Thursday, November 08, 2007
like a meatball sub
My roommate was preparing his section on maximin and the Difference Principle. I told him he should ask his students to think of an example of maximin reasoning in everyday life. The closest example I could come up with is having to order an entree from a restaurant whose quality is unknown, and thus ordering the item that's probably going to be okay even if the cooks are not good (such as a meatball sub), rather than a dish that is likely to be better, but could be much worse (such as fried chicken) . I have often regretted my optimism in not following maximin principles in such situations. Any better examples?
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2 comments:
in the same vein, picking out a movie at the video store that everyone wants to watch often works the same way...you end up with something predictable and mediocre that doesn't offend anyone, but there are other movies (say, independents) which could be great or just plain awful. i think this is how they pick the movies to show on airplanes. they pick the "best" of totally unoffensive (and thus the worst) movies. so we got Oceans 13 and Evan Almighty on a flight back from Europe last week.
It would be interesting to know how they get pick the movies on planes, but I think it probably isn't determined with your welfare, even maximizing your minimal welfare, in mind at all. Notice how it always tends to be movies that didn't do very well at the box office. It's rarely a successful movie that is wildly popular but maximally inoffensive. I assume they get unpopular movies for free (or very cheaply), whereas they would have to pay for popular movies.
I think we tacitly rely upon a maximin principle in picking restaurants sometimes, but that's similar to your original example. (Are meatball subs really that reliable? I would say turkey clubs are more reliable.)
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