How to handle feeling low status? I mean the feeling that people don't respect you, and don't consider what you're doing or saying important or worthy. When I was young, I used to feel this way all the time. Now there are groups in which I don't feel this, but I still feel it occasionally, especially if I'm in new social situations. This is the worst feeling for me, and usually the number one reason why I sometimes lose motivation to do things.
The simple solution is to acquire more status, but I'm not really asking about that because you have to be able handle being low status before you can become high-status. Easiest way I've found for acquiring status in groups is this:
Your 'easiest way' feels to me like: "If you are low-status, and you want to change it, aim for middle status, not high status." Which in my opinion is an excellent advice. Because if you succeed at this, you can try the higher status later, and it will feel more comfortable. But many people consistently keep aiming higher than they can afford, and then they predictably fail. Now that I think about it, it applies to so many areas of life -- people trying to run before they can walk, which ultimately leaves them unable to either walk or run.
People probably fail to notice this strategy because they see the situation as a dichotomy between "low status" and "high status", as if any deviation from the highest observed status means they remain at the bottom.
All of the following behaviors are not highest status:
What do people here think of going into condensed matter physics to work on technology relevant for the continuation of some form of Moore's Law?
The basic motivation here is that having progress in our capacity to engineer the physical basis for information processing grind to a halt would be a bad thing. My comparative advantage is probably working in experimental or theoretical condensed matter physics.
I am an undergraduate physics concentrator, and specifically I am interested in quantum computing (esp. topological) 70%, spintronics 10%, valleytronics 10%, traditional solid state nanoelectronics 5%, atomtronics 5%.
A great question.
As a condensed matter physics grad student (doing scanning tunneling microscopy), I should start my reply by saying that going to grad school in physics is something that fewer people should be doing. If you want to do research in the field it is basically irreplaceable, but you have to be aware that there are many fewer spaces for postgraduate researchers, especially faculty, than there are grad students. If you are accepted at a top university, or get to work in a prestigious lab (good publications in Nature, PRL, Nature Physics, etc.), then you at least have a shot, but even then there's not enough space and too many hopefuls. Don't depend on everything going right, and if you have other plans, consider them. If you don't have any other plans that are even mildly appealing, this is a warning sign that you need to spend some more time planning. A little time on plans can save you a lot of trouble.
That said, doing a PhD can force you to improve yourself. You'll become better at doing research. It can be a lot of fun. And sometimes not so much fun, but hey, that's why they pay you and not vice versa. Just keep in mind that if you do it, you should do it because you...
Epistemic status: vague conjecture and talking aloud.
So this article by Peter Watts has been making the rounds, talking about how half the people with cranial cavities filled 95% with cerebrospinal fluids still have IQs over 100. One of the side discussions on Hacker News was about how most of the internal tissue in the brain was used for routing while most 'logic' happened in the outer millimeters.
So far, I haven't seen anyone make the connection to cryonics and plasatination. If it's true that most of the important data is stored near the outside of the ...
I'm interested in talking to people knowledgeable in decision theory/bayesian statistics about a startup that aims to disrupt the $240,000,000,000 management consulting market. it's based on the idea of prediction polls, but done on the blockchain(the same thing bitcoin uses) in a completely decentralized way.
I'm particularly interested in people who can help me out with understanding/choosing alternative scoring rules besides Brier scoring.
I can't pay you for your time, but I can virtually order you a pizza or buy you a beer :).
edit: Here's the (still...
You seem to assume that the management consulting companies are paid for making the correct decision based on the data... as opposed to giving the answer someone important in the management (the person who made the decision to hire them) wanted to hear, while providing this person plausible deniability ("it wasn't my idea; it's what the world-renown experts told us to do; are you going to doubt them?").
Depending on which view is correct, there may or may not be a market demand for your solution.
I have no direct experience with management consulting.
My opinions are formed by: my own observations of office politics; reading Dilbert; reading Robin Hanson; listening to stories of my friend who is an IT consultant. But I trust the other sources because they are compatible with what I observe.
Maybe it depends on a company, and maybe the one where I work now is an unually dysfunctional one (or maybe I just have better information channels and pay better attention), but most management decisions are completely idiotic. What the managers are good at optimizing for, is keeping their jobs. Even that is not done by making sure the projects succeed, but rather by destroying internal competitors.
For example, one of our managers was fired because our IT support department was actively sabotaging our project for a few months and we had no budget to seek help elsewhere; so we missed a few deadlines because we even had no servers functioning, and then the guy was fired for incompetence. The new manager is a good friend with the IT support manager, so when he got his role, our IT support department stopped actively sabotating us. This was all he ever did for us; otherwise he almost complete...
I know about scoring rules and probability assessments. Email me and we'll set up a time to talk.
