Programmer, rationalist, chess player, father, altruist.
cata
Karma: 2,696
In which Winnie-the-Pooh tests a hypothesis about the animal tracks that he is following through the woods:
“Wait a moment,” said Winnie-the-Pooh, holding up his paw.
He sat down and thought, in the most thoughtful way he could think. Then he fitted his paw into one of the Tracks…and then he scratched his nose twice, and stood up.
“Yes,” said Winnie-the Pooh.
“I see now,” said Winnie-the-Pooh.
“I have been Foolish and Deluded,” said he, “and I am a Bear of No Brain at All.”
A. A. Milne (via John Regehr)
Being male, I never had any visibility into experiences like these until I first began reading anecdotes like this online, and then started talking with women I knew about how things were for them. So thanks for taking the effort to put this together.
Many times in the past I have felt like I should respond to someone’s message, but I put it off for some trivial reason. Later, I feel too guilty about ignoring it to reply, and then the next time I feel even guiltier, and then I never respond to hide my shame. Seriously.
I will add a $1k bounty to this, since it seems like Twitter agrees this is a great idea and there should be more money in it.
I definitely have a strong sense reading this post that “those environmental conditions would not cause any problems to me” and I am trying to understand whether this is true or not, and if so, what properties of a person make them susceptible to the problems.
Do you have any perception about that? I wonder things like:
Would you circa 2010 have been able to guess that you were susceptible to this level of suffering, if put in this kind of environment?
What proportion of, say, random intellectually curious graduate students do you think would suffer this way if put into this environment?
Do you have some sense of what psychological attributes made you susceptible, or advice to others about how to be less susceptible?
I have a lot of respect for what I know of you and your work and I’m sorry this happened.
(clarification edit: I have some sympathy for why it could be good to have an intellectual environment like this, so if my comment seems to be implying a perspective of “would it be possible to have it without people suffering”, that’s why.)
Instead of, ‘I don’t want to read My Little Pony fanfiction,’ now I think ‘I used to not want to read My Little Pony fanfiction.’ You modified a total of fifty-eight opinions in my mind.
I work at Manifold, I don’t know if this is true but I can easily generate some arguments against:
Manifold’s business model is shaky and Manifold may well not exist in 3 years.
Manifold’s codebase is also shaky and would not survive Manifold-the-company dying right now.
Manifold is quite short on engineering labor.
It seems to me that Manifold and LW have quite different values (Manifold has a typical startup focus on prioritizing growth at all costs) and so I expect many subtle misalignments in a substantial integration.
Personally for these reasons I am more eager to see features developed in the LW codebase than the Manifold codebase.
I am skeptical of the gender angle, but I think it’s being underdiscussed that, based on the balance of evidence so far, the person with the biggest, most effective machine gun is $5000 to the richer and still anonymous, whereas the people hit by their bullets are busy pointing fingers at each other. Alice’s alleged actions trashing Nonlinear (and 20-some former people???) seem IMO much worse than anything Lightcone or Nonlinear is being even accused of.
(Not that this is a totally foregone conclusion—I noticed that Nonlinear didn’t provide any direct evidence on the claim that Alice was a known serial liar outside of this saga.)
A pleasantly pithy remark, but also a nasty one to present without actual evidence. We don’t need cheerleading, especially at the expense of people who probably could contribute effectively to LW if they felt like it.
I have to admit, I don’t really understand this idea that it makes sense for J. Random Company to pay “market rate”, that is, the same amount of dollars that Google et al would pay the same person for a different job. That’s not how markets work. I think that Lightcone should pay people whatever it can pay while being positive-sum for both parties. Whether the candidate’s BATNA is an offer at Google affects that, but not in a formulaic “we match pay” way.
My perspective here is as someone who has had offers from Google and Facebook and repeatedly took alternative offers from different companies for ~50% as much TCO, because I had many reasons to prefer to work for those other companies. It wasn’t even close, actually. I don’t think that there is anything strange about this, and I don’t understand how I could consider those companies to have been underpaying me or insulting my dignity, given that I freely determined that they were in fact making me a better offer than Google was.
One crux here is that it seems to me like all the parties involved have lots of alternatives—engineers have many jobs to choose from, and companies have many candidates to choose from, so I think the market will really work out to give people what they want the most. If it were a situation without so much genuine competition, I might feel differently.
By the way, in this particular case, I expect Lightcone to have an extremely easy time hiring all the engineers it wants at the rates quoted (because 70% of FAANG is much more than most similar very small startups), and it wouldn’t get much easier if they paid more, so I think they are if anything overpaying.
I like classic style. I think the thing that classic style reflects is that most people are capable of looking at object-level reality and saying what they see. If I read an essay describing stuff like things that happened, and when they happened, and things people said and did, and how they said and did them, then often I am comfortable more or less taking the author at their word about those things. (It’s unusual for people to flatly lie about them.)
