I don’t see where Said’s comment implies a dichotomous view of prestige. He simply believes the gap between LessWrong and Donald Knuth is very large.
Elizabeth
Karma: 1,115 (LW), 0 (AF)
[Question] How do you know it’s time for a break?
That makes sense. Neither of those was my intention- I declare at the beginning that the research is crap; repeating it at every point seems excessive. And I assumed people would take the conclusions as “this will address this specific problem” rather than “this is a Pure Good Action that will have no other consequences.”
I understand that this isn’t how it came across to you, and that’s useful data. I am curious how others feel I did on this score.
Thanks for the kind words.
I’m unclear if you think all conclusions should be hedged like that, or my specific strong conclusions (site visits are good, don’t split a team) are insufficiently supported.
Update: found a relevant book, have ordered from library.
These kinds of questions feel premature, given the absolute lack of data. I’d be interested in “returns drop off after N hours of deliberate practice” or “meetings go net negative after M minutes.”
Agreed. I’d love to see data on all of those as well.
I’m hoping for something that can definitively say “productivity drops after N hours”, or at least examines that question, rather than “we checked and people only do N hours of work/day”. Maybe people can do more than N if they feel like it, in which case it’s not a matter of how much the brain is capable of but of motivation.
[Question] How long can people be productive in [time period]?
since people check the score of their old content quite frequently
I’ve stopped doing this since karma notifications came online.
Post-WW2, the allies sold enigma machines to developing countries, without mentioning they had broken the code.
Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enigma_machine
Note: some people speculate the purchasing countries knew this and accepted the risk (https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/5cpqrc/after_ww2_the_uk_government_sold_enigma_machines/).
The British kept radar secret during WW2, and attributed pilots’ ability to shoot down planes in the dark to vitamin A.
The grandfather of a friend in college had a technique for producing irreplaceably smooth ball bearings that he preferred to keep secret rather than patent. He had two employees, one of which was his son in law.
I suspect there are a lot of small cases like this, because it would be weird for me to know the only one.
Data points from papers can either contribute directly to predictions (e.g. we measured it and gains from colocation drop off at 30m), or to forming a model that makes predictions (e.g. the diagram). Credence levels for the first kind feel fine, but like a category error for model-born predictions . It’s not quite true that the model succeeds or fails as a unit, because some models are useful in some arenas and not in others, but the thing to evaluate is definitely the model, not the individual predictions.
I can see talking about what data would make me change my model and how that would change predictions, which may be isomorphic to what you’re suggesting.
The UI would also be a pain.
clearer epistemic status tags for the different claims....
I find it very hard, possibly impossible, to do the things you ask in this bullet point and synthesis in the same post. If I was going to do that it would be on a per-paper basis: for each paper list the claims and how well supported they are.
Generally, what research do you wish had existed, that would have better informed you here?
This seems interesting and fun to write to me. It might also be worth going over my favorite studies.
Orienting a bit more around the “the state of management research is shitty” issue
Can you say more about this? That seems like a very valuable but completely different post, which I imagine would take an order of magnitude more effort than investigation into a single area.
About 80% of Americans think “political correctness is a problem”
And lots of people who agree with statements about hate speech being bad, white people starting out with advantages in life, sexual harassment being a problem, etc, also think political correctness is a problem.
How much of this is about the definition of political correctness? I haven’t seen the term used positively since the 90s, while people only seem to care more about correct speech. I suspect many people who say they hate political correctness nonetheless support punishing a lot of kinds of speech.
The easiest way for friendships to build is out of repeated low stakes interaction. The more atomized society gets, the less those happen naturally. Jumping from “hey I met you at a party” to “let’s eat 1:1″ is hard, and puts pressure on the 1:1 interaction. I’ve found facebook and blogs to be good ways to bridge that gap.
The most relevant paper I read was Chapter 5 of Distributed Work by Hinds and Kiesler. You can find it in my notes by searching for “Chapter 5: The (Currently) Unique Advantages of Collocated Work”
If all of the following conditions are met:
It’s mid-afternoon
I’ve previously been able to focus on the project.
I can’t focus and just seem to keep checking social media.
I either need a nap or to leave for a room with less carbon dioxide.