Glad you liked it :-).
So I'd be interested to hear a little more info on methodology - what programming language(s) you used, how you generated the graphs, etc.
I used R for this analysis. Some resources that you might find relevant:
Physics is established, so one can defer to existing authorities and get right answers about physics. Starting a well-run laundromat is also established, so ditto. Physics and laundromat-running both have well-established feedback loops that have validated their basic processes in ways third parties can see are valid.
Depending on which parts of physics one has in mind, this seems possibly almost exactly backwards (!!). Quoting from Vladimir_M's post Some Heuristics for Evaluating the Soundness of the Academic Mainstream in Unfamiliar Fields:
...If a resea
A few nitpicks on choice of "Brier-boosting" as a description of CFAR's approach:
Predictive power is maximized when Brier score is minimized
Brier score is the sum of differences between probabilities assigned to events and indicator variables that are are 1 or 0 according to whether the event did or did not occur. Good calibration therefore corresponds to minimizing Brier score rather than maximizing it, and "Brier-boosting" suggests maximization.
What's referred to as "quadratic score" is essentially the same as the negative ...
Brian Tomasik's article Why I Prefer Public Conversations is relevant to
...I suspect that most of the value generation from having a single shared conversational locus is not captured by the individual generating the value (I suspect there is much distributed value from having "a conversation" with better structural integrity / more coherence, but that the value created thereby is pretty distributed). Insofar as there are "externalized benefits" to be had by blogging/commenting/reading from a common platform, it may make sense to regard
Wait, your category (ii) is surely exactly what we care about here.
Yes, I see how my last message was ambiguous.
What I had in mind in bringing up category (ii) is that we've had some students who had a priori worse near term employment prospects relative to the usual range of bootcamp attendees, who are better positions than they had been and who got what they were looking to get from the program, while not yet having $100k+ paying jobs. And most students who would have gotten $100k+ paying jobs even if they hadn't attended appear to have benefited from attending the program.
The nature of the value that we have to add is very much specific to the student.
Hello! I'm a cofounder of Signal Data Science.
Because our students have come into the program from very heterogeneous backgrounds (ranging from high school dropout to math PhD with years of experience as a software engineer), summary statistics along the lines that you're looking for are less informative than might seem to be the case prima facie. In particular, we don't yet have meaningfully large sample of students who don't fall into one of the categories of (i) people who would have gotten high paying jobs anyway and (ii) people who one wouldn't expec...
Thanks for the written feedback (which adds to what I had gleaned in person).
There were actually multiple times during the first couple weeks when I (or my partner and I) would spend 4+ hours trying to fix one particular line of code, and Jonah would give big-picture answers about e.g. how linear regression worked in theory, when what I'd asked for were specific suggestions on how to fix that line of code. This led me to giving up on asking Jonah for help after long enough.
I think that what happened here is me having misunderstood what you were asking...
Hi Toggle,
Thanks for your question!
Most of our students have just started looking for jobs over the past ~2 weeks, and the job search process in the tech sector typically takes ~2 months, from sending out resumes to accepting offers (see, e.g. "Managing your time" in Alexei's post Maximizing Your Donations via a Job).
The feedback loop here is correspondingly longer than we'd like. We expect to have an answer to your question by the time we advertise our third cohort.
Thanks for your interest! Some responses below.
Do you require applicants to have a graduate degree?
No degree is required. We're selecting on ability rather than on credentials.
Zipfian Academy, App Academy, and other bootcamps are 12 weeks long, and (the first instance of) this one is only 6 weeks long. Why is this, and what are you cutting out relative to other data science bootcamps to make it this short? (This is my most pressing question).
Based on the preliminary interest that people have expressed anticipate that the students in our first coho
I'm sure you're aware that the word "cult" is a strong claim that requires a lot of evidence, but I'd also issue a friendly warning that to me at least it immediately set off my "crank" alarm bells.
Thanks, yeah, people have been telling me that I need to be more careful in how I frame things. :-)
...Do you have evidence of legitimate mathematical results or research being hidden/withdrawn from journals or publicly derided, or is it more of an old boy's club that's hard for outsiders to participate in and that plays petty politics to t
That probably where there's something I don't understand. I don't understand why the analysis took ~1500 hours. Spending that much time with a dataset also instinctively triggers "fishing expedition" in my head. I don't know to what extend that's warranted.
