A Bayesian Network is, in a nutshell, a way of describing relationships between things in a probabilistic way. For example: someone might say that if I finish my novel Cloudytown then the world will end with probability .5. Okay, that’s an idiotic example, but if you take a gander at the link you might get the idea.
Bayes nets are nice because the process for creating them mimics the process by which people think about the world. We think that X and Y cause Z, and Z causes Q, which is also caused, a little bit, by X. You can not only represent that exactly with a Bayes net, but you can do inference on the resultant distribution, which means you can pose questions and answer them: “Given X and A, what’s the probability of Y?” This requires some extraordinarily complicated math, but conceptually it’s pretty simple.
This matters because last week I tried to decompose my life as a Bayes net, which is just the latest in a long history of self-modeling. It is also probably the most useful, since the causal chaining is clear the way it wasn’t in the rule-based model I wrote about late last summer. In layman’s terms, this means it’s easier to tweak something in your life and see how it would play out. For instance, I can say: if I improved my diet fifty percent, what result would that have on my creative output? And so long as I’ve represented the causal relationships properly, I can have confidence that the answer will be consistent with the axioms of probability. It will be ‘right’ as it is possible to be, given the model.
So in the Bayes net of my life there is, for real, a “diet” node, which is connected to, among others, the “pain” node, the “focus” node, and the “mood” node. The “diet” node is super important, mostly because of chronic pain issues, and the issues that result from the chronic pain issues. But “diet” isn’t the most important node in the Bayes net; it’s “social”, which I defined as the summation of all social influences. Which means that the biggest bang for my buck in making substantive change to my circumstances is to spend a lot of effort on the “social” node.
Which brings me to the purpose of this post: I’m looking to ramp up my social activities, but I want to do it in a way consistent with the rest of the stuff I’m doing. So for example: I want to see you, but I don’t want to go out to lunch or dinner with you, because it’s too damn hard to deal with the dietary restrictions when I’m going out to eat with people all the time. And it’s funny what a huge hole that leaves in my social repertoire — food mediates everything.
But I am very much open to suggestions of things to do, either generally (things you suggest that I should do) or with the people who read this blog. What can we do together? What projects can we undertake? Where could we go? What could we make? And though I won’t go out to lunch or dinner with you, I will come over to your house and make dinner with you; or you can come to mine. But maybe we should make movies; or interview Indians; or something. I dunno. But I can’t be the only person underperforming socially, so help me think of some creative and worthwhile things so that I’m not in a room alone staring at fucking pixels for 90% of my life.