As an amateur race car driver, I've got a few things to add here.

There's one very important tip I've never seen driver's ed courses mention concerning rain driving: the available traction on wet pavement varies wildly depending on the surface. Rougher surfaces tend to offer more grip, some feel nearly as good as driving in the dry. Smoother surfaces tend to offer less, some (the worst blacktop parking lots) feeling as bad as driving on ice. Any paint (such as painted-on brick strips on some intersections) is going to be very slick, as is most concrete (as its generally smooth, though rougher concrete like is found on runways will have lots of grip). Between different types of wet asphalt the difference in grip of my race car (on street tires) can range from around 1.0 gees of maximum lateral acceleration to as low as 0.65.

Metal drawbridges are also extremely slick in the wet, to the point where a strong wind can blow a car into other lanes.

So unless your familiar with the surface you're driving on, do not take anything for granted in the wet. On poor surfaces even a little bit of water can massively increase stopping distances. Unfortunately you can't count on newer construction being better here, as the slickest interstate I've encountered was relatively new (if you can read a sign from its reflection off the wet surface, the road probably sucks).

I regard tips on how to drive (at night? during the rain? at what speed?) as being largely dependent on environment and visibility. You always need to be prepared to react to something as soon as you can see it. Rain, night time and curvy roads keep you from seeing things as quickly, and mean you need to be more conservative. Every time you drive faster than you can react to unseen dangers you're rolling the dice. Always drive within your visibility. Sounds like common sense, but it doesn't seem to be commonly followed.

Aside from working headlights, tires are the #1 accident-avoidance device on the car. Almost all cars on the road have brakes powerful enough to lock the tires up, meaning stopping distances are a function of available grip. They may look like simple blocks of inflated rubber, but tires are extremely complex and not at all created equal. The best tire for a vehicle is going to vary with wheel size, ambient temperatures and budget, and you definitely don't always get what you pay for here.

All other things equal, more tread depth = more hydroplaning resistance. Bald tires can grip just fine in the wet provided there is no standing water, but this is generally not recommended for obvious reasons.

Some people say tire inflation pressures are critical. You definitely don't want them more than 5 or so psi from ideal, but I've done a lot of testing here and not generally found pressures to make a measurable difference in overall grip when they're kept within reason. Lower pressures feel "sloppier" but still grip, while high pressures feel "crisper" and probably save you some gas. A severely under-inflated tire can overheat and de-laminate just driving in a straight line, and no you won't always notice this until the tread is already coming off. Tire pressure monitors are really great safety devices and I wish I had them on my race car.

Here's an anecdote where tires saved the day: I was driving on the interstate and came upon a block of traffic. In front of me was a Toyota, and I slowed to match its speed. Less than a minute later the Toyota veers off the road and his right front tire hits a concrete construction barrier. The tire climbs up this barrier and flips the car onto its roof, landing in my lane. I was blocked in by traffic and had no other choice than to slam on my brakes and hope. The impact with the barrier slowed the car very quickly, to the point where I came within a few feet of hitting it. Once I matched its speed it skidded away from me as roofs obviously don't slow cars down very well.

I was in a sports car equipped with aerodynamic downforce and road-legal racing tires. Had I of been been on economy tires I certainly would have hit the car with significant force. Had I of been in an SUV I likely would have run it over. As it was the driver crawled out of the car shaken and bleeding, but largely alright. He didn't remember what caused the incident. As it was in the afternoon, I suspect he was distracted, dropped a tire off the road, and the pavement height change pulled on the steering and sucked the car into the barrier.

In hindsight I shouldn't have been following so closely, though I was maintaining more distance than others in the block. I admit it never went through my mind that the car in front of me might veer off into a concrete wall and be deflected back into my lane.

So thats what I've learned: tires are very important, and rain needs respect to be handled safely.

[Linus]: And I do it partly (mostly) because it's who I am, and partly because I honestly despise being subtle or "nice".

Steelman this. I am pretty sure that in the North European culture being "subtle or nice" is dangerously close to being dishonest. You do not do anyone a favour by pretending he's doing OK while in reality he's clearly not doing OK. There is a difference between being direct and blunt - and being mean and nasty.

I don't understand what you're saying here. Are you saying that anyone is proposing that Linus to act in a way that he would see as dishonest? Because I don't think that's the proposal. Consider the difference between these three statements:

• Only a fucking idiot would think it's OK to frobnicate a beezlebib in the kernel.
• It is not OK to frobnicate a beezlebib in the kernel.
• I would prefer that you not frobnicate a beezlebib in the kernel.

The first one is rude, the second one is blunt, the third one is subtle/tactful/whatever. Linus appears to think that people are asking for subtle, when instead they're merely asking for not-rude. Blunt could even be:

• When you frobnicate a beezlebib, it fucks the primary hairball inverters, so never do that.

