Pareto optimal is definitely a core concept in game theory. It says that no other vector beats it in every dimension (or at least as good in all but one, and better in at least one).
I wish more business / product people understood this concept. When a product has been refined enough to approach Pareto optimality (at least on the dimensions the product is easily measured), it's all too common for people to chase improvements to one metric at a time, and when that runs out, switch to another metric. This results in going in circles (make metric A go up-up-up, forcing metric B down-down-down, then make B go up-up-up while forcing A to go down-down-down - it's worse than this because multiple dimensions go up/down together, making it harder to spot). Sometimes these cycles are over a period of quarters or years, making it even harder to spot because cycles are slower than employee attrition.
This is not independent of Goodhart's Law[1]. I've seen entire product orgs, on a very mature product (i.e., nearing the Pareto frontier for the metrics that are tracked), assign one metric per PM and tie PM comp to their individual metric improving. Then PMs wheel and deal away good features because "don't ship your thing that hurts my metric and I won't ship my thing that hurts yours" - and that's completely rational given the incentives. Of course the best wheelers-and-dealers get the money/promotions. So the games escalate ("you didn't deal last time, so it's going to cost you more this time"). Eventually negative politics explode and it's all just a reality TV show. Meanwhile engineers who don't have an inside view of what's going on are left wondering why PMs appear to be acting insane with ship/no-ship decisions.
If more people understood Pareto optimality and Goodhart's Law, even at a surface level, I think being "data driven" would be a much better thing.
[1] Goodhart's Law: when a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure
Cybernetics has devolved into KPI metrics with accelerationism as a treat.
Apparently documents from Google's antitrust case revealed the search algorithm was adjusted to give worse results in order to force the KPI for AdSense to drive quarterly earnings reports.
> “I care more about revenue that the average person but think we can all agree that for all of our teams trying to live in high cost areas another $[redacted] in stock price loss will not be great for morale, not to mention the huge impact on our sales team.
> “I don’t want the message to be ‘we’re doing this thing because the Ads team needs revenue.’ That’s a very negative message.
> But my question to you is – based on above – what do we think is the best decision for Google overall?
> …Are there other ranking tweaks we can push out quickly?” - Dischler
Anil Sabharwal, the Chrome executive:
> “1…we were able to get launch approval to rollout two changes (entity suggest and tail suggest) that increase queries by [redacted]% and [redacted]% respectively.
> 2. We are going to immediately start experiments to improve search ranking in the omnibox (more search results and nudging search to the top).”
Make a will.
Pay off your credit card balance.
Get term life insurance if you have a family to support.
Fund your company 401K to the maximum.
Fund your IRA to the maximum.
Buy a house if you want to live in a house and can afford it.
Put six months’ expenses in a money market account.
Take whatever is left over and invest it 70 percent in a stock index fund and 30 percent in a bond fund through any discount brokerage company and never touch it until retirement
If any of this confuses you, or you have something special going on (retirement, college planning, tax issue), hire a fee-based financial planner, not one who charges you a percentage of your portfolio.
Solid advice overall. But I have to disagree with the 401k advice.
> Fund your company 401K to the maximum.
Fund it up to amount your company matches. The maximum you can contribute to 401k is 40% of your salary I believe. I wouldn't contribute 40% of my salary to the 401k. Just the amount your company matches ( 5% or whatever it is for your company ). That 5% match ( or whatever it is ) is free money. It would be foolish to leave it on the table.
Not American, but as I understand it, 401k's are tied to your employers 401k implementation and while you are employed you have little choice in how the funds are managed. If you are contributing to a third party managed fund (employer or otherwise) that is not being matched, then you are ceding control of your retirement funds for no practical benefit. You would be better off putting your savings into another tax shelter appropriate to your needs that you can control.
If you aren't getting a matching benefit or other reward for using an employer managed investment, then you shouldn't. If someone doesn't have the time, inclination, or knowledge to understand the difference then investing in an unmatched 401k is still better than not saving at all :S
This is incorrect. First off, you do control your retirement funds. The amount of control varies, but at the very least you are offered dozens of mutual funds, indexed funds and bond funds to choose from. Some companies allow offer Fidelity BrokerageLink which allow you to invest in anything including individual stocks.
