All of Barry_Cotter's Comments + Replies

Can’t you staple three papers together with filler/linking material and call it “Essays in Political Science” or a narrower topic if you’ve been focused?

I suggest emailing Chris Blattman and Bryan Caplan and asking for advice. Greet, be brief and to the point. I suggest Blattman because he works as a political scientist though he was trained as an economist. If your statistical skills are good you can do very well outside academia. Amazon Economists (PhD required) are getting over $175K starting. Bryan Caplan I suggest because he suggests academia is a tru... (read more)

1Tim Liptrot
Just got Jason Brennan's book. It's very helpful!
1Tim Liptrot
That's a good question Barry. Yes I could do a 3 paper very easily. I just finished a first article on expropriation and successions crises, it has a shot for a top journal. I'm working on a next one on succession crises and appointments. My professors tend to say that this isn't enough, that I need a special incredible dissertation where everything is laser focused on one topic and tightly linked. They also say that 90% of students take more than 5 years. I'm honestly confused. Thanks for sending the link. I go to Dr. Brennan's school, so I can read the book then talk to him. Good idea!

Surely this calls for data analysis? I’ve seen Economics papers on publication and placement for PhD students by programme, and I think for Sociology. There are almost certainly relevant publications for your field and if there aren’t you could probably get a publishable paper out of writing up your own research.

If you’re in Year 2 of your programs and on track to have three publications by Year 5 your personal probability of getting a tenure track position must be 50% or higher, not 25%. Again, this calls for data. The 25% of your programme’s graduates do... (read more)

5Tim Liptrot
I did quite a bit of research on it after this. It turns out there really isn't good data, the best is from the APSA but is full of holes. I did a tweet thread on it a while back. I do have more publications than my competitors. Unfortunately, I have been repeatedly told in my program that publications do not matter and only dissertations matter. Kind of sucks, but what can you do. Publishing is definitely a signal of value, so I have the skills to do a good dissertation. It just sucks that what I like doing (papers) isn't rewarded. The real kicker here is that even if I get the tenure track job, it's just not that great. For tenure track the average pay is 75k (for non-tenure 60k). More importantly, the tenure process is 6-8 years and very stressful. So I would be on the treadmill of competition from 27 (now) to 38. I doubt I want that level of stress for that long. So probably not my best option but we'll see.

If you are in that position surely the economically rational thing to do would be to juice your returns by borrowing to invest more?

4ike
I'm currently looking into buying a bank or insurance company to do exactly that. It's really non-trivial to borrow large amounts at low rates to lend. Way easier said than done.

The consultants aren’t parasites. They offer something extremely valuable, on call, disposable expertise without requiring you to hire another full time employee. If you have a month’s work for someone but that someone needs to actually know what they’re doing right now then paying a large premium can make sense very quickly. Convenience and lack of expectation of continued employment are part of what contractors generally provide.

I see the appeal of actually making a thing but the thing can equally be an info-product like a book or course that also serves as proof of expertise. That serves as a casing card for consulting services too. Margins are better on services and information products than on physical objects.

Do you have any experience teaching, interacting with or mentoring 14-18 year olds that makes you confident some small minority of them can do this? If you please give details.

4ChristianKl
Take someone like Laura Deming as an example. She got with 14 into MIT and was raising her fund when she was 18. From people with whom I have spoken more personally I would expect that people with 150-160 IQ 

Based on my own experience I strongly suspect the only way to do this is to fail repeatedly until you succeed. That said the following rules are very, very good.

If you really, really want an example I can send you my Developmental Psychology and Learning and Behaviour Deck. It consists of the entirety of a Cliff's Notes kind of Developmental Psychology book, a better dev psych's summary section and an L&B book's summary section. In retrospect the Cliff's Notes book was a mistake but I've invested enough in it now that I may as well continue it, most of... (read more)

It may not be an effective way to help people but it sure as hell helps you up to do it up to three times a year. All hail longevity! I regret I am in a rush so I can't link but I believe RomeoSteverns' post on optimising your health has the references.

3Gunnar_Zarncke
This is RomeoSteverns' post on optimising your health. See the section under "blood donation". Note that this advice only applies to males. In response to that I started donating blood once a year (thus by now twice).

