A matter of perspective -- lessons from machine learning for real life

Perspective changes can come about quite quickly and when seen in retrospect you begin wondering how you hadn't ever thought about thinking it that certainly way, why you were so stuck in your 'local minima' so to speak. It can be wild to imagine yourself ending up in such vastly different circumstances had you not reconsidered you choices and ideas, and you had gone the straight linear path of thinking. Whenever life give you lemons, don't make lemonades, start thinking of all the cool things you can do with lemons, make electricity, lemon sports drink that's most definitely not lemonade, lemon cloth cleaner, so many other things to do, just expand your horizons and don't go for the most obvious solution to a problems!

There's a discussion thread in the orange site, from a couple of days ago, where someone brought up the topic of bringing lessons from machine learning to real life. What if you're stuck at a local minima, you need to either increase the side of your steps (aka, widen/broaden your perspective), or to most definitely confirm that the minima is not a local one, start over again from a different point (random initialization) -- if you end up where you were before, over and over again, it's quite likely you were at the ideal place. Starting you life over and over again from different points is um not a real suggestion, but you can do something similar -- reset your expectations on what you want to do and where you want to be, experiment around various fields and projects and ideas, and if you think they all lead to the same place, perhaps where you were headed in your original linear run was the best place to be, then yeah just go back to it. You do need a lot of slack in your life for this, 'privilege' in social terms, but if you do have that, it's an option worth considering. How do you know that the major choices you have made for your life are the most ideal, without even considering the alternatives, therefore put in a good amount of time to explore the alternative spaces and you can always come back to the original place. One cost of that is the opportunity cost of further exploring the field, perhaps your coworkers have moved up two levels while you were out exploring your options but what you get back is the knowledge and satisfaction that you are indeed barking up the correct tree.