Matt Parker
speaker
278 appearances
8 recordings
1 series
first heard Oct 2010
last heard 8 Jul
Matt Parker’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Jul 2026 with 1.
Appearances
I screamed at the radio.
I'm a top-of-pay scale teacher.
The average is nowhere near £54,000.
Exactly.
When you're looking for a life partner, as you're interviewing people, or I believe dating is what it's commonly called, as you're going through the candidates...
If you meet a candidate and you assess their qualities and then you reject them, later on, it's very hard to go back and say, look, I've changed my mind.
It turns out you were the best I'm ever going to do.
But on the flip side, if you settle down with someone straight away, you have no idea what the general quality of possible candidates was.
So the question is, how many people do you reject to get a sense of the standard?
And at what point do you stop rejecting and you start choosing?
And that is called the optimal stopping problem.
So you've had a complaint that my description of what is called the secretary problem is apparently suboptimal.
A big fan of E. It's one of these numbers like pi in mathematics.
One over E is about 36, 37%.
What's who's excuse?
Dr. Bunk is absolutely correct.
That is well known.
That is the famous solution to the problem where you interview one over E of your candidates, then pick the next best one.
And that was originally published in 1961.
So the secretary problem was being thrown around in the 1950s when hiring secretaries was at an all-time high.
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