overgrownzygote

I’m surprised I had to scroll this far to see this.

I think most folks want to care about their jobs and the default is having a healthy level of investment. But especially in larger companies, it’s so easy to get burned by workplace politics or leaders just not seeing things the same way you do — just as you said.

Emotional disinvestment in work is a defensive mechanism. Honestly, it feels like the two camps in this thread are almost talking past each other. Yes, it’s good to be invested in your work — it’s better for your emotional/existential health and good for your career. On the other hand, investment being a net good for an employee is hugely dependent on your work environment.

While one could argue that the right thing to do if you feel you can’t be invested is to leave, and I generally agree that leaving is the only real long-term solution, there are also a million reasons why it might not in the short term.

Is it the (lack of) reliability of electronic systems that people don't like? As a fairly anxious driver, I rather like the extra peace of mind that comes from having automatic braking, blind spot indicators, and cameras. ACC and lane centering are also quite convenient for long drives, and I do rather like CarPlay.

Maybe I'm the problem?

Could you elaborate on what those "upgrades" look like?

At least for math, I found that by around Calc II I had to start grinding problem sets to do well on exams, and I can't imagine what the next "level" would look like for something like a graduate-level math course.

My personal favorite egg white cocktail is the Clover Club, which hasn’t been mentioned yet.

I’m surprised I had to scroll so far to find this response.

It was a revelation to me when I realized that, no, it’s not that “most people” lack intellectual curiosity. Their interests are just different than mine.

The Bolt is one of the cars available through the carshare system in my city, and I was pleasantly surprised with how much I liked it. The combination of absurd torque and econobox look and feel was just fun.

I probably would have bought one if I didn’t have to street park somewhere where subzero temperatures (°F) aren’t uncommon. Ended up getting a low(er) mileage Ford Fusion Hybrid instead.

Over-analyzing has always been a huge struggle of mine, and your comment reminded me of a few times in my life where actually doing things taught me something important:

1. I thought I wanted to be a lawyer through most of college. I took tons of law-related courses, did a few internships, and then realized I strongly disliked actually doing it once I got my first job in the field. Thankfully, I figured it out before going to law school.

2. I studied abroad in Kenya basically on a whim. I realized my penultimate semester of college that I’d managed to get all my graduation requirements done a semester early and somehow not noticed, and decided I’d take the last semester to have a little adventure. It turned out to be one of the best things I’ve ever done.

3. At the start of lockdown in 2020, I took CS50 basically because I was bored and a friend was doing it. I had never even considered studying CS before that point, and now here I am getting my ducks in a row to do an OSU post-bacc.

I suppose the throughline here is that life is full of unknown unknowns, and unknown unknowns, by definition, aren’t something you can think about and factor into your decision-making process. Just like you said — sometimes you just gotta try stuff.

Having the Apple Store support option is another one. Yes, repairs can be a bit expensive, but most of them can be done same-day instead of having to ship my phone off for a week+ to get repairs.

This depends on where you’re located though — in some places it’s much easier to get quick OEM repairs for (some) Android devices than for Apple ones.

The A-series chips are also genuinely very good, but one could argue that a lot of that power is wasted on iOS.

Anecdotally, I’ve also found battery life on iPhones to be more reliable out of the box than on most Android devices, especially in standby.

Highly recommend Nand2Tetris. I completed it a few months ago as a relatively non-technical person (I had only taken CS50 as my first CS class ever in 2020) and learned a ton.

For what it's worth, my undergraduate experience was that we had very few opportunities to do any actual empirical* research in most disciplines.

Most of the "research" positions available were just grunt work, and even in cases where we had the opportunity to perform some independent research, often we had to use relatively unreliable methodologies because the more robust ones required more resources than we had access to.

I also found that a lot of hard science students didn't understand the statistical methods they were applying very well, but that's a different can of worms.

* "Empirical" is a pretty big caveat here — I know some math majors that had the opportunity to carry out some substantive research, and I imagine the same goes for other disciplines that don't rely as heavily on labor-intensive (or capital-intensive, or both) data collection.

> We don't hear phrases like "I used to read and write English, but since I moved to management I have stopped"

I had to chuckle a bit at this one given how some VP+ folks write emails.

> I definitely think there's an advertising bubble and it's popping.

