Comment author: CellBioGuy 04 October 2016 10:00:49PM *  11 points [-]

Advice solicited. Topics of interest I have lined up for upcoming posts include:

  • The history of life on Earth and its important developments
  • The nature of the last universal common ancestor (REALLY good new research on this just came out)
  • The origin of life and the different schools of thought on it
  • Another exploration of time in which I go over a paper that came out this summer that basically did exactly what I did a few months earlier with my "Space and Time Part II" calculations of our point in star and planet order that showed we are not early and are right around when you would expect to find the average biosphere, but extended it to types of stars and their lifetimes in a way I think I can improve upon.
  • My thoughs on how and why SETI has been sidetracked away from activities that are more likely to be productive towards activities that are all but doomed to fail, with a few theoretical case studies
  • My thoughts on how the Fermi paradox / 'great filter' is an ill-posed concept
  • Interesting recent research on the apparent evolutionary prerequisites for primate intelligence

Any thoughts on which of these are of particular interest, or other ideas to delve into?

Comment author: korin43 09 October 2016 12:18:52AM *  1 point [-]

My first attempt to list which of these I want most ended up being "all of them". In the interests of giving useful feedback, I think the most interesting ones are the problems with SETI (haven't heard anything about this but I also haven't been looking) and the origin of life (have heard about this but I suspect your post would be better than average).

Your response to CarlShulman makes me want more about eukaryotes too.

Comment author: hg00 28 September 2016 01:43:41AM *  6 points [-]

My understanding is that a USA programmer would start at the $20,000-a-year level (?), and that someone with experience can probably get twice that, and a senior one can get $100,000/year.

A pessimistic starting salary for a competent US computer programmer is $60K and senior ones can clear $200K. $100K is a typical starting salary for a computer science student who just graduated from a top university (also the median nationwide salary).

In the US market, foreigners come work as computer programmers by getting H1B visas. The stereotypical H1B visa programmer is from India, speaks mostly intelligible English with a heavy accent, gets hired by a company that wants to save money by replacing their expensive American programmers, and exists under the thumb of their employer (if they lose their job, their visa is jeopardized). I think that the average H1B makes less money than the average American coder. It sounds to me like you'd be a significantly more attractive hire than a typical H1B--you're fluent in English, and you've made contributions to Scheme?

The cost of living in the US is much higher than the Philippines. Raising a family in Silicon Valley is notoriously expensive. Especially if you want your kids to go to a "good school" where they won't be bullied. I don't know what metro has the best job availability/cost of living/school quality tradeoff. It will probably be one of the cities that's referred to as a "startup hub", perhaps Seattle or Austin. If your wife is willing to homeschool, you don't have to worry about school quality.

You can dip your toes in Option 1 without taking a big risk. Just start applying to US software companies. They'll interview you via Skype at first, and if you seem good, the best companies will be willing to pay for your flight to the US to meet the team. To save time you probably want to line up several US interviews for a single visit so you can cut down on the number of flights. Here are some characteristics to look for in companies to apply to:

  • The company has a process in place for hiring foreigners.

  • The company is looking for developers with your skill set.

  • The company's developer team is "clued in". Contributing to Scheme is going to be a big positive signal to the right employer. You can do things like read the company engineering blog, use BuiltWith, look up the employees on LinkedIn to figure out if the company seems clued in. Almost all companies funded by Y Combinator are clued in. If your interviewer's response to seeing Scheme on your resume is "What is Scheme?", then you're interviewing at the wrong company and you'll be offered a higher salary elsewhere.

  • The company is profitable but not sexy. For example, selling software to small enterprises. (You probably don't want to work for a business that sells software to large enterprises, as these firms are generally not "clued in". See above.) Getting a job at a sexy consumer product company like Google or Facebook is difficult because those are the companies that everyone is applying to. You can interview at those companies for fun, as the last places you look at. And you don't want to apply for a startup that's not yet profitable because then you're risking your wife and kids on an unproven business. I'm not going to tell you how to find these companies--if you use the same methods everyone else uses to find companies to apply to, you'll be applying to the same places everyone else is.

Of course you'll be sending out lots of resumes because you don't have connections. Maybe experiment with writing an email cover letter very much like the post you wrote here, including the word "fucking". I've participated in hiring software developers before, and my experience is that attempts at formal cover letters inevitably come across as stuffy and inauthentic. Catch the interviewer's interest with an interesting email subject line+first few sentences and tell a good story.

Actually you might have some connections--consider reaching out to companies that are affiliated with the rationalist community, posting to the Scheme mailing list if that's considered an acceptable thing to do, etc.

Consider donating some $ to MIRI if my advice ends up proving useful.

Comment author: korin43 28 September 2016 04:51:17PM 1 point [-]

Raising a family in Silicon Valley is notoriously expensive.

