Said Achmiz
Karma: 9,112 (LW), 5 (AF)
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I’ve now used Slice (their website, not the mobile app) to order lunch from a local pizza joint. In case anyone’s curious, here are notes on the experience:
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I found the website to be fairly well-designed, as these things go, and easy to use. I encountered no technical problems, and the user experience was, overall, at least up to par with the popular online delivery services, if not better. (The ability to “order as a guest”—without making an account—was particularly welcome. I was also offered an easy way to make an account, without having to re-fill-in my info; I declined, this time.)
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The selection of pizzerias available in my neighborhood was impressive; all of my favorites were there.
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Prices were (at a cursory skim) identical to those available via GrubHub. My pizzeria of choice had a 10% discount going (I have no idea if this is temporary, or what), which brought the price down. (I have never seen such a discount on GrubHub.)
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There were strange differences in availability of dishes. (Example: on GrubHub, I could get penne vodka, which was absent from Slice; but Slice let me order the restaurant’s pasta special with chicken, whereas on GrubHub the chicken option was not available.)
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My food was delivered with this pizzeria’s usual alacrity, and it was as delicious as always. From the moment I placed the order, no part of the experience further distinguished GrubHub from Slice.
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[for clarity, we were both quoting other sources]
Indeed, my apologies—I read hastily, and didn’t spot the quoting without the quotation styling. I’ve corrected the wording in the grandparent.
Moreover, the rationality community will actually need the original Hamming Question from time to time, referring specifically to scientific fields that you have extensive training. (Or, at least, if we didn’t need the Actual Science Hamming Question that’d be quite a bad sign).
This seems plausible. Has this happened so far?
Reading this article (which, to be clear, absolutely does support the claims I asked for a citation of [but see end of comment]—my comments below are about a different aspect of the issue), I was slightly taken aback by this bit:
These delivery companies charge restaurants exorbitant commissions off of every customer order, when the only real the value they bring is helping new customers find your restaurant for the first time. When a customer orders again and again, it’s because your staff was friendly, the food was delicious and they had a great experience. Why should you pay Grubhub a 30% commission every time a customer orders?
This does not even begin to match my own experience.
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When I use GrubHub, I order almost exclusively from places I have physically been to.
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By far the greatest value I get out of using GrubHub is convenience—and that’s huge. At least half of all the times when I’ve used the service, if I instead had to telephone the restaurant, I just… wouldn’t. Nine times out of ten, I would, quite literally, rather go hungry than place a phone order. (Of course, in reality, I’d simply eat leftovers, or cook something quickly, or go out for a bagel, etc. It would be an inferior meal, but I’d gladly pay that price, in order to avoid having to make an order over the phone.)
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If I order again from the same restaurant, using GrubHub, it has exactly nothing to do with the staff being friendly. I don’t interact with their staff in that situation—that’s the point! The only thing I’m interested in is (a) food quality, (b) delivery speed, and (c) price.
Then there was this rather appalling bit:
Furthermore, third-party marketplaces like Grubhub and Postmates don’t give restaurants access to their own customers’ email addresses, which makes marketing directly to your own customers virtually impossible. There’s so much value in owning your own customer’s information, so that you can encourage them to order directly from you and not pay marketplace fees time and time again for the same customer.
This is an excellent reason to use a service like GrubHub. If a restaurant wants my email address so that they can market directly to me, they can go to hell. I would avoid patronizing a restaurant like that, on general principle.
… then again, maybe all of this is a moot point. After all, the linked article is, in fact, an advertisement in disguise—an advertisement for ChowNow, which seems to be a company that’s selling a competing product to GrubHub, etc. Can we trust that what they tell us about how online delivery services work, their pros and cons, etc.? We absolutely cannot! Even the true facts they tell us will be framed so as to make their offering look good. The author of this article started with their bottom line.
Does anyone have any citations that come from a neutral source?
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Thanks!
That seems like a startlingly weak anecdote (especially so given that it’s the only one we’ve seen). From this quote, it seems like Hamming—contrary to the claim Elo quoted—in fact inspired none of his colleagues to “make major shifts in focus” or to “rededicat[e] their careers to the problems they felt actually mattered”.
The one colleague who was, allegedly, inspired by Hamming’s questions in some way, explicitly said (we are told) that he did not shift his research focus! He ended up being successful… which Hamming attributes to his own influence, for… some reason. (The anecdotal evidence provided for this causal sort-of-claim is almost textbook poor; it’s literally nothing more than post hoc, ergo propter hoc…)
Do we have any solid evidence, at all, that there is any concrete, demonstrable benefit, or even consequence, to asking the “Hamming question”? Any case studies (with much more detail, and more evidential support, than the anecdote quoted above)? So far, it seems to me that the significance attached to this “Hamming question” concept has been far, far out of proportion to its verified usefulness…
Edit: Corrected wording to make it clear Elo was quoting a source.
