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Patrick Collison's Questions

374 points by apsec112 6y ago

foolinaround 6y ago
One common answer for many questions comparing past to present : "More regulations" This is not necessarily a bad thing, but often it is becoming a nightmare of labyrinthine proportions to navigate, which hinders new entrants.
- xoxoy 6y ago
  huh? there’s plenty of colleges to choose from and yet costs go up every year. to me it seems like a distortion caused by a Federal Gov that guarantees payment to universities in the form of federally backed student loans.
  - peacefulhat 6y ago
    Subsidized corn is not rapidly and consistently increasing in price.
    - grandmczeb 6y ago
      I don’t necessarily buy the idea that student loans are driving price increases, but there’s a tangible difference between subsidizing producers versus consumers (corn subsidies are generally the former, student loans are the latter).
      - xoxoy 6y ago
        education is a highly inelastic good...couple that with essentially unlimited federally back loans and you get price increases year after year
      - dantheman 6y ago
        If people couldn't get the loans the price wouldn't be that high, people don't have the money to pay it.
    - xoxoy 6y ago
      education is not a commodity in the same sense as corn and it’s much more of an inelastic good than corn the difference between 50k in tuition and expenses and 55k will not change demand a meaningful amount, and universities exploit the fact that education is inelastic and the money is coming from a guaranteed source regardless of the student’s ability to pay upfront.
    - dragonwriter 6y ago
      The reason for the subsidies is to support farmers by offsetting what would otherwise be price decreases, so...
    - donw 6y ago
      Corn is an example of subsidized supply. Government money increases the supply of corn, and drives the price down. Hence, corn, and products derived from it -- high-fructose corn syrup (HFCS), corn-fed beef, Nu Metal bands, etc -- are cheaper. College is an example of subsidized demand. Government money increases the number of prospective students, by lowering the financial barrier to attend university. The result being that the cost of a university education has risen, drastically, while the quality of that education has plummeted.
  - foolinaround 6y ago
    supply/demand you are right, the demand is artificially propped up by the govt. as you stated. However, it is tied to the job market, which is more realistic, and we are starting to see the fallout where many of the colleges will be going out of business.
  - jdkee 6y ago
    Education is now a Veblen good.
    - dredmorbius 6y ago
      I agree that it is presently such. I disagree that it's ever been otherwise.
- josu 6y ago
  Cars and Cellphone service sectors are heavily regulated. Textbooks are not regulated. There is more to it than just "more regulations". Also regulation doesn't necessarily have to come from the government, for example, the Apple App Store is heavily regulated, and yet they have some of the lowest software prices compared to other platforms. In my opinion, competition through trade may have a stronger effect on prices; you can easily buy a TV or a car made in China, but you can't easily attend the University of Shanghai, or be treated in a Hospital in Hong Kong.
  - dantheman 6y ago
    That is a correct definition of regulation - it captures a feedback cycle; but the parent, was clearly meaning government regulation. If customers don't like a product that helps regulate quality, etc...
  - noirbot 6y ago
    Textbooks aren't regulated in the governmental sense (though they are somewhat at the middle/high school level), but there's certainly been more "regulation" in the sense of schools trying to enforce what books are used for what class for their own enrichment.
    - danans 6y ago
      > there's certainly been more "regulation" in the sense of schools trying to enforce what books are used for what class for their own enrichment. That has little bearing on the prices of textbooks. Also a school can't function without textbook standardization. That's hardly the same thing as regulation.
      - Robin_Message 6y ago
        UK schools don't seem to have textbook standardisation in the way the US does, but the schools seem to function fine.
        6y ago
- repsilat 6y ago
  I wonder if it's reasonable to talk about some of these things separately from the rest of the economy. San Francisco can't build a bus lane, but it can build the hell out of some software. (You might argue that our productivity has gone down there too, but I'd say the social impact has never been higher.) Maybe with "hard" infrastructure being a bit old-fashioned, or bogged down in red tape, maybe the entrepreneurial or organising or effective talent moved into other industries? It sounds a little self-congratulatory, so I don't like the idea, but it's hard (for me) to see something like SpaceX as something other than a competent "can do" entrant into a stale old industry. I don't know what lessons we might learn from that, though. Room for small upstart players in industries (especially around government spending) might be one.
apsec112 6y ago
There was a thread on this back in 2018, although I think this page has been updated since then: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18105129 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18105129
eganist 6y ago
> How do people decide to make major life changes? Most days, people don't decide to change their lives in big ways. On a few days, they do. What's special about those days? How much is it about the stimulus versus their own inner state? A recognition of self was what it took for me. Changed my life situation pretty recently for the better after a realization following a personal conversation with a close friend. The realization undermined a lot of my assumptions about how I was living my life, but it took substantial input and questioning from them for me to understand it; it was akin to pulling a thread and unraveling a tapestry, so to speak. Can't say this is true for everyone, but it was for me. tl;dr a bit of both.
- streulpita 6y ago
  Can you elaborate on the "recognition of self" bit?
  - eganist 6y ago
    I'm being deliberately obtuse, but in essence I recognized that I was mentally working around growing in a certain area rather than tackling it head on.
- gorgoiler 6y ago
  This is a very heartening comment to read and I would love to know more, or to receive advice to be pointed in the same direction as you.
nzdhandala 6y ago
Regulations are out of control. We need VERY limited govt. Societies thrive when govt gets out of the way.
ajju 6y ago
“ Is Bloom's "Two Sigma" phenomenon real? If so, what do we do about it? Educational psychologist Benjamin Bloom found that one-on-one tutoring using mastery learning led to a two sigma(!) improvement in student performance. The results were replicated. " Does anyone know if this also true of learning & development in companies? For example sales training or training
- thundergolfer 6y ago
  Out of everything on the page, this grabbed my attention too. This seems to have immediate implications for how even experienced professionals train. I'd like to become much better at math than I am now. Should I be putting a lot of effort into working out a one-on-one tutoring partnership?
  - hectormalot 6y ago
    That, and/or mastery learning. I haven’t read the research, but I hypothesize the focus on ‘mastery in each subtopic before moving to the next’ is what drives results, while 1-1 tutoring is what drives the speed of attaining them.
  - dbcurtis 6y ago
    Why do you think that takes a lot of effort? I suspect it would not be hard to find a tutor at readonable rates. (Speaking as a former home-schooling dad. We used math toturs for 1:1 instruction at various times. )
    - thundergolfer 6y ago
      I'd be looking for a tutor in graduate mathematics, and particularly the subjects that I can most readily apply to my work. In Sydney I don't think there'd be that many available, and it would take time to find the right 'fit'. I don't think you can assume that once a reasonable rate is settled that the partnership would be a success.
      - 6y ago
donw 6y ago
It is interesting that the real cost of medical care and hospital services didn't see any sort of inflection change with the introduction of the ACA. One the key reasons for implementing the ACA -- which I supported, mind you -- was to control rising healthcare costs. Costs might still rise, but the rate of rise should be lower than before. This graph doesn't seem to show that. What am I missing?
- dragonwriter 6y ago
  > It is interesting that the real cost of medical care and hospital services didn't see any sort of inflection change with the introduction of the ACA. No one expected it would. > One the key reasons for implementing the ACA -- which I supported, mind you -- was to control rising healthcare costs. The immediate reason was to address broad consumer affordability, especially for the people that could least afford it and needed it most. Long-term, overall cost containment was a long-term goal, but it wasn't expected to have that effect in the short-term, and the pieces that contribute to that either weren't implemented at all, weren't implemented fully, or weren't maintained. (And, heck, a lot of the other pieces weren't in place long before they too started being chipped away at.) For example, the pieces building on the HIPAA Administrative Simplification provisions designed to by increasing the coverage of transaction standards and doing regular modernization so that incompatible ad hoc approaches wouldn't be needed as extensively were largely unimplemented, with the most important mandated standard operating rules never adopted and the mandated regular (3-year, IIRC) update cycle for the standards and standard operating rules never begun. There are mandated dates in law, but HHS never adopted the required regulations. (That's actually one of the more minor unimplemented cost containment measures, but the one I'm most intimately familiar with because I spent a lot of time those rules were in limbo being involved in planning compliance catch-up and forward looking planning for a component of a state Medicaid system.)
- paxys 6y ago
  The key reason for ACA was to get more people insured. In fact the biggest criticism against it was that it would cost too much. No one expected overall healthcare spending to decrease.
- nugget 6y ago
andrewstuart 6y ago
(I chose to delete this because it's not a sufficiently positive response.)
- CincinnatiMan 6y ago
  Interesting thought but what are you trying to get across?
- sudhirj 6y ago
  There are different questions that we have at each level in Maslow’s pyramid, and HN tends to focus on the last two levels - but that doesn’t mean the questions at the other levels are any less important. There are other site, communities and blogs that cater to people at these levels. A one size fits all solution wouldn’t be good for any of the levels, and it doesn’t mean people are one level are any better or worse than people at others.
- apsec112 6y ago
  "Where will the money come from to get the car fixed?" is a very personal question; answering it well would require knowing a lot about the person asking, and what their life circumstances, talents, resources, and obstacles were. This makes it harder to discuss on HN (or most other Internet sites), since these are very large groups who are mostly strangers, and don't know that much about each other. Questions about economic equality, the cost of housing, career advice, and so on in general are reasonably well represented here, I think.
akirakurusu 6y ago
"Why are so many things so much nicer in Switzerland and Japan?" Figuring out why this is without fully attributing it to culture has been of great fascination to me. It really is mindblowing just how _good_ things are in Japan, perhaps they're just highly optimized for tourism? The cleanliness, the service, the great care people place in doing things and in their work is just amazing. Anyone here have more insights on this question? What are the non-cultural factors which contribute to this phenomenon that seemingly makes Japan an outlier?
- donw 6y ago
  I live in Japan, and have for about a decade. You're bang-on when it comes to culture, but it has nothing to do with being optimized for tourism. Japan is a very conservative country. Change happens slowly here, and Japan does a lot to ensure that people raised here share a common culture, with a strong focus on stability and harmony. To provide some examples: - NHK, the national broadcaster, has several series of popular programs showing life across all of Japan -- rural, urban, suburban, every prefecture. There are also programs showing Japanese people living overseas, and showing how they have integrated into the local culture. There is no "rural vs urban" divide in Japan. - Japanese schools focus heavily on structure and responsibility. Students maintain their classrooms, clean their bathrooms, staff the cafeterias, etc. All of this is under adult supervision, but the kids do the actual work. Discipline is strong as well -- there are real consequences for poor behavior. - Japan follows the Prussian education model. Compulsory schooling ends at 14 (9th grade). From there, you can immediately begin working, go to a trade school, or go to high school. There is also a professional education track separate from university. - There is a strong culture around keeping families whole and raising kids as a whole family in Japan. Often the wife will move back home and live with her family shortly before and after childbirth, and there's a lot of cultural reinforcement there. - Parents are very active in the education of their children, and the locus of responsibility is first on the child, second on the parent. - The Koban system is fantastic. Police live in their communities, and interact with people every day. You never want to end up on the wrong side of the law -- the conviction rate is well north of 90%, and the accused have very few rights here -- but overall, Japanese police are very polite and professional. There are downsides to this -- everything comes with trade-offs -- but it delivers a very stable and safe society.
Anon4Now 6y ago
> Why are certain things getting so much more expensive? > * College textbooks I've always felt that textbook pricing is predatory and should be subject to price gouging laws.