Similar to Viliam in a sibling comment, I think that this is the sort of idea that would work in the ideal world but not the real world. To channel Hanson, "Consulting is not about advice," and thus a product that seeks to disrupt consulting by providing superior advice will simply fail. (Compare to MetaMed, which tried to disrupt medicine by providing superior diagnostics. Medicine is not about healing!)
I broadly differ with the hansonian take on medicine. I think metamed failed not because it offered more effective healing but went bust because medicine doesn't really demand healing; but rather that medicine is about healing, generally does this pretty well, and Metamed was unable to provide a significant edge in performance over standard medicine. (I should note I am a doctor, albeit a somewhat contrarian one. I wrote the 80k careers guide on medicine).
I think medicine is generally less fertile ground for hansonian signalling accounts, principally because health is so important for our life and happiness we're less willing to sacrifice it to preserve face (I'd wager it is an even better tax on bs than money). If the efficacy of marginal health spending is near zero in rich countries, that seems evidence in support of, 'medicine is really about healing' - we want to live healthily so much we chase the returns curve all the way to zero!
There are all manner of ways in which western world medicine does badly, but I think sometimes the faults are overblown, and the remainder are best explained by human failings rather than medicine being a sham practice:
1) My understanding of the a...
(using throwaway account to post this)
Very true.
I was recently involved in a reasonably huge data mining & business intelligence task (that I probably should not disclose). I could say this was an eye-opener, but I am old enough to be cynical and disillusioned so that it was not a surprise.
First, we had some smart people in the team (shamelessly including myself :-), "smart" almost by definition means "experts in programming, sw development and enough mathematics and statistics) doing the sw implementation, data extraction and statistics. Then there were slightly less smart people, but experts in the domain being studied, that were supposed to make the sense of the results and write the report. These people were offloaded from the team, because they were very urgently needed for other projects.
Second, the company bought very expensive tool for data mining and statistical analysis, and subcontracted other company to extend it with necessary functionality. The tool did not work as expected, the subcontracted extension was late by 2 months (they finished it at the time the final report should have been made!) and it was buggy and did not work with the new version o...
Not sure it could help other people, but still.
I tutor in 'statistical biology' a girl who might choose to go into math. About a week ago I gave her Thomas's Calculus and analytic geometry, pt. 1, and told her that as long as she can work through the exercises, the book is hers, but as soon as [the clock strikes midnight] she loses interest, she should return it.
She pounced at it, and said today that she's solved a few problems, although one of them she could not understand (it's in English, after all), so - baiting people with foreign, advanced, and most of all, privileged textbooks is a powerful tool:)
What is worth reading in psychology, if you don't have too much time to explore the field?
My value set explicitly rates chemistry (specifically) and hard sciences (generally) as more worthy of my time than the soft sciences. Due to the culture I'm in, I may be unduly dissing the latter. In case that's true, I would like to rectify that. I would like to get a grasp of what is known, what is not, and what can be known. However, I would much prefer to get some kind of applicable knowledge. I am as susceptible to the fuzzies of thinking I understand something ...
From my experience the most "value added per book" in psychology is reading Games People Play. Just read the "games" and ignore all the psychoanalytical classifications attached to them -- psychoanalysis is highly dubious field, but the examples of the "games" come from real life, and many readers are shocked to find out that some of their life-long problems are actually instances of quite trivial scenarios. Sometimes there is an advice about how to quit playing the "game".
I know it's not exactly the kind of book you wanted, but it probably has more everyday applications than anything else. And it is really easy to read (when you skip the psychoanalytical classifications, which are provided separately).
I haven't read "Games Trainers Play", but from the online descriptions, it seems to contain icebreakers and fun activities. To avoid possible misunderstanding, "Games People Play" is not like that.
Berne uses the word "game" to mean -- I'll use my own words here -- an insincere human interaction, where people pretend that they try to achieve X as an outcome of the interaction, but they actually want to achieve Y (and they arrange things so that Y actually happens). This insincerity is driven by not fully conscious forces; people may have these kinds of interactions for years without fully realizing what is going on. Sometimes the games are cooperative: both players pretend to want X, both want to achieve the same Y; both can win by playing the game. Sometimes the games are adversarial: one player pretends to want X but works to get Y, the other player either honestly wants X or they want some different Z; one player wins by making the other one lose. Sometimes the games are relatively harmless, sometimes they can ruin lives. The value of the book is describing some frequently played "games", and explaining what the X, Y and Z are for each of t...
...After Kravinsky learned that many African-Americans have difficulty obtaining kidneys from family members, he sought out a hospital in Philadelphia that would allow him to donate one of his kidneys to a lower-income black person. According to Peter Singer, writing in The New York Times, Kravinsky justified the donation mathematically when speaking to Singer's students, noting that the chances of dying as a result of t
I'm looking for is a set of bodyweight exercises that I can do every day (I found daily routines are easier to keep than weekly routines) without injuries, while still being able to run every day, with repetition counts I don't need a lookup table for.