It's worth pointing out that Silicon Valley isn't typical though. Jobs there can be worth it if the companies pay enough (see: Netflix, Google, etc.), but there are plenty of reasonable-paying tech jobs in much cheaper areas.

Comment author: korin43 07 December 2015 06:15:23PM 2 points [-]

I'm planning to go to this, and I sent you an email. I'm glad someone is organizing another meetup in Baltimore itself. I moved here recently and assumed I could just go to D.C. meetups, but I haven't made it to one yet since an hour of driving plus figuring out how to park in D.C. just makes it too inconvenient (and meeting new friends who live an hour away isn't helpful..).

In response to LessWrong 2.0
Comment author: korin43 03 December 2015 05:31:01PM 1 point [-]

I think moving some of the information from the about page to the main page would be a good idea. I suspect that new people coming here will want to read the "famous" posts first. Recommending Eliezer's book would also be a good idea.

LW is a convenient way to follow a lot of people, since you only need to go to one site, or follow one RSS feed. Since those people don't post here directly anymore, is it possible to make LW automatically cross-post? This is common in the open source world with the "planets", like Planet GNOME. I assume we'd want a way to still directly post to LW, and probably a way to filter by tag (for example, only posts tagged "lesswrong" go to LW).

In response to comment by ingres on LessWrong 2.0
Comment author: jkaufman 03 December 2015 10:44:15AM *  6 points [-]

At the same time, given the implied privacy of Facebook I have to wonder if the point of posting there is so that things will not be read outside of the small audience EY now caters to.

I think this isn't a big factor. Instead people post to fb because:

  • low thresholds: it's socially acceptable to post anything from am odd thought you had to a big essay, and there's no expectation you polish your post or get friends to review drafts

  • positive comments: over the years comments on LW have gotten more and more critical, not clear why

  • blocking people: if there's someone who really annoys you but is well behaved enough that they meet site rules you can't ban them on LW but you can still block them on FB so you don't have to interact with them.

What keeps you off fb? I find some of my best discussions happen there these days.

In response to comment by jkaufman on LessWrong 2.0
Comment author: korin43 03 December 2015 05:11:07PM 10 points [-]

Ignoring privacy / monopoly concerns, Facebook is also remarkably inconvenient for reading long-form writing.

  • The main feed semi-randomly decides what it thinks you want to read and may decide not to show you something at all.
  • You can set it up to notify you about new posts from a particular person, but that gets annoying with longer writing (since you can't easily tell it to remind you later).
  • Saving to services like Pocket doesn't work right.
  • There's no RSS feeds.

Twitter and Tumblr have similar problems. I thought Reddit did too, but they actually make their RSS feeds easy to find, although it's fairly annoying that they're not full-text (makes it much harder to read on a phone).

Comment author: Mac 19 March 2015 07:54:56PM 0 points [-]

You are comparing the historical return of one asset class to the prospective return of another.

"Apples and Oranges"

Comment author: korin43 19 March 2015 08:03:29PM 1 point [-]

How else would you compare them? The values I chose are meant to be the expected returns. For bonds I chose the listed rates, since those are (I think?) guaranteed, so historical rates would be meaningless. For stocks I chose the historical rates since that's all we have. Did I use the wrong rates for bonds somehow?

Comment author: korin43 19 March 2015 07:07:32PM *  3 points [-]

As you approach retirement consider putting much of your new savings into safe government bonds.

This is "safer", but it introduces new problems. Since your investment has lower expected returns, you need significantly more money saved up. The S&P 500 has historically returned around 10% per year over 25 year periods, and has almost never returned less than 5%[1]. Right now, as far as I can tell, government bonds return 1-2% depending on their length. With 5% expected returns, you need 20x your expenses saved up, but with 2% you need 50x, and with 1% you need 100x. Most of these are probably possible for high income/low expense Lesswrongers to save up, but I'd expect that we have higher value things to do with 30x our expenses than to hold onto it in case of very unlikely personal risks.

It is possible to live for a long time while withdrawing more than you earn. For example, with 5% expenses and 2% returns, you would last about 26 years[2] before running out of money. Considering point #19 though, guessing how long we're going to live seems like a pretty big risk too.

[1] http://financeandinvestments.blogspot.com/2015/01/historical-annual-returns-for-s-500.html

[2] http://ideone.com/0K2Uhd

Comment author: Jayson_Virissimo 25 October 2009 07:16:53PM 2 points [-]

"I probably came off as more "anticapitalist" or "collectivist" than I really am"

There is most certainly nothing anti-capitalist about creating and maintaining a reputation for cooperation. Who would loan you money or send you goods without payment if you have a reputation for defecting?

Comment author: korin43 28 October 2009 12:51:42AM 0 points [-]

And what's the point of making money if everyone hates you?