The 80⁄20 rule is especially true for cleaning. Better to get it 80% clean twice as often than 99% clean half as often.
buybuydandavis
Karma: 8,810
best track record of any top pundit in the US
The study linked to meant next to nothing in my eyes. It studied political predictions in an election year by political hacks on tv. 2007-2008. Guess what? IN an election cycle that liberals beat conservatives, the liberal predictions more often came true than conservative predictions.
Reminds me of the reported models of mortgage securities, created using data from boom times only.
Krugman was competing with a bunch of other political hacks and columnists. I doubt that accuracy is the highest motivation for any of them. The political hacks want to curry support, and the columnists want to be invited on tv and have their articles read. I’d put at least 3 motivations above accuracy for that crowd: manipulate attitudes, throw red meat to their natural markets, and entertain. It’s Dark Arts, all the way, all the time.
I’d say you’re doing this the wrong way. You’re trying to do a mountain of inference on a mole hill of data. Take more data. This has been of my issues in life, and I’ve found life gets easier when I just ask. There is the concept of managing up—having to manage your manager, doing what you can to make sure your manager gets what they need from you, even if they don’t know how to arrange that themselves. If they’re incompetent, their incompetence is your problem.
First, you want to be adequately trained. Too many people focus on getting a list of what to do, instead of a list of the figures of merit. What are we trying to accomplish? What are our goals? What does a good job look like? What does a bad job look like? Stephen Covey distinguishes this as the difference between gopher delegation and stewardship delegation.
Second, instead of worrying about icebergs, ask for feedback, good and bad. People refrain from criticism often because they are uncomfortable giving it, and expect you to be uncomfortable getting it. They only bring it up when their annoyance with your failure overcomes their reticence about criticizing you. That’s not going to be a fun talk. Preempt that, and make clear that you want to do a good job, and want feedback to improve. That way they can bring up issues before their annoyance has mounted. When they’ve done that once or twice and it’s not a horrible experience, it gets easier for them to give you feedback in the future.
I’m more and more struck by how different people have different things going on in their heads.
Sounds to me like the guy struck a group, and thereby self, depreciating tone that would be non threatening to an outsider; that you’d have to be dragged to the meeting if you weren’t a regular reader lowers the status of the meeting members relative to outsiders, and is thereby respectful and inviting to an outsider.
That’s how I would take it if someone asked me that. I would take it as a comment to gain information about me in a way that was meant to reassure me if I were an outsider. It is a relevant question at the meeting, after all—do you or don’t you read the list? Just getting some context.
Now I wasn’t there, and I suppose one could say that in a particularly aggressive and hostile way, but given the guy’s passive response to the aggressive attack he received in turn, I don’t think he had started the conversation in an aggressive frame of mind.
But even if you thought the comments could be taken as hostile, I thought the attack on the guy was unwarranted, and was a very socially inept response. If the guy committed a faux pas with an outsider, the goal should have been to deescalate the situation in a gracious way, leaving the outsider feeling more comfortable. Instead, the conflict was escalated by aggressively white knighting, leaving the “rescued damsel” a front row witness to a wholly unnecessary conflict about her. Talk about your weird and creepy groups. I guess the guy wasn’t joking about people needing to be dragged to these meetings.
Even if she found the first question off putting, would being “rescued” me more or less annoying? Maybe she thinks she’s a big girl, and doesn’t need protection from such an “attack”. But whatever the answer to those questions, I think the escalation made matters worse in the vast majority of scenarios, and usually much worse.
It seemed like a basic failure to think about the consequences of his words.
Pot. Kettle. Black.
I thought the alternative questions were worse as well. Questions with a presupposition that the person is a reader puts them on the spot to contradict the assumption and fess up that they’re not. Better to ask whether the person was a reader or had been dragged there. The most open ended way to ask would have been the cliched “come here often”?
The easiest way to avoid offense is to say nothing at all. I don’t see it as an advance to paint the less usual demographics as mine fields to be navigated. I’ve got other things to do than navigate mine fields. I try to start with a presumption of basic good will, and behave accordingly. When others share that presumption, life is easy between us. I’m not going to spend my life tip toeing around people who don’t need it for the sake of people who do.
saving fetuses generates QALYs
Not merely saving them, but creating them and bringing them to term. Every unoccupied womb is an idle QALY factory going to waste.
LW has a cult-like social structure. …
Where the evidence for this is:
Appealing to people based on shared interests and values. Sharing specialized knowledge and associated jargon. Exhibiting a preference for like minded people. More likely to appeal to people actively looking to expand their social circle.
