= 27d567bc2d48d9f40e9ccc20ea370b15)
SaidAchmiz comments on Rationalists Are Less Credulous But Better At Taking Ideas Seriously - Less Wrong
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
= 783df68a0f980790206b9ea87794c5b6)
Loading…= b715d02e85f7b3b4ae65ca3d3e450868)
Subscribe to RSS Feed
Powered by Reddit
= f037147d6e6c911a85753b9abdedda8d)
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
Comments (285)
Yvain, could you give a real-life example analogous to your Goofus & Gallant story?
That is, could you provide an example (or several, even better) of a situation wherein:
Note that cryonics does not fit that bill (it fails point 5), which is why I'm asking for one or more actual examples.
Slightly different but still-important questions -- what about when you remove the requirement that the idea be strange or unconventional? How much of taking ideas seriously here is just about acting strategically, and how much is non-compartmentalization? To what extent can you train the skill of going from thinking "I should do X" to actually doing X?
Other opportunities for victory, not necessarily weird, possibly worth investigating: wearing a bike helmet when biking, using spaced repetition to study, making physical backups of data, staying in touch with friends and family, flossing.
Oh boy, is this ever a good example.
I used to work retail, selling and repairing Macs and Mac accessories. When I'd sell someone a computer, I'd tell them — no, beg them — to invest in a backup solution. "I'm not trying to sell you anything!", I'd say. "You don't have to buy your backup device from us — though we'd be glad to sell you one for a decent price — but please, get one somewhere! Set it up — heck, we'll set it up for you — and please... back up! When you come to us after your hard drive has inevitably failed — as all hard drives do eventually, sure as death or taxes — with your life's work on it, you'll be glad you backed up."
And they'd smile, and nod, and come back some time later with a failed hard drive, no backup, and full of outrage that we couldn't magic their data back into existence. And they'd pay absurd amounts of money for data recovery.
Back up your data, people. It's so easy (if you've got a Mac, anyway). The pain of losing months or years of work is really, really, really painful.
This post convinced me to make a physical backup of a bunch of short stories I've been working on. At first I was going to go read through the rest of the comments thread and then go do the back up, but further consideration made me realize how silly that was - burning them to a DVD and writing "Short Story Drafts" on it with a sharpie didn't take more than five minutes to do and made the odds of me forever losing that part of my personal history tremendously smaller. Go go gadget Taking Ideas Seriously!
(This is a stream of consciousness where I explore why I haven't backed up my data. This proceeds in stages, with evolution to the next stage only because the writing of this comment forced me to keep going. Thus, it's a data point in response to this comment.)
Interesting. I have a very dense 'ugh field' around backing up my data, come to think of it. Based on this population of one, it has nothing to do with not trusting the salesperson, or not being aware that my hard drive is going to fail.
... in fact, I know my hard drive is about to fail (upon reboot I get those dooming system error messages that cycle, etc.) and has occurred to me several times I might want to back up my data. Yes, there's some important stuff I need to back up.
Maybe the hurdle is that most stuff on my computer is useless, and I don't want to prioritize the material. I just want it all there if I need it, so I wish my computer wouldn't break.
Since I know my computer is likely to break, or in case the power goes out or I accidentally close without saving, while working I save files electronically very frequently, and I make hard copies if there will be any pain within say -- 72 hours -- of losing a particular document. The pain of the loss of anything later than a few days is discounted. (Is that hyperbolic discounting? Or just akrasia, as another commenter suggested?)
But I do know I won't spend 20 minutes tomorrow investigating how to back up my hard drive. I know someone will say it is "easy", but there will instead be some obstacle that will mean my data won't actually get backed up and I'll have wasted my twenty minutes. Right?
... OK, fine. (sigh) Let's suppose my budget is $20 and 20 minutes. What should I do?
(reading online)
...OK, I buy a hard-drive, connect it with a USB, and drag and drop the files I want to save once the computer recognizes the device. Although I still need to determine which folders are worth saving, and this is a continuous, ongoing chore, there are some folders I know I need to save right away. I should go ahead and store those.
(I'll report back tomorrow whether this back-up actually happened.)
Others have mentioned Dropbox, but it's so wonderful I'll mention it again. Dropbox. It's almost as awesome in its just-works-ness as Time Machine (Apple's awesome backup solution). Free up to 2GB, $10/month gets you 100GB. Runs on everything.
Note that Dropbox isn't designed as a backup solution, it's really for sharing files across multiple devices. It only preserves the current version of a file, so offers no protection against deleting a file you didn't mean to. As soon as you edit a file, the changes are uploaded to the Dropbox cloud.
A point to remember is that every backup solution protects against some threats but not others, and you have to decide what you need to defend against. I have a Time Capsule (external drive for Time Machine backup), but it's in the same room as the computer, so it provides excellent protection against disc failure or accidental deletion, but none against theft. So I also have an external drive that I plug in once a week and the rest of the time leave hidden elsewhere. If the files on your computer are your livelihood, you need an off-site backup to survive risks such as your house burning down, or serious burglars doing a complete house clearance.
A backup solution that presents a continuous, ongoing chore is not going to work. It has to be something that once you set it up, Just Works. I don't know if there's anything as awesome as Time Machine in this respect for Windows. Ideally a solution should automatically backup everything, except possibly some things you specifically exclude. If you only back up things you specifically decide to, you will inevitably leave things out, that you'll only discover when you need the backup you don't have.
Dropbox actually does version control, which has saved several files I've accidentally deleted or overwritten. It's only up to 30 days, though.
I take it you've got a Windows or Linux machine? Because if you have a Mac, there's a much easier solution. Edit: I mean easier than a continuous, ongoing chore of deciding what files to save, drag-and-dropping stuff, etc. You do still need to buy a device, though. For a $20 budget I recommend this 32 GB USB flash drive.
I have a Windows machine, but I know there are automatic back-up schedules that can be done. I just don't want to do it... I don't want to think about a complex automatic process or make decisions about scheduling. Trying to pinpoint why ... it feels messy and discontinuous and inconvenient, to keep saving iterations of all my old junk.
When dealing with old data, what I find most stressful is deciding which things to keep. So as far as possible I don't. It's a wasted effort. I keep everything, or I delete everything. It doesn't matter that there's gigabytes of stuff on my machine that I'll never look at, as long as I never have to see it or think about it. Disc space is measured in terabytes these days.
In case this wasn't clear, for the benefit of any Mac users reading this:
Time Machine makes all these decisions for you. That's one of the things that makes it awesome.
This.