I have heard that in economics and possibly other social sciences Ph.D. students can staple together three journal articles, call it a dissertation and get awarded their doctorate. But I've recently read "Publication, Publication" by Gary King, which I interpret as saying a very bright and hardworking undergraduate can write a quantitative political science article in the space of a semester, while carrying a normal class load.

This is confusing. Now, Dr. King teaches at Harvard so all his students are smart and it's two students writing one paper... (read more)

2badger
From an economics perspective, the stapler dissertation is real. The majority of the time, the three papers haven't been published. It's also possible to publish empirical work produced in a few months. The issue is where that article is likely to be published. There's a clear hierarchy of journals, and a low ranked publication could hurt more than it helps. Dissertation committees have very different standards depending on the student's ambition to go into academia. If the committee has to write letters of rec to other professors, it takes a lot more work to be sufficiently novel and interesting. If someone goes into industry, almost any three papers will suffice. I've seen people leave because they couldn't pass coursework or because they felt burnt out, but the degree almost always comes conditional on writing something and having well-calibrated ambitions.
6[anonymous]
There is usually more to a "PhD by publication" than just publishing any 3 articles and then submitting them for the degree. A nice 2011 article in Times Higher Education describes what the process actually requires, at least in the UK most importantly, coherence: the articles must be on related themes, and additional supporting documentation on the order of 10k words is usually required to convert the independent publications into some kind of coherent package that, very often resembles a conventional thesis. It's also informative to look over the recent discussion on the Thesis Whisperer blog - lots of comments from people in various disciplines about the realities of publication-based theses.... and usually they describe them as more work than a conventional thesis. For published papers like the one described by Gary King - it may be hard to write a combination of them that meets an institution's criterion for PhD by publication. Not just the coherence part but usually there is a requirement that a PhD makes a novel contribution to the field -- and it is hard to justify this with strictly replication-based approaches. However, if the work follows King's suggestion to replicate and then make minimal changes ("make one improvement, or the smallest number of improvements possible to produce new results, and show the results so that we can attribute specific changes in substantive conclusions to particular methodological changes" - King p.120) - a series of such publications on closely related themes starts to look a lot like a conventional PhD..... although getting a paper through peer review is still quite a challenge. King's paper (and supplemental comments) can also be a useful guide for researchers outside academia to get published.
JoshuaZ160

I don't know about social sciences, but the situation in math isn't that far off. The short answer is that the papers done by the undergraduates are real papers but the level of papers which are of the type and quality that would be stapleable into a thesis are different (higher quality, more important results) than would be the sort done in undergraduate research.

2Alsadius
I've never been a grad student, so this is pure supposition, but... I suspect that if you went into a PhD program and tried to hand in a thesis six months later, the response that you'd get from on high is "Ha ha, very funny. Come back in three years", and that this response would happen whether or not you produced something that's actually good enough to be a proper thesis. Profs know how long a doctorate is "supposed to" take, and doing it in a tenth of that time will set off alarm bells for them.

They have examination centres in many, many countries, the USA included.

Centres in the United Kingdom Belfast, Darlington, Edinburgh, Glasgow, Jersey, Leeds, London, Newcastle, Newport (Gwent), Sheffield, Southport, Titchfield, York.

Centres outside the UK Alphabetical list of current non-UK centres, including some that have not been used for a few years.

Our professional exams are not offered in Hong Kong. Instead, the Hong Kong Statistical Society provides professional exams of an equivalent standard.

Anguilla: The Valley Australia: Perth; Sydney Austria:

... (read more)

(Friedman, among other things, supported a version of guaranteed basic income. To which today's GOP mainstream would probably say, "but if we do that, it will just make poor people even lazier!")

He supported a large negative income tax for those on the lowest (earned) incomes, tapering off to zero, then positive as earned income increased. This is really very far from a guaranteed basic income.

I think you may be over-estimating the intelligence required to be a physicist. I don't know what constitutes a meaningful contribution to physics, but there are certainly productive tenured professors who are not in the top 25% of quantitative ability.

