Barry_Cotter

Karma: 1,132

Barry_Cotter 19 Apr 2010 16:48 UTC
11 points
on: Attention Lurkers: Please say hi
Hi. Came here via Overcoming Bias. I’ve been reading for a long time but I haven’t made the effort to go through the sequences. (On that note, is the essence of the “Mysterious Answers to Mysterious Questions” sequence that if you don’t have a better predictive model at the finish than at the start, the answer is meaningless?)

I’m almost certainly moving to Germany to do an Economics Masters shortly but I’m interested in learning to programme because it seems like a productive skill in a way that Economics mostly isn’t (Econometrics and to a lesser extent Microeconomics excepted).

So. I think that it would be possible to combine my studies with programming and Machine Learning and Statitics in a not-totally-insane way. Any tips on that would be great, as would the opportunity to talk, chat or otherwise communicate with someone in Germany, native or expat.

Barry_Cotter 23 Apr 2010 17:37 UTC
7 points
in reply to: mstevens’s comment on: Attention Lurkers: Please say hi
1. Many of them are pretty new, or at least have only recently been cleanly reformulated.
2. Many people’s actual and professed goals are disjoint, and most of these people are deluded, not hypocrites.
3. The individual techniques each only give relatively small advantages, on average, and given the vastly greater number of people who’ve never heard of these techniques they’ll dominate success.
4. Inertia is high and people generally don’t change their behaviour except in response to personal experience. Until they see personally someone using these techniques and talking about them they will not be used.
--

Related to the companies question; some are, but they’re either new or small. Changing a companies internal culture or working processes is wrenchingly hard to really do, and requires real enduring commitment. Robin Hanson gets some consulting work out of prediction markets, Google is possibly the most data driven company in the world for making decisions, but mostly the answer is;

This stuff is new and hard, people mostly don’t want to rock the boat or look stupid, and the overwhelming majority of people work in companies that work pretty well as they are.

Barry_Cotter 9 Jul 2010 11:19 UTC
9 points
on: Open Thread: July 2010, Part 2
What’s the deal with programming, as a careeer? It seems like the lower levels at least should be readily accessible even to people of thoroughly average intelligence but I’ve read a lot that leads me to believe the average professional programmer is borderline incompetent.

E.g., Fizzbuzz. Apparently most people who come into an interview won’t be able to do it. Now, I can’t code or anything but computers do only and exactly what you tell them (assuming you’re not dealing with a thicket of code so dense it has emergent properties) but here’s what I’d tell the computer to do

# Proceed from 0 to x, in increments of 1, (where x =whatever) If divisible by 3, remainder 0, associate fizz with number If divisible by 5, remainder 0, associate buzz with number, Make ordered list from o to x, of numbers associated with fizz OR buzz For numbers associated with fizz NOT buzz, append fizz For numbers associated with buzz NOT fizz, append fizz For numbers associated with fizz AND buzz, append fizzbuzz #

I ask out of interest in acquiring money, on elance, rentacoder, odesk etc. I’m starting from a position of total ignorance but y’know it doesn’t seem like learning C, and understanding Conrete Mathematics and TAOCP in a useful or even deep way would be the work of more than a year, while it would place one well above average in some domains of this activiteity.

Or have I missed something really obvious and important?

Barry_Cotter 9 Jul 2010 11:33 UTC
0 points
in reply to: sroecker’s comment on: Attention Lurkers: Please say hi
Yeah, after my total lack of success in my exams study is no longer really an option, but I was considering Berufsakademie in WI. My German probably isn’t good enough to get an Ausbildungsplatz though, and it’s really badly paid. I’m leaning to teaching English at the moment and hoping to move into translation later.

Barry_Cotter 30 Jul 2010 12:20 UTC
1 point
in reply to: RHollerith’s comment on: Forager Anthropology
Nobody can downvote on Hacker News. The only vaguely analogous function is “flag” which leads to posts (not comments) being killed or marked for killing.

(Edit:rhollerithdotcom points out correctly that this is only true for submissions and that above a karma threshold comments are downvotable)

Useful essay on online communities http://www.kuro5hin.org/story/2009/3/12/33338/3000

Barry_Cotter 7 Aug 2010 10:19 UTC
0 points
in reply to: NihilCredo’s comment on: Interested in a European lesswrong meetup
Dublin wasn’t much cheaper than London when I left it, and that was less than six months ago. I know the economy’s cratering but I don’t think the economy’s adjusting that fast.

Barry_Cotter 7 Aug 2010 10:22 UTC
0 points
in reply to: [deleted]’s comment on: Interested in a European lesswrong meetup
I might be. I’m in Heidelberg, Germany. Calling all in S(W) Germany!

Barry_Cotter 21 Sep 2010 15:12 UTC
0 points
in reply to: MartinB’s comment on: Open Thread, September, 2010-- part 2
I can’t programme but I should learn. I amn’t sure but I think my progression was soc.history.what-if to Randy McDonald’s blog to gnxp to Mencius Moldbug to him linki´ng to “Beware of Steven Jay Gould” when Eliezer was on OB. Insofar as anyone who isn’t a programmer can fit the cognitive profile I probably do.