Typically when I change machines, the data from the old one goes into the /old folder on the new one. You get a nesting hierarchy and down at the bottom there are some files from many years ago that I would need to get a simulator to even read :-/
So that's what I am going to do. I actually ordered an external hard drive, and every few weeks I'll back up my hard drive. The whole thing (no decisions).
I also understand that I don't need to worry about versions -- the external hard drive just saves the latest version.
I also talked to a friend today and found out they backed their data regularly. I was surprised; didn't know regular people did this regularly.
Backups aren't about saving your old junk. Backup are about saving everything that you have on your hard drive in case it goes to the Great Write-Only Memory In The Sky.
If you're talking about staggered backups or snapshots, their usefulness lies mostly in being a (very primitive) versioning system, as well as a possible lifeline in case your data gets silently corrupted and you don't notice fast enough.
Well, the way it works on the Mac — and I'm only describing this because I speculate that similar, if not quite as awesome, solutions exist for Windows — is this:
Scheduling: backups happen every hour if the backup drive is plugged in; or, whenever you plug it in; plus, you can trigger them manually. You pretty much don't have to think about it; just either keep the thing plugged in (easy with a desktop), or plug it in once in a while.
Multiple iterations of your stuff: there's a "history" of backups, maintained automatically. You can go back to any backed-up prior version (to a certain point; how long a history you can keep is dictated by available storage space). The interface for restoring things hides the messy complexity of the multiple versions from you, and just lets you go back to the latest version, or any previous available version, sorted by time.
With good backup software, it's really quite smooth and easy. The process is not complex; decisions to be made are minimal; your backup feels nice and non-messy; restoring is easy as pie.
Unfortunately I can't recommend good Windows backup software, but maybe someone else can chime in.
If the person doesn't know anything about computers or backups, he can't distinguish "I'm not trying to sell you something" from "I am trying to sell you something and I'm lying about it" and he'd have to do a Bayseian update based on the chance that you're trying to sell him something. Furthermore, he knows that if you are trying to sell him something, the fact that you are trying to sell him something would make it likely that anything you say is untrustworthy (and the fact that you are lying about your intent to sell him something increases the probability of untrustworthiness even more).
So the customer is being rational by not listening to you.
I am not a salesman.
I am, however, reasonably competent with technology. Growing up in a congregation of all age groups, this made me one of the go-to people whenever somebody had computer problems. I'm talking middle-aged and above, the kind of people who fall for blatant phishing scams, have 256mb of RAM, and don't know what right-clicking is.
Without fail, these people had been aware that losing all their data would be very painful, and that it could happen to them, and that backing up their data could prevent that. Their reaction was universally "this is embarrassing, I should've taken that more seriously", not "I didn't know a thing like this could happen/that I could have done something simple to prevent it". Procrastination, trivial inconveniences, and not-taking-the-idea-seriously-enough are the culprit in a large majority of cases.
In short, I think it requires some contortion to construe the typical customer as rational here.
I note an amusing and strange contradiction in the sibling comments to this one:
VAuroch says the above is explained by hindsight bias; that the people in question actually didn't know about data loss and prevention thereof (but only later confabulated that they did).
Eugine_Nier says the above is explained by akrasia: the people did know about data loss and prevention, but didn't take action.
These are contradictory explanations.
Both VAuroch and Eugine_Nier seem to suggest, by their tone ("Classic hindsight bias", "That's just akrasia") that their respective explanations are obvious.
What's going on?
Well, it depends on what precisely we mean by them "knowing" about data loss.
Limits of language, I think. Both explanations are possible, giving what the parent post said; both VAuroch and Eugine_Nier may have had experience with similar cases caused, respectively, by hindsight bias and akrasia, which makes their explanation appear obvious to them.
A lot of the time, I've noticed that "it's obvious" means "I have seen this pattern before (sometimes multiple times), and this extra element is part of the same pattern every time that I have seen it"
I meant less that the explanation was obvious and more that it was a very good example of the effect of hindsight bias; hindsight bias produces precisely these kinds of results.
If something else is even more likely to produce this kind of result, then that would be more likely than hindsight bias. I don't think akrasia qualifies.
To elaborate on what I think was actually going on: People 'know' that failure is a possibility, something that happens to other people, and that backups are a good way to prevent it, but don't really believe that it is a thing that can happen to them. After the fact, hindsight bias transforms 'yeah, that's a thing that happens' to 'this could happen to me' retroactively, and they remember knowing/believing it could happen to them.
That's just akrasia.
Classic hindsight bias. If you went to a representative sample of similar people who had not recently suffered a backup-requiring event, they would probably think the second version, not the first.
Hindsight bias is almost certainly a component. Plus, I was a friendly member of their in-group, providing free assistance with a major problem, so they had two strong reasons to be extra-agreeable.
Even so, in my experience, your second sentence does not match reality. As in, doing exactly that does not in fact yield responses skewing toward the second option, even among the very non-tech-savvy. Many of them don't know exactly how to set such a thing up (but know they could give a teenager $20 to do it for them, which falls under "trivial inconveniences"), but the idea is not new info to them.
My sample size here is small and demographically/geographically limited, so add as many grains of salt as you see fit.
Well, look, of course I'd prefer to sell the customer something. If, knowing this, you take everything out of my mouth to be a lie, then you are not, in fact, being rational. The fact that I would specifically say "buy it elsewhere if you like!", and offer to set the backup system up for free, ought to tell you something.
The other part of this is that the place where I worked was a small, privately owned shop, many of whose customers were local, and which made a large chunk (perhaps the majority) of its revenue from service. (Profit margins on Apple machines are very slim.) It was to our great advantage not to lie to people in the interest of selling them one more widget. Doing so would have been massively self-defeating. As a consequence of all of this, our regular customers generally trusted us, and were quite right to do so.
Finally, even if the customer decided that the chance was too great that I was trying to sell them something, and opted not to buy anything on the spot, it is still ridiculously foolish not to follow up on the salesperson's suggestion that you do something to protect yourself from losing months or years of work. If that is even a slight possibility, you ought to investigate, get second and third opinions, get your backup solution as cheaply as you like, and then take me up on my offer to install it for free (or have a friend install it). To not back up at all, because clearly the salesperson is lying and the truth must surely be the diametrical opposite of what they said, is a ludicrously bad plan.
It tells customers something, but considering that these are plausible marketing techniques, it's not very strong evidence.
If you tell the customers that something is really important, that they should buy it, even if from somewhere else, this signals trustworthiness and consideration, but it's a cheap signal considering that if they decide, right in your store, to buy a product which your store offers, they probably will buy it from you unless they're being willfully perverse. Most of the work necessary to get them to buy the product from you is done in convincing them to buy it at all, and nearly all the rest is done by having them in your store when you do it.
