has fewer postulates and is therefore the more likely theory.

I don't see why "fewer postulates" makes something "more likely". Occam's Razor is not a natural law, it's a convenient heuristic for human minds.

"For every complex problem there is an answer that is clear, simple, and wrong." -- H. L. Mencken

I wish I had taken more statistics courses. I learned the basics and have picked up a fair amount of the advanced stuff through self-study during graduate school, but I didn't realize during college how useful it would be.

I wish more people would take more computer science courses. Intro to Comp Sci is usually too basic to be useful. Data structures, algorithms, numerical/scientific computing are all useful in a large variety of careers.

I defended my dissertation earlier this month, earning a PhD in experimental high energy physics in just over 3 years. In January, I'll be moving on to a postdoctoral research position at a national laboratory.

TV and Movies (Live Action) Thread

I rounded off "I think abortion laws should be stricter than they currently are in my country" to "I am anti-abortion", which was misleading and I'm sorry. I think that still puts me out of line with my political group though (e.g. the provisions of that Texas bill that was notably filibustered sounded reasonable to me).

I think we should be less squeamish about acknowledging when we're trading off on human lives, particularly those of children. I think the life of a 12-week fetus is less valuable than that of a 30-week one, which in turn is less valuable than that of a 12-month child, but not by a huge margin. I think we should attempt to reduce (and ideally eliminate) these natural miscarriages through funding of medical research, the same way we do e.g. cot death.

Submitted, answering almost all questions.

The hardest question was choosing a single favorite LW post.

Also, I wasn't sure if Worm should count as more than one book. (It didn't end up mattering.)

A scanner + Photoshop makes it significantly easier to measure digit ratios.

I'm a traditional leftist/tax-and-spend liberal but anti-abortion. It could be my catholic upbringing, but it just seems incredibly obvious to me, a "you must be this rational to ride" line, that killing the same entity inside someone else is just as bad as killing it outside.

(Pro-abortion is coherent if you are pro-infanticide - really pro it, not just the "lol yeah delicious babies" kind we sometimes see on LW. And there's a coherent position of "the line needs to be somewhere and birth is the Schnelling point, so I'm contingently pro-abortion but anti-infanticide, pro tem". But I don't think many pro-abortion folk would endorse that position. )

Are these companies simply wrong and are actually hurting themselves by overextending their human resources?

Yes, unquestionably. We've known how human productivity works for over 100 years now. This knowledge has been "forgotten" due to the effects of tough, largely unprotected labor markets. If the guy at the next desk over stays an hour later than you every day, he'll look like he's working harder, so he'll be less likely to get laid off. Once you have multiple people thinking that way and no opposing structure to encourage cooperation, you get a classic status arms race.

Why Crunch Modes Doesn't Work: Six Lessons

Executive Summary

When used long-term, Crunch Mode slows development and creates more bugs when compared with 40-hour weeks.

More than a century of studies show that long-term useful worker output is maximized near a five-day, 40-hour workweek. Productivity drops immediately upon starting overtime and continues to drop until, at approximately eight 60-hour weeks, the total work done is the same as what would have been done in eight 40-hour weeks.

In the short term, working over 21 hours continuously is equivalent to being legally drunk. Longer periods of continuous work drastically reduce cognitive function and increase the chance of catastrophic error. In both the short- and long-term, reducing sleep hours as little as one hour nightly can result in a severe decrease in cognitive ability, sometimes without workers perceiving the decrease.

Managers decide to crunch because they want to be able to tell their bosses "I did everything I could." They crunch because they value the butts in the chairs more than the brains creating games. They crunch because they haven't really thought about the job being done or the people doing it. They crunch because they have learned only the importance of appearing to do their best to instead of really of doing their best. And they crunch because, back when they were programmers or artists or testers or assistant producers or associate producers, that was the way they were taught to get things done.

Another good article about the history of the 40-hour work week is Why We Have to Go Back to a 40-Hour Work Week to Keep Our Sanity on AlterNet. I recognize the political leaning of AlterNet may be offputting to some, so consider yourselves warned. I also don't necessarily endorse their theory that Asperger's Syndrome is to blame for the rise of overwork in Silicon Valley.

Survivors often regret their decision in midair, if not before. Ken Baldwin and Kevin Hines both say they hurdled over the railing, afraid that if they stood on the chord they might lose their courage. Baldwin was twenty-eight and severely depressed on the August day in 1985 when he told his wife not to expect him home till late. “I wanted to disappear,” he said. “So the Golden Gate was the spot. I’d heard that the water just sweeps you under.” On the bridge, Baldwin counted to ten and stayed frozen. He counted to ten again, then vaulted over. “I still see my hands coming off the railing,” he said. As he crossed the chord in flight, Baldwin recalls, “I instantly realized that everything in my life that I’d thought was unfixable was totally fixable—except for having just jumped.”

Good at math, definitely not "gifted".

Don't think like this. You are an expert at quantum computing. 99% of the population doesn't know what quantum computing IS. You are probably 3-4 sigmas above the mean, which basically qualifies you to do anything. If you don't think of yourself as particularly smart, it is probably just because you are in contact with people who are 5-6 sigmas above the mean.