LESSWRONG
LW

All of jsu's Comments + Replies

Open thread, Jan. 19 - Jan. 25, 2015
jsu00

Yeah, that sounds like the most likely possibility actually.

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Open thread, Jan. 19 - Jan. 25, 2015
jsu20

Maybe they are friends and discussed their thesis topics with each other. I find it unlikely that 4 out of 20 students would come up with sibling related topics independently.

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7gjm
Or maybe they picked them out loud in class, and some of those were deliberate responses to others. So what happens is: Albert is an oldest child whose younger sister is loud and annoying and gets all the attention. He says "I'm going to write about how being an older sibling is hard". Beth is a youngest child whose older brothers get all the new clothes and toys and things; she gets their hand-me-downs. She thinks Albert's got it all wrong and, determined to set the record straight, says "I'm going to write about how being the youngest child is hard." Charles realises that as a middle child he has all the same problems Albert and Beth do, and misses out on some of their advantages, and says he's going to write about that. Diana hears all these and thinks, "Well, at least they have siblings to play with and relate to", and announces her intention to explain how things are bad for only children. Notice that all these children may be absolutely right in thinking that they have difficulties caused by their sibling situation. They may also all be right in thinking that they would be better off with a different sibling situation. (Perhaps there's another youngest child in the class who loves it -- but you didn't hear from him.)
How valuable is volunteering?
jsu30

it's generally better to donate $X than it is to volunteer $X worth of your time

In what sense is this better?

Consider a diehard Democrat volunteering for the Obama campaign. He's perfectly willing to spend six hours knocking on doors (for free), because he enjoys spreading awareness and bonding with his fellow Democrats. But to hire someone to do it (for minimum wage), he'd have to donate ~$50, which he might not be willing to part with. So in this case it's much better for the individual to volunteer than donate. It's also better for the Obama camp... (read more)

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3JonahS
Yes, I was restricting consideration to social value contributed to others; it's true that if you factor in both social value to the volunteer and to those helped, it can be better to volunteer than donate, even if the same wouldn't be true if one didn't factor in one's own well-being. This falls into the category "the volunteer can do a better job than an employee hired with $X, where $X is the earning power of the volunteer."
How can Cognito Mentoring do the most good?
jsu00

Remember several years ago, when people were concerned about how unreliable Wikipedia was, and told students never to cite it in their essays? It took a long time for people to trust Wikipedia, and nowadays people only trust it because lots of other people trust Wikipedia. But in the case of Cognito Mentoring, the average customer won't know anyone else who's used the service, nor is it popular or established. It's not impossible for a free service to be trustworthy, but it's a lot more difficult to trust a free service than a paid one.

At most you can

... (read more)
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0Lumifer
There is folk wisdom which goes along the lines of "it's worth whatever you paid for it" but it is becoming rather irrelevant nowadays. Look at the tech scene. Consumer-oriented services (Google, Facebook, Twitter, Flickr, etc.) do not charge their customers directly, they all find other ways to make money. Their services are "free" (yes, I know, we can discuss whether they are actually free and are you a product or a customer, but that's another topic) and yet clearly recognized as very valuable. Even if they do charge directly, they almost always offer a generous free tasting that is sufficient for many uses (Evernote, Dropbox, etc.) The point is ease of trying. Testing a free service only costs you your time and so is easy and tempting to do. In particular, you don't need to trust that service very much because, again, all you are risking is your time. On the other hand, charging $200/hour is going to make most (but not all) people require some proof of the value before they part with the cash. A paid service needs more trust. I understand that some people interpret price as signaling quality. But there are other factors in play, too.
How can Cognito Mentoring do the most good?
jsu00

Yeah, but nobody's going to think that if the service is offered for free. Some people might if they charge for it. By charging a certain amount you tell people how much they should value your product.

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0Lumifer
Yeah, nobody in their right mind would highly value things like Linux or Wikipedia... Or the Sequences, for that matter. At most you can do some anchoring. You can tell people how much they should value your product and people can (and often do) disagree with that.
What are some science mistakes you made in college?
jsu50

CS grad student here. Some mistakes I made were

  • Not documenting code.
  • Naming figures/datafiles poorly, so that you have no idea what they are in two weeks. It's best to have an automated way of labeling files if you'll be creating a lot of them.
  • Storing data in an inefficient way (very bad if you're generating large amounts of data).
  • Not using version control.
  • Diving right into implementing an algorithm without first thinking about whether that's the best way to solve the problem.
  • Being intimidated by tasks that looked difficult (they were rarely as hard as I thought they would be).
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How can Cognito Mentoring do the most good?
jsu00

Most of the students who we advised said that knowing what they know now, they would have sought advising from us only if it were free.

I think this is precisely because you aren't charging for advice. If you charged a $200/hour "consulting fee," people would see you as professionals, and value your advice highly. But now that you're giving advice for free, you're just some random Internet guy telling kids how to run their lives.

High school and college students generally don't have much money.

Well, you market it to the parents. People pay for college admissions consulting all the time.

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1Lumifer
Conditional on those people first deciding that these two guys are worth $200/hour.