Sorry I’ve been polluting 0stack with notes.
This is probably not good for my whole “picking up a reading base again thing”.
Anyways, I said last week that I’d do a weekly post and I put it on my calendar so I guess here is this weeks post.
Recently someone was explaining a board game to me. And the guy explaining it was like “this board game does not have the Markov property”. Like, there are some pieces where you have to remember some amount of history for the piece that isn’t recorded on the board anywhere. And I was like dang. That sucks.
But then I got really philosophical (as a side note, this is always a good idea --- vaguely related to taking life seriously; but here I’m being facetious in this blog post. hmm, maybe that was a bad idea given that it’s especially hard to tell if something is humor or not without conversation context; in fact, I can’t even tell from looking at my own writing whether or not it’s humorous sometimes).
And anyways I was like, is the Markov Propety good? I think the short answer is, it kind of depends.
- The sunk cost fallacy, one of the most pernicious pieces of human psychology (because it has a grain of truth / usefulness in it which makes it especially hard to deprogram), is the emotional feeling that “life doesn’t have the Markov Property”.
- I think in this instance your emotions are very clearly wrong.
- I think in lots of interactions with people you can assume the Markov property.
- by which I mean, a really dangerous part of interpersonal connections is that we grow used to them
- think about how differently you would treat someone if they were coming over to your house as a guest for 1 day, vs if they were living in your house for a year.
- what I mean is, if they came for 1 day you’d make it a crazy good day.
- you’d pull out your best food, best conversations, best games etc
- can you meet someone a-new? should you even?
- I think a little bit to both.
- but also by markov property here I meant don’t hold grudges.
sorry this probably doesn’t quite make sense but I’ve got to sleep.