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I was made aware of my current software job (it's a Quixey), which is infested with LW people, through LW. Two years ago I moved to the Bay Area to work at it and now most of my meatspace social circle is rationalist sort of people and I am dating one too. I am not super duper thrilled about this lack of intellectual diversity in my world, but it seems like a path of least resistance, and I am pretty happy for now.
In response to
Optimal Exercise
Suggestions:
Please put the actionable parts into wiki, and then add a link to this article for those who want to see the full explanation. Please add the links to the youtube videos and tutorials (for convenience, but also because an unlucky reader might google some wrong advice).
you'll see dramatic changes in your appearance in 4 months
Are there volunteers to test this program for 4 months and report the results?
I'm a skinny young programmer who has been following these weight training recommendations for two and a half months and I now have Actually Visible Muscles in my upper arm that never existed before, which I find entertaining.
In response to
Stupid Questions Thread - January 2014
When non utilitarian rationalists consider big life changes, it seems to me that they don't do it based on how happy that will make them, Why?
Utilitarians could say they are trying to maximize the World's something.
But non utiltarians, like I used to be, and like most here still are, are just... doing it like everyone else does it! "Oh, that seems like a cool change, I'll do it! yay!" then two weeks later that particular thing has none of the coolness effect it had before, but they are stuck with the decision for years....... (in case of decisions like job, partner, quitting, smoking, big travels, big decisions, not ice cream flavour stuff)
So, why don't rationalists use data driven happiness research, and reasoning in the happiness spectrum, to decide their stuff?
I know a lot of LW-ish people in the Bay Area and I see them explicitly thinking carefully about a lot of big life changes (e.g. moving, relationships, jobs, what habits to have) in just the way you recommended. I don't know if it has something to do with utilitarianism or not.
I'm personally more inclined to think in that way than I was a few years ago, and I think it's mostly because of the social effects of from hanging out with & looking up to a bunch of other people who do so.
Does that mean we should spend more of our altruistic energies on encouraging happy productive people to have more happy productive children?
Maybe. I think the realistic problem with this strategy is that if you take an existing human and help him in some obvious way, then it's easy to see and measure the good you're doing. It sounds pretty hard to figure out how effectively or reliably you can encourage people to have happy productive children. In your thought experiment, you kill the hermit with 100% certainty, but creating a longer, happier life that didn't detract from others' was a complicated conjunction of things that worked out well.
A hermit, long forgotten by the rest of the world, lives a middling life all alone on a desert island. Eve kills the hermit secretly and painlessly, sell his organs, and uses the money to change the mind of a couple who had decided against having additional children. The couple's child leads a life far longer and happier than the forgotten Hermit's ever would have been.
Eve has increased QALYs, average happiness, and total happiness. Has Eve done a good thing? If not, why not?
Sure, Eve did a good thing.
In response to
A proposed inefficiency in the Bitcoin markets
Actually, I think a truly efficient market shouldn't just skip around across orders of magnitudes, just because expectations of future prices do. I think truly efficient markets show some degree of "drag", which should be invisible in typical cases like publicly-traded stocks, but become noticeable in cases of order-of-magnitude value-uncertainty like Bitcoin.
Can you elaborate on why you think this is true?
In response to
Meetup : Bay Area Solstice
Can anyone expand on "ritual, light, warmth, and companionship?" I'm not sure what to expect besides singing.
In response to
November 2013 Media Thread
Other Media Thread
The 2013 Interactive Fiction competition is currently ongoing: http://ifcomp.org/comp13/info.php
It has a variety of fairly short games playable online, some being parser-based (you enter a command and the world tells you what is happening) and some in other forms (e.g. Twine games, where there's a clearly marked set of things you can do at each node, CYOA-style), some puzzly and some less puzzly. Here is a brief introduction to parser-based IF if you find yourself confused.
I enjoyed:
- Captain Verdeterre's Plunder by Ryan Veeder - a short puzzle game with an entertaining narrative voice, where you rush to scrounge up valuables from your sinking ship and make it off alive.
- Their Angelical Understanding by Porpentine - a moving allegorical story about something like pain and redemption.
- Coloratura by Lynnea Glasser - where you play a strange, inhuman mind which can emotionally influence humans to try to get them to achieve your goals.
- Solarium by Alan DeNiro - an alternate history about nuclear holocaust with fantastic elements.
Additionally, if you play them and have an opinion then you can sign up and vote afterward :-)
In response to
Open Thread, September 30 - October 6, 2013
I got an offer of an in-person interview from a tech company on the left coast. They want to know my current salary and expected salary. Position is as a software engineer. Any ideas on the reasonable range? I checked Glassdoor and the numbers for the company in question seem to be 100k and a bit up. I suppose, actually, that this tells me what I need to know, but honestly it feels awfully audacious to ask for twice what I'm making at the moment. On the other hand I don't want to anchor a discussion that may seriously affect my life for the next few years at too small a number. So, I'm seeking validation more than information. Always audacity?
You may feel better about being audacious if you do an explicit cost-of-living calculation given the rent and price differential. If you see that maintaining the same standard of living is going to cost you 80k, then 100k stops seeming like a huge number.
It's also true that there is only epsilon chance of screwing yourself. Nobody is going to reject you because the expected salary number you suggested was too high; it makes no sense. You could suggest 150k and the only bad thing that will happen is you might only get offered 120k.
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I've been having a bit of a hard time coming up with specifics, because it's more a general sense that I'm lacking a lot of the basics. Like the professor will say something and it'll obliquely reference a concept that he seems to expect I'm familiar with, but I have no idea what he's referring to. So then I look it up on Wikipedia and the article mentions 10 other basic-sounding concepts that I've never heard of either. Or for example when the programming assignment uses a function that I don't know how to use yet. So I do the obvious thing of googling for it or looking it up in the documentation. But the documentation is referencing numerous concepts that I have only a vague idea of what they mean, so that I often only get a hazy notion of what the function does.
After I made my original post I looked around for a while on sites like Quora. I also took a look at this reddit list. The general sense I got was that to learn programming properly you should go for a thorough computer science curriculum. Do you agree?
The suggestion was to look up university CS degree curricula and then look around for equivalent MOOCs / books / etc. to learn it on my own. So I looked up the curricula. But most of the universities I looked at said to start out with an introductory programming language course, which is what I was doing before anyway. I've taken intro courses in Python and R, and I ran into the problems I mentioned above. The MITx Python course that I took was better on this score, but still not as good as I would have hoped. There are loads of resources out there for learning either of those languages, but I don't know how to find which ones fit my learning style. Maybe I should just try out each until I find one that works for me?
The book you mentioned kept coming up as well. That book was created for MIT's Intro to CS course, but MIT itself has since replaced the original course with the Python course that I took (I took the course on edX, so probably it's a little dumbed-down, but my sense was that it's pretty similar to the regular course at MIT). On the other hand, looking at the book's table of contents it looks like the book covers several topics not covered in the class.
There were also several alternative books mentioned:
Any thoughts on which is the best choice to start off with?
If you want a fundamentals-first perspective, I definitely suggest reading SICP. I think the Python course may have gone in a slightly different direction (I never looked at it) but I can't think of how you could get more fundamentals-first than the book.
Afterward, I suggest out of your list Concepts, Techniques, and Models of Computer Programming. That answers your question of "where do I go to learn about each of the different paradigms."
This is more background than you will strictly need to be a useful data scientist, but if you find it fun and satisfying to learn, then it will only be helpful.