This is not true. According to Kaufman, Alan S. (2009). IQ Testing 101. New York: Springer Publishing MDs, JDs and PhDs have an average IQ of 125+. PhDs in Physics are going to have higher quantitative scores than that. I regret that being behind the Great Firewall I can't source this but Steve Hsu wrote ... (read more)

0leplen
Is this the post you're looking to cite? From what I've been able to tell looking at that post and some related sources physicists seem to be about 2 standard deviations above the norm on average, with an uncertainty in that average measurement of a couple IQ points. This makes a physicist something like 1 in 50, rather than 1 in 100,000. Unfortunately it's not really clear what the standard deviation is for those numbers. An average, by itself tells you very little about a distribution. If we assume that the standard deviation of IQ scores of physics Ph.D.s is close to that of the rest of the population (this may be a bad assumption) then we expect 10% of physics doctorate holders to have an IQ of 110 or less, which would put them outside of the top quartile of the IQ distribution. You could play around with the parameters for the distribution here and come up with a bunch of different results, and I'm not totally sure which ones are meaningful. I may be wrong. I may be framing the problem wrong. I may not have a good picture of just how bad merely average quantitative skills are. I do work with a lot of people who have Ph.Ds in physics and while some of them certainly have remarkable quantitative skills, others really don't. I know people who have gotten doctorates in physics who didn't score particularly well on the GRE. This is especially true in experimental physics (in physics the standard joke is that as a theorist you don't have to study anything that exists in the real world, and as an experimentalist you don't have to get the math right). Physicists are pretty smart people, but they're not all 1 in 100k and that's certainly not a requirement for being a physicist. Also, I think the level of quantitative ability necessary for physics research is often below the level needed to muddle through the coursework.

Introduction to the History of Psychology Good, well written, excellent summary and glossary at the end of each chapter. I'm not finished but so far my only complaint is the obvious political bent in the intelligence chapter.

Psychology, Themes and Variations Clear, concise and comprehensive introductory psychology textbook. Reading the history book has made me aware of some minor errors in it but nothing damning, just a reminder that if you're really interested this is the first book to read, not the last.

Social Psychology Very far from the first social ps... (read more)

Success: Still exercising, have now read three and a half psychology textbooks, still using Anki for learning Chinese, moved from contextless Anki cards to multiple cloze massive context as recommmended by AJATT.com My savings continue to grow, which is great.

Failures: Opening Habit RPG got aversive due to me constantly dying due to missing dailies on programming and diary writing so I stopped. I have just realised I should take them out of dailies and put them in habits. I also really need to start doing to do lists and planning things, considering what I want to do, etc.

0Metus
What psychology books are you reading if you don't mind answering?
4hamnox
7.5x congrats Barry! I feel ya. HabitRPG can be very discouraging when you're dying. Just remember, habitrpg mirrors life. If you don't really need to do something everyday, then why is it killing you to not? One thing I've found helpful: When I'm worried about not getting any of my habits or to-dos done, I don't try to stick them on my dailies instead. Instead, I make it a daily to fill some quota of habits or to-dos. I don't have to get every habit done every day, or keep track of which days I have to either check off or reschedule the daily. It's only vital that I've made some progress. Reviews are also important. Have you tried Alex Vermeer's Guide?

Academia in the US is much leftier than the population at large. I believe it was Jonathan Haidt who went looking for examples of social conservatives in his field and people kept nomimating Philip Tetlock who would not describe himself thus. At a conference Dr.Haidt was looking for a show of hands for various political positions. Republicans were substantially less popular than Communists. Psychology is about as left wing as sociology and disciplines vary but academia is a great deal to the left of the US general population.

I believe his political views are somewhere between way to the left of the Democratic Party and socialism. He dislikes the entire field of intelligence research in psychology because it's ideologically inconvenient. He criticises anything that he can find to criticise about it. Think of him as Stephen Jay Gould, but much smarter and more honest.

2gjm
See, this is a place where the US is different from Europe. Because over here (at least in the bit of Europe I'm in), being "somewhere to the right of socialism" isn't thought of as the kind of crazy extremism that ipso facto makes someone dangerously biased and axe-grindy. Now, of course politics is what it is, and affiliation with even the most moderate and reasonable political position can make otherwise sensible people completely blind to what's obvious to others. So the fact that being almost (but not quite) a socialist looks to me like a perfectly normal and sensible position is perfectly compatible with Shalizi being made nuts by it. But to me "he's somewhere to the left of Barack Obama" doesn't look on its own like something that makes someone a biased source and explains what their problem is.