… [delivery services] take mindbogglingly huge fees out of every order. We’re talking on the order of 20%.
Do you have a citation for this?
[Hamming] did inspire some of his colleagues to make major shifts in focus, rededicating their careers to the problems they felt actually mattered.
Do you have more info on this? I’d be very curious to hear about some specific examples!
I have seen the “Hamming question” concept applied to domains other than science (example 1, example 2, example 3, example 4, example 5, example 6, example 7).
I think that’s a mistake.
First, generally, it’s a mistake for terminology-dilution reasons: if you significantly broaden the scope of a term, you obscure differences between the concept or thing the term originally referred to, and other (variously similar) things; and you integrate assumptions about proper categories, and about similarities between their (alleged) members, into your thinking and writing, without justifying those assumptions or even making them explicit. This degrades the quality of your thought and your communication.
Second, specifically, it’s a mistake because science (i.e., academic or quasi-academic [e.g., corporate] research) differs from other domains (such as those discussed in my examples) in several important ways:
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In science, if you’re trained in a field, then there’s no particular reason (other than—in principle, contingent and changeable—practical limitations such as funding) why you can’t work on just about any problem in that field. This is not the case in many other domains.
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In science, there is generally no urgency to any particular problems or research areas; if everyone in the field works on one (ostensibly important) problem, but neglects another (ostensibly less important) problem, well, so what? It’ll keep. But in most other domains, if everyone works on one thing and neglects everything else, that’s bad, because all that “everything else” is often necessary; someone has got to keep doing it, even if one particular other thing is, in some sense, “more important”.
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In science, you’re (generally) already doing inquiry; the fruit of your work is knowledge, understanding, etc. So it makes sense to ask what the “most important” problem is: presumably, it’s the problem (of those problems which we can currently define in a meaningful way) that, if solved, would yield the most knowledge, the greatest understanding, the most potential for further advancement, etc. But in other fields, where the goals of your efforts are not knowledge but something more concrete, it’s not clear that “most important” has a meaning, because for any goal we identify as “important”, there are always “convergent instrumental goals” as far as the eye can see, explore/exploit tradeoffs, incommensurable values, “goals” which are essentially homeostatic or otherwise have dynamics as their referents, etc., etc.
So while I can see the value of the Hamming question in science (modulo the response linked in my other comment), I should very much like to see an explicit defense and elaboration of applying the concept of the “Hamming question” to other domains.
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And here’s the best response (that I’ve seen) to a “Hamming question”.
Here is a series of comments by gwern with many citations of research into head trauma and brain injury.
This comment in particular cites a paper called…
“Long-Term Outcomes Associated with Traumatic Brain Injury in Childhood and Adolescence: A Nationwide Swedish Cohort Study of a Wide Range of Medical and Social Outcomes”, Sariaslan et al 2016, is a population registry study which reports within-family correlations adjust for education about various negative outcomes with 1 or more diagnosed TBIs …
TBI is common enough that the effects are large on a population-wide basis:
We found that the crude population contributions of TBI explained approximately...2%–6% of the population differences in the outcomes. The strongest population attributable risks were found for the severe outcomes, including psychiatric inpatient hospitalisation (PAF = 5.5%; 4.9%–6.1%), premature mortality (PAF = 4.7%; 2.9%–6.5%), and disability pension (PAF = 4.6%; 3.8%–5.3%).
The comment goes on to list statistics on various long-term effects of TBIs—worth reading, IMO.
I’ve now read the linked post. I’m confused about what relevance it has.
Are you saying that, once we stop looking at the world as a bunch of discrete objects and start seeing quantum fields, or whatever, instead, then it’s no longer trivial or even possible to say things like “this cake is delicious, but that cake is not”?
Or, are you using that sort of “ontological crisis” as an illustrative example only, but actually suggesting some different, unrelated, sort of ontology shift? If so, then what might this alternative ontology be, and why should we prefer it?
What standards do you[1] use to judge whether something is an inferior result?
If you bake a pie, and I bake a pie, and all our friends try both pies, and they think my pie is delicious but your pie is mediocre, or bad, is there some sense in which your pie is, nonetheless, not inferior?
What if, following my approach, I am able to bake ten desserts, all different, but all widely acknowledged to be delicious; whereas you, following your approach, can only bake ten different pies (some good, some not so great), and are at a loss as to how to make any of the other things I can make? Is there some sense in which your approach is not inferior?
What sort of alternative ontology would you apply to this scenario, and why?
(Disclaimer: I have not yet read the linked post by Wei Dai; I will comment further when I’ve done so. UPDATE 2019-02-01: I’ve read it now, see sibling comment.)
[1] Or, if not you, then whoever subscribes to the mindset in question (whom you are representing in this conversation).
More data: these figures on injury rates in various sports, among children, from the National Institutes of Health.
