The following problem is best when not described by me:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Secretary_problem

Although there are many variations, the basic problem can be stated as follows:

 

There is a single secretarial position to fill.

There are n applicants for the position, and the value of n is known.

The applicants, if seen altogether, can be ranked from best to worst unambiguously.

The applicants are interviewed sequentially in random order, with each order being equally likely.

Immediately after an interview, the interviewed applicant is either accepted or rejected, and the decision is irrevocable.

The decision to accept or reject an applicant can be based only on the relative ranks of the applicants interviewed so far.

The objective of the general solution is to have the highest probability of selecting the best applicant of the whole group. This is the same as maximizing the expected payoff, with payoff defined to be one for the best applicant and zero otherwise.

 

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Application

 

After reading that you can probably see the application to real life.  There are a series of bad and good assumptions following, some are fair, some are not going to be representative of you.  I am going to try to name them all as I go so that you can adapt them with better ones for yourself.  Assuming that you plan to have children and you will probably be doing so like billions of humans have done so far in a monogamous relationship while married (the entire set of assumptions does not break down for poly relationships or relationship-anarchy, but it gets more complicated).  These assumptions help us populate the Secretary problem with numbers in relation to dating for the purpose of children.

 

If you assume that a biological female's clock ends at 40. (in that its hard and not healthy for the baby if you try to have a kid past that age), that is effectively the end of the pure and simple biological purpose of relationships. (environment, IVF and adoption aside for a moment).  (yes there are a few more years on that)

 

For the purpose of this exercise – as a guy – you can add a few years for the potential age gap you would tolerate. (i.e. my parents are 7 years apart, but that seems like a big understanding and maturity gap – they don't even like the same music), I personally expect I could tolerate an age gap of 4-5 years.

If you make the assumption that you start your dating life around the ages of 16-18. that gives you about [40-18=22]  22-24 (+5 for me as a male), years of expected dating potential time.

If you estimate the number of kids you want to have, and count either:

3 years for each kid OR

2 years for each kid (+1 kid – AKA 2 years)

(Twins will throw this number off, but estimate that they take longer to recover from, or more time raising them to manageable age before you have time to have another kid)

My worked example is myself – as a child of 3, with two siblings of my own I am going to plan to have 3 children. Or 8-9 years of child-having time. If we subtract that from the number above we end up with 11-16 (16-21 for me being a male) years of dating time.

Also if you happen to know someone with a number of siblings (or children) and a family dynamic that you like; then you should consider that number of children for yourself. Remember that as a grown-up you are probably travelling through the world with your siblings beside you.  Which can be beneficial (or detrimental) as well, I would be using the known working model of yourself or the people around you to try to predict whether you will benefit or be at a disadvantage by having siblings.  As they say; You can't pick your family - for better and worse.  You can pick your friends, if you want them to be as close as a default family - that connection goes both ways - it is possible to cultivate friends that are closer than some families.  However you choose to live your life is up to you.

Assume that once you find the right person - getting married (the process of organising a wedding from the day you have the engagement rings on fingers); and falling pregnant (successfully starting a viable pregnancy) takes at least a year. Maybe two depending on how long you want to be "we just got married and we aren't having kids just yet". It looks like 9-15 (15-20 for male adjusted) years of dating.

With my 9-15 years; I estimate a good relationship of working out whether I want to marry someone, is between 6 months and 2 years, (considering as a guy I will probably be proposing and putting an engagement ring on someone's finger - I get higher say about how long this might take than my significant other does.), (This is about the time it takes to evaluate whether you should put the ring on someone's finger).  For a total of 4 serious relationships on the low and long end and 30 serious relationships on the upper end. (7-40 male adjusted relationships)

Of course that's not how real life works. Some relationships will be longer and some will be shorter. I am fairly confident that all my relationships will fall around those numbers.

