alexandercrohde

My own take trying to express this dichotomy of second-hand versus firsthand knowledge https://blog.alexrohde.com/archives/682

Yeah, I'm curious if he burdens himself with our inane internet opinions (reads it)? Or if people manage to send him emails about it?

When I read this type of thing, I try my best to look for some basis to decide if it's fortune-cookie-nonsense or great advice.

It's obvious to me that a person can care too much about being/seeming right. But can a person also care too little about it? What is the exact right amount, and how do you know?

Yes there is. What you do is have don't put any IO calls inside your pure functions, but rather pass in their results as parameters.

Keep the impure code and the pure code separated.

One thing I've learned, is that unit testing seems much much more painful than it has to be when you are using too many classes.

When you are writing code as pure functions (i.e. stateless), it's actually much less painful. In the provided example, I would never write a class to curl a website and parse json.

I hate this framing too. I don't understand all the hand-wringing over people losing money in the stock market.

If you want to be mad about people losing money, be mad about the ones where it's rigged against them -- lotto/casinos. Not the ones where they average positive. Hard for me to take this even remotely seriously.

I would turn down applicants who don't have this mindset. The last thing I need is a dev who never mastered postgres because they were too busy learning mongo.

- Don't delete accounts entirely when they are reported, just lock them. If it's not disputed delete them 1 year later.

- Add a "reputability score" for every channel which is log((total videos) * total views * total likes * months since first video). Obviously there should be a HUGE burden of proof when deleting a channel with millions of views and over a dozen videos.

- These are just two 15-minute-ideas of an engineer who can't get an interview at google. I'm sure among the thousands of employees somebody has an even better one.

I don't know why you're downvoted, this is a pretty important topic. Well, I do know why you're being downvoted -- you're challenging an a very dear orthodoxy.

Ridiculous. Completely hypothetical argument devoid of any real-world considerations.

Reducto ad absurdem -- A single crack-house can bring down the value of every house in the neighborhood by 100k or more.

Housing has huge externalities (traffic, parking, noise, crime, property values) and a lot of what makes a property a "good" property is having an area where those externalities are controlled so you can walk your dog safely at night.

I've heard this hypothesis that groups tend to go down in quality for this reason --

1. Group has an average quality. 2. People who have a much higher quality tend to avoid the group (e.g. that discussion is fallacious) 3. People who have lower quality are incentivized to join the group. 4. Eventually, the best performers of the group have less incentive to stay in that community

As soon as those metrics are exposed though, people will start hacking them by purchasing older accounts, etc.

What are you talking about, that's absolutely a premise.

To quote a huge heading "Should violent video games narratively justify their obsession with violence?"

My response is that there's nothing to justify. There is no dissonance between violence and questing. Lopping heads off to get treasure is no more dissonant than lopping a chicken's head off to make soup.

I absolutely reject a premise of this article, which I suppose is that violence in videogames is somehow bad or meaningful. They are best understood as toys or works of art, and their moral implications are the same moral implacations of playing with army men, or looking at a painting.

Yeah, but this is to some extent just an interesting side-note. At least I know several people who are liberals but don't agree with lacking "political correctness" being sufficient cause for "canceling."

According to that article, those vaccines are on track for next year, which I believe is a year too late.

>> Whether or not you quarantined, the economy would collapse because you would have a massive death toll and paranoia throughout the country.

Lol, what? 1/3rd of the covid deaths have been nursing-home patients. Covid basically doubles your odds of dying in a given year. So it'd be like 2 years worth of people died in 1 year (and importantly, mostly retired people), so no, not a societal collapse.

Damaging the economy to the tune of 2 trillion in bailouts, the cost of the war in Iraq, just to have the exact same number of deaths delayed by 4 months is inexcusable.

And you should be ashamed of your self-righteous and dishonest argument style.

>And also realise that what you're saying is that you advocate for a modeled 2 million deaths.

So far as I know, there's no evidence that now that quarantine is over the same number of people aren't going to get it anyways and the deaths will be equal.

As far as I'm concerned, if quarantine is the "answer" then the cure is worse than the disease.

In fact, I'd take this as evidence that quarantine might have been a mistake.

>> There is no such thing as universal advice. All advice is useful in some context, but no advice is useful in all contexts.

The interesting thing is some advice is pretty good for almost all-contexts (e.g. "If you feel like killing yourself, don't.")

Some advice is very good for its specific context "When playing chess, a knight is worth about 3 pawns."

Some advice sounds good, but is completely impractical or even bad "Never give up, never surrender." "Dance like nobody is watching"

I find, usually the best tidbits of information (e.g. /r/lifeprotips) don't try to be too brief or cutesy. They are fine being specific "It can be rude to joke about when a married couple is going to have kids. They may already be trying"

>> In your example, try and try again does NOT mean try and try the SAME thing again.

Who says? For surfing, "If at first you don't succeed, try try again" may seem to apply. And maybe you get on the board again and nail it. Or maybe you get on the board and get a concussion.

Because aphorisms are just very reductive phrases they contain almost no data. I contrast this with a sentence that has a ton of signal "The average human pregnancy lasts 9 months."

>> don't break your head against a brick wall is usually used in the context of trying to change someone else

I'm not aware of it being specific to the context of people. I think you added, that, which actually makes it closer to what I'm saying, because it's more specific. For a heuristic to be good, it needs to have a clear domain of when it applies and when it doesn't. Otherwise you've just got a box of fortune-cookies and no idea which ones apply.

Yes.

I'll take it a step further and ask, do adages actually contain any signal at all? If you have a saying "try try again" and another saying "don't bust your head against a brick wall" which one wins? When?

Getting fluent in French is probably best done without a plan, but just practicing a bunch. But I'm sure you can think of several activities where "just try it" is godawful advice. Who says writing is in the former camp? Prove it.

For a while I wasn't sure if this was just some "talking point." Then one day, on a hiking meetup, I met a guy who was ranting about his job that was to write "oddly hyper-specific job descriptions that might seem to make no sense" to bring in cheaper h1b candidates.

So yeah, it's a problem.

step 1. Psychologist identifies "defense mechanism" preventing people from accepting unpleasant truths.

step 2. Psychologist being aware of defense mechanisms, declares with no apparent evidence/testing that they are immune to them.

step 3. Psychologist ends up with beliefs no different than anybody else.

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Edit:

I'm unclear what to even make of the article. To read it as a criticism of Freud that he fell onto religion when his own death was near? To read it as a celebration of religion that a controversial and disowned psychologist turned to it in his old age? Or just an assortment of historical facts without any larger relevance?

Also, maybe I'm a little turned off by the typo in it. Makes it feel unreviewed.

This is cherry-picked, emotional, and an anecdote.

How about some happy stories of all the 20-year-olds who became millionaires from unregulated bitcoin trading to show the other side of the coin?

I guess I have a rather libertarian view on this, that it's worse to outlaw the knife than for a fraction of knife users to accidentally cut themselves. That said, I'm entirely in support of more educational resources on the topic, but don't hold anybody accountable for that.

shrug And people jump off bridges. Doesn't mean we stop building bridges. The market is rough, them's the rules, sorry not sorry.

Seems rather cut-throat. If this type of thing becomes the norm, then the market will just end up with a conservative or apolitical github. Progress?

>> All corporations are political

Almost no corporations are overtly political in who they service.

Sounds like a non-story? I'm not sure what the value is in linking it here, other than to try to provoke a similarly controversial flare.