console.log(decisions)
I used to dream. Lately I don’t remember what about though.
I think that may be part of adulthood, losing your dreams. You get glimpses of what they once were, but they’re never quite the same. That anomaly of how when you wake up, you practically forget about the main events right away, but in a grander scale. You even lose the theme.
I don’t mean this in a dark way. I just mean it in a realistic one. Dreams die. Mutate. Change. You adapt.
Those dreams are replaced with goals. Things you can realistically achieve. Sometimes it’s hard when to set those goals when you doubt what you can achieve.
Have you ever been in one of those positions where you have nothing but confidence in your abilities, but doubt them all at the same time? One of my favorite quotes from Soren Kierkegaard is “I think I have the courage to doubt everything; I think I have the courage to fight everything. But I do not have the courage to know anything, nor to possess, to own anything.” The whole idea of self-concept is fascinating. Are you really the best judge of your worth when it comes to value added? But how much weight should you place in the words of others?
I love religion because it looks at human nature in a way where things are clearly defined as right and as wrong. You can in a way put numerical values to actions. Just like in Redux. Something is correct or incorrect, you can asses it. 1 is right, 0 is wrong.
State management is one of the most interesting topics, at least for me, in computing. Everything is just combined in one place, and it’s your job to work through it all and figure out where each individual piece fits. Depending on what your creating, you just add some variables and you can create logic gates where things only happen based on a process of logical equivalencies. If you’ve done this, then trigger this.
Recently, I’ve been going a bit mad. Not in a bad way. But in a way that allows for growth. Because I’ve been questioning everything. Things about myself that I never thought I would question. My values. My integrity. My honesty. I’ve just wanted to become a better person. So far, I’ve found out I’m flawed.
There’s a lot about me that can’t be changed. But I digress.
Logically speaking though, so much is still possible. Because working through life at a lot of those logic gates, I learned the key lesson. I’ve learned that in life you don’t always make the right decision. We’re not computers. Nor are we meant to be. Working with them though, we can achieve so much more.
I’ve written about it before, but I have a love for fantasy RPG’s. I actually used to be embarrassed of it. I used to actually hide it from people going to school because I thought it would make the weird kid.
Binary life decision equivalency of a 0 in that situation.
DecisionTree1.0
Decision tree’s are non-linear models.
At a simpler level if fact a is true, do option one. If fact b and fact c are true do option two. While if fact b, d, and f are true, you would execute the third option. Now, if b, c, d, and f are all true. You would think multiple things happen, but only one does.
If you change up your code, just a little bit, you can make both options run.
Simpler, but quickly grows exponentially in complexity depending on the number of ones and zeros present.
Now, I probably just lost most people. But in terms of life this much easier to understand.
In our hypothetical example we have individual A. Individual A is accused of committing a crime. Here are the facts, see if you can figure out the “1’s” and “0’s”:
- Individual B sold Individual A a soda at 3:23 pm
- Individual A is caught on camera leaving the store at 3:30 pm right behind individual C
- Individual C went to an ATM at 3:35 pm, again caught on camera
- Individual C identifies individual A as the person that mugged them
- Individual D says they saw another person commit the crime
Did individual A buy a soda, 1 or 0?
Was individual A at the store, 1 or 0?
Was individual A behind individual C, 1 or 0?
Did individual D see individual C, 1 or 0?
Most of those are easy, even the fourth premise can be assumed to be true, although the value is truthy. You would assume that if individual D was even talking about individual C they must have at least seen them.
But what about what most people would assume to be the most important question? Did individual A commit the crime? Is that a 1 or a 0?
In this situation I could choose, but that’s not really the point of the exercise. There’s more information that can be gathered and more 1’s and 0’s that can be pulled out. With just the information presented, you can abstract so many more variables and assign different outcomes based on them.
In this scenario we only have so much data that can be gathered, but you can further extrapolate based on the information presented and then make assumptions.
Life is in a lot of ways extremely similar. You can look at your past and assign a bunch of 1’s and 0’s based on decisions you’ve made. Sometimes, I get a little lost in trying to figure all of mine.