I have a lucky circumstance; I have already had a few serious relationships (substitute your own numbers in here).  With my existing relationships I can estimate how long I usually spend in a relationship. (2year + 6 year + 2month + 2month /4 = 2.1 years). Which is to say that I probably have a maximum and total of around 7-15 relationships before I gotta stop expecting to have kids, or start compromising on having 3 kids.

 

 

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A solution to the secretary equation

A known solution that gives you the best possible candidate the most of the time is to try out 1/e candidates (or roughly 36%), then choose the next candidate that is better than the existing candidates. For my numbers that means to go through 3-7 relationships and then choose the next relationship that is better than all the ones before.  

 

I don't quite like that.  It depends on how big your set is; as to what the chance of you having the best candidate in the first 1/e trials and then sticking it out till the last candidate, and settling on them.  (this strategy has a ((1/n)*(1/e)) chance of just giving you the last person in the set - which is another opportunity cost risk - what if they are rubbish? Compromise on the age gap, the number of kids or the partners quality...)  If the set is 7, the chance that the best candidate is in the first 1/e is 5.26% (if the set is 15 - the chance is much lower at 2.45%).  

 

Opportunity cost

Each further relationship you have might be costing you another 2 years to get further out of touch with the next generation (kids these days!)  I tend to think about how old I will be when my kids are 15-20 am I growing rapidly out of touch with the next younger generation?  Two years is a very big opportunity spend - another 2 years could see you successfully running a startup and achieving lifelong stability at the cost of the opportunity to have another kid.  I don't say this to crush you with fear of inaction; but it should factor in along with other details of your situation.

 

A solution to the risk of having the best candidate in your test phase; or to the risk of lost opportunity - is to lower the bar; instead of choosing the next candidate that is better than all the other candidates; choose the next candidate that is better than 90% of the candidates so far.  Incidentally this probably happens in real life quite often.  In a stroke of, "you'll do"...

 

Where it breaks down

 

Real life is more complicated than that. I would like to think that subsequent relationships that I get into will already not suffer the stupid mistakes of the last ones; As well as the potential opportunity cost of exploration. The more time you spend looking for different partners – you might lose your early soul mate, or might waste time looking for a better one when you can follow a "good enough" policy. No one likes to know they are "good enough", but we do race the clock in our lifetimes. Life is what happens when you are busy making plans.

 

As someone with experience will know - we probably test and rule out bad partners in a single conversation, where we don't even get so far as a date.  Or don't last more than a week. (I. E the experience set is growing through various means).

 

People have a tendency to overrate the quality of a relationship while they are in it, versus the ones that already failed.

 

Did I do something wrong? 

“I got married early - did I do something wrong (or irrational)?”

No.  equations are not real life.  It might have been nice to have the equation, but you obviously didn't need it.  Also this equation assumes a monogamous relationship.  In real life people have overlapping relationships, you can date a few people and you can be poly. These are all factors that can change the simple assumptions of the equation. 

 

Where does the equation stop working?

Real life is hard.  It doesn't fall neatly into line, it’s complicated, it’s ugly, it’s rough and smooth and clunky.  But people still get by.  Don’t be afraid to break the rule. 

Disclaimer: If this equation is the only thing you are using to evaluate a relationship - it’s not going to go very well for you.  I consider this and many other techniques as part of my toolbox for evaluating decisions.

Should I break up with my partner?

What? no!  Following an equation is not a good reason to live your life.  

Does your partner make you miserable?  Then yes you should break up.

 

Do you feel like they are not ready to have kids yet and you want to settle down?  Tough call.  Even if they were agents also doing the equation; An equation is not real life.  Go by your brain; go by your gut.  Don’t go by just one equation.

Expect another post soon about reasonable considerations that should be made when evaluating relationships.

The given problem makes the assumption that you are able to evaluate partners in the sense that the secretary problem expects.  Humans are not all strategic and can’t really do that.  This is why the world is not going to perfectly follow this equation.  Life is complicated; there are several metrics that make a good partner and they don’t always trade off between one another.