Offering to provide services for free is also not very strong evidence, because in marketing, "free" is usually free*, a foot-in-the-door technique used to extract money from customers via some less obvious avenue. Indeed, the customers might very plausibly reason that if the service was so important that they would be foolish to do without it, you wouldn't be offering it for free.
Given that setting up backups on a Mac is so easy that, as I suggested in my quoted spiel, the customer could even do it themselves, this is not a very well-supported conclusion.
Well, duh. You "extract" money from customers by the fact of them liking you, trusting you, and getting all their service done at your shop, and buying future things they need from you, also.
I think you underestimate how doggedly many people hunt for deals. I don't even blame them; being a retail shop, my place of work sometimes couldn't compete with mail-order houses on prices.
You're right, though: if they decided then and there that they would buy the thing, the customers often in fact went ahead and bought it then and there.
But you might plausibly think "hmm, suspicious. I'll wait to buy this until I can do some research." Fine and well; that's exactly what I'd do. Do the research. Buy the thing online. But dismissing the entire notion, based on the idea that "bah, he was just trying to sell me something", is foolishness.
The customer is estimating the probability that the statement is a sales pitch. The fact that many people would hunt for deals affects the effectiveness of the sales pitch given that it is one, not the likelihood that the statement is a sales pitch in the first place. Those are two different things--it's entirely possible that the statement is probably a sales pitch, but the sales pitch only catches 20% of the customers.
Yes; that comment was a response to your scenario whereby someone has already decided to purchase the item. You asserted that said person would then surely purchase it in the store, at the moment of the decision to purchase. I claimed that some people are too keen on getting a good deal to do that, opting instead to wait and buy it mail-order or online.
This is unrelated to the probability of my statements being a sales pitch.
Thus, a person might think: "Hmm, is this merely a sales pitch? Perhaps; but even if it is, and it succeeds in convincing me to buy a backup device, I might well still not buy it here and now, because I really want a good deal." They might then conclude: "And so, given that the salesman knows this, and is nonetheless insistent that I should buy it — and is even encouraging me to buy it elsewhere if it'll get me to buy it at all — I should take his words seriously; at least, seriously enough to look into it further."
Thanks for the encouragement. I decided to do this after reading this and other comments here, and yes it was easy. I used a portable hard drive many times larger than the Mac's internal drive, dedicated just to this, and was guided through the process when I plugged it in. I did read up a bit on what it was doing but was pretty satisfied that I didn't need to change anything.
I can verify this -- as an acknowledged "computer person" and "rational person", I still didn't back up my data, even while advising my friends that they should and they'll be sorry when they don't. Fortunately, my hard drive started making interesting new noises, rather than failing without warning, so I didn't embarrass my self too badly. It is fairly common for someone to acknowledge and advise others of backing up their data, but failing to do so themselves.
I think it's a combination of procrastination, laziness, being super-cheap, optimism/arrogance, and not having especially valuable data. Though people with valuable data do it too.
You got me kinda scared. I just use Evernote or wordpress for all my important writing. That should be enough, right?
Some hazards your online data are exposed to:
Your account could be hacked.
Their service could be hacked.
They might decide that you're in breach of their ToS and close your account.
They could go out of business.
Anywhere your data are, they are exposed to some risks. The trick is to have multiple copies, such that no event short of the collapse of civilisation will endanger all of them together.
Precisely. My most immediately critical data — the stuff on which my current employment and professional success/advancement depends — exists in no less than seven places:
I worry that that's not enough. I am considering investing in some sort of NAS, or two, and placing them in more secure areas of both of the dwellings to which I have access.
How much time are you spending keeping all of that in sync...?
Just having a lot of drives is not a good use of resources from the data protection standpoint. It ensures you protection against the catastrophic failure of one or two drives simultaneously, but you seem unprotected against most other forms of data loss: for example, silent corruption of files (what are you using to ensure integrity? I don't see any mention of hashes or DVCSes), or mistaken deletions/modifications (what stops a file deletion from percolating through each of the 7 before you realize 6 months later that it was a critical file?).
For improving general safety, you should probably drop some of those drives in favor of adding protection in the form of read-only media and error detection + forward error correction (eg periodically making a full backup with PAR2 redundancy to BluRays), and more frequent backups to the backup drives.
Synchronization is automatic. It does not take up any of my time.
I have enough drive space to maintain backups going back several months, which protects against both file corruption (volume corruption is taken care of by redundancy) and mistaken deletion/modification. In any case, the files in question are mostly text or text-based, not binary formats, so corruption is less of a concern.
Code, specifically, is of course also kept in git repositories.
Backups to read-only media are a good idea, and I do them periodically as well (not blurays, though; DVDs or even CDs suffice, as the amount of truly critical data is not that large).
I can't resist the temptation... :-D
"Only wimps use tape backup: real men just upload their important stuff on ftp, and let the rest of the world mirror it" -- Linus Torvalds
Certainly not.
No.
What method of backing up data do you recommend for a computer with windows? How often do you recommend doing it?
It depends on your use case. My "life work" consists exclusively of things I've typed. These types of files tend to be small, and lend themselves to being written in Google Documents. If I use Emacs, then the files are tiny and I back them up to Google Drive in about 2 seconds. This costs me all of $0 and is very easy.
But maybe your life work also includes a bunch of pictures documenting your experiences. These, and other large files, will quickly exceed your 15 gigs of free storage. Then you're probably looking at an external hard drive or cloud storage. The better fit will depend on things like your internet connection, which USB standard your computer has, your tech level, how much stuff you need backed up, whether you travel a lot, whether you'll lose or damage the external hard drive, etc.
And then just use Yvain's method to find the best one.
Of course, there's more elaborate solutions for power users, but by the time you're high enough level for them, you're a power user and don't need to ask.
Thank you, I basically use this method now and am glad to have it corroborated by an expert.
I don't use Windows nearly as much, but one idea (depending on use case, as zedzed said) is cloud storage. Dropbox is free up to 2 GB. Paid services exist. Synchronization is regular and automatic; some services keep some file history, as well.
I'm not Yvain, but his Goofus and Gallant parable did remind me of the time some dude noticed that the uncapped jackpot rollover of the Irish lotto made it vulnerable to a brute force attack.
Interesting. Pretty niche (in that it doesn't seem to be an example of behavior that the average rationalist will often, or ever, have a chance to emulate), but interesting.
I note that the National Lottery responded by attempting (with partial success) to block the guy from his victory, and also making such things unfeasible in the future. So someone who thought "nah, that would never be allowed to work" (i.e. didn't take the idea seriously), would have been at least partly correct.
