All of novalis's Comments + Replies

So you have to start defining "morality" any you figure out pretty quickly that no one has the least idea how to do that in a way that doesn't rapidly lead to disastrous consequences.

No, because it's possible that there genuinely is a possible total ordering, but that nobody knows how to figure out what it is. "No human always knows what's right" is not an argument against moral realism, any more than "No human knows everything about God" is an argument against theism.

(I'm not a moral realist or theist)

0Jack
I wasn't making an argument against moral realism in the sentence you quoted.

Unless you were both influenced by Perelandra, in which case the odds are much higher.

I actually think of Chesterton's fence argument as a rhetorical move. I imagine that some hypothetical "Alice" says, "I can't see any reason for this", in order to force their opponent to justify something which was historically justified by values which are considered obsolete -- for instance, "I can't see any reason why same-sex couples should not marry". Well, Alice probably can see reasons, but if Alice gives those reasons, she is doing her opponent's job. If she instead says, "The only reason for this is bigotry,&... (read more)

while Democrats could run pretty much the same campaign in the primaries as well as the general election.

Democrats in fact differ between the primary and the general election. Off the top of my head, consider Obama's shift on FISA from 2007 (voted against) to post-primary 2008 (voted for telecom immunity).

I recently came across this, which seems to have some evidence in my favor (and some irrelevant stuff): http://www.bakadesuyo.com/2013/10/extraordinary-leader/

Before I tell my suicidal friends to volunteer, I want to make sure that your experimental design is good. What experiment are you proposing?

5Kawoomba
Well, it'd be double blind, so I wouldn't know exactly what I'm doing with my scalpel. There may be -- hypothetically speaking -- various combinations of anesthetics and suppression microelectrode neural probes involved. Would also be BYOCNS (bring your own craz...curious neurosurgeon) due to boring legal reasons.

You mean, have not yet expressed an opinion in a way that you understand.

Anyway, the fact that slaves and ex-slaves did advocate for the rights of slaves indicates that closeness to a problem does not necessarily lead one to ignore it.

That doesn't work for preference utilitarians (it would strongly prefer to remain alive).

Um, what about the actual slaves and ex-slaves?

-1MugaSofer
They did not benefit from slavery, as the plantation owners did. Sorry, that was meant to be the implication of "plantation owners" - "they're biased", not "anyone who actually met slaves was fine with it.".
7PhilGoetz
In this analogy, they correspond to non-human animals, who have not yet expressed an opinion on the matter.

Isn't there an equivalent negative utility monster, who is really in a ferociously large amount of pain right now?

5AndHisHorse
Perhaps, but if your utility scale can actually become negative (rather than simply hitting zero), the solution of assisted suicide is fairly simple and cheap to implement.
1Micha_Eichmann
The purely negative utility monster (whether it is in a ferociously large amount of pain or not), that also has by definition no diminishing returns in its utility function, just hits zero pain at some point. Until it is in pain again, it is simply not part of the equation. The difference is: If your goal is to minimize X, you can't go on forever without diminishing returns (but with diminishing returns, you can) whereas if your goal is to maximize Y, you can go on forever with or without diminishing returns. edit: It depends on how the function is defined. Above, I used allocated resources vs. utility (utility = relieve from suffering). But a negative utility monster would be possible if its condition got automatically worse and if it had no diminishing returns of (f.e.) suffering per unit pain, but all the other beings had.
4Shmi
Killing it reduces the overall suffering, since its quality of life is well below the "barely worth living" level, with no hope of improvement.

why should I care?

Isn't this an objection to any theory of ethics?

0Juno_Watt
Not necesarily a fatal one.
0MugaSofer
I believe some famous philosopher already has this point named after him.
3Said Achmiz
No, only theories of ethics that say that I should care about things that I do not already care about. And it is, in case, not an objection but a question. :)
5metastable
As a lone question, it could be, but the point of his post is that even stipulating utilitarianism it does not follow that you or I should maximize the utils of Mr. Utility Monster.

Presumably, that's diminishing marginal returns relative to dollars input. In other words, "You can only drink 30 or 40 glasses of beer a day, no matter how rich you are."

Yes, but we can generalize the games (which is what Hearn and Demain do), and see how the solving complexity changes with the size of the board. This is the only reasonable way to talk about the computational complexity of games.

