trominos
That's not an indictment of you. Contrary to popular belief, motivation doesn't much come from within. For almost everybody, long-term motivation is about other people: your friends, your community, and the world at large. You'll be motivated to do something when these groups of people push you to.
And the mechanism for that push is almost always the same: status. In the long term, human beings find it very easy to do things that increase their status, and very difficult to do anything else (except for things that are inherently more pleasurable than difficult — but that generally doesn't include studying CS theory).
This is really hard on college students, because even though good grades will increase your status after college, they rarely do much for your status in college. If you're good, professors might care, but the collective student body won't.
The solution is to find people who really care about your performance in your field of study — maybe a professor's lab, maybe a group of high achievers, maybe (ideally) a club with an external goal (e.g. autonomous vehicle club) — and make those people central to your life by spending a lot of time with them. If you do, it'll become natural for you to work hard at your field. Although still, you'll only be driven to do things that directly increase your status in your group.
And of course, this solution can be hard to implement; spending lots of time with a new group of people takes its own motivation. It gets a lot easier after college, though. After college you get a job, and wherever you work, everybody will care about how you perform.
If the company goes bust convertible debt is worth nothing, like equity.
Where's the upside? Convertible debt seems like a strictly worse investment than stock.
It's (to some extent) true, and potentially interesting philosophically -- but completely meaningless from an engineering perspective.
"1. I denote by A the amount in my selected envelope.
2. The probability that A is the smaller amount is 1/2, and that it is the larger amount is also 1/2."
If we're gonna be taking expected values we need to assume that the monetary amounts in the two envelopes are generated from a probability distribution on the nonnegative reals. Then the probability distribution for the amount of money in the smaller envelope is going to be some kind of curve (call it S), and obviously the probability distribution for the amount of money in the bigger envelope is going to be the same curve only "stretched out" and "squashed" by a factor of two (we'll call it B).
Now if you say "my envelope contains exactly A dollars," you can tell what the probability is that your envelope is the smaller envelope by comparing the relative heights of the two curves at the value A; let's denote these heights by S(A) and B(A). It is certainly possible that the two heights are the same, in which case it's fifty-fifty that you have the bigger or smaller envelope, the rest of the logic holds, and you should indeed switch, getting an expected return of 5/4 * A.
But it is obviously impossible that in general the two heights are the same for any given A, because then the two probability distributions are the same -- and that can't be true, because B is a squashed, stretched-out version of S, and for a variety of fairly obvious reasons you can't squash and stretch out a finite curve on the positive reals and get the same curve (unless that curve is 0 everywhere). And so we can't conclude that in general you should switch, which is good because if you're not allowed to look at the money before you switch it obviously doesn't matter whether you do or not (unless the people running the game are messing with you).
What do you get in return? Essentially the government receives a bunch of claim checks for wealth (remember that "money" itself has almost no intrinsic value; what we're after, from a macroeconomic viewpoint, is a maximal sustainable production of wealth). Your proposal amounts to reducing overall wealth production in exchange for increasing the government's buying power by a comparatively small amount. Forget ethical arguments against it; except in very extreme economic circumstances, it's absurd from a practical standpoint.
That's just not true in either case. If the widespread use of a substance accelerates human work (or learning) by 10% (whatever that means) but halves life expectancy, it almost certainly isn't good. That's obviously pathological but my intention here is only to show that your argument is bad, not your conclusion.
Moreover, you seem to believe that, outside of schoool, people would only take nootropics if the net benefit to humanity outweighs the net detriment; the real world, after all, isn't a competition. The problem is that it often feels a lot like one. If I'm competing with a coworker of roughly equal skill for a promotion and a nootropic is available to both of us that will increase job performance by 5% but noticeably decrease quality of life -- again, this is pathological -- we're put in a prisoner's dilemma: both of us would much prefer that neither of us take the drug if the alternative is that we both take the drug, but both of us have a strong incentive to take the drug no matter what the other one does.
There's no getting around the fact that allowing nootropics in the real world at least has the potential to instigate exactly the same sort of prisoner's-dilemma-esque mental arms race that allowing nootropics in schools generates. Some of the side effects of that arms race might be good, sure, but some of them might be very bad. This issue isn't anywhere near as cut-and-dried as you make it out to be.
All that said, I do think that HNers are way too quick to upvote comments that happen to support their previously-held beliefs even when those comments are extraordinarily lacking in nuance (see: the score on your post). But I don't think that's ever gonna change.
You might enjoy imagining a forum where smart people anonymously engage in civilized discussion without need for the kind of lowbrow pleasure-center-stimulation that the current karma system provides, but I doubt such a thing could exist; if it did, it would probably be much less exciting than HN. Smart people who enjoy good discussion are still people, and most of what people do is seek out easy rewards.
You've built something almost impossible here: a place where it's very rewarding to say interesting things and very unrewarding, generally, to say uninteresting things. Don't look this gift horse too directly in the mouth. If you kill the point display on comments I think you'll kill a lot of the content on this site.
