In my first real job search, I told myself I about a month to find a job. Then, after a bit over a week I just decided to go with the best offer I had. I justified this as the solution to optimal stopping problem, to pick the best option after 1/e time has passed. The job was fine, but the reasoning was wrong—the secretary problem assumes you know no info other than which candidate is better. Instead, I should’ve put a price on features I wanted from a job (mentorship, ability to wear a lot of hats and learn lots of things) and judged each job within what I thought was the distribution.
Notably: my next job didn’t pay very well and I stayed there too long after I’d given up hope in the product. I think I was following a pattern of following a path of low resistance both for the first and second jobs.
I was reading up on crypto a couple years ago and saw what I thought was an amazing opportunity. It was a rebasing dao on the avalanche chain, called Wonderland. I looked into the returns, and guessed how long it would keep up, and put that probability and return rate into a Kelly calculator.
Someone at a LW meetup: “hmm I don’t think Kelly is the right model for this...” but I didn’t listen.
I did eventually cut my losses after only losing ~$20,000, and some further reasoning that the whitepaper didn’t really make sense.
Ways I’ve followed math off a cliff
In my first real job search, I told myself I about a month to find a job. Then, after a bit over a week I just decided to go with the best offer I had. I justified this as the solution to optimal stopping problem, to pick the best option after 1/e time has passed. The job was fine, but the reasoning was wrong—the secretary problem assumes you know no info other than which candidate is better. Instead, I should’ve put a price on features I wanted from a job (mentorship, ability to wear a lot of hats and learn lots of things) and judged each job within what I thought was the distribution.
Notably: my next job didn’t pay very well and I stayed there too long after I’d given up hope in the product. I think I was following a pattern of following a path of low resistance both for the first and second jobs.
I was reading up on crypto a couple years ago and saw what I thought was an amazing opportunity. It was a rebasing dao on the avalanche chain, called Wonderland. I looked into the returns, and guessed how long it would keep up, and put that probability and return rate into a Kelly calculator.
Someone at a LW meetup: “hmm I don’t think Kelly is the right model for this...” but I didn’t listen.
I did eventually cut my losses after only losing ~$20,000, and some further reasoning that the whitepaper didn’t really make sense.