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Kindle Notes & Highlights
How can it be that the foods that taste best to us are broadly considered to be bad for our health, when the entire function of taste buds, evolutionarily speaking, is to prevent us from eating things that are bad? The answer is that taste is our body’s proxy metric for health. Fat, sugar, and salt are important nutrients, and for a couple hundred thousand years, being drawn to foods containing them was a reasonable measure for a sustaining diet.
Perhaps nowhere, however, is overfitting as powerful and troublesome as in the world of business. “Incentive structures work,” as Steve Jobs put it. “So you have to be very careful of what you incent people to do,
“It really is true that the company will build whatever the CEO decides to measure.”
If you can’t explain it simply, you don’t understand it well enough.
Additive Increase, Multiplicative Decrease,
Seek out games where honesty is the dominant strategy. Then just be yourself.
I firmly believe that the important things about humans are social in character and that relief by machines from many of our present demanding intellectual functions will finally give the human race time and incentive to learn how to live well together.
We can hope to be fortunate—but we should strive to be wise. Call it a kind of computational Stoicism.
If we can be kinder to others, we can also be kinder to ourselves. Not just computationally kinder—all the algorithms and ideas we have discussed will help with that. But also more forgiving.