Not to mention that, though it's easy to make fun of people who get too sucked in to internet arguments, there's frankly nothing wrong with people going out of their way to correct other people and that kind of behavior is pretty fundamental to crowd conversations like HN. It's probably annoying that jacquesm's popular approval forced you to respond to him, but I (and others) enjoyed reading your comment; I think you'd be hard-pressed to show that you writing it was a net loss activity.
Thus at one point the poem asks whether Q halts without specifying an input to Q. This question is meaningless.
The correct proof is given by BrandonM in a thread somewhere on this page. Check it out. (scott_s restates the incorrect proof above BrandonM, for comparison.)
If your pay is just a percentage of a company's profits, the amount of equity you hold has no impact on this number. If you working 50% more hours generates 10% more profits (or whatever) for the company, you get 10% more pay for 50% more work, so the screwed factor is 5.
Again, this is assuming that the screwed factor is meaningful in the context of a startup, and it isn't. First of all, the different possible outcomes for an early employee of a small startup can mostly be boiled down to two, maybe three: the startup IPOs and you get rich, it gets sold and you get well-compensated, it fails and you get nothing. Treating your income as a very smooth function of the hours you work is misguided in this kind of scenario.
Second, contributing to a culture of working really hard on the startup (by working overtime) might be more important than the work you actually do in your overtime. Startup employees don't work in a vacuum.
So are you saying that that's not actually the case, that smart people aren't disproportionately unpopular? Interesting if true. Definitely needs some kind of justification, since it flies in the face of most people's intuition.
I'm not sure what the answer is, but I'm leaning more towards the position that intelligence is negatively correlated with popularity. Smart people aren't necessarily outcasts, but IMX you'll tend to see fewer of them at the top of the popularity curve and more at the bottom than you'd expect from a random distribution. And I imagine that there are a lot of reasons for why this is.
PG's argument in particular is closer to the truth than it seems at face value, I think. He says that smart people's problem is that they don't spend enough time on socializing; I'm not sure if this is really the prime cause of smart people's ostensible unpopularity, but it applies to my experience in middle and high school. My parents were rich enough to send me to good private schools that valued intellectualism (which probably more closely parallel schools outside the US) so I was never really unpopular, but I was definitely less popular than I wanted to be. In retrospect it's pretty clear that I could've been way more popular if I'd doubled or tripled the amount of time I spent on it; instead, I spent my free time programming and doing math.
The only place that I disagree is with PG's rationalization of why nerds don't socialize more. In my case, it wasn't that I wanted to build great things (although to some extent I did). I'm pretty sure it was just that solving math problems was a much more reliable and straightforward endorphin trigger than socializing.
Anyway, all this is to say that a) I disagree with you and b) you should be less pithy and more explanatory.
The only conclusion you can legitimately draw from this, I think, is that decriminalization doesn't result in all hell breaking loose in at least the short term. Which is great! But I'd like to see a more substantial (and, if possible, more neutral) study.
The problem is that investors don't get "consistently burned" by companies with bad practices, they get inconsistently burned. And people are so bad at appropriately estimating and valuing really rare events that, if the burns are infrequent enough, investors will choose options that don't maximize their expected outcome. Leading, in some cases, to disaster.
Note that this wouldn't happen in an ideal market where 1) everybody's perfectly rational and 2) everybody pursues strategies of maximizing their long-term expected finances. But it happens in real life. That's one of the major problems with the financial system as it stands, and (ostensibly) a powerful argument that regulation of some sort is a good idea.
But it pisses me off. (It pisses me off because, a priori, I don't think business should be done that way -- but the reason why is sort of beside the point.) And if I can help make even a tiny amount of trouble for Apple over it I'm definitely going to.
The end.
Using the phrase "poor people" instead of "poor black people" is equally effective -- more, actually, because "poor black people" makes you wonder why the hell it matters that they're black -- and has the virtue of not perpetuating (many) people's unconscious associations of "black" with "poor".
I haven't done research myself, but I've spent a fair amount of time around researchers in math and the basic sciences and my experience strongly suggests that the purpose of the Nobel etc, insofar as they have any, is not to advance the careers of the recipients (who don't need the help if they're deserving) or to drive the recipients to do better research (the consensus is that, if anything, earning a major prize dampens a researcher's potential, though of course that has selection bias written all over it); the purpose is really to give those researchers who've already reached the top of the playing field something to aspire to. (I used to think these prizes were net losses for science, but over time it's become clearer to me that the role they play is actually fairly important.)
All of this is to say: the actual distribution of prizes is more a necessary evil than anything, and delaying conferral to the end of a person's career minimizes the bad effects of a prize and maximizes the good ones.
The Poincare Conjecture postulates that if any loop on a "nice" surface can be shrunk to a point, it's topologically equivalent to a sphere. ("Nice" here means connected, finite, and without a boundary -- like a sphere or pyramid, but not a disk or infinite plane.) For instance, if the conjecture is true, a cube is topologically equivalent to a sphere, because if you draw a loop on it you can always shrink it down to a point; but a torus (donut) isn't, because a loop around a vertical cross-section can't be shrunk.
Perelman proved the conjecture for three-dimensional surfaces (which are the boundaries of four-dimensional objects).
