Surprise Me!
Is human life meant to be an optimized function? Is every moment in it supposed to be carefully planned? And does planning slowly gnaw at the tree of happiness?
Recently, on a trip abroad, I didn't plan any activity for a day. I decided to take the subway to the other side of the city, but realized I had reached the wrong station. While walking to the right one a kilometer away, I grabbed a Subway to snack on, only for my card to be rejected at the next station (oops, never carried cash!). I was at a loss and stood at the intersection while crowds jostled around. Suddenly, I was surprised to see a friend from my city appear. He helped me get the transit card and asked me to join his group heading to the museum. I ended up spending the full day with them.
This has now become a core memory for me, because what are the odds of finding someone you know in foreign lands, at the same place at the same time, uncoordinated? What if I had not grabbed that snack? It proved to be a chain rule of path probabilities that led to the outcome of an entire day of my life, which fascinated me and brought a smile to my face!
Introspecting, how often do we choose a restaurant without checking its ratings? Do we travel in our car without maps telling us the route? Are we slowly eliminating serendipity from our lives completely to make it easier to manage?
Every small decision is now a measured take informed by statistical data points, eliminating random discovery. We all want determinism in our models, but forget that stochasticity leads to unconventional ideas. Even in the LLM post-training world, it is interesting to note that entropy within models leads to aha moments and eventually results in learning, not an entropy collapse similar to what we are experiencing. It is ironic that as we reduce uncertainty estimates in our algorithms, we are doing so in our lives too!
Recently, on a trip abroad, I didn't plan any activity for a day. I decided to take the subway to the other side of the city, but realized I had reached the wrong station. While walking to the right one a kilometer away, I grabbed a Subway to snack on, only for my card to be rejected at the next station (oops, never carried cash!). I was at a loss and stood at the intersection while crowds jostled around. Suddenly, I was surprised to see a friend from my city appear. He helped me get the transit card and asked me to join his group heading to the museum. I ended up spending the full day with them.
This has now become a core memory for me, because what are the odds of finding someone you know in foreign lands, at the same place at the same time, uncoordinated? What if I had not grabbed that snack? It proved to be a chain rule of path probabilities that led to the outcome of an entire day of my life, which fascinated me and brought a smile to my face!
Introspecting, how often do we choose a restaurant without checking its ratings? Do we travel in our car without maps telling us the route? Are we slowly eliminating serendipity from our lives completely to make it easier to manage?
Every small decision is now a measured take informed by statistical data points, eliminating random discovery. We all want determinism in our models, but forget that stochasticity leads to unconventional ideas. Even in the LLM post-training world, it is interesting to note that entropy within models leads to aha moments and eventually results in learning, not an entropy collapse similar to what we are experiencing. It is ironic that as we reduce uncertainty estimates in our algorithms, we are doing so in our lives too!
My job is to protect her from the scary stuff she can’t see. I plan for the future - Anxiety (Inside Out)
We have curated our feeds, spending time watching things we like the most. Unknowingly, we have slowly started even making our daily life in the real world mimic the life we want to live, where nothing happens unexpectedly. This enhances convenience but makes it harder to truly squeeze the elixir from life.
Dopamine hits and achievement satisfaction are higher when led through the process of discovery than by walking the same paths laid down for you to achieve your goal. We can see this tradeoff even in something as trivial as gifting:
"Thanks for gifting me <> that I had asked for" vs "Omg yay! Thanks for this surprise gift"
Inadvertently, this little act of predicting what someone else would love for a gift even tests relationships that an algorithm cannot define. It's based on the act of discovering each other's likes and dislikes through the journey of spending enough time with each other. Is our favourite memory of a gift to date the most useful one you asked for or the least expected one we received?
Did the previous generation without the internet/mobiles/llm (aka the know-it-all) have greater difficulties but also a greater surface area of extracting joy in doing simple essential life activities? In the churn, drop by drop, as we have less appetite for uncertainty, we outsource decision-making to machines and risk human minds that can't hold tension long enough for novel insights.
So, why don't you go out and spend a day without any recommendations, taking untrodden paths, meeting fascinating unknown people in the world?
Dopamine hits and achievement satisfaction are higher when led through the process of discovery than by walking the same paths laid down for you to achieve your goal. We can see this tradeoff even in something as trivial as gifting:
"Thanks for gifting me <> that I had asked for" vs "Omg yay! Thanks for this surprise gift"
Inadvertently, this little act of predicting what someone else would love for a gift even tests relationships that an algorithm cannot define. It's based on the act of discovering each other's likes and dislikes through the journey of spending enough time with each other. Is our favourite memory of a gift to date the most useful one you asked for or the least expected one we received?
Did the previous generation without the internet/mobiles/llm (aka the know-it-all) have greater difficulties but also a greater surface area of extracting joy in doing simple essential life activities? In the churn, drop by drop, as we have less appetite for uncertainty, we outsource decision-making to machines and risk human minds that can't hold tension long enough for novel insights.
So, why don't you go out and spend a day without any recommendations, taking untrodden paths, meeting fascinating unknown people in the world?
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