Quotes About Optimization

Given the costs of information, the perfect can be the enemy of the good.

Kids need playgrounds dangerous enough to remain challenging. People, including children (who are people too, after all), don't seek to minimize risk. They seek to optimize it. They drive and walk and love and play so that they achieve what they desire, but they push themselves a bit at the same time, too, so they continue to develop. Thus, if things are made too safe, people (including children) start to figure out ways to make them dangerous again.

The higher good would be the simultaneous optimization of your function and the function of the people around you, across time, as we have discussed previously.

A basic rule of mathematical life: if the universe hands you a hard problem, try to solve an easier one instead, and hope the simple version is close enough to the original problem that the universe doesn't object.

One thing the American defense establishment has traditionally understood very well is that countries don't win wars just by being braver than the other side, or freer, or slightly preferred by God. The winners are usually the guys who get 5% fewer of their planes shot down, or use 5% less fuel, or get 5% more nutrition into their infantry at 95% of the cost.

Often people think of developments in computation as arising when we make our computers more blazingly fast, so they can compute more stuff , bigger data . It's actually just as important to prune away big parts of the data that aren't relevant to the problem at hand! The fastest computation is the one you don't do.

countries don't win wars just by being braver than the other side, or freer, or slightly preferred by God. The winners are usually the guys who get 5% fewer of their planes shot down, or use 5% less fuel, or get 5% more nutrition into their infantry at 95% of the cost. That's not the stuff war movies are made of, but it's the stuff wars are made of. And there's math every step of the way. —

It's time to set our sights on the marketing funnel, aka, AIDA. AIDA stands for Awareness, Interest, Desire, and Action. (p.3)... There's something inherently out of whack with the traditional marketing funnel and there are better ways to optimize it (p.7).

Getting your message in front of the right people in the right place at the right time using the right channels is the right thing to do. But what if the real optimization that needs to take place is from acquisition-led efforts to retention-led ones [retention, consolidation, and referrals]? p. 18

In designing your game's internal economy, you need to watch out for deadlocks, which can occur whenever there's a loop in the production process. To avoid deadlocks, either avoid such loops or provide an alternative source for one of the resources.

Plan to throw away all sound, art, and code created for a prototype. That way your artists, audio people, and programmers can work quickly without worrying about having to debug their content later. Trying to build production-quality assets during preproduction just slows the process down. Once

For me, the goal is to make the most of each player, play them in the position they feel best in. And then repeat, repeat, repeat.

There's a lot of automation that can happen that isn't a replacement of humans but of mind-numbing behavior.

Even when things are going well, there are always aspects that can be improved.

How do you set the right price for the right customer at the right time in the right channel?

You have no idea how destructive and wasteful your infrastructure is because you don't need to use it the way the workforce does... Drive the forklift, use the database, fill out the form, submit it to HR, and find out how long it takes to get a response. Use your own infrastructure.

There are some risks we choose to take because the benefits from taking them exceed the possible costs. Optimal behavior takes risks that are worthwhile. This is the central paradigm of finance: we must take risks to achieve rewards, but not all risks are equally rewarded.

One of the biggest wastes of time is doing something well that didn't need to be done at all.

Questioners tend to be very interested in improving processes. They like to eliminate mistakes and make things better.

It's a Secret of Adulthood: The biggest waste of time is to do well something that we need not do at all.

So you hire minimum viable people, and much like improving your minimum viable product, you improve your minimum viable employee.

Sharing good stuff is 90 percent of the battle of getting more followers. Almost everything else is merely optimization. End of discussion.

In our opinion, most search engine optimization (SEO) is bullshit. It involves trying to read Google's mind and then gaming the system to make Google find crap. There are three thousand computer science PhDs at Google trying to make each search relevant, and then there's you trying to fool them. Who's going to win?

It is better to have 100 functions operate on one data structure than to have 10 functions operate on 10 data structures.