The issue of multiple hypothesis testing is precisely why it took 1500 hours :-). I was dealing with the general question "how can you find the most interesting generalizable patterns in a human interpretable data set?" It'll take me a long time to externalize what I learned.
For ...
I'll be writing more about this later.
The most scary thing to me is that the most mathematically talented students are often turned off by what they see in math classes, even at the undergraduate and graduate levels. Math serves as a backbone for the sciences, so this may badly undercutting scientific innovation at a societal level.
I honestly think that it would be an improvement on the status quo to stop teaching math classes entirely. Thurston characterized his early math education as follows:
I hated much of what was taught as mathematics in my early sc...
Do people pathologize Grothendieck as having gone crazy?
His contribution of math is too great for people to have explicitly adopted a stance that was too unfavorable to him, and many mathematicians did in fact miss him a lot. But as Perelman said:
Of course, there are many mathematicians who are more or less honest. But almost all of them are conformists. They are more or less honest, but they tolerate those who are not honest." He has also said that "It is not people who break ethical standards who are regarded as aliens. It is people like me...
The top 3 answers to the MathOverflow question Which mathematicians have influenced you the most? are Alexander Grothendieck, Mikhail Gromov, and Bill Thurston. Each of these have expressed serious concerns about the community.
Grothendieck was actually effectively excommunicated by the mathematical community and then was pathologized as having gone crazy. See pages 37-40 of David Ruelle's book A Mathematician's Brain.
Gromov expresses strong sympathy for Grigory Perelman having left the mathematical community starting on page 110 of Perfect Rigor. (You
One of the things I find most charming about LW, compared to places like RationalWiki, is how much emphasis there is on self-improvement and your mistakes, not mistakes made by other people because they're dumb.
I agree that LW is much better than RationalWiki, but I still think that the norms for discussion are much too far in the direction of focus on how other commenters are wrong as opposed to how one might oneself be wrong.
I know that there's a selection effect (with respect to the more frustrating interactions standing out). But people not infrequ...
I'm sympathetic to everything you say.
In my experience there's an issue of Less Wrongers being unusually emotionally damaged (e.g. relative to academics) and this gives rise to a lot of problems in the community. But I don't think that the emotional damage primarily comes from the weird stuff that you see on Less Wrong. What one sees is them having born the brunt of the phenomenon that I described here disproportionately relative to other smart people, often because they're unusually creative and have been marginalized by conformist norms
Quite frankly, I...
Thanks so much for sharing. I'm astonished by how much more fruitful my relationships have became since I've started asking.
I think that a lot of what you're seeing is a cultural clash: different communities have different blindspots and norms for communication, and a lot of times the combination of (i) blindspots of the communities that one is familiar with and (ii) respects in which a new community actually is unsound can give one the impression "these people are beyond the pale!" when the actual situation is that they're no less rational than ...
See my edit. Part of where I'm coming from is realizing how socially undeveloped people's in our reference class are tend to be, such that apparent malice often comes from misunderstandings.
See Rationality is about pattern recognition, not reasoning.
Your tone is condescending, far outside of politeness norms. In the past I would have uncharitably written this off to you being depraved, but I've realized that I should be making a stronger effort to understand other people's perspectives. So can you help me understand where you're coming from on an emotional level?
You asked about emotional stuff so here is my perspective. I have extremely weird feelings about this whole forum that may affect my writing style. My view is constantly popping back and forth between different views, like in the rabbit-duck gestalt image. On one hand I often see interesting and very good arguments, but on the other hand I see tons of red flags popping up. I feel that I need to maintain extreme mental efforts to stay "sane" here. Maybe I should refrain from commenting. It's a pity because I'm generally very interested in the topi...
Why did you have this impression?
Groupthink I guess: other people who I knew didn't think that it's so important (despite being people who are very well educated by conventional standards, top ~1% of elite colleges).
Tell me how exactly you're planning to use PCA day-to-day?
Disclaimer: I know that I'm not giving enough evidence to convince you: I've thought about this for thousands of hours (including working through many quantitative examples) and it's taking me a long time to figure out how to organize what I've learned.