Where could one find many, many past exam papers for university undergraduate courses? I find attempting them under exam conditions the ideal way of preparing for exams, and really excellent at pointing out where there are gaps in my knowledge and I need to revise. I'm particularly interested in psychology exam papers.

6Douglas_Knight
fraternities.
7sixes_and_sevens
Here are all the MIT OCW courses listed under "psychology". Many of them include both specimen and actual exam papers. My experience with using other institutions' exams to revise for my own is that there's enough variation in the syllabus to distract from the task of actually passing the exam.
2DanielDeRossi
Depends on your uni. Ask your classmates. That's what I did.

Please write about this or link me to someone who has already. Congratulations on your escape.

0kalium
At the time, I had a moral system in which it was not permissible to leave grad school because science was the thing I should be doing. However, towards the end of my first year I became too depressed to do any problem sets and as a result I had to drop all my classes at the last minute and would then have had to reapply to get back in, which wasn't happening. If I'd been slightly less vulnerable to stress-related depression, I suppose I'd still be there (and still be quite unhappy, so maybe the whole thing was adaptive after all). I don't have a good link to post, but if I write more extensively I'll put it here.

Why haven't you gone back to college for a Masters in English Literature or something along those lines? Robin Hanson was 35 before he got his Ph.D. in Economics and he's doing ok. The market for humanities scholars is not as forgiving as that for Economics but that's what you want, right?

3polymathwannabe
After some years of self-analysis and odd jobs, I'm close to finishing a second degree in journalism.

One can read in one's spare time or learn languages or act. If one does not come from wealth not majoring in something remunerative in college is a mistake if you will actually want money later.

He didn't dismiss the humanities he said studying them at university was a poor decision.

-5therufs

He didn't dismiss the humanities he said studying them at university was a poor decision.

Moreover, it wasn't really presented as general advice, but advice for their own younger version. It's not generally applicable advice (not everyone will be happy or successful in STEM fields), but I think it's safe to assume it is sound advice for Young!nydwracu.

Or even if it was intended as generally applicable advice, it's still directed at kids gifted at mathematics, who will have a high likelihood of enjoying STEM fields.

2polymathwannabe
My parents made me study business management instead of literature. My life has been much more boring and unfulfilling as a result, because the jobs I can apply for don't interest me, and the jobs I want demand qualifications I lack. In my personal experience, working in your passion beats working for the money.

How are your todos functioning for long-term repeating tasks, or tasks that have a long while before they become actionable?

Dailies, forget about it or Boomerang.

Read any really interesting textbooks lately?

Cambridge Handbook of Expert Performance and Psychology, Themes and Variations are it so far. They are large tomes so I feel okay about going so slowly.

I have started using HabitRPG to reinforce reading on a daily basis, Anki usage and exercise, as well as doing some programming, though that last is less well established. I had the program on my phone for a while but kept on forgetting it so I just set two daily reminders in Google calendar. Problem solved. I uninstalled remember the milk as HabitRPG's todk functionality is good enough.

I am now spending a lot of time that was previously unproductive internet time reading textbooks on my phone's Kindle app. Almost certainly inferior to paper books but my p... (read more)

0hamnox
Go Habit! How are your todos functioning for long-term repeating tasks, or tasks that have a long while before they become actionable? I applaud your more productive use of internet time, and your exercise habits. Read any really interesting textbooks lately? There was talk of effective daily exercises here in the last journal thread.

Just want to say I'm glad you're back and don't let the bastards/SJWs grind you down.

I understand the idea of limited capacity per sleep cycle -- I'm curious whether it works in different ways for different kinds of learning.

Personally I'd be surprised if it did. The maximum amount of deliberate practice you can get in a day tops out at 3-4 hours, according to K. Anders Ericsson. I think that's quite close to the limits of what the brain can do. I'll honestly be surprised if napping tesets that clock or he or other psychologists woul have uncovered them.

0Lumifer
Do you have a link?

It is also generally held as true that on the global scale all top-ten business schools are American.

