you can very quickly check to see if you are a natural computer programmer by pulling up a page of Python source code and seeing whether it looks like it makes natural sense
The 2006 study that claimed that humans divide neatly into "natural computer programmers" and "everyone else" failed to replicate in 2008 on a larger population of students. And it didn't rely on students' subjective assessment of whether code "makes natural sense", but their measured consistency in answering questions about it.
We know from other studies that people can have highly erroneous assessments of their own ability — both in the Dunning-Kruger sense (low-skilled people overestimate greatly; high-skilled people underestimate slightly) and in the impostor-syndrome sense (high-skilled people can sometimes dramatically underestimate their skill).
In other words, if you look at a page of Python code and don't get a subjective feeling that it makes sense, that does not place you in a population of "not natural computer programmers".
(Disclaimer: I'm of the opinion that coding should be treated as a literacy skill — like reading, writing, and arithmetic.)
(high-skilled people can sometimes dramatically underestimate their skill)
I think that much of the time what's actually going on is that they dramatically overestimate everyone else's skill.
Coding aptitude clearly exists
The 2006 study I'm referring to is entitled "The camel has two humps", and attempts to establish that coding aptitude not only exists, but is bimodally distributed ("two humps") and can be predicted accurately before the student has taken any coursework or written any code. IOW, that you can discern, pretty unambiguously, who is worth teaching before you try teaching them.
And that is what didn't replicate.
Sure, aptitude exists. But there probably isn't a bright line, or even a bottleneck, between natural coders and everyone else.
Coding is a highly specialized skill not useful to most people in everyday life.
That's what they said about literacy a thousand or so years ago. If you're not a scribe or a priest, why bother? Today, though, a person who can't read is effectively mentally incompetent to deal with ordinary, expected situations in society. Within a hundred years, the same will be true of a person who can't choose and apply algorithms to solve problems. It's not about getting a job slinging Java; it's about being able to tell (increasingly-omnipresent) machines what you want them to do for you.
P/S/A: You are probably spending too much time looking for yet another possible solution to a problem you want to solve, and too little time making an effort to actually try the possible solutions you are already familiar with. As an example, if you are depressed, stop reading about Seth Roberts' latest pet theory of circadian oscillators if you haven't even bothered to seek professional medical advice.
Potentially dangerous advice. See a medical professional that is willing to discuss the potential risks & benefits of treatment with you before you go in asking your PCP for some Prozac. Some studies show SSRIs are only slightly more effective than placebo & they have a whole slew of side effects. They might be appropriate for some people. For other people, safer approaches like getting some counseling, fixing your diet, exercising, & socializing might be better.
Which might mean: By declining to do favors/tasks for people, you may feel like a selfish person, but limiting what work you take on you will reduce your stress, increase the quality of your work, and and increase your status. Plus you don't feel used or resent being helpful.
A good strategy could be to decline first, check schedules, then accept if possible: "I may be able to do that, but let me check my schedule first." Good for many situations.
I doubt your doubt :-) Resisting peer pressure is easy if it's not actually peer pressure -- if you can detach yourself and basically go "oh, I'm cooler/better than that". But resisting pressure from you true peers -- people you respect, people whose opinion you respect, people who you want to like you -- that is hard.
Same thing for defying authority. It's not a big deal to defy some assistant dean on college campus who's trying to enforce some obviously stupid rule. But not many people have the internal grit to stand up to real cops (who have zero problems with putting you in handcuffs and booking you on a variety of charges), real security services, people with real authority who actually have the power to screw up your life pretty badly.
No, peer pressure and authority are not inherently bad. But I would argue that the -- rare! -- ability to resist them when needed is a valuable feature of one's character. Knowing this ability exists is the first step.
Most of the personal-finance-advice industry is parasitic and/or self-deluded, and it's generally agreed on by economic theory and experimental measurement that an index fund will deliver the best returns you can get without huge amounts of effort.
True. But just because something is marketed as an index fund doesn't make it an actual index fund. You want to invest in an index fund that has (1) low fees, (2) indexes something large such as the S&P 500, and (3) can be invested in via a tax-preferred mechanism such as a pension plan.
I'm an academic economist who writes a column for Better Investing Magazine.