Yes. But presumably when you earned that dollar you somehow contributed to making something that somebody wants. Now that thing is slightly more common, so it should be slightly easier to obtain than it was. Thus you've given a tiny little bit of value to everybody who participates in the same economy that you do. When millions of people do this we get modern civilization.
EDIT: Okay, I sort of see your point. My feeling is that if you consistently work long hours you definitionally put yourself outside of the "social mainstream," because I was thinking of "social mainstream" as "the set of people whose non-work lives are fairly similar to the median".
Whereas I think you're using a definition closer to "people who aren't 'weird'/'losers'". I don't think that's what the original commenter meant, but it's possible. And if that's what he meant, I think you could be right.
[/EDIT]
For the record, I don't (necessarily) agree that geeky people are more likely to do good computer work than non-geeky people. I just think that it's a valid point of discussion, and that in particular comparing the quoted comment to racism instead of addressing it is both incorrect and incredibly obnoxious.
Honestly, I fail to see how this sort of argument differs from asserting that black people are lazy or Latinos are stupid."
It's different because, as far as I know, it's not actually true that black people are lazy or that Latinos are stupid (on average). Whereas that comment as quoted is technically (more-or-less) correct.
Startup ideas are worthless in the sense that you're almost certainly not gonna be able to get anybody to pay you for one. If you want to prove that they're worthless in any other sense -- in particular, if you want to prove that you can't improve somebody's chances of succeeding in the startup world by giving them a good idea -- you have a lot of work to do. In fact, I bet you can't do it, because I don't think it's true.
Now, I have almost no experience in this area -- my conclusions are mostly a priori. But I don't think anybody else really does either, and in particular I don't think Paul has actually seen enough startups succeed or fail to judge the value of ideas. How many YC startups have "succeeded"? Depends on where you set the bar, but at this point in time the answer's somewhere between "not many" and "none".
And I'm kind of surprised that you're using this as an example of how idea doesn't matter; in my eyes, it's just the opposite. This succeeded because it was a great idea executed decently, not because it was a decent idea executed spectacularly.
It wasn't. It was an argument for believing that "in many cases it matters where the arguments that I hear come from."
Let me be clear: I don't like the fact that I think this policy is right. I just think it's right.
And let me also be clear that in many or most cases it makes sense to disregard the source of an argument. In most exchanges on HN, the people involved all implicitly agree on the data that's being argued from, and in those cases I tend to think that we don't ever need to think about people's biases.
But the fundamental belief underlying the "we can always disregard an argument's source" movement is that sufficiently logical and dispassionate people can validate or invalidate an argument very easily (compared to the work it took to formulate the argument in the first place). I really really would like this to be true. I just don't think it is, IN GENERAL.
To reiterate why: I think it's perfectly possible to follow a logical train of thought without actually re-deriving that train of thought -- and so I think that we can untangle argument and arguer when arguments are purely logical -- but if an argument is based on data from a complex system I don't think it's possible to determine if that data was chosen in an unbiased manner without actually looking at all the available data and essentially re-deriving the arguer's conclusion.
Combine that with two hopefully-obvious (and hopefully-true) premises: first, that a large data set on any sufficiently complex system contains individual data points that support any given belief about that system,
and second, that most really complex systems can't be considered completely logically, because there's so much going on, and must instead be approached by looking at data, and I think it follows that you need to think about the source of any argument about a complex system when you're deciding whether you (provisionally) believe it.
Incidentally, I find it genuinely ironic that your post is actually a not-particularly-sophisticated example of "I don't listen to people whose politics I disagree with," since you ignored my argument based on my dissenting conclusion.
So USUALLY what an unbiased observer will do is proceed with caution: see what the arguer's point is, see how it fits with the observer's intuition (because this is the same as appealing to the observer's subconscious, which in most cases has processed far more data relevant to some issue than has their conscious mind), and see whether the data seems overwhelming enough that its conclusion couldn't be the result of biased data selection on the part of the arguer. But this method often fails. Without formulating your own opinion by immersing yourself in data, you just can't be sure whether you're looking at a legitimate picture of an issue. That's why whenever I hear a convincing argument about something complex, I only provisionally believe whatever I've just been convinced of. And that's why an argument's author actually matters if the argument relates to a sufficiently complex system.
Now, arguments about simple (by which I really mean "completely specified") systems aren't victim to this weakness -- mathematical proof, for instance, can actually be really verified by an observer without the observer doing the same work that the discover did, as can many logical arguments in the hard sciences.
But what ESR is trying to show here is that some particular set of scientists committed scientific fraud. This is a) a value judgment and b) depends substantially on context.
So I think that it is not only reasonable but very much a good thing that ieure pointed out that ESR is a nutjob. Now I know that even if I find his post compelling, he has no intellectual honesty and the data he's showing me have been carefully selected from the unimaginably vast amounts of data in the world because they happen to support his worldview. Maybe he's still right -- but ieure's post is still very much relevant.
Now, being a top researcher takes more than just clarity of mind, so many people with enormous teaching abilities don't have the skill set to be an MIT professor, but I do think that MIT indirectly selects for good teaching.