Category: Relationships

To spend time with a child is to dwell under the terms of an uneasy truce between the possibility of the present and the inevitability of the future…

To spend time with a child is to dwell under the terms of an uneasy truce between the possibility of the present and the inevitability of the future…

… Our deepest hope for the children we love is that they will enjoy the liberties of an open-ended destiny, that their desires will be given the free play they deserve, that the circumstances of their birth and upbringing will be felt as opportunities rather than encumbrances; our greatest fear is that they will feel thwarted by forces beyond their control. At the same time, we can’t help poring over their faces and gestures for any signals of eventuality — the trace hints and betrayals of what will emerge in time as their character, their plot, their fate. And what we project forward for the children in our midst can rarely be disentangled from what we project backward for ourselves.

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A marriage counselor was giving a seminar to a room filled with people seeking marital advice…

A marriage counselor was giving a seminar to a room filled with people seeking marital advice…

— From Invest Like a Guru – How to Generate Higher Returns at Reduced Risk with Value Investing P. 39

… he projected his first slide, the key to a successful marriage, which showed just one phrase:

‘Love each other, forever.’

Participants started to shake their heads and said the sentiment was hard to put in practice. Then the marriage counselor put up his second slide, which said:

‘If you cannot do that, now you need to follow these four rules: (1) Compromise, tolerate, and forgive. (2) Make it a habit to compromise, tolerate, and forgive. (3) Pretend to be a fool. (4) Make that a habit, too.’

The participants grew more vocal, saying the four rules are impossible to follow. Waiting until they quieted down, the counselor put up his third slide, which said:

‘If you cannot follow these four rules, now you need to do these 16 things right: (1) Don’t lose your tempers at the same time. (2) Don’t yell unless it is an emergency. (3) When getting into an argument, let your spouse win. (4) Don’t let an argument last overnight. (5) Always be ready to apologize …’

After reading these, some laughed and some sighed. The counselor then showed his fourth slide, which said:

‘If you still cannot follow 16 rules, now you need to do these 256 things right…’ 

 

Tolstoy, Anna Karenina, & Machine Learning?

Tolstoy, Anna Karenina, & Machine Learning?

— From The Master Algorithm – How the Quest for the ultimate learning machine will remake our world by Pedro Domingos P. 67

A conjunctive concept is what Tolstoy had in mind when he wrote the opening sentence of Anna Karenina: “All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.” The same is true of individuals. To be happy, you need health, love, friends, money, a job you like, and so on. Take any of these away and misery ensues.

In machine learning, examples of a concept are called positive examples, and counterexamples are called negative examples. If you’re trying to learn to recognize cats in images, images of cats are positive examples and images of dogs are negative ones. If you compiled a database of families from the world’s literature, the Karenins would be a negative example of a happy family, and there would be precious few positive examples.”