Peach was goated in Super Mario Bros 2 as well. I always pick her.
Mario Meets Pareto
151–160 of 177 posts
Re: Mario Meets Pareto
#152Re: Mario Meets Pareto
#153Re: Mario Meets Pareto
#154Earlier quoted context omitted.
Agreed with what you said, when you're only considering security and usability you're often not at a Pareto optimal state, but once you add cost into the picture you see a lot more cases of being on the Pareto optimal boundary, or at least in case where the next improvement only comes with significant effort (by re-platforming, for example).
I guess that makes sense. as you get to higher dimensions, most points sit very close to the surface. So if we're trading off N things and N >> 1, expect to basically always be at the pareto boundary.
On the other hand, we should recognize that, to put it plainly, not all dimensions on the frontier have the same level of importance.
Any technological and societal progress is going to have negative consequences. To give just one example, completely curing cancer will put many doctors (and other healthcare professionals who aren't paid as well as doctors are) out of a job. It will definitely cause at least a few children to go hungry. It will probably cause a few suicides when some oncologists start to "feel useless." This does not mean we shouldn't cure cancer if the opportunity arises.
Our society, driven by clickbait, rage and social media hot takes, tends to overweight the dimensions at which new technology makes things worse. There are many news stories about social-media-fueled teen suicides or AI datacenter water use, very few about how talking to family abroad no longer requires astronomical long-distance bills.
Re: Mario Meets Pareto
#155I always thought in these games; picking acceleration is a way for you to recover from your mistakes. If you made no mistakes the speed would win. So, it is always better to pick the harder option and have a room to improve
That's not the full picture though, because other players can hit you with items, and it's sometimes unavoidable.
If you get hit by a blue shell with a build fully optimized for speed at the cost of acceleration, it's likely to cost you the race.
Re: Mario Meets Pareto
#156There are a few things that are assumed to be true when talking about the Pareto frontier here, but aren’t always true. One, that more of something is always better, e.g. it is always better to have more speed. Maybe, but what if having too much speed causes you to run off the track and perform worse? It could be that there is actually a peak in the utility of speed that declines as it increases. There could also be…
One way of defining Wisdom is the ability to look at a set of metrics and discern when an adjustment or adaptation to them is needed in order to better approach the true objective we are optimizing toward—since the true objective is almost never perfectly described by any of the metrics that we can find to approximate it.
Eventually, almost every attribute we can practically and objectively measure is at best a proxy measure for the thing we actually want to know, which is, in this case, "Most likely to win races." The thing we actually want to measure is often hard, impossible, or impractical to objectively measure, which is why we resort to proxies in the first place. By "proxy measure" we mean, not a perfect 1:1 to the thing we want to measure, but containing some amount of signal about it.
So yes, sometimes there's a peak in the utility of speed. But perhaps that trade-off can be modeled by another attribute called "Proneness to fly off the track" which increases as speed does, and is weighted such that the peak and then taper-off of benefit in speed is captured between the combination of the two of them.
But then, any vehicle that has the same speed but lower "Proneness to fly off the track" would be objectively preferable to any equally-fast vehicle with greater "Proneness to fly off the track." And so it continues.
Re: Mario Meets Pareto
#157Nice figuratively demonstrating, I think it can be a impressive lecture material if my teacher/prof use this kind of demonstration.
Re: Mario Meets Pareto
#158Previously on HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39936246
Re: Mario Meets Pareto
#159Finally, this page has some information that's actually useful in real life.
Re: Mario Meets Pareto
#160Earlier quoted context omitted.
I guess that makes sense. as you get to higher dimensions, most points sit very close to the surface. So if we're trading off N things and N >> 1, expect to basically always be at the pareto boundary.
On the other hand, we should recognize that, to put it plainly, not all dimensions on the frontier have the same level of importance. Any technological and societal progress is going to have negative consequences. To give just one example, completely curing cancer will put many doctors (and other healthcare professionals who aren't paid as well as doctors are) out of a job. It will definitely cause at least a few chi…
The article does talk about putting weights on the dimensions to account for different dimensions having different importance.