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Comment by t_mann

It's a really cool result when you tell people about it, but actually when you think about it, it doesn't seem as useful as it sounds at first. The combination of some fundamental assumptions - you know the number of candidates in advance and you can't go back to previous candidates (*edit - should have added another one here: that you don't know anything about the distribution from which candidates are drawn before you begin) - don't really seem to match any of the purported applications, nor any I could think of quickly off the top of my head.

In reality, you're usually be able to gauge some estimates of the moments of the population distribution before you have to make any decision (which also aren't always final). Ie, you'll be interviewing a couple of candidates before you send out any rejections, you'll see several potential mates before you narrow in on one, you know from experience what a nice appartment looks like when you visit one,...

There are also other problems in other potential applications: a gig economy worker needs to not only optimize the value of the next gig but also the time spent searching for the next gig, when buying a used car the biggest problem is the information asymmetry regarding the true value of the car, not that it's gone if you don't buy right away,...

parent t_mann 4 years ago

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