As a general rule, when you game the system, the system changes to stop the game, because the organisers have a goal beyond the rules of the day. So there's only a certain window of opportunity to profit. If there are high stakes, you need to be really sure that there is a gap to work with, in between "no-one has done this before, so maybe it doesn't work for reasons I haven't seen" and "everyone's doing it, so does it still work?"
The example in the thread is real-life-ish - compare to the story of Voltaire and friends winning the French lottery. But if you want more:
It's easy to think of trivial examples of one-time victories - for example, an early Bitcoin investor realizing that crypto-currency had potential and buying some when it was still worth fractions of a cent. But you can justly accuse me of cherry-picking here and demand repeatable examples.
Nothing guarantees that there will be repeatable examples - it could be that people are bad at taking ideas seriously until the ideas succeed once, at which point they realize they were wrong and jump on the bandwagon.
But in fact I think there are such examples. One such is investing in index funds rather than mutual funds/picking your own stocks. There are strong reasons to believe you'll do better, most people know those reasons but don't credit them, and some people do credit them and end up with more money.
Occasional use of modafinil might fall in this category as well, depending on whether we define people's usual reasons for not taking it as irrational or rational-given-different-utility-functions.
I don't think most of these examples will end out as "such obvious wins no one could possibly disagree with them" - with the possible exception of index funds it's never as purely mathematical as the lottery example - but I think for most people the calculus is clear.
Isn't it a little bit self-contradictory, to propose that smart people have beaten the market by investing in Bitcoin, and at the same time, that smart people invest in index funds rather than trying to beat the market? Or in other words, are those who got rich off Bitcoin really different from those who picked some lucky stocks in 1997 and cashed out in time?
That's a good point but I'm going to argue against it anyway.
Unlike a lucky stock, Bitcoin wasn't accounted for by mainstream markets at the time. An index fund amortizes the chances of lucky success and catastrophic failure across all the stocks into a single number, giving roughly the same expected value but with much lower variance. Bitcoin wasn't something that could be indexed at that point, so there was no way you could have hedged your bet in the same way that an index fund would let you hedge.
Actually, I've been working on a mini-essay on exactly this topic: because of my PredictionBook use, I have a long paper trail of explicit predictions on Bitcoin which implied major +EV at every time period, but I failed to meaningfully exploit my beliefs and so my gains have been far smaller than they could have been.
UPDATE:
I think index funds are a good example of something that fits my criteria #s 1, 2, and 3. (Thank you to the commenters who've explained to me both why they are a good idea and why many/most people may not understand or believe this.)
Do index funds fit #s 4 and 5? It might be interesting to ask, in the next survey: do you invest? If so, in index funds, or otherwise? If the former, how much money have you made as a result? In the absence of survey data, is there other evidence that rationalists (or "rationalists") invest in index funds more than the general population, and that they win thusly (i.e. make more money)?
I think modafinil is clearly a good example of my #s 2 and 3; I am not so sure about #1. I am still researching the matter. Gwern's article, though very useful, has not convinced me. (Of course, whether it fits #s 4 and 5 also remains to be demonstrated.)
I remain unsure about whether the Bitcoin investment is a good example of anything. Again, if anyone cares to elucidate the matter, I would be grateful.
I seriously doubt most people know the the reasons they should be investing in index funds. Remember, the average American has an IQ of 100, doesn't have a degree higher than a high school diploma, and rarely reads books. I'm not sure I'd know the reasons for buying index funds if not for spending a fair amount of time reading econ blogs.
Agreed: I have no idea why I should be investing in index funds (if, indeed, I were investing in anything). My skepticism about that example, though, actually comes from a slightly different place:
If I decided to do some investing, went to five financial experts, asked them what I should invest in, and they all said "Yep, index funds, definitely the way to go", then I would invest in index funds. Right? Where would I even get the idea to do anything else?
And thus, why does "invest in index funds" qualify as a counterintuitive idea? Why is it a thing that some people might not take seriously? Wouldn't it just be the default?
Because this
probably wouldn't happen. If you asked uninvolved experts, it would, but the most accessible experts aren't uninvolved. What is much more likely is that you (the average American with some money to invest) go to invest your money with an investment firm. And that investment firm pushes you toward actively-managed funds, since that's where their incentives are. In order for the idea of investing solely in index funds to be available, you have to put in meaningful thought, if only enough to look for non-corporate advice on how to invest well.
Huh. That makes sense, I suppose. Do people generally not seek advice from uninvolved experts? Is that true only in investing, or in other domains?
I'm not an expert, but my impression is that most people don't think about this kind of thing without prompting. Which means that they don't think about it unless they, for example, see an ad for Charles Schwab and call them to look into investing. Getting to the point of considering whether the expert has an incentive to lie to you seems to mark you as of substantially above-average reasoning skills.
Thank you for the response.
I'd like to hear this from a financial expert. Do we have any who'd like to speak on this?
Oh? What will modafinil do for me? (Will google and return to this thread, but if someone wants to recommend some links with concentrated useful info, it would be appreciated.)
I also have some objections to this sort of "obvious win" that do not depend on what modafinil's specific effects are: namely, that "deciding to start taking a drug without the advice and supervision of a licensed medical professional is bad" seems to be a decent heuristic to live by. It's not unalterable, but it seems good to a first approximation. Do you disagree?
Forgive me for my ignorance: so this guy has lots of Bitcoin now? What can you buy with Bitcoin? Can you just convert the Bitcoin into dollars? If so, how much money did this person make from this?
My suspicion is that these examples are actually more like "it's not clear whether these things are, in fact, even wins for the people who did them, never mind whether they will be wins for other people who are considering doing them". I was really looking for something more unambiguous than that.
I will comment more when I've investigated / received clarifications on the examples you've provided. In the meantime I would love to see more examples.
I'm one (PhD in economics) and yes and ordinary investors should use low fee index funds.
For ordinary investors won't there still be an issue of buying these funds at the right time, so as not to buy when the market is unusually high?
You can migitate the problem by making the investment gradually.
Yes
Thank you. A couple of follow-up questions, if you don't mind:
Do most ordinary investors not do this?
If not, do you know why? Do most people not know about the advantage of index funds? Or do they know, but don't use them anyway?
If the latter, why don't they? That seems strange. What makes index funds the "non-default" idea, so to speak? If index funds are known by financial experts to be superior to mutual funds (or other investing strategies), where would an ordinary person get the idea that they should be using anything other than index funds?
An index fund is intended to go up or down y the exact same amount as the entire exchange as a whole. For example, you might hear that the S&P 500 rose a total of 7% last year. If that happened, then your index fund would go up by 7%.
