[thom]

Blast from the past! I used PerfectTablePlan for our wedding, tweaked by the far superior ‘do what your better half tells you’ algorithm. We used the same approach later when naming our first child, I built a complicated machine learning system to learn what names and sounds we liked, then we settled on my wife’s first choice.

The thing I’ve learned in life (and especially in sports analytics where variance can dominate) is that “knowing what you’re doing” isn’t any number of instances where you got something right first time. It’s having a process (or even a process-creating-process!) that you’re willing to stand by even when individual results don’t work out. The question isn’t “would you do it all again, knowing what you know now?” it’s “would you learn the same way in the future?” I think being open about this with kids is pretty helpful.

[thathndude]

This second paragraph is consistent with advice from a piece on HN about a month ago, describing how playing poker can make us better at life. And one of the key principles was being process oriented.