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A serious prophet upon predicting a flood should be the first man to climb a tree.
--Stephen Crane, The Red Badge of Courage.
In response to
Rationality Quotes February 2014
Charlatans also tend to do this.
Often, a charlatan would dedicate her life to selling boats. When questioned if she really believes in the floods, obviously she does! Why else would she be wasting her life as a boatwright?
Looking at the sticker price isn't comparing apples to apples. Aid has gone up drastically. It's never been cheaper for a kid from a poor family to get an education. Although a lot of the increases at state schools relate to decreasing funding, a huge amount of them at private schools (and a lesser extent at state schools) is their financial aid programs. Tuition has become more progressive and we're comparing the top prices.
But if you're middle class the price has gone up and may be unaffordable.
Running a college is about as labor-intensive as it ever has been, which is to say, very. Prices in all labor-intensive stuff have gone up faster than CPI.
And the ratio of administrators to professors has also exploded.
But if you're middle class the price has gone up and may be unaffordable.
My basic point was just the fact that the numbers we compare have nothing to do with each other. (The really don't.)
And the ratio of administrators to professors has also exploded.
The number of administrators, as traditionally defined, has changed little, though the number of professional staff has increased a lot. The biggest increase has been the growth of IT, though it goes beyond that. The part of this which is IT-related is somewhat mirrored by most other labor-intensive stuff.
The typical size comic books were $0.12 when I started buying them. I have no idea what they cost now.
It's also pretty obvious that gasoline has gone up in price for reasons that are not just general increase in prices.
And yet despite its uniqueness, it doesn't really deviate from the trend that everything else follows. Go figure.
I could have thrown in college tuition, about $2870 in 1974 when I started at Swarthmore College, currently $44,368. You still get a professor standing in front of the room for the same number of hours per semester.
College tuition inflation is often talked about but rarely dealt with sensibly. To understand the nature and extent of college tuition inflation, it's important to understand
Looking at the sticker price isn't comparing apples to apples. Aid has gone up drastically. It's never been cheaper for a kid from a poor family to get an education. Although a lot of the increases at state schools relate to decreasing funding, a huge amount of them at private schools (and a lesser extent at state schools) is their financial aid programs. Tuition has become more progressive and we're comparing the top prices.
Running a college is about as labor-intensive as it ever has been, which is to say, very. Prices in all labor-intensive stuff have gone up faster than CPI.
There has been a real increase, but it's not all real and it's not all for the reasons a lot of people assume.
I'm good at blowing bubbles with bubble gum. I have yet to charge anyone for doing it.
I suppose you could say that as long as I gain pleasure from blowing bubbles I'm not doing it "for free" but that makes the statement very trivial. Under normal interpretations of "for free", the statement is wrong because there's no demand from anyone else that I blow bubbles.
I'd correct that statement to "if you're good at something, never do it under market value", which raises the possibility that I would still do for free things like blowing bubbles that have no market value.
The quote is a good one, and not because it's true.
In response to
Rationality Quotes November 2013
The enemy of the enemy of my enemy is my enemy.
"The enemy of my enemy has their own relationship with me."
In response to
Rationality Quotes November 2013
Efficiency is doing things right; effectiveness is doing the right things.
-- Peter Drucker
See also: the distinction between verification and validation, or between quality control and quality assurance.
In response to
Rationality Quotes November 2013
Is time real? …In one sense, it’s a silly question. The “reality” of something is only an interesting issue if its a well-defined concept whose actual existence is in question, like Bigfoot or supersymmetry. For concepts like “time,” which are unambiguously part of a useful vocabulary we have for describing the world, talking about “reality” is just a bit of harmless gassing. They may be emergent or fundamental, but they’re definitely there.
"I don't understand why a question is interesting, so clearly it's meaningless."
In response to
Rationality Quotes October 2013
A majority of life's errors are caused by forgetting what one is really trying to do.
-Charlie Munger
Hyperbole.
In response to
Rationality Quotes September 2013
I believe that the final words man utters on this Earth will be "It worked!", it'll be an experiment that isn't misused, but will be a rolling catastrophe. (...) Curiosity killed the cat, and the cat never saw it coming.
Jon Stewart, talking to Richard Dawkins (S18, E156)
Let's get one thing straight: ignorance killed the cat.
Curiosity was framed.
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It's got a few things going for it.
It sounds really profound, It's by a person well-respected for his contributions to science It seems to give usable advice for improving your rationality.
Only one problem: it's bullshit. Standard counterexample: quantum mechanics. But even in Galileo's time, or earlier, a rationalist shouldn't have believed this. There's a huge sampling bias. You don't tend to discover things you can't understand.
Quantum mechanics is infinitely easier to understand than to discover.