I already have been using di...
It seem to me like to make major contributions to human knowledge you need to do a lot more than say: "Hey PCA is really great". You actually have to understand reasons of why people aren't using it and fixing those reasons.
Have you read my speed dating project posts? I haven't yet written up the most important one on demographics (I can do that soon, just many conflicting priorities), but the one on individual variation in revealed preferences for attractiveness vs intelligence and sincerity starts to get at what I'm talking about.
My project...
Ok, I guess what I mean is that it's suspicious that it maps onto a preexisting notion held by the general population, in the same way that it would be suspicious for psychology research to apparently show the existence of demon possession (which humans have in fact believed in). I wouldn't find it suspicious if it mapped onto a notion of someone with demonstrated exceptional ability to read and connect with people (e.g. Bill Clinton).
The way scientific progress occurs is by developing progressively more refined understandings of what's going on: for exam...
I know that many researchers know something about PCA. I do think that it's not applied nearly enough (c.f. Sarah's remarks about Asperger's Syndrome, which was removed from the DSM a few years after she made her post). The main issue to my mind is that when people apply it in psychology they seem to come into it with preconceived notions concerning what they might find, rather than collecting large and diverse datasets, letting it speak for itself, and then trying to interpret what the principal components mean in human terms.
Consider the construct of co...
Yes. The basic situation is that I figured out how the methods that Charles Spearman used to discover IQ can be used to shed a lot of light on many different psychology and sociology questions. This is what I was implicitly getting at in my sequence of posts on my Speed Dating Project, though I did a poor job contextualizing the results. IQ is by far the most robust construct to come out of psychology research, so this could in principle revolutionize social science (with a huge amount of work by many talented people).
Some people would say that psychology...
I did some reading of the literature on intrinsic motivation and came to a conclusion I hadn't seen anywhere else, which is that people are intrinsically motivated to complete tasks that raise their status.
Yes, I think that the situation is that people are biologically hardwired to pursue their comparative advantage because doing so was was historically what was most conducive to becoming higher status, so that people's motivation goes way up when they're pursuing their natural comparative advantage (relative to their subjectively perceived communities).
Thanks for the detailed comment. I omitted details in order to keep my post short, and get the main point across.
I believe that the IQ tests that Terman and Hollingworth were using were effectively scaled differently from modern IQ tests. They may have corresponded to "mental age" as opposed to "standard deviations. In particular, they discuss IQ scores of 180, and there definitely aren't enough people who are 5+ SD above the mean to get reliable scores in that range.
Putting that aside, there are genetic factors other than IQ alone that pl...
Thanks for the suggestion.
The actual situation is that over the past 3 months I've had a cluster of insights that's extended far beyond math education as typically conceived, and I think that I've finally uncovered a road forward for people in our reference class to (as a group) increase our productivity by ~100x+. (As a point of reference, Bill Gates makes ~$10 billion a year: that should make the factor of 100x less far fetched.)
There are so many things to say that it's difficult to know where to start. I have ~500 unpublished pages on the subject, but a...
I know that the content itself is clear. The main thing that I need to work on is making my writing more engaging to a broader audience. If the writing isn't appealing enough to motivate people to read carefully, I'm not going to get through to them :D. I think that Scott Alexander / Yvain would do a better job than I can. I don't expect to be able to get up to his level, but I hope to move in that direction.
Thanks.
I know that I'm actually far above average after controlling for the complexity of the material that I'm trying to convey, but nature doesn't grade on a curve: it's not enough to be at the 99th percentile of academic mathematicians to actually successfully convey ideas to a broad audience of people without technical backgrounds :D.
I'm glad that you're understanding what I'm writing, but as a practical matter it seems as though I've been failing with > 50% of those who I've been trying to reach.
Thanks.
There are meta-principles that are relevant to learning how to communicate with any group of people, that I'm just starting to learn. Reaching the LW community would be a great starting point, but only makes a small dent in the general problem of knowledge of how to think about the world mathematically in general being very rare, in juxtaposition with the fact that far more people are capable of learning than are currently learning.
I would like to see an (optional) personality test section - email me at jsinick@gmail.com if you're interested in the possibility, as I have some detailed thoughts.