aterimperator

> Investing is the science and art of placing money where it does the most good

Err, no it isn't. It's the science and art of placing money where it will grow the most. That is neither equivalent nor synonymous with "does the most good".

I like how this meshes with Cal Newport's ideas on procrastination. As I understand it, he views procrastination as the mind's natural tendency to avoid things it doesn't trust: that crappy plan you came up with for getting that project done? Yeah, you don't trust it, so why would you actually try to implement it?

I would argue that a portion of that is simply the way you view things. I would also argue that you could eek out control like the method by which you choose to meet your deadlines.

Still... I have this work I should be doing...

That link makes the unfounded assumption that the poor choose to be poor. If you assume that the poor choose to be poor, then it is easy to see that there are situations in which it's rational to choose to try to live off welfare. From that perspective it makes perfect sense to want to make the lives of poor people even more miserable so they'll choose to stop being so poor...

Also, don't forget that Clinton ended welfare as we know it, resulting in fixed periods of welfare anyway. It also resulted in some evils, like single mothers working 6 hours a day (with their kids in a daycare) making less money and spending less time raising their children.

I think the final line (heavily edited) "it is rational not to work as long as work opportunities pay less than $30k/year" is what we should focus on: let's try to make their work opportunities better through extra services (maybe mandatory without a waiver of disability or insanity) that give training and education.

I disagree, I'd vastly prefer a good episode 3 than an early episode 3. Valve has always sacrificed time for quality, and it's the sacrifice that allows them to be great.

Citation? Obviously healthcare works on some level, else life expectancy wouldn't be going up.

But easily revised to "Do you want to come with us?"

Not that I particularly think the rules are inviolable. I see them as guidelines: if you're using the passive voice then make sure that it won't be better in active. If you're ending with a preposition, then perhaps there's a clearer way to phrase it.

Knowledgable readers who care will likely know both standards; at that point it's a matter of consistency (or, at the very least, never do something that breaks both sets of rules).

Or, more likely, coming from privileged families.

"There are dozens of disciplines where virtually every single scientific consensus in the entire field has been overturned."

You seem to be arguing that since mankind once thought the world was flat and was wrong, and then mankind thought the world was round and was wrong (more oblate spheroidal), and then mankind thought the world was oblate spheroidal and was wrong, we definitely can't trust the scientific consensus that the world is approximately oblate spheroidal with a very slight bulge south of the equator. Indeed, maybe the earth will turn out to be cubical tomorrow, and a taurus the day after that.

"Wrong" is a relative statement. Saying the earth is flat is more wrong than saying the earth is a sphere, and saying the earth is a sphere is more wrong than saying the earth is oblate spheroidal. Yes they're all wrong, just as newtonian mechanics was, strictly speaking, "wrong", yet no one looks at a car and says "that was built using newtonian mechanics, and therefore can't possibly work".

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2tcOi9a3-B0

Are you really arguing that the marginal value of an extra dollar is more for a billionaire than for a college student who eats ramen?

I agree with both of you. I'm not entirely sure where that leaves me. Conflicted. On the one hand I fully agree that these markets are kind of silly and incentivize dickish behavior. On the other hand, both the drug users and the time-wasters are knowingly inflicting those evils upon the world and other people through their own behavior.

I think I've decided where it leaves me: upset at both the bad-market creators and at the individuals who make choices knowing the ill-effects of those choices.

To be fair... money has different value to different people. I doubt any billionaires would care to waste 10 minutes of other people's time to save much money, because money doesn't have that much value to them. On the other hand, college students that eat lots of ramen are already valuing money more than their own health, so it seems natural that they'd place far more value on the money, even if they place the same value on other people's time.

So with a Full boeing 747 (probably a large overestimate), that's about 366 people (with wikipedia as source). At 10 minutes you're wasting 61 man hours (did I make a mistake? That seems way too large). Taking a low estimate on the value of people's time of about $10 per hour, you should be saving $610 to justify it...

Let's go with a smaller plane... My friend who is into airplanes tells me that 40 is a good estimate for shuttle planes from small cities to bigger hubs (30ish to 50ish, I just averaged them). So every 10 minutes you waste is about 6.5 man hours. Again valuing people's time at $10 per hour, you'd have to save $65 to break even (though that relies on pretty low valuation of the value of people's time).

I've always found the best way to keep good posture is to put my monitor high up so that I have to sit up straight to be at that perfect eye-level location. If my monitor is too low I slouch down to align my head with the center of my monitor.

I don't know off the top of my head. However, I can think of two very simple reasons pretty quickly.

Reason #1: future favors, tit-for-tat types of responses. If I help a friend out in a time of need, some day when I am in need the same friend might be able to help me. Neither of us are related, but we've both increased our survivability. This effect becomes more prominent with communities, even communities of unrelated individuals: you all survive or die as a group.

Reason #2: a fluke of the system. Evolution doesn't provide perfect solutions, just "good enough" solutions (evolution is dumb). Thus a species that is very good at being altruistic for close relatives (a beneficial thing), but occasionally is altruistic for unrelated strangers (possibly not beneficial) might be, on the whole, better than one that is never altruistic.

"From Charles Darwin on, evolutionary biologists have struggled to explain self-sacrificing behavior."

I had trouble reading beyond that line, since it's simply false. A quick reading of "The Selfish Gene" by Dawkins would correct that impression.

But isn't the purpose of cross-validation to avoid over-fitting and cherry-picking? Asked another way: how does you argument specifically single out Eureqa, instead of all of machine learning?

Except that it does. I'm not too familiar with the application itself, however I know the original research worked by finding pareto optimums based on the predictive power and the simplicity of the equation.

So for double pendulum it came back with like 8 equations, one of which was conservation of momentum (not actually accurate, but as close as you can get with that number of terms), and one of which was conservation of energy (actually accurate, but a bit more complicated).

He was killed in Pakistan, if I heard correctly.

Ok, I won't. :D

"The worst thing to post or upvote is something that's intensely but shallowly interesting. Gossip about famous people, funny or cute pictures or videos, partisan political articles, etc. If you let that sort of thing onto a news site, it will push aside the deeply interesting stuff, which tends to be quieter."

This is also mentioned in "Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance" (which I haven't read in a while, so bear with me). When one of his English students complains she's stuck and can't figure out where to start her essay, he tells her to pick a single city to write about. When she returns later with the same problem, he tells her to pick a single building in that city to write about. When she again returns later, he tells her to pick a single brick in that building to write about. When she again returns later, she comes back with dozens of pages.

I recall there being some comments about how she had to narrow her focus, because when you think of a city you can only think of all the things you've ever been told about that city, or ever heard about that city. Even when you think of a building you can only think of what other people have said about that building. When you focus on a single brick, it becomes clear that no one has ever said anything about it; so you clear your mind and think and write your own thoughts...

Point being, limiting yourself can get rid of certain distractions and make it clearer what your task actually is.