The curse of nostalgia and the blessing of fading memory

I tend to swim in very deep nostalgia from time to time. For some reason, I tend to remember the most horrible things I have commited in the past way too vividly. And that makes me want to go and hide from the people who I have commited those atrocities to. But then, sometimes when I "accidentally" connect with them on social media after all these years, they dont seem to hold a grudge.. or maybe they do, and they are doing an awesome job of covering it.

This made me wonder, how many things and how many people do I genuinely wish, would forget my existence. When i started filling out that list, the list of incidents grew uncomfortably large. What a horrible human being I am. For some people in the list, the only thing i remember about the relevant person is the atrocities i committed and sometimes not even their face.

I sometimes notice posts in social media, about people getting forgotten in the constant influx of history and asking us not to worry about that. But with this thought experiment, I would dare say that getting forgotten is a wonderful gift to life in Earth. Imagine how bad would it be, if everyone remembers all the horrible things the other person has done on them. It would truly be a bloodbath. 

Moral of the story, dont connect with old school friends you have forgotten. You might remember stuff about them. ( just kidding. Connect with each and every one )

All of this makes me wonder, Is this common ? Or is it peculiarity that I am blessed with !?

An Opinion on criticism of candidates shopping for offers, which promise a better pay. ( Alt-title: Is it fair to consider an organization and a job-seeker as comparable entities ? )

DISCLAIMER: Not that anyone cares, but the data mentioned in the below article may not be accurate and paragraphs i quoted in the text may well be inaccurate. I am not making any claims about the authenticity of the experiment or the data used.

I frequent LinkedIn, against my own aversions for it, for ruining the little peace I have. There are a lot of recurring content in LinkedIn that grates my cheese. This one is about one of them, which I feel is completely trivializing a dilemma regularly faced by job-seekers. 

If you have been to LinkedIn before, you have definitely seen posts from HRs / CXOs , cursing, deriding people who have accepted their offer only to reject it later for a better offer. Recently I have been seeing lots of "what-if" posts , asking what if the employer also starts doing the same, and reject an offer if another candidate accepts lesser pay for the same job. The way I see it, this argument has multiple issues, and I am not even talking about the fact that companies actually already do this, granted not as frequently as job seekers. One of the main issues I have with this kind of thinking is, Companies and job seekers ( people ) are not interchangeable. The assumption in that scenario is, they are both equal entities, so if it is fair in one direction, it is fair in the other too. But obviously they aren't, for a lot of reasons apart from the fact that, one of them doesn't have a family to feed apart from its own expenses.

But this article is not about all those reasons. While I would love to write about it, I think I lack the clarity to make a blog post about it. This article is just to point out an interesting similarity between a bit mentioned in one of my favourite books called Freakonomics and this problem.

 

In the first chapter of that book, an interesting counter-intuitive "study" ( Freakonomics/its authors have a lot of critics, and many of them are critical about the fundamentals of the experiments. Regardless, I think it is an interesting thought experiment. ) about how real-estate agents don't work in the best interest of their clients, even after the incentive structure seemingly favouring the case. 

...You hire a real-estate agent to sell your home.

She sizes up its charms, snaps some pictures, sets the price, writes a seductive ad, shows the house aggressively, negotiates the offers, and sees the deal through to its end. Sure, it’s a lot of work, but she’s getting a nice cut. On the sale of a $300,000 house, a typical 6 percent agent fee yields $18,000. Eighteen thousand dollars, you say to yourself: that’s a lot of money. But you also tell yourself that you never
could have sold the house for $300,000 on your own. The agent knew
how to—what’s that phrase she used?—“maximize the house’s value.”
She got you top dollar, right? 

Right ?

If the agent is getting a percentage of the final deal, It is mathematically better for the agent, if the client gets a better deal for their home. So will agents get the best deal for all their clients ?

Freakonomics gives a counter-intuitive perspective  backed by data.

But as incentives go, commissions are tricky. First of all, a 6 percent real-estate commission is typically split between the seller’s agent and the buyer’s. Each agent then kicks back roughly half of her take to the agency. Which means that only 1.5 percent of the purchase price goes directly into your agent’s pocket.
 

So on the sale of your $300,000 house, her personal take of the $18,000 commission is $4,500. Still not bad, you say. But what if the house was actually worth more than $300,000? What if, with a little more effort and patience and a few more newspaper ads, she could have sold it for $310,000? After the commission, that puts an additional $9,400 in your pocket. But the agent’s additional share - her personal 1.5 percent of the extra $10,000—is a mere $150. If you earn $9,400 while she earns only $150, maybe your incentives aren’t aligned after all. (Especially when she’s the one paying for the ads and doing all the work.) Is the agent willing to put out all that extra time, money, and energy for just $150?

There’s one way to find out: measure the difference between the sales data for houses that belong to real-estate agents themselves and the houses they sold on behalf of clients. Using the data from the sales of those 100,000 Chicago homes, and controlling for any number of variables—location, age and quality of the house, aesthetics, whether or not the property was an investment, and so on—it turns out that a real-estate agent keeps her own home on the market an average of ten days longer and sells it for an extra 3-plus percent, or $10,000 on a $300,000 house. When she sells her own house, an agent holds out for the best offer; when she sells yours, she encourages you to take the first decent offer that comes along. Like a stockbroker churning commissions, she wants to make deals and make them fast. Why not? Her share of a better offer—$150—is too puny an incentive to encourage her to do otherwise.