Seems a rather gigantic net to cast for “cults”.
Technical person meets a bureaucracy. Good clean fun, like the Mr. Bill show. I wish I had been there when Thomas Sowell interned for the Department of Labor.
The only things about your story that surprised me was that you weren’t shit canned within a month, and that an actual company exists that would hire you. You, and by extension them, rocked the boat and survived. That’s not what anyone is paying you for. You’re there to validate that they’re doing the right thing. I don’t know how you and your company have survived this long, but I’d like to thank you all for saving some students from the regularly scheduled destruction of their lives.
As for your conversations with the bureaucracy, do you really think their confusion was in not understanding your point? I’d guess that any confusion they had was in how you had a job there at all, while you were busy saying things that shouldn’t be said. I think you were the one not “getting it”.
Every so often someone says something that opens a new world to me. I’ll pass on the new world to you.
The purpose of a bureaucracy is to further the interests of the bureaucracy, whatever goals they give lip service to. But even theoretically, you don’t have the lip service goal right. That goal is not to help students. It’s to remake society so that it looks right, primarily as measured by equality of outcomes for groups. Helping a white child is helping the white group, thereby making group inequality worse.
If you think in racial groups, everything makes sense. Blacks are more likely to have poor achievement, therefore you help blacks, regardless of achievement. But also, if you judge them by group, then you conclude they aren’t ready for the advanced math classes either.
Why not use test scores? Because test scores are objective measurements. Can’t allow those into the school system. Then the bureaucracy’s performance can be judged, as you demonstrate. Can’t have that.
And of course the proposal’s execution is the goal of the proposal. Well, it’s really the grant itself which is the goal, but they couldn’t write “receive check” as the goal, so they write what they plan to do, something entirely in their power. If they wrote that the goal was the delivery of some objective measurement, someone crazy person might measure it and determine that they had failed. Can’t have that. Who in the system would possibly want that? Only people like you who just don’t “get it”.
An anecdote from corporate bureaucracy. I was in a meeting with two managers, where they were describing back and forth what some other woman did. Except their story was completely false. And we all knew it was false. Having the foolishness of youth, if not the years and health, I came out and said “But she didn’t really do that, right?” Silence. For a moment. Then the subject was changed and they moved on. People in bureaucracies spend much of the day telling each other social truths that are epistemically false. I don’t say lying, because as George Constanza would say, it’s not a lie, if you believe it. Their standard of truth is the socially useful. They forgot they had let a fool into the room whose standard was epistemic truth. That buffoon just doesn’t get it. We won’t invite him to more of these meetings.
EY doesn’t seem so fond of Rand, and it’s like he’s building her up as the great bugaboo of the story. That whole talk with Hermione was one of those “Gault Recruits a Striker” speeches.
If you live in a world where you are punished for what was called Good:
And yet it was as if they tried to do everything they could to make his life unpleasant. To throw every possible obstacle into his way. I was not naive, Miss Granger, I did not expect the power-holders to align themselves with me so quickly—not without something in it for themselves. But their power, too, was threatened; and so I was shocked how they seemed content to step back, and leave to that man all burdens of responsibility. They sneered at his performance, remarking among themselves how they would do better in his place, though they did not condescend to step forward.”
And rewarded for what was called Evil:
“And it was the strangest thing—the Dark Wizard, that man’s dread nemesis—why, those who served him leapt eagerly to their tasks. The Dark Wizard grew crueler toward his followers, and they followed him all the more. Men fought for the chance to serve him, even as those whose lives depended on that other man made free to render his life difficult… I could not understand it, Miss Granger.”
What should you do?
Voldemort Shrugged:
“Why, no,” said Professor Quirrell. “I stopped trying to be a hero, and went off to do something else I found more pleasant.”
At that point, it’s hard to complain. But I’m seeing Rand paired with Lord Foul. Consider Harry, Dumbledore, and Quirrell.
Harry: Harry’s eyes were very serious. “Hermione, you’ve told me a lot of times that I look down too much on other people. But if I expected too much of them—if I expected people to get things right—I really would hate them, then.
“No...” said Professor Quirrell. “That was not why I came here. You have made no effort to hide your dislike for me, Miss Granger. I thank you for that lack of pretense, for I much prefer true hate to false love.
Dumbledore: There is evil in this world which knows itself for evil, and hates the good with all its strength. All fair things does it desire to destroy.”
