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As the article says, it is not hard to MEET people - I meet plenty of people mostly through work and a few through book clubs, running clubs, bike clubs or just at the coffee shop. And a lot of them are actually legitimately cool people that I would have become friends with if I met in college or grad school.

The challenge is converting those people into FRIENDS. Basically you have to hang out together a ton in order to build that comfort level and familiarity. And modern adult western life simply doesn't facilitate this very much.

The one exception I can think of is a small town or village where people bump into each other all the time without having to consciously plan to do so.

So it is a bit paradoxical: Living in a city there are a ton of interesting people to meet, but precisely because of the density it is unlikely for you to randomly end up spending enough time with someone for you to become good friends.

I recently did some informal research and found that Canada has by far the most positive public opinion towards immigration among "rich" Western countries.

Many European countries view immigration in almost entirely negative terms (largely for xenophobic reasons) and have been competing to make immigration of any kind harder.

The UK has even recently made it harder for foreign graduates of UK universities to get work visas - a policy which I find to be MINDBOGGLINGLY stupid. Aren't those the EXACT kind of people that you'd want to stay in your country?

I am also a computer science assistant professor like Cal Newport so I can relate to what he is trying to say here.

An academic paper in computer science usually consists of applying a well defined "technique" to a well defined "problem." For example applying "Support Vector Machines" to "Text Classification" or applying "Expert Systems" to "Medical Diagnosis" or applying "Particle Filters" to "Robot localization"

The crux of what Newport is referring to is that in practice, many(most?) academic researchers don't deeply learn new techniques that are outside of their immediate research agenda after leaving grad school. They will certainly be AWARE of new techniques and might learn their high level ideas but they won't really learn them deeply enough to be able to improve them or use them in a non-trivial way. It is much much easier to continue exploiting and building upon the techniques they have already mastered than to invest several painful months(years?) to master completely new techniques.

So what Newport is suggesting that you should stop applying your current methods that are easy and very productive for you and make a substantial investment of time and energy to master the latest techniques - even if you don't exactly know how you're going to apply them

A programming analogy: If you're a C++ programmer, stop doing C++ projects and spend at least 3 months until you're an expert in Python. If you're a Python programmer, stop writing Python and invest several months in becoming an expert in Go. (the analogy is not perfect because mastering a new language is probably a bit easier and more fun than the kind of things Newport is talking about)

Here are a couple of thoughts I had on this:

(1) How applicable is this idea outside of academic research? For example, in academia there is a big reward for being the FIRST person to apply a given technique to a certain problem, but outside of research being the 2nd or 3rd person to do something can be just fine. (See: Friendster, MySpace, Facebook). So maybe you can afford to wait until someone has shown a great application of a new technique and only then jump in and try to exploit it.

(2) An opposing but also convincing idea is that it is better to focus your efforts in one area to avoid spreading yourself too thin. Such focus allows you to gain "comparative advantage" and to easily do things that are difficult for people who don't have your deep experience. In other words, it is better to spend your efforts trying to become the world's greatest Python hacker than to jump on the bandwagon of every new programming language that comes out and ending up as a "Jack of all trades, master of none."

My conclusion: I do think it is worthwhile to challenge yourself not to just stick to what you already know (which in my personal experience is VERY easy to do especially if you find that you're very productive using what you know). But you also have to be selective. Life is too short to try to be a master of everything. And there is great value in gaining a very deep expertise in a particular topic or technique.

I think 300 miles is plenty for most people (for me definitely). Most people drive less than 30 miles a day. I could even drive from DC to Pittsburgh without having to recharge (about 240 miles).

GUYS! I am pretty sure those little Stonehenge references are are just humor. The author is not REALLY suggesting that future civilization would be puzzled by Manhattan's grid. The comparisons with Stonehenge are just an amusing way of pointing out this phenomena that many people are probably not aware of.

Personally I think it is pretty cool that the perfect conditions for observing this are only available in a few cities - despite the fact there must be a lot of cities around the world with skyscrapers and grid like street plans.

One FT employee easily costs more than $100,000 when you include benefits, expenses and so on.

Also GM sells a few dozens models of cars, I could easily see the salaries for the staff who do daily updates for all these models and the advertising agencies who manage it costing 30 million or more.

Also GM has annual revenue of almost 160 BILLION, 30 million is a drop in the bucket in their marketing budget.

Parenthetically, I get rather irritated with people who like to criticize everything as "not novel." Depending on how you look at it almost nothing is completely "novel" ("nothing new under the sun" and all that).

