I am sitting at my monthly book club meeting, the book this month was the stranger by Camus.
We started talking about the rage we feel when other project their expectations of grief onto us.
I can't help but think that the way humans work is that we use socialization to create expectations and a kind of unwritten social manual for feelings.
Why is that? Is it true that most people cannot process feelings in the moment?
My idea is that society creates the structure for a feedback loop where emotional norms shape what we expect a person to feel and it turn shape what we ourselves feel in a particular situation.
On an unrelated note, reinforcement learning (RL) is a type of machine learning algorithm that allows artificial intelligence (AI) systems to learn and make decisions based on trial and error.
In RL, an AI agent interacts with an environment and learns to take actions that maximize a reward signal.
The agent explores the environment, takes actions, and receives feedback in the form of rewards or penalties. Over time, it learns to associate certain actions with higher rewards and adjusts its behavior accordingly.
RL is particularly useful in situations where the optimal solution cannot be explicitly programmed or is not known in advance.
By using RL, AI systems can learn to make complex decisions and navigate dynamic environments without being explicitly programmed.
Having strongly different emotional responses is more likely to mark you as a social deviant if not accompanied by a label of some sort.
When discussing the stranger by Camus I’ve found that the opinions of a good chunk of the people around us got really challenged when imagining Camus writing in the preface that his protagonist is on the spectrum in some way.