Does anyone know of such?
It's Monday the 28th in Australia.
Different LessWrongers have different time zones...
Then again, only Clarity would somehow get his open thread downvoted to a negative balance...
Didn't notice the author of either the post or your comment for a second, which made it significantly funnier.
Just to clarify, nobody appointed me of anything. It's just that I was the only one to take the time to do it regularly, and happened to do it before anyone else because of my geographical position. It became sort of a custom, just that. I do not object however if someone else wants to do it and beats me earlier, although I would prefer two threads not to overlap.
edit: OH GOD HOW DO I STOP RECEIVING NOTIFICATIONS FOR NEW REPLIES IN THE OPEN THREAD :(
Happy new year everyone! How were your plans, progress and problems this year?
My New Years Resolutions
Move out
Find a new supervisor
interesting thoughts this week
OH GOD HOW DO I STOP RECEIVING NOTIFICATIONS FOR NEW REPLIES IN THE OPEN THREAD :(
I hope you will find this message among the hundreds of notifications.
Has anyone learned to play an instrument as an adult? Is it realistic to do that without hiring a tutor? To be more specific, I want to learn to play the piano. I have never played a musical instrument before.
It's useful to realize that "learn to play" is not a thing. It's not a concrete goal.
Do you want to learn a particular song? That's not only doable, but easy. You just get the sheet music, figure out music notation sufficiently to break the sheet music into tiny sections, and practice until you can play the song.
I always find learning a particular song to be a good starting point with any new instrument. Even if that song is "hard". It just needs to be something that you really want to learn to play. If you love Moonlight Sonata, start trying to learn Moonlight Sonata. Don't start with beginner piano lessons, particularly if you don't have a teacher forcing you to grind through them. Because you simply don't do them. But you will practice Moonlight Sonata.
Also, I think it is a valid approach to go for moderate stretches just "teaching yourself" and then checking in with a tutor to correct bad habits. I expect some people will disagree with me on this, on the grounds that the bad habits will already be entrenched by that point, but I think it's just a matter of balancing your priorities. Some bad habits have to be acceptable if you're mainly doing it for enjoyment.
Not sure if there is a thread for this, does anyone have access to this article?
“Comparative Efficiency of Informal (Subjective, Impressionistic) and Formal (Mechanical, Algorithmic) Prediction Procedures: The Clinical Statistical Controvery”, Psychology, Public Policy, and Law 2: 293—323
While US politicians advocate building a wall on the border with Mexico, startups develop hoverbikes. In a few years all border walls might be obsolate because it's easy for everybody who wants to fly over them.
All sorts of other situations where walls or height is used to prevent certain area's to be inaccessible by human will also be affected.
The implication of my story for management consulting is: if this company (assuming that I have described it correctly) would ever hire a management consulting company, why would they decide to do it, how would they choose the specific company, what task would they give to the company, and how would they use the results?
My model says that they wouldn't hire the management consulting company unless as a move in some internal power struggle; the choice would most likely be done on basis of "some important person's friend works for the consulting company or recommended the company"; they would give the company a completely false description of our organization and would choose the most uninformed and incompetent people as speakers (for example, they might choose one of those 'programmers' who doesn't contribute to our project as the person who will describe the project to the consultants); and whatever reports the consulting company would give to us, our management would completely reinterpret them to fit their existing beliefs.
In other words, I have no direct information about the management consulting companies, but I have a model of their customers; and that models says that in the market for management consulting the actual quality of the advice is irrelevant. (Unless companies like this are a minority on the market.)
It is also possible that you aren't aware of most of what your management does.
The upper echelons don't invite me to their meetings, so there is always a chance. But when I tried to socialize with some of the lower managers, the story is usually that the higher managers mostly sabotage their work by "hit-and-run management". It works like this: the higher manager knows nothing about the project and most of the time doesn't even care. Suddenly they become interested in some detail (e.g. something got wrong and the customer complained to them, or they just randomly heard something and decided to "be useful"). So they come and start micromanaging to optimize for that detail, completely ignoring all the context. Sometimes they contribute to improve the detail, sometimes the detail would be fixed in exactly the same time even without their contribution; but in the process they usually do harm to all other things.
