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formulaTon The Counterculture Is Better in the Suburbs

The problem with counterculture is that it encourages people to uncritically accept that mainstream culture is horrible (e.g. boring, White, materialist, racist/sexist/homophobic) and must be rejected.

While everyone feels this way on some issues, counterculture encourages people to turn a dissatisfaction with some aspects of mainstream culture into a total rejection of it. And it does so not by rational argument, but by exploiting people's desire to feel special and enlightened.

formulaTon Does donation matching work?

All behavioral studies aside, in the long run matching doesn't seem like a reasonable approach. The only money you have to donate is your own. If individual A offers to match my donations, I could reason that A will probably donate less to charity in proportion to how much of A's matching funds are used up. That is, in the long run, whether I take up A's offer won't affect the total amount A spends on charity. So it shouldn't affect my decision either.

As an aside, I think people don't fully consider the effectiveness of earning more money as a form of altruism. Since around 30% will be taken by the government, and used to fund various social services, the choice to earn more money is really the choice to earn money and donate 30%.

formulaTon Chemicals in plastics alter the brains of baby boys, making them “more feminine”

I couldn't see the article, only the abstract. But what they report in the abstract is some regression coefficients for a "masculinity score" and associated p-values. A very simple analysis, and not much that can go wrong there.

My only concern is with cherry picking the chemicals. It wasn't clear if they were only reporting specific chemicals that had significant relationships, or if all the chemicals that would be expected to have a significant relationship did.

formulaTon Ask HN: Why are Silicon Valley interviews such a drag now?

This is my defense of whiteboard interviews.

- They are aimed at identifying smart people who know the basics of coding and algorithms. They are intentionally not domain specific. In my experience, smart people can pick up all the other details over time. I've worked with many people who switched languages and within a few months were (for the purposes of their job) as good as someone with years of experience. Similarly, version control, testing etc. are things you can learn on the job.

- They have worked for major companies. Look at the share price of Google and Facebook over time, or the general feeling that they are successful in their goal of hiring the best people.

- They are fast and scalable. They only take as long as the interview, and they scale well because it's easy to compare the notes of different interviewers. The process takes about 5 hours for the interviewee, and about 10 hours combined for the interviewers.

formulaTon The tensor renaissance in data science

In this context, tensors are just multidimensional arrays. The easiest way to understand them is by analogy with matrices.

Matrices are 2d arrays, and matrix decomposition uses methods inspired by geometry, to analyze data in matrix form. Even though the matrix in question might have no intrinsic geometric meaning (e.g. a matrix of which individual likes which beer), the geometric methods still give useful result.

Similarly, tensor decompositions are inspired by geometry, but are also a simple way to get information from a 3d array. For tensors, the most basic tensor decomposition, where a tensor a_ijk is approximated by sum_l b_li * c_lj * d_lk.

tl;dr don't read too much into the geometric side of tensors. Data science applications don't have a geometric interpretation, but the techniques can still work.

formulaTon “Information asymmetry” cuts both ways

They key point here is that workers are not identical. If you are getting paid less than your colleagues, that could be because you got a raw deal, but it could also be because you aren't as good as them.

Even within a job title, there are good reasons why pay should not be the same. For example, the job ladder represents both authority and technical ability, and these sometimes need to be decoupled. A very talented individual might have technical ability that deserves high pay, but not the industry experience to hold a position of leadership or authority. So they get hired at a lower job title, but with higher pay than their peers.

formulaTon What happened when an anti-Semite found he was Jewish?

Jewish people should question the ideology and politics that the Jewish community promotes, just as Hungarians should question the ideology and politics of the people who claim to represent Hungarians.

This guy did a full about face from "Gypsies and Jews are destroying Hungary" to "Jews should be welcome everywhere, but we need to stop Muslim immigrants from destroying our tolerant open society".

formulaTon Peak car

Apart from their energy intensiveness, what is wrong with the suburbs?

I grew up in suburbia, and I remember fresh air, open spaces and low crime. I get that suburbs can be boring for some people, but a lot of people I knew growing up chose to return to the suburbs after living in bigger cities, or never left.

formulaTon As a math professor, how can I help grad students find nonacademic jobs?