The idea here is, even though the percentage increase in the reward is the same for both parties, One of them may be more interested in the increase than the other, and the agent might not optimize for the best rate.

Why did I quote this here ? Think of a company with multiple crores ( say 5 ) in expenditure. They decide to provide an offer to a candidate, for say, 10 Lakhs. The candidate goes back, and shops with the new baseline and gets an offer for 12 Lakhs. The company is furious, and says they can't provide this 2 lakhs extra and the HR in charge, storms to LinkedIn to post about this horrible candidate, who behaved utterly selfishly for some puny bucks, while the company has generously offered him a lot of monies.

Before siding with the HR or the candidate, the incentive difference for both of them must be noticed here. The candidate getting 2 Lakhs extra means, that he gets almost 20% extra than what his previous offer gives him. Thats a 20% increase in the monthly income for his family ( assuming sole-earner ). But for the company, the extra 2 Lakhs is a 0.4% increase in expenditure. This is almost like the inverse problem of the one mentioned in the book.

So before vilifying every single candidate, for opting for " just extra money ", please kindly gently note that the incentive is not uniform. By opting for the few extra bucks, the candidate has a much larger portion to gain than the company has to lose.

Please voice out your opinion on this trend in the comments. Do you still think a candidate chasing money is comparable to a company on a low-balling spree ?

Small worlds and denser stories

I recently watched the web series Suzhal - The Vortex, and was blown away. It stayed with me for a long time. Two days went by, and I was stuck relistening to its soundtrack and scenes from youtube. I felt far more connected to the plot, compared to the ones which involves International Intelligence, A global terror plot etc. 

I love huge open worlds in games. Typically when i used to choose games , acreage was one of the big factors considered. Huge worlds means lot of things to explore right !? Thats true to some extent, but then there is only so much a game/story can fit in before hitting the hard stop. Huge maps were my goto when I open a new map in OpenTTD ( Not Tirumala Tirupathi Devasthanam. Transport Tycoon Deluxe ). It took me a while to realize why i typically get bored after sometime with large Open worlds.

This video by Razbuten and one from GMTK ( This channel never stops giving. ) opened my eyes to why this strange phenomenon was happening. 

We typically tag a game/movie as a huge world when it involves lots of characters/ multiple cities, countries etc. But what we ultimately care about when we experience a game or a movie is the content. Our brain strengthens a neural pathway when we recall the memory related to that path. Something similar seems to be happening with stories. In a small world, there are not many characters/places to write the story with. So the entity is reused for other purposes. This seems to not only keep the entity from fading into irrelevance, but to strengthen our connection with a story.

With interactive media aka Games though it seems it is a weird mix. The number of meaningfully different interactions matter. The entity doesnt matter. But if the story has to stay then the entities have to be limited. In Deus Ex, eventhough it involves a global conspiracy and all those good stuff, the game was engaging and never allowed me to relax. There is always something to find in Deus ex. And to add to that, like mentioned in the GMTK video, the lack of a dynamic map adds to the necessity of learning the landscape better to do anything. But the story of Deus Ex consists of too many important characters, which after a certain point just renders everyone except a select few useless ultimately.

How then can we get games which are good at both ? A near perfect example is A Short Hike. The map is tiny, the characters are few. But at every nook and corner you are bound to find something. Some of the characters have multiple dimensions. What do i mean by dimensions ? In A Short hike, sometimes a single NPC can be involved in more than 1 thread of quests. In Witcher 1 , A trader can be involved in a robbery, a murder plot, a conspiracy against the king simultaneously, and asks you to fetch some flowers from an island. All almost simultaneously. Not of all of them are linked. The story feels real. Typically in open world games, all characters are very very single dimensional and they want/do one thing.

Video games have limits. Since there is a limited amount of resources, the size of the map and the content available tends to be inversely proportional all else remaining same. That is maybe why in most GTA games above san andreas, there is always places where nothing interesting is going on with repasted buildings.

Coming back to where i started from, Suzhal does this excellently. Seemingly everyone has multiple angles. Some people I talked to, about this series, were critical about some plot threads which dont lead anywhere, and the plot could have done without those threads. But in my opinion, thats real life. Not everything is relevant to the biggest plot point. And it adds one more layer of mystery. If something juicy is revealed, it remains to found whether it is actually relevant to the outcome, in addition to how it is relevant. From a shear mathematical POV, it allows the mesh density to be even more. Infact in Suzhal masterfully uses misdirection to effectively use these unclosed threads.

I used to be put off by stories with very limited scope. But with an overload of grand stories, stuff like Before Trilogy , The Man from Earth and 12 Angry Men captivate me and from time to time shape who I am.

Any other small worlds which stayed with you for a long time. Please mention in the comments. I am looking for movie/game suggestions anyway.

Thank you.