Algorithms to Live By: The Computer Science of Human Decisions

The mean income in America, for instance, is $55,688—but because income is roughly power-law distributed, we know, again, that many more people will be below this mean than above it, while those who are above might be practically off the charts. So it is: two-thirds of the US population make less than the mean income, but the top 1% make almost ten

Perhaps the patron saint of the minimal-context-switching lifestyle is the legendary programmer Donald Knuth. “I do one thing at a time,” he says. “This is what computer scientists call batch processing—the alternative is swapping in and out. I don’t swap in and out.” Knuth isn’t kidding. On January 1, 2014, he embarked on “The TeX Tuneup of 2014,”

The road to hell is paved with intractable recursions, bad equilibria, and information cascades. Seek out games where honesty is the dominant strategy. Then just be yourself.

However, in a Vickrey auction, the winner ends up paying not the amount of their own bid, but that of the second-place bidder. That is to say, if you bid $25 and I bid $10, you win the item at my price: you only have to pay $10. To a game theorist, a Vickrey auction has a number of attractive properties. And to an algorithmic game theorist in parti

We should be especially hesitant to overrule our own doubts—and if we do, we might want to find some way to broadcast those doubts even as we move forward, lest others fail to distinguish the reluctance in our minds from the implied enthusiasm in our actions.

The takeaways are several. For one, be wary of cases where public information seems to exceed private information, where you know more about what people are doing than why they’re doing it, where you’re more concerned with your judgments fitting the consensus than fitting the facts.

Whenever you find yourself on the side of the majority, it is time to pause and reflect. —MARK TWAIN

Religion seems like the kind of thing a computer scientist rarely talks about; in fact, it’s literally the subject of a book called Things a Computer Scientist Rarely Talks About. But by reducing the number of options that people have, behavioral constraints of the kind imposed by religion don’t just make certain kinds of decisions less computation

For instance, he could simply make a certain minimal amount of vacation compulsory. If he can’t change the race, he can still change the bottom. Mechanism design makes a powerful argument for the need for a designer—be it a CEO, a contract binding all parties, or a don who enforces omertà by garroted carotid.