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apathy

1,638 karma · joined August 24, 2007

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apathy··on Show HN: Should you buy a house and rent it out?
Tried that. Unless you have a lot of properties or can get one who is also an REA, they aren’t nearly as motivated as your more “proactive” tenants will demand.

And forget about evicting an unwieldy tenant on any reasonable schedule in California. I have friends who’ve been foreclosed upon while trying to get unpaid tenants evicted.

If you’re willing to do this as a second job, go for it! Personally I would (with the benefit of hindsight) invest in a multi-unit income property or a vacation home with rental potential if I were going to buy investment properties, but that’s just me.

apathy··on Show HN: Should you buy a house and rent it out?
Hello fellow statistician (whether by training or habit). For everyone else, note that this approach is not limited to landlording.

Excellent exposition!

apathy··on Show HN: Should you buy a house and rent it out?
This 1000x. I reflexively said (out loud) “god no!” in answer to the title question.

The only people who ask this question are people who haven’t been landlords. Every single one of my friends who has, can commiserate with me as a former landlord.

Maybe buy a vacation home to rent, or an apartment complex. And of course being a part- or full-time landlord is a perfectly reasonable job.

But if you think that being a landlord just means having someone else pay your mortgage, I guarantee you will think differently after a year with even exemplary tenants. And most tenants are far from exemplary.

(still shaking head)

apathy··on Hollywood Upended as Unions Tell Writers to Fire Agents
This. REAs live and die on referrals.
apathy··on Hollywood Upended as Unions Tell Writers to Fire Agents
I should probably care more, but after netting about $750k fixing up houses over the past 20 years while my wife and I worked full time jobs, I don’t. Estimates had converged on between $860k and $940k from various realtors and models; we took her advice, listed at $950k, and ended up with about $300k in net profits.

FSBOs don’t usually sell as well for the simple reason that REA caravans don’t hit them. This is kind of important since we live 2000 miles away from where we were selling. We’ve seen some 1% agents and they were possibly worse than nothing (we soaked a seller with shitty agents for about $35k when we started to walk away after an inspection).

Our agent also dealt with endless bullshit (reassessment, delivering an ultimatum to an annoying tenant when my wife folded, etc) for a couple months leading up to the sale. We wanted to unload the house and NOT deal with finding a new tenant. I think this is the part people underestimate — it’s NOT just the $5k net. It’s also all the crap we didn’t have to deal with while living 2000 miles away and both working full time jobs. There are endless time sensitive documents, amendments, etc that I didn’t have to grind my teeth about.

Honestly I’m starting to wonder how many houses the friendly Internet Experts have sold. It’s a shocking amount of bullshit to navigate.

apathy··on Hollywood Upended as Unions Tell Writers to Fire Agents
Usually it’s 1% to 3% on each side of the sale. I sure as hell didn’t like paying $45000 to the agents but we would have listed (and sold) the house for $50000 less if not for our agent’s prodding. So in the end we cleared an additional $5000 by not getting nervous and accepting her advice.

We thought the market was cooling down too much to support a price on the high end of the range. We were wrong. It sold in one week.

apathy··on Reliable novelty: New should not trump true
“Should” is an amazingly dangerous word (in the usage often embraced in the US, at least).

I find that asking why something “should” be XYZ is much more enlightening, both for the writer and the reader, in terms of exposing structural problems that make it so.

“People seldom do what they know to be right. They do what is convenient, then repent” —attributed to bob dylan

(Corollary: make the “right” thing the least inconvenient thing to do, and the odds of people doing it will rise appreciably.)

apathy··on The Death of an Adjunct
At one point it was typical — looks like scrutiny has driven indirects down massively outside of dedicated research institutes in the past few years.

https://osp.mit.edu/facilities-and-administrative-fa-rates

HMS declared rate is 58% but there are a lot of loopholes (as at other R1s with Institutes)

apathy··on Reliable novelty: New should not trump true
Wait, there are groups that don’t do this already?

