avancil

Karma: 197

avancil 30 Jan 2026 4:04 UTC
2 points
0
on: To be well-calibrated is to be punctual
Another thing you need to calibrate on is context.

There are different cultural approaches to punctuality that can be divided into “Cold Climate” and “Warm Climate” categories, or roughly, being more oriented toward time and efficiency, or toward relationships and going with the flow. “Meet me at 10” might mean showing up at 10, or it might mean you start getting ready to go at 10, and if you meet a friend along the way, you might be later.

Even in our “Cold Climate” time-oriented culture, there are different definitions of “on time”.
- If the bus leaves at 3:05 and you get to the bus stop at 3:07, don’t be surprised if you missed the bus. (Depending how good the transit system is.)
- If the party starts at 7:00 and you show up at 6:58, your host might not be ready for you. In some groups, a timely arrival would be more like 9:00.
- Sometimes there is confusion about degree of precision. “Noon” could mean some time between ~11:30 and ~12:30, or it could mean 12:00:00 PM on the dot. If I wanted to meet someone for lunch, I wouldn’t suggest noon, I would say 12:05, implying at least a 5-minute precision interval.
If you are calibrated in your expected transit time, but not calibrated with the context, you might show up at the time you predicted, but still be early or late.

avancil 29 Nov 2025 3:41 UTC
10 points
3
on: Ruby’s Ultimate Guide to Thoughtful Gifts
One reason missing from your “couldn’t get it on their own” scenario: They couldn’t justify spending the extra money on the “fancy” version of something, or never would have thought to. If that something was relatively cheap, you can get the deluxe version without breaking the bank.

I had a crummy little basic stapler that would jam. Someone got me a fancy Swingline. They spent like, $12.99, and years later, every time I staple something (maybe only a few times a year, but still...) I feel gratitude. I could easily have bought a better stapler, but never thought to.

The nice pen. The fancy bit of super-tasty cheese. The actual Otterbox phone case. One decent kitchen knife. Go for quality on something small, rather than look for a bargain on the big stuff.

avancil 20 Nov 2025 22:45 UTC
2 points
1
on: 10 Wrong and Dumb Grammar Rules
I’ve always held that, since “fewer” refers to discrete quantities and “less” refers to continuous quantities, but the integers are a subset of the reals, using “less” when the grammar police would call for “fewer”, is less precise, but not wrong. Going the other way doesn’t work, though.

avancil 7 Nov 2025 18:36 UTC
4 points
1
in reply to: Metacelsus’s comment on: Halfway to Anywhere
Getting to Mars is a big jump compared with going to the moon, since you’re traveling 500-1000x farther on any efficient route, and have to do much more to keep the astronauts from getting irradiated, or hopelessly weakened by the lack of gravity. Getting to Pluto is 100x farther than that, so you would need to do some special things to, e.g., not have your astronauts die of old age on the trip.

This is all true, but these jumps in difficulty are nothing compared with the jump in difficulty of getting to the moon (or even LEO), versus getting between any two points on Earth.

avancil 27 Aug 2025 20:56 UTC
2 points
0
on: Would you sell your soul to save it? ( I am NOT a Christian)
This is an interesting piece, thought provoking, but the core premise is unconvincing. As you’ve presented things, maybe in this case, I have to accept that there is some super-powerful being that will do really bad things to me if I don’t kowtow, or do really good stuff for me if I do, but that’s not the same as truly accepting that this being is the fundamental reference for right and wrong, and that aligning with what this being says is ultimately good, and not aligning with it is evil. There’s a fundamental difference between believing, “According to God, [religiously proscribed thing] is wrong”, and, “[religiously proscribed thing] is wrong”. In your scenario, maybe I become convinced of the former, and either rebel, or avoid [religiously proscribed thing], or try find some way to appease God, while in the second case, I’ll either be genuinely trying to change, or at least feeling really guilty about being such a bad person.

There’s a big difference between being an Atheist in a quandary, versus being truly converted.

