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My Mathematical Regression

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Re: My Mathematical Regression

#101

Post by golem14 »

nradov wrote: post #70
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…

How is that sad? A disruptive competitor will come along and eat their lunch. Creative destruction is the natural order of things. Ideally the badly managed organization will eventually be liquidated, thus freeing up resources for more productive activities.

Unless they are, in addition to bad at management, really good at regulatory capture.

E.g. Experian, Transunion and their ilk are unlikely to be eaten as lunch soon.

Apologies to the good engineers and managers in those orgs!

Re: My Mathematical Regression

#102

Post by eru »

chii wrote: post #77
skydhash wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> even the managers treasured him so there should've been even less of an issue of communicating value. I’m not a fan of doing politicking, bjut after much courses on writing and communication, I strongly believe that such simple solutions could have been presented in a way to justify rewards. There are people that do nothing worthwhile and can find words to justify themselves. If someone brings value, you can find w…

This is what i hate about modern corporate culture (or human culture in general perhaps). I dont want to expend effort politiking. I dont want to expend effort blowing my own trumpet. The value of my work is self-evident, but requires an equally intelligent person to understand. And most people do not understand, and thus, fail to recognize the value.

I don't think this has anything to do with _modern_ corporate culture. There was never a golden age where corporate culture was better across the board.

Re: My Mathematical Regression

#103

Post by jmalicki »

eru wrote: post #100
jmalicki wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Banks are the inversion where a Director is higher than a VP! An ED w/o reports is actually moderately impressive though!

Re: My Mathematical Regression

#104

Post by eru »

ForOldHack wrote: post #60
boothby wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A great many real world problems have, at their crux, a mathematical problem. A mathematician paired with a subject matter expert can be powerful indeed when each sees deeply into the others' blind spots. But, I've heard statements like yours a lot over the years: assuming mathematicians aren't fully aware of the limitations of what you think math is.

Its all a math problem, and if it isn't a math problem, its a database problem. I come across a lot of problems, and since I always try to reduce it to a math problem... I intuitively come up with both the solution to the problem, but solutions to other problems. But, if it's not a math problem, of course, its a database problem. I would safely assume that there are no limitations of what mathematicians can do, with…

The hard part is often finding a way to turn your business problem into a math problem in the first place.

Re: My Mathematical Regression

#105

Post by eru »

ForOldHack wrote: post #61
gobdovan wrote: post #38

This is a pre-AI phenomena. I observe it quite a lot with stuff I did in high school but usually with complex problems. What's generally happening is that you were working with pen and paper through a hard problem. With adult brain, you'd expect just to know the answers, but in reality you're not much smarter than you were at 14, so you need to do the thing properly. Also if you help little kids with homework, you'll…

Yes, AI can write a solution, but cannot visualized a solution. When I was 9, I refused to learn my times tables, and addition, so I was relegated to work with blocks. I loved the blocks... I was able to complete all the problems, come up with my own, and return to class, with some extreme facility. Two years later, comes a challenge in class... make a formula for summing the integers... well everyone started with 1+…

Eh, AI is getting better at creating little visualisations, too.

Re: My Mathematical Regression

#106

Post by eru »

jmalicki wrote: post #103
eru wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Banks are the inversion where a Director is higher than a VP! An ED w/o reports is actually moderately impressive though!

Well, I was on the tech side which (at least at Goldman) has comparatively higher powered titles at less reports compared to the real bankers.

I suspect it's because the tech side doesn't run the model where ambitious young people without a clear idea of what to do go work for an investment bank for three years as sort-of 'finishing school'. So there are less juniors to herd for the techies.

Re: My Mathematical Regression

#107

Post by wwind123 »

adrianN wrote: post #75
xg15 wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I imagine this is where the reputation of a good manager comes in and the ability to say to their boss "hey, we should keep this guy... just trust me on this."

If the company runs on reputation it’s only a matter of time until a consultant comes in and processes are established to move to a more efficient metric based management style.

Yeah, it's tough either way. Some managers might be biased and keep praising some of their reports that don't actually provide good value for the company. For an outside observer that has no intimate knowledge to the work, how could this be differentiated from the manager having a backbone to support a report that does truly great work but there is no good metric to prove it?

Re: My Mathematical Regression

#108

Post by iwsk »

noosphr wrote: post #89

All problems in project Euler have closed form solutions. The computer programming part of it is just a quick way to develop candidate solutions.

https://projecteuler.net/problem=76 does this have a closed form solution? vast majority of the problems don't seem to have a closed form solution

Re: My Mathematical Regression

#109

Post by xelxebar »

mb7733 wrote: post #3

An intuitive motivation for the solution in the article (2n choose n). For an n*n grid you have to you will take 2n steps, n "over" and n "down". All that matters is the order of the steps. So if you think of there being 2n "slots", you have to pick n to be "over", and the rest are forced to be "down". So it's n choose 2n indeed. You can also think of it another way, without using the formula combinations, and only t…

Just noticed this, but intriguingly, Catalan numbers are (2n C n)/(n+1), which hints at a connection with trees.

Off the cuff, notice that the diagonal has n+1 intersection points, and a path that never passes through the diagonal gives a forest via the isomorphism with ballot sequences [0]. Any sequence that does pass below the diagonal can be "rotated" into one that doesn't, and so there are probably n+1 paths in each "path class" on average.

Conversely, this would suggest that all paths contained in just one upper or lower triangle of the square can be counted by the Catalan numbers. Indeed, a 2x2 square has just 2 such paths and (2n C n)/(n+1) = 6/3 = 2.

[0]:https://blog.wilsonb.com/posts/2026-02-27-easy-random-trees....

Re: My Mathematical Regression

#110

Post by phtrivier »

mym1990 wrote: post #87
xg15 wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I imagine this is where the reputation of a good manager comes in and the ability to say to their boss "hey, we should keep this guy... just trust me on this."

Good managers are fairly rare, even though every manager probably thinks they are a good manager.

I'm one of the few who absolutely believe they're not one of the rare "good" - hopefully, "not yet".

What resources do you recommend to improve ?

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