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My Mathematical Regression

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Re: My Mathematical Regression

#91

Post by left-struck »

analog8374 wrote: post #90
ranit wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>> He eventually got bored. He retired and joined a seminary. Wow, got bored and joined a seminary - Do you know how does he feel there? A genuine question - Did he expect to get excited and challenged in a seminary?

If a smart guy joins a seminary then joining a seminary is probably smart.

I think a better way to think about it is that humans in general just make so many mistakes and imperfect judgements. Smart people just do them slightly less. Smart people also typically have biases as well which affects their judgement, their basis are just more complicated than normal people. Like obviously being smart is an advantage for any decision, but saying if someone smart does something it must be smart makes no sense in a world where smart people usually can’t agree on what is right.

Re: My Mathematical Regression

#92

Post by cindyllm »

left-struck wrote: post #91
analog8374 wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If a smart guy joins a seminary then joining a seminary is probably smart.

I think a better way to think about it is that humans in general just make so many mistakes and imperfect judgements. Smart people just do them slightly less. Smart people also typically have biases as well which affects their judgement, their basis are just more complicated than normal people. Like obviously being smart is an advantage for any decision, but saying if someone smart does something it must be smart mak…

[dead]

Re: My Mathematical Regression

#93

Post by abetusk »

I appreciate where the author is coming from, as we often have much more context because of training that have since atrophied a bit, but in defense of the dynamic programming solution, this generalizes very well.

As stated, the choose(2n,n) solution of course works but as soon as you deviate from a square, things can get more complicated. What if it's a rectangle? An arbitrary shape? One with holes? The dynamic programming solution takes all of this in stride (assuming, of course, that the conditions of only going right and down still hold).

Pascal's triangle is, after all, a dynamic programming solution. It just so happens that there's a "closed form" solution to their entries.

I'm all for clever tricks but I also appreciate much more a solution that generalizes well and gives more insight into a class of problems.

Re: My Mathematical Regression

#94

Post by random3 »

jp57 wrote: post #7

I think one of the saddest thing is that the kind of person who would recognize, "we can solve this seemingly complicated problem by just applying this formula", would often have trouble even getting recognized in many corporate environments. I managed a guy like that. He was capable of very complex thinking, but he wasn't in love with complexity, he was in love with simplicity. His solutions tended to be of the form…

reminds me of this other post https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48498385

Re: My Mathematical Regression

#95

Post by analog8374 »

left-struck wrote: post #91
analog8374 wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If a smart guy joins a seminary then joining a seminary is probably smart.

I think a better way to think about it is that humans in general just make so many mistakes and imperfect judgements. Smart people just do them slightly less. Smart people also typically have biases as well which affects their judgement, their basis are just more complicated than normal people. Like obviously being smart is an advantage for any decision, but saying if someone smart does something it must be smart mak…

it's a pretty good guess that when a smart person does something like this, it's something he considered long and hard and applied his full smartness to, and therefore it is probably the smart move. Right? Let's not split hairs.

Re: My Mathematical Regression

#96

Post by ezst »

abhaynayar wrote: post #35
jp57 wrote: post #7

I think one of the saddest thing is that the kind of person who would recognize, "we can solve this seemingly complicated problem by just applying this formula", would often have trouble even getting recognized in many corporate environments. I managed a guy like that. He was capable of very complex thinking, but he wasn't in love with complexity, he was in love with simplicity. His solutions tended to be of the form…

If his monetary value to the company was as said why would any other metric like complexity even remotely matter or need convincing assuming the main goal of the company was to make money. Money would matter even more than the interpersonal stuff in most cases but on top of it even the managers treasured him so there should've been even less of an issue of communicating value. Getting bored is totally understandable…

> If his monetary value to the company was as said why would any other metric like complexity even remotely matter or need convincing assuming the main goal of the company was to make money.

I'll just be the Nth commenter to say it, but corporations, especially larger ones, are anything but efficient. I don't know if it ever was true, except maybe for companies focused on producing high volumes of highly standardized/specific products in a competitive environment. That's not to say that efficiency isn't desirable or beneficial in general, but as soon as it becomes difficult to put a value tag on the work being done (which unfortunately gets harder in more services oriented corporations), competing for clever ideas just rewards less than competing for the boss's attention. There's no justice or fairness in that.

Re: My Mathematical Regression

#97

Post by eru »

jp57 wrote: post #7

I think one of the saddest thing is that the kind of person who would recognize, "we can solve this seemingly complicated problem by just applying this formula", would often have trouble even getting recognized in many corporate environments. I managed a guy like that. He was capable of very complex thinking, but he wasn't in love with complexity, he was in love with simplicity. His solutions tended to be of the form…

> I managed a guy like that. He was capable of very complex thinking, but he wasn't in love with complexity, he was in love with simplicity. His solutions tended to be of the form, "we can ignore all these things, and just focus on X, and it will provide all the value." He'd notice something and simplify it and the benefit to the company would be measured in multiples of his salary.

I did some of that a few times in my life. But I also realised that a large part of the value I brought was not necessarily in coming up with the solution, but in convincing the rest of the company---and in training up enough of the rest of the team to understand and maintain the system.

For example at Goldman, I used an integer linear programming solver to re-shuffle how we assigned compute capacity in different data centres to various departments and how to compute fail-over plans ahead of time.

The actual modelling and implementing barely took any time at all; I used an off-the-shelf open source solver. But I spend multiple weeks teaching the team enough about linear programming so that they can eg change the model when business requirements change.

Re: My Mathematical Regression

#98

Post by eru »

analog8374 wrote: post #90
ranit wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>> He eventually got bored. He retired and joined a seminary. Wow, got bored and joined a seminary - Do you know how does he feel there? A genuine question - Did he expect to get excited and challenged in a seminary?

If a smart guy joins a seminary then joining a seminary is probably smart.

Compare and contrast https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ted_Kaczynski

Re: My Mathematical Regression

#99

Post by eru »

ezst wrote: post #96
abhaynayar wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If his monetary value to the company was as said why would any other metric like complexity even remotely matter or need convincing assuming the main goal of the company was to make money. Money would matter even more than the interpersonal stuff in most cases but on top of it even the managers treasured him so there should've been even less of an issue of communicating value. Getting bored is totally understandable…

> If his monetary value to the company was as said why would any other metric like complexity even remotely matter or need convincing assuming the main goal of the company was to make money. I'll just be the Nth commenter to say it, but corporations, especially larger ones, are anything but efficient. I don't know if it ever was true, except maybe for companies focused on producing high volumes of highly standardized…

Companies can be efficient and inefficient at the same time. Efficient at some things, and inefficient at other things.

For things with direct bottom line impact and fierce competition, many companies can suddenly become very efficient. But in a big company, that's often the exception rather than the rule.

Re: My Mathematical Regression

#100

Post by eru »

jmalicki wrote: post #82
BobbyTables2 wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Same with executives and upper management. One cannot be a director/VP of 3 people. They need an empire…

One can be a VP of 0 people. Look into what the title means at banks!

I was an Executive Director / Vice President at Goldman with 0 reports.
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