- bumby 6y ago
  I think it was Freakanomics that had an episode about textbook cost. Their idea was it was a disparity between those choosing the textbooks (professors) to those bearing the costs (students). In other words, it is much easier to increase the cost of a product if those bearing the cost don’t have a say.
  - aeternum 6y ago
    I definitely had a few classes in which the professor wrote the text-book which while impressive in some ways also yields a conflict of interest.
    - analog31 6y ago
      Oddly enough, one of my professors wrote textbooks for his classes that he gave to us for the cost of copying them. He was outraged by the price of textbooks.
- ipnon 6y ago
  It's a racket. Universities must use the latest textbooks to remain accredited. This is why syllabi will always list the latest edition of a textbook as the required text (and mentioning that the last edition is sufficient is always done parenthetically). Publishers can fix a few typos, change some example problems, and call it a new edition. Every university will have to recommend the new edition to their students. The students who bought the last edition last year will have to sell their now obsolete textbook for a fraction of the purchasing price. Markets in everything: University textbooks are always priced to be marginally outrageous. If they were to cost something ridiculous like $1,000 a piece, there would be protests and riots on campus. Instead they merely fleece the students for $100 or $200. Enough people pay up that the system is deemed imperfect rather than inherently flawed.
ISL 6y ago
On the Chinese research question: Just wait a decade. In all likelihood, I am permanently departing academia in about a month. The underlying reason is structural -- neither our funding agency nor our institution is willing to yield on a fundamental sticking point that is causing all of our young researchers to leave. I am about to join them. There is literally no path forward. In the decade that I have watched my world-leading research group wither, our Chinese colleagues have expanded their laboratories by 4-5x, appear to be well-resourced, and are poised to lead the world on all fronts within the decade. An excellent colleague of mine, who had done excellent work for US particle-physics experiments, went to China for a high-energy physics faculty interview. On arrival, he was surprised to find that there appeared to be another candidate competing for the position. He did his best, as did the other candidate. As he prepared to depart, he asked whether or not it had been a competition for the open position. The reply? "We had one position, but we liked both of your talks so much, we are extending offers to both of you." There was no matching US offer of which I am aware: he accepted. That essentially never happens these days in the United States. It is a story the likes of which one might have heard from 1950-1970. Chinese physics results are continuing to gain in reliability. Where once we saw quite a bit of copy-catting, Chinese fundamental science research is beginning to transition into regularly breaking new ground. Wait a decade. We should welcome this development with open arms. A billion smart people, with equal potential, should be able to turn out roughly three times as much research as the 0.34 billion smart people in the US. We can encourage that research at the same time that we must stand against the regime's attacks on democracy in Hong Kong, the atrocities occurring in Xinjiang, their surveillance state, threatening the independence of Taiwan, enabling North Korea, and more. ( The US has dirty laundry, too: Our President is incompetent. Vote! )
- apsec112 6y ago
  If academia is structured the same way in China as it is in the US, that situation won't be sustainable for long there, either. If each professor produces ten new PhDs, the only way for them to all find academic jobs is through very rapid growth in faculty size, which can't be sustained for that long.
  - ISL 6y ago
pchristensen 6y ago
"Why are certain things getting so much more expensive?" That list is pretty much rank ordered by the amount of non-substitutable human labor involved per unit. Everything in red is a pretty universal need (health, education, child care, housing, food), while the blues are mostly wants. So we want medical care, but that requires a lot of labor, and each of those workers requires housing, but that's supply constrained in much of the country, and they have be educated, but college cost is rising, and their employees need child care, and the child care workers need to go to the doctor ... If there was a way to reduce the cost of living (my hobby horse is dramatically increasing the amount of by-right housing permitted to be built in an area), then that would ripple through all of these industries. High and increasing costs and wages make labor-intensive industries much more expensive by comparison.
- hn_throwaway_99 6y ago
  The answer linked to in Collison's question, https://medium.com/@arnoldkling/what-gets-expensive-and-why-33bf4b891be2 https://medium.com/@arnoldkling/what-gets-expensive-and-why-... , is really insightful and interesting in my opinion and goes to a deep level of analysis.
  - bohemian99 6y ago
    Exactly- people don't/can't really comparison shop when it comes to medical procedures. They don't know how good their doctors are at it, this is all unpublished information. Similarly college textbooks- if your professors assigns work from their book, then you need that book. You can't competitively shop on that. As the response points out, all of these groups and then backed by accreditation systems to limit new entrants.
    - dalbasal 6y ago
      Starting from Patrick's question, and working through the list... It suggests that some of our market-thinking has been off mark. Free-market economic policies have tended to define things in terms of market "freeness." How much intervention, etc. This is commonly how we think politically, because it relates directly to policies. The way these affect reality is through the market structures themselves. We can regulate or deregulate barber shops and restaurants... but within wide margins they are likely to remain pretty good market structure. Lots of choice, competition, churn, etc. Hospital services or college tuition are structurally different. If we are "laissez faire" with hospitals, and have heavy handed regulation for restaurants... Restaurants would still behave like a more free market, just because of innate structure. It would take a truly byzantine accreditation system to make restaurants look like textbooks or pharmaceutical drugs. Someone would literally have to assign you a dinner reservation.
lisper 6y ago
> Why do there seem to be more examples of rapidly-completed major projects in the past than the present? Different risk postures. If you're willing to sacrifice a few lives and limbs and not worry about the disposition of toxic waste, you can get things done just as fast today as yesterday.
thundergolfer 6y ago
P Collison comes across pretty well in his 'thinking in public' type stuff. The questions are all pretty interesting and important, or at least important to the class of society that he occupies.
twoodfin 6y ago
For the first chart/question it’s important to distinguish cost from spending. For example, “food and beverage”: Americans are (at least pre-Covid) eating out a lot more than they were 20 or 30 years ago, so that category presumably now covers a very different basket of goods than in the past, even if they add up to roughly the same number of calories.
swyx 6y ago
i wonder what pc thinks of https://wtfhappenedin1971.com/ https://wtfhappenedin1971.com/ - is this a cherrypicked statistical fluke or is this an actually important long term economic trend worth exploring?
- counter_point 6y ago
  One thing I have found about HN in general is a refusal to ponder the meaning of money itself. 1 Why is a small amount of inflation considered a "good thing"? In just one generation, inflation targets reduce the purchasing power by nearly 50%. What if you knew that assumption lead to all kinds of terrible outcomes, but they only surfaced after 7-8 election cycles? 2 Why is a gold standard considered impractical? After all, today, the technology actually exists to at least make this a worthwhile pursuit (that is, a digital gold standard which doesn't involve the actual movement of physical gold) 3 Why is there so little discussion on the "amount of currency units your central government printed this year"? I find it remarkable, and somewhat amusing frankly, that there could be so many intelligent people on a forum (compared to the average online forum) and how few of these folks have asked themselves this question. 4 Why is there so little discussion on the possibility of currency deflation being a very good thing for the people on the margins of society? It certainly doesn't help that 99% of the folks who ask these questions happen to be both male and white, which just makes people auto-associate these ideas with racism, privilege etc. I don't think the core ideas themselves have been given sufficient thought for a few decades. And as for Patrick Collison, I am willing to bet he hasn't read a single book written by Thomas Sowell (whose books will at the very least force you to ask these questions, even if you might come to different conclusions to others who read his books).
  - SpicyLemonZest 6y ago
    It’s very challenging to ponder these questions in a public forum, because so many people hold uninformed or nonsensical views on them. Whenever I’ve tried to discuss them, I’ve had to fight off very basic misunderstandings like: * The Fed prints money by giving free gifts to banks. That is, QE for $500 billion means banks are $500 billion richer. * The first person to get a new dollar has an unfair advantage, since they can spend it before the rest of the economy knows about the extra dollar. * Inflation is a deterministic function of the money supply. There wouldn’t be inflation if we didn’t create more money. I’m sure you understand the problems here, and I certainly don’t hate educating people about them. But it’s hard to have a deep discussion punctuated by constant breaks into monetary theory 101.
zuhayeer 6y ago
I find the replacement rate question really interesting. Is there an aligned way we can allow companies to decay once they have stalled in innovation? What do we do about companies that have reached a point of monopolistic advantage but provide no real new innovation (PG&E comes to mind)? In some cases like Internet access, is competition the only driver of affordability or do we eventually have to find a way to regulate pricing on things that evolve to become general public needs. This question likely comes up a lot in healthcare and pharma, but I'm not sure there's a good answer. It's sort of muddled in between providing enough incentive to creators to start things and ensuring that once things do get created, that privatized commercial interest doesn't work to remove the very value it helped create (which happens when the company stops innovating).
- aeternum 6y ago
  I believe regulation is often the cause rather than the solution to stalled innovation. If you look at areas where innovation has stalled, high barriers to entry for new companies is typically a primary cause and in many cases regulations contribute to that barrier. We should make it a goal to lower those barriers and encourage competition wherever possible. NASA's commercial crew program is one example of this. Another is how Illinois forced their electric companies to open access to the power lines, fostering healthy competition.
jariel 6y ago
Some of these are odd questions. "How do we help more experimental cities get started? It seems that the returns to entrepreneurialism in cities remain high: Hong Kong, Singapore, Dubai, and others, " ??? HK and to a lesser extent Singapore are some of the most inegalitarian places in the world, that thrive because they have established Western commercial practices in a sea of otherwise more obvious corruption. There is a very dark underbelly to HK. Dubai is an Oil Rich state, with a fairly ruthless totalitarian leadership wherein the pay Indian workers 10's of cents an hour in a form of indentured servitude. An Arab Dubai resident could kill one of these workers and probably get away with it. They also are nice places for rich people to hide their money. There are no mysteries here. Dubai is the 'anti civilisation' - maybe one of he worst examples of 'what to build'. As for 'why some things are more expensive'? Some things are commodities, some are not, some things have price inelasticity, some do not. Why was the P43 made in a few months? Because WW2 planes are very simple, and it was during war, and we didn't care about safety back in the day. 'Crash tests' for cars? We didn't even wear seat belts. No emissions standards. etc.. Most of today's projects are much more complex. It takes government 10 years to do anything because those systems are complicated, we have strong government unions, and a kind of civic dysfunction in many places. The GDP is not consistent - it just looks like that in the chart. The GDP naturally, is not going to change that much year over year - because we are largely engaged in the same patters of activity. But the rate of growth swings a lot. There is no mystery to solve here.
jonny_eh 6y ago
> Why is US GDP growth so weirdly constant? Not anymore! [1] [1] https://www.npr.org/sections/coronavirus-live-updates/2020/07/30/896714437/3-months-of-hell-u-s-economys-worst-quarter-ever https://www.npr.org/sections/coronavirus-live-updates/2020/0...
paxys 6y ago
The infrastructure one really stands out to me, and I'm always astounded by it. Adding yet another example - The Golden Gate Bridge was built in 4 years for $1.6 billion (inflation adjusted), under budget and ahead of schedule. 11 workers died during construction, a safety record matching or surpassing most modern projects. In contrast, a project to install suicide nets around the bridge has been under development for 12 years. It was recently delayed for another 2 years, and is estimated to cost ~$250 million. Where/when did we go wrong, and how do we fix it?
- calinet6 6y ago