Barry_Cotter 21 Sep 2010 15:33 UTC
3 points
in reply to: Richard_Kennaway’s comment on: Religion’s Claim to be Non-Disprovable
Is there a sequential dump of the entirety of the sequences as one file anywhere? Text or HTML preferably.

Barry_Cotter 28 Sep 2010 16:11 UTC
13 points
in reply to: Alicorn’s comment on: Luminosity (Twilight fanfic) discussion thread
Rubidium and Cesium in water

Very serious explodey

Barry_Cotter 7 Oct 2010 9:25 UTC
9 points
on: I need to understand more about...
The comment is invisible because you haven’t adjusted your settings to have comments with a score below −2 visible to you. When I clicked on your overview (your name) it was there, and when I ctrl-f-ed your name it was there with −7 and “comment score below threshhold, no children”

Barry_Cotter 10 Oct 2010 10:22 UTC
1 point
on: Request: Interesting Invertible Facts
If you want to remember something for the long haul you should study it in many differing places times and environments. This goes pretty strongly against the normal advice on the quiet room.

Barry_Cotter 22 Oct 2010 11:49 UTC
3 points
on: How do autistic people learn how to read people’s emotions?
Asperger’s diagnosis here.

My advice to someone in my 17 year old self’s position would be to get a stack of social psychology books and read them, along with succeedsocially.com and a few ettiquette books that explain the why as well as the what. Then find a venue in which to practice those skills, whether it be work (bar or restaurant work at best because of the continuous exposure to people) play (an interest group, like a club or society). If you choose play it must actually be fun because otherwise you will not go after a while. Something like comedy or acting would be great as would dancing or martial arts. I suspect the PUA community would be excellent training for men who already have training wheels but I have no personal experience with it, I just found the books helpful in providing me with better mental models of people.

My personal experience.

Alcohol fueled disinhibition leading to expanding the range of behaviours I was willing to try, and non-deliberate practice by doing more of the things that seemed to work and less of the things that didn’t. This was one of the major things.

Other important ones;

Discovery Channel programmes on flirting gave me a base on which to build with interacting with the opposite sex in a more natural or at least more fluid and comfortable (for all concerned) way.

Working and going to university also made a huge difference. I was more reserved than was helpful before. Dealing with extroverts and non-intellectuals all day at work was really helpful un rubbing off some rough edges and university was great for dealing with a group with common interests and varied levels of social skills. You could see what worked and given that it was an SF society there was a large spread, and some of the people there had made large strides very quickly, some of whom I became good friends with and who were fonts of good advice.

Barry_Cotter 27 Oct 2010 2:17 UTC
0 points
in reply to: [deleted]’s comment on: Activation Costs
That was really interesting to read, thanks. It sounds like you are or at least were at one point on the way to becoming a (semi)competent sysadmin. Any advice on how one does that for those who think it’d be nice to have a marketable skill that can be learned to employable levels in 3-6 months?

Barry_Cotter 27 Oct 2010 3:00 UTC
0 points
in reply to: gwern’s comment on: Activation Costs
Great Ghu. Okay, I believe. Does the answer change if employable is taken to mean worth hiring to do some low level work under supervision of someone who is genuinely competent?

That makes me hesitant to combine learning linux through Ubuntu and Python. Is that a reasonable hesitancy?

Barry_Cotter 27 Oct 2010 13:51 UTC
2 points
in reply to: Craig_Heldreth’s comment on: Human performance, psychometry, and baseball statistics
I just want to say thanks for writing this. The replacement-level player in particular made it immediately obvious once I examined my prejudice that the average drop in quality as you go down a tier in graduates of highly ranked graduate programmes will be very, very low, almost swamped by noise.

If something apart from the Cambridge Handbook of Expert Performance was particularly helpful for figuring out when people peaked or if peaking time was a function of invested time or of age I’d be very interested.

New Month’s Resolutions

Barry_Cotter2 Nov 2010 16:15 UTC

8 points

5 comments1 min readLW link

Barry_Cotter 12 Jan 2011 22:10 UTC
2 points
in reply to: TheOtherDave’s comment on: Branches of rationality
Could you post your checklist, or if it is domain specific, something that is more general but based on it?

Barry_Cotter 12 Jan 2011 23:16 UTC
8 points
in reply to: Broggly’s comment on: Bayesians vs. Barbarians
This will only work against enemies who are unwilling to make atrocities part of their official pacification doctrine. It took killing ~30% of (male?) Afghans to convert them to Islam.

On a slightly less odious level, collective punishment and population dispersal/resettlement work pretty well.

Barry_Cotter 19 Jan 2011 11:24 UTC
0 points
in reply to: JenniferRM’s comment on: Meditations on first philosophy
IIRC Foucault’s method was as follows

Four reams of paper, each 15 pages, lined. You take your notes, basically summary, implications and connections with other previously encountered knowledge. Every time you finish a ream you reread it and your next ream begins by summarising, and connecting the previous ream. Repeat ad infinitum, and once you get up to 75 pages, the last 15 are dead to you.