P/S/A: that thing that happens at night sometimes where it feels like you can't move and maybe some other crazy shit is happening like a demon is sitting on your chest or there's an intruder in your room... is called sleep paralysis. At least in my case, you can make it go away by fixing your sleep schedule, although according to Wikipedia it might also be a symptom of narcolepsy.
quickly check to see if you are a natural computer programmer by pulling up a page of Python source code and seeing whether it looks like it makes natural sense, and if this is the case you can teach yourself to program very quickly and get a much higher-paying job even without formal credentials.
I just did this. And I was surprised; this seemed far less inscrutable than I intuitively expected, having never read any code. My father is a computer programmer, so I may have it in my DNA. He is more intelligent than me though. Example, I once told him the three gods puzzle and he had it solved in ~20 minutes; he didn't even use paper.
P/S/A: If your work involves writing and you often find yourself procrastinating on the internet, buy an old laptop, rip out the wifi card and use it as your dedicated writing laptop.
P/S/A: When you need to get a large amount of writing done outside of office hours, go to some non-home location (a coffee shop not a library, as books are the ultimate distractions) and commit yourself to not leaving until you reach a specific word count--I find two thousand words is reasonable and achievable; at least it is for non-creative writing.
Also, If there is some fact that you need to research use the TK method to mark it down for later.
Three gods puzzle (aka "The Hardest Logic Puzzle Ever", I didn't make that name up!) for reference. Try to solve the puzzle first, I've appended the text. The referenced link contains the solution.
Three gods A, B, and C are called, in no particular order, True, False, and Random. True always speaks truly, False always speaks falsely, but whether Random speaks truly or falsely is a completely random matter. Your task is to determine the identities of A, B, and C by asking three yes-no questions; each question must be put to exactly one god. The gods understand English, but will answer all questions in their own language, in which the words for yes and no are da and ja, in some order. You do not know which word means which.
Clarifications:
It could be that some god gets asked more than one question (and hence that some god is not asked any question at all).
What the second question is, and to which god it is put, may depend on the answer to the first question. (And of course similarly for the third question.)
Whether Random speaks truly or not should be thought of as depending on the flip of a coin hidden in his brain: if the coin comes down heads, he speaks truly; if tails, falsely.
Minor QoL PSA: if you get indigestion every time you consume milk or milk products, you probably have lactose intolerance, which can be fixed semi-cheaply and effectively by taking a lactase supplement before consuming milk. Lactose intolerance is widespread in adults (statistics range from 33% to 75%). Lactase supplements are available without a prescription. Considering how useful as a source of nutrients, not to mention tasty, milk is ..
PSA: There is an actual physical sensation that accompanies religious experiences. If you feel the presence of a being of awesome power and an unusual sensation of... fullness?... in your chest, don't panic or starting believing in a god or anything crazy.
It's a physiological thing that happens to people, especially in altered states (drugs, sleep deprivation, etc.), and it doesn't mean anything.
PSA: If you are female, live in the US, and have health insurance, you can get 5 years of birth control for the cost (in copays) of one or two doctor's visits. The new health care mandates that IUDs be paid for, and in exchange for making it 3-5 years instead of 5-10 (taking the hormonal version instead of nonhormonal), you get a 20% chance of not menstruating at all while on it. It's also 99.5% effective over a year, which is quite good.
Not the perfect, side-effect free treatment for unwanted fertility and menses that I hope the future holds, but it's pretty good.
don't buy gold when they tell you to
Don't buy X when "they" tell you to is good advice for a wide variety of X.
P/S/A: If you have friends you want to see more of, but they don't have enough social events they go to, you can cause one to happen just by announcing it. (Social Schelling points!) One particularly nice example is that you can send out a group email saying simply "hey, I'm hosting brunch this weekend; I'll provide X and Y; anyone else want to bring something?" and it usually works!
P/S/A: earwax type varies by race. Asians and Native Americans tend to have "dry" earwax while Africans and Europeans tend to have "wet" earwax. Ear cleaning is primarily an Asian practice because it's adapted to dry earwax. (I have a terrible story about how I found this out by asking a white girlfriend of mine to clean my ears.)
P/S/A: the same genetic variation that controls earwax type above also controls underarm odor, which is less common among people with dry earwax than wet earwax. (I have a terrible story about how I found this out by telling a group of white people I knew that I had never used deodorant before.)
And while I'm annoying people...
P/S/A: If you're male, you have few legal protections against women. Do not behave assuming that police or courts will treat you equally. If a woman hits you, you should consider self-defense as a last resort, and calling the police a second-to-last resort, because in either case you're likely to be arrested, and in the former you're likely to be convicted.
