Yes, upon re-reading I see that you are correct. I think there may be overlap between activities I consider part of the formulation and activities others may consider part of the solution.
To expand on my poker suggestion. When attempting to determine the probability of a hand in poker it is necessary to determine a way to represent that hand using combinations/permutations. I have found that for certain hands this can be rather difficult as you often miss, exclude, or double count some amount of possible hands. This process of representing the hand u...
Thanks FiftyTwo- I just looked up the article you refer to and it indicates that it may be a paraphrase of a longer quote. I heard this from Anthony Robbins, this quote is attributed to Einstein in some of his literature. It seems that the sentiment, if not the exact quote, seem to be attributable to Einstein
General class of examples: almost any combinatorial problem ever
Yes! Combinatorics problems are a perfect example of this. Trying to work out the probability of being dealt a particular hand in poker can be very difficult (for certain hands) until you correctly formulate the question- at which point the calculations are trivial : )
The significant problems we face cannot be solved at the same level of thinking we were at when we created them.
-- Albert Einstein
This reminds me of Steven Covey's idea of a coordinate graph with four quadrants where you graph importance on on axis and urgency on the other. This gives you for types of "activities" to invest your time into.
Urgent and Unimportant (a phone ringing is a good example): this is where many people loose a tremendous amount of time
Urgent and Important (A broken bone or crime in progress) hese immediately demand our "focus"
Not Urgent and Not Important: pure time wasters- not a good place to invest much energy
Not Urgent BUT Import
In my experience it can often turn out that the formulation is more difficult than the solution (particularly for an interesting/novel problem). Many times I have found that it takes a good deal of effort to accurately define the problem and clearly identify the parameters, but once that has been accomplished the solution turns out to be comparatively simple.
One of my favorites for exactly that reason- if you don't mind, let me take a stab at convincing you absent "the right people agreeing."
The trick is that once Monty removes one door from the contest you are left with a binary decision. Now to understand why the probability differs from our "gut" feeling of 50/50 you must notice that switching amounts to winning IF your original choice was wrong, and loosing IF your original choice was correct (of course staying with your original choice results in winning if you were right and loosin...
This was an excellent read- I particularly enjoyed the comparison drawn between our intuition and other potentially "black box" operations such as statistical analysis. As a mathematics teacher (and recreational mathematician) I am constantly faced with, and amused by, the various ways in which my intuition can fail me when faced with a particular problem.
A wonderful example of the general failure of intuition can be seen in the classic "Monty Hall Problem." In the old TV game show Monty Hall would offer the contestant their choice of...
Hello LW community. I'm a HS math teacher most interested in Geometry and Number Theory. I have long been attracted to mathematics and philosophy because they both embody the search for truth that has driven me all my life. I believe reason and logic are profoundly important both as useful tools in this search, and for their apparently unique development within our species.
Humans aren't particularly fast, or strong, or resistant to damage as compared with many other creatures on the planet, but we seem to be the only ones with a reasonably well develo...
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