throwawayarnty

Do people have to sign waivers so phone checkers aren’t liable if and when robbers come and take the whole basket of phones ?

Having lived in many European countries, Netherlands was by far the most openly racist of them all. Especially during coronavirus.

Just browse a Facebook apartment rental group in Netherlands. Most would say “No internationals!”.

Imagine a society where such blatant discrimination exists, and you will see why such scandals targeting foreigners is no surprise.

As another anecdote. It is common for apartment ads in Netherlands to explicitly say “no foreigners!” in their ads. Which was a shock to me when first seeing them on Facebook by 18-22 year old Dutch university students offering rooms.

Extremely offensive if this ad would show up in usa or other new world countries.

I found Wikipedia most inconsistent when dealing with academics. Whether living academics are included or not has no relationship with whether they are prominent or influential. That is, May prominent academics do not have wiki pages, and many academics with wiki pages are not prominent.

Eg Donna Strickland did not have a wiki page until after it was announced that she won the Nobel prize. People who win Nobel prizes are not overnight successes and were prominent long before getting their prize.

My only objection is the food/fruit/vegetable argument. The best fruits and veggies come from gardens, most from Japan.

Random fruits and veggies from the wild mostly taste overly sour, bitter, or under or over ripe.

I can’t feel sorry for people who take a line of credit and use it to put it in cryptocurrency.

Maybe its schadenfreude, but I feel they all got what they deserved. Trying to make 7 percent returns risk free is asking for hidden risks.

You’re right that France is also bad (also spain) but it’s better to sample around phd salaries in different countries. Roughly in euros per month:

Netherlands: 3000

Sweden: 3000

Switzerland: 4000

France: 1500

Italy: 1000-1500

Spain: 1000-1500

Germany: 2000-3000

USA: 2000-3000

Uk: 1300-1600

Note in many countries you get benefits like insurance, pension, unemployment insurance (basically free money after your PhD).

In summary, there are different tiers, and UK is at the bottom tier comparable to France, Spain, and Italy.

As a non Brit but had a permanent position in Oxbridge, my advice was to look beyond the UK.

Even within Europe, there are many institutes that are strictly better than oxbridge. If you’re a scientist, there is no point in being too narrow and confining yourself to UK.

I would agree though that at the undergraduate level oxbridge is excellent. Postgraduate what matters actually is the advisor and grant money.

PhD in the UK is a different level of poverty compared with PhDs in any other “Western” country.

Can you imagine graduating at the top of your class and you living in London or near London on less than 20k pounds a year? You can double or triple that income in other phd programs.

The only advice if one really wants to do a PhD is to sample broadly across different countries and PhD programs and choose one that unlocks future options and also pays living wages.

The thing that is so foreign to me in the UK is their academic culture.

There are people who literally think there are only two universities worth being at: Cambridge and Oxford. They are shocked when they find candidates from abroad turning down offers for permanent positions there or leaving their positions for somewhere else.

Do everything yourself to show them how things should be done.

The desire to live in NYC is mostly for the hype and story you can tell yourself.

The reality is that the daily commute, expenses, and crowds is worse than other places. Your daily life matters much more than the few weeks of the year that you can take your visitors around the city.

The fuel that drives people to live in NYC is propaganda from TV, films, and books.

It might be fun to live for a few years, but imagine raising a family with multiple kids in a tiny apartment. There are better ways to live than that.

Even if FSD doesn’t work out Andrej still has an impressive achievement for 5 years.

I’m not sure if many people 5 years out of their PhD can say they did anything close to what Andrej did.

University rankings are mostly bunk because they weigh mostly on perception and lagging indicators. A university can deteriorate for decades while remaining high on ranking.

The only criterion that matters for a student that wants to select a university is the fraction of graduates that go on to do impressive things.

The interesting thing is that knowing these facts has no correlation with whether you are a good biologist.

Real biology involves designing clever wet lab experiments, analysing data to predict new phenomenon, then following up with more experiments.

Nothing in real life biology relies on knowing a huge amount of facts. You just look it up on google.

What makes biology hard to teach is that there are no principles. So teacher can just point to experimental results and ask students to memorise those results. Real biology is about saying the textbooks are all wrong and here is how it really works.

Biology is particularly difficult to learn in school or from any book because one cannot “do” much biology on pen and paper.