Secondly, as far as "another tax shelter" there aren't any. For most people the only tax shelter available is 401(k). And the tax shelter is a very good reason to contribute to 401(k), even if there is no company match.
Right, it is much lower, and also there is this: If your company offers a 401(k), the IRS limits your ability to deduct Traditional IRA contributions from your taxes based on your income.
Tacking on, in evangelical circles Dave Ramsey's financial peace university talks about saving 15% of retirement when getting out of debt and generally working through that list, then once you have paid off the house, build more retirement wealth as you desire...most of us don't get to that point until later in life.
There is also the rent vs buy calculation to take into account, depend on where you live, it might make more sense to rent and invest the difference than buying.
Every 401K I've been in has had some choice in investments. Even if they don't, you'd have to assume that you could do better actively managing your own funds in another tax shelter than the "S&P 500 index" or whatever the 401K is doing. For most people, this is unlikely.
> You reduce your taxable income and the money doesn't pay capital gains when you pull it out.
You do pay income tax on it when you pull it out though. Whether or not you come out ahead depends at least partially on your marginal tax rates before and after retirement.
70% in a stock fund is extremely risky if you are close to retirement. You will not have fresh income to dollar-cost-average your way back into the black in the event of another market crash.
This is solid advice assuming the shit doesn't hit the fan. In Adams' lifetime many countries' pension funds went bust and inflation ate any soft assets.
Believe it or not, not all researched information is accurate. And even when it is accurate it isn't always interpreted correctly. It is not sufficient to simply research something.
One must also discuss it. That allows revealing what one thinks they know, to help realize what they don't through coordination with others.
That is what discussion is for. If he already had a perfect picture, what would the point of talking about it be? There isn't one.
I mean there were conversations in closed rooms nobody outside of the room knows about. What we know publicly is they refused the funding because it required them to drop DEI activities, which not only would have solved their funding issues but was the morally correct thing to do. The PSF should be focused on improving Python, it shouldn't be a political organization.
OK, thanks for making your position clear. You disagree with some of the core mission of the PSF. Luckily you are in the minority and the PSF is carrying on.
> You disagree with some of the core mission of the PSF.
It seems he disagrees with the approach rather than the core mission; suggesting that instead of relying on reparations, to use those resources instead to fix the core issues with Python that demand those reparations in the first place.
Is he in the minority though? Remind me again who won the popular vote two years ago.
Turns out many people aren't big on racial discrimination "but hip and cool B-) this time". When the core principle of an organization is at conflict with the concept of hiring any ethnicity with no specific preference, you have a racist organization.
It's a play on the famous essay 1960 "The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Mathematics in the Natural Sciences".
I agree this is getting old after 75 years. Not least because it seems slightly manipulative to disguise a declarative claim ("The Fourier transform is unreasonably effective."), which could be false, as a noun phrase ("The unreasonable effectiveness of the Fourier transform"), which doesn't look like a thing that can be wrong.
Also how most of the articles with this kind of title (those posted on HN at least) are about computation/logical processes, which are by definition, reasonable.
Funny. You might want to do that modulo capitalization, and perhaps some other common substitutions (LLM/LLMs/Large Language Model/Large Language Models, it's/ it is, what's/what is, I am/I'm), but they change the number of words, so better opt for the shortest alternative.
Given how much of the talk is about the original paper the title references, and how the Fourier transform turns out to be unreasonably effective at allowing communication over noisy channels, I'd say it's a reasonable reference.
FTs are actually very reasonable, in the sense that they are a easy to reason about conceptually and in practice.
There's another title referenced in that link which is equally asinine: "Eugene Wigner's original discussion, "The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Mathematics in the Natural Sciences". "
Like, wtf?
Mathematics is the language of science, science would not compound or be explainable, communicable, or model-able in code without mathematics.
It's actually both plainly obvious for mathematics then to be extremely effective (which it is) and also be evidently reasonable as to why, ergo it is not unreasonably effective.
Also the slides are just FTs 101 the same material as in any basic course.
Hi, original presenter here :) The beginning is FTs 101. The end gets more application-centric around OFDM and is why it feels 'unreasonably effective' to me. If it feels obvious, there's a couple of slides at the end that are food for thought jumping off points. And if that's obvious to you too, let's collab on building an open source LTE modem!