The main reason people don't invest in index funds is because they want to "beat the market." They see some stocks double or triple within a year and think "oh man, if only I'd bought that stock a bit earlier, I'd be rich!" So some people try to pick individual stocks, but the majority of laypeople want to let "experts" do it for them.
Mutual funds generally have a fund manager and tons of analysts working there trying to figure out how to beat the market (get a return greater than the market itself). They all claim to be able to do this and some have a record to point to to prove that they have done it in the past. For example, fund A may have beat the market in the previous 3 years, so investors think that by investing in Fund A over an Index fund, they will come out ahead.
But unfortunately, markets are anti-inductive so past success of individual stocks, mutual funds, and even index funds is no guarantee of future performance.
If you look at the performance of all funds over the past 20+ years and correct for survivorship bias (take into account all the funds that went out of business as well as the ones that are still around today), it becomes very clear that almost no mutual funds actually beat the market in terms of your ACTUAL RETURN when averaged over each year.
The final big problems with actively managed funds are fees and taxes. Actively managed funds charge higher percentage rates each year to cover their work. That's how they make money. They also tend to sell a percentage of your stocks each year and buy new ones in their attempt to beat the market. This gives a certain "portfolio turnover" percentage and the higher that is, the more you have to pay in taxes (capital gains), which lessens your return even more.
The bottom line is that mutual funds claim to be able to beat the market and many do in any given year. People chase the money and pay more in capital gains and fees to try to make a higher return. Over time though, the index fund beats all others in terms of total return over time.
But mutual funds are. I don't remember the citation, but I recall that mutual funds that do very poorly one year are more likely to do so in the future when you take into account fees and taxes.
Clearly, there are actively managed funds that do consistently worse than index funds, otherwise index funds wouldn't be able to make money, since financial markets are negative-sum.
Financial markets are positive-sum. If you just buy a bunch of stocks and hold onto them, on average you'll outperform cash.
Not necessarily. First, it depends on the market. Some are zero-sum, and about others one can say that they are NOT zero-sum, but that's it. They might be negative-sum or positive-sum, depending on the circumstances.
That also depends. Average over what? Which countries and what time periods?
If you buy a stock A at price X, somebody must be selling you stock A at price X.
If buying turns out to be a good deal (that is, the discounted dividends Y you collect from holding stock A are greater than X), then selling must turn out to be a bad deal: if the other party held stock A they would have collected the profit Y-X that they forfeited to you. Your gain is their lost profit, therefore the market is zero-sum between investors. Add transaction costs and it becomes negative-sum.
This analysis is simplified by the fact that I didn't take into account risk aversion and the fact that different parties can discount future utility in different ways (different discount rates or even hyperbolic discounting). But I suppose that when it comes to collective investors such as mutual funds or banks, these parameters can be considered to be roughly the same.
The stock market is not (necessarily) zero-sum or negative-sum as a whole, since money is transferred from companies to investors each time dividends are paid, but the way the investors slice the cake between them is negative-sum.
Survivorship bias means that most existing funds can have beating index funds in the past.
Yes, but taking into account survivorship bias, there are some actively managed funds that do do consistently worse than the market, and eventually fail (and are replaced by other funds that do so)
1) No but I'm doing my best as a columnist for Better Investing Magazine to tell them. Still, lots of money is in index funds.
2 and 3) Actively managed mutual funds put a lot of money into marketing, and the explanation for index funds is probably beyond most people. A huge number of financial experts would be out of jobs if all non-professional investors switched to index funds.
I don't know, the simple explanation for index funds is "on average, you will get the market average. So why not avoid the fees?", though it requires people being self-aware enough to recognize situations where they are, in fact, average.
But the actively managed mutual fund you are considering investing in has consistently outperformed the market even when taking into account taxes and fees.
Am I above average at picking actively-managed mutual funds?
What if you are the kind of person who is above average in most things. It's far from obvious why you shouldn't think you would be above average at picking stocks or mutual funds.
Two questions:
Doesn't this ignore the very important question of "which indices?"
Is this advice different from the "hold a sufficiently diversified portfolio" one?
Not an economist or otherwise particularly qualified, but these are easy questions.
I'll answer the second one first: This advice is exactly the same as advice to hold a diversified portfolio. The concept of an index fund is a tiny little piece of each and every thing that's on the market. The reasoning behind buying index funds is exactly the reasoning behind holding a diversified portfolio.
For the second question, remember the idea is to buy a little bit of everything, to diversify. So go meta, and buy little bits of many different index funds. But actually, as this is considered a good idea, people have made such meta-index funds, that are indices of indices, that you can buy in order to get a little bit of each index fund.
But as an index is defined as "a little bit of everything", the question of which one fades a lot in importance. There are indices of different markets, so one might ask which market to invest in, but even there you want to go meta and diversify. (Say, with one of those meta-indices.) And yes, you want to find one with low fees, which invests as widely as possible, etc. All the standard stuff. But while fiddling with the minueta may matter, it does pale when compared to the difference between buying indices and stupidly trying to pick stocks yourself.
This is not true. An index fund holds a particular index which generally does not represent "every thing that's on the market".
For a simple example, consider the most common index -- the S&P 500. This index holds 500 largest-capitalization stocks in the US. If you invest in the S&P500 index you can be fairly described as investing into US large-cap stocks. The point is that you are NOT investing into small-cap stocks and neither you are investing in a large variety of other financial assets (e.g. bonds).
Yes. What I wrote was a summery, and not as perfectly detailed as one may wish. One can quibble about details: "the market"/"a market", and those quibbles may be perfectly legitimate. Yes, one who buys S&P 500 indices is only buying shares in the large-cap market, not in all the many other things in the US (or world) economy. It would be silly to try to define a index fund as something that invests in every single thing on the face of the planet, and some indices are more diversified than others.
That said, the archetypal ideal of an index fund is that imaginary one piece of everything in the world. A fund is more "indexy" the more diversified it is. In other words, when one buys index funds, what one is buying is diversity. To a greater or lesser extent, of course, and one should buy not only the broadest index funds available, but of course also many different (non-overlapping?) index funds, if one wants to reap the full benifit of diversification.
Maybe in your mind. Not in mine. I think of indices (and index funds) as portfolios assembled under a particular set of rules. None of them tries to reach everything in the world, in fact a lot of them are designed to be quite narrow.
I still disagree. An index fund's most striking feature is that it invests passively, that is its managers generally don't have to make any decisions, they just have to follow publicly announced rules. I don't think a fund is more "indexy" if it owns more or more diverse assets.