Well, it's not entirely unrelated, since jkaufman says:

Go is the most interesting of the three, and has stood up to centuries of analysis and play, but Dots and Boxes is surprisingly complex (pdf) and there used to be professional Checkers players.

The interest here is not provided by the complexity of the rules themselves, but by the complexity of solving the games (or, rather, playing them well, but this is probably related). One can easily imagine games with very complex rules that nonetheless admit simple strategies and are thus boring.

1Kawoomba
We seem to agree: if I tell you the length of two pieces of code but nothing else, you won't be able to tell me which of them is more likely to terminate. It could be the one, or it could be the other. The relationship may not be strictly orthogonal (e.g.: longer code could contain more unintended infinite loops), but enough to call it mostly unrelated. Same with complexity of rules versus "solving the games". Go compensates for the simplicity of its rules by blowing up the search space (it's a big board), which doesn't take any noteworthy additional complexity. The rules of a Go variant played on a 5 x 5 board would have about the same complexity as if played on a 3^^^3 x 3^^^3 board. Some of the easiest-to-play children's board games have some of the hardest rules, compared to Go.

You might also look at the computation complexity of solving the games. Games, Puzzles, and Computations, by Hearn and Demaine would be relevant here. Dots and Boxes is apparently NP-hard; a variant of Go called Rengo Kriegspiel might be undecidable; NxN Checkers is Exptime-complete.

1Eugine_Nier
Where by "variant" you mean so different it belongs in a different category of games.
4Kawoomba
You mean as another, mostly unrelated task.

The right comparison is to compare that to how much you'd be bothered if you had to clean up the mess left by an incompetent coworker. Or having to deal with an incompetent bogon in middle management.

Unsurprisingly, I've had to deal with both of these things. It has never seemed to me that yelling at someone could make them more competent. Educating them, or firing them and replacing them seems like a better plan.

[Linus]: And I do it partly (mostly) because it's who I am, and partly because I honestly despise being subtle or "nice".

Steelman this. I am pretty sure that in the North European culture being "subtle or nice" is dangerously close to being dishonest. You do not do anyone a favour by pretending he's doing OK while in reality he's clearly not doing OK. There is a difference between being direct and blunt - and being mean and nasty.

I don't understand what you're saying here. Are you saying that anyone is proposing that Linus to act in... (read more)

0Lumifer
We keep hitting the Typical Mind Fallacy over and over again :-) Let me offer you my interpretation: the first one is blunt and might or might not be rude, depending on what the social norms and context are (and on whether thinking about frobnicating the beezlebib does provide incontrovertible evidence of severe brain trauma). The second one is not blunt at all, it's entirely neutral. The third one is a slighly more polite version of neutral. Your fourth example is still neutral, by the way -- there's nothing particularly blunt about explaining why something should not be done (or about using four-letter words, for that matter). To contrast I'll offer my examples: * (rude) You are a moron and can't code your way out of a wet paper bag! Stuff your code where the sun don't shine and never show it to me again! * (blunt) This is not working and will never work. You need to scrap this entirely and start from scratch. * (subtle) While this is a valuable contribution, we would really appreciate it if you went and twiddled the bogon emitter for us while we try to deal with the beezlebib frobnication on our own. It's only the most successful open software ever. Otherwise, not much :-P
0Grant
A more direct approach might be: "no patches which frobnicate a beezlebib will be accepted". I would say the size (in terms of SLOC count), scope (everything from TVs to supercomputers), lack of a equivalent substitute (MySQL or Postgres? Apache or Nginx? Linux or... BSD?), importance of correctness (its the kernel, stupid), and commercial involvement (Google, Oracle, etc.) make it very different from most FOSS projects. Mostly I'd say the size, complexity and very low tolerance of bugs. I have no idea if Linus's attitude is helpful or not. I tend to think he could do better with more direct, polite approaches like the above, but I don't hold that belief very strongly.