 

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Meta: writing time - 3 hours over a week; 5+ conversations with people about the idea, bothering a handful of programmers and mathematicians for commentary on my thoughts, and generally a whole bunch of fun talking about it.  This post was started on the slack channel when someone asked a related question.

 

My table of contents for other posts in my series.

 

Let me know if this post was helpful or if it worked for you or why not.

There are many ways to tackle this question, but I mean this in a homo economicus, not biased perspective. If we were great optimizers of some things (experiences, states of the world, utility in the emotional sense), should we be sad upon hearing we lost an opportunity?

The intuitive answer, to me, is yes. But for many things, for most things I have begun to believe otherwise. This is because we combine two distinct meanings of opportunity

Opportunity₁ = Something good in the future that is uncertain at the moment and could happen to you, frequently depending on environmental factors outside of your control and some factors within your control in the time between now and the opportunity taking place. Ex: 

 

• Getting a promotion
• Finding a romantic partner
• Having a really good friendship
• Having a large H index (for scientific publications)

 

 

 

Opportunity₂ = Something good in the future that is uncertain at the moment and could happen to you, but all the actions you could have personally taken that could influence this are in the past, and now only time and chance will determine if it will be the case. Ex:

 

• Being approved at Google after the entire interview process has happened
• Being accepted at Harvard
• Avoiding wine in your clothing after it has been dropped
• Being accepted to work with CEA after filling in the entire application. 

 

I think it is very reasonable to be sad when you lose opportunites₁ but completely pointless to be sad over the loss of the second kind, opporunities₂. It feels obvious to me, but in case it isn't I'll try to make it explicit:

When you lose opportunities₁, you change the course of your future actions, each of your actions, your time and your effort has become less valuable, since you have to do more to get the same odds or even less. 

When you lose opportunities₂ you are only being notified of an indexical property, you learn in which of the possible universes you could be you happen to be. You have gained knowledge, you can tailor your future actions regarding other things accordingly. Nothing has become pricier for your efforts, in fact, now you have a better map, and can navigate with ease. 

So let us be neutral or happy with the loss of oportunities₂, and gain strenght from the loss of opportunities₁. It seems right to allocate emotional and psychological resources to things you can act on, when you are not in flow. Otherwise, you may end up in the hardest death spiral to overcome, learned helplessness.

For political reasons related to my prospective adviser's academic history, all applicants who wanted to study with him didn't make it to Berkeley University.  But hey, I didn't care... That just means I'm in the fun universe in which I actually have to do all the crazy stuff like moving into the unknown, that is a universe of adventure right?

Loss aversion be damned! 

 

Peter Thiel is offering another round of "20 under 20" Fellowships. The application deadline is December 31st. We know many of the current Thiel fellows here in the Bay Area, and it's a great opportunity. Here's the official letter from the Thiel Foundation:

 

We are delighted to announce that we are now accepting applications for the 2012 class of Thiel Fellows.  The 20 Under 20 Thiel Fellowship is a no-strings-attached grant of $100,000 that lets extraordinary young adults skip college and focus on their work, their research, and their self-education. The deadline is December 31st.

The 2011 class of Fellows includes 24 people who are tackling breakthroughs in hardware and robotics, making energy plentiful, making markets more effective, challenging the notion that there is only one way to get an education, and extending the human lifespan. Several of them have already launched companies, secured financing, and won prestigious awards. As they’re demonstrating, you don’t need college to invent the future (you can read about their progress in a recent article in TechCrunch).

If you’re under twenty and love science or technology, we hope you'll consider joining the 2012 class. Go to ThielFellowship.org and apply to change the world. There’s no cost to apply. Fellows will be appointed this spring and begin two-year fellowships in the summer of 2012.

If you’re twenty or over, we have a different request. Think of the smartest, most creative person you know who’s 19 or younger. Sit down and talk with that person about her or his goals and interests. For some people, such as future doctors, the time and cost of four years of college may be worth it. But for those who plan to invent things or start companies, starting now may make more sense. Please send such visionaries and tinkerers our way.