The Moral of the Story seems to be Harry finding an answer to the weakness, stupidity, and evil of others besides hating them and destroying them.
You get a lot of interesting passages just by searching for Hate.
The Killing Cure is formed of Pure Hate
And it’s not that I hate this Ron guy,” Harry said, “I just, just...” Harry searched for words. “Don’t see any reason for him to exist?” offered Draco. “Pretty much.”
“Sometimes,” Professor Quirrell said in a voice so quiet it almost wasn’t there, “when this flawed world seems unusually hateful, I wonder whether there might be some other place, far away, where I should have been.
Right now this flawed world seemed unusually hateful. And Harry couldn’t understand Professor Quirrell’s words, it might have been an alien that had spoken, or an Artificial Intelligence, something built along such different lines from Harry that his brain couldn’t be forced to operate in that mode. You couldn’t leave your home planet while it still contained a place like Azkaban. You had to stay and fight.
There’s no light in the place the Dementor takes you, Hermione. No warmth. No caring. It’s somewhere that you can’t even understand happiness. There’s pain, and fear, and those can still drive you. You can hate, and take pleasure in destroying what you hate.
But then something in the world changed, and now you can’t find any great scientists who still think skin color should matter, only loser people like the ones I described to you. Salazar Slytherin made the mistake when everyone else was making it, because he grew up believing it, not because he was desperate for someone to hate.
“I guess I was stupid too,” Draco said. “All this time, all this time I forgot that you must hate the Death Eaters for killing your parents, hate Death Eaters the way I hate Dumbledore.”
“No,” Harry said. “It’s not—it’s not like that, Draco, I, I don’t even know how to explain to you, except to say that a thought like that, wouldn’t,” Harry’s voice choked, “you wouldn’t ever be able to use it, to cast the Patronus Charm...”
Harry remembered it from the night the Dark Lord killed his parents: the cold amusement, the contemptuous laughter, that high-pitched voice of deathly hate.
Fury blazed in Harry then, blazed up like fire, it might have come from where a phoenix now rested on his own shoulder, and it might have come from his own dark side, and the two angers mixed within him, the cold and the hot, and it was a strange voice that said from his throat, “Tell me something. What does a government have to do, what do the voters have to do with their democracy, what do the people of a country have to do, before I ought to decide that I’m not on their side any more?”
The old wizard’s voice was pleading. “And it is possible to oppose the will of your fellows openly or in secret, without hating them, without declaring them evil and enemy! I do not think the people of this country deserve that of you, Harry! And even if some of them did—what of the children, what of the students in Hogwarts, what of the many good people mixed in with the bad?”
“Don’t go!” The voice came in a scream from behind the metal door. “No, no, no, don’t go, don’t take it away, don’t don’t don’t—” Why had Fawkes ever rested on his shoulder? He’d walked away. Fawkes should hate him. Fawkes should hate Dumbledore. He’d walked away. Fawkes should hate everyone—
rage grew in him alongside the self-loathing, a terrible hot wrath / icy cold hatred, for the world which had done that to her / for himself, and in his half-awake state Harry fantasized escapes, fantasized ways out of the moral dilemma,
You have everything now that I wanted then. All that I know of human nature says that I should hate you. And yet I do not. It is a very strange thing.
A couple more that I recalled showing the difference between Harry answer and Quirrells. See the last in particular.
There was a pause at this. Then the boy said, “Professor, I have to ask, when you see something all dark and gloomy, doesn’t it ever occur to you to try and improve it somehow? Like, yes, something goes terribly wrong in people’s heads that makes them think it’s great to torture criminals, but that doesn’t mean they’re truly evil inside; and maybe if you taught them the right things, showed them what they were doing wrong, you could change—” Professor Quirrell laughed, then, and not with the emptiness of before. “Ah, Mr. Potter, sometimes I do forget how very young you are. Sooner you could change the color of the sky.” Another chuckle, this one colder. “And the reason it is easy for you to forgive such fools and think well of them, Mr. Potter, is that you yourself have not been sorely hurt. You will think less fondly of commonplace idiots after the first time their folly costs you something dear.
“I’m certainly becoming a bit frustrated with… whatever’s going wrong in people’s heads.” “Yes,” said that icy voice. “I find it frustrating as well.” “Is there any way to get people not to do that?” said Harry to his teacup. “There is indeed a certain useful spell which solves the problem.” Harry looked up hopefully at that, and saw a cold, cold smile on the Defense Professor’s face. Then Harry got it. “I mean, besides Avada Kedavra.” The Defense Professor laughed. Harry didn’t.
