2012-12-04

Bloom in town

In the morning, with the computer vision types at NIPS, it was just us astronomers. Fadely and I worked on making fake data to test our calibration systems, while Foreman-Mackey ran MCMC sampling on some Kepler transit data. In the afternoon, I met up with Josh Bloom (Berkeley) at an undisclosed location to discuss various things in play. We spent a bit of time realizing that we are very closely aligned on automated decision making. Somehow it has to involve your long-term future discounted free cash flow, measured in currency units.

3 comments:

  1. Why currency units? Those fluctuate a lot and have only a mild correlation with ethicists' "utility".

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  2. Brendon: Fluctuate with respect to what?

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  3. With respect to other currencies and the prices of things. I suppose the fluctuations aren't that bad really, I just got burned by exchange rates once so I'm a bit sensitive about them. Also, money is imaginary so I'm a bit wary of optimising it long term at the expense of other things. I'm sure people who diligently optimised their Zimbabwe dollar accounts are doing really well now.

    I should probably stop talking about things I don't understand.

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