3 ms·
regarding the first part, you're absolutely right, but understanding the worst case computational complexity of a problem does lend a certain appreciation to th
by carterschonwald 18y ago
regarding the first part, you're absolutely right, but understanding the worst case computational complexity of a problem does lend a certain appreciation to the average case complexity that happens when people implicitly approximately solve those problems.
Admission: My current research project involves studying the computational complexity of socially inspired optimization problems. Turns out that even the simplest nontrivial ones are PPAD Hard or #P hard. (so special cases or approximations become key very quickly)
This is why its useful to put social problems into at least semi-mathematical language to make it easier to spell things out to the socially oblivious (but still logically endowed, which sadly isn't always the case) or to make it easier to discuss a complex social issue with a friend
- dkarl 18y agoThis reminds me of an article I read years ago about cognitive psychologists trying to model how outfielders catch fly balls. Evidently, even given the massively parallel nature of the brain, it was very hard to come up with a model that was effective enough to explain the performance of real outfielders (Little League to Major League) but was simple enough to be neurologically plausible. Just like the social models you describe, none of the mathematically straightforward ways of modeling the fly ball problem were cognitively feasible. Yet, if you were teaching an engineering student to catch a fly ball, they would probably be helpful, even though the final goal would be to induce an entirely unrelated cognitive structure in the engineer's mind.