No, I think we’ll be seeing much more of intelligent!McGonagall starting now...
Yeah, I don’t get the complaints about “meekness” in Minerva. She showed more strength than she ever has. Some people see admission of mistakes as submission; I see it as having the strength to accept the truth, regardless of status considerations from ninnies who don’t.
The author apparently has the privilege of living in a bubble where everyone she knows fundamentally approves of all her opinions, but occasionally has one person out of 20 show up at a gathering who disagrees, and just may throw a fit if that person dare voice their opinions.
Me—atheist, egoist, libertarian—I’m lucky if one person out of 20 won’t think I’m the devil if I’m open about my opinions. I weep for the discomfort she feels when my existence impinges on her awareness.
I note that a Christian or Muslim describing how they are hurt by those who dare openly(!) question their sacred values wouldn’t receive such polite consideration, and certainly not by this blogger.
I don’t know if our love has any magical power under your rules, but if it does, don’t hesitate to call on it.
Foreshadowing alert, particularly given canon.
The old witch’s eyebrows rose. “How did he identify you to the Hogwarts wards, then?”
A slight smile. “ “The Headmaster drew a circle, and told Hogwarts that he who stood within was the Defense Professor. Speaking of which—”Quirrell is Baba Yaga, a “she”, and some “he” also in that circle is the Defense Professor. EDIT: The Troll is the Defense Professor.
Past Professors of Defense have included not just the legendary wandering hero Harold Shea but also the quote undying unquote Baba Yaga, yes, I see some of you are still shuddering at the sound of her name even though she’s been dead for six hundred years.
″ quote undying unquote Baba Yaga”
Quote hint unquote.
“Here of course we have the Sorting Hat, I believe the two of you have met. It told me that it was never again to be placed on your head under any circumstances. You’re only the fourteenth student in history it’s said that about, Baba Yaga was another one
Gee, Baba Yaga’s mind had the same effect on the Hat as Harry’s. Do we hypothesize his brain being like anyone else’s brain?
And I daresay that most wizards would be hard-pressed to name a single Dark Lady besides Baba Yaga.”
Yes, they’d be hard pressed to name a single Dark Lady besides Baba Yaga. Note how that doesn’t say there weren’t any, and indeed many. Maybe, let’s say, the quote undying unquote Baba Yaga masquerading as other people? Do we know anyone else who masquerades as other people? Anyone else with a brain like Harry’s?
I will say this much, Mr. Potter: You are already an Occlumens, and I think you will become a perfect Occlumens before long. Identity does not mean, to such as us, what it means to other people. Anyone we can imagine, we can be; and the true difference about you, Mr. Potter, is that you have an unusually good imagination. A playwright must contain his characters, he must be larger than them in order to enact them within his mind. To an actor or spy or politician, the limit of his own diameter is the limit of who he can pretend to be, the limit of which face he may wear as a mask. But for such as you and I, anyone we can imagine, we can be, in reality and not pretense.
There are 3 and only 3 mentions of Baba Yaga in the book so far, and they tie Harry, the Dark Lord, and Quirrell together.
“Oh, now I see!” said Tracey Davis, speaking up so suddenly that Hermione gave a small startle. “You’re joining our protest because you’re worried that not enough girls are becoming Dark Witches!”
There was a half-smile on Professor Quirrell’s face as he replied,...Probably a good idea to pay close attention to what Quirrell says when he smiles to himself.
EDIT: Guess who else Harry is like?
“Congratulations indeed,” said Dumbledore. “Even I did not make any original discoveries in Transfiguration before the age of fourteen. Not since the day of Dorotea Senjak has any genius flowered so early.
Latest half baked idea. Harry is Quirrell. I’d been operating on the theory that Quirrell is preparing Harry to take over the world, and then take over Harry. He’s actually already taken over Harry as a baby, and lived out a new life as Harry. There are multiple scense of Quirrell comparing events in his life to Harry’s, with the implication that Harry’s life is the new and improved one.
The whole “Sense of Doom” business is the potential coming together of one person in two time turned bodies in the same space time.
With the ridiculously rampant and specific foreshadowing, some kind of time turning solution seems likely. And causality back through time was already set up with the Comed-Tea incident
but it all makes sense once you draw the causal arrows going BACKWARDS IN TIME!”