  I would bet it’s tied to the neglect of work in both real wages and respect for workers. We no longer take pride in work. We pay people less and make them compete for the mere privilege of holding a job. Then, we tell them what to do, disrespecting their intelligence and autonomy and ability to make something they can be proud of. For the brilliance of this strategy, we pay leaders ten times more than we did before, and even more when they fail and need to be replaced—surely installing a new CEO is the answer. It is no surprise at all. Deming tried to lay it out for us, but no one really listened.
  - graeme 6y ago
    The issue might actually be the opposite. It would probably cost too much to employ the number of bridgeworkers that were employed for the Golden Gate Bridge. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baumol's_cost_disease https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baumol's_cost_disease This can’t be a complete explanation though as other places can still build things.
  - zachware 6y ago
    It's entirely possible that you are right except for construction and civil project jobs. I've built several large-scale buildings and developments at urban scale in California and Nevada, both heavy heavy union states. I can't point to the systemic problem leading to the delays but I can tell you that any job even tangentially related to construction requires high wage labor. This is universally true for civic projects. Some of those unions (e.g. electrical workers, carpenters) provide exceptional training services for apprentices. Others (e.g. the people holding the stop signs at highway construction sites) are mostly strong-arm groups. These groups could be causing delays and from personal experience I can tell you they do, sometimes. But overall I can certainly say that the point you made here is not the reason why projects are delayed.
keiferski 6y ago
What does religion cause? There has been considerable philosophical work on this topic. Contemporary scientific studies (such as the ones in the link) are not particularly useful here, as they are too trapped in the current societal context to understand deeper cultural trends. Religion as a word is so broad as to basically be meaningless. Separating religion from culture or history is a modern legacy of academic and industrial specialization. In any case, some reading suggestions, if you're interested in this topic. - Max Weber. Pretty much the founder of modern social science, particularly with regards to religion. He originated the idea of “The Protestant Work Ethic” and argues that specific features of Protestantism lead to market capitalism arising in Northern Europe, rather than in India or China. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Protestant_Ethic_and_the_Spirit_of_Capitalism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Protestant_Ethic_and_the_S... - Charles Taylor, A Secular Age. This book really changed the way I think about the modern world and what I'll call "the preference for scientistic, humanistic atheism". Taylor essentially argues that modern secularity is not merely the subtraction of religious belief, but a new historical situation where religious beliefs are co-existent both with each other and with immanent beliefs (entirely focused in the world.) This book is huge, so I recommend starting with How Not to Be Secular by James K. A. Smith, as it's a condensed summary of Taylor's book. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Secular_Age https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Secular_Age https://www.amazon.com/How-Not-Be-Secular-Reading/dp/0802867618 https://www.amazon.com/How-Not-Be-Secular-Reading/dp/0802867... - Friedrich Nietzsche. A philosopher quite interested in this problem. His main goal was to trace the development of moral ideas and subsequently create new, healthier (to him) ones. Too many books to list, but I recommend The Genealogy of Morality and Beyond Good and Evil. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/On_the_Genealogy_of_Morality https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/On_the_Genealogy_of_Morality https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beyond_Good_and_Evil https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beyond_Good_and_Evil
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
hyperpallium2 6y ago
Is Bloom's "Two Sigma" phenomenon real? If so, what do we do about it? "the average tutored student was above 98% of the students in the control class"[1] As a tutor, my goal was to identify gaps and misunderstandings. Consider: how can you give a driver helpful directions if you don't know where they are? As a student, I noticed that teachers are routinely ambiguous in ways they cannot understand. And mostly, these alternative interpretations work... mostly. So when they cause problems many layers later, the learner can see no clues to the cause. But an attentive tutor can. Subtle gaps and misunderstanding have an outsize effect, and maybe could account for 2σ? OTOH teachers accidentally trained me to disentangle ambiguity, and that is a valuable real-world skill. The mentor relationship has magic in it and I remember the moment I learnt certain things. So maybe social aspects contribute too, as wiki suggests. What to do? Like mandatory military service, mandatory tutoring service. We appear to be wasting obscene quanities of human capital. Imagine the economic productivity unleashed by a more fully realized workforce. PS did pc receive one-on-one tutoring? Intelligent parents often tutor their children, conferring this outsize headstart. https://wikipedia.org/wiki/Bloom%27s_2_sigma_problem https://wikipedia.org/wiki/Bloom%27s_2_sigma_problem
- paxys 6y ago
  I remember Salman Khan (of Khan Academy) talking about this a few years ago. He believed that the current accepted method of teaching - students attending lectures and sitting in classrooms getting knowledge from teachers, then later doing homework alone trying to apply it - needs to be inverted. Lectures, presentations, textbooks can all be online and automated. Teaching resources, limited as they are, are much better spent helping students specifically when they are stuck and need more personalized help. Of course this brings us to the more fundamental question - are schools more for learning or daycare?
  - jodrellblank 6y ago
    Most online forums have an "RTFM" or FAQ approach to beginners. Reddit's LearnPython sub has a ton of "explain OOP/Recursion/debug my beginner code/restart game/etc." style questions, and while there is a FAQ, it's not enforced very hard. Almost the opposite of StackOverflow. As a result, there are a huge number of people learning themselves by explaining to other people, practising by solving other people's problems, and answering the beginner questions over and over. I think things like that have got to be part of the future of learning online, instead of dumping what you know into a FAQ and pulling the ladder up after you, closing the community from outsiders.
nazgulnarsil 6y ago
A few of interest to me: 1. Is steelmanned buddhism wrong in important ways? Can some sort of minimal set of claims version of buddhism even be steelmanned consistently? 2. The joint-stock corporation appears to be the most scalable coordination tech ever invented. What is the embedding space of the things that make it possible and what else is in the space? 3. Does most progress come from pairs of people in high bandwidth collaboration? How could we test this and how could we scale the matching problem implied? If this is true why aren't there more famously successful twins? (also mentioned by Gwern) 4. Are dramatically better matching algorithms possible (lemon markets, costly signal bandwidth saturation)? Ones good enough that they would encourage more geographic mobility? 5. What's the natural embedding space of 'values'? If discovered and rendered tractable would this solve problems with our current attempts at formalization (VNM, Arrow's impossibility, various decision theory gotchas etc)? 6. Why are all the general purpose 'how to navigate life' resources so poor in quality? (also mentioned by Patrick) 7. Does DNA (and RNA?) transcription error rate emerge as a natural kind in large scale biological prediction? Does this create natural limits on malleability of biological systems? 8. Is there low hanging fruit in CNS imaging? Would this directly lead to dramatically better mental health interventions? 9. Can research stagnation be undermined by funding more research review enabling more cross collaborative legibility of researchers into each other's work?
- leobabauta 6y ago
  Can you say more about the steelmanned buddhism questions? I'm interested but not clear on what you're pointing to with the term "steelmanned buddhism" or what important ways you think it might be wrong about. Edit: Just to clarify, I'm familiar with the idea of steelmanning, but not what set of buddhist ideas you're pointing to with the term "steelmanned buddhism".
jacquesm 6y ago
Lovely list. As for real estate and housing prices: interest rates are ridiculously low, once you account for that the price increase from the 1970's to today makes really good sense. Corrected for inflation it is now much cheaper to own rather than to rent real estate even though the sticker price of the houses went up. Rents then predictably increased because houses/apartments that got bought reduced the supply available for renting out. Especially in the bigger cities where the economy is a bit better rents have skyrocketed. But the cost of owning a house as a function of take home pay has dropped. The same house that cost my parents a ridiculously high mortgage (10% was pretty normal in the 70's here) can now be had for a fraction of the inflation adjusted wages today. Even though the on-paper value of the house is roughly 10x what it cost back then. To fix the rental market a lot of new housing would have to be built, but then you run into zoning issues, transportation issues, the price of land and other limitations that make it hard to expand affordable housing for cities. Historically institutional investors (for instance: pension funds) would fund these developments but since they now have shorter time horizons for their ROI and want higher returns they are not as interested as they used to be to pick this up. This problem will not resolve easily or even at all as long as people are willing to pay high rents and the market is as restricted as it is I would expect rents to continue to go up. Even an increase in interest will likely not return all that many houses to the rental market because that would require the sticker price of houses to come down, which hardly even happens. Even in the 2009 financial crises housing prices reacted only in a limited way: people had bought in at a certain price level and could not let go of their properties without ending up with a debt to the bank, a situation best avoided.
totetsu 6y ago
on "What's the right way to understand and model personality?" Personality is an outdated concept, personality types triply so. There is no fundamental stability of personality, just behavior context. Christian Miller - The character gap https://philosophybites.com/2019/02/christian-miller-on-the-character-gap.html https://philosophybites.com/2019/02/christian-miller-on-the-... https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2016/06/24/481859662/invisibilia-is-your-personality-fixed-or-can-you-change-who-you-are https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2016/06/24/4818596... Robert Sapolsky - Introduction to Human Behavioral Biology https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NNnIGh9g6fA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NNnIGh9g6fA
- hcta 6y ago
  If you taboo the word 'personality', the underlying question here is still interesting. Do different people in the "exact same" situation always behave /identically/? (Obviously not.) What are the most informative features of the person explaining the divergence in response?
  - totetsu 6y ago
    Christian Miller is arguing that while we do have phycological character traits and motivations, that persist between situations, how we actually behave is a complex interaction between these and our contexts. Divergence can maybe be explained as much by contexts as by characteristics. If I were to meet someone who works a similar job, has a similar social and familia situation, but divergent motivations, I might have more in common with them than I would have if I met the university student version of myself.
dalbasal 6y ago
What great questions. I've had pub debates about 3/5 of these over the last year. Reminds me a lot of pg during his prolific periods. What makes a lot of these interesting is that most have bad answers. Some (eg the inflation question) have answers were sustainable 10-20 years ago, but grew out of them. Some have cliched or even ideological answers. Again, time has changed the strength of these answers. Time to re-ask and re-answer. Some (eg progress in science) have no obvious or common answer, but are commonly discussed at a smaller scale. Academic incentives, publishing & such are commonly discussed, but no ways forward seem to emerge.. even rhetorically. In any case, I think the first one (inflation by sector) hits squarely at a major blindspot in most economic thinking. I think it's responsible for a lot of the divergent views of economists (relying on measurements) and non economists relying on intuition. Your answer to this question may relate to GDP growth consistency. Again, I feel this is a blindspot in most theoretical economics. One of Thomas Picketty's controversy bombshells was treating GDP growth and rate-of-return (r>g) as basically constant. Almost all other theories (even Marx) treat these as determined by everything else in the theory. All that doesn't seem consistent with consistency, as patrick points out. I would have also asked, "what is the successor to the university" since several of these questions could be answered if you had an answer to that. It's a loaded form of a question, but other questions take that form. How you load questions can be the most important thing. "What's the successor to the scientific paper and the scientific journal?" is loaded in an opposite way to "* How do we help more experimental cities get started?*" I'm not saying questions shouldn't be loaded, just that they should be loaded carefully. Great read. i will come back for the links.
dalbasal 6y ago