Yeah, it's not really surprising that Americans think that. Being 5% of the world's population and 25% of its economy leads to understandable insularity of vision. The FT's 2014 businesses school ranking has London Business School, INSEAD in France/Singapore, IESE in Spain and HKUST in Hong Kong in the top 10. The latest Economist rankings have IESE in Spain and HEC in France in the top 10 as well.

The US is certainly dominant but it's not crushing dominance.

Move to Main. One learns by rote, not wrote.

Use the try harder Luke.

What do you mean by "not new to programming at all"? How many hours programming have you done? How many projects have you completed? Because unless you've had a job as a programmer before or you did CS as a college degree your previous experience will be utterly swamped by App Academy. If you feel insecure about algorithms specifically practice them specifically. If you want more practice with Ruby maybe do Hartl's book. The Codecademy Ruby course is not the end of the world. If programming appeals to you prepare, apply and let App academy do the judging.

Edit: Remember, many people who have had jobs as programmers can't do FizzBuzz if asked to in an interview. Retain hope.

Hey Jonah, you might be interested in http://www.mergersandinquisitions.com It's been years since I looked at it and it's been extensively redesigned but as a site with information about I-banking it was excellent way back. There's an associated site of similar quality on Management Consulting as well. Its name escapes me but it shouldn't be too hard to find from M&I

How to Get into Grad School for Math, Engineering or Computer Science

Juniors and seniors often ask me how to get into a Ph.D. program. Having looked at applications for three years now, I feel like I can offer some good advice. [This advice applies for masters students too.] The one-word version of that advice is: PUBLISH.

Five minutee has not found me the link but there is a much upvoted post on the value of reading the Classics or Great Works of a field. IIRC Vassar commented that outside of fields like Math or Chemistry where progress is completely unambiguous it's a good idea. Darwin invented, conceived and distinguished natural and sexual selection in his greatest work. Despite this sexual selection was more or less rediscovered from scratch starting in the 70's.

Macroeconomists are still talking about DSGE models, right now, after the Great Recession. I recall a recent ... (read more)

Why are people downvoting this? It is the refounding of macroeconomics.

If I was recommending a first book on economics this would not be it because macroeconomics is compared to microeconomics useless and something we know nothing about but still. Also, if your only reason for learning about economics is to bullshit about politics Keynes' book will equip you to crush the ignorant quite adequately.

Is "Worm" finished and is there a pdf/epub/text file somewhere convenient for one behind the Great Firewall? I have heard Good Things about it.

7David_Gerard
Yes and no, in that order. The author has asked that ebooks and PDFs not be made available, as he's working on a partial-rewrite with the aim of selling ebook versions for money.

Kawoomba suggests that colleges' statements on the first point below can't be taken at face value. What do you think?

I find it alarming that you assumed honesty on the part of the admissions officers. It reduces my confidence in everything you wrote that you assumed honesty from people whose job it is to be gatekeepers to the American elite class.

1brazil84
Well you can't assume honesty from anyone about their preferences. Unless they are talking about a completely innocuous quirk, e.g. that they prefer strawberry ice cream to vanilla ice cream. For one thing, people are often not fully aware of their preferences. For another, when people talk about what goes in in their head, they have a tendency to spin so as to put themselves in the best possible light.
0JonahS
http://lesswrong.com/lw/jys/what_colleges_look_for_in_extracurricular/aqp9 See also

I suggest looking into r/bodyweight. Bodyweight exercises, followed by same supplemented by a bookbag gradually more full of books, then gradually more full of bags of sand/gravel are not expensive and don't require a gym.

In my career coaching work, one of the things I try to teach is how to spot these patterns of which way a market is going. This has some classic signs, and I can give plenty of examples of other industries in which this same pattern took place.

