​The past two months, I’ve been completing University of Michigan’s fantastic Model Thinking course, available for free on Coursera. There’s so much to love about the modern world: you can learn interesting things through quality teaching, no matter where you are (well, you need a wifi), no matter when. And it doesn’t cost a cent!

Anyway, the course had a section about Random Walks, and it got me thinking. A while back I wrote about how the nonlinear life and our linear emotions aren’t exactly optimally suited to each other. Your brain craves signs of progress, so it could reward you with a burst of feel-good chemicals. Unfortunately, the nonlinear life doesn’t work like that. Often, you can spend days or weeks slaving away at the office/studio/whatever, not really moving forward – or even taking two steps back for each move forward. Despite the hours that you put in, the article/thesis/design never seems to be finished, making you question whether you’re really cut out for this kind of job. Perhaps you’d do the world a favor by setting your sights lower and working as a sales clerk instead.

Now, while watching one of the course lectures, I suddenly realized that the creative nonlinear work is exactly a random walk! I don’t claim this to be a unique insight or anything – I’m sure many of you have realized this before. But for the fun of it, it might be a nice exercise to show with a random walk model how the nonlinear life functions. At least in my own case, models often help to see the bigger picture, and forget about the noise in the short term. And who knows, maybe this will help to quell those linear emotions, too.

So, a random walk is very simple. In this case, let’s assume that we have a project that has a goal we’re trying to reach. Arbitrarily, let’s say that the completion means we reach a threshold of 100 points. Of course, these numbers are completely make-believe and I pulled them from my magical hat. Now, further, let’s assume that each unit of time – say 1 unit equals 1 day – means we have three possibilities: make progress, stay where we are, or take steps backward. In my personal experience, this is an ok model for work: sometimes you’re actually making progress, and things move smoothly. Sometimes, though, you’re actually hurting your project, for example by programming bugs into the software, which need to be fixed later on (just happened to me two weeks ago). Most often, though, you’re trying your best, but nothing seems to work. Maybe you’re stuck in a dead end with your idea, and need to change tack. Maybe you’re burdened with silly tasks that have nothing to do with the project. Well, I’m sure we all have these kinds of days.
So let’s again use my magical hat and pull out some probabilities for these options. Let’s say you have a 5% chance of making a great jump forwards (10 points), 25% chance of making 3 points of progress, 55% chance of getting stuck (0 points), 10% chance of making a mistake (-2 points), and a 5% chance of doing serious damage (-6 points). Now we just simulate these across and get a graph that shows your cumulative progress towards the goal (yes I'm doing this in Excel):

​So, in the graph there are several periods when it’s just going downhill, or plateauing for several time periods. Even though the numbers are really made up, I feel the above graph is actually a pretty decent example of how the nonlinear work often feels. However, there’s still the additional complication: the emotions.

Suppose that our emotions work as follows. If you’re making progress, you feel good. And this is mostly irrespective of how much progress you’re making. Suppose the same holds for drawbacks – it hurts, but it hurts almost as much to look for a bug for two hours or the full day. Finally, I’ll assume that if you’re not moving anywhere, you inherit the feeling from the day before. Now, I realize this is probably not how emotions really work (we’re often annoyed by our administrative duties, for example). But on the other hand, when I have a day I have spent at a dull seminar, I seem to find myself looking back a bit to evaluate the progress. The “inherit from t-1” rule tries to describe this: I feel good if the past has been good, and I feel annoyed if the past wasn’t successful. Why just t-1 and not the actual level? Well, I’ve also found that it’s really hard to evaluate how far the project actually is, which makes that option unrealistic. And when looking back, our memories are much stronger from the immediate past than the long-gone part. In short, I’m modeling here the short-sightedness. The actual progress-emotions payoff table looks like this:

So with these assumptions, we get the following graph portraying emotions:

Now this is pretty interesting! You can see how 1) there’s a lot of fluctuations back and forth, and 2) how there’s still “runs”, ie. the same emotional state tends to linger for a while. If you run the numbers, with this particular string of successes and failures you get 99 positive time periods and 51 negative ones, out of the total 150 periods I ran the simulation for. I think the above graph is quite a good summary of how the nonlinear life often feels: you love you’re job, but you’re not above hating it when things are not going well.

A final word of warning: this was of course just one simulated outcome. With the exact same parameters, you can get project outcomes that never finish, that run into negative progress, that finish in less than 30 periods, etc. They are not very nice for terms of a presentation, but also capture the great amount of uncertainty in a nonlinear project. Sometimes it just falls apart, and after 50 periods you’re back to exactly where you started. Or that a project you thought takes 6 weeks takes 16 weeks instead. Well, I’m sure everyone has had these experiences.

I’m currently staying through Airbnb with a lovely couple in Strasbourg at the moment. They were yesterday out, watching a stand-up comedy show, which apparently is done by some very famous actors, and you have to wait for tickets forever. Unfortunately, the comedy turned to tragedy as the audience was after the show told what had happened in Paris. I read the news this morning, and couldn’t get any more sleep. What a shock.

Last night, terrorists struck in Paris, killing at least 120 people, and injuring a hundred more. The attacks seemed very professional, striking six targets including restaurants, a concert hall, and a football stadium. If you want more details, any news site will have good coverage.
This feels surreal: perhaps the most secular country in Europe suffers its worst terror attack since WWII, most likely perpetrated by Islamist extremists. And this happened so soon: it was only in January, when terrorists struck against the satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo. In June, there was the attack in Grenoble. What is concerning is the strain on the French public and morale that these attacks are going to have.

This was the most massive attack in the European West for decades that has struck against targets of the general public. Fair enough, the targets this time were mostly inside Paris’ multicultural districts – in the center, the death toll could have been so much worse. But the move from targeting a newspaper to killing ordinary citizens selected at random, makes for a completely different situation. For sure, the effect on the feeling of security is much heavier.

What worries me is the backlash after these attacks. These attacks are making people angry and scared – and with reason. However, I’m just hoping that the response to these attacks is not going to be a war against Islam, but a war against extremism. In fact, after the Charlie Hebdo attacks, Prime Minister Valls made similar comments, saying that France is at war against radical Islamism, extremism, and terrorism – but not against a religion. I also hope France will not turn to the far right parties for guidance, since their response is likely going to be a version of “close the borders, and kick out all muslims”, just with more obscure political jargon.

I think the best response the French people can do is stick to their values – keep France a secular state, keep going out to cafés, keep living their lives. Because ultimately, terrorism is just a way of inciting hatred. If hatred is created against Islam in general, even more muslims are going to feel left out, and then turn radical. That’s hardly going to be a recipe for success. Better to say: “hey, I don’t care in which god you believe in, just follow the democratic laws we have”. To be clear: the problem of Islamist extremists and terrorism is not the Islam, it’ the terrorism. No matter what you religion, killing others is a dick move.

I hope France doesn’t fight hatred with more hatred. I hope it stays true to its morals, and is the “bigger person” here. More security measures at home won’t solve the problem. Terrorism is only successful when it creates fear and hatred – we can all prove the terrorists wrong by not playing that game, by showing we’re not scared. Like, for example, by singing the national anthem when you’re being evacuated. Of course, police and state security have to try to stop all the strikes they can. But, barring a police state, that isn’t going to happen. In the end, terrorism ends only when the will of terrorists to blow themselves up ends.
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So, I hope France remains France. Liberté, égalité, fraternité. Viva la France!