Since OSS projects are easy to create and it's easy for developers to move from project to project

Creating projects is easy; forking is hard. And nobody wants to create a new kernel from scratch. Kernel hackers don't really have a lot of options. So I don't think your theoretical world has anything to do with the real world. Also, it seems to me that culture doesn't end up contained within a single project; Linux depends on GCC, for instance, so the Linux people have to interact with the GCC people. Which means that culture will bleed over. I was ... (read more)

1Lumifer
Forking is pretty easy -- it's getting people to follow your fork that's hard. Well, there are certainly enough programmers who prefer to discuss code in terms of "only a brain-dead moron could write a library that does foo" or "why is this retarded object making three fucking calls to the database for each invocation", etc. And while people generally don't find it fun to be on the losing side, this does not stop them from seeking and entering competitions and competitive spheres. Consider sports, e.g. boxing or martial arts. Steelman this. I am pretty sure that in the North European culture being "subtle or nice" is dangerously close to being dishonest. You do not do anyone a favour by pretending he's doing OK while in reality he's clearly not doing OK. There is a difference between being direct and blunt - and being mean and nasty. As I said, Linus' style is proven to work. We know it works well. An alternative style might work better or it might not -- we don't know. I suspect you have a strong prior but no evidence.
1solipsist
I agree. My further comments shouldn't detract from this fact. I don't agree. Every CS student and their mother wants to write their own OS. There are a lot [of] projects out there. As to the effectiveness of the community, there's an important datapoint. BSD came before Linux, but Linux took over the world. I think this is generally attributed to a more vibrant community of developers.

Do you think we have a basic difference in values or there's some evidence which might push one of us towards the other one's position?

That's a pretty good question.

Hypothesis: I think some of it might be a case of the "Typical Mind Fallacy". Maybe if Linus yelled at you, you wouldn't be bothered at all. But I know that my day would be ruined, and I would be less productive all week. So I assume that many people are like me, and you assume that many people are like you.

I would be curious about a controlled experiment, where free/open sour... (read more)

-3Eugine_Nier
The right comparison is to compare that to how much you'd be bothered if you had to clean up the mess left by an incompetent coworker. Or having to deal with an incompetent bogon in middle management.
0Lumifer
Yes, I think the Typical Mind Fallacy plays some role in this. But then let's explicitly go around it. Let's postulate that the population of, say, qualified programmers, is diverse. Some are shy wallflowers, wilting from any glance they perceive as disapproving, some thrive in a rough-and-tumble environments where you prove your solution is better by smashing your opponent into bits. Most are somewhere in between. This diverse population would self-sort by preferences -- the wallflowers would gravitate towards polite, supportive, never-a-harsh-word environments (in our case, OSS projects), while the roar-and-smash types will gravitate towards the get-it-done-NOW-you-maggot environments. Since OSS projects are easy to create and it's easy for developers to move from project to project, the entire system should evolve towards an equilibrium where most people find the environment they're comfortable with and stick with it. Now, that seems to me a fine way for the world to work. But would you object to such a state of the world, after all, there are some projects there which are "mean" and where you (and likely some other people) would be uncomfortable and unproductive? Oh, there are piles and piles of those. The only problem is, they all come to different conclusions (with a strong dependency on the decade in which the study was done). Put yourself into manager's shoes and consider the difference between instrumental and terminal values. You, an employee/contributor, value fun highly. That is a terminal value for you. Being productive is a secondary goal and may also be an instrumental value (some but not all people are not having fun if they see themselves as being unproductive). Now, for a manager, the fun of his employees/contributors/developers is NOT a terminal value. It's only an instrumental value, the true terminal value is to Get Shit Done. Do you see how that leads to different perspectives?

I hope you didn't take my position to be that yelling at people is always the right thing to do. There certainly is lots of yelling which is stupid, unjustified, and not useful in any sense.

The issue is whether yelling can ever be useful. You are saying that no, it can never be. I disagree.

No, the issue is whether Linus's yelling is useful, or, whether yelling is generally useful enough in free/open source projects that it outweighs the costs. Specifically, whether "Let’s drive away people unwilling to adopt that “git’r'done” attitude with witheri... (read more)

0Lumifer
Do you think we have a basic difference in values or there's some evidence which might push one of us towards the other one's position? He has the huge advantage in that he actually delivered and continues to deliver. His method is known to work. Beware the nirvana fallacy.

Bill Gates failed to create an organization that would thrive in his absence. We'll see how Steve Jobs did in a few more years (it seems likely that he did better, but he also had the famous "reality distortion field", which Linus doesn't). Steve Jobs also got kicked out of his own company for a bunch of years.

-2Eugine_Nier
During which time the company tanked. In any case, your argument was that Linus might have better succeeded in "taking over the world" if he had used a less confrontational style. My point is that the people who did "take over the world" used the same style.

touching the electric fence did not make me a more productive worker.

How do you know?