The scenario you’ve presented starts with the discovery that the universe is different than previously believed, but glosses over the steps for me to become convinced “with p(99%), that Christianity is and always has been true”. Maybe for someone at 4 or 5 on the Dawkins scale, just seeing some strong evidence supporting the existence of God nudges them to 1 or 2. But, for me (6), Atheism is not just a matter of lack of evidence, but the cumulative effect of experience and logic. There are versions of God that I could accept, but an arbitrary, anthropomorphized God is a much bigger leap. To get from A to B would involve such a fundamental rewiring of my thought processes, that I’m no longer really the same person I am now. If I got there somehow, I would not be rebelling.

avancil 20 Apr 2025 23:58 UTC
3 points
0
in reply to: Huera’s comment on: Scaffolding Skills
Most of your examples seem more like “prerequisites” or basic skills that you build on. But scaffolding is a thing you build up to get something else done, then get rid of afterwards. So, a scaffolding skill would be a skill that enables you to learn how to do something you actually want to learn, but once you have learned how to do that thing, you no longer need the scaffolding skill.

Algebraic notation can still be useful to a chess player. Knowing basics like how to properly cut things is integral to cooking. Debugging is an essential skill for programming. Etc.

A couple better examples of scaffolding skills:
- In calculus, learning to calculate a derivative using limits. Once you have the concept of derivatives down, you wouldn’t go through that exercise, you would use the the various formulas (or a math program) to actually calculate them.
- When trying to get a business group to adopt Agile methodology, using strict Agile Scrum, which gives a bunch of prescriptive processes, and demonstrate how to “do Agile”. But, teams that have internalized the Agile philosophy tend to ditch many of those processes (or at least strict adherence to them) as they move toward more efficient approaches, tailored to their situation.

avancil 20 Mar 2025 22:21 UTC
1 point
0
on: Algebraic Linguistics
There are conventions pertaining to the style a letter is written in. You might have a as an arbitrary element in set A, while a<sub>1</sub>, a<sub>2</sub>, etc., are a sequence of elements in A, while fancy-boldface A or fancy-script A (I don’t know how to render those here) could represent the class of A-like sets. Also, a′ would be another case of a, or maybe the derivative of a, while a″ would be a third case, or maybe the second derivative. Sometimes superscripts or backscripts are used, when subscripts are not enough. Sometimes the Greek equivalent of a Latin letter denotes some relationship between them, e.g. ⍺ is some special version of a.

If the math goes way off into the weeds, the author might even whip out a Hebrew letter or two.

avancil 5 Jan 2025 19:05 UTC
26 points
15
on: Maximizing Communication, not Traffic
There is a related problem where many browser-based productivity tools follow design principles from websites that are trying to get clicks. For example, I commonly run into DB interfaces at work that will return, say, 10 (or 25, or other small number) results per page. Now, it’s good design to not let a query that returns, say, a million results, crash the browser. But, if a few hundred, or even a few thousand, results will display within milliseconds, why make me page dozens (or hundreds) of times? (I’m looking at you, GitHub commit history!)

Another example would be Microsoft Office’s long history of making design choices that optimize increasing “engagement with the tool” rather than making the tool unobtrusively facilitate the task. They got rid of Clippy, but now they’re into obnoxious pop-ups that are designed to call attention to some new gadget or feature.

The “click” economy has had pervasive effects on the software industry.

avancil 18 Dec 2024 0:00 UTC
2 points
−3
in reply to: Said Achmiz’s comment on: Trying to translate when people talk past each other
It seems to me this is an example of you and Kaj talking past each other. To you, B’s perspective is “eminently reasonable” and needs no further explanation. To Kaj, B’s perspective was a bit unusual, and to fully inhabit that perspective, Kaj wanted a bit more context to understand why B was holding that principle higher than other things (enjoying the social collaboration, the satisfaction of optimally solving a problem, etc.).

avancil 8 Nov 2024 3:15 UTC
13 points
3
in reply to: Ninety-Three’s comment on: Should CA, TX, OK, and LA merge into a giant swing state, just for elections?
Except there’s more at play than just winning the election. If you’re a voter in a swing state, the candidates are paying more attention to you, and making more promises catering to you. The parties are picking candidates they think will appeal to you. Even if your odds of winning stay the same, the prize for winning gets bigger.

It was exiting a few elections ago when Colorado was in play by both parties. We even got to host the Democratic convention in Denver. Now, they just ignore us.

avancil 17 Jul 2024 21:41 UTC
5 points
1
on: What are you getting paid in?
One thing you touched on, but didn’t delve into, is that the various “pay” components will having varying marginal utility at different levels.

