Algorithms to Live By: The Computer Science of Human Decisions

Anyone who has experienced a snake bite or a lightning strike will tend to retell those singular stories for the rest of their lives. And those stories will be so salient that they will be picked up and retold by others.

What would you do if all jobs paid the same? The idea behind such thought exercises is exactly that of Constraint Relaxation: to make the intractable tractable, to make progress in an idealized world that can be ported back to the real one.

For your first attempt at an itinerary, you might look at taking the cheapest flight out of San Francisco (let’s say it’s Seattle), then taking the cheapest flight from there to any of the other remaining cities (call it Los Angeles), then the cheapest from there (say, New York), and so forth, until you’re at your tenth city and you fly from there

Our interviewees were on average more likely to be available when we requested a meeting, say, “next Tuesday between 1:00 and 2:00 p.m. PST” than “at a convenient time this coming week.”

exploration necessarily leads to being let down on most occasions.

as the remaining opportunities to savor it dwindle.

do we try new things or stick with our favorite ones?

Small data is big data in disguise. The reason we can often make good predictions from a small number of observations—or just a single one—is that our priors are so rich.

each restaurant visit you make is worth a constant fraction of the last one.

This proxy metric worked reasonably well as an approximation, but it wasn’t worth overfitting—which explained why spending extra hours painstakingly “perfecting” all the slides had been counterproductive.