Well, I can tell you that afterwards, I felt like shit and didn't get much done for a while. Or I started looking for a new job (whether or not I ended up taking one, this takes time and mental energy away from my current job). And getting yelled at has never seemed to me to correlate with me actually being wrong, so I'm not clear on how it would have changed my behavior.

I'm saying that it's not optimal.

How do you know? (other than in a trivial sense that any

... (read more)
-1Lumifer
I hope you didn't take my position to be that yelling at people is always the right thing to do. There certainly is lots of yelling which is stupid, unjustified, and not useful in any sense. The issue is whether yelling can ever be useful. You are saying that no, it can never be. I disagree. The secondary issue is whether Linus runs kernel development in a good/proper/desirable/productive way. The major question here is the metric -- how do we decide what is a "good/... way". From your point of view, if you define a good way as "fun" for developers, then sure, it probably is possible to run the kernel in a more fun way. From my point of view, the proof of the pudding is in the eating. Is the kernel a good piece of software? I would argue that it is, and that it is a remarkably successful piece of software. More, I would argue that Linus deserves a lot of credit for making it so. Given this, I'm suspicious of claims that Linus' way is "non-optimal", especially if there is the strong underlying current of "I, personally, don't like it".
-4Eugine_Nier
The issue is whether the person in question would have been a productive contributor.

Yes, I used to work for RMS; I am well aware of the difference. I should also note that most of the systems you mention use proprietary kernel modules; it would be better if they didn't, and perhaps if Linus's attitude were different, there would be more interest in fixing the problem.

Also, desktops are where I spend most of my time, so I think they still matter a lot.

04hodmt
I use GNU+Linux on the desktop myself, and I share RMS's goals, although I'm willing to make bigger compromises for the sake of practicality than him. Linus does not share RMS's goals, so my point is that from Linus's point of view his management techniques are highly effective.

Ahem. I think you mean to say that you never touched the electric fence. Doesn't mean the fence is not there.

No, I mean that touching the electric fence did not make me a more productive worker.

The fact that kernel development goes on and goes on pretty successfully is evidence that your concerns are overblown.

I'm not saying that Linus's style will inevitably lead to instant doom. That would be silly. I'm saying that it's not optimal. Linux hasn't exactly taken over the world yet, so there's definitely room for improvement.

-3Eugine_Nier
Well Bill Gates and Steve Jobs have similar reputations.
24hodmt
It's important to distinguish between Linux the operating system kernel, and the complete system of GNU+Linux+various graphical interfaces sometimes called "Linux". The Linux kernel can also be used with other userspaces, eg. Busybox or Android, and it's very popular in these combinations on embedded systems and phones/tablets respectively. GNU+Linux is popular on servers. The only area where Linux is unsuccessful is desktops, so it's unfortunate that desktop use is so salient when people talk about "Linux". Linus only works on the kernel itself, and that's making great progress towards taking over the world.
-2Lumifer
How do you know? How do you know? (other than in a trivial sense that anything in real life is not going to be optimal) You're making naked assertions without providing evidence.

The incentives include both carrots and sticks and sticks are punishments and are meant to be so. If you want to talk about carrots-only management styles, well, that's a different discussion.

For what it's worth, I've never worked at a place that successfully used aversive stimulus. And, since the job market for programmers is so hot, I can't imagine that anyone would willingly do so (outside the games industry, which is a weird case). This is especially true of kernel hackers, who are all highly qualified developers who could find work easily.

I dis

... (read more)
2Lumifer
Ahem. I think you mean to say that you never touched the electric fence. Doesn't mean the fence is not there. Imagine that someone at your workplace decided not to come to work for a week or so, 'cause he didn't feel like it. What would be the consequences? Are there any, err... "aversive stimuli" in play here? No need for imagination. The empirical reality is that a lot of kernel hackers successfully work with Linus and have been doing this for years and years. Which means that anyone who doesn't like his style is free to leave at any time without any consequences in the sense of salary, health insurance, etc. The fact that kernel development goes on and goes on pretty successfully is evidence that your concerns are overblown.

I think it's pretty clear that Linus is more on the power-play end of the spectrum. Notice his comment above about the Android developer; that's not someone who is part of his microculture (the person in question was a developer on the Android email client, not a kernel hacker). And again, the shouting-as-punishment thing shows that Linus understands the effect that he has, but doesn't care.