Examples would be appreciated. But this seems to be a case of trying to time the market and the usual objection applies; if you can time the market to within a year you can make huge piles of money. One of the contributors on HN, lsc of prgrmr.com talks about how he was calling the property bubble in the Bay area ... (read more)

0[anonymous]
As maia said, it's not really about trying to time the market down to the year (or even trying to pinpoint it within 5 years)... but rather picking up on trends and trying to invest your time in the right places. I started teaching the basic concepts after working with so many clients who had painted themselves into a corner by creating a great career in a dying industry. Some examples of industries for which the writing was on the wall: -Print Journalism -Almost any US manufacturing job, especially textiles. -Projectionists I suppose those are all jobs/industries which declined due to technology, although the example of technical manufacturing of computer hardware shares many similarities to programming/coding jobs today. Here are a few jobs which have declined due to commoditization(is that a word?) of the knowledge: -Typists -Data entry specialists -Computer Operators Those are just the ones that have recently (past 15 years) continued to decline as skills have gone from specialist to commodity. If you go further back, you'll find similar examples for most new technologies that initially have high pay for specialists who operate it, but which becomes very cheap to learn. And here are some of the jobs and industries which, if my clients insist on taking them, I recommend they leverage to another job title or industry as soon as possible: -Social Media/Community Manager -Programmer -Anything print journalism
0maia
I suspect that predicting trends in the pay for a certain career path doesn't need to be that precise in order to be useful. If you can predict the year in which it'll happen, you make huge piles of money. If you can predict the decade in which it'll happen, maybe you can't do that as well, but you could still make a choice to do something else.

I stopped running at lunchtime since I kept on injuring my knees. I joined a gym a month ago and have been going three times a week, doing barbell weightlifting, bench, squat and overhead press. My progress has been almost non-existent in weight lifted so I probably need to alter my diet. At least I no longer get DOMS.

I started spending too much time mindlessly checking websites so I banned myself from spending any time on the internet at work . This works a lot better than having an exception for legitimate use.

I now have a very large collection of Chine... (read more)

0ephion
What's your lifting program?

Amy Chua's kids have two Yale law school professors for parents. Genetically and in terms of social capital they rolled a natural 20. I suggest reading Judith Rich Harris's "The Nurture Assumption" and/or Bryan Caplan's "Selfish Reasons to Have More Kids" if Chua is getting to you.

0JoshuaFox
Sure, but note that the the type of advice Jonah is giving is disproportionately aimed at gifted kids. So, Chua's technique and Jonah's are indeed aimed at the same population and so we can look at the results that each offers. Chua's two daughters are not a big data sample, however. Certainly, kids who are pushed to "play the game" succeed in life along all relevant parameters more than those who are not (those Upper East Side kids whose parents prep them for Harvard are going to end up with above average outcomes as compared to the US population). But there are some major confounding variables there, of course.
4James_Miller
And Amy's father was a super-genius, even compared to Ivy league professors.

The middle class would prefer that people be homeless than that they have permanent dwellings that do not reach their standards. None of your explanations is correct but the second comes closest. See Flophouse. I believe Matthew Yglesias has written on this and there's a commenter on slatestarcodex, St. Rev, who may or may not have a blog, who's homeless.

My first thought on reading this was of one person driven away from LW, Peter D. Jones by extensive downvoting. Reading his posts this was obviously a good thing. Enabling downvoting has driven away at least one person I really wish was still an active contributor, (wedrifid)[http://lesswrong.com/lw/jm7/open_thread_for_february_3_10/aj15/]. I think given that Hacker News doesn't have downvotes for stories but does for comments and employs hellbanning extensively I support the current system. Do you have any examples of good redditalikes without downvoting?... (read more)

3NancyLebovitz
I think I'd heard of hellbanning before, but not really registered it. It's tempting, but in a way unfair because the hellbanned person is still posting, and not realizing they're being blanked out for everyone else until (perhaps) they leave because of the lack of response. I don't know whether it would be better or worse to let hellbanned posters see and respond to each other's posts and comments. It's still sneaky. It would use up some system resources, but probably not very much, and it would be a public service to keep them occupied with each other.

I've been running during my lunchbreak for two weeks now. I've decided to just walk for the rest of this workweek because I've been moving heavy crap while moving house but it seems an easy habit to keep up and a clear win.

I am not professionally involved in these fields but I have read that among those who are there is a very jaundiced opinion of Chinese and Indian scientific research. If none of the following hold completely ignoring their publications is apparently a good heuristic; at least one foreign co-author or one who did their doctorate in the first world or an institution or author with a significant reputation. Living in China and having some minimal experience with the Chinese attitude to plagiarism/copying/research makes this seem plausible. I doubt anyone's missing anything by ignoring scientific articles published in Mandarin. I make no such claims for social sciences.

