Fight or Flight

June 05, 2020 • 2 min read

The human brain was never built for certain kinds of conditions. As humans we enjoy not being lazy but thinking lazily. It’s who we are and what we do.

Fight or flight happens when the brain receives a brand new signal that it hasn’t processeed before.

Think of a function - lets call it what_do_i_do. You’re used to seeing a, b, c as inputs but now you’ve come across a d.

What do you do next?

d is just too new and doesn’t apply to any function you’ve ever written before. You have no choices left but to call fight_or_flight(d) that takes in any inputs and deterministically returns one of

1. Fight, represented with a 1
2. Flight, represented with a 0

Regardless of the result assigned, when all is said and done you now have more information for the next time. You saw d, acted on one of two options - fight or flight - and now have more information. The degree to which it worked we’ll save into bias_d, which is a decimal between 0 and 1, but tends to be closer to the extremes E.g. it worked or it didn’t

What do you do next?

You first consider how often you’ll encouter d again which we’ll call d_t. For example d == bear and you live in the city d_t is closer to 0 but if you live in the hills then d_t is closer to 1

You look for answers on Google to understand how others have dealt with d by calling google(d, d_t). It returns another decimal between 0 and 1 as a function of the event and how long you think it’s worth for you to dig in to.

You then weigh in bias_d from your experience and save it in to a final do_d or, your duty, on how you act the next time you encounter d.

It’ll look something like this

do_d = google(d, d_t) * bias_d

as a one time operation and then we update our function to be

def what_do_i_do(a, b, c, d):
  # other stuff before
  return do_d if d
  # other stuff after

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Fran

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