Also, Linus, as the person in the position of power, isn't in a position to judge whether his culture is fun. Of course it's fun for him, because he's at the top. ... (read more)

2Lumifer
That's not clear to me at all. Note that management of any kind involves creating incentives for your employees/subordinates/those-who-listen-to-you. The incentives include both carrots and sticks and sticks are punishments and are meant to be so. If you want to talk about carrots-only management styles, well, that's a different discussion. I disagree. You treat fun and enjoyment of working at some place as the ultimate, terminal value. It is not. The goal of working is to produce, to create, to make. Whether it's "fun" is subordinate to that. Sure, there are feedback loops, but organizations which exist for the benefit of their employees (to make their life comfortable and "fun") are not a good thing.
1Vaniver
The claim, as I understand it, is that the culture trades off fun for productivity. A common example given is Apple, where Steve Jobs was a hawk that excoriated his underlings, and thus induced them to create beautiful, world-conquering products.

Linux kernel seems to me a quite well-managed operation (of herding cats, too!) that doesn't waste lots of time on flame wars.

I don't follow kernel development much. Recently, a colleague pointed me to the rdrand instruction. I was curious about Linux kernel support for it, and I found this thread: http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.linux.kernel/1173350

Notice that Linus spends a bunch of time (a) flaming people and (b) being wrong about how crypto works (even though the issue was not relevant to the patch).

Is this typical of the linux-kernel mailing list... (read more)

5Lumifer
Actually, that depends. Mostly that depends on what the intent (and context) of calling me an idiot in public is. If the intent is, basically, power play -- the goal is to belittle me and elevate himself, reassert his alpha-ness, shift blame, provide an outlet for his desire to inflict pain on somebody -- then no, I'm not going to put up with it. On the other hand, if this is all a part of a culturally normal back-and-forth, if all the boss wants is for me to sit up and take notice, if I can without repercussions reply to him in public pointing out that it's his fat head that gets into his way of understanding basic things like X, Y, and Z and that he's wrong -- I'm fine with that. The microcultures of joking-around-with-insults exist for good reasons. Nobody forces you to like them, but you want to shut them down and that seems rather excessive to me.

I'm pretty sure that argument proves too much: A watermelon substitutes for some other watermelon that I might have bought, so my grocer is worse off because the value of their watermelons are now slightly lower.

5fortyeridania
You are right that finding a watemelon would also have pecuniary externalities, assuming you would have bought a watermelon if you hadn't stumbled upon one. Finding the watermelon would still be better than finding currency (assuming in both cases that what you found would not otherwise have been found or used by anyone else)--better by the value of one watermelon--but it would not be a Pareto-improvement. Thanks!

I'd pay $5/hour for someone to drive me almost anywhere if availability was coordinated by Uber, but not taxi prices... This looks to me like a barrier-to-entry, regulatory-and-tax scenario, not "Darn it we're too rich and running out of things for labor to do!"

Federal minimum wage has been falling relative to productivity for decades. Also, Australia has a much higher minimum wage than the US but a lower unemployment rate. They also don't have at-will employment, implying that the risks of hiring are larger. So I'm not sure the regulations are actually the problem here (that said, I oppose many of them anyway on various grounds).

4Eliezer Yudkowsky
Sure, there can be more than one solution to a problem; Australia and Germany took different paths, one regularizing NGDP, one deregulating labor markets, but neither is suffering from unemployment despite robotics. Basic Income might also solve it. Getting rid of huge marginal tax rates on the poor might solve it. Or making it easier for someone to sign up with an online service that lets them offer me a ride somewhere for $5 might solve it. Since I don't think unemployment problems are due to literal lack of labor that anyone can be paid to do, there are potentially all sorts of things that might solve it.

Armen Alchian, the most powerful economist ever

... whom nobody has ever heard of? Like, he's not a Nobel prize winner or anything.

Also, isn't this post sort of meaningless? That is, doesn't it simply boil down to saying "everything is the way it is, and it couldn't be any other way"?

For instance, imagine that I walk by a $20 bill on the street (for the sake of argument, let's say that immediately after I walk by it, it's blown into a storm drain and destroyed). I miss it because I'm looking up in order to count air conditioners, which I'... (read more)

4fortyeridania
Though he wasn't a public figure, he was actually pretty famous in his field. I assumed /u/BenjaminLyons meant the "powerful" but lightheartedly. If it were something other than currency (say, a watermelon), I'd agree. But picking up a twenty-dollar bill has the same welfare effects as minting one yourself. If you spend it, you'll boost prices slightly, which harms other buyers. (And if you don't spend it, it's still not a Pareto-improvement, because you haven't benefited from it--unless you just like having money around, in which case your example could have been about anything at all.) Edit: I see now that even finding a watermelon would not be a Pareto-improvement, except under the unrealistic assumption that a watermelon is not a substitute for other goods.