Millions of people enjoy a higher quality of life because smart people like Steve Jobs, Muriel Siebert, Benjamin Franklin, Mark Zuckerberg, and hundreds of others skipped college to start a project that couldn’t wait.

We hope you’ll help us spread the word.

Thanks,

The Thiel Foundation

I recently was reminded of some work I did last year, and thought that it is the type of opportunity some LW-ers would be interested in, since there are a lot of STEM students on here.

The following are details about a research/scholarship opportunity. You must be a student, but you can be of any level: high school, college, grad school, or post-doc. You do not have to go to any specific school,  but you probably have to relocate to Dayton, OH for the 10 weeks of the summer program. You do not have to relocate for the rest of the year. 

They are very flexible on their admissions! GPA isn't high enough? Not a US citizen? Can't commit to the entire 10 weeks? They will still accept you if you turn in a good essay!

 

Basic Info

Website: http://wbi-icc.com/

5 minute video: http://vimeo.com/31103711 

Tec^Edge is a research opportunity/experiential learning scholarship that takes students  and puts them in groups with mentors from academia (such as professors with research projects), government (such as the Air Force Research Labs (AFRL)) and business (such as General Dynamics). 

Besides Tec^Edge, it also goes by: Academic Leadership Pipeline Scholarship (ALPS), Summer at the Edge (SATE), and Year at the Edge (YATE).

Summer At the Edge (SATE) is a 10-week program, and generally requires relocating for the summer to Dayton, OH, where the facility is. The work is full-time, though you make your own hours, and you get paid $4000 for the whole thing, generally in the form of a scholarship to your school (which means no taxes!). The facility is amazingly nice. Lots of high-tech things to work/play with.

It has been described as "Lock a bunch of smart people in a room with lots of gadgets, occasionally shove pizza under the door, and see what comes out."

Year at the Edge (YATE) is the "off-season". They ask for about 10 hours a week (so the scholarship is only $1000/10 weeks). But you do not have to be in Dayton. You can work from your school, but the occasional virtual meeting is required. For some reason, they were set on using Second Life instead of Skype for this, even though everyone disliked it. I am guessing it was for some sort of experiment..

There are lots of projects, and they try to put you on one that matches your interests. Many of the projects are sponsored by the Air Force Research Labs, so there are a lot involving sensors (aka surveillance) and aeronautics. Most projects need a lot of programming, most commonly in Java. But there are also opportunities for non-programmers (They are very big on inter-disciplinary work). Oftentimes you can request your own project, if there is something specific you want to work on. Anything that AFRL or DARPA might be interested in is generally accepted.

A sample project: One group was trying to develop a micro air vehicle that could be shot out of a rocket-launcher thing, so it had to roll up into a 2" diameter. It had to carry sensors (aka video feed), and it had to have a controlled descent. The whole thing had to cost less than $100 per unit, and their end of year test was to drop it from a height of perhaps 200' (I forget), use the video feed to find their mentor's truck, and use the controlled descent to land it in his truck bed. I don't know if they were successful in this... 

Besides getting to work on awesome projects, you also have a chance to meet and work under some pretty awesome people and network with contacts from various research labs. They are pretty willing to buy any expensive gadgetry required for your project. You can get your work published. You have lots of freedom as to what you want to do, how/when you want to do it. There are some really great presenters that they bring in too. All in all, it's a pretty awesome experience.

Downsides: The organization is what they call "Chaordic". There's not much of a hierarchy. You have to be ok pretty much making your own way. A lot of projects have some application to surveillance, so you have to be ok with that. Most LW-ers would have to relocate for the summer program. I think they help out with this, but all the same, Dayton is not the most interesting city to be in.

 

My experiences: 

For Summer At the Edge (SATE) I was teamed with a post-doc in some sort of computer science, and a 17 year-old programmer from a local high school. We were working on a project from the Human Performance Wing of the AFRL. The whole of our instruction was "Do something with Information Visualization, and Computer Mediated Communications." In other words, ways to make pretty pictures out of things like email, chat rooms, blogs, etc, so that people can understand them faster or see patterns easier.

