One of my side projects is attempting to categorize all of the trade-offs that decision-makers in our universe face. As of a literature search in June 2010, I could find no good system to classify trade-offs, even though (and perhaps because) this is a topic that cuts across many disciplines (see Wikipedia). My main goal in doing this is to attempt to parse out the parameter space so that people can share insights across fields, although I have other goals as well.
The simplest example is probably speed vs accuracy. This comes up all the time in computer science, it comes up in athletics, it comes up in molecular biology (e.g., DNA polymerase is more accurate, RNA polymerase is faster); it comes up, as far as I can tell, pretty much everywhere it could come up. Once we know this, can we say how people or agents have tended to solve this problem, and apply those same sorts of solutions to our own decisions where we must make a trade-off between speed and accuracy? My working hypothesis is that this will be the case.
If you have any ideas or interest, please let me know.
One of my side projects is attempting to categorize all of the trade-offs that decision-makers in our universe face. As of a literature search in June 2010, I could find no good system to classify trade-offs, even though (and perhaps because) this is a topic that cuts across many disciplines (see Wikipedia). My main goal in doing this is to attempt to parse out the parameter space so that people can share insights across fields, although I have other goals as well.
The simplest example is probably speed vs accuracy. This comes up all the time in computer science, it comes up in athletics, it comes up in molecular biology (e.g., DNA polymerase is more accurate, RNA polymerase is faster); it comes up, as far as I can tell, pretty much everywhere it could come up. Once we know this, can we say how people or agents have tended to solve this problem, and apply those same sorts of solutions to our own decisions where we must make a trade-off between speed and accuracy? My working hypothesis is that this will be the case.
If you have any ideas or interest, please let me know.