I can point you to a book which substantiates it; "New Visions of Crime Victims" by Hoyle, Young, and Young. It's actually common advice on men's abuse sites -not- to call the police for this very reason. And some of them even have the statistics. For reasons of personal emotional stability I'm not currently willing to go there and get them, however.
I'm sorry that you had a difficult time in your encounter with the legal system.
As a practical matter, there are some differences in how supposedly neutral laws are applied based on the sex / gender of the participants, even if the law as written says there aren't. The way the legal world looks when the rubber meets the road can (and often is) very different than one would think if one only read appeals decisions.
An example for your hobbyhorse: It's an undeniable fact that female statutory rape defendants are sentenced less harshly that male statutory rape defendants. But that's not a fact about the law as written. If a law were actually written that way, it would be invalid.
Your PSA made an assertion about the law as written, and that statement was wrong. I'm speaking as an expert on the subject.
If you want to talk about the problems identified in places like Three Felonies per Day, I agree already. But that's not really a sex / gender issue because we're all equally vulnerable.
if you have an area where you are great at (better than anyone you know or heard of), put most of your efforts there, regardless of the expected payout or other considerations. Don't wait too long, unused abilities deteriorate with age (yes, speaking from personal experience).
p/s/a: Going up to a girl pretty much anywhere in public and saying something like "I thought you looked cute and wanted to meet you" actually works if your body language is in order. If this seems too scary, going on Chatroulette or Omegle and being vaguely interesting also works, and I know people who have gotten married from meeting this way.
p/s/a: Vitamin D supplements can take you from depressed zombie to functioning human being in one week.
if your body language is in order
This reads unfortunately like an excuse ahead of time. "Oh, your body language must not have been in order."
(Although I do agree that if you're not socially offensive, just telling people when you fancy them does in fact work quite well and I wish I'd realised that ten years earlier than I had.)
Word to the wise: If you substitute "hot" for "cute" you may get unanticipated negative results. I would not interpret "hot" in anywhere near the same way as "cute". Here's how that would translate for me:
"I thought you looked cute..." = "I am likely to be interested in things like emotional intimacy and cuddling."
"I thought you looked hot..." = "I am likely to be one of those guys who is going to be so persistent in making attempts to get casual sex out of you tonight that it is going to drive you up a wall."
I have nothing against sex, but like many people, I am annoyed by persistent attempts to get things from me.
But don't start taking it without actually testing first. Hypervitaminosis D doesn't sound like any fun at all.
As the article points out, even a conservative estimate is that the upper limit is probably ~10k IU (and if you look at the earlier sections, it's safe to inject as much as 600k IU). 1k IU is going to be safe for everyone who isn't already popping 9k IU...
But don't start taking it without actually testing first. Hypervitaminosis D doesn't sound like any fun at all.
It feels uncomfortable to be advising Less Caution but in the case of vitamin D supplementation most people who don't supplement vitamin D already and who don't spend their lives naked in the sun would be well served just adding daily vitamin D3 to their schedule. The safety risk is negligible and for most people the value of information over assuming based on priors and just supplementing is low.
P/S/A: The /r/scholar subreddit is an easy way to get any academic paper that's stuck behind a paywall -- just post your request and someone will upload it for you for free within a day.
The frustrating thing about these threads is that I probably have a bunch of useful contributions stashed somewhere in my brain that simply aren't coming to mind right now.
PSA: Your problems are basically solvable if you step outside of the comfortable certainty of only acting on objective scientific research. Instead throw as much information as you can regarding the problem at yourself, perhaps relying on unsupported, vague, or even several contradictory models of reality in order to plot your course. There are hundreds of self-help books written on any...
P/S/A: exercise can not make you healthy if your diet is poor.
If your diet is micronutrient poor because you are living off prepackaged or fast foods, milk (whole), bananas, and orange juice is a good/cheap/easy place to start. Replace sugar water/other empty carb sources with these.
P/S/A: About half of our country's gifted students are never identified (USA), internet / Mensa IQ scores can be too low*, a lot of things are correlated with having a high IQ (for the tip of the iceberg: A 25% chance of being misdiagnosed by a psychologist (1) due, partly, to having super-sensitivities / over-excitability), so if you feel weird or crazy, have been diagnosed with a mental disorder or ADD/ADHD, or want to find out what other differences you have (perhaps in order to counter mind projection fallacy, which I've observed many unidentified gift...
