Algorithms To Live By: The Computer Science of Human Decisions

by Brian Christian

As a parallel example, consider the computational problem posed by a bus stop. If there is a live display saying that the next bus is “arriving in 10 minutes,” then you get to decide once whether to wait, rather than taking the bus’s continued not-coming as a stream of inferential evidence, moment by moment, and having to redecide and redecide. Moreover, you can take your attention away from squinting down the road—spinning—for those ten minutes straight. (For cities that aren’t up to the implementation necessary to predict the next arrival, we saw how Bayesian inference can even make knowing when the last bus left a useful proxy.) Such subtle acts of computational kindness could do as much for ridership, if not more, as subsidizing the fares: think of it as a cognitive subsidy.