Sylvia Plath's Fig Tree Meets Machine Learning

One could look at feed-forward decision trees as representing the idea that preferences are latent and immutable, and that the optimal branch is the truest expression of innate preferences. And, one could look at backpropagation as adjusting preferences to accomodate situational constraints -- or as learning to want what is good for you, where what is good for you is defined by some external or imposed metric. Tragically, Plath was unable to "backpropagate". Was attention all she needed?

Her fig tree metaphor is great-- I was reminded of it during a dialog in True Detective (season one). A line that felt like a response to the metaphor where Russ says, "Life is barely long enough to get good at one thing. Be careful what you get good at."[1]

https://youtu.be/fHmmR3GnGpU?si=Czu9o2yKfYQbmr6y&t=96