For example, if you’re literally starving, “coolness” won’t matter much, you need enough money to buy food! But if you have enough money, you start caring about other things.

Perhaps having some social interaction is important, and you would sacrifice other things to have at least some of that in your job. But, beyond a certain point, the value diminishes, and would likely go negative, as the constant socializing gets tiring, and distracts from work you actually would like to do.

I think a good manager would be good at optimizing against those utility curves. They would pay people enough, but not more, than they need to not be upset about low pay. They would recognize that one team party per quarter might be valuable to the team, but parties every week would not be appreciated. They would give people opportunities to socialize, but also, to avoid getting dragged into socializing when they would really rather be focused on the job. And so on.

avancil 12 Jul 2024 21:28 UTC
1 point
0
on: Whiteboard Pen Magazines are Useful
The OCD in me objects to the colors not being in chromatic order. On the other hand, if you wanted to maximize visual contrast between adjacent colors, then a sensible order would be black, red, green, purple, orange, blue.

avancil 7 May 2024 2:14 UTC
20 points
11
on: Observations on Teaching for Four Weeks
As a former teacher, I firmly believe that if we want to reform schools, we must reform the teaching profession and school management structures. At least, we should address the things that are most insane:
- A school district is a big operation, with many having thousands of employees, and budgets running into the hundreds of millions of dollars. And it is usually run by literal amateurs. As in, the school board is a group of unpaid volunteers.
- As tough as it is to be a teacher, consider what it’s like to be a principal: You get the most odious parts of being a teacher (dealing with discipline, contentious meetings with parents), with a longer workday, shorter (if any) summer vacation, much greater responsibility, much greater public exposure (and corresponding chance of getting fired for some perceived failure), but not really that much more pay. It’s hardly surprising that it’s hard to find good people to take that job. So, as a teacher, you can’t count on competent support from management. But, you really need it.
- The teaching profession takes a lot of skills. Yet, the job description for a first year teacher, and the job description for a 30th year teacher are identical. Imagine hiring an engineer fresh out of college and asking them to do what a senior architect does.
- But, from a practical standpoint, the job of the inexperienced teacher is often much more challenging. The experienced teacher gets to pick the honors classes, the electives, etc., to teach. The inexperienced teacher gets stuck with the remedial classes. It’s not uncommon for a new teacher to get hired to teach class sections that were added at the last minute—and those sections will be full of students who got put into those sections at the last minute, because they didn’t have their act together, didn’t pass, didn’t register, etc.
- As you discovered, an inexperienced teacher will find it a lot of work to deal with even one or two classes. Where I work now, if someone was asked to conduct a training session, they might spend a couple days prepping. We ask teachers to do 5, 6 even 7 of those per day, only not with well-mannered professional adults, but kids whose brains are not fully developed. And then grade homework, call parents, be hall monitors, function as social workers, etc.
I could go on.

There are many problems one could bring with various approaches to teaching. There are many challenges that teachers would face even in the best of systems. But fundamentally, there are some serious structural issues with the design of the system.

avancil 23 Mar 2024 0:10 UTC
0 points
−1
on: [Linkpost] Vague Verbiage in Forecasting
Ironic that “Maybe” seems to have one of the narrower ranges of probabilities...

avancil 7 Mar 2024 21:53 UTC
36 points
35
in reply to: Ben Pace’s comment on: Using axis lines for good or evil
The cell borders example is misleading. The readability issue is not the cell borders themselves, the issue is that the borders are heavier weight than the text, and there’s no difference between the borders separating the row and column headers, and the borders separating the data rows and columns.

If your only choices for gridlines are “off” and “obnoxious”, “off” seems like a good choice. And for small tables, no borders works well. But for larger tables, finer lines (maybe in a lighter color or shade) can really improve the readability.

avancil 25 Feb 2024 7:53 UTC
5 points
0
on: Balancing Games
In multiplayer games, one balancing factor is that other players can gang up on the person who is ahead. Depending on the game dynamic, this can even things out a lot. In some games, this even creates the dynamic where you don’t want to look too strong, so that others don’t focus their attention on you.