What is important is the execution and new wrinkles in the CURRENT iteration - NOT whether something vaguely or even pretty similar was attempted or proposed at some point in the past.

Darn, looks like this is not editable like the code at http://0x10co.de

I was looking forward to seeing if I could figure out how to cheat and give myself infinite lives (I'm not very coordinated so that's the only I'll ever win ;-))

THIS:

"Better yet: since the agency is already receiving that data from all those financial institutions through a separate stream, how about organizing the data for me and simply letting me sign off on my automatically-generated return? I suspect that a lot of people would like that, given that the alternative is spending a spring day doing paperwork."

Especially for those who only have a single W2 or a similarly simple state of affairs, it is quite ridiculous the amount of pain you have to go through (and preparation fees you have to pay) CONSIDERING THE GOVERNMENT ALREADY HAS THE INFORMATION!

I definitely think tax preparation firms are lobbying to keep from simplifying the preparation process.

I remember one year around 2005 or so I was able to file my (federal) return by telephone directly with the IRS for FREE (I was a student and had only the one W2) and it was relatively painless but the next year the option seems to have disappeared. Anyone remember that?

The same story when anything involving race comes up.

THIS. This is my biggest problem with this entire issue. It is ALWAYS reported as an Apple problem, when in reality

(i) There is no evidence presented that Apple is doing something other companies are not doing.

(ii) The reasons for these working conditions are pretty well known: (1) China is still a relatively poor country (2) Electronics customers are very price conscious - you can't compete if your costs aren't low.

I think it's fine to pressure large companies to improve working conditions (even if it leads to higher prices) - but I have not seen the reason why Apple got almost all the scrutiny on this issue.

(1) I object to the use of the term "stole" - there is no indication that the Forbes blogger did anything unethical. She gave links and full attribution to the NYT article and therefore helped to promote it. YES, the quotes from it are more extensive and lengthy than you would normally see but on the other hand it IS a NINE page article so I am pretty sure the excerpts still falls under Fair Use.

(2) The article in question is a feature article in the NYT Sunday magazine which is where they put the long in-depth articles which took months to investigate. These are meant to be Pulitzer Prize level pieces that will get people talking and make a big splash in the news cycle. This explains both the length and the title. There is NO WAY the NYT Sunday Magazine is going to lead with a sensationalist headline like “How Target Figured Out A Teen Girl Was Pregnant Before Her Father Did.“ That smacks of The National Enquirer or something. The title they actually used (“How Companies Learn Your Secrets“) is not THAT bad either - it got me to click on it when I saw it.

(3) Most importantly, I don't see how Facebook Likes can be the sole metric of an article's "success." This weeks NYT Sunday Magazine is just officially coming out today. This is a front page article. Lots of people are going to be reading,talking and emailing it all week. And when they do they are going to send the link to the source and NYT will get the credit.

(4) Lastly, - no evidence is given that the TITLE was the SOLE reason why the Forbes post went viral. It is an interesting topic and the Forbes blogger adequately summarized it, making the post very "shareable." The promotion and SEO strategies of Forbes may also have helped.

So in summary the Forbes blog and the NYT magazine are very different types of publications and it looks like they both succeeded in what they were trying to do.

Yeah the same happens within any large organization - universities are one example I am familiar with. If you get a large grant from NIH or NSF or whoever, you don't have any incentive to minimize expenses because you don't benefit in any way from spending less than your budget.

So typically people will order the most expensive things that can fit within the budget or even buy stuff they don't need just to spend all the money.

This does strike me as often wasteful but I don't see an easy fix.

It seems this guy doesn't account for "bureaucratic overhead" that is involved in dealing with any large client: You already mentioned the need for lots and lots of meetings and doing the translations, there is also writing up a proposal and some reports, drawing up contracts and sub-contracts, doing usability testing and ensuring compliance with applicable federal regulations.

And there is probably a lot of other stuff involved that I don't know about. And lets not forget some overhead to pay for the office and some profit.

It probably ends up being a few hundred man hours once you account for everything.

So yeah - it could most likely be cheaper or better, but the pitchfork attitude is probably going too far.

Surprised no one has mentioned Doug Bowman's reasons for leaving Google, which seems in part because of extensive use of A/B testing. I don't really know enough to comment on it but it seems relevant: http://stopdesign.com/archive/2009/03/20/goodbye-google.html

Perhaps this will prompt a substantial reorganization of society. Ideas like the http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Basic_income_guarantee might actually gain traction.

Marshall Brain's novel http://www.marshallbrain.com/manna1.htm is one recent exploration of similar ideas.

