topics: |  optimization | math | multi-criteria | pareto

Quotes

The people who succeed and do not push on to greater failure are the
spiritual middle classers. Their stopping at success is the proof of their
compromising insignificance. How petty their dreams must have been! The man
who pursues the mere attainable should be sentenced to get it -- and keep
it. Let him rest on his laurels and enthrone him in a Morris chair, in which
laurels and hero may wither together. Only through the unattainable does man
achieve a hope worth living and dying for -- and so attain himself. He with
the spiritual guerdon of a hope in hopelessness, is nearest to the stars and
the rainbow's foot.
      - Eugene O'Neill, playwright, NY Tribune, Feb 1921

Singleness of purpose in areas other than religion is
fanaticism.   - H.E. Daly, 1981

Things can only be correctly evaluated by comparing them with the most
valuable. . . The heart of man does not tolerate an absence of the
excellent and supreme.
	  - Jose Ortega y Gasset, Revoln of the Masses, 1964.

Importance of initial point of reference in people's estimates

Tversky and Kahneman (1975): People were randomly placed in two groups
   and assigned a number between 0 1nd 100 by the spin of a wheel made in
their presence. They were told to assume this number was an initial
estimate of the percentage of African nations in the UN. Their task
was to adjust this figure to reflect their own estimates of the
correct percentage. . . . the roulette wheel values turned out to have
a marked effect. The group wirh a roulette value of 10 percent
estimated the African membership to be 25 percent, whereas the group
starting from 65% estimated it at 45 percent. . . . 

similarly, the 5-second estimate of the product 1x2x3...8 is much less than
8x7x...1 - the median values are 512 and 2,250 (correct answer = 40,320).