Sigh. Still no. You're buying a portfolio composed under certain rules. Some of these portfolios (= index funds) are reasonably diversifed, some aren't, and that depends on how do you think of diversification, too.
The "classic" index fund, one that invests into S&P500, is not diversified particularly well. It invests in only a single asset class in a single country.
Yup. Take an actively managed fund that seems to be indexy by ygert's standards today. It might not be so indexy tomorrow.
The hypothetical investor probably has the same amount of Bitcoins he always had, but Bitcoins are worth many more dollars now than previously, a difference of three orders of magnitude.
Noted. And as for the other things I asked?
You can easily sell Bitcoins for US dollars on mtgox.com, but after mid-2013 you need a verified account (which IIRC requires sending them proof of residence) to transfer them to your bank account, which is a heck of a trivial inconvenience. (For all I know there might be an easier way, though.)
I heard other exchanges, e.g., BitStamp don't have this problem.
There's lots of modafinil info at gwern's page. Wikipedia is also a pretty good source. The short (and only slightly inaccurate) version is that it gives you the good effects of caffeine, but stronger, and with no withdrawal or other drawbacks. It's had positive effects on my mood and focus.
Reasonable! Which is why I'm taking modafinil with the advice and supervision of a licensed medical professional. If you're wary of self-medication, you might want to look into that route.
Thank you for the link, I will look into that.
If you are so inclined, I would be interested in hearing how you approached the "advice of a medical professional" aspect; did you go to your GP and say "So I'm considering taking modafinil"? (If you'd prefer not to answer, I entirely understand, no need to even respond to say no; thank you in any case for your comment.)
I'd been seeing a psychiatrist to get treated for anhedonia. We tried a few different SSRIs, which didn't help. Then I read about modafinil, and it seemed like it could plausibly help treat some of my symptoms (although not their causes), so I brought it up. He agreed it was a reasonable thing to try and prescribed it. I've been taking modafinil regularly for a year, now. It's not a giant boost for me, but it is a boost, and the drawbacks are negligible.
That's pretty remarkable, I would expect that most psychiatrists would be highly resistant to such a proposal. Also, having to try SSRIs first in order to maybe get them to agree is not an insignificant cost.
Yeah, it doesn't sound like Ben_LandauTaylor's strategy of modafinil acquisition is viable for me.
No kidding!
How much data is there behind this conclusion. Is it comparable to the centuries of experience we have with caffeine?
Why are you asking, instead of looking?
So - holding up Said, and for that matter my own memories, as evidence - most people simply haven't considered these options.
Which ... checks ... does fit with the original criteria:
I don't think it does, actually. The following are three distinct scenarios (as pertain to my point #2):
1. Being entirely unaware of what options/possibilities exist in some domain.
Example: I don't do any investing, and so, prior to this thread, had no opinion on index funds whatsoever, nor on mutual funds, nor on anything related.
2. Being unaware of some* particular* (potentially counterintuitive) idea or option.
Example: I'd never had anyone recommend modafinil to me, or suggest that I should take it, or explain what benefits it might have.
3. Being aware of some idea or option, but not taking it seriously.
Example: I have no idea. Gaming poorly-designed lotteries? I suspect this example fails for other reasons, but it does fit the criterion #2.
The claim, as I understand it, was:
There are numerous cases like scenario 3 above, where the main thing that keeps people from taking advantage of an opportunity, and winning thusly, is not taking some idea seriously — despite being aware of that idea. Rationalists, on the other hand, do take the idea seriously, and win thusly.
Index funds are not a good example for people who have no knowledge of investing, because what kept me, for instance, from taking advantage of the profit opportunities offered by the idea "invest in index funds" was not having any knowledge of investing whatsoever, not some failure to take things seriously.
Modafinil is not a good example for people not aware of modafinil or its (alleged) positive effects, because what kept me, for instance, from taking advantage of the cognitive boosts offered by the idea "take modafinil" was not being aware of modafinil, not some failure to take things seriously.
I haven't gotten a good response about Bitcoin, so I won't comment on that.
Now, don't get me wrong: I think index funds are a good example in general, based on the very helpful and clear comments I've gotten on that topic (thank you, commenters!). (Modafinil is not as clearly a good example. I'm still researching.) But my case, and similar others, are not good evidence for those examples.
Oh, indeed! Sorry, I didn't mean to state that they proved his point or anything like that. I was just observing that they do seem to fit the criteria listed in the original comment Yvain was replying to.
Well... my point is that they do not, in fact, fit the criteria — specifically, criterion #2 — in the case of people who haven't considered these ideas as options.
Really?
Unless they're not considering them as options because they wouldn't work for them (e.g. not having the necessary resources/connections, being risk-averse, having a different utility function, etc.), but rather because they're unusual in some fashion...
I guess perhaps you weren't clear on why, exactly, you wanted them to have been ignored?
I'm not claiming that a majority of the people who don't do these options don't do them because they're aware of them but don't take them seriously. I'm claiming a majority (or at least many) of the people who possess enough knowledge about them to be able to figure out that they should do them, don't.
My source is mainly anecdotes from people I've talked to who know all the arguments for these but don't do them.
So, concretizing your claim, we get:
I find this hard to believe. Do you really have anecdotes supporting this? (And a lack of a comparable or greater quantity of anecdotes to the contrary?)
I am entirely unconvinced that taking modafinil is a good idea, so you would have to first demonstrate that.
I think your post would greatly benefit from the inclusion of some of those anecdotes you allude to. In other words, why do you believe this thing you believe? What has caused you to come to this conclusion? I would love to know!
ETA: Note that I work for App Academy. So take all I say with a grain of salt. I'd love it if one of my classmates would confirm this for me.
Further edit: I retract the claim that this is strong evidence of rationalists winning. So it doesn't count as an example of this.
I just finished App Academy. App Academy is a 9 week intensive course in web development. Almost everyone who goes through the program gets a job, with an average salary above $90k. You only pay if you get a job. As such, it seems to be a fantastic opportunity with very little risk, apart from the nine weeks of your life. (EDIT: They let you live at the office on an air mattress if you want, so living expenses aren't much of an issue.)
There are a bunch of bad reasons to not do the program. To start with, there's the sunk cost fallacy: many people here have philosophy degrees or whatever, and won't get any advantage from that. More importantly, it's a pretty unusual life move at this point to move to San Francisco and learn programming from a non-university institution.
LWers are massively overrepresented at AA. There were 4/40 at my session, and two of those had higher karma than me. I know other LWers from other sessions of AA.
This seems like a decent example of rationalists winning.
EDIT:
My particular point is that for a lot of people, this seems like a really good idea: if there's a 50% chance of it being a scam, and you're making $50k doing whatever else you were doing with your life, then if job search takes 3 months, you're almost better off in expectation over the course of one year.