Playing games against my kids when they were young, rather than just slack off and let them win, it was more fun for me to figure out the best way to handicap myself: What algorithm for sub-optimal play would keep the game close? Solving that puzzle effectively became my victory condition, rather than the game’s victory condition, and I was effectively competing against myself, a more balanced opponent.

avancil 24 Feb 2024 20:40 UTC
7 points
2
in reply to: jasoncrawford’s comment on: Why you, personally, should want a larger human population
The question of what IS happening versus what SHOULD happen with population growth are certainly two different things. My point is that arguments for growth ultimately need to address the questions of how big should we grow, and what happens when we reach that point. If our economy depends on continued growth, that’s going to stop working at some point.

While the physical limits of the universe are a long ways off, there are other limits that we could hit much sooner. Underlying your pro-growth arguments, there is an assumption that collective intelligence can continue to grow without limits, leading to technology that can grow without limits. I would question those assumptions.

And of course, your post is ignoring the costs of growth. Ideas are non-rival goods, but space on this planet, and physical resources, are rival goods. If intelligence (and the resulting technology) reaches a point of diminishing returns, but the costs of growth hit an upward inflection, you quickly hit a limit. For example, larger, more complex systems risk becoming less stable, while coordination problems can grow factorially.

Reasonable people can disagree on whether the current population is too big, too small, or about right, but “ever larger” is not going to work as an answer. At some point, we need to either figure out how to have a stable population, or deal with the less pleasant alternatives.

avancil 23 Feb 2024 22:56 UTC
15 points
17
on: Why you, personally, should want a larger human population
The fundamental problem with these anti-Malthusian arguments is they ignore the fundamental reality that exponential growth is unsustainable. There are physical limits to the universe, whether you believe the earth can support 10 billion or 100 trillion, or if we can expand through the universe and achieve a billion billion times more than that, it won’t take that long, with exponential growth, to get there. At a certain point, the entire mass of the universe has been converted to human flesh. Some point before that, we either stabilize, or collapse.

Maybe we get past the obvious physical limits by ditching human bodies and uploading to the matrix. But, that only gives us a few more orders of magnitude.

And note that sub-exponential growth is mathematically equivalent to saying that the growth rate approaches zero.

So, it becomes a question of what the ideal max population level should be. The answer will clearly change based on available technology, but is not unlimited.

avancil 12 Jan 2024 5:49 UTC
1 point
−2
on: Introduce a Speed Maximum
Where I live, I don’t see many people going 15 over. I see most people going within −3 to +9 of the speed limit. They’re following the law—maybe not strictly as written, but as socially understood. There are a few people breaking the law—and they get ticketed, etc. There are places where the speed limit is unreasonably low, and gets ignored (e.g. speed limit drops from 75 to 55 for construction zone, but no construction activity is visible), but in general, people around here follow the speed limit—as socially understood.

The social definition is that +9 is OK, and it is logically based. Speed limits are only given to the nearest 5 MPH, so arguably (not legally arguably, but in people’s heads) going 4 MPH over is not really speeding. Then, you need some kind of reasonable cushion. It defies common sense (but not the law) that a certain speed is perfectly legal in a variety of reasonable conditions, but 1 MPH faster than that is a crime. So, you have to have reasonable padding, say one 5 MPH increment. Thus, if you’re going within 9 MPH of the speed limit, you’re not speeding, just bending the speed limit, pushing into that safety margin.

Bumping a speed limit from the current value of 55 (+ social tolerance) to 65 (no tolerance) would not work. It would quickly become 65 (+ social tolerance), because you have not addressed the arbitrary nature of the speed limit. With strict enforcement, you could reduce the social tolerance value (I believe it was smaller before the 1970s national speed limit of 55 fostered widespread disrespect for speed limits), but it would difficult to eliminate it.

avancil 12 Dec 2023 5:56 UTC
3 points
2
in reply to: faul_sname’s comment on: Deeply Cover Car Crashes?
Yes, when it comes to ordinary driving situations, there’s only so good you can get, if you can get from A to B without trouble, without annoying and/or scaring your passengers or other people on the road, it’s hard to do noticeably better. It’s hard to get too much above the median; the 80th percentile driver won’t seem that different from the 50th percentile driver. But, you can be really bad and drag the average down. Thus, the average is below the median, ergo most people (most drivers, anyway) are above average drivers. (Even assuming we are using some identical, objective scale, which, as jefftk points out, is not going to be the case.)