Steven's Weblog

Seth’s Blog: On Mediocrity

While I agree with the spirit of this post, and specifically with:

Part of the curse of Wall Street is that enough is never enough. So short-term thinking sets in.

I also have to put in a word for mediocrity (maybe just to be contrary :-). It comes down to this:

It has to do with our willingness to settle for work product that just isn’t that good–at the same time we vote with our dollars to buy things and experiences that are exceptional.

I, for one, have a finite number of dollars to vote with, and I’d rather have more to use for exceptional video cards, say, than exceptional check holders, so I’ll choose the mediocre holder.

I don’t think capitalism could work without having a mix of exceptional and mediocre products, so that different people can express their different values through that dollar-voting process.

And, yada yada, you could say, “well, there’s no reason why everyone can’t just put it 110% and make everything they create of the highest caliber, and labor doesn’t cost anything, and throwing out a bruised tomato to save the appearance of the salad isn’t going to hurt anyone, and…” well, now that I think of it, I’m sure you wouldn’t say that.

It occurred to me today, in a meeting where we were talking about a pricing model for a complex of services, that that’s another application for statistics.

If you have a complex thing that you want to give to your customers as a simple thing, you don’t want to have a complex price associated with it. Your cost to produce the thing is a function of many variables you know, many variables you have a vague idea about, and many variables you don’t even know about yet. You can’t hand that massive cost function (times 1.15) to your customer, you need to simplify it to 0-3 or so variables for them, while making sure you can still make money.

There are statistical methods around that can let you model a complex space with a simple one, while putting (probabilistic) bounds on the error. Good thing to think about; it gives a way to make a factored, principled argument about pricing that doesn’t suffer from overestimation (like interval-based methods tend to) or unbounded error (like ad-hoc methods tend to).

FYI, according to a rather unscientific estimate, there’s about $3.33/fl oz of US coins (1, 5, 10, 25, no 50 or higher).

Which means I still have $900+ sitting around. Geesh.

Sweet little bit of HCI/image processing:
I/O Brush: The World as the Palette

Although I like the locution, I’m not always quite sure what might be meant by “become what you are” (BTW, I get the phrase from Watts, not Hatfield). To some ears, including some of mine, such phrases smack of circularity, or worse. Then I think of phrases like “the limit, as t approaches 0, of sin(t)/t equals 1”, which makes the same amount of sense as “become what you are”. Somehow (sometimes) the former seems more concrete than the latter. If I believe a man-made bridge will hold my weight as I walk over it, I’m implicitly agreeing with some statements about limits and differentials, right? So somehow I need to bridge that understanding of the ‘limit’ concept over into the ‘becoming’ concept.

There seems to be an irreconcilable divide between how I see myself and how others see me. I care mostly about who I am and what I can become, and little about what I’ve done or what I can do. Most others take the opposite weighting. This is, I think, as it should be. But it’s good to recognize the fact and make use of it in order to choose my priorities or align my directions with others’. For example, learning about geometry is a better way of becoming who I am than learning about marketing, and that gives a certain lean to my priorities. However, learning a little bit of marketing will let me better put geometry into action in the world, and will help hook me up with people, projects, and tools to learn about the next bit of geometry.

Helping others become what they are is the next most joyous thing in my life after becoming what I am. A friend mentioned today that attending a funeral made him think about the importance of telling people in his life the things he needs to tell them. Along those lines, I think I ought to make sure that I’m doing what I can to help people close to me become what they are. I’d like each of my loved ones to pass from this plane with their last thought of me being that I had helped them achieve their self. More than that, I’d like that to always be their last thought of me.

Ya know, you could structure your life so that, say, you never have to cross a bridge over water, or you never have to use a Nabisco product, or you never have to buy a car, etc… but is there any way to align your life so that you never have to deal with morons? I have my doubts about that one. Morons have infiltrated every level of society, insinuated themselves into every institution.

Maybe there should be a public service campaign, featuring Dummy the Bear: “Only you can prevent the growing stupidity”.

Of course, we do have the problem that if you asked each person to enumerate the Morons and the Not-Morons, the union of the former sets would be a superset of the union of the latter ones. Ah, what am I saying? That’s no problem for me, because I’m not _asking_ anyone else.

[This post has been rated Useless. Please do not read.]

if PDEs were often a topic in a labor-law talk. But hey, what do I know compared to this site. 🙂

Due to the heavy use of the calculus of variations in my image analysis class, I’m having to refresh some of my mathematical knowledge. Frankly, I’ve felt like an idiot at several times during the class, since, ya know, the phrase “as we all know” in the lectures was often followed by something that I, for one, didn’t really know.

Part of it, though, is that my criterion for ‘to know’ has changed over time. Through grade school, high school and my early college years, I think the main thing I was trying to achieve in my mathematical learning was recognition by my teachers and peers. And, that I did accomplish. I was praised by teachers and somewhat respected by peers. But most of what they were seeing was a symbolic show, like the translator in Searle’s Chinese Room.

Not that I had a complete lack of deeper understanding, just that I didn’t particularly care about a deeper understanding and was fine with being able to do the symbolic manipulation efficiently and ‘correctly’. Nor did I really have any basis for connecting the stuff to the real world: I didn’t have any applications in mind when learning a new concept, except for the sham applications that textbooks present (“you can use this to calculate the area under the graph of x^2”. BFD!).

So now, when I remember the ‘rules’ of mathematics, I’m immediately stopped short by the fact that they don’t all really make _sense_ to me. And with my new criteria for an acceptable level of understanding, I now have to put my work in the class on hold for a while while I try to get the next level of understanding of, for example, what ‘dy/dx’ means (hint: it’s not just an indivisible symbol for ‘derivative of y with respect to x’).

Of course, I do know that in order to apply image processing techniques, I can get by without really understanding it very deeply, just like I can drive a car without being able to design an aerodynamically optimal intake manifold. So, I can still get through the applications by symbolic manipulation, but I’m going to be backfilling a lot of understanding of some basic mathematics at the same time.

Huh.