Jinoc

Karma: 17

Jinoc 21 Oct 2014 12:22 UTC
0 points
in reply to: lmm’s comment on: Open thread, Oct. 20 - Oct. 26, 2014
How do you choose the measure over Everett branches in the absence of interactions between branches?

Jinoc 4 Jul 2014 18:20 UTC
2 points
in reply to: Stefan_Schubert’s comment on: Separating university education from grading
I’d expect the market to correct first on the students side by creating reliable tools to determine which college is most cost effective (e.g. a simple measure would be average time before repayment of college loan), which would then lead students to these colleges which are more cost effective, which would lead colleges to focus on employability-related courses (and on specializing etc).

Now there is the fact that people have conflicting notions of what education is for, because they’re also looking for signalling, and could thus be misguided in their seeking of information (looking only for the most prestigious college in their affordable range).
Another thing is that employers, not students, are purchasers of signalling and consider that current institutions do a good job.
But I struggle to think why that wouldn’t allow the development of fast-track colleges that would compress costs by focusing on employability-related courses, making them more cost-effective for a similar quality of graduates offered to employers.

Jinoc 3 Jul 2014 19:17 UTC
6 points
on: Separating university education from grading
I’m actually curious why “the market” hasn’t corrected itself on this one. I mean, since people go to college to become employable, tools to determine the best colleges should have emerged, and this in turn should have forced colleges to make sure they deliver. Especially since most colleges in the US are largely private institutions.

But this hasn’t happened, even with the outcry against college loan burdens. I’m no libertarian, but this is one situation where I’d expect libertarians to get it right, so what’s going on ?

Jinoc 3 Jul 2014 16:09 UTC
2 points
in reply to: Nornagest’s comment on: Downvote stalkers: Driving members away from the LessWrong community?
Thank you !

Jinoc 2 Jul 2014 17:40 UTC
2 points
in reply to: Viliam_Bur’s comment on: Downvote stalkers: Driving members away from the LessWrong community?
Actually, I was wondering about this: do we need downvoting ?

I mean, is there a discussion somewhere on the relative merits of up/down-voting versus upvoting only ?

Jinoc 23 Jun 2014 13:23 UTC
4 points
in reply to: djm’s comment on: Open thread, 23-29 June 2014
I have heard (I have no citation and it’s probably apocryphal, but I found the anecdote enlightening) that Enrico Fermi’s way of reading articles was to read the abstract, put the paper away, do the maths by himself and once he was done, compare his results with the article. That’s probably a bit hardcore, but you should be able to start from somewhere in the paper’s reasoning and do a few steps forward.

But where are you in your paper reading at the moment ? Is there a particular problem that spurred this question ?

Jinoc 15 May 2014 14:27 UTC
−1 points
on: [LINK] Utilitarian self-driving cars?
It seems there are few distinct cases
- I am someone who does not wear helmet in our current society where this is illegal and people don’t exactly discriminate in case of car accidents, so the introduction of smart cars will only confirm my current (bad) decision—no change there.
- I currently wear a helmet, but would stop wearing one if smart cars were introduced.
  Assuming every car magically became a smart car, that means I am willing to suffer a fine in exchange for a slightly greater likelihood of surviving a nearby car crash.
  Considering smart cars are better drivers than humans, and that car crashes are already rare, that means if I considered the fine adequate to incentivize me into wearing a helmet previously I should consider them adequate now.
  There is an edge case here : smart cars are better drivers, but only by a small fraction that is offset by their tendency to aim away from me.
- I currently wear a helmet, and will continue to do so.
Only the edge case would create a morally ambiguous situation, but that seems pretty unlikely (you’d hope that a swarm of cars with superhuman reaction speed would be more than marginally better at preventing accidents).

Jinoc 3 May 2014 19:59 UTC
0 points
on: Email tone and status: !s, friendliness, ‘please’, etc.
What do you mean exactly by “lower status” ? Do they lower the perceived status of the writer, or do they convey the idea that the reader has lower status than the writer ?

Exclamation marks friendliness, “it’d be great if” and “Thanks!” I’d perceive as somewhat condescending in an email exchange with someone I didn’t know well, whereas “you don’t have to do this but” and “sorry to bother you” I’d read as delaying expressions and thus status-lowering for the writer.

But again, it’s a matter of context. In an informal email exchange I wouldn’t worry too much about these things.

Jinoc 15 Apr 2014 17:00 UTC
0 points
in reply to: polymathwannabe’s comment on: The Cold War divided Science

In this field communism made the same mistake of the postmodernists: it couldn’t conceive of objective science without an agenda hidden somewhere. Genetics was labeled “bourgeois science” and thus not worth learning. A classic example of rejecting a good idea because of who happened to say it.

I’d say argue it’s not a complete mistake, and indeed can be a very useful guide, to assume that there is an ideology behind everything, even science. There are, however, a number of mistakes one can make given this statement, the first being to divide all ideologies according to familiar political divisions (capitalist/communist) rather than imagine there might be local ideological divisions in any given field, across arbitrary dimensions. And the second being to think biased results are useless (a coin being biased doesn’t make it an ineffective random number generator).

I find it useful to think in this way when reading papers (in physics) : it’s entirely possible, even pretty certain, to miss very clear and simple ideas because the ideological background in which things are presented does not have room for them (the classic Kuhnian idea). In this way I see postmodernism (and a good part of continental philosophy) as a useful warning, albeit like most useful warnings it can be taken too far into paranoia.

Jinoc 15 Mar 2014 23:34 UTC
1 point
on: What attracts smart and curious young people to physics? Should this be encouraged?
In my personal experience, it was because physics makes for the best kids’ magazine. Few things beat reading about astrophysics, especially in a highly illustrated science for kids magazine.

Jinoc 10 Mar 2014 18:12 UTC
0 points
in reply to: zedzed’s comment on: Optimal Exercise
I’m doing Overcoming Gravity now, and I must say I’ve been pretty impressed by the results so far even though it hasn’t been long. Probably the first time since I started working out that I can really feel results so quickly.

Jinoc 31 Jan 2014 16:28 UTC
1 point
in reply to: [deleted]’s comment on: Amanda Knox Guilty Again
Actually the Italy-Austria border is a pretty mountainous area with a bunch of national parks. The only cities of note are Udine and Trieste, but altogether I doubt you have more than 5% of the population (and google maps suggests Venzone is around 20km from the border). So I think it’s not an altogether arbitrary suggestion to make.