However, most people don’t seem very good at figuring out how likely their syntheses of things are, or what things they believe they might be wrong about, or how many important things they don’t know, and so on. So when people write all that stuff in an essay, unless I personally trust their judgment enough that I want to just import their beliefs, I don’t really do much with it. I end up just shrugging and reading the object-level stuff they wrote, and then doing my own synthesis and judgment. So the self-aware style really did end up being a lot of filler, and it crowds out the more valuable information.
(If I do personally trust their judgment enough that I want to just import their beliefs, then I like the self-aware style. And I am not claiming that literally all self-aware content is totally useless. But I think the heuristic is good.)
As a strong amateur DotA player, this seems absurdly impressive, albeit much less impressive than if they could beat humans in the full DotA ruleset. (Their restrictions seem to be avoiding much of the “long-term strategic planning” part of DotA, e.g. choosing heroes, item builds, and level of aggression in a way that makes sense against the enemy team.)
This seems way more surprising to me than beating humans at Go.
Gwern wrote a summary comment with some opinions here.
Does the order of the two terminal conditions matter? / Think about it.
Does the order of the two terminal conditions matter? / Try it out!
Does the order of the two previous answers matter? / Yes. Think first, then try.
Friedman and Felleisen, The Little Schemer
As someone who is often (as the article describes) willfully indifferent to the finer arts of conversation, I personally appreciate the directness and sharpness of discussion here. I feel like I can take people’s comments at face value, and that I can usually assess a fair consensus about something by reading people’s reactions to it, rather than having to figure out what social factors are influencing the posts. So I’m anti-politeness!
I do know, though, that a lack of grace in these areas can totally drive away some personalities, which is probably a much more severe consequence than making life a little more ambiguous for us few social pariahs. To the extent that LW is made up of people who are willing to assume good faith on everything, I worry that it might be because we insulted everyone else until they went away, or never registered at all.
I don’t think it’s going to be transformative until you are happy to wear a headset for hours on end. In and of themselves, VR meetings are better than Zoom meetings, but having a headset on sucks compared to sitting at your computer with nothing on your face.
I am a pretty serious chess player and among other things, chess gave me a clearer perception of the direct cost in time and effort involved in succeeding at any given pursuit. You can look at any chess player’s tournament history and watch as they convert time spent into improved ability at an increasingly steep rate.
As a result, I can confidently think things like “I could possibly become a grandmaster, but I would have to dedicate my life to it for ten or twenty years as a full-time job, and that’s not worth it to me. On the other hand, I could probably become a national master with several more years of moderate work in evenings and weekends, and that sounds appealing.” and I now think of my skill in other fields in similar terms. As a result, I am less inclined to, e.g. randomly decide that I want to become a Linux kernel wizard, or learn a foreign language, or learn to draw really well, because I clearly perceive that those actions have a quite substantial cost.
Looking at the article and the abstract, it seems equally plausible that we have just gotten a lot better recently at detecting fraud and plagiarism and error. Is there any reason that the study excludes that possibility?
One of my mentors once gave me a list of obvious things to check when stuff doesn’t work. Funny, years later I still need this list:
It worked. No one touched it but you. It doesn’t work. It’s probably something you did.
It worked. You made one change. It doesn’t work. It’s probably the change you made.
It worked. You promoted it. It doesn’t work. Your testing environment probably isn’t the same as your production environment.
It worked for these 10 cases. It didn’t work for the 11th case. It was probably never right in the first place.
It worked perfectly for 10 years. Today it didn’t work. Something probably changed.
edw519, Hacker News, on debugging.
I always need that list, too.
I still don’t get why you are even considering finishing the degree, even though you clearly tried to explain it to me. Taking eight college classes is a lot of work actually? “Why not” doesn’t really seem to cover it. How is doing a “terrible” commute several times per week for two semesters and spending many hours per week a low cost?
You sort of imply that someone is judging you for not having the degree but you didn’t give any examples of actually being judged.
If you really really want to prove to yourself that you can do it, or if you really want to learn more math (I agree that taking college courses seems like a fine way to learn more math) then I understand, but based on your post it’s not clear to me.
Because you underestimate how off-putting it is to people when things are deleted with no clear accountability or visibility. It’s way worse than having an off-topic lousy post sitting on the page for a few days. It is like a hundred times worse.
You have to provide transparency (e.g. a “see deleted” section or a list of moderator actions) or rationale (e.g. Metafilter’s deletion reasons and MetaTalk) or people get paranoid that there is weird, self-interested censorship and that the moderators aren’t acting in the interests of the community. This is an Ancient Internet Feeling.