Quotes About Optimization

RAND scientists tried to tell their wives that the decision whether to buy or not to buy a washing machine was an "optimization problem.

The shortest route to top quartile performance is to be in the bottom quartile of expenses. —Jack Bogle

Take what you have and just make it the best it could be.

Frederick Taylor

It is rather a problem of how to secure the best use of resources known to any of the members of society, for ends whose relative importance only those individuals know.

Worse still, programs like these may lead employers to optimize for misleading metrics, like maximizing for "likes" or "shares" or high "net promoter scores," which are easy to earn when programs are fun and fluent but not when they're demanding. Instead of designing for recall or behavior change, we risk designing for popularity.

The intelligent altruists, though less altruistic than unintelligent altruists, will be fitter than both unintelligent altruists and selfish individuals.

It looks as though yields of over 10 times what we can currently grow per acre are feasible if you control the CO2 concentration, the humidity, the temperature, all the various factors that plants depend on to grow rapidly.

Anyone can build a fast CPU. The trick is to build a fast system.

SEO is knowing what the search engines want and giving it to them... so hard they f***ing bleed

Agile management is about working smarter rather than harder. It's not about doing more work in less time: It's about generating more value from less work.

Perhaps, as with cars, there was a law of diminishing evolutionary return, and it was no longer economical to build models with ever larger engines.

If you want a great site, you've got to test. After you've worked on a site for even a few weeks, you can't see it freshly anymore. You know too much. The only way to find out if it really works is to test it.

The big optimizations come from refining the high-level design, not the individual routines.

Spend your time on the 20 percent of the refactorings that provide 80 percent of the benefit.

Google Adwords, Long Tail Pro and Market Samurai. 

If I designed a computer with 200 chips, I tried to design it with 150. And then I would try to design it with 100. I just tried to find every trick I could in life to design things real tiny.

when you don't have the hardware resources, you have to take advantage of what you have inside the chip

As long as we can make them smaller, we can make them faster.

The only way to make government more efficient is to make it smaller and to make it more local.

It always seemed mad to me that people who have common investment objectives, let alone are related to each other, should take their capital and allow it to be less efficient by breaking it up into smaller bits.

I'm a very big believer that the primary focus for any organization at any point in time should always be smarter, better, faster.

We don't need more government, we just need the government we have to work smarter and more efficiently.

ALWAYS DO YOUR BEST