{"id":3398,"date":"2020-11-11T06:34:00","date_gmt":"2020-11-11T12:34:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.mooreds.com\/wordpress\/?p=3398"},"modified":"2020-11-10T07:10:45","modified_gmt":"2020-11-10T13:10:45","slug":"algorithms-to-live-by","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.mooreds.com\/wordpress\/archives\/3398","title":{"rendered":"Book Review: Algorithms to live by"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<p>I finished <a href=\"https:\/\/algorithmstoliveby.com\/\"><em>Algorithms to Live By<\/em><\/a>, by Brian Christian and Tom Griffiths. I enjoyed it immensely.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>The premise of the book is that computer programs make decisions with algorithms all the time. There&#8217;s math behind how they do so, including tradeoffs and time considerations. Human beings face some of the same decisions and there&#8217;s no reason we can&#8217;t use this knowledge to live better lives.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Yes, this is kind of a self help book&#8212;&#8220;you can live a better life by thinking like a computer&#8221;. But it&#8217;s math, folks.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>I actually recommended it to my SO because I feel like she&#8217;d understand me better after reading it. I&#8217;m always talking about how much of the stress in our life is due to resource contention.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>The book covers a wide swathe of decision making. Here are some examples of the broad categories and some specific references:<\/p>\n\n\n\n<ul class=\"wp-block-list\"><li>when to decide to stop looking for a house or a partner<\/li><li>when to explore new knowledge vs exploit current knowledge in the context of clinical trials<\/li><li>how randomness can lead to better outcomes<\/li><li>how caches can help you determine what of your wardrobe to keep<\/li><li>how overfitting warps sports like fencing<\/li><\/ul>\n\n\n\n<p>As illustrated above, this is not a book about theory, but is actually hands on. I don&#8217;t recall seeing a single equation, though there are graphs. And the authors do mention plenty of researcher names, provide footnotes and have a twenty page bibliography. So if you want to learn more about the formal proofs, the info is there.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>It&#8217;s hard to choose just one takeaway from this book, but if I had to pick one, it&#8217;d be the fact that game theory shows that you need external forces to avoid the tragedy of the commons, and that emotions may play a role in providing that. <\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Here&#8217;s <a href=\"https:\/\/algorithmstoliveby.com\/excerpt.html\">an excerpt<\/a> if you want a deeper look.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>If you spend any time thinking about how you can make decisions better, <em>Algorithms to Live By<\/em> is worth reading.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>I finished Algorithms to Live By, by Brian Christian and Tom Griffiths. I enjoyed it immensely. The premise of the book is that computer programs make decisions with algorithms all [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3,6],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3398","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-books","category-programming"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.mooreds.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3398","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.mooreds.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.mooreds.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.mooreds.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.mooreds.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3398"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/www.mooreds.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3398\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3404,"href":"https:\/\/www.mooreds.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3398\/revisions\/3404"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.mooreds.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3398"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.mooreds.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3398"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.mooreds.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3398"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}