And most of the people I know who disparaged this kind of course didn't do so because they disagreed with my calculation, but because it "didn't offer real accreditation" or whatever. So I feel that this was a good gamble, which seemed weird, which rationalists were more likely to take.
Unrelatedly to my other response: uh, move to San Francisco? That... costs a lot of money. Even if only for nine weeks. Where did you live for the duration?
They let you live at the office. I spent less than $10 a day. Good point though.
Moving to San Francisco has a lot of expenses other than housing expenses, including costs for movers, travel costs (and the costs of moving back if you fail), costs to stop and start utilities, storage costs to store your possessions for 9 weeks if you live in the office, and the excess everyday costs that come from living in an area where everything is expensive. It's also a significant disruption to your social life (which could itself decrease your chances of finding a job, and is a cost even if it doesn't.)
You make a good point. But none of the people I've discussed this with who didn't want to do App Academy cite those reasons.
I think this falls into the category of not assuming everyone talks like a LW-er.
Someone who has moved in the past or known someone who has moved might not remember (at least without prompting) each of the individual items which make moving cost. They may just retain a generalized memory that moving is something to be avoided without a good reason.
But guess what? When it comes to making decisions that should take into account the cost of moving, remembering "moving should be avoided without a good reason" will, if their criteria for "good reason" are well-calibrated, lead to exactly the same conclusion as having a shopping list of moving costs in their mind and knowing that the movers are $500 and the loss of social links is worth 1000 utilons etc. even if they can't articulate any numbers or any specific disadvantages of moving. Just because the people didn't actually cite those reasons, and wouldn't be able to cite those reasons, doesn't mean that they weren't in effect rejecting it for those reasons.
And yes, this generalizes to people being unable to articulate reasons to avoid other things that they've learned to avoid.
This is an extremely cogent articulation of something I've been wanting to articulate for a while (but couldn't, because I'm the sort of person who just remembers "you shouldn't move without a good reason). I would strongly encourage you to write a top level post about this.
... huh. Could you elaborate on this, please? How's that work? Do they have actual housing? What is living at the office like?
They don't have actual housing.
There are three rooms and one open space to put beds / storage in.
80%+ of beds are air mattresses people bought at Target.
Living at the office means you have to sign up at a nearby gym if you wish to shower.
It also means no privacy.
The showers in the nearest gym occasionally turn to cold water. (about 1 in 15 times)
The nearest gym is ~7 mins away walking and costs $130 for three months membership.
There are no housing costs.
Lights typically go off at 11 pm - 12 am
Residents have to wash dishes and take out the trash, and generally pick up after themselves.
There are ~15 residents per active cohort.
Food costs are ~$10 / day if you eat out for lunch and dinner, and ~$4 / day if you make food.
Each sleeping space is ~20 square meters. (there are four)
If you sleep in the last sleeping space, you have to move your shit during the day.
Thank you for the info.
I guess the takeaway here is that when someone on LessWrong talks about something being an obvious win, I should take it with a grain of salt, and assume a strong prior probability of this person just having very different values from me.
Possible things to consider are:
It's assumed that you go to App Academy with the interest of getting a high paying job without paying too much for that opportunity, and being very confident of your success.
It's also assumed you want to be able to program, and would imagine it to be fun in the future, if it is not already.
Humans acclimate to conditions relatively quickly.
It's relatively easy to improve your living conditions with earplugs, night eyewear, and a mattress cover.
Having people around you to debug when you are too exhausted to is a significant boon for progression in programming skill.
That said, it's understandable if your values differ.
I'm one of Solvent's App Academy grads here. Unclear to me whether this is indicative of LWer's superior rationality, and to what extent it's because word about App Academy has gotten around within the LessWrong community. For me, the decision process went something like:
So I don't know how much of my decision was driven by superior rationality and how much was driven by information I had that others might not (due in large part to the LessWrong community.) Though this certainly played a role.
(EDIT: And in case anyone was wondering, it was a great decision and I'd highly recommend it.)
Don't dismiss what non-LWers are trying to say just because they don't phrase it as a LWer would. "Didn't offer real accreditation" means that they 1) are skeptical about whether the the plan teaches useful skills (doing a Bayseian update on how likely that is, conditional on the fact that you are not accredited), or 2) they are skeptical that the plan actually has the success rate you claim (based on their belief that employers prefer accreditation, which ultimately boils down to Bayseianism as well).
Furthermore, it's hard to figure the probability that something is a scam. I can't think of any real-world situations where I would estimate (with reasonable error bars) that something has a 50% chance of being a scam. How would I be able to tell the difference between something with a 50% chance of being a scam and a 90% chance of being a scam?
I don't think that they're thinking rationally and just saying things wrong. They're legitimately thinking wrong.
If they're skeptical about whether the place teaches useful skills, the evidence that it actually gets people jobs should remove that worry entirely. Their point about accreditation usually came up after I had cited their jobs statistics. My impression was that they were just looking for their cached thoughts about dodgy looking training programs, without considering the evidence that this one worked.
If their point about accreditation was meant to indicate that they are skeptical that the plan leads to useful skills or to getting a job, then having them bring it up when you cite the job statistics is entirely expected. They brought up evidence against getting a job when you gave them evidence for getting one.
(And if you're thinking that job statistics are such good evidence that even bringing up something correlated with lack of jobs doesn't affect the chances much, that's not true. There are a number of ways in which job statistics can be poor evidence, and those people were likely aware that such ways exist.)
To elaborate a bit, one form of deceptive figures I've heard about is to only count successes as percentages of people who go through the entire program. It makes sense to do this to some degree since you don't want to count people who dropped out after a day, but depending on how the program is run, it's not hard to weed out a lot of people part of the way through and artificially increase your success rate.
There's also the difference between the percentage of people who get jobs and the percentage who keep them, and the possibility that past performance covers a time period where the job market was better and won't generalize to your chance of getting a job from the program now. Not to mention that success rate partly depends on the people who take the course--if most of the people who take the course are, say, high school graduates with high aptitude but no money for college, their success rate might not translate to the success rate for an adult who moves from another area.
And there's the possibility of overly-literal wording. Has everyone who has gotten a job gotten a job based on a skill learned during the program? Is an "average salary" a mean or median?
Then there's always the possibility that the success rate is simply false. Sure, false advertising is illegal,. but with no oversight, how's anyone supposed to find that out?
I don't know specifically about App Academy, but I've found a hacker news thread where there is some speculation that these "coding bootcamps" might inflate their statistics by having a selective enrollment interviews that screens off most people who are not already employable and/or hire their own students as instructors or something after they complete the program, so that they can be counted as employed, even for a short time.