I see. This seems like a fairly poor approach to estimation, though. It doesn’t actually matter how many potential soccer (or football) players there are, when it comes to calculating risk, except insofar as it helps us estimate how many actual soccer (or football) players there are. But we can just get those numbers directly:
24,472,778
Number of people who play soccer at some level in the U.S. — second only to China. (Source: FIFA World Football Big Count)
3,055,148
Youth players officially registered with U.S. Soccer programs in 2014 — up by 89 percent since 1990, the first year the U.S. qualified for the World Cup final round since 1950.
(From NBCNews.com)
The largest category of soccer in the United States in terms of participation is boys’ and girls’ youth soccer. Soccer is one of the most played sports by children in the United States. In 2012, soccer was the #4 most played team sport by high school boys, and soccer overtook softball to become the #3 most played team sport by high school girls.[117] As of 2006, the U.S. was the #1 country in the world for participation in youth soccer, with 3.9 million American youths (2.3 million boys and 1.6 million girls) registered with U.S. Soccer.[118] Among girls, the U.S. has more registered players than all other countries combined.[119] The number of high school soccer players more than doubled from 1990 to 2010, giving soccer the fastest growth rate among all major U.S. sports.[120]
(From Wikipedia)
Even leaving aside the 1,531 girls who played high school football in the 2012-2013 school year, the 1,086,627 high school boys who played football exceeded the number of boys and girls combined who participated in any other sport.
Here are the Top Ten high school sports by the number of students who participated in them in the 2012-2013 school year:
Football, 1,088,158 (1,086,627 boys; 1,531 girls)
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Soccer, 782,514 (410,982 boys; 371,532 girls)
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In 2012-2013, a record 7,713,577 students participated in a high school sports, up from 7,692,520 in 2011-2012.
(From cnsnews.com)
A total of 1.23 million youth ages 6-12 played tackle football in 2015, up from 1.216 million the year before, according to data from the Sports & Fitness Industry Association, which commissions an annual survey of participation rates in United States households across a range of sports.
A record 4.3 million children were born in the U.S. in 2007 -- they are now around age 8, when communities begin to offer tackle football. As a share of the age 6-12 population, the total participation rate remained the same as the past year, 4.2 percent.
Across the board, in the 6-12 and 13-17 age groups, participation in football on a regular and casual basis is down since 2009, before the risks of youth playing the game began to grow, partly due to research findings and a number of former NFL players saying they would keep their kids from football or delay their entry into tackle until adolescence.
In 2009, 3.96 million youth ages 6-17 played tackle football. Last year, that number fell to 3.21 million, down from 3.25 million in 2014.
(From ESPN.com)
The numbers aren’t clear-cut, but from what I can see, your prediction does not seem to be borne out.
My comment was more directed at avoiding negative short-term changes in people’s lifestyles.
Agreed, this is good advice.
By “per capita” do you mean “what percentage of people who engage in each activity sustain head injuries”? If so, yes, I agree that this would be useful to know.
I’m somewhat confused by your notes about the gender distribution of sports. Could you elaborate on that?
The scenario you describe is not, of course, literally impossible. However, it seems to me that the number of people for whom the only feasible choices are either “play soccer” or “be a couch potato” must be so small that even considering this point as a meaningful concern is epistemically unwise. (There are, after all, so many ways in which to avoid a “largely sedentary lifestyle”, starting with “get up, go outside, and walk around the block a few times” and going all the way to “play other team sports, selected specially for their unusually low incidence of head injuries”, with many stops along the way at places like “go swimming”, “go hiking”, “go to a gym”, “purchase and use basic exercise equipment”, etc., etc., etc.)
Excellent post!
Some comments/additions:
There totally is! It’s called “Bob’s Red Mill”, and they have both rolled oats (my favorite) and steel-cut. I highly recommend their stuff.
I also like French toast quite a bit. Challah is a great suggestion; here’s another one: brioche! Get a soft, buttery brioche, slice it thick, and you’ll get fantastic French toast out of it.
Also, try adding just a bit of nutmeg to the mix (but don’t overdo it).
With a bit of advance planning, you can get the best of both worlds—the deliciousness of homemade from-scratch pancakes, and the convenience of a ready-made mix. The trick is to make your own pancake mix! Here’s a simple recipe—but of course you will want to substitute real butter for the vegetable shortening (yuck!).
And here’s one of my own favorite NYC breakfast-food places (I would definitely be very sad if it closed down):
Crepe Factory
It’s on 3rd Ave. and 73rd St. in Bay Ridge (that’s in Brooklyn! not uptown Manhattan).
Let me tell you, ladies & gents, I have eaten (and made!) a lot of crepes in my life. The ones they serve at the Crepe Factory (which, despite the name, is actually a cozy little hole-in-the-wall place that would struggle to fit a dozen people at once) are the best.
Get the ice cream crepe (strawberries, bananas, Nutella, vanilla ice cream, whipped cream):
Or, if you want something savory instead of sweet, get the Chicken Cordon Bleu crepe (you actually get two of these—good for sharing!).