An analytic account of Depression: When the agent has noticed that strategies that seemed fruitful before have stopped working, and doesn’t have any better strategies in mind.
I imagine you’ll often see this type of depression behavior in algorithmic trading strategies, as soon as they start consistently losing enough money to notice that something must have changed about the trading environment, maybe more sophisticated strategies have found a way to dutch book them. Those strategies will then be retired, and the trader or their agency will have to search for new ones.
Chronic depression in humans (designed agencies wouldn’t tend to have such an obvious bug) kinda feels like when the behavior of searching for new strategies has itself has been caught within depression’s scope as an invalidated strategy.
Searching anew is what’s supposed to happen (I had a post called “Good Gloom” that drew an analogy to turning all of the lights out in a town so that you’ll be able to see the light pollution of a new town, and set out for it), but if the depression is blocking that too, you stop moving.
An analytic account of Depression: When the agent has noticed that strategies that seemed fruitful before have stopped working, and doesn’t have any better strategies in mind.
I imagine you’ll often see this type of depression behavior in algorithmic trading strategies, as soon as they start consistently losing enough money to notice that something must have changed about the trading environment, maybe more sophisticated strategies have found a way to dutch book them. Those strategies will then be retired, and the trader or their agency will have to search for new ones.
Chronic depression in humans (designed agencies wouldn’t tend to have such an obvious bug) kinda feels like when the behavior of searching for new strategies has itself has been caught within depression’s scope as an invalidated strategy.
Searching anew is what’s supposed to happen (I had a post called “Good Gloom” that drew an analogy to turning all of the lights out in a town so that you’ll be able to see the light pollution of a new town, and set out for it), but if the depression is blocking that too, you stop moving.