That is really good I have a friend in Ukraine who will benefit from that, his is trapped in literal revolution though. He won't take a break from fighting, every now and again he takes out a senior Russian officer and that keeps him going but he is hollowing out. A good post post now and again... Or a successful mission. I'm sure you know about Skinners pigeons and the trap of intermittent reward. The Pecking Game – Why We Don't Know When to Quit In the 1950s, psychologist B.F. Skinner placed pigeons inside small experimental chambers known as "Skinner boxes." The setup was simple: there was a button, and pecking that button sometimes released a food pellet. Skinner, already famous for his work on operant conditioning, wanted to explore how patterns of reward influenced behavior. He tried two approaches. In the first, every peck delivered a food reward. The pigeons caught on quickly, peck, eat, peck, eat. But when the food stopped coming, the birds just as quickly gave up. “No more food?” they seemed to say. “Then why bother?” They lost interest. The behavior extinguished itself. But in the second approach, Skinner introduced partial reinforcement, a trick of probability. Now the reward didn’t come every time. Sometimes it arrived after one peck. Sometimes five. Sometimes twenty. The pattern was unpredictable, like a crooked slot machine. And something extraordinary happened. The pigeons became obsessed. They pecked the button relentlessly, long after any food had ceased to appear. They would peck hundreds, even thousands of times, refusing to quit. Some pecked until they were physically exhausted, disoriented, or collapsed in their enclosures. No food. No reward. Just the ghost of a chance that maybe, just maybe, the next peck would be the one. This is known today as the partial reinforcement effect, and it has quietly shaped modern life in ways that Skinner’s pigeons could never have imagined. The Power of Maybe At the heart of this behavior is a simple psychological principle: an unpredictable reward is more powerful than a guaranteed one. When outcomes are uncertain, we pay more attention, feel more suspense, and are more likely to keep trying—even when logic would suggest we should stop. This pattern is what powers: Slot machines and scratch cards. Social media likes and notifications. Text messages that might never come. The compulsion to “just check” email one more time. Trading... Of course. When rewards are delivered inconsistently, our brains light up with the possibility of gain, and that possibility overrides reason. We become pigeons in boxes of our own making, pecking away at phones, apps, or machines, long after the payoff has gone cold. The Trap The tragedy... and the genius... of this mechanism is how it exploits our ability to hope. Unlike punishment or failure, hope doesn’t extinguish behavior. It prolongs it. If you knew the slot machine would never pay out again, you’d walk away. But if it paid out once… then maybe again… you’re trapped. The system doesn’t need to reward you often, just enough to keep the dream alive. Skinner never intended to build a blueprint for addiction, but the implications of his pigeon experiment are everywhere today. Partial reward schedules don’t just encourage perseverance, they can create compulsion. They hijack the very part of our psychology that equates uncertainty with potential, and persistence with virtue. But in the wrong hands, or in the wrong context, what starts as persistence becomes pathology.
This is why your iphone dings on every notification. And why i stare complusively at the market and ET.
Being in an asymmetric fight.. Following above, something I’ve mentioned to @gwb-trading, based on my experience growing up during "The Troubles", is what it taught me about the Gazans who continue to fill the ranks of Hamas and other factions. From the outside, it might seem logical that they would eventually give up. But they don’t. And here’s a fair bit of why. I have seen this in Africa, Myanmar, Ukraine and also in Colombia of course, the mother-FARCers.. In guerrilla versus state conflict, the unpredictability of both suffering and success creates conditions where fighters are psychologically conditioned to persist, even when there is no clear path to victory. The same mechanism that caused Skinner’s pigeons to peck themselves to exhaustion.. the power of uncertain reward.. can keep insurgencies alive far beyond what seems strategically reasonable. Of course, resistance is not driven by psychology alone. Identity, history, trauma, and belief all play crucial roles. But intermittent reinforcement is a significant factor in sustaining these conflicts. Martyrdom is a reinforcement loop. Many guerrilla movements, especially those with religious or ideological foundations, elevate sacrifice into a kind of victory. The death of a fighter becomes meaningful in other domains: propaganda, morale, and recruitment. When loss itself is reframed as success, TRUMP!!, it creates a feedback loop that cannot be broken with conventional force. Well until genocide kills everybody. This is why I believe that indiscriminate attacks from the air must stop if there is to be any hope of ending the cycle. When a state responds to insurgency with overwhelming or poorly targeted force, it often creates the perception that death or arrest is arbitrary. Entire neighborhoods may be hit not for what individuals have done, but for who they are or where they live. This breeds defiance, not surrender. When survival no longer feels connected to personal behavior, and when giving up offers no clear path to safety or dignity, there is little reason not to keep fighting. Even a rare success can then feel like vindication, proof that resistance still has meaning. So a different approach must prevail that does work to thwart the evil pigeon.
Of course the phone doesn't ding when scrolling or typing, just a silent notification which is why I said, sometimes it's easier to browse ET or something than put the phone down. I guess we all remember the "Crackberry" days, with emails all binging all day. In my case I'm supporting three charities, my own little business projects, some Ukraine friends, my daughter's business, some others.. And my two day a week MAD man marketing job.. May give that up soon as I've has some really good beginners luck and end on a high... As fucking stupid as ET is, it's easier to not get the notifications and just look at what's come in when I'm finished reading or typing. I'm in control of what's going to cause the next mild anxiety, occasional reward
I can’t figure out how to get the notifications I want. I remember the crackberry days. People would check their emails while taking a piss in the office urinals.
I tell them if something is truly urgent, voice call me so I cannot miss it, but effing younger people would rather self-harm than voice call. I strongly prefer to knock things off as they come, rather than batch them, but that's probably what stopped me getting higher than senior project manager in corporate life, it wore me out.
I did however retire from trading in 2020, according to project plan, after six years of maximum effort. I and my team of two, set numbers we were happy to retire with and the coincidence of the pandemic starting, really helped I was at the natural Forrest Gump inflection, subconscious had decided enough was enough.
Wait, was that a mea culpa? Tuxan’s account was clearly compromised. His account appears to have been taken over by someone who is somewhat reasonable and far more diplomatic. I appreciate the candor. I was looking for an old-school trading board and just stumbled upon this gem of a subforum.