citation_please

This, and your other responses in this thread, come off as rather disappointing to me, as someone who considers the work they do as "data science". Machine learning as a method clearly has quite a bit to contribute to the business world based on revenue alone. My argument could rest here.

But it's also disappointing the way that you belittle all machine learning practitioners, even those with academic credentials, for their work not being worthy of serious consideration. This also sounds a little defensive and projective, and I can't imagine it's easy seeing the forest for the trees with your head in the clouds.

I would also submit Judea Pearl to the list.

What do you mean by "on temporal data"?. For example, no feature extraction was performed? This sounds pretty amateurish, and completely below the understanding levels of the many machine learning papers that I've read - which is admittedly a small percentage of what has been published.

Worth pointing out that "getting value out of extra space", in the long-term, only benefits property owners, as rents will simply rise to consume the generated surplus. Worst case being that if you want to live in a nice part of town, not only do you have to earn good money, but you have to become a part-time hospitality provider.

Could it also be the case that investments driven by speculation and market manipulation would obscure the actual ROI (a lá Uber)?

Long-term the intuition is "this must be profitable at some point", so the market participants are acting irrational in the short-term. No one can compete with irrational actors, especially ones with an insane amount of capital to burn like we see today.

Hmm. Using the site that was the first Google result[0] to test myself and I could never get anything below 220ms. Could you be misremembering by a factor of 10?

[0] https://www.humanbenchmark.com/tests/reactiontime/

I agree with your list! Except with your use of the word essential, because I was trying to draw attention to the fact that these jobs are highly reactive, which I think is orthogonal to how essential they are to society (i.e. not "bull shit").

As a counter-example, I think everyone who is currently working to reduce environmentally-damaging emissions of industrial processes are essential to society, but if they all disappeared tomorrow it would have little immediate impact.

But this brings up that some Vim hotkeys are more positional than mnemonic (J-down, K-up), while others are more mnemonic than positional (I-insert, X-exterminate(?)).

Food for thought.

I think we're merely highlighting the distinction between what level of responsivity a job actually requires. Those who deal with things that require near-immediate attention (janitors, sys admins, doctors) would stop the world. Everyone else the world can (by definition of responsibility) continue without any issue for awhile, and maybe at worst stagnate.

I think this might be a completely orthogonal concept to measuring how "bull shit" a job is, despite how often it gets brought up in this context.

I think it's fair to consider that our current view on classical music could be due to survivorship bias as well. Consider all of the composers who were lost to time because their peers or musical historians did not consider their music noteworthy.

Whenever I see discussion on classical music, it's a fun mental game for me to imagine it's a forum for metal instead, and these (assumingly) well-to-do academics are all metalheads who have a strangely archaic way of describing the specific merits of songs.

I think your comment highlights the biggest take-away from the article. Finding statistics to fit your narrative is a trope in journalism, XKCD has even pointed it out: https://xkcd.com/1845/

I think one way these articles could be more honest is if they did not compare the survivors to all modern top 40 hits, but rather to the most curated selection of culturally-relevant and generation-defining songs. I'm sure any avid listener to any genre/time period could find you 10 songs that will make you reconsider your perhaps preconceived negative opinion on that genre/time period, and 10 songs that will make you continue to generalize the genre/time period as low-quality music.

But this is non-trivial and prone to more bias, so we'll probably never see it happen. In the mean time we can continue to use this example of pop-statistics in journalism to remind ourselves to be wary of what we read.

Mildly high isn't equivalent to stoned, and I don't think it's a stretch to consider that the might be some issues with everyone self-medicating for motivation and concentration with caffeine all day.

I'm not saying reduce the body count, I'm saying don't specialize. If you have three managers, have them do everything, don't fire two of them and give the third one the work of the other two.

If you still disagree then I think we have different intuitions about the difficulty of wearing different hats in management positions. This is somehow analogous to the split on full-stack vs. specialized development. Interestingly, full-stack teams have been heads and shoulders above in quality in my experience.

I think that these are different persons leads may be one of the causes of a lot of the negative symptoms we're seeing in project management in our industry. If I compare the teams that I've been on, a lot of the frustration was due to the communication (or lack thereof) between the leadership roles that you've described. The best teams where were single people were responsible for all types of leadership - even if it was more than one person.

It does not always pay to specialize.

This seems like some application of "no true scottsman" combined with complex human interactions in a theoretically "simple" system. I guess the perfectly rational consumer fits in somehow too.

For things like headphones you should definitely try to find domain experts who have put significant effort into researching and documenting the difference between products, and then purchase based on their review until you're able to make the purchase on your own based on trying the product out in person.

I knew nothing about headphones, bought a few based on expert reviews (maximizing quality in my price range), and now I feel confident when trying out "floor models" at my local audio store.

If anyone's interested in the head phone website, I can provide it. Just didn't want to seem like I was shilling a blog. If you search Google "site:reddit.com in ear monitor review blog" you'll find it, and this is a pretty good formula in my experience for researching consumer products that have a high information asymmetry.

Wow! That was amazing. I'd love to see that applied to Reddit / Subreddit / User networks.

Should we interpret your comment as support that it doesn't necessarily matter what the leading political ideology of the country is, rather who is the one enforcing it?

Have you considered that "isolating" yourself from the people in your community who are most in need has had a negative impact on both you and your community? And that you may vastly overestimate the presence of crime and homelessness because of this isolation?

As someone who does take public transit on a daily basis and occasionally interacts with the homeless and petty criminals, the dehumanization of people in your own community in your comment is absolutely astounding. These people are your neighbors, whether they smell bad, have become victims of addiction, or have turned to petty crime.

Seems to me that there is quite a bit of commentary on this subject, and you can find it by searching for its typical solution: guard clauses[1].

[1] http://wiki.c2.com/?GuardClause

This might be off-topic WRT the linked article, but I just wanted to take the time to say that I admire that you did this with your sons. If I become a parent I want to also instill the value of leaving behind a wake of improvement to our environment and communities, even if it's just picking up a piece of trash that would otherwise sit there until it decomposes.

I believe the post above was working out math that would make it so the probability would be 1 / #(of planets in the universe), which, following the law of large numbers, would mean that given an infinite number of universes, those universes would tend to have exactly one planet (Earth in our universe's case) that would have life.

This really doesn't mean anything to me without a citation. Wikipedia led me to this [1] article, that states "Nearly half of the homeless money, $81.5 million, goes for rent subsidies and programs to assist the 6,355 people living in "permanent supportive housing" - long the cornerstone of the city's program for helping the down and out.".

I'm not sure if the 6,355 in the supportive housing contributes to the 7000 "homeless" statistic, but dollar spent per homeless person seems like a measurement that's at best misleading and at worst a propaganda soundbyte.

[1] http://www.sfgate.com/bayarea/matier-ross/article/S-F-spendi...