I think the best thing you can do is encourage them to take math related courses that can lead to non-academic jobs, such as statistics, machine learning, data science, bioinformatics and quantitative finance.

formulaTon An analysis of Internet trolling and why they do it

I didn't expect to like this article, but the author did a good job of describing trolling patterns that were clearly not simply posting opposing views. I also liked this inspirational quote:

If you're out there trying to build, write or draw something, be proud of that - it's not easy. Doing something means actually trying and not wasting your life watching repeats of Friends on Comedy Central, an example that is not at all autobiographical.

formulaTon Why men won't get married anymore

The problem with that attitude is that "good quality" sites have their own biases, so in order to escape these biases requires reading material from sites that are not written as well, e.g. sites that are sensationalist. It's just like if you want authentic street food, you will probably have to compromise on cleanliness.

formulaTon Peter Thiel on what works at work (2014)

or maybe it means you get Gmail, Google Web Search, Google Apps, Android and Chrome.

Seems like you are using very selective evidence there, or selectively attributing only unsuccessful products to lack of diversity.

formulaTon Bees are doing democracy right

Of course, every bee wants credit for their own find. So there needs to be a countervailing costly mechanism to prevent bees from simply over-promoting any pollen source they know.

Two problems with this. Most importantly, if bees have the same genetic interests (it's a bit complicated but see The Selfish Gene for Dawkin's explanation of why bees are genetically programmed not to have different interests than their hives) then there is no reason for a bee to want credit. Second, has any reward for the scouts ever been observed?

formulaTon Why men won't get married anymore

Interesting counterpoint to modern liberal orthodoxy. I don't buy everything in the article. Even though I agree that the law is stacked against men when it comes to divorce and custody of children, I don't think this is the reason people are not getting married.

Everyone tries to pidgeon hole phenomena like this into their own favorite narratives. Social conservatives will write articles like this. Social liberals will write articles like "Why women aren't getting married anymore" and either blame men for not being good enough to marry, or say that it's a good thing anyway. Those on the economic right will say that stupid millennial lifestyles are preventing people from saving enough to get married, while those on the left will say that lack of jobs and debt from education is to blame.

EDIT: Looks like this story is getting killed in spite of its score. Not complaining, but it's funny that "Why Japanese men won't get married anymore" would probably be on the front page by now.

formulaTon What's wrong with finance

It's just a blog post. Regular economist articles are better edited, but mainstream economics doesn't make the HN front page.

>25 standard deviations has to be an exaggeration? I fail to see how any model could ever be that far off the mark.

It's easy to be that far off the mark. E.g. assume a normal distribution for a fat-tailed distribution.

formulaTon The Causes and Consequences of Distinctly Black Names (2004) [pdf]

One question I've had is why didn't parents who wanted to avoid originally European names take from actual African names, rather than minting new names. I understand being disconnected from one's ancestry, but still, this seems a different alternative.

People do things for so many reasons, or for no reason. Trying to make Black people's choices of names fit some narrative is going to fail to capture the complexity and depth of their culture.

Put another way, if people are choosing not to use White names, why wouldn't they also choose not to the use traditional names of any culture. Maybe having a "respectable" name that has a long history as a name, is also something people were choosing to avoid.

formulaTon The Most Diverse Cities Are Often the Most Segregated

The great thing about academic research is that the author isn't the sole judge of what is a valid interpretation of his work. In this case, Putman asserts, for reasons other than his research, that diversity is still a good thing. But taken on its own, his research certainly is evidence that diversity is bad.

formulaTon Take Nothing, Leave Nothing: On being banned from the world’s most remote island

I had a few hypotheses on this:

- There is more to the story, and the public part was enough for islanders to deduce the full story given what they knew. E.g. she had a child to the sailor who was raised by someone else, or she had an abortion.

- Extra marital sex was so taboo in their culture than a story that even implied it might have happened would be a scandal.

- The husband simply found the story offensive, and had enough influence in the community to get the journalist banned.

formulaTon Take Nothing, Leave Nothing: On being banned from the world’s most remote island

I would be interested in seeing any of these quantified. And I'm not asking for people to educate me, but rather for people to take a more careful look at which claims can be directly justified by the science, vs which claims are assertions made based on extrapolating from very different data.

