jorleif

9 ms·

31.
by jorleif 13y ago
My own experience from academia tells me that a big part of the problem is the fact that everyone is competing for a small pool of faculty positions and those positions are filled based on individual performance. This means you can never wi
32.
by jorleif 13y ago
It's not either "just luck" or no luck involved. Sure, most people who do get rich try and work very hard. The question is how big a proportion of people who work hard do get rich. If it is only 1% and it cannot be predicted
33.
by jorleif 13y ago
It is certainly true that workforce reduction is just one possibility, but what I still wonder is when coops work and when they don't. Somehow it seems to me that they only work when the business is not too scalable, but profit is dire
34.
by jorleif 13y ago
While I think co-ops can work very well in some cases, I wonder how well they cope with significant change for the worse in their environment. If you need to lose a third of the workforce suddenly, can a co-op decide on that kind of thing o
35.
by jorleif 13y ago
We are all semi-technical outside of the narrow situations and technologies we have a lot of experience with. In other words, you can learn to be technical, but only in narrow subfields like a particular programming language, programming en
36.
by jorleif 13y ago
I think the process of peer review often causes papers to be optimized for being hard to critique rather than easy to understand. I have myself participated in writing papers where we decided to leave out some non-crucial but very useful de
37.
by jorleif 13y ago
I wonder if there would be any way to implement some alternative identification system that would enable the benefits the article mentions, but still allow for privacy that does not require a trustworthy government. I think, if the governme
38.
by jorleif 13y ago
That is very well put. I am often amazed what a big difference certain ideas make it possible to build complex things quickly and with low amounts of bugs. For example building a parsing subsystem "properly" as taught on compiler
39.
by jorleif 13y ago
Why is the mental model building not seen as a special case of induction? One needs to generalize (i.e. interpolate/extrapolate) from the known instances. The mechanism may be just "replaying" known sequences, but there is st
40.
by jorleif 13y ago
Had he said that Bayesian decision theory with optimization of utility functions etc. was behaviorism, then I would agree, but Bayesian formulations can be used for many other things as well. At least one can propose very complex internal m
41.
by jorleif 13y ago
I think there is a difference, but my view is that it is impossible to reason without sufficiently accurate prediction, and that the concepts we use for reasoning are largely formed based on how predictive they are. Consider playing a game
42.
by jorleif 13y ago
What do you mean is unfounded? My suggestion for what creativity might be as be? I guess I was unclear, I don't mean to say I know what creativity is. What I do mean to ask, is whether creativity is something more than just solving opt
43.
by jorleif 13y ago
"only a tiny component of thinking is about prediction at all" Here I really struggle to follow his argument. It seems, he is saying that thinking is not prediction, but how does he know that? As I see it, we don't know what
44.
by jorleif 13y ago
It seems you are assuming there are direct observations. Musk is talking about generating hypothetical observations from a model (the cost of the battery is bounded from below by the cost of the battery materials). This sort of bounding doe
45.
by jorleif 13y ago
I agree, but would like to add the aspect of uncertainty. When reasoning from analogy, you usually have good statistical knowledge about the properties of the problem. For example, the targetted product category may exist, and customer beha
46.
by jorleif 13y ago
Exactly what I thought. There is an awful lot of damage a semi-truck can do if things go wrong. But, then I realized, that there is not necessarily a need for the "trucks" to be big. Maybe you could go the Roomba route, and make t
47.
by jorleif 13y ago
That is a very modern take on it. I think the cultures that matter are the ones that will protect you if you protect it. Traditionally they are very much based on ancestry or political power. Still today, when people run into trouble, the o
48.
by jorleif 13y ago
Could the teachers statement be rephrased in terms that the kid is developing analytical skills so quickly that they are dominating over the more "experiential" part of socializing with others? It seems that this kind of thing per
49.
by jorleif 13y ago
If you want to buy, say furniture, a big barrier of web shopping is that you cannot automatically reason about their dimensions, because they are not exact enough (and even more seriously, they are usually available only as free text). The
50.
by jorleif 13y ago
The article has an interesting argument structure. First it undermines the science behind psychiatric drugs by referring to their discovery as serendipitous. Then it proceeds to point out that there is no good theoretical understanding for
51.
by jorleif 13y ago
> we've watered our teaching of history (and most things) down to soundbites Exactly, or at least to neat narratives that are very much retrospectively constructed and do not really give a realistic picture of the messiness of how t
52.
by jorleif 13y ago
Exactly, I think it's a good heuristic that people who ask for loyalty don't deserve that loyalty. People who do deserve it rarely have to ask, because they are busy turning the situation into a win-win, or at least symmetric in r
53.
by jorleif 13y ago
For a big corporation it is not important to succeed in most acquisition. The real risk, is that some startup eats your current business model and you didn't buy it when you could still afford it. If most acquisitions "fail" that is ok, you
54.
by jorleif 13y ago
Since we there is no exact definition of what a mentally healthy human being is, in the same way that those specifications would be available for a machine for example, the definitions of mental problems have obviously been developed mostly
55.
by jorleif 13y ago
Yes, the solution would be more along the lines that the owner or one of his direct descendants has to live at the site. Then hurting the environment hurts yourself.
56.
by jorleif 13y ago
The much bigger problem is that nobody tries to repeat findings, because there is no incentive to do so. There is an asymmetry between positive and negative findings. Say I make a study that shows that X causes Y. Then someone else tries to
57.
by jorleif 13y ago
Usually these kinds of data are not part of the publication or up for review. I don't know why exactly, but I suppose it is a combination of: 1) paper publishing tradition, where distributing this material is too much work. 2) too much wor
58.
by jorleif 14y ago
It's not entirely clear to me how givedirectly.org operates, but it seems they give in an unpredictable fashion, rather than continuously. That might make a big difference, since fixed amounts of money every week or so can lead to the recei
59.
by jorleif 14y ago
It seems that no one has mentioned that the effect of relative wealth might be severe also from a rationality point of view. In a more primitive environment, if your neighbor becomes too powerful, he might enslave or even kill you, so bette
60.
by jorleif 14y ago
You can surely call that playing the cards, the difference with actual cards, is that you can't reliably calculate probabilities, and avoiding too large harm is a good strategy in that case.

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