The Will to Learn
Photography by Benny Kim
When you go to a new city, how many coffee shops should you try out to find your favorite coffee shop? This is known as the multi-armed bandit problem in probability theory.
Well, if you’re new to the city, you should explore like crazy. Early on, there’s a good probability that the places that you’ve visited so far isn’t the best place in your city, so you should opportunistically go to new places. But if you’ve been in the city for a while, you should instead consider exploiting your hard-earned knowledge and stick with a familiar place.
You find the multi-armed bandit problem everywhere— infants eat and believe anything, but older people know exactly what they want and what they believe. There’s nothing particularly wrong about this. But it becomes a huge problem when those older people are making decisions for all of America. This is the case in American politics.
“People have a certain worldview. Then, they’re confronted with evidence that conflicts with the worldview. So instead of changing their worldview (which they may have held their entire lives), they dismiss the evidence.” — Bill Nye
