if I was able to overcome this aversion and math was as fun as playing video games

Good video games are designed to be fun, that is their purpose. Math, um, not so much.

Polish (or Polish-speaking) people help me out here: do we even have a word for mathematical odds? I distinctly remember learning about it in math class, but I can't for the life of me remember what the old hag called it, bless her grumpy soul. And the fact that this page... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Odds ...has all those equivalents in other languages, but not Polish, is starting to make me seriously fear that we just don't have a word for it.

While we're on the subject, what words would you use to differentiate "proof" from "evidence" in Polish? Seems "dowód" is the only thing we have...

Is your original point that people are reluctant to steelman "LW-unpopular" positions? I have seen steelmen (of varying quality..) of frequentism, deathism, conservativism, etc.

I think the problem with young earth creationism is that it's just kind of a stupid position, along the lines of "pi is exactly 3!" Creationism you can steelman (I think smart Catholics try to).

The corresponding number at 3.5% is $500,000. I wasn't trying to argue for any particular value, merely that the cited value isn't wildly off base, and that long-term investment is how you get into its neighborhood.

Says more about the power of investment over 35 years than it does about bicycles, really.

I haven't taken more than a glance over the grandparent's calculator, but this shouldn't be too hard to estimate. The Edmonds TCO calculator gives the five-year cost of ownership for a two-year-old base-spec Toyota Camry (as generic a car as I can think of) at $37,196, inclusive of gas, maintenance, etc. Assuming you buy an equivalent car every five years, that comes out to a monthly cost of $619. If you instead invested that money at a five-percent rate of return, then after 35 years of contributions, the resulting fund ends up being worth a hair over $700,000 -- not enough to fit the "millionaire" tag, but close.

There are plenty of less obvious costs associated with riding a bike instead of driving a car, of course -- and some less obvious benefits. But the moral of the story is obviously "invest your money".

If money doesn't make you happy, then you probably aren't spending it right

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.

are people expected to work extra hours for free in the US?

Depends on the kind of work you're doing. Under American labor law, workers in retail, manufacturing, or the trades can't be asked to work more than eight hours a day or forty hours a week without being paid their hourly wages plus a substantial overtime bonus. However, there's a loophole. American workers in clerical, administrative, and professional positions -- those on the administrative side of historical labor disputes, in other words -- are usually paid a fixed yearly income (salaried, or "exempt") and are not eligible for overtime pay.

This has both advantages and disadvantages. The advantage is that the hours are usually more flexible and there's less administrative overhead; the disadvantage is that people that want to signal loyalty or overachievement are incentivized to work crazy hours without extra pay, a practice that employers often encourage, or even -- though usually only in the short term -- de-facto require. Most studies I've read find that actual productivity doesn't go up much with the extra hours in the long run, especially for knowledge workers, but it occasionally does make business sense to do a hard push right before a deadline -- and, of course, managers aren't always rational about these things.

Generally speaking, within IT, operations people are paid hourly and developers are paid on salary. This can make salary figures a little misleading, depending on corporate culture; more than once I've had friends in ops whose nominal wages were considerably lower than mine, but whose actual pay, after overtime, was well higher for the same hours. (I'm in dev.) I try not to make a habit of working those long hours, though.

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.

This seems related: http://squid314.livejournal.com/350090.html