P/S/A: The people telling you to expect above-trend inflation when the Federal Reserve started printing money a few years back, disagreed with the market forecasts, disagreed with standard economics, turned out to be actually wrong in reality, and were wrong for reasonably fundamental reasons so don't buy gold when they tell you to.
You would have missed out on doubling or tripling your money if you hadn't bought gold when those same people had made the predictions.
You would have missed out on doubling or tripling your money if you hadn't bought gold when those same people had made the predictions.
The S&P 500 has outperformed gold since quantitative easing began. I don't believe there has been a time past four years where a $100 gold purchase would be worth more today than a $100 S&P 500 purchase.
There are many many more submissive/masochistic men in the world than there are dominant/sadistic women
My guess is that this is true, but I'd be curious what the evidence is other than anecdote. Also, I wonder in the long-term how this will change. In popular media depictions, dominant females and submissive males are a common theme, so if people's sexuality is influenced by what they see/imprint at a young age (which is a standard hypothesis to explain fetishes), one would expect this to possibly change over time.
...If you are smart and underemployed,
I don't agree with this one. Python is one of the easiest languages to read certainly, but there's still enough conventions used in programming languages that someone could be a very good programmer with small amounts of training and have this not happen.
This is one of those tests with lots of false negatives and very few false positives. I.e. it's a sufficient condition, not a necessary one.
given the abundance of situations where you accidentally step into programming
These only exist in particular socioeconomic situations. Most parents do not buy Lego Mindstorms for their kids.
Consider that Apple II in 1977. It cost $1300; the median income in the U.S. was $11884. The median income in 2011 was $48152, so imagine a working-class family buying a $5200 computer for their kid to mess around on. Not likely! So not many working-class kids would have one.
Today, fortunately, you can get a more powerful computer today for $25 — a Raspberry Pi. The socioeconomic situation for learning computing has changed.
It's very easy for people to mistake their skills acquired through long and heavy practice for "natural talent" ... especially if the practice didn't feel like practice at the time, but felt like play. An unfortunate consequence of this is that people who have those skills may tend to see people who don't have them, or who don't acquire them rapidly, as lacking natural talent.
Or, to put it in Eliezer's tabletop role-playing vocabulary: you have to earn the experience points before you can spend them on character traits.
P/S/A: Given the time it takes to learn it, the mnemonic major system is ridiculously powerful. You can learn it in a weekend, and it will give you a 100 slot mnemonic peg list in your head, that will work as a random access array for absolutely any arbitrary items you can somehow map into numbers 00..99.
What you do: 1. Learn the consonant sounds for the numerals 0 to 9. 2. Come up with a list of 100 different mnemonic items that are concrete objects, like 'oar', 'match' and 'bell' that match phonetically with numbers 0 to 99 ('oar' is 4, 'match' is 36, 'b...
P/S/A: There's a treatable genetic mutation that half the population has which has more or less recently begun to be treated called MTHFR that causes several vitamin deficiencies (due to you not processing them into the usable forms - and it's treatable because you can take the usable form as a supplement) and homocysteine issues, and it's symptoms can range between none to raging horrible problems with depression, anxiety, IBS, fatigue, and a list of other things.
Specifics:
It reduces the body's ability to convert folic acid into the usable form, methy...
This is okay science, and unlike most times people link to these kinds of things on here I'm not going to throw a fit. But a few caveats:
First of all, my totally unfounded opinion is that the guy you're linking to seems sketchy as hell. His site implies he is a doctor a bunch of times, including his biography talking about when he entered medical school, but the only degree listed is one from a college of "naturopathic medicine". He founded a sketchy online pharmacy that sells (among other things) homeopathic solutions. He believes that vaccinations cause autism, at least in MTHFR babies (aka 1/4 of the population). And he fits a very worrying stereotype of the doctor who prescribes the same cure for almost every disease, and recommends that if it doesn't work you just need to "optimize" his cure a little more carefully, as opposed to consider that other factors may be involved.
I don't actually know anything about the research on this subject, but because of the red flags raised above I've tried to investigate it very briefly and see what it looks like. You should probably ignore everything below, but just out of curiosity:
Dr. Lynch seems to think that if you ha...
There are many many more submissive/masochistic men in the world than there are dominant/sadistic women, so if you are a woman who feels a strong temptation to command men and inflict pain on them, and you want a large harem of men serving your every need, it will suffice to state this fact anywhere on the Internet and you will have fifty applications by the next morning.
More like, twenty sincere applications, ten trolls, five misogynists who think they can tame you, five socially inept introverts who aren't into being a sub but will put up with it in e...