So he doesn't even have to stop cursing.

As I said, Linus' style is proven to work. We know it works well. An alternative style might work better or it might not -- we don't know.

There are many FOSS projects that don't use Linus's style and do work well. What's so special about Linux?

I suspect you have a strong prior but no evidence.

I've run a free/open source project; I tried to run it in a friendly way, and it worked out well (and continues to do so even after all of the original developers have left).

I can also point to Karl Fogel's book "Producing Open Source Software", where he says that rudeness shouldn't be tolerated. He's worked on a number of free/open source projects, so he's had the chance to experience a bunch of different styles.

if Linus removed them from development

Um, Linux kernel doesn't work like that. Linus doesn't "add" anyone to development or "remove" anyone. And I don't know if companies who pay the developers would be likely to fire them if the developers' patches start to get rejected on a regular basis.

Oh, and you misquoted your source. It's not 75% of developers, it's 75% of the share of kernel development and, of course, some developers are much more prolific than others.

For what it's worth, I've never worked at a place that successfully used aversive stimulus.

Ahem. I think you mean to say that you never touched the electric fence. Doesn't mean the fence is not there.

Imagine that someone at your workplace decided not to come to work for a week or so, 'cause he didn't feel like it. What would be the consequences? Are there any, err... "aversive stimuli" in play here?

I can't imagine that anyone would willingly do so ... This is especially true of kernel hackers

No need for imagination. The empirical reality is that a lot of kernel hackers successfully work with Linus and have been doing this for years and years.

Also, Linus doesn't have employees.

Which means that anyone who doesn't like his style is free to leave at any time without any consequences in the sense of salary, health insurance, etc. The fact that kernel development goes on and goes on pretty successfully is evidence that your concerns are overblown.

Ditto, and downvoting b1shop's response since the quote did not mention any particular economic theory.

I wouldn't recommend downvoting b1shop's response (I didn't), because they are correct that the basic reading of the quote relies on particular economic assumptions. There are economic theories that put the fault in the bust- if things were intelligently managed, you could keep the bubble inflated at just the right amount to prevent it from popping or inflating further, and never have to deal with the bust.

For example, look at this graph that Krugman posted in 2010. The "projected real GDP" is from Mark Thoma, another economist, but where you choose to draw that line says a lot about your assumptions. The Austrian would basically draw it from trough to trough, claiming that all the reported GDP above that line was activity that could be recorded but didn't actually generate lasting wealth. In that view, the bubbles are clearly harmful; in Krugman's view, the busts are harmful. It's the difference between a trillion dollars that we can never get back, and a trillion dollars that was never there.

I've been thinking about this problem lately, and I agree it's a problem. I have some tentative ideas for starting to address it, which I'll post to Discussion next week. I'd like more data on where the stumbling blocks are, though.

1. Are there LW posts (by Eliezer or whoever) that you have found helpful, readable, concise, etc.? If so, what are some of the better examples? Would you say, for example, that Lukeprog and Hanson's styles work for you about equally well?

2. What are some examples of specific posts (or series of posts) you haven't gotten through? How much was a result of length, how much a result of content (e.g., too difficult or boring or mathy), and how much a result of style (e.g., too narrative or unstructured or jargony)?

3. What are specific ideas, perspectives, approaches, or terms you feel (or have been told) you're currently missing out on? The more examples of this the better.

ETA: I'd be interested in others' responses to this too.

I chose Ramanujan as my example because mathematics is extremely meritocratic, as proven by how he went from poor/middle-class Indian on the verge of starving to England on the strength of his correspondence & papers. If there really were countless such people, we would see many many examples of starving farmers banging out some impressive proofs and achieving levels of fame somewhat comparable to Einstein; hence the reference class of peasant-Einsteins must be very small since we see so few people using sheer brainpower to become famous like Ramanujan.

(Or we could simply point out that with average IQs in the 70s and 80s, average mathematician IQs closer to 140s - or 4 standard deviations away, even in a population of billions we still would only expect a small handful of Ramanujans - consistent with the evidence. Gould, of course, being a Marxist who denies any intelligence, would not agree.)

Read at a basic level, it supports a particular economic theory rather than a larger point of rationality.

I read it as an extension of Gendlin; the damage comes from living in the untrue world, not from the realization that the untruth is untrue, even if the second is much more visible.

I think such schemes are promising avenues for exploration. I don't currently know of any schemes that can demonstrate a track record of improving predictions, have room for more funding, and can make a case that marginal funding would yield a marginal benefit in making predictions.

If existential risks are hugely important but we suck at predicting them, why not invest in schemes which improve our predictions?