ABSTRACT
If my life is diagramed as if it were a tree of probabilities—what’s called a “stochastic branching process” by mathematicians—the probabilities for my engaging in unusual behavior probably became larger and larger as I grew older. Of course, the probabilities of any given kind of behavior are what is known as “path dependent,” and probably increasingly so. That is, the older you are, the greater the chance that what you will be in the future is influenced by what you were in the past. My paths diverged further and further from the average, rather than converging toward the average, as I grew older; I have become less and less socialized with time, rather than more socialized. Maybe this just reflects the general tendency to get more quirky as you get older, but I think that it is much more than that with me.