 Some of the groups were very organized under their mentor who had a specific project that they were working on, and so would tell students what they wanted done. Our group was very self-led. Our mentor would ask us if we needed anything, but pretty much would leave us to our own devices.

We did some research for about a week, then my partners started working on programming text analyzers. Not being a programmer, I had to find other things to do. Not knowing what to do, I spent a lot of time doing the paperwork and giving presentations, organizing the SATE trip to an amusement park, and generally helping out.

One thing about SATE is that you have to be very self-motivated. If you don't have something to do, it is up to you to find something. Because it's so self-led, there's a decent amount of updates you have to give (such as a weekly email about what you accomplished that week, and how many hours you worked), and also a paper that you have to submit at the end, summarizing your findings.

Every now and then I'd have an idea. There were a lot of dead ends, but eventually I managed to coalesce my ideas into somewhat of a whole. I probably spent about a month working on my actual project, and then about a week writing my paper, and some of my teammates' paper. Both of our papers ended up getting published in the Collaborative Technologies and Systems International Symposium. If I had still been a student when the conference occurred, Tec^Edge would have paid my way for me to present the poster at the conference, but as it stood, our adviser presented for me.

 

After SATE was over, I applied for Year at the Edge (YATE). This program only requires ~10 hours a week, since it is during the school year, and allows you to work from home/school. For this project there was even less instruction, as I had to propose my own project. If you can manage to turn a class assignment into something YATE is interested in, they are quite accepting of it.

I had a pretty open-ended project for a Computer Design class, so I asked my partner in that class if she would be willing to do a project on something called Computer Supported Collaborative Work (aka "Using computers to work together with other people"), and I proposed the same project to YATE. They all agreed, so for all intents and purposes I ended up getting a research scholarship to do my homework!

This time there was a bit more structure, as we were following the class guidelines as to what we needed to accomplish. Mainly we were doing quantitative and qualitative measurements on collaborating using Google docs, versus other collaborative methods (being in the same room and sharing a computer). Being a much smaller project, this didn't get published, but we did get an A on the assignment, and used the paper-writing as an excuse to learn LaTeX.

Unfortunately, that was my last quarter before my divorce, so I didn't continue with the program. But I couldn't recommend it more to anyone who is interested. You get a lot of opportunities to work on whatever interests you. The mentors are amazing contacts from many different research companies that you can use as references. It's not uncommon to get offered a job or internship with the company that is mentoring your project. Also, even if you are a high schooler or an undergrad, you have the opportunity to get published.

 

Want to Apply?

This website has application instructions and a short video: http://wbi-icc.com/who-we-work-with/students-teachers 

Things they like: Passion, Willingness to venture into the unknown, Willingness to "fail" (allowing discovery of things that don't work), Interdisciplinary work and knowledge, Desire to make a difference

My admissions essay earned me a spot as a "Student Leader" and I'm willing to post it, if it will help people see the sort of thing that they are looking for. But I won't bother, if no one asks!

If you have any questions about it, let me know!

As a part of my job, I recently created an econometric model. My boss wants someone to look over the math before its submitted internally throughout the company. We have a modest amount of money set aside for someone to audit the process.

The model is an ARMA(2,1) with seasonality, trend, and a dummy variable. There's no heteroscedasticity or serial correlation, but the Ramsey Reset test suggests a more different model might work better.

I currently have the data in an eviews file, so you'd need to do zero data entry.

There's a small chance this will be used in court, but none of the liability will be transferred to you. There should be an emphasis placed on parsimony. You'd have to sign a confidentiality agreement.

If you're qualified to review this/suggest a marginally better model, then this would be an easy way for you to make bank in a couple hours time. If it goes well, there might be more work like this in the future.

Let me know if you're interested.