"if only we stopped trying to be happy, we could have a pretty good time"
Conversation
Obviously this too can be posed as an optimization problem (eg explore/exploit models) as I’m sure you know. Some versions are even surprisingly tractable... which seems to be less well known. eg
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Yes! I'm literally just repeating everything I learned from this
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Heh I did a talk once 20y ago for a non-STEM audience titled “why life is (NP) hard” where I walked through a bunch of nice life-lesson optimization models without the math... bandit problems, phase transitions etc. Should dig up slides.
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Please do! I'd also be curious if you disagree at all with Brian Christian.
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Eyeballing it I suspect we basically agree on everything. Iirc I used the 37% optimal sampling for sequential ranking example myself as well. It’s a popular one.
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I really loved the distinction made between maximizing probability of getting the best option and minimizing expected rank of the person you get (1/e for the first, ~57% for the second iirc).
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I just finished listening and took some notes but plan to go through the transcript and copy out parts I liked into my workflowy after my afternoon constitutional.
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Did a quick look and I don’t appear to have saved the files sadly. Would have been fun to revisit. It was a bunch of undergrads in the audience so I used dating/social life examples for everything.