Because if you read the recommendations they are none of them objectionable though some may be mistaken if taken as moral injunctions rather than as guides to bear in mind. Your post otoh, is mealy mouthed misdirection combined with "Boo blues!".

Don't discuss politics, discuss policy, unless you're aiming to overthrow the system because even if you devote your entire life to one singular policy goal, and get elected to your national Parliament your chances of achieving your goal is not great.

Politics, dating, anyone got a third topic where Lesswrong varies between being useless and immensely frustrating compared to the usual standards of discussion around here?

Well, mileage clearly varies, but I find these periodic superficial discussions about the nature of LessWrong to meet both criteria. Nothing really new gets said, and old stuff doesn't get built on, just repeated at mind-numbing length.

When using pre-made decks the only efficient way is to follow along, i.e. if you don't know the source book/course it's not very good. Partial exception, vocabulary lists.

2Emile
Agreed - and you can even go wrong with vocabulary lists if they're too advanced (some German vocabulary got overwhelming for me, I just dropped everything). Another partial exception can be technical references (learning keywords in a programming language or git commands).

Personal fitness folk: doing starting strength is three hours a week that will make all the rest much better and a personal trainer will make your form good, which is really important. If your conscientiousness is normal tutors rock. If you can afford one, hire a tutor.

3RomeoStevens
Most personal trainers will not be able to help you have awesome form in powerlifting (starting strength) lifts. You're better off submitting videos of your form to forums devoted to such things than with the average PT.

Auf Englisch wuerde man STEM, science, technology, engineering, mathematics nutzen statt MINT.

0Metus
Ich wusste irgendwas stimmt nicht mit der Abkürzung. Danke für die Korrektur.

Don't deliberately screw yourself over. Don't accept less than the average for your position and either point blank refuse to give them negotiating leverage by telling them your current salary or lie.

For better, longer advice see [Salary Negotiation for Software Engineers](http://www.kalzumeus.com/2012/01/23/salary-negotiation)

I'm afraid I couldn't quite bring myself to follow all the advice in your link, but at any rate I increased my number to 125k. So, it helped a bit. :)

Given the Bloom two sigma phenomenom it would not surprise me if unschooling + 1 hour tuition per day beat regular school. And if you read Lesswrong there's a reasonable p() that an hour of a grad student's time isn't that expensive.

8Viliam_Bur
I googled the "Bloom two sigma phenomenom" and... correct me if I am wrong, but I parsed it as: "If we keep teaching students each lesson until they understand, and only then move to the next lesson (as opposed to, I guess, moving ahead at predetermined time intervals), they will be at top 2 percent of all students". What exactly is the lesson here? The weaker form seems to be -- if students don't understand their lessons, it really makes a difference at tests. (I guess this is not a big surprise.) The stronger form seems to be -- in standard education, more than 90% of students don't understand the lessons. Which suggests that of the money given to education, the huge majority is wasted. Okay, not wasted completely; "worse than those who really understand" does not necessarily mean "understands nothing". But still... I wonder how much additional money would be needed to give decent education to everyone, and how much would the society benefit from that. Based on my experience as a former teacher, the biggest problem is that many students just don't cooperate and do everything they can to disrupt the lesson. (In homeschool and private tutoring, you don't have these classmates!) And in many schools teachers are completely helpless about that, because the rules don't allow them to make anything that could really help. Any attempt to make education more efficient would have to deal with the disruptive students; perhaps to remove them from the main stream. And the remaining ones should learn until they understand. Perhaps with some option for the smarter ones to move ahead faster.

My failure to write precisely strikes again. As long as your work process isn't illegal or against a relevant code of conduct no one cares how you got your grades. This does rather speak against what I wrote above. College is a four year adventure in less supervision than you will have at work.

I cannot be the only person who had no trouble getting up at five in the morning for money but found getting up at ten verging on impossible in college. No one cares what you do in college but if you don't show up for work you won't get paid. I'm not sure whether people like me support your argument or not. Maybe I'm just a workaholic with a high discount factor.

-1James_Miller
Lots of employers care about grades. If you don't get As at my school, you don't get a job at an investment bank.
Load More