It would take a serious marketing campaign. But Givewell seems to be increasingly popular -- they would probably promote a well-designed program.

I was going to ask what you thought about http://www.certifiedhumane.com/ but it is completely fucking useless: "The Animal Care Standards for Chickens Used in Broiler Production do not require that chickens have access to range." So nevermind.

So instead I'll ask why a meaningful set of standards doesn't exist. http://www.globalanimalpartnership.org/ Step 5, maybe? Their web site sucks, because it doesn't give me a searchable list of products, but maybe they just need some help.

Anyway, this seems like it would be a way more effective thing fo... (read more)

4MTGandP
That sounds like it could be a good idea. One immediate problem I see with this is that most consumers wouldn't be able to distinguish EAA's label from the dozens of nearly-meaningless labels such as "Free Range", "Cage-Free", etc.

This essay's thesis is that we should eat less meat, but its evidence is only that factory-farmed meat is a problem.

Most (but not all) of the meat I eat is not factory-farmed. The coop where I buy my meat says (pdf) that it buys only "humanely and sustainably raised" meat and poultry ... from animals that are free to range on chemical-free pastures, raised on a grass-based diet with quality grain used only as necessary, never given hormones and produced and processed by small-scale farmers." (For eggs, the coop does offer less-humane opti... (read more)

Niman Ranch claims to raise their animals humanely. Do they really?

The shareholders of Niman Ranch voted to reduce their standards to increase profits. As a result, Bill Niman (who originally founded the company) now refuses to eat their products, Wikipedia has more

This essay's thesis is that we should eat less meat, but its evidence is only that factory-farmed meat is a problem.

I only think factory-farmed meat is the problem. I use "eat less meat" as a shorthand, since nearly all meat is factory-farmed meat.

~

The coop where I buy my meat says (pdf) that it buys only "humanely and sustainably raised" meat and poultry

I definitely agree it's better to buy "humanely raised" meat and poultry than not "humanely raised" meat/poultry. And perhaps you have found a trustworthy ... (read more)

I'm not a military historian (I'm not any kind of historian), but it strikes me that there are probably lots of examples of military planning which turned out to be for the wrong war or wrong technological environment. Like putting rams on ships in the late 19th Century:

No other ironclad was ever sunk by an enemy ship in time of war by the use of the ram, although the ram was regarded by all major navies for some 30 years as primary battleship armament. A number of ships were, however, rammed in peacetime by ships of their own navy.

On the other hand,... (read more)

Do you have a sense for the size of the threat that Y2K presented?

Some competing cost estimates. I tend towards the "fix it when it fails" side of things, but that is a tendency not a rule.

And a related issue

Albania spent billions of dollars on useless bunkers in case of an invasion.

Can you give a reference? Who did they anticipate potential invasion from?

Bunkers - invasion from the US or the USSR; cost was twice the Maginot Line, which Wikipedia elsewhere describes as 3 billion French Francs.

this is the conversion to 2012 Euros

1JonahS
Great! Thanks.

Here, for example:

Why? Three possible reasons. First, the Brave New World Factor: Research cloning gives man too much power for evil. Second, the Slippery Slope: The habit of embryonic violation is in and of itself dangerous. Violate the blastocyst today and every day, and the practice will inure you to violating the fetus or even the infant tomorrow. Third, Manufacture: The very act of creating embryos for the sole purpose of exploiting and then destroying them will ultimately predispose us to a ruthless utilitarianism about human life itself.

All of t... (read more)

Many countries now or in the past have banned human cloning. There are a number of justifications for this, but some of them center around speculative risks.

0JonahS
Can you give a reference for discussion of speculative risks?

Some random examples:

Y2K mitigation.

Doris Lessing's "Report on the Threatened City" (I found it unreadable, so this is not a recommendation) points out that Californians live with the constant threat of a major earthquake. A big enough quake could kill millions, although a quake of that magnitude would be rather infrequent. In general, seismic, volcanic, and weather events are a matter of when, not whether, so perhaps this is not quite in the right reference class.