The claim was that the population size of Tristan da Cunha is problematic. I still haven't seen any direct evidence presented of this fact.

formulaTon Take Nothing, Leave Nothing: On being banned from the world’s most remote island

But the question is how the population size relates to health, which you haven't answered here. You have numbers for the number of deleterious mutations, but that doesn't directly give a quantitative relationship between population size and health.

formulaTon Take Nothing, Leave Nothing: On being banned from the world’s most remote island

Let me put it another way: Can you or anyone else provide scientific studies that would directly back the claim

The level of inbreeding on that island is quite scary. Although if they purged a lot of the deleterious alleles from the population, if they outbred with others, they could produce much healthier offspring and a lower likelihood of various genetic ailments.

And not the general statements that have been made in this thread, but something that would pin down a specific numeric relationship between population size in humans, and health.

EDIT: and for reference, the prevalence of Asthma may be purely due to the founder effect, not an effect of inbreeding per se. Two or three of the original settlers suffered from asthma[0].

http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1365-2222.1974....

formulaTon Take Nothing, Leave Nothing: On being banned from the world’s most remote island

My point was that the quantity of the effect matters. If the science can't quantify how bad having a population of 150 is, then we can't say we understand things well enough to recommend "outbreeding", as the original post did.

formulaTon Take Nothing, Leave Nothing: On being banned from the world’s most remote island

So since the science of recessive genes is so well understood, how big does the population need to be before scientists instruct the group to start outbreeding?

formulaTon The Troubling Reality of Forensic “Science”

I don't see how any of those things prevent the methodology I described being applied.

formulaTon Take Nothing, Leave Nothing: On being banned from the world’s most remote island

More like no one would ever write about the need for Jews to outbreed, and if they did they would be rebuffed with a bazillion qualifications about the science being uncertain. You only get to make sweeping statements when politics are on your side.

formulaTon Take Nothing, Leave Nothing: On being banned from the world’s most remote island

Why do you think you have such certain knowledge of these things? It seems like knowledge of human genetics and diseases is in a very early stage. As far as I can tell the idea that inbreeding is bad is primarily political.

formulaTon [dead]

I think you contradict yourself when you say that my implication in my second point is unfair do dang, and then go on to say why you think that stories like mine should be treated negatively by moderators (note that dang has unflagged political stories before, so it's not just about the community).

Anyway to the main point, you cannot escape hysterical leftist social campaigns, HN is already full of them. And there have been numerous stories on them on the front page (most notably https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9150107). The story I posted was unfortunately from a source that used language that will distract from the real issues. But it was also the best story on the issue I found.

formulaTon The Troubling Reality of Forensic “Science”

Coming from a statistics background, it seems like there is an easy fix for many of these problems (trigger warning: p-values ahead).

For example, if you want to claim someone's fingerprints are a match for a given fingerprint from a crime scene, you need to show that the probability of a random person's fingerprints matching is small. One direct way to prove this is to get the prints of N random people, plus the prints of the suspect, and compare them to the print from the crime scene. If the suspect is a better match than N(1-p) of the other fingerprints, then the match has a p-value of p.

Even if matching is done by a human expert, a computer could be used to reduce the set of potential matches before a human was used to select the best match out of these candidates (of course, the expert would not know which one belonged to the suspect).

I know all of this is obvious to someone with a thorough knowledge of statistics, but I honestly think this is just lacking in the discipline.

formulaTon Is Computer Science Science? (2005) [pdf]

Economics as a discipline is very reasonable given the constraints involved (studying human beings not particles, no experiments, short history of events to study). Unfortunately it takes a few years to get up to speed in the discipline, and only a few hours to write an "economics is all nonsense" blog article. Also see https://xkcd.com/793/

formulaTon If your results are highly counterintuitive

Endogeneity is not unique to big data. If your results are counterintuitive, it could be because of endogeneity, or your data is just generally messed up, or more subtle statistical issues. Or maybe your analysis is right.