I like the way "Is Bloom's "Two Sigma" phenomenon real? If so, what do we do about it?" is loaded. Touches on several "questions" in the vein of this article. One load is "why don't we know this with more certainty?" It's a useful thing to know. What is achievable? What's the bar? How good could education be, regardless of resources and other limitations. If true, that can be our 100% marker for instructional effectiveness. From there, we cold say that average school instruction is 10% effective or 60% effective. Realistically, this needs to be tackled with a lot of force to make progress. Change is likely inconvenient, in a real world environment with limited resources. Maybe school should be 3 hrs per day, not 8. In any case, I think it's notable that high-end private education, which has more resources available, have not pursued these kind of goals any more than public education.
- cloogshicer 6y ago
  There's an assumption in this line of thinking which I think is unlikely to be true: that this stuff is measurable, at least in principle. I think 'instructional effectiveness' can't ever be clearly and unambiguously defined, much less measured. As with anything that involves people. In my experience, most attempts to do so only cause more harm than good.
  - dalbasal 6y ago
    There are different kinds of measurable, and the purpose of the measure is important. Measuring for the purpose of management (eg creating incentives for teachers and schools), measuring for the purpose of most academic publishing, etc. Each have their own pitfalls, and I agree with you on these. That said... there is clearly such a thing as better and worse instruction. Where the 2-sigma claim gets interesting is scale. We're not concerned with marginal differences (management measures) and we're not concerned with legibly identifiable causal relationships (academic publishing). We're just concerned with establishing a high watermark. The simple measures (eg testing) we have, work fine for that... in the context of math, reading/writing, foreign language, etc. Stuff that's easy to test for, and assuming we're only interested in big differences. Two sigma implies that within 1 year of instruction, the two sigma group will have progressed by several years. 12th grade math level by grade 10. This doesn't have to be achievable by every teacher, it just has to be achievable at the high end.. assuming a random sample of students. Agreed though.. we have a history of insisting that the unmeasurable be measured... and its a very common, long term failure mode. more harm than good. I'm not suggesting implementing anything, let alone implementing anything using measures. Just setting that watermark, so we know what awesome looks like.
known 6y ago
Social ills in Japan https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-34615972 https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-34615972
anonu 6y ago
> Why don't we build nice neighborhoods any more? We might, we just dont know that we are building them. Assuming today's nice neighborhoods are the old ones, I would argue that they escaped a period of modernization. I think we look back at our recent creations and always think about how we can tear them down and rebuild. The neighborhoods that escape this cycle of "tear down and rebuild" and luckily slip into the status of "vintage charm" suddenly hold more caché and may even get protected status by their city or municipality.
huevosabio 6y ago
> Why are certain things getting so much more expensive? Alex Tabarrok argues that this is largely do to Baumol cost disease [0]: "rise of salaries in jobs that have experienced no or low increase of labor productivity, in response to rising salaries in other jobs that have experienced higher labor productivity growth". He has a book about it [1] This aligns well with Patrick's graph: healthcare, college, childcare are all labor intensive and have seen little to no productivity increase in the last 23 years. The story for housing is different, though. We are consistently concentrating economic opportunity in the urban centers. However, through NIMBYism, we have made it very difficult to build new housing. The "surprising" result: very expensive housing. Relatedly, Matt Rognlie found out [2] that the increase in the capital share of income since 1970, as noticed by Piketty, can be mostly explained by the housing sector. The solution to both, in my view, are related. We need to reduce barriers for labor movement. We can reduce labor cost by liberalizing immigration to the USA and by liberalizing (re-zoning) and incentivizing (via Land Value Taxation) housing production within the main US urban areas. > Why do there seem to be more examples of rapidly-completed major projects in the past than the present? My suspicion is institutional ossification in the USA. With time we accumulate rules / regulations / procedures that increase the complexity of the task at hand. Eventually, the marginal procedure increases complexity such that our competence is exceeded, making the task impossible. I think the solution is related to his other question "How do you ensure an adequate replacement rate in systems that have no natural way to die?". We should have a way to replace these institutions. Market forces are a great way to do so for private endeavors, startups being the prime example. But for public institutions, it is less clear what could be the proper approach. If there was a way to have states compete for citizens in a non-violent way, that may help. > Why don't we build nice neighborhoods any more? I think it is a mixture of i) survivorship bias (as he suggests), ii) car-oriented development (as he suggests), and iii) the fact that attractive neighborhoods have an organic feel to them that only time can give. Thus, in the car-era we built new neighborhoods but they were car-oriented so they never aged into nice, walking neighborhoods. We are trying to rectify that with new walking-oriented developments, but they have a synthetic feel to them that will only go away with time. > What's going on with infrastructure? I would say this is a combination of the Baumol cost disease and the ossification of our institutions (both mentioned above). [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baumol%27s_cost_disease https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baumol%27s_cost_disease [1] https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/46013009-why-are-the-prices-so-damn-high https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/46013009-why-are-the-pri... [2] https://www.brookings.edu/wp-content/uploads/2016/07/2015a_rognlie.pdf https://www.brookings.edu/wp-content/uploads/2016/07/2015a_r...
CyberRabbi 6y ago
The answer to every question is either “because of smart and/or virtuous people” or “because of Stupid and/or immoral people” Japan’s cleanliness, healthcare costs, etc
cryptica 6y ago
> Why do there seem to be more examples of rapidly-completed major projects in the past than the present? Because we have been shifting responsibility away from individuals who have the best knowledge to complete a task (I.e. engineers) towards managers. In software development, this can be seen by an increased focus on frameworks, statically typed languages, 100% test coverage, CI pipelines, code analysis tools; all designed to relieve developers from a sense of responsibility and ownership over the code and to give managers extra visibility. > Why is US GDP growth so weirdly constant? Because there is no growth. What looks like growth is just inflation of the dollar relative to the value of goods and services which underlie the GDP calculation. > How do you ensure an adequate replacement rate in systems that have no natural way to die? Abolish the Federal Reserve, introduce UBI. Trickle-up economics will bring back the free market because companies will compete to actually satisfy people instead of competing to manipulate them at the behest of their institutional paymasters. > How do we help more experimental cities get started? This is an artificial concept which does not align with free market dynamics. Does the market need experimental cities to begin with? > How do people decide to make major life changes? When they become deeply unhappy with their current situation. > Could there be more good blogs? Only in a free market. If visitor numbers are being shaped and suppressed by algorithms, there will not be any good blogs. It will devolve to mindless hedonistic garbage. > Why are programming environments still so primitive? Because simple tooling is essential. Complex programming environments will create more reliance on tools which will pull back the sense of responsibility from developers which will make them produce inferior work. No amount of tooling can make a developer care more about the work; the more you automate a developer's work, the less they will feel as if it is their own work and the less they will care. No tool cannot ever compensate for lack of care. > What does religion cause? It's a very positive force. People need to share ideals related to altruism and fairness in order to allow social contracts to remain coherent. People need to believe that if they do nice things for others, they will be rewarded with eternal life. Without this, most people will work only in their own self-interest and the whole capitalist system, which is rooted in the exploitation of the altruism of others, won't work. Pervasive, single-minded self-interest is not compatible with capitalism. Capitalism needs somebody altruistic to exploit; religious people, young people, etc... When capitalism runs out of altruists, it runs out of fuel. > What influences when people act in accordance with their self-interest and when they don't? People always act in accordance with their self interest or in the interest of their kin. If they think otherwise, they're lying to themselves.
Balgair 6y ago
> Why is there no canon for life's most important questions? There is! Well, sorta, but a very good attempt at least: Mortimer J. Adler's Great Works of the Western World, 1965 (a bit dated by now). It's the supra-compilation of 'western' thought, and the works in there do come close to a canon for the most important questions in life. That list of questions does need to be formalized first, unlike, say Electromagnetism; you're dealing with more than just charged particles after all. Still, the best thing about Adler's work was the Syntopicon: a 'quick' reference of the great works based on ~100 topics (Astronomy, God, Justice, Family, Dialectic, etc.). Each of those topics was further subdivided into specific areas (The nature of Jesus' human form, Ellipses, Jurisprudence of Judges, etc.). It's a huge work. Most critically, these specific areas listed a where you could find the relating pages in the great works. For example: Under the topic of 'Mind' and the subtopic of 'The condition of the human mind when the soul is separate from the body', you have a listing for 'GIBBON: Decline and Fall, 233d' and a lot of other listings too. It's not exactly what the question asks, but it is as good a starting point as I think you can get shipped to your door. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Books_of_the_Western_World https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Books_of_the_Western_Wor... https://www.logos.com/product/55052/great-books-of-the-western-world https://www.logos.com/product/55052/great-books-of-the-weste... (pricey, but the search feature is essential)
nojvek 6y ago
The question about healthcare, infrastructure, college, housing is a major one. The explanation I’ve come up with is that they aren’t machine scalable problems and that the barrier to entry is so high that existing incumbents have little incentive to do “more with less $” when due to increased demand they are racking in billions. Matt Stroller’s BIG newsletter goes deep into the little monopolies and consolidation of markets by private equity. There’s also insurance and loans that comes into play. You can charge obscene amounts of money when it’s other people’s money. In a complex system, accountability is hard, so it’s ripe for rent seeking and corruption by the few people who are the bottleneck.
raldi 6y ago
> Sublime's built-in ⌘-T works better than every third-party Emacs package. What's this about? Google's not helping.
jl2718 6y ago
Quick answers just for fun: 1. Technological abundance vs regulated scarcity 2. Complexity outpacing human understanding. Plus regulation/approvals. 3. Because the FOMC controls it. 4. Reduce legal barriers to entry. 5. Reduce central control. 6. Risk minimization. 7. Trust by common identity. 8. Maybe. Pace tracking classes. 9. Money is cheap enough now for investors to fund most science for profit. 10. No programming. AI queries (e.g. “Her”) 11. Audiobooks 12. Arxiv / citation ranking 13. No. Too easy to ignore ads on text. 14. Nobody’s paying for IDEs anymore. 15. See #7. 16. See #15. 17. See #7. 18. Political vs scientific incentives. 19. contra to #7. 20. See #7. 21. It’s more lucrative to fail than to succeed. 22. I’ve heard it was due to mass burning by humans. Fire/regrowth fixes more carbon than it releases.
simonebrunozzi 6y ago
In relation to the Golden Gate Bridge construction, it was mostly financed by the son of Italian immigrants turner banker, Giannini; his bank also lent to people devastated by the 1906 earthquake in San Francisco. The "Bank of Italy" changed its name to "Bank of America" [0]. From the article linked at the bottom of my comment [0]: > A. P. Giannini, President of Bank of America, was legendary for his dedication to the development of the San Francisco region. A native of San Jose with a blue-collar background, Giannini believed that banks should lend more freely to working-class people, whom he believed to be fiscally responsible. Following the 1906 earthquake that destroyed much of San Francisco, most banks closed up shop, but Giannini set up a makeshift desk and issued credit "on a handshake and a signature" to families and small businesses in immediate, desperate need. His investments built a foundation for San Francisco's economic recovery. Also, it's ironic that A.P. Giannini was what we would call today a "college dropout", which is particularly "cool" and "popular" in the San Francisco Bay Area. From [1]: > Giannini attended Heald College but realized he could do better in business than at school. In 1885, he dropped out and took a full-time position as a produce broker for L. Scatena & Co. [0]: https://about.bankofamerica.com/en-us/our-story/building-the-most-photographed-bridge.html https://about.bankofamerica.com/en-us/our-story/building-the... [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amadeo_Giannini https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amadeo_Giannini

