would push you to use any opportunity to secure the money and keep surviving. Depending on how sensitive you feel towards losses, and together with prolonged unemployment, loss aversion will make any job look like a royalty, even in a place with high turnover rates and bad reputations.

As of the writing of this article, many companies are slowly embedding artificial intelligence as an automation obstacle against the high number of applications that are attempting to net an interview. I am failing to see if this will kill the HR positions, though I'll still be interested in seeing the upcoming shitstorms.

Seeking a roof: the worst they can say is no

August 2022 marks the day I was told that my old home was sold and that I (we) had till December 2022 to leave the apartment. By this time, a war happened in the east of Europe, which negatively impacted the economy and the demographic stats in the west, something which also played a role in making it extra hard for me to seek a new home.

Small spoiler here: I could stay despite the limit, but I was operating under some horrible living conditions, which make me and many question how I could still survive for that long. Hearing the news from the house owner motivated me to look for a better place after living there for aprox. 2 years. So even though I had the option to stay, this whole thing made me feel desperate for a new roof.

Unlike Job seeking, the randomness here felt less punishing so to speak, as I could somehow sight the obstacles. Ideally I would prefer to live with the right people to maximize my survivability. Sadly I had to deal with the sudden demographic explosion, inflation, and some other unseen features that I will soon discuss and talk about.

Naturally, as a student, my options -In theory- were a bit vast, since I had access to services that welcome students much more than regulars. I had budget constraints, and I also had to wisely pick the people that I would live with.

Winter was approaching, I had to be active, as pretty much anyone who posts online about having a free room tends to receive tons of notifications, it makes me wonder how I would deal with it if I was in their position. The more I kept failing to find a place, the more I slowly kept increasing my budget threshold. I also had to deal with scammers, which sadly do exist and will for certain take any chance to scheme on me. The best I could do was to set an automation mechanism that sends a message to everyone who posts online right when their room goes available.

I mentioned that I would have to seek people to live with, though I did not mention anything regarding being compatible with them. This was a bit problematic, since I would have to mask in order to receive a chance at being accepted. Some would love to party all day, some would love to try my dishes....And there is me, who just wants to routinely be a student.

Source: https://xkcd.com/173/

There is of course, the other option of networking yourself out in order to find a clique to live with, an option that sadly wasn't available for me at the time since I barely built any relationships in my first 2 years of living in Germany.

Mathematically speaking, with the way I see it, \(\Omega\)'s space here only has 2 coins at the minimum, the first of which revolves around finding an offer and getting into contact with the owner, and the second is getting the deal. I honestly wish if some offers had a highly-detailed check list that could help me filter my search, or get filtered of course. But I suppose some might cheat this, given how dire the housing situation was back then.

By the time of November, loss aversion started to kick in and I was tilting between accepting scams or enduring the life that I was having. Every time I came back home, the house and its people remind me of how stupid I am for not accepting an apartment room where I would pay thrice as much as what I usually to give each month.

I am writing this article from my new home, in a room bigger than the kitchen I had. Had I not asked an acquittance of mine for help, I probably would never be able to blog this out. My link to this person was purely professional. Normally, getting in here would require me to meet certain requirements, and receiving the privilege from this person was something I would never expect. I would never forget this and I would always be thankful for it.

Getting the European visa: My least favourite casino

I don't have much to say here, this is somehow comparable to job seeking. Since you are dealing with unseen variables which somehow led to many into creating phantasies on the topic.

Normally, to apply for a European visa, I would have to submit my documents and see the magic happen. More often than not, getting a refusal comes dry with no feedback or remarks that hint towards the decision, which is why people keep speculating on the matter, to the point that I heard things like: Make sure to smile properly in order to have a chance.

Without the feedback, it becomes a bit difficult to plan your next moves, especially if you are desperate and want to alter the outcome RNG. The wisest thing one can do is to have a plan B on the side. I recall hearing someone sold their house to generate enough money for the whole gamble, only for them to get a refusal.

In all fairness, this is a special case in my opinion, as all you have to do is to fill their requirements I suppose. I believe any amount of extra effort is great. I made it in by simply meeting the (official) bar, which is the case for many other. But some who had much brighter profiles couldn't make it, for reasons that are left unknown to us of course. Our society's psyche makes the whole thing discouraging when commenting on the latter case, where they would mention things like "See ? his grades are quite high and still could not make it."

There is of course, the idea that the feedback element is left unseen to allow for more money-farming shenanigans by the shadow people. The only way to find out I guess is to join their ranks and climb their hierarchy. This whole model has only one coin to be flipped, you either make it in or not, unless if you are into conspiracies which makes your sample space grow further.

In the summer of 2019, parallel to waiting for a response, I was climbing the leaderboards of a competitive activity. My rank was stuck in its spot as I could not improve it. Amongst the members of my team, my rank was the worst. One of my team mates gave birth to the joke "You have higher chances to get a visa to Europe than reaching our rank", a quote which I always laugh at, alluding that I will never reach that rank. One day we played together 2 matches, both of which were victories, and the second of which allowed me to reach the rank that I was dreaming of. After exactly 9 minutes, I received a call from the visa office, telling me to come and retrieve my visa.

Side note: The danger of living in a routine

I highly appreciate structure routines. Under normal conditions, spending my days feels like meditating, as I have nothing to worry about, as long as I take the proper measures and as long as I stay responsible with things like paying bills and being on time with my appointments. It really feels good to be ignorant and face everything as I plan, I feel elegant and smooth in this state.

Relying too much on a routine, passively makes me sometimes forget and undermine the uncertain accidents that can occur in my daily life. Though I do my best to stay away from these, I am not a perfect being. By developing a routine and staying in this meditation mode, I put myself on a risk, which can often lead to anxiety, which extends to ruining my processing powers and implies a decrease in my productivity.

As much as I appreciate all the lucky shots that I had in my life, I sometimes wish if I could systematically tackle many challenges instead of relying on any sort of luck factor in order to succeed. It sucks that not everything is written to the public in some instances and that people would have to use their instincts/intelligence to figure things out. Some people keep telling me about how every deal with another human is a 50/50 if you simply engage and initiate some communication with them. To me, it never feels like a 50/50, it never was linear.