Albania spent billions of dollars on useless bunkers in case of an invasion.

3JonahS
Do you have a sense for the size of the threat that Y2K presented? Building regulations may count, though I think that the historical precedent somewhat frequent large earthquakes in California makes the case disanalogous to the issue of AI risk, which involves an event that has never happened before. Can you give a reference? Who did they anticipate potential invasion from?
4novalis
Many countries now or in the past have banned human cloning. There are a number of justifications for this, but some of them center around speculative risks.

Maybe this is the moment to ask why Hermione isn't already the hero of HP:MOR. If the point of HP:MOR is that someone who is smart and rational (and raised by smart/rational muggles) would immediately find a million holes in the Potter-verse, why not start with the character who is already known to be the smart one, and is at least a bit more rational than canon Harry? Sure, there's some issues with the prophesies -- but (rot13 for spoiler) Hayhaqha had a pretty good solution to that.

The indirection syntax should be rewritten to be left to right.

I don't actually think so. The final answer is simply f(g(h(x))), which is a perfectly normal thing to see in programming.

That said, I still think it's a bad test. It involves no reasoning whatsoever -- merely following instructions carefully. I'm a reasonably good programmer, but sometimes a bit sloppy (that's why I write tests). So, I ended up with the correct final answer but a wrong number in one of the boxes.

Well-calibrated means that your certainty matches your odds of correctness. Do we really think that Beatrice can make ten trillion statements of this form and have only one of them be wrong? Even if she uses "Bayesian" methods? Or, if you prefer the wagering approach -- do you really think she would bet at those odds?

was there a meta-charity category before Give Well?

Yes: Guidestar has been around for quite some time.

Recall that in law, you're mostly dealing with people who have a problem. Yes, there is some transactional work, but it is usually either low-paying or at least somewhat adversarial. Will dealing with miserable people all day make you miserable? If so, skip law.

For programming, if you follow the path that LW recommends, you should be able to tell within a month or two whether you like it enough to continue.

I would be surprised to learn that market research pays well. I just Googled, and this was the first hit that had salary data. It's not terrible... (read more)

0Peter Wildeford
I don't think it pays nearly as well as law / medicine / banking. I'd expect to enter at $50-60K. But I think I would enjoy it and think I could get into it easily, so it has those kinds of things going for it. And it doesn't require school beforehand (like law and medicine).

That's totally a big area, yes. And if it's what excites Chris, then he should totally go for it. But it isn't my first recommendation, because most mobile apps are written in Objective C or Java, while Chris has learned Python. There's a fairly large amount of new stuff that one has to learn to transition from Python to a statically typed language, so it's not the most efficient path to a working app.

(It doesn't feel that different if you have been programming for a while, especially if you learned a statically-typed language first, but you've probably forgotten about having to learn about covariance/contravariance/invariance, or about memory allocation, or about type-casting).

0Viliam_Bur
After short googling, perhaps this could be interesting: http://kivy.org/ An open-source Python library for making programs that run also on Android and iOS.
0[anonymous]

Oh, and one more thing: Consider taking the Algorithms and Data Structures class on Coursera. It will make you a better programmer, and help you with job interviews. When I am interviewing programmers, I always ask candidates to name any algorithm or data structure and tell me how it works.

  1. Learn a framework for developing web applications. Specifically, learn Django.

    This is because most new applications are web applications, and because you can write a satisfying application without knowing much. Also, you get immediate feedback on your code -- you can see whether or not the app is coming out the way you want.

    Django is recommended because (a) it is written in Python, (b) it is relatively popular, and (c) it is similar to Rails, which is very, very popular and thus easy to get hired for.

  2. (in parallel with 1) Decide on an application tha

... (read more)
3Richard_Kennaway
Or smartphone/tablet apps? Many of which are just web apps reskinned for a phone, but there's a lot that aren't. But I don't know the industry enough to say which is bigger these days, in terms of either developer jobs, or new ideas waiting to be plucked from the tree of knowledge.
2novalis
Oh, and one more thing: Consider taking the Algorithms and Data Structures class on Coursera. It will make you a better programmer, and help you with job interviews. When I am interviewing programmers, I always ask candidates to name any algorithm or data structure and tell me how it works.

If you want funny and pithy, I would recommend Catharine G. Evans, @aristosophy on twitter.

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