374 points by apsec112 6y ago

One common answer for many questions comparing past to present : "More regulations" This is not necessarily a bad thing, but often it is becoming a nightmare of labyrinthine proportions to navigate, which hinders new entrants.

xoxoy 6y ago
huh? there’s plenty of colleges to choose from and yet costs go up every year. to me it seems like a distortion caused by a Federal Gov that guarantees payment to universities in the form of federally backed student loans.
- peacefulhat 6y ago
  Subsidized corn is not rapidly and consistently increasing in price.
  - grandmczeb 6y ago
    I don’t necessarily buy the idea that student loans are driving price increases, but there’s a tangible difference between subsidizing producers versus consumers (corn subsidies are generally the former, student loans are the latter).
    - xoxoy 6y ago
      education is a highly inelastic good...couple that with essentially unlimited federally back loans and you get price increases year after year
    - dantheman 6y ago
      If people couldn't get the loans the price wouldn't be that high, people don't have the money to pay it.
  - xoxoy 6y ago
    education is not a commodity in the same sense as corn and it’s much more of an inelastic good than corn the difference between 50k in tuition and expenses and 55k will not change demand a meaningful amount, and universities exploit the fact that education is inelastic and the money is coming from a guaranteed source regardless of the student’s ability to pay upfront.
  - dragonwriter 6y ago
    The reason for the subsidies is to support farmers by offsetting what would otherwise be price decreases, so...
  - donw 6y ago
    Corn is an example of subsidized supply. Government money increases the supply of corn, and drives the price down. Hence, corn, and products derived from it -- high-fructose corn syrup (HFCS), corn-fed beef, Nu Metal bands, etc -- are cheaper. College is an example of subsidized demand. Government money increases the number of prospective students, by lowering the financial barrier to attend university. The result being that the cost of a university education has risen, drastically, while the quality of that education has plummeted.
- foolinaround 6y ago
  supply/demand you are right, the demand is artificially propped up by the govt. as you stated. However, it is tied to the job market, which is more realistic, and we are starting to see the fallout where many of the colleges will be going out of business.
- jdkee 6y ago
  Education is now a Veblen good.
  - dredmorbius 6y ago
    I agree that it is presently such. I disagree that it's ever been otherwise.
josu 6y ago
Cars and Cellphone service sectors are heavily regulated. Textbooks are not regulated. There is more to it than just "more regulations". Also regulation doesn't necessarily have to come from the government, for example, the Apple App Store is heavily regulated, and yet they have some of the lowest software prices compared to other platforms. In my opinion, competition through trade may have a stronger effect on prices; you can easily buy a TV or a car made in China, but you can't easily attend the University of Shanghai, or be treated in a Hospital in Hong Kong.
- dantheman 6y ago
  That is a correct definition of regulation - it captures a feedback cycle; but the parent, was clearly meaning government regulation. If customers don't like a product that helps regulate quality, etc...
- noirbot 6y ago
  Textbooks aren't regulated in the governmental sense (though they are somewhat at the middle/high school level), but there's certainly been more "regulation" in the sense of schools trying to enforce what books are used for what class for their own enrichment.
  - danans 6y ago
    > there's certainly been more "regulation" in the sense of schools trying to enforce what books are used for what class for their own enrichment. That has little bearing on the prices of textbooks. Also a school can't function without textbook standardization. That's hardly the same thing as regulation.
    - Robin_Message 6y ago
      UK schools don't seem to have textbook standardisation in the way the US does, but the schools seem to function fine.
      - 6y ago
repsilat 6y ago
I wonder if it's reasonable to talk about some of these things separately from the rest of the economy. San Francisco can't build a bus lane, but it can build the hell out of some software. (You might argue that our productivity has gone down there too, but I'd say the social impact has never been higher.) Maybe with "hard" infrastructure being a bit old-fashioned, or bogged down in red tape, maybe the entrepreneurial or organising or effective talent moved into other industries? It sounds a little self-congratulatory, so I don't like the idea, but it's hard (for me) to see something like SpaceX as something other than a competent "can do" entrant into a stale old industry. I don't know what lessons we might learn from that, though. Room for small upstart players in industries (especially around government spending) might be one.

apsec112 6y ago

There was a thread on this back in 2018, although I think this page has been updated since then: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18105129 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18105129

eganist 6y ago

> How do people decide to make major life changes? Most days, people don't decide to change their lives in big ways. On a few days, they do. What's special about those days? How much is it about the stimulus versus their own inner state? A recognition of self was what it took for me. Changed my life situation pretty recently for the better after a realization following a personal conversation with a close friend. The realization undermined a lot of my assumptions about how I was living my life, but it took substantial input and questioning from them for me to understand it; it was akin to pulling a thread and unraveling a tapestry, so to speak. Can't say this is true for everyone, but it was for me. tl;dr a bit of both.

streulpita 6y ago
Can you elaborate on the "recognition of self" bit?
- eganist 6y ago
  I'm being deliberately obtuse, but in essence I recognized that I was mentally working around growing in a certain area rather than tackling it head on.
gorgoiler 6y ago
This is a very heartening comment to read and I would love to know more, or to receive advice to be pointed in the same direction as you.

nzdhandala 6y ago

Regulations are out of control. We need VERY limited govt. Societies thrive when govt gets out of the way.

ajju 6y ago

“ Is Bloom's "Two Sigma" phenomenon real? If so, what do we do about it? Educational psychologist Benjamin Bloom found that one-on-one tutoring using mastery learning led to a two sigma(!) improvement in student performance. The results were replicated. " Does anyone know if this also true of learning & development in companies? For example sales training or training

thundergolfer 6y ago
Out of everything on the page, this grabbed my attention too. This seems to have immediate implications for how even experienced professionals train. I'd like to become much better at math than I am now. Should I be putting a lot of effort into working out a one-on-one tutoring partnership?
- hectormalot 6y ago
  That, and/or mastery learning. I haven’t read the research, but I hypothesize the focus on ‘mastery in each subtopic before moving to the next’ is what drives results, while 1-1 tutoring is what drives the speed of attaining them.
- dbcurtis 6y ago
  Why do you think that takes a lot of effort? I suspect it would not be hard to find a tutor at readonable rates. (Speaking as a former home-schooling dad. We used math toturs for 1:1 instruction at various times. )
  - thundergolfer 6y ago
    I'd be looking for a tutor in graduate mathematics, and particularly the subjects that I can most readily apply to my work. In Sydney I don't think there'd be that many available, and it would take time to find the right 'fit'. I don't think you can assume that once a reasonable rate is settled that the partnership would be a success.
    - 6y ago

donw 6y ago

It is interesting that the real cost of medical care and hospital services didn't see any sort of inflection change with the introduction of the ACA. One the key reasons for implementing the ACA -- which I supported, mind you -- was to control rising healthcare costs. Costs might still rise, but the rate of rise should be lower than before. This graph doesn't seem to show that. What am I missing?

dragonwriter 6y ago
> It is interesting that the real cost of medical care and hospital services didn't see any sort of inflection change with the introduction of the ACA. No one expected it would. > One the key reasons for implementing the ACA -- which I supported, mind you -- was to control rising healthcare costs. The immediate reason was to address broad consumer affordability, especially for the people that could least afford it and needed it most. Long-term, overall cost containment was a long-term goal, but it wasn't expected to have that effect in the short-term, and the pieces that contribute to that either weren't implemented at all, weren't implemented fully, or weren't maintained. (And, heck, a lot of the other pieces weren't in place long before they too started being chipped away at.) For example, the pieces building on the HIPAA Administrative Simplification provisions designed to by increasing the coverage of transaction standards and doing regular modernization so that incompatible ad hoc approaches wouldn't be needed as extensively were largely unimplemented, with the most important mandated standard operating rules never adopted and the mandated regular (3-year, IIRC) update cycle for the standards and standard operating rules never begun. There are mandated dates in law, but HHS never adopted the required regulations. (That's actually one of the more minor unimplemented cost containment measures, but the one I'm most intimately familiar with because I spent a lot of time those rules were in limbo being involved in planning compliance catch-up and forward looking planning for a component of a state Medicaid system.)
paxys 6y ago
The key reason for ACA was to get more people insured. In fact the biggest criticism against it was that it would cost too much. No one expected overall healthcare spending to decrease.
nugget 6y ago

andrewstuart 6y ago

(I chose to delete this because it's not a sufficiently positive response.)

CincinnatiMan 6y ago
Interesting thought but what are you trying to get across?
sudhirj 6y ago
There are different questions that we have at each level in Maslow’s pyramid, and HN tends to focus on the last two levels - but that doesn’t mean the questions at the other levels are any less important. There are other site, communities and blogs that cater to people at these levels. A one size fits all solution wouldn’t be good for any of the levels, and it doesn’t mean people are one level are any better or worse than people at others.
apsec112 6y ago
"Where will the money come from to get the car fixed?" is a very personal question; answering it well would require knowing a lot about the person asking, and what their life circumstances, talents, resources, and obstacles were. This makes it harder to discuss on HN (or most other Internet sites), since these are very large groups who are mostly strangers, and don't know that much about each other. Questions about economic equality, the cost of housing, career advice, and so on in general are reasonably well represented here, I think.

akirakurusu 6y ago

"Why are so many things so much nicer in Switzerland and Japan?" Figuring out why this is without fully attributing it to culture has been of great fascination to me. It really is mindblowing just how _good_ things are in Japan, perhaps they're just highly optimized for tourism? The cleanliness, the service, the great care people place in doing things and in their work is just amazing. Anyone here have more insights on this question? What are the non-cultural factors which contribute to this phenomenon that seemingly makes Japan an outlier?

donw 6y ago
I live in Japan, and have for about a decade. You're bang-on when it comes to culture, but it has nothing to do with being optimized for tourism. Japan is a very conservative country. Change happens slowly here, and Japan does a lot to ensure that people raised here share a common culture, with a strong focus on stability and harmony. To provide some examples: - NHK, the national broadcaster, has several series of popular programs showing life across all of Japan -- rural, urban, suburban, every prefecture. There are also programs showing Japanese people living overseas, and showing how they have integrated into the local culture. There is no "rural vs urban" divide in Japan. - Japanese schools focus heavily on structure and responsibility. Students maintain their classrooms, clean their bathrooms, staff the cafeterias, etc. All of this is under adult supervision, but the kids do the actual work. Discipline is strong as well -- there are real consequences for poor behavior. - Japan follows the Prussian education model. Compulsory schooling ends at 14 (9th grade). From there, you can immediately begin working, go to a trade school, or go to high school. There is also a professional education track separate from university. - There is a strong culture around keeping families whole and raising kids as a whole family in Japan. Often the wife will move back home and live with her family shortly before and after childbirth, and there's a lot of cultural reinforcement there. - Parents are very active in the education of their children, and the locus of responsibility is first on the child, second on the parent. - The Koban system is fantastic. Police live in their communities, and interact with people every day. You never want to end up on the wrong side of the law -- the conviction rate is well north of 90%, and the accused have very few rights here -- but overall, Japanese police are very polite and professional. There are downsides to this -- everything comes with trade-offs -- but it delivers a very stable and safe society.