“We thank reviewer 3 for the insightful suggestion...” (ok now copy paste the results that we cut for submission)

Ha ha only serious. Otherwise you get “helpful suggestions” like “run another few phase III trials first”

apathy··on The Death of an Adjunct
“Some”?

Try 90% or more!

apathy··on The Death of an Adjunct
Insane administrative overhead?

http://thebullelephant.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/01/Doctor...

apathy··on The Death of an Adjunct
Just like in medicine
apathy··on The Death of an Adjunct
It’s adorable that people think a research university would settle for just 50% indirects.

Try 90% and almost all of it goes to the football coach or the dean’s legal fees.

apathy··on Scandals suggest standards have slipped in corporate America
Indeed, the Sackler family is a scourge.

Behind every great fortune lies a great crime...

apathy··on Simpson’s Paradox (2016)
That’s the whole point of doubly robust models. However, in the event of confounding by indication or sampling misspecification, my experience is that nothing can save you.

I am a rather strong proponent of randomized trials for this exact reason. (They can also have sampling bias, but some degree of noise is inevitable)

apathy··on Simpson’s Paradox (2016)
Always happy to be a bad influence.
apathy··on Simpson’s Paradox (2016)
I hate to take “both sides” but in the absence of confounding by indication, you can often use propensity scoring within robust models to decrease these impacts.

Mind you, the problem with non random and undetected sampling bias is that it can be subtle. See for example https://www.nytimes.com/2018/08/06/upshot/employer-wellness-...

apathy··on Simpson’s Paradox (2016)
I <3 this reply. So, so good. Sneaky way of introducing the RCT.

You’re doing it right.

apathy··on Simpson’s Paradox (2016)
“Just”

This would be like saying “it’s just that we haven’t proven P!=NP” in CS. Best of luck.

Meanwhile applied people will deal with the problem by model diagnostics and sensitivity analysis as has been done for decades. I can’t wait for the next AI winter to come. So tired of this handwaving by people who don’t seem to have practical experience.

apathy··on Why Drugs That Work in Mice Don't Work in Humans
Good luck in study section, especially with mouse specialists. I hope you have a mighty compelling argument for why a random sample of (say) house mice is going to be free of unmeasured confounding effects...
apathy··on More Google Employees Are Losing Faith in Their CEO's Vision
AWS accounts for something like half of Amazon’s operating revenue. It may not be exciting but it is a license to print money. Why wouldn’t google (and MSFT, and anyone else with a big sunk investment in data centers) want to monetize their investment too?

Originally bezos was pissed off that Amazon’s excess capacity for the Black Friday/Christmas surge was going to waste the other 50 weeks of the year. I suspect that’s a pretty powerful motivation. But google absorbs huge spikes too (9/11 was one of the first harbingers of this) so it seemed inevitable, even back then, that they’d do it eventually.

Fighting the momentum of entire markets and hoping a muse settles on your shoulder isn’t a sustainable business strategy for most companies, let alone very large public companies.

apathy··on More Google Employees Are Losing Faith in Their CEO's Vision
Urs and Jeff were amazing. Something has changed though. Granted it’s been 15 years since I worked there, but some of the incredible spark that used to be there seems to have gone out.
apathy··on Response to the ASA’s Statement on p-Values
Analyzing papers in a glam journal for a year isn’t a very good way to judge what counts as science in terms of what is publishable. (“Just because it’s in Nature doesn’t mean it’s wrong!”)

That said, I agree that most of science is about becoming less wrong (choosing the least worst among available models for how observations arose), and that type of model selection problem is what Bayesian approaches excel at.

“Considering the evidence that preceded this study (or trial, or series), what explanatory model does the weight of the evidence best support?”

This need not be a binary decision (witness Bayes model averaging) and it need not be static (Bayesian updating explicitly evolves from a prior, whether flat or subjective). But it better matches the way most people approach research and probability, imho. Extraordinary claims must be supported by extraordinary weights of evidence, and frequentist testing in a vacuum doesn’t enforce this intuition.