This is the first time I hear about this training program, but my impression (as somebody living outside the US) is that at the moment there is a shortage of programmers in the Silicon Valley, and therefore it is relatively easy, at least for people with the appropriate cognitive structure (those who can "grok" programming), to get a relatively high-paying programming job, even with minimal training.
I suppose this is especially true in the web app/mobile app industry, since these tend to be highly commodified, non-critical products, which can be developed and deployed incrementally and have often very short lifecycles, hence a "quantity over quality" production process is used, employing a large number of relatively low-skilled programmers (*).
Since the barriers to entry to the industry are low, evaluating the effectiveness of a commercial training program is not trivial: just noting that most people who complete the program get a job isn't great evidence.
You would have to check whether people who complete the program are more likely to get a job, or get higher average salaries, than people who taught programming themselves by reading a few tutorials or completed free online courses like those offered by Code.org, Coursera, etc.
If there was no difference, or the difference was not high enough to pay back the training program cost, then paying for it would be sub-optimal.
(* I'm not saying that all app programmers are low-skilled, just that high skill is not a requirement for most of these jobs)
Few people have the mental starmina to just teach themselves 8 hours a day via reading a few tutorials and complete free online courses.
If you go with your mattress to App Academy it takes effort to not spent time programming when all the people around you are programming.
It also likely that the enviroment will make it easy to network with other programmers.
It's actually a defining characteristic of hackers, except that it's more like 16 hours a day.
It depends on the teacher. If you have a specific well defined project than a good hacker can work his 16 hours focused on the project.
From the people I know few have the same ability for the kind of general tutorial learning that provides broad knowledge.
I think I certainly spend many days where I spent most of my time learning but it wasn't the kind of focused learning you have in school.
Which teacher? "...mental stamina to just teach themselves"
If that's the case do you have any idea what makes them so exceptional?
Are you asking what makes people self-motivated, have burning curiosity, and be willing to just dive headlong into new fields of study?
I have no idea, but I suspect carefully choosing one's parents helps :-)
There is also the standard stereotype of high-functioning autistics with superhuman ability to focus, but I don't know how well it corresponds to reality.
You might consider this interesting.
I do, thanks.
True, but I suspect that the effect of training time runs into diminishing returns well before you reach 8 hours a day, in particular after you have been doing it for a few days.
Agreed.
I think there are many smart people that have issues with akrasia. Being in an enviroment with other people who also work makes it much easier to just sit down and follow the course.
The fact that the deal with App Academy is that you only pay when you get a job also makes it in their interest that the logistics of the job search are settled.
For someone without a programming job the way to find work as a programmer might not seem straightforward even after completing a bunch of tutorials.
For this description the only reason I won't go to App Academy is that it's in the US. If I could just do this is a a European city I would likely pursue it because it's a path that's much more straightforward than my current one.
I'm not saying that they offer no value, I'm saying that the fact that they have high hiring ratios statistics is, by itself, not strong evidence that they offer enough value to justify their price.
"Shortage of programmers" often means "shortage of programmers willing to work for the salaries we offer".
And/or "shortage of programmers ticking all the boxes on this highly specific technology stack we're using". I get the impression that the greatest advantage of these development bootcamps from a hiring perspective is having a turnaround time short enough that they can focus narrowly on whatever technologies are trendy at the moment, as opposed to a traditional CS degree which is much more theory-centric and often a couple years out of date in its practical offerings.
It seems to me they already tend to offer quite high salaries.
Further increasing them could increase the number of available programmers, although there are going to be both short-term and long-term availability limits. And obviously, companies can't afford to pay arbitrary high salaries.
More specifically, I suppose that much of this labor demand comes from startups, which often operate on the brink of financial viability.
Startups have high failure rates, but a few of them generate a very high return on investment, which is what makes the whole startup industry viable: VCs are as risk averse as anybody else, but by diversifying their investments in many startups they reduce the variance of their return and thus obtain a positive expected utility. However, if failure rate goes up (for instance due to increased labor costs) without the other parameters changing, it would kill the whole industry, and I would expect this to occur in a very non-linear fashion, essentially as a threshold effect.
App Academy was a great decision for me. Though I just started looking for work, I've definitely become a very competent web developer in a short period of time. Speaking of which if anyone in the Bay Area is looking for a Rails or Backbone dev, give me a shout.
I don't know if I agree that my decision to do App Academy had a lot to do with rationalism. 4//40 is a high percentage but a small n and the fact that it was definitely discussed here or at least around the community pretty much means it isn't evidence of much. People in my life I've told about it have all been enthusiastic, even people who are pretty focused on traditional credential-ism.
I've wondered why more people don't train to be software engineers. According to wikipedia, 1 in 200 workers is a software engineer. A friend of mine who teaches programming classes estimates 5% of people could learn how to program. If he's right, 9 out of 10 people who could be software engineers aren't, and I'm guessing 8 of them make less in their current job than they would if they decided to switch.
One explanation is that most people would really hate the anti-social aspect of software engineering. We like to talk a lot about how it's critical for that job to be a great communicator etc., but the reality is, most of the time you sit at your desk and not talk to anyone. It's possible most people couldn't stand it. Most jobs have a really big social factor in comparison, you talk to clients, students, patients, supervisors, etc.
This...
does not imply that all those people can learn to be software engineers. Software engineering is not just programming. There are a lot of terrible software engineers out there.
I suspect that most people don't think of making the switch.
What does almost mean in percentages?
How many people drop out of the program and how many complete it?
Of the people who graduated more than 6 months ago and looked for jobs (as opposed to going to university or something), all have jobs.
About 5% of people drop out of the program.
Any comment on this? (News article a couple of days ago on gummint regulators threatening to shut down App Academy and several similar named organisations.)
It will probably be fine. See here.
You have, I take it, already gotten a job as a result of finishing App Academy?
I did, but the job I got was being a TA for App Academy, so that might not count in your eyes.
Their figures are telling the truth: I don't know anyone from the previous cohort who was dissatisfied with their experience of job search.
Indeed it does not. I don't count your experience as an example of the OP.
That's... an awfully strange phrasing. Do you mean they all found a web development job as a result of attending App Academy? Or what?
Pretty much all of them, yes. I should have phrased that better.
My experience was unusual, but if they hadn't hired me, I expect I would have been hired like my classmates.
Out of curiosity, why did you take the TA job? Does it pay more than $90k a year?
Google "The Pudding Guy".
You could argue earning to give fits this pattern, though I'm not sure the victory/win is unambiguous enough.