Public Service Announcement Collection

Eliezer Yudkowsky

P/S/A: There are single sentences which can create life-changing amounts of difference.

P/S/A: If you're not sure whether or not you've ever had an orgasm, it means you haven't had one, a condition known as primary anorgasmia which is 90% treatable by cognitive-behavioral therapy.
P/S/A: The people telling you to expect above-trend inflation when the Federal Reserve started printing money a few years back, disagreed with the market forecasts, disagreed with standard economics, turned out to be actually wrong in reality, and were wrong for reasonably fundamental reasons so don't buy gold when they tell you to.
P/S/A: There are many many more submissive/masochistic men in the world than there are dominant/sadistic women, so if you are a woman who feels a strong temptation to command men and inflict pain on them, and you want a large harem of men serving your every need, it will suffice to state this fact anywhere on the Internet and you will have fifty applications by the next morning.
P/S/A: Most of the personal-finance-advice industry is parasitic and/or self-deluded, and it's generally agreed on by economic theory and experimental measurement that an index fund will deliver the best returns you can get without huge amounts of effort.
P/S/A: If you are smart and underemployed, you can very quickly check to see if you are a natural computer programmer by pulling up a page of Python source code and seeing whether it looks like it makes natural sense, and if this is the case you can teach yourself to program very quickly and get a much higher-paying job even without formal credentials.

P/S/A: There are single sentences which can create life-changing amounts of difference.

P/S/A: If you're not sure whether or not you've ever had an orgasm, it means you haven't had one, a condition known as primary anorgasmia which is 90% treatable by cognitive-behavioral therapy.
P/S/A: The people telling you to expect above-trend inflation when the Federal Reserve started printing money a few years back, disagreed with the market forecasts, disagreed with standard economics, turned out to be actually wrong in reality, and were wrong for reasonably fundamental reasons so don't buy gold when they tell you to.
P/S/A: There are many many more submissive/masochistic men in the world than there are dominant/sadistic women, so if you are a woman who feels a strong temptation to command men and inflict pain on them, and you want a large harem of men serving your every need, it will suffice to state this fact anywhere on the Internet and you will have fifty applications by the next morning.
P/S/A: Most of the personal-finance-advice industry is parasitic and/or self-deluded, and it's generally agreed on by economic theory and experimental measurement that an index fund will deliver the best returns you can get without huge amounts of effort.
P/S/A: If you are smart and underemployed, you can very quickly check to see if you are a natural computer programmer by pulling up a page of Python source code and seeing whether it looks like it makes natural sense, and if this is the case you can teach yourself to program very quickly and get a much higher-paying job even without formal credentials.

Certainly a more capable user can do more than a less capable user, but that's just restating the obvious.

I would argue that there is a more important trend here: the growth and accumulation of software -- accumulation which continues to reduce the need to program something from scratch. 30 years ago if you wanted, say, a tool to convert metric amounts to imperial and back you had to write it yourself. Nowadays your task is to select one of a few dozen apps that can do it. Most needs of an average user (ones that he himself recognizes as his needs) have been met, software-wise -- no need to code anything yourself.

I believe you also overestimate the willingness of the general population to get involved with programming of any kind. I happen to know a group of fairly high-level accountants. They are all smart people, computer-literate, work all day in Excel with rather complex structures, etc. A significant part of their work is automateable and would be made noticeably easier with a collection of scripts and snippets in Excel's VBA (Visual Basic for Applications). However they refuse, explicitly and forcefully to delve into VBA using a variety of not-too-rational arguments which boil down to "we're accountants, not programmers". I don't believe these people are exceptions, I think they are the rule.

Oh, and MS Office certainly implements a full-blown scripting language -- the above-mentioned VBA.

I believe you also overestimate the willingness of the general population to get involved with programming of any kind.

I don't believe I made a statement about that. I'm not trying to predict whether general computer science skills will become more common outside of formal software engineering in the future -- that's not something I'm equipped to answer. I'm saying that the potential value added by being an accountant who can code or an HR specialist who can code has increased over the last decade or so and will probably continue to do so.

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