Math, physics, and certain parts of chemistry can actually be done on pen and paper (or by computer simulations) because it is based on solid theory with mathematical underpinnings.

The only solid foundation biology has is descriptive theories from Darwin and maybe Mendel. All other biology must be studied through experimental data, which means wet lab and analysis. Just reading about a result (which is how school is done) doesn’t mean you are a good biologist no matter how well you can regurgitate the textbook.

I hear a lot how people find it difficult to slog through anna karenina because of its length and numerous characters.

They cannot see how such a book could be one of the greatest of all time.

I think the analogy to music may be like: Beethoven’s 9th Symphony is one of the greatest of all time. But it’s a really long and complex piece lasting over an hour. It can be hard to pay attention to the entire piece.

That said, the recommendation for reading Anna Karenina would be to read it fast or watch a good tv series on it. War and piece 2016 tv series was excellent for example.

Highly recommend the 2016 tv series of war and peace starting Paul Dano.

Sometimes the movie can be better than the book, especially if the book is a dense classic.

Amazing how much China has changed over the past 60 years. From backwards and famined to a global super power.

Single cell sequencing technology is analogous to taking many radios, and listing all the parts the radios contains. Then clustering radios by similarity in their part abundances.

Useful, but a parts list is still far from figuring out how a radio works.

When cooking zucchini it is worth chopping a slice in the middle and tasting it. If it’s bitter just throw it out.

The worst is you cut 5 zucchini’s , and one bitter zucchini ruins your entire dish.

How would this advice apply to people who have won Nobel prizes? These people worked on things that were scientifically unpopular and deemed unimportant (eg autophagy, GFP).

What matters is only often clear in hindsight. Don’t focus too much on results, but focus on an inner concentration for your work that is decoupled from external rewards.

What works for us when you’re in a city is to pick a restaurant you want to go to, then walk in the general direction there. Allow spontaneous detours in corners you find interesting.

This allows one to flaneur but still have a destination.

On vacation, one can literally eat lunch, then wander about the city until it is tea time, then repeat until dinner. Beautiful way to spend the day and explore the city.

I wonder how member of Congress justify that they need a special health care that is different from the public.

It seems to make sense and align incentives to have members use the same public systems (eg transport, education, health, housing) as everyone else, otherwise they will never understand how their policies affect real people.

The lack of enthusiasm to learn new stuff is also due to opportunity costs and “exploration vs exploitation“ dynamics.

You spend time and effort when you are younger (eg 15) to develop skills that allow you to be productive and valuable.

Learning entirely orthogonal skills when you’re older no longer pays off after a certain point because the opportunity cost of not using your existing skills to produce becomes too large.

To make an extreme analogy, there is no point in Warren Buffet to learn to program at his stage of his career (or even 30 years ago). Any time spent not reading financial reports is such a huge opportunity cost that he really has no reason to learn any other skill.

Another extreme example is Lang Lang the pianist has no reason to pick up the violin. He has absolutely nothing to gain by learning new musical instruments.

Science is a special career where learning new things is important for longevity. A productive science career involves breaking new ground, picking up the low hanging fruit before your competitors do, then move on to break new ground once your old field becomes saturated. Learning new things is strategic, where you try to leverage existing expertise to break ground in new fields.

I would argue the people’s choices are appropriate.

In real life you never get perfect information, so doing nothing as opposed to pulling represents the humans uncertainty of the parameters in the scenario.

“First do no harm”.

I never understood how the trolley problem applies to real life.

When is there ever a situation where you have perfect and complete information about a scenario? Only in thought experiments.

The situation where the boxes are probabilistic was more realistic. You’re never sure in real life that you will certainly do less harm if you pull vs not pull.

In some cities it’s common to eat out at restaurants every day (eg Shanghai). So I guess different cultures handle their after work social life differently.

My opinion has been that since you need to eat dinner anyway (although I’ve seen Dutch and English people skip dinner to drink), you kill two birds with one stone.

It saddens you that people now consume less alcohol?

My take on Netherlands and Uk culture is that the they (still) drink too much alcohol.

They rather drink beer all night than have a proper dinner at a restaurant, which still blows my mind.

The amount of alcohol some cultures consume is excessive, and I’m glad they’re reducing it.

I always thought that textbooks never gave detailed solutions because of space limitations.

Digital pdf is a great way to break free of these limits and this document is impressive indeed with the detailed solutions.