Anon4Now 6y ago

> Why are certain things getting so much more expensive? > * College textbooks I've always felt that textbook pricing is predatory and should be subject to price gouging laws.

bumby 6y ago
I think it was Freakanomics that had an episode about textbook cost. Their idea was it was a disparity between those choosing the textbooks (professors) to those bearing the costs (students). In other words, it is much easier to increase the cost of a product if those bearing the cost don’t have a say.
- aeternum 6y ago
  I definitely had a few classes in which the professor wrote the text-book which while impressive in some ways also yields a conflict of interest.
  - analog31 6y ago
    Oddly enough, one of my professors wrote textbooks for his classes that he gave to us for the cost of copying them. He was outraged by the price of textbooks.
ipnon 6y ago
It's a racket. Universities must use the latest textbooks to remain accredited. This is why syllabi will always list the latest edition of a textbook as the required text (and mentioning that the last edition is sufficient is always done parenthetically). Publishers can fix a few typos, change some example problems, and call it a new edition. Every university will have to recommend the new edition to their students. The students who bought the last edition last year will have to sell their now obsolete textbook for a fraction of the purchasing price. Markets in everything: University textbooks are always priced to be marginally outrageous. If they were to cost something ridiculous like $1,000 a piece, there would be protests and riots on campus. Instead they merely fleece the students for $100 or $200. Enough people pay up that the system is deemed imperfect rather than inherently flawed.

ISL 6y ago

On the Chinese research question: Just wait a decade. In all likelihood, I am permanently departing academia in about a month. The underlying reason is structural -- neither our funding agency nor our institution is willing to yield on a fundamental sticking point that is causing all of our young researchers to leave. I am about to join them. There is literally no path forward. In the decade that I have watched my world-leading research group wither, our Chinese colleagues have expanded their laboratories by 4-5x, appear to be well-resourced, and are poised to lead the world on all fronts within the decade. An excellent colleague of mine, who had done excellent work for US particle-physics experiments, went to China for a high-energy physics faculty interview. On arrival, he was surprised to find that there appeared to be another candidate competing for the position. He did his best, as did the other candidate. As he prepared to depart, he asked whether or not it had been a competition for the open position. The reply? "We had one position, but we liked both of your talks so much, we are extending offers to both of you." There was no matching US offer of which I am aware: he accepted. That essentially never happens these days in the United States. It is a story the likes of which one might have heard from 1950-1970. Chinese physics results are continuing to gain in reliability. Where once we saw quite a bit of copy-catting, Chinese fundamental science research is beginning to transition into regularly breaking new ground. Wait a decade. We should welcome this development with open arms. A billion smart people, with equal potential, should be able to turn out roughly three times as much research as the 0.34 billion smart people in the US. We can encourage that research at the same time that we must stand against the regime's attacks on democracy in Hong Kong, the atrocities occurring in Xinjiang, their surveillance state, threatening the independence of Taiwan, enabling North Korea, and more. ( The US has dirty laundry, too: Our President is incompetent. Vote! )

apsec112 6y ago
If academia is structured the same way in China as it is in the US, that situation won't be sustainable for long there, either. If each professor produces ten new PhDs, the only way for them to all find academic jobs is through very rapid growth in faculty size, which can't be sustained for that long.
- ISL 6y ago

pchristensen 6y ago

"Why are certain things getting so much more expensive?" That list is pretty much rank ordered by the amount of non-substitutable human labor involved per unit. Everything in red is a pretty universal need (health, education, child care, housing, food), while the blues are mostly wants. So we want medical care, but that requires a lot of labor, and each of those workers requires housing, but that's supply constrained in much of the country, and they have be educated, but college cost is rising, and their employees need child care, and the child care workers need to go to the doctor ... If there was a way to reduce the cost of living (my hobby horse is dramatically increasing the amount of by-right housing permitted to be built in an area), then that would ripple through all of these industries. High and increasing costs and wages make labor-intensive industries much more expensive by comparison.

hn_throwaway_99 6y ago
The answer linked to in Collison's question, https://medium.com/@arnoldkling/what-gets-expensive-and-why-33bf4b891be2 https://medium.com/@arnoldkling/what-gets-expensive-and-why-... , is really insightful and interesting in my opinion and goes to a deep level of analysis.
- bohemian99 6y ago
  Exactly- people don't/can't really comparison shop when it comes to medical procedures. They don't know how good their doctors are at it, this is all unpublished information. Similarly college textbooks- if your professors assigns work from their book, then you need that book. You can't competitively shop on that. As the response points out, all of these groups and then backed by accreditation systems to limit new entrants.
  - dalbasal 6y ago
    Starting from Patrick's question, and working through the list... It suggests that some of our market-thinking has been off mark. Free-market economic policies have tended to define things in terms of market "freeness." How much intervention, etc. This is commonly how we think politically, because it relates directly to policies. The way these affect reality is through the market structures themselves. We can regulate or deregulate barber shops and restaurants... but within wide margins they are likely to remain pretty good market structure. Lots of choice, competition, churn, etc. Hospital services or college tuition are structurally different. If we are "laissez faire" with hospitals, and have heavy handed regulation for restaurants... Restaurants would still behave like a more free market, just because of innate structure. It would take a truly byzantine accreditation system to make restaurants look like textbooks or pharmaceutical drugs. Someone would literally have to assign you a dinner reservation.

lisper 6y ago

> Why do there seem to be more examples of rapidly-completed major projects in the past than the present? Different risk postures. If you're willing to sacrifice a few lives and limbs and not worry about the disposition of toxic waste, you can get things done just as fast today as yesterday.

thundergolfer 6y ago

P Collison comes across pretty well in his 'thinking in public' type stuff. The questions are all pretty interesting and important, or at least important to the class of society that he occupies.

twoodfin 6y ago

For the first chart/question it’s important to distinguish cost from spending. For example, “food and beverage”: Americans are (at least pre-Covid) eating out a lot more than they were 20 or 30 years ago, so that category presumably now covers a very different basket of goods than in the past, even if they add up to roughly the same number of calories.

swyx 6y ago

i wonder what pc thinks of https://wtfhappenedin1971.com/ https://wtfhappenedin1971.com/ - is this a cherrypicked statistical fluke or is this an actually important long term economic trend worth exploring?

counter_point 6y ago
One thing I have found about HN in general is a refusal to ponder the meaning of money itself. 1 Why is a small amount of inflation considered a "good thing"? In just one generation, inflation targets reduce the purchasing power by nearly 50%. What if you knew that assumption lead to all kinds of terrible outcomes, but they only surfaced after 7-8 election cycles? 2 Why is a gold standard considered impractical? After all, today, the technology actually exists to at least make this a worthwhile pursuit (that is, a digital gold standard which doesn't involve the actual movement of physical gold) 3 Why is there so little discussion on the "amount of currency units your central government printed this year"? I find it remarkable, and somewhat amusing frankly, that there could be so many intelligent people on a forum (compared to the average online forum) and how few of these folks have asked themselves this question. 4 Why is there so little discussion on the possibility of currency deflation being a very good thing for the people on the margins of society? It certainly doesn't help that 99% of the folks who ask these questions happen to be both male and white, which just makes people auto-associate these ideas with racism, privilege etc. I don't think the core ideas themselves have been given sufficient thought for a few decades. And as for Patrick Collison, I am willing to bet he hasn't read a single book written by Thomas Sowell (whose books will at the very least force you to ask these questions, even if you might come to different conclusions to others who read his books).
- SpicyLemonZest 6y ago
  It’s very challenging to ponder these questions in a public forum, because so many people hold uninformed or nonsensical views on them. Whenever I’ve tried to discuss them, I’ve had to fight off very basic misunderstandings like: * The Fed prints money by giving free gifts to banks. That is, QE for $500 billion means banks are $500 billion richer. * The first person to get a new dollar has an unfair advantage, since they can spend it before the rest of the economy knows about the extra dollar. * Inflation is a deterministic function of the money supply. There wouldn’t be inflation if we didn’t create more money. I’m sure you understand the problems here, and I certainly don’t hate educating people about them. But it’s hard to have a deep discussion punctuated by constant breaks into monetary theory 101.

zuhayeer 6y ago

I find the replacement rate question really interesting. Is there an aligned way we can allow companies to decay once they have stalled in innovation? What do we do about companies that have reached a point of monopolistic advantage but provide no real new innovation (PG&E comes to mind)? In some cases like Internet access, is competition the only driver of affordability or do we eventually have to find a way to regulate pricing on things that evolve to become general public needs. This question likely comes up a lot in healthcare and pharma, but I'm not sure there's a good answer. It's sort of muddled in between providing enough incentive to creators to start things and ensuring that once things do get created, that privatized commercial interest doesn't work to remove the very value it helped create (which happens when the company stops innovating).

aeternum 6y ago
I believe regulation is often the cause rather than the solution to stalled innovation. If you look at areas where innovation has stalled, high barriers to entry for new companies is typically a primary cause and in many cases regulations contribute to that barrier. We should make it a goal to lower those barriers and encourage competition wherever possible. NASA's commercial crew program is one example of this. Another is how Illinois forced their electric companies to open access to the power lines, fostering healthy competition.

jariel 6y ago

Some of these are odd questions. "How do we help more experimental cities get started? It seems that the returns to entrepreneurialism in cities remain high: Hong Kong, Singapore, Dubai, and others, " ??? HK and to a lesser extent Singapore are some of the most inegalitarian places in the world, that thrive because they have established Western commercial practices in a sea of otherwise more obvious corruption. There is a very dark underbelly to HK. Dubai is an Oil Rich state, with a fairly ruthless totalitarian leadership wherein the pay Indian workers 10's of cents an hour in a form of indentured servitude. An Arab Dubai resident could kill one of these workers and probably get away with it. They also are nice places for rich people to hide their money. There are no mysteries here. Dubai is the 'anti civilisation' - maybe one of he worst examples of 'what to build'. As for 'why some things are more expensive'? Some things are commodities, some are not, some things have price inelasticity, some do not. Why was the P43 made in a few months? Because WW2 planes are very simple, and it was during war, and we didn't care about safety back in the day. 'Crash tests' for cars? We didn't even wear seat belts. No emissions standards. etc.. Most of today's projects are much more complex. It takes government 10 years to do anything because those systems are complicated, we have strong government unions, and a kind of civic dysfunction in many places. The GDP is not consistent - it just looks like that in the chart. The GDP naturally, is not going to change that much year over year - because we are largely engaged in the same patters of activity. But the rate of growth swings a lot. There is no mystery to solve here.

jonny_eh 6y ago

> Why is US GDP growth so weirdly constant? Not anymore! [1] [1] https://www.npr.org/sections/coronavirus-live-updates/2020/07/30/896714437/3-months-of-hell-u-s-economys-worst-quarter-ever https://www.npr.org/sections/coronavirus-live-updates/2020/0...

paxys 6y ago

The infrastructure one really stands out to me, and I'm always astounded by it. Adding yet another example - The Golden Gate Bridge was built in 4 years for $1.6 billion (inflation adjusted), under budget and ahead of schedule. 11 workers died during construction, a safety record matching or surpassing most modern projects. In contrast, a project to install suicide nets around the bridge has been under development for 12 years. It was recently delayed for another 2 years, and is estimated to cost ~$250 million. Where/when did we go wrong, and how do we fix it?

