Elo,

You seem to be posting, like, a lot. This is good, this is what we have personal blogs for.

I do have an issue with syndicating your content straight to here, regardless of state, amount of research, amount of prior discussion with other people, confidence, or epistemic status. This introduces an asymetric opportunity cost on behalf of the lesswrong community; specifically, writing these is much easier, and lower effort, than the amount of effort these will collectively soak up for no gain.

For this reason, I have downvoted this post as is. I will also kindly ask of you to introduce a pre-syndication filter, which respects other people's limited amount of time, and attention; and cross-post only the ones where you have 1, a coherent thesis, and 2, validated interest coming from other people (as in, someone explicitely remarked "that's interesting").

Thanks.

Say, that you have a school with about 100 teachers, 1000 students, 25 rooms ... Each having his/hers demands and constraints.

Now, you want an optimal schedule - who doesn't. For that I have a software to do it automatically. Not semi-automatically like everyone else.

I want to test it for the North America and Australia's primary and secondary schools on several real life examples. For free, of course.

I am looking for a principal or his assistant to try this together over Skype.

Online Videos Thread

Online Videos Thread

Within the context of online businesses, we have some stats on failure mode frequency, which strongly reflects my own priors, and the ~200 startup founders I've talked with to date (source: Quora )

patio11 on language learning:

"...A lot of people have vague goals like "I want to learn French" or "I want to be fluent in Japanese." There is no defensible definition of the word "fluent." Instead, you should have specific goals which test ability to complete tasks that are representative of the larger set of tasks you need to be good at to achieve metagoals which are important to you.

This is why I care relatively little about "fluency in Japanese" and quite a bit about "what percentage of commercially significant terms in my apartment lease did I understand without having to ask a Japanese speaker to explain them to me?"

That task is roughly representative of many tasks required to achieve my metagoal, which is "being a functioning adult / educated professional in Japanese society."

Now how do I measure progress? Well, I have some notion of groupings of tasks by difficulty level. The "apartment lease" task is in the same grouping and difficulty level as the "employment contract" task was or the "extract the relevant rule for recognizing SaaS revenue from the National Tax Agency's docs" was. Given roughly comparable levels of difficulty, if I start doing better on a task where previously I did poorly, then I'm progressing.

Why don't I just take Japanese tests yearly? Because my metagoal is not becoming the best Japanese test-taker there is. They are good from the perspective of many decisionmakers, since they allow decisionmakers to compare me against other people in a reproducible and cheap-at-the-margin fashion, but that doesn't get anything that I value. I don't care how I compare to Frank or Taro -- being better than Frank will not save me social embarrassment if I have to ask an accountant "Here is my... um, I don't know what the word is, but it's the piece of paper that records the historical prices I purchased by assets at and then their declining present value representing their worth diminishing over time as calculated by the straight line method. There's an accounting word I'm searching for here and I bet it is followed by the word 'schedule.' DEPRECIATION. Yep, that's the one, thanks."

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9341401

Online Videos Thread

Here's an evolutionary psychology question:

#1: Lemma: Replicator-selection works only through genes; that is, there is no such thing as group selection; from a reproduction perspective, the only which matters, is delta-reproduction-fitness increase.

#2: Lemma: Technologies, and techniques doesn't require gene-transfer. Once someone comes up with a new idea, that idea can freely spread across the entire population. Therefore, technologies, and techniques doesn't offer delta-reproduction-fitness increase.

#3: Observation: Some people appear to be interested more in things (as observed in Scientists, engineers; think "flow"), as opposed to other people (as predicted by the Machiavellian Intelligence Hypothesis )

For the purpose of this thread, I'm not interested in discussing lemma #1, and #2. Assume these to be axiomatic. How can #3 still increase delta-reproduction-fitness?

Online Videos Thread

I'm not ready for my current employer to know about this, so I've created a throwaway account to ask about it.

A week ago I interviewed with Google, and I just got the feedback: they're very happy and want to move forward. They've sent me an email asking for various details, including my current salary.

Now it seems to me very much as if I don't want to tell them my current salary - I suspect I'd do much better if they worked out what they felt I was worth to them and offered me that, rather than taking my current salary and adding a bit extra. The Internet is full of advice that you shouldn't tell a prospective employer your current salary when they ask. But I'm suspicious of this advice - it seems like the sort of thing they would say whether it was true or not. What's your guess - in real life, how offputting is it for an employer if a candidate refuses to disclose that kind of detail when you ask for it as part of your process? How likely are Google to be put off by it?