This is something I’ve been thinking about a decent amount over the past few years. Advertising is the cash cow that underpins a good chunk of tech firms’ value. But the purpose of advertising, ultimately, is to drive sales of real goods and services.

Are those tech firms really driving actual consumption to a degree that justifies their value? I suppose it’s possible, but the massive growth in tech firm valuation doesn’t seem to be paralleled by massive growth in the “real” economy.

This is such a key insight. For me at least, “time management” is really about managing my energy levels more than anything.

Figured someone who has read the book might see this and be able to answer a question — to what extent is Caplan’s critique of the U.S.-model of widespread-ish resource-intensive higher education tied and the credentialing problem it “solves,” and how much is a critique of higher education in toto?

I can certainly get on board with the former, and if that’s Caplan’s argument, I might have to add his book to my reading list.

Edit: I get that the two critiques I described are difficult to separate in practice, but maybe this will clarify for anyone who might be willing to share their read or Caplan’s argument: it’s the difference between “university is more or less fine, but people should have to pay their own way” vs. “we need to find ways to reduce the real costs of education and/or better socialize the benefits, so that more people have access to education because education is itself a worthy goal”

I think a big part of why remote learning is such a "tough nut to crack" is because in-person learning is about the social experience as much as anything else.

As much as I've enjoyed online courses that I've taken, even the ones with robust Discord channels haven't felt the same as in-person courses. At least in my experience, so much learning is done outside of the classroom in study groups, talking to teachers/professors, and even in casual conversations with other students. While some of that can be facilitated with technology and appropriate structure, it simply doesn't have the same effect as putting all those people in the same physical space.

There's also the cost aspect: CS50x and Nand2Tetris are among the best courses I have taken, including the in-person classes I took for my Bachelor's. However,I don't think I'd be nearly as satisfied if I'd paid university tuition for either. I've taken a few community college courses remotely during the pandemic, and after experiencing high-quality MOOCs, it's hard to avoid the feeling that I'm basically paying a hefty premium for the credential.

I feel like the line between Wikipedia and Objectivism is a bit of a stretch.

The key Objectivist principles are that are relevant to Wikipedia — realism and rationalism — are hardly the controversial parts of Objectivist philosophy. Moreover, they seem like appropriate a priori beliefs for an encyclopedia, given that the entire point of an encyclopedia is to be an accurate reference of objects and events in the real world.

I do however agree that the problem of trust and sourcing is a huge issue for Wikipedia, and speaks to a larger problem in epistemology that as our collective knowledge grows, we have to rely more and more on trust and appeals to authority, since most of that knowledge consists of things that you or I can’t easily go verify.

I was going to propose that perhaps Wikipedia should just tighten up their definitions of “trusted sources” rather than throwing out a priori notions of truth, but that would just be appealing to a different authority. Maybe that’s the best we can hope for, though?

I think it’s less likely that companies like Shopify are purposely filtering out candidates who have interview anxiety and more likely that it’s simply not a factor they take into account.

Assuming that:

1. Companies like Shopify do not have a shortage of qualified candidates

2. The cost of hiring a “bad” candidate is outweighs the benefit of finding the best possible candidates.

3. Tons of people who aren’t qualified also apply

The optimal strategy is one that focuses on weeding out as many bad candidates as possible, even if there are some good candidates that get dismissed as a result.

This is of course a gross oversimplification, but the key takeaway is that there seem to be enough candidates that are both qualified and able to get through the stressful interview process, so there’s little incentive to change it.

However, I think starting a conversation about it as the quoted twitter user is doing I might change it. If companies start wanting to take (real) steps to be more inclusive, they might have enough reason to change their hiring practices.

This is brilliant.

I’d never thought about it such explicit terms, but of course using analogies with an unsympathetic interlocutor is basically building them a all-too-convenient strawman

Replication as part of scientific consensus-building dates back at least to the air-pump experiments of 17th century.

See e.g. “Leviathan and the Air-Pump”

This seems to be a particularly salient issue in the area of medicine, since many practice but may not actually “do science” unless they’re affiliated with a university or research hospital.

Most doctors are more like engineers than physicists.

That’s my favorite thing about reading Feynman’s autobiographical works or anecdotes about him. There’s a feeling that he must be embellishing, but the stories are never entirely outside the realm of plausibility.