P/S/A: If you are smart and underemployed, you can very quickly check to see if you are a natural computer programmer by pulling up a page of Python source code and seeing whether it looks like it makes natural sense, and if this is the case you can teach yourself to program very quickly and get a much higher-paying job even without formal credentials.
Here is the above-mentioned page of python code (IMO)
http://learnxinyminutes.com/docs/python/
Also, you can build confidence and to some degree (increasingly) credibility by taking online courses at udacit...
For some reason I am reminded of The Shockwave Rider.
PSA: on ThePaperBay you can request a paywalled paper to be "liberated".
If you are smart and underemployed, you can very quickly check to see if you are a natural computer programmer by pulling up a page of Python source code and seeing whether it looks like it makes natural sense
Is this really a good way to check whether one is a "natural computer programmer"?
Most of the personal-finance-advice industry is parasitic and/or self-deluded
True.
...and it's generally agreed on by economic theory and experimental measurement that an index fund will deliver the best returns you can get without huge amounts of effort.
Not true. Or at least much more complicated.
The first problem (minor) is with the concept of an "index fund". Most people read it as an S&P500 index fund, that is, a fund that passively invests into US large-cap equity. At this point it's reasonable to ask, why US large-cap equity? Why ...
Most of the personal-finance-advice industry is parasitic and/or self-deluded, and it's generally agreed on by economic theory and experimental measurement that an index fund will deliver the best returns you can get without huge amounts of effort.
...There are many many more submissive/masochistic men in the world than there are dominant/sadistic women, so if you are a woman who feels a strong temptation to command men and inflict pain on them, and you want a large harem
P/S/A: If you have any perceived advantages over other people, your advantages are considered public property by those who feel they require them; if you're smart people will ask you for advice, if you're strong people will ask you to lift things for them, if you're tall people will ask you to reach things for them, if you can program people will ask you to write webpages from them, if you're female men will ask you to have sex with them. Develop and follow a strategy for dealing with this as rapidly as possible, and remember that it is not necessarily to your advantage to -have- an additional advantage.
That's a pretty depressingly cynical view of social reciprocity. I like being able to do things for other people. (The last example doesn't seem to me to be analogous to the others.)
If you're in a situation where you seem to be surrounded by DefectBots, the problem is not that you are not defecting enough. The problem is to get the hell out of that situation.
Attempting a charitable (and somewhat objectivist) interpretation of this:
Other people are not entitled to your services, these can be given or withheld freely, and you do not need to feel shame for not sharing your abilities. In some situations not sharing or concealing your advantage over others may in fact be essential to your well-being or even survival.
...if you're smart people will ask you for advice, if you're strong people will ask you to lift things for them, if you're tall people will ask you to reach things for them, if you can program people will ask you to write webpages from them, if you're female men will ask you to have sex with them...
One of these things is not like the other. In your first four examples, the requests for assistance do stem from a clear advantage at performing a particular task -- smart people are presumably better at giving advice, strong people are better at lifting stuff, etc. But what is the advantage associated with being female in this particular example? The only thing I can think of is that women are better at the task of being satisfactory sexual partners for heterosexual men. This is not what I would ordinarily categorize as an "advantage", but even if it is, the purported advantage is symmetrical -- men are better at being satisfactory sexual partners for heterosexual women. Yet most men do not frequently get approached by women for sex, seemingly falsifying your general thesis. Was there some other advantage you were thinking of here, or is this just a poorly chosen example?
If a randomly selected male and a randomly selected female have casual sex the direction in which this is most likely to be considered a favour is from the male to the female.
Maybe this is true, but the (overwhelmingly, I think) most likely situation is that it is not considered a favor at all, in either direction. In most cases, casual sex just isn't seen as a favor. I'm not a woman and I may be wrong about this, but I really doubt that many women are inclined to agree to casual sex out of a sense of obligation or altruism.
This makes the advice provided relevant.
The general advice of developing and following a strategy is of course applicable in all four cases, but that's just because the advice is so general. The reason I brought this whole thing up is because the particular strategy that one should follow will, I think, be importantly different in the casual sex case than in the other three examples. I think a decent strategy for a tall person, say, would be to accede to requests for help if the request doesn't require you to go significantly out of your way or put you at risk of significant harm. The same strategy would work for the strong person and the smart person. Bu...
P/S/A: There are single sentences which can create life-changing amounts of difference.