Disclaimer: I am a statistician and a part-time Bayesian. Not a zealot, and not a jihadist against subjective inference. I use empirical Bayes procedures when they improve results on an ongoing basis, and I avoid them when the effort is more than the expected benefit can justify. The tipping point has moved over time, as more, faster, and better tools have decreased the cost (effort) to obtain a posterior distribution over complicated models.

apathy··on Elsevier journal editors resign, start rival open-access journal
Except that leeching has benefits
apathy··on Highly mutated cancers respond better to immune therapy
Not only, and not always. HGSOC-hypercalcemic is a particularly notable exception. The idea that it’s always MMR came from Lynch syndrome, but that doesn’t seem to be universal.

Immunity is complicated, you heard it here first...

apathy··on Highly mutated cancers respond better to immune therapy
That’s not the important conclusion of the primary article. Highly mutated cancers of certain types respond better to checkpoint inhibition and so forth. Melanoma, lung adeno, colorectal with MMR defects, for example. Others (glioma, high-grade serous ovarian, germ cell for example) don’t seem to get “hot” immunologically in proportion to their mutation burdens. (And there are other tumors, serous ovarian hypercalcemic for example, that have a vanishingly low mutational burden and respond to checkpoint inhibitors anyways).

The initial results suggested that more mutations == more immune response. That’s clearly not universal enough to rely upon clinically, although in some tumor types it’s suitably reliable to stratify clinical trials. In other tumor types, it looks like we are stuck with trial and error to find good enough biomarkers for response, as with most drugs.

So while TMB can be useful, it has limitations, and this study (the primary results, published in Nature Genetics, a related but different journal) helped clarify where those limitations are. The news & views piece just has pull quotes.

apathy··on Fewer Americans bike to work despite new trails, lanes, bicycle share programs
Where are the hills in Seattle? It may not be as flat as Amsterdam, but it certainly isn’t San Francisco (or even LA, for that matter).

I had the good fortune to essentially never get in a car in Seattle — I always took the subway, or the trolley, or walked. Granted I only ever spent a lot of time at Amazon and the Hutch, most everywhere beyond walking distance of south lake union or the subway is a blank spot on the map to me. But it seemed like a pretty casual place to bike commute.

I rode to work most every day when I lived in SF, and in DC, and for a while in LA. Perversely, it was always safest where the traffic was worst (gridlocked) as drivers couldn’t get going fast enough to severely injure me then. Northern Virginia by contrast was terrifying — soccer moms barreling around at 70mph in SUVs while on cell phones. I think it’s a cultural issue — that wouldn’t fly in the Netherlands.

apathy··on Fewer Americans bike to work despite new trails, lanes, bicycle share programs
Yes, regularly.
apathy··on Elucidating Cuttlefish Camouflage
Oh hey, is this Nautilus the publication that doesn’t pay their authors until they sue?

They used to have some excellent work before all the authors wised up...

If you’re interested in this type of material, may I suggest mosaic (https://mosaicscience.com) and Quanta (https://www.quantamagazine.org)?

Both are excellent and sustainable (they pay their authors).

apathy··on Salk scientists find genetic signatures of biological aging
Unless they’re dense they used the inside of the upper arm to avoid sun damage.

The bigger issue is that Steve Horvath calibrated and has successfully marketed a DNA methylation based “epigenetic clock” accurate to within a couple of years, from blood, with hundreds of not thousands of citations and successful replications since 2013. DNA is more stable than RNA, and blood is easier to come by than fibroblasts (skin punches), so this seems like a nonstarter to me.

Horvath’s clock works in arbitrary other tissues; we’ve applied it to pediatric and adult tumors, adjacent normal, and blood samples at diagnosis, remission, and relapse, and it works quite well (unlike the knockoffs that followed). I don’t see the point of a less reliable, less proven clock on less stable molecules (RNA), when I can use a handful of targeted amplicons to run Horvath’s for $30/sample on blood DNA (even dried blood) or other tissues.

Ref: https://genomebiology.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/gb-...

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