Here’s a fascinating quote by Dumbledore about Fawkes:
as close to undying as any creature that exists in this world, for whenever their bodies fail them they immolate themselves in a burst of fireand leave behind a hatchling, or sometimes an egg.”
And Harry is discovered as a baby next to the presumed immolated remains of Voldemort.
[Please read the OP before voting. Special voting rules apply.]
Utilitarianism is a moral abomination.
So the lesson I’m taking away from that one is to beware of trivial inconveniences.
I thought the lesson was look for trivial inconveniences as indicative of potential opportunities.
And should we deliberately promote children because they’re likely to be successful?
(If the answer is yes, we should focus on giving more opportunities to children of the wealthy, since parental wealth is the strongest correlate with career success.)
Bad economics. You should invest where the marginal utility of each dollar is highest, which is especially unlikely for the children of the wealthy, who will usually already have great amounts on investment made in their future, such that the marginal utility of the next dollar is extremely low.
You don’t invest in the likely most successful, you invest where your dollar gives you the most bang for the buck.
it wouldn’t be optimized for people who differ in any relevant respect from average.
School is potentially crippling if you’re smart. If you’re smart, school rewards you for just basically showing up. Don’t mistake the ability to get the right answer in class with the ability to accomplish something in life, where there generally aren’t right answers, only better ones.
If you listen to the praise, and judge yourself by their false standards, you may manage to make yourself useful to some employer, but you won’t make yourself useful to you. You will never learn there the most important thing you need to learn while growing up—how to run yourself.
To avoid being creepy, the focus should be on keeping your model well-calibrated, and on being fairly risk averse.
How is he to get calibrated while being risk averse and not taking data? Calibration implies knowing the boundary between yes and no.
For the first time kiss, I thought the “suddenly” was exactly the wrong advice. The proper tactic, IMO, is to go slowly and incrementally. Confidence is projected by going slowly but with clear intent. That also allows a woman to decline graciously. She should not be asking “what was that”, because you should have made it clear before doing it.
In most physical and emotional human endeavors, rushing is the sign of a mind focused on success/failure instead of the act. Do not try, do.
So, in the example of kissing that girl for the first time from before, I’d be suggesting he get verbal consent.
That seems a comment based in ideology, and not reality. I guess there must be some women for whom that would work, but I believe most women would find that a massive cold shower—perhaps permanently. The offer and consent should be nonverbal. Going slowly and incrementally allows you to minimize any delta between act and consent.
I’ve noticed a trend lately of large articles. Large articles that I end up not reading because I don’t know where the article is going. If you’re writing a full length article, starting with an abstract would be helpful, IMO.
Lest anyone get the idea that no-one thinks LW should be more phygish or more exclusive, let me hereby register that I for one would like us to all enforce a little more strongly that people read the sequences and even agree with them in a horrifying manner. You don’t have to agree with me, but I’d just like to put out there as a matter of fact that there are some of us that would like a more exclusive LW.
I can understand people wanting that. If the goal is to spread this information, however, I’d suggest that those wanting to be part of an Inner Circle should go Darknet, invitation only, and keep these discussions there, if you must have them at all.
As someone who has been around here maybe six months and comes everyday, I have yet to drink enough kool aid not to find ridiculous elements to this discussion.
“We are not a Phyg! We are not a Phyg! How dare you use that word?” Could anything possibly make you look more like a Phyg than tabooing the word, and karmabombing people who just mention it? Well, the demand that anyone who shows up should read a million words in blog posts by one individual, and agree with most all of it before speaking does give “We are not a Phyg!” a run for it’s money.
Take a step back, and imagine yourself at a new site that had some interesting material, and then coming on a discussion like this. Just what kind of impression would it give you?
Of course, if you just want to talk to the people who you consider have interesting things to say, that’s fine and understandable. In fact, I think this discussion serves your purpose well, because it will chase away new folks, and discourage those who haven’t been here long from saying much.
Given the current list software, sharing that infrastructure between who want a pure playground and those who want new playmates creates an inevitable conflict. It is possible to have list filtering that is more fine grained, and offers more user control, that mitigates much of the problem. That would be a better solution than a Darknet, but it’s work.
Suggestion: I recommend sending people their deleted posts.
I find it annoying to spend the effort to type a post, only to have it disappear into a bit bucket. If you want it gone, that’s your prerogative, but I think it is a breach of etiquette for a forum to destroy information created by a forum user.
Now I assume you found the original post a breach of etiquette, so may feel that tit for tat is the right policy here. I’d consider an intentional breach of etiquette as an unnecessary escalation.