Amanda’s Reviews > Algorithms to Live By: The Computer Science of Human Decisions > Status Update

Again, a lot of the advice on scheduling just seems impractical in real life. Am I really going to sit there and calculate how long every task will take to do and/or its due date and divide that from the task I’m currently doing? Or am I just going to get to it when I get to it in most cases? I’m just not a fan of this idea of productivity optimization in general. I know he kind of addressed this but still

This chapter on caching is the first one that I can really see being useful in everyday life. The previous ones involve such complex algorithms/formulas, many of which rely on unknowable variables, that I just can't see how they could be practically applied in most situations.

I like the concept of optimal stopping and can see its many potential applications, but choosing a life partner is not one of them. Love is a feeling and compatibility is not something you can quantify definitively. But even if you could somehow rank all of your partners, there's no way to know when you've reached the optimal stopping point, since you can't know the number of "applicants" or how long you have to look

I'm a little wary of this book because it seems self-help adjacent. But as someone who struggles a lot with decision-making, there could be some useful information in here. And the premise does intrigue me even though I have zero knowledge or background in computer science (hopefully that doesn't present an issue while reading it)