T3t
Karma: 285 (LW), 0 (AF)
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This brings up the question of what you’re trying to optimize for when teaching; in particular, which segment of the student population are you trying to best teach? If the median, then this strategy will, at best, be useless, at worst, actively harm their learning. If the top percentile, then it may very well produce better outcomes than a more straightforward approach. But it does seem to be the case that there’s a trade-off.
Grubhub also exclusively uses its own drivers. See my response to Said: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/z9hqPS6NNdNYLYunT/minimize-use-of-standard-internet-food-delivery#XRNiX7GgZ7pF6HD5Y
Here is a neutral (from the perspective of potential competition) source, that quotes industry insiders: https://nypost.com/2016/02/06/tech-giants-start-getting-serious-about-food-delivery/
I agree that delivery services provide significant value to the consumer for the reasons you describe. I suspect that in the situation where a specific class of restaurant (pizza places) already have their own delivery network in place (fixed costs already paid, domain-specific efficiencies already captured), a bare-bones online order system could easily beat out a full-service middleman like UberEats or Grubhub.
In fact for some services it’s 30%: https://get.chownow.com/blog/restaurant-delivery-killing-restaurants
I only learned about this a few days ago, and (bizarrely) thought it was only UberEats that had such a high fee schedule.
I think there’s an important distinction between x-risks and most other things we consider to be tragedies of commons: the reward for “cooperating” against “defectors” in an x-risk scenario (putting in disproportionate effort/resources to solve the problem) is still massively positive, conditional on the effort succeeding (and in many calculations, prior to that conditional). In most central examples of tragedies of the commons, the payoff for being a “good actor” surrounded by bad actors is net-negative, even assuming the stewardship is successful.
The common thread is that there might be a free-rider problem in both cases, of course.
I want to signal-boost this harder than just upvoting it, because a couple examples could have been pulled directly from my life.
It should also be noted that I haven’t experienced anybody getting upset about somebody taking charge of organizing something after it’s been (unsuccessfully) opened to group coordination. I notice that when I’m on the other side of that equation, I’m mostly just grateful that somebody else is doing the work of organizing/coordinating things.
Sorry for not specifying—if you hover over the bottom half of the link to a post, i.e. the part that shows Username, points, time since post submission, and read time, it will display “Show Highlight”. Clicking on any part of the bottom half except the username will expand the item to show a section of the post, along with “Collapse” and “Continue to Full Post (59 words)” option (word count will vary; I used the one for this post as an example).
I occasionally use it to gauge approximate post length, since the seeing the word count requires UI interaction. I would rather have the word count be immediately visible, but I probably wouldn’t miss “read length” if it was gone entirely either.
Meta-comment:
It’s difficult to tell, having spent some time (but not a very large amount of time) following this back-and-forth, whether much progress is being made in furthering Eliezer’s and Paul’s understanding of each other’s positions and arguments. My impression is that there has been some progress, mostly from Paul vetoing Eliezer’s interpretations of Paul’s agenda, but by nature this is a slow kind of progress—there are likely many more substantially incorrect interpretations than substantially correct ones, so even if you assume progress toward a correct interpretation to be considerably faster than what might be predicted by a random walk, the slow feedback cycle still means it will take a while.
My question is why the two of you haven’t sat down for a weekend (or as many as necessary) to hash out the cruxes and whatever confusion surrounds them. This seems to be a very high-value course of action: if, upon reaching a correct understanding of Paul’s position, Eliezer updates in that direction, it’s important that happen as soon as possible. Likewise, if Eliezer manages to convince Paul of catastrophic flaws in his agenda, that may be even more important.
From talking to some people in the UK, my impression is that pay is considerably lower (by 50% or more!), but I don’t know what interviewing is like. I’ll see if I can get some info on that.
Taking Google as an example, that is what they want at entry-level. If you’re more experienced, my impression is that you still get run through the same gauntlet, but then you also get interviewed by a few different teams for more specific skill sets (i.e. mobile will want actual mobile experience, etc).
Keep in mind “data structures and algorithms” is underselling it a bit—you need to know well beyond what you typically cover in an introductory algorithms course.
Because I’m not sure what the motivations behind asking trivia questions are, I don’t know for sure how your answer would be perceived. That is likely how I would answer a question about an API I wasn’t familiar with, though filters are more of a structural aspect of .NET MVC than an API (though it’s still all functions at the bottom). Not knowing an important structural aspect of a framework you claim to be proficient in can be a red flag—though in my case I knew what they were, but did not know what they were called. (I looked them up after the first interview where I was asked about them, which was a good thing, because I was asked about them again in my last interview.) Another good lesson!
I agree that making the interview pleasant for the interviewer is a good idea. It does seem like a “too obvious to be said” sort of thing, which probably means it needs to be said more often. The question that follows is how to do that, especially if you don’t have an instinct for it.
I’ve also read the advice to practice answering questions on a whiteboard. It’s good advice, but in the interview that got me hired I didn’t actually do any whiteboarding, so I didn’t think to list it.
Thanks!
In fact, all of my jobs (3 in total) until the current one had placed very lenient demands on my time. I think it’s more of a management/operational issue, though. While I won’t deny that I can solve some problems fast, most of the downtime was from an inefficient work pipeline.
Do you have 10-15 hours a week to spend writing code? It’s likely possible to frame your absence from the job market in a way which doesn’t hurt your prospects too much. Feel free to DM me if you want to talk more.
You Are Being Underpaid
Sorry for the delayed response—for some reason I never got any notifications about comments on this post.
We never had a discussion about the schedule when the reboot happened, mostly because “weekly” was the way we’d always done it and nobody seemed interested in changing it. Yes, it was explicitly weekly. The “core” members had known each other for anywhere from 3-5 years, but that was mostly in the context of the meetup (with a few exceptions). That’s changed significantly—we (including the newer members) spend much more time together socially outside of the context of the meetups now than we used to.
Thanks—I remember finding your post interesting the first time I read it. This time I put it in Evernote so that I actually remember to try some things out.
One-Year Anniversary Retrospective—Los Angeles
Thanks, I’ll keep that in mind for future events.
You do gesture at it with “maximum amount of harm”, but the specific framing I don’t quite see expressed here is this:
While a blackmailer may be revealing something “true”, the net effect (even if not “maximized” by the blackmailer) is often disproportionate to what one might desire. To give an example, a blackmailer may threaten to reveal that their target has a non-standard sexual orientation. In many parts of the world, the harm caused by this is considerably greater than the (utilitarian) “optimal” amount—in this case, zero. This is a function of not only the blackmailer’s attempt at optimizing their long-term strategy, but also of how people/society react to certain kinds of information. Unfortunately this is mostly an object-level argument (that society reacts inappropriately in predictable ways to some things), but it seems relevant.