Comment by FLUX-YOU | Hacker News Reader

Comment by FLUX-YOU | Hacker News Reader

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I'm going to be the dumb guy ranting here and say that I dislike this word problem since external knowledge of the world can change your strategy. I might be stopping too soon because the time cost of evaluating candidates is far too high compared to the work that needs to be done immediately. The sooner I get someone in, the sooner that work gets done, the less behind we all get, the less workload for the new secretary, the better he/she will perform, and the better the first impression.

You might also be able to recognize a rock star secretary immediately or recognize obviously incompetent people. There's a competence threshold that's present here and has to be addressed if you dissect the analogy. Going for 'best' here has diminishing returns beyond a certain level of competence. The immediate need to decline/accept also really doesn't make sense if we're trying to explain this with a hiring analogy.

However, the Game of Googol nails it and I really like this approach much better when explaining this problem. It's a game with arbitrary rules so I can't easily use my worldly experience biases to solve the problem.

I think the difference is that you're reading it as practical word problem, when the intent is to present a math problem.

I first heard about this problem in a politically incorrect variation: a tribe chief is given the opportunity to choose a wife from a pool of n women, presented in a random order, one at a time. He can choose any woman, but can't choose a woman who he has already passed up. What's the strategy for the chief to choose the most beautiful wife?

How is that variation politically incorrect? Genuine question here. If anything, to me it seems culturally correct.

Do you really need to ask? Are you seriously incapable of seeing that some people might be offended (stupidly, if you ask me, but that doesn't make them any less so) by a story where a woman is apparently picked like cattle by a feudal lord?

I suspect he meant to say that the analogy accurately depicts something that really happens. An assessment that, incidentally, is pretty politically incorrect in itself.

Ah, yes, what an accurate depiction of the "tribe."

Seriously, if you want to go the accurate route, probably best to pick a specific people where that's what actually happens. Not having done that, the problem as stated advances stereotypes of peoples that are referred to as "tribes" as being primitive and misogynistic.

Perhaps use "nation" instead, or better yet, formulate the problem differently.

The word "correct" in "politically correct" means "as we want it to be", not "as it really is".

Interesting. In Russia this problem is known as choosy bride problem, where bride is looking for the best groom.

I hope Putin's not planning to apply this problem to decide which country to invade.

Isn't that basically how dating works? It's hard to go back to an ex...

I think that when presenting a problem like this, it's not unreasonable to assume that the audience is capable of the abstract thinking that is needed to distill the underlying problem from the application in which it is presented.

Come to think of it, maybe I'd argue even stronger: when I was younger, I had a hard time understanding programming problems that were explained in terms of 'foo / bar' classes or function names. 'Applied' examples with cars and wheels made more sense, even if I could easily have come up with 'not every car has 4 wheels' counterarguments. Nowadays, I like foo / bar better, because they expose the problem directly, without an additional layer of real-world application, but only because I've gotten better at abstract reasoning.

As I became more experienced, I started understanding abstract concepts better because I have already seen more real world things. I can now quicky think of my own examples in my head.

(Aside: This is why I think you should work first, study later. University deals with abstract concepts, but without experience these abstract concepts often mean nothing to you)

If you play that game with any kind of prior belief about the values that you're about to see, then the theoretical solution is not longer valid.

What you're describing with the rock star vs incompetent people scenario is about bringing prior knowledge in there. You see a rock star as first candidate. You figure that, in your lineup of 10 people, odds are that no one will be better than that rock star. So you pick him/her.

This makes the theoretical solution at best a kind of intuitive justification in practical settings, but you shouldn't apply it mechanically without using your judgment.

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