If you're 20 and want to get married by 30, how many ppl should you date?
Math has an answer for you. 🧵
It's hard.
On one side, you need to spend some time learning the quality of your potential partners.
On the other, you nee time to snatch the best candidate.
Too little exploration, and you might marry a dud.
Too little exploitation, and you might let the Right One pass.
This is a type of logic problem called explore-exploit.
The exploration is the time you need to learn about the best solution, and the exploitation period is the time you spend finding the solution once you know what to look for.
So if you're 20 and want to marry by 30, you need to date people until you're ~23 without committing to any one of them. After that, you should pick the first one that is better than all the previous ones.
If the setup changes, the optimal solution changes too.
Eg, if you can go back to any of your old dates to pick the best one, you should spend all 10 years dating (exploring) and then picking the best.
If you can try to date old partners who might have moved on, it's in btwn
Explore-exploit pbms (& others) are magnificently described in this book. Highly recommended amazon.com/Algorithms-Liv…
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It sounds to me like the debate about free speech is mixing 2 things completely different: The letter & spirit of the law. I don't think that's the right debate. So let's look at Trump, Social Networks, the future of speech, and much more. 🧵
1. The 1st amendment protects PRIVATE entities from the GOV.
That means you can say whatever you want without risking penalties from the gov. That's it.
You don't get to be heard. Others don't have a duty to listen. You're free to scream in the void.
Cases in the UK are up and to the right.
Probably due to the new strain.
What does that mean for your country? 🧵
Deaths are ~2 weeks delayed vs cases in the UK.
Since cases have doubled in the UK over the last 2 weeks, deaths will likely ~2x in the next 2 weeks, blowing past the April record.
Hospitalizations are already there.
Imagine the consequences for the healthcare system, and all the ppl who will also suffer because of its renewed collapse.
If person W says “I was wrong, you were right”, our immediate reaction is that the right person (R) is better, smarter, and will gloat. W is humiliated, proven ignorant.
That’s why those in the wrong don’t want to acknowledge it, and hence mutter sorry
R hears muttering, and doesn’t think W really means it. So she’s not satisfied either.
But why? R did get an apology.
It’s because the point of the apology is to make sure it won’t happen again.
And now for good news. Another failure of linear thinking: Vaccine rollouts.
Disregard comments such as “With the current level of vaccinations, it will take 3 years to vaccinate everybody!”
We will not have the current level of vaccinations for long.
Over the next few weeks, you will see how daily vaccination rates steadily increase. This is something humans, markets and govs are good at: making one single thing happen when there’s a huge incentive.
Even a linear growth in daily vaccinations would get lots of ppl vaccinated fast (quadratic growth):
Eg, If today the US vaccinates 100k ppl, tomorrow 120k, and 20k more every day, after 1 week you have 1.1M vaccinated, but by the end of next week 3.2M are vaccinated.
2. The evidence of the transmission-virulence tradeoff theory is not that clear. This fantastic paper explains it well. ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/P…