Nicky - Jul 28, 2010, 9:39a
I am very impressed Nikhil, but I must say the Jewish mother in me would like to feed you and I am going to resist that when I see you next. The emotional experience is interesting to me. On a side note, Salt must have been an interesting choice of movies to watch when you are so weak, with all of the crazy action and all. I hope your weakness resides. I look forward to your posts~
With admiration~n

Name
Comment
	Thanks! Your comment will be published in a few minutes.

Jessica - Jul 31, 2010, 4:14p
I don't believe your four parts adequately delineate the factors contributing to X.

Survival school pushes one way past one's own personal psychological and physical limitations. I find that those who experience "X" are people who are coming from a place a far greater dependency on society. Those students that did a lot of wilderness training do not, in my opinion, experience X to the same degree. I think it is partially a matter of the brain being trained to realize that the "threats" we face in society are not real threats in the same way that they are in the field.

Carl Jung wrote about this in one of his early essays, I believe it is on the Stages of Life. He writes that when man's survival is at stake, his problems remain in the field of his existence. Once his survival is guaranteed, his problems move into the sphere of his psychology. People who are struggling to make ends meet do not suffer the same type of psychological ailments of those of the privileged classes. Also, I have never seen a non-privileged person sign up for survival school. I believe that the main contributing factor to "X" is the vacation it provides the psyche by moving one's sphere of problems outside the mind. It takes a period of time after the experience for the problems to move back into the sphere of the mind. During that period you are able to fully appreciate everything you do have and life seems a joy and completely easy. But man thrives on challenge, and you will slowly and by your own volition give up this vacation as you take on new problems.

I don't believe you will be able to achieve "X" with purely a dietary change or by limiting pleasure or by sociality isolating yourself, or by being miserable for a period of time.

I think the key contributing factor to "X" is being confronted with the basic problems of existence and not taking life for granted. It's hard to induce this on your own without a sense of falseness.


BillW - Sep 29, 2010, 12:33p
I doubt the diet will lead you to X as it cannot be attained. Have you tried meditation? If you were meditating during the 2 months following X, you may have been able to continue in the realization you had. Take a look at this article:
http://www.scribd.com/doc/33283952/How-Meditation-Works-by-Shinzen-Young-PhD



nikhil - Sep 29, 2010, 5:14p
I've tried meditation, ever since a field trip in 11th grade. I've tried several kinds, including mindfulness meditation. I am not very consistent with it, but I've found that the feeling I have during and after in no way compares to the feeling of X I describe above. Survival school is the only thing that has ever given me the feeling of X, and before survival school I didn't even know that it was possible for me or anyone to feel this way.

So overall I'm not a big fan of meditation. Seems like it works for some people, but it never really worked for me. One's reaction to survival school is also probably person-dependent.


BillW - Sep 29, 2010, 6:02p
Meditation is very difficult when its not easy, for me that's most of the time.


nikhil - Jun 7, 2011, 5:48p
I think this guy had a similar experience to what I experienced and now call "X":

http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/06/02/reprieve/


nikhil - Sep 5, 2018, 8:19p
Jessica, I have read your comment again about 8 years since you wrote it. Somehow, I am not on board.

When I was in survival school, I never once feared for my life. I never once thought I was going to die, or not make it. I was fully confident that I would survive. What struck me then, I think, is the deprivation from life's pleasures that I was forced to dehabituate from, a kind of "withdrawal" from being unconsciously dependent on modern comforts. I then habituated to the primitive life in survival school, which then sensitized me to the comforts of life in civilization. It was in fact when I no longer had the discomforts of survival school that I felt X.

I understand that if your are a more seasoned wilderness trekker, that it would not be as uncomfortable for you, and therefore it might contrast less with civilized living, and therefore the degree of X would be less. I think we at least agree on that.

Name
Comment
	Thanks! Your comment will be published in a few minutes.

sundar - Jul 8, 2010, 11:51p
yes i did get this far - great to see you continue to do interesting stuff, this atleast is much better than those frikking worms you write about:)


Tuomas Talola - Jul 9, 2010, 5:35a
Have to say, I've never heard of Support Vector Machines. What you've done, I know as regression analysis. Nothing wrong with regression analysis itself, but using it to predict future returns or defaults is little dubious. This has been the case in financial markets over and over again.

However, the work you have done seems quite thorough, I appreciate it. I'd be interested in more detailed results.


asenski - May 7, 2012, 12:57a
Few questions:

1. Have you tried applying non-linear SVM?

2. Did you make sure you are not using training data that would not have been available for the test data set? i.e. whether a loan defaulted or not won't be known until 3 years from its origination date. You may be cheating unintentionally here!



nikhil - May 10, 2012, 9:57p
Hi asenski,

1) No, I have not tried using the non-linear SVM. I think I just tried whatever was the default option in libsvm.

2) If I recall accurately (it's been several years now), the training set always included loans issued before the loans in the test set. I defined a default as a loan that's more than 1 month late. So it's possible that a loan that issued several years ago defaulted after a loan from the test set was issued. So if you were doing this analysis in current-time to predict the future, this might be construed as a form of "cheating" - i.e. you wouldn't know that a training set loan would default because it hasn't at the time you're considering making a new loan (which would be equivalent to an item from the test set). Good eyes! If I were to redo this analysis I would try to take care of this caveat, since it might make a difference.


Dave - Jun 16, 2012, 2:34p
You should really try non-linear. I'd try a radial basis function first.

Name
Comment
	Thanks! Your comment will be published in a few minutes.

Name
Comment
	Thanks! Your comment will be published in a few minutes.