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June 22 - August 26, 2023
Don’t always consider all your options. Don’t necessarily go for the outcome that seems best every time. Make a mess on occasion. Travel light. Let things wait. Trust your instincts and don’t think too long. Relax. Toss a coin. Forgive, but don’t forget. To thine own self be true.
No choice recurs. We may get similar choices again, but never that exact one. Hesitation—inaction—is just as irrevocable as action.
exploration is gathering information, and exploitation is using the information you have to get a known good result.
Exploration in itself has value, since trying new things increases our chances of finding the best. So taking the future into account, rather than focusing just on the present, drives us toward novelty.
In the memorable words of management theorist Chester Barnard, “To try and fail is at least to learn; to fail to try is to suffer the inestimable loss of what might have been.”
To live in a restless world requires a certain restlessness in oneself. So long as things continue to change, you must never fully cease exploring.
In fact, the weighted version of Shortest Processing Time is a pretty good candidate for best general-purpose scheduling strategy in the face of uncertainty.
Personally, we have found that both programming and writing require keeping in mind the state of the entire system, and thus carry inordinately large context-switching costs.
Brian, for his part, thinks of writing as a kind of blacksmithing, where it takes a while just to heat up the metal before it’s malleable.
Part of what makes real-time scheduling so complex and interesting is that it is fundamentally a negotiation between two principles that aren’t fully compatible. These two principles are called responsiveness and throughput: how quickly you can respond to things, and how much you can get done overall.
Establishing a minimum amount of time to spend on any one task helps to prevent a commitment to responsiveness from obliterating throughput entirely:
you should try to stay on a single task as long as possible without decreasing your responsiveness below the minimum acceptable limit.
Failing the marshmallow test—and being less successful in later life—may not be about lacking willpower. It could be a result of believing that adults are not dependable: that they can’t be trusted to keep their word, that they disappear for intervals of arbitrary length.
In one particularly dramatic case, an officer instinctively grabbed the gun out of the hands of an assailant and then instinctively handed it right back—just as he had done time and time again with his trainers in practice.
Jump toward the bandwagon, by all means—but not necessarily on it.
what might seem at first blush like being halfhearted or unthorough emerges, instead, as an important strategy in its own right.
A low price of anarchy means the system is, for better or worse, about as good on its own as it would be if it were carefully managed.
A high price of anarchy, on the other hand, means that things have the potential to turn out fine if they’re carefully coordinated—but that without some form of intervention, we are courting disaster.
Politely withholding your preferences puts the computational problem of inferring them on the rest of the group. In contrast, politely asserting your preferences (“Personally, I’m inclined toward x. What do you think?”) helps shoulder the cognitive load of moving the group toward resolution.