If one wants to contribute to an open-source LTE modem, the best place to start may be OpenLTE: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenLTE The core of any LTE modem is software, even if it is written for DSPs or other low-level software.
> FTs are actually very reasonable, in the sense that they are a easy to reason about conceptually and in practice.
ok but it's not the FTs that are unreasonable, it's the effectiveness
I think we all understand at this point that "unreasonable effectiveness" just means "surprisingly useful in ways we might not have immediately considered"
I find it hard to parse the middle of your post. Are you saying Wigner's article, which is what all the "unreasonable effectiveness" titles reference, is silly?
If that is what you are saying I suggest that you actually go back and read it. Or at least the Wiki article:
By means of contrast: I think it's clear that mathematics is, for example, not unreasonably effective in psychology. It's necessary and useful and effective at doing what it does, but not surprisingly so. Yet in the natural sciences it often has been. This is not a statement about mathematics but about the world.
(As Wittgenstein put it some decades earlier: "So too the fact that it can be described by Newtonian mechanics asserts nothing about the world; but this asserts something, namely, that it can be described in that particular way in which as a matter of fact it is described. The fact, too, that it can be described more simply by one system of mechanics than by another says something about the world.")
Yeah it's silly, I don't mean it in any mean spirited way.
> Wigner's first example is the law of gravitation formulated by Isaac Newton. Originally used to model freely falling bodies on the surface of the Earth, this law was extended based on what Wigner terms "very scanty observations"[3] to describe the motion of the planets, where it "has proved accurate beyond all reasonable expectations."
So despite 'very scant observations' they yielded a very effective model. Okay fine. But deciding they should be 'unreasonably' so is just a pithy turn of phrase.
Something can be effective, and can be unreasonably so if it's somehow unexpected, but I basically disagree that FTs or mathematics in general are unreasonably so since we have so much prior information to expect that these techniques actually are effective, almost obviously so.
I am not discussing the FT case. But as regards Wigner's article, the core thing he points out is that while we are used to the effectiveness of maths, centuries after Newton, there in fact is not any prior grounds to expect this effectiveness.
And no, this is unrelated to whether math is invented or discovered. If anything this is related to the extreme success of reductionism in physics.
As a general point of reflection: If an influential article by a smart person seems silly to you, it's good practice to entertain the question if you missed something, and to ask what others are seeing in it that you're missing.
So, biology and medicine are not sciences? Or are only sciences to the extent they can be mathematically described?
The scientific method and models are much more than math. Equating the reality with the math has let to myriad misconceptions, like vanishing cats.
And silly is good for a title -- descriptive and enticing -- to serve the purpose of eliciting the attention without which the content would be pointless.
They are still capable of being described with math, we are just not capable of doing the math, or probably better put is there is a diminishing return of doing the formalisation of those systems as our cognitive abilities are limited and couldn't reason about those models. It leaves them using very approximate models based on human language descriptions that can be reasoned about.
Which means, the language of some fields can’t be math.
However, I don’t think the original presenter was asserting those fields aren’t science, that’s an unreasonable interpretation. More so , ideally they would be use math as it is a language that would help prevent the silly argument “so, Y is not X?, or is Y only X provided Y is in the subset of X that excludes Z? “
(Even in Engineering, we hit this cognitive limit, and all sorts of silliness emerges about why things are or are not formalised)
It is likewise unreasonable to look down on any kind of world model from the past. Remember that you, in 2026, are benefitting from millions of aggregate improvements to a world model that you've absorbed passively through participation in society, and not through original thought. You have a different vantage point on many things as a result of the shoulders of giants you get to stand on.
I mean... this one's actually a pretty good paper, but we also had Linus Pauling pontificate on Vitamin C, so maybe we should cool it with the appeals to Nobel authority alone.
It's not easy to separate cause and effect from direct and strong correlations that we experience.
The job of a scientist is not to give up on a hunch with a flippant "correlation is not causation" but pursue such hunches to prove it this way or that (that is, prove it or disprove it). It's human to lean a certain way about what could be true.
While they only had positive samples, the AIs sometimes reported cancer in the wrong location, meaning a double whammy: It failed to detect the cancer, and misdiagnosed a non-cancer.
From the paper:
> Two cancers had abnormality scores greater than 10 but were not correctly localized and were therefore categorized as AI-missed.
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