calinet6 6y ago
I would bet it’s tied to the neglect of work in both real wages and respect for workers. We no longer take pride in work. We pay people less and make them compete for the mere privilege of holding a job. Then, we tell them what to do, disrespecting their intelligence and autonomy and ability to make something they can be proud of. For the brilliance of this strategy, we pay leaders ten times more than we did before, and even more when they fail and need to be replaced—surely installing a new CEO is the answer. It is no surprise at all. Deming tried to lay it out for us, but no one really listened.
- graeme 6y ago
  The issue might actually be the opposite. It would probably cost too much to employ the number of bridgeworkers that were employed for the Golden Gate Bridge. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baumol's_cost_disease https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baumol's_cost_disease This can’t be a complete explanation though as other places can still build things.
- zachware 6y ago
  It's entirely possible that you are right except for construction and civil project jobs. I've built several large-scale buildings and developments at urban scale in California and Nevada, both heavy heavy union states. I can't point to the systemic problem leading to the delays but I can tell you that any job even tangentially related to construction requires high wage labor. This is universally true for civic projects. Some of those unions (e.g. electrical workers, carpenters) provide exceptional training services for apprentices. Others (e.g. the people holding the stop signs at highway construction sites) are mostly strong-arm groups. These groups could be causing delays and from personal experience I can tell you they do, sometimes. But overall I can certainly say that the point you made here is not the reason why projects are delayed.

keiferski 6y ago

What does religion cause? There has been considerable philosophical work on this topic. Contemporary scientific studies (such as the ones in the link) are not particularly useful here, as they are too trapped in the current societal context to understand deeper cultural trends. Religion as a word is so broad as to basically be meaningless. Separating religion from culture or history is a modern legacy of academic and industrial specialization. In any case, some reading suggestions, if you're interested in this topic. - Max Weber. Pretty much the founder of modern social science, particularly with regards to religion. He originated the idea of “The Protestant Work Ethic” and argues that specific features of Protestantism lead to market capitalism arising in Northern Europe, rather than in India or China. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Protestant_Ethic_and_the_Spirit_of_Capitalism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Protestant_Ethic_and_the_S... - Charles Taylor, A Secular Age. This book really changed the way I think about the modern world and what I'll call "the preference for scientistic, humanistic atheism". Taylor essentially argues that modern secularity is not merely the subtraction of religious belief, but a new historical situation where religious beliefs are co-existent both with each other and with immanent beliefs (entirely focused in the world.) This book is huge, so I recommend starting with How Not to Be Secular by James K. A. Smith, as it's a condensed summary of Taylor's book. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Secular_Age https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Secular_Age https://www.amazon.com/How-Not-Be-Secular-Reading/dp/0802867618 https://www.amazon.com/How-Not-Be-Secular-Reading/dp/0802867... - Friedrich Nietzsche. A philosopher quite interested in this problem. His main goal was to trace the development of moral ideas and subsequently create new, healthier (to him) ones. Too many books to list, but I recommend The Genealogy of Morality and Beyond Good and Evil. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/On_the_Genealogy_of_Morality https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/On_the_Genealogy_of_Morality https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beyond_Good_and_Evil https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beyond_Good_and_Evil

deleted 6y ago

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hyperpallium2 6y ago

Is Bloom's "Two Sigma" phenomenon real? If so, what do we do about it? "the average tutored student was above 98% of the students in the control class"[1] As a tutor, my goal was to identify gaps and misunderstandings. Consider: how can you give a driver helpful directions if you don't know where they are? As a student, I noticed that teachers are routinely ambiguous in ways they cannot understand. And mostly, these alternative interpretations work... mostly. So when they cause problems many layers later, the learner can see no clues to the cause. But an attentive tutor can. Subtle gaps and misunderstanding have an outsize effect, and maybe could account for 2σ? OTOH teachers accidentally trained me to disentangle ambiguity, and that is a valuable real-world skill. The mentor relationship has magic in it and I remember the moment I learnt certain things. So maybe social aspects contribute too, as wiki suggests. What to do? Like mandatory military service, mandatory tutoring service. We appear to be wasting obscene quanities of human capital. Imagine the economic productivity unleashed by a more fully realized workforce. PS did pc receive one-on-one tutoring? Intelligent parents often tutor their children, conferring this outsize headstart. https://wikipedia.org/wiki/Bloom%27s_2_sigma_problem https://wikipedia.org/wiki/Bloom%27s_2_sigma_problem

paxys 6y ago
I remember Salman Khan (of Khan Academy) talking about this a few years ago. He believed that the current accepted method of teaching - students attending lectures and sitting in classrooms getting knowledge from teachers, then later doing homework alone trying to apply it - needs to be inverted. Lectures, presentations, textbooks can all be online and automated. Teaching resources, limited as they are, are much better spent helping students specifically when they are stuck and need more personalized help. Of course this brings us to the more fundamental question - are schools more for learning or daycare?
- jodrellblank 6y ago
  Most online forums have an "RTFM" or FAQ approach to beginners. Reddit's LearnPython sub has a ton of "explain OOP/Recursion/debug my beginner code/restart game/etc." style questions, and while there is a FAQ, it's not enforced very hard. Almost the opposite of StackOverflow. As a result, there are a huge number of people learning themselves by explaining to other people, practising by solving other people's problems, and answering the beginner questions over and over. I think things like that have got to be part of the future of learning online, instead of dumping what you know into a FAQ and pulling the ladder up after you, closing the community from outsiders.

nazgulnarsil 6y ago

A few of interest to me: 1. Is steelmanned buddhism wrong in important ways? Can some sort of minimal set of claims version of buddhism even be steelmanned consistently? 2. The joint-stock corporation appears to be the most scalable coordination tech ever invented. What is the embedding space of the things that make it possible and what else is in the space? 3. Does most progress come from pairs of people in high bandwidth collaboration? How could we test this and how could we scale the matching problem implied? If this is true why aren't there more famously successful twins? (also mentioned by Gwern) 4. Are dramatically better matching algorithms possible (lemon markets, costly signal bandwidth saturation)? Ones good enough that they would encourage more geographic mobility? 5. What's the natural embedding space of 'values'? If discovered and rendered tractable would this solve problems with our current attempts at formalization (VNM, Arrow's impossibility, various decision theory gotchas etc)? 6. Why are all the general purpose 'how to navigate life' resources so poor in quality? (also mentioned by Patrick) 7. Does DNA (and RNA?) transcription error rate emerge as a natural kind in large scale biological prediction? Does this create natural limits on malleability of biological systems? 8. Is there low hanging fruit in CNS imaging? Would this directly lead to dramatically better mental health interventions? 9. Can research stagnation be undermined by funding more research review enabling more cross collaborative legibility of researchers into each other's work?

leobabauta 6y ago
Can you say more about the steelmanned buddhism questions? I'm interested but not clear on what you're pointing to with the term "steelmanned buddhism" or what important ways you think it might be wrong about. Edit: Just to clarify, I'm familiar with the idea of steelmanning, but not what set of buddhist ideas you're pointing to with the term "steelmanned buddhism".

jacquesm 6y ago

Lovely list. As for real estate and housing prices: interest rates are ridiculously low, once you account for that the price increase from the 1970's to today makes really good sense. Corrected for inflation it is now much cheaper to own rather than to rent real estate even though the sticker price of the houses went up. Rents then predictably increased because houses/apartments that got bought reduced the supply available for renting out. Especially in the bigger cities where the economy is a bit better rents have skyrocketed. But the cost of owning a house as a function of take home pay has dropped. The same house that cost my parents a ridiculously high mortgage (10% was pretty normal in the 70's here) can now be had for a fraction of the inflation adjusted wages today. Even though the on-paper value of the house is roughly 10x what it cost back then. To fix the rental market a lot of new housing would have to be built, but then you run into zoning issues, transportation issues, the price of land and other limitations that make it hard to expand affordable housing for cities. Historically institutional investors (for instance: pension funds) would fund these developments but since they now have shorter time horizons for their ROI and want higher returns they are not as interested as they used to be to pick this up. This problem will not resolve easily or even at all as long as people are willing to pay high rents and the market is as restricted as it is I would expect rents to continue to go up. Even an increase in interest will likely not return all that many houses to the rental market because that would require the sticker price of houses to come down, which hardly even happens. Even in the 2009 financial crises housing prices reacted only in a limited way: people had bought in at a certain price level and could not let go of their properties without ending up with a debt to the bank, a situation best avoided.

totetsu 6y ago

on "What's the right way to understand and model personality?" Personality is an outdated concept, personality types triply so. There is no fundamental stability of personality, just behavior context. Christian Miller - The character gap https://philosophybites.com/2019/02/christian-miller-on-the-character-gap.html https://philosophybites.com/2019/02/christian-miller-on-the-... https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2016/06/24/481859662/invisibilia-is-your-personality-fixed-or-can-you-change-who-you-are https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2016/06/24/4818596... Robert Sapolsky - Introduction to Human Behavioral Biology https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NNnIGh9g6fA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NNnIGh9g6fA

hcta 6y ago
If you taboo the word 'personality', the underlying question here is still interesting. Do different people in the "exact same" situation always behave /identically/? (Obviously not.) What are the most informative features of the person explaining the divergence in response?
- totetsu 6y ago
  Christian Miller is arguing that while we do have phycological character traits and motivations, that persist between situations, how we actually behave is a complex interaction between these and our contexts. Divergence can maybe be explained as much by contexts as by characteristics. If I were to meet someone who works a similar job, has a similar social and familia situation, but divergent motivations, I might have more in common with them than I would have if I met the university student version of myself.

dalbasal 6y ago

What great questions. I've had pub debates about 3/5 of these over the last year. Reminds me a lot of pg during his prolific periods. What makes a lot of these interesting is that most have bad answers. Some (eg the inflation question) have answers were sustainable 10-20 years ago, but grew out of them. Some have cliched or even ideological answers. Again, time has changed the strength of these answers. Time to re-ask and re-answer. Some (eg progress in science) have no obvious or common answer, but are commonly discussed at a smaller scale. Academic incentives, publishing & such are commonly discussed, but no ways forward seem to emerge.. even rhetorically. In any case, I think the first one (inflation by sector) hits squarely at a major blindspot in most economic thinking. I think it's responsible for a lot of the divergent views of economists (relying on measurements) and non economists relying on intuition. Your answer to this question may relate to GDP growth consistency. Again, I feel this is a blindspot in most theoretical economics. One of Thomas Picketty's controversy bombshells was treating GDP growth and rate-of-return (r>g) as basically constant. Almost all other theories (even Marx) treat these as determined by everything else in the theory. All that doesn't seem consistent with consistency, as patrick points out. I would have also asked, "what is the successor to the university" since several of these questions could be answered if you had an answer to that. It's a loaded form of a question, but other questions take that form. How you load questions can be the most important thing. "What's the successor to the scientific paper and the scientific journal?" is loaded in an opposite way to "* How do we help more experimental cities get started?*" I'm not saying questions shouldn't be loaded, just that they should be loaded carefully. Great read. i will come back for the links.