For example, imagine that there are five known minor bugs in the program, and there are five programmers working on them. Under usual circumstances, all five bugs would be solved in a day, one bug per programmer. But the customer complained about one of the bugs on the phone, so the big boss comes and makes everyone work on that one bug. So at the end of the day, only one of the five bugs is fixed, and the big boss leaves, feeling victorious. (From his point of view the story probably reads: "Without my oversight, this department produced a software with an error that bothered the customer, but thanks to my heroic action, the whole problem was solved in a single day. Yay for being agenty!") Meanwhile, the things that would allow us detect and fix the bugs more reliably before they even get to the customer, such as automated testing or even using written test scenarios, are ignored for years (this is not an exaggeration), no matter how often the programmers complain about that on meetings.
Another issue is that the managers never cross-check the information they get. That makes "being the first one who has an opportunity to tell managers their version of the story" critical. For example, we need some work done from the IT support department. The support does step 1 of 10, then reports to managers "it's done" and stops working on the issue. The managers are happy, the programmers keep waiting... a few months later the topic gets mentioned at the meeting, the manager is like: "so, you guys were happy to have this problem solved so quickly, right?", the programmers are like: "wtf, we keep waiting for months", the manager is: "wtf, the problem was already solved months ago", the programmers: "no way!", the manager: "okay, let's call the support on the phone", the support: "sure, the problem was solved months ago... oh yeah, yeah... well, it wasn't solved completely, there are still a few details missing (such as steps 2 to 10), but the programmers never complained about that so we thought that way okay", the manager: "guys, seriously, why don't you communicate more clearly", the programmers: "well, the steps 1 to 10 were clearly described in the specification we had to write for the support department", the support: "well, we were not sure you really needed that"... And the next time again we need something, the support again mostly ignores it and reports the work as done, and no manager bothers to verify. Similarly when we get incomplete specifications, etc. Many people in the company use this opportunity to not do their work, report it as done, and later use some half-assed excuse. Only the programmers have to write the code, otherwise the customer would complain. Anyone else only generates internal complaints, which are not taken seriously by the management.
Somewhat related to this: imagine that you would manage a project where three employees, A, B, C, each have to do one aspect of the project, and the next one can start their job only after the previous one has finished. For example: specification, programming, testing. And you would have 10 days to deliver the results to the customer. Well, I would certainly create internal deadlines, e.g. A must deliver their part on day 3, B must deliver their part on day 6, C must deliver their part on day 9, and there is one day reserve. If on the day 4 the employee A tells me he is not ready and will probably not complete it even today, I would treat that as an impending crisis; because every delay caused by A means less time for B and C. -- Instead, our managers simply write into their private calendars that on day 10 we need to deliver the product to the customer, and they feel their work is done. The person A usually takes 8 days to do their part, and even then they often give an incomplete work to the B, who will work like crazy the remaining 2 days, and the part of C is usually skipped (C is testing, this is why we then have so many bugs reported by the customer). The managers start being active on day 10, usually when they return from lunch, and start reminding everyone that today is the critical day we need to deliver the product to the customer. The employee A has their work already finished, so there is no pressure on them; all pressure goes to B and C. And this keeps happening again and again, every few weeks, for years. If you try to speak with the managers about it, they tell you "yes, we are aware of the problem, and we are working on solving it". Just like they told you a year ago.
Another failure mode typical for our company is the following: there is some work X that needs to be done, but none of our employees is an expert on X, and we can't solve the problem using google (also we have other work to do). We keep reminding the management that we would need some expert on X; either a new employee, or at least an external consultant that would spend a day or two working with us. There are two ways this can end. Option 1 -- a year or two later the management finally tells us they will invite the external expert, but only for an hour or two, because the expert is very expensive. We keep waiting. A week or two later we are told that the expert already was here. "Really? Who did he talk with?" No one knows, but after another week we find out it was someone irrelevant who knows nothing about our project or about X. "So what did he ask the expert?" Most likely, it was something different that either doesn't apply to our project, or is so simple that we could have answered that ourselves. "So what did the expert answer?" Sorry, we forgot. Nope, no one took notes. Then the management says: "Okay guys, we already did what you wanted, now please stop making excuses and finally do the work we were supposed to deliver to the customer a year ago." Option 2 -- a year or two later an expert on X is hired. Everyone in the team celebrates. However, the next day the person is given a task to work on some completely unrelated Y. Why? For some reason management suddenly believes it is the highest priority of the day, although it is something we could have solved without the new guy. So the new guy works on Y and doesn't have time for X. Then the new guy is told to work on Z, et cetera. A few months later the new guy is annoyed and quits, because he wants to specialize on X, but he was given no time to do that here; so our problems remain unsolved. Then the management says: "Okay guys, we had an expert on X here, now please stop making excuses and complete the work."
Eh, I could go on like this for days. The point is, I don't believe there is some higher wisdom there. Other than the fact that we get government projects because of political connections, so the actual quality of our product is irrelevant as long as it works and is completed more or less on time; and even that is often a problem.
If it's worth saying, but not worth its own post (even in Discussion), then it goes here.
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