dalbasal 6y ago

I like the way "Is Bloom's "Two Sigma" phenomenon real? If so, what do we do about it?" is loaded. Touches on several "questions" in the vein of this article. One load is "why don't we know this with more certainty?" It's a useful thing to know. What is achievable? What's the bar? How good could education be, regardless of resources and other limitations. If true, that can be our 100% marker for instructional effectiveness. From there, we cold say that average school instruction is 10% effective or 60% effective. Realistically, this needs to be tackled with a lot of force to make progress. Change is likely inconvenient, in a real world environment with limited resources. Maybe school should be 3 hrs per day, not 8. In any case, I think it's notable that high-end private education, which has more resources available, have not pursued these kind of goals any more than public education.

cloogshicer 6y ago
There's an assumption in this line of thinking which I think is unlikely to be true: that this stuff is measurable, at least in principle. I think 'instructional effectiveness' can't ever be clearly and unambiguously defined, much less measured. As with anything that involves people. In my experience, most attempts to do so only cause more harm than good.
- dalbasal 6y ago
  There are different kinds of measurable, and the purpose of the measure is important. Measuring for the purpose of management (eg creating incentives for teachers and schools), measuring for the purpose of most academic publishing, etc. Each have their own pitfalls, and I agree with you on these. That said... there is clearly such a thing as better and worse instruction. Where the 2-sigma claim gets interesting is scale. We're not concerned with marginal differences (management measures) and we're not concerned with legibly identifiable causal relationships (academic publishing). We're just concerned with establishing a high watermark. The simple measures (eg testing) we have, work fine for that... in the context of math, reading/writing, foreign language, etc. Stuff that's easy to test for, and assuming we're only interested in big differences. Two sigma implies that within 1 year of instruction, the two sigma group will have progressed by several years. 12th grade math level by grade 10. This doesn't have to be achievable by every teacher, it just has to be achievable at the high end.. assuming a random sample of students. Agreed though.. we have a history of insisting that the unmeasurable be measured... and its a very common, long term failure mode. more harm than good. I'm not suggesting implementing anything, let alone implementing anything using measures. Just setting that watermark, so we know what awesome looks like.

known 6y ago

Social ills in Japan https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-34615972 https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-34615972

anonu 6y ago

> Why don't we build nice neighborhoods any more? We might, we just dont know that we are building them. Assuming today's nice neighborhoods are the old ones, I would argue that they escaped a period of modernization. I think we look back at our recent creations and always think about how we can tear them down and rebuild. The neighborhoods that escape this cycle of "tear down and rebuild" and luckily slip into the status of "vintage charm" suddenly hold more caché and may even get protected status by their city or municipality.

huevosabio 6y ago

> Why are certain things getting so much more expensive? Alex Tabarrok argues that this is largely do to Baumol cost disease [0]: "rise of salaries in jobs that have experienced no or low increase of labor productivity, in response to rising salaries in other jobs that have experienced higher labor productivity growth". He has a book about it [1] This aligns well with Patrick's graph: healthcare, college, childcare are all labor intensive and have seen little to no productivity increase in the last 23 years. The story for housing is different, though. We are consistently concentrating economic opportunity in the urban centers. However, through NIMBYism, we have made it very difficult to build new housing. The "surprising" result: very expensive housing. Relatedly, Matt Rognlie found out [2] that the increase in the capital share of income since 1970, as noticed by Piketty, can be mostly explained by the housing sector. The solution to both, in my view, are related. We need to reduce barriers for labor movement. We can reduce labor cost by liberalizing immigration to the USA and by liberalizing (re-zoning) and incentivizing (via Land Value Taxation) housing production within the main US urban areas. > Why do there seem to be more examples of rapidly-completed major projects in the past than the present? My suspicion is institutional ossification in the USA. With time we accumulate rules / regulations / procedures that increase the complexity of the task at hand. Eventually, the marginal procedure increases complexity such that our competence is exceeded, making the task impossible. I think the solution is related to his other question "How do you ensure an adequate replacement rate in systems that have no natural way to die?". We should have a way to replace these institutions. Market forces are a great way to do so for private endeavors, startups being the prime example. But for public institutions, it is less clear what could be the proper approach. If there was a way to have states compete for citizens in a non-violent way, that may help. > Why don't we build nice neighborhoods any more? I think it is a mixture of i) survivorship bias (as he suggests), ii) car-oriented development (as he suggests), and iii) the fact that attractive neighborhoods have an organic feel to them that only time can give. Thus, in the car-era we built new neighborhoods but they were car-oriented so they never aged into nice, walking neighborhoods. We are trying to rectify that with new walking-oriented developments, but they have a synthetic feel to them that will only go away with time. > What's going on with infrastructure? I would say this is a combination of the Baumol cost disease and the ossification of our institutions (both mentioned above). [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baumol%27s_cost_disease https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baumol%27s_cost_disease [1] https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/46013009-why-are-the-prices-so-damn-high https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/46013009-why-are-the-pri... [2] https://www.brookings.edu/wp-content/uploads/2016/07/2015a_rognlie.pdf https://www.brookings.edu/wp-content/uploads/2016/07/2015a_r...

CyberRabbi 6y ago

The answer to every question is either “because of smart and/or virtuous people” or “because of Stupid and/or immoral people” Japan’s cleanliness, healthcare costs, etc

cryptica 6y ago

> Why do there seem to be more examples of rapidly-completed major projects in the past than the present? Because we have been shifting responsibility away from individuals who have the best knowledge to complete a task (I.e. engineers) towards managers. In software development, this can be seen by an increased focus on frameworks, statically typed languages, 100% test coverage, CI pipelines, code analysis tools; all designed to relieve developers from a sense of responsibility and ownership over the code and to give managers extra visibility. > Why is US GDP growth so weirdly constant? Because there is no growth. What looks like growth is just inflation of the dollar relative to the value of goods and services which underlie the GDP calculation. > How do you ensure an adequate replacement rate in systems that have no natural way to die? Abolish the Federal Reserve, introduce UBI. Trickle-up economics will bring back the free market because companies will compete to actually satisfy people instead of competing to manipulate them at the behest of their institutional paymasters. > How do we help more experimental cities get started? This is an artificial concept which does not align with free market dynamics. Does the market need experimental cities to begin with? > How do people decide to make major life changes? When they become deeply unhappy with their current situation. > Could there be more good blogs? Only in a free market. If visitor numbers are being shaped and suppressed by algorithms, there will not be any good blogs. It will devolve to mindless hedonistic garbage. > Why are programming environments still so primitive? Because simple tooling is essential. Complex programming environments will create more reliance on tools which will pull back the sense of responsibility from developers which will make them produce inferior work. No amount of tooling can make a developer care more about the work; the more you automate a developer's work, the less they will feel as if it is their own work and the less they will care. No tool cannot ever compensate for lack of care. > What does religion cause? It's a very positive force. People need to share ideals related to altruism and fairness in order to allow social contracts to remain coherent. People need to believe that if they do nice things for others, they will be rewarded with eternal life. Without this, most people will work only in their own self-interest and the whole capitalist system, which is rooted in the exploitation of the altruism of others, won't work. Pervasive, single-minded self-interest is not compatible with capitalism. Capitalism needs somebody altruistic to exploit; religious people, young people, etc... When capitalism runs out of altruists, it runs out of fuel. > What influences when people act in accordance with their self-interest and when they don't? People always act in accordance with their self interest or in the interest of their kin. If they think otherwise, they're lying to themselves.

Balgair 6y ago

> Why is there no canon for life's most important questions? There is! Well, sorta, but a very good attempt at least: Mortimer J. Adler's Great Works of the Western World, 1965 (a bit dated by now). It's the supra-compilation of 'western' thought, and the works in there do come close to a canon for the most important questions in life. That list of questions does need to be formalized first, unlike, say Electromagnetism; you're dealing with more than just charged particles after all. Still, the best thing about Adler's work was the Syntopicon: a 'quick' reference of the great works based on ~100 topics (Astronomy, God, Justice, Family, Dialectic, etc.). Each of those topics was further subdivided into specific areas (The nature of Jesus' human form, Ellipses, Jurisprudence of Judges, etc.). It's a huge work. Most critically, these specific areas listed a where you could find the relating pages in the great works. For example: Under the topic of 'Mind' and the subtopic of 'The condition of the human mind when the soul is separate from the body', you have a listing for 'GIBBON: Decline and Fall, 233d' and a lot of other listings too. It's not exactly what the question asks, but it is as good a starting point as I think you can get shipped to your door. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Books_of_the_Western_World https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Books_of_the_Western_Wor... https://www.logos.com/product/55052/great-books-of-the-western-world https://www.logos.com/product/55052/great-books-of-the-weste... (pricey, but the search feature is essential)

nojvek 6y ago

The question about healthcare, infrastructure, college, housing is a major one. The explanation I’ve come up with is that they aren’t machine scalable problems and that the barrier to entry is so high that existing incumbents have little incentive to do “more with less $” when due to increased demand they are racking in billions. Matt Stroller’s BIG newsletter goes deep into the little monopolies and consolidation of markets by private equity. There’s also insurance and loans that comes into play. You can charge obscene amounts of money when it’s other people’s money. In a complex system, accountability is hard, so it’s ripe for rent seeking and corruption by the few people who are the bottleneck.

raldi 6y ago

> Sublime's built-in ⌘-T works better than every third-party Emacs package. What's this about? Google's not helping.

jl2718 6y ago

Quick answers just for fun: 1. Technological abundance vs regulated scarcity 2. Complexity outpacing human understanding. Plus regulation/approvals. 3. Because the FOMC controls it. 4. Reduce legal barriers to entry. 5. Reduce central control. 6. Risk minimization. 7. Trust by common identity. 8. Maybe. Pace tracking classes. 9. Money is cheap enough now for investors to fund most science for profit. 10. No programming. AI queries (e.g. “Her”) 11. Audiobooks 12. Arxiv / citation ranking 13. No. Too easy to ignore ads on text. 14. Nobody’s paying for IDEs anymore. 15. See #7. 16. See #15. 17. See #7. 18. Political vs scientific incentives. 19. contra to #7. 20. See #7. 21. It’s more lucrative to fail than to succeed. 22. I’ve heard it was due to mass burning by humans. Fire/regrowth fixes more carbon than it releases.

simonebrunozzi 6y ago

In relation to the Golden Gate Bridge construction, it was mostly financed by the son of Italian immigrants turner banker, Giannini; his bank also lent to people devastated by the 1906 earthquake in San Francisco. The "Bank of Italy" changed its name to "Bank of America" [0]. From the article linked at the bottom of my comment [0]: > A. P. Giannini, President of Bank of America, was legendary for his dedication to the development of the San Francisco region. A native of San Jose with a blue-collar background, Giannini believed that banks should lend more freely to working-class people, whom he believed to be fiscally responsible. Following the 1906 earthquake that destroyed much of San Francisco, most banks closed up shop, but Giannini set up a makeshift desk and issued credit "on a handshake and a signature" to families and small businesses in immediate, desperate need. His investments built a foundation for San Francisco's economic recovery. Also, it's ironic that A.P. Giannini was what we would call today a "college dropout", which is particularly "cool" and "popular" in the San Francisco Bay Area. From [1]: > Giannini attended Heald College but realized he could do better in business than at school. In 1885, he dropped out and took a full-time position as a produce broker for L. Scatena & Co. [0]: https://about.bankofamerica.com/en-us/our-story/building-the-most-photographed-bridge.html https://about.bankofamerica.com/en-us/our-story/building-the... [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amadeo_Giannini https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amadeo_Giannini