But personally I'm sceptical if this will actually happen in the near future. As long as we don't have "Strong-AI" there are many jobs only humans can do well and a lot of those jobs don't require extensive education (nanny, nursing home attendant, customer service etc.)

This might now end up affecting not only Airbnb but also the image of Ycombinator and pg.

Also the important issue here is not just the (terrible) handling of this specific incident by Airbnb but the fact that it puts into question their entire business model: Is it really smart to rent out your personal residence to a complete stranger? Does the potential benefit($$$) outweigh the significant risks(being completely violated)? Yes, they could put in some more checks but will that be enough to make people feel SAFE?

Personally I think the risk is too high and the problem will only become worse as the service tries to expand to more customers and scammers become more aware of it. That nice "guest" may simply be casing the joint, copying your keys and snooping in your mail. Who needs that risk?

They SHOULD get bad press, their service is MASSIVELY risky.

After this incident I feel very disinclined to rent out my personal residence through Airbnb and I think a lot of people would feel the same way.

Unless they really need the money.

(1) England and Spain were at war around that time (The Spanish Armada sailed in 1588 so maybe change the date to 1600).

(2) England was protestant, Spain was Catholic.

(3) Because of the language difference probably most English couldn't communicate with most Spanish.

I am also taking into account the average modern Swede is probably fairly well educated and relatively liberal.

Of course I may have pushed things a bit to make a rhetorical point ;-)

The assumption seems to be that muslims born, brought up and living in Europe would have the exact same birthrate as if their ancestors who lived in a very different society at a different time.

For that matter, birthrates are plummeting in many developing countries including the middle eastern ones - this is generally not acknowledged in these kind of projections.

I read a lot of arguments about how 'multiculturalism' and 'too many muslims' will lead to loss of social cohesion and lead to inevitable social conflict.

My thought is how come Europe managed to have CENTURIES of warfare (100 years war, 30 years, LOTS of civil wars, World War I, World War I and LOTS more) and most of these conflict were purely intra-Europeans? The Englishman in 1700 saw the Spaniard as being just as foreign as a Swede sees a Muslim today - probably more so if the Muslim lives in Sweden and speaks Swedish.

My point is just that if immigrants didn't exist people would still find something to fight over so this whole "immigrants are the very cause of social conflict" logic seems very dubious to me.

THIS.

A lot of people would be surprised to learn that America in 1500 was arguably less racist than America in 1850 or 1950 simply because the concept of "race" wasn't well established as being a particularly important way to categorize people.

There is a tendency to assume that people always thought in the categories that we use now.

" Honestly, when you hear the phrase 'the world’s best developers,' you see a guy. "

Thats the key right there - women are comfortable competing, they just have a hard time picturing themselves as the alpha geek hacker that this competitive language brings to mind for many people. At least thats how I interpreted it.

Also there are studies that women tend to underestimate their skills while men tend to overestimate them which might also be relevant, see Sheryl Sandberg's commencement address:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AdvXCKFNqTY

Here is one problem with life extension that I haven't seen mentioned - can we just assume that people who grew up in vastly different time periods will just be be able to coexist comfortably?

To give an obvious contemporary example - gay marriage is a lot more controversial among older American voters than younger voters.

Now multiply that times a thousand - what if people who grew up in the time of Christ were still a significant part of the voting population? We can't just assume they'll all become hip techno-libertarian atheists/extropians just because they managed to live long enough. My guess is that they'd have a strong attachment to the values and way of life they grew up with - thus creating potentially bitter conflicts among the different cohorts which might make contemporary domestic politics seem downright friendly.

So while its cool to imagine living indefinitely - it seems to be in many ways healthier for society to have a continuous "purge", to constantly start fresh with new minds that have less baggage from the past.

Also on a personal note - if society in 2,000 years is radically transformed into something I find really bewildering and bizarre - do I really want to be around for that? Of course I would gamely try and adapt, but it might be better for everyone to just leave that future world for people who grew up with it and who find it natural.

Still, I am not any kind of Luddite - if life extension and mind uploading etc. is perfected I won't oppose it - I'll just have a lot of misgivings as will a lot of other people.

Joe Haldeman's "Forever War" has some good exploration of the nature of "Future Shock": http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Forever_War

Actually, now that I think about it, if this whole scenario actually happens the best thing might be to maintain separate societies for people born in different time periods, which can communicate and interact but which operate relatively independently.(e.g. Being gay might be illegal in the 1000 CE society but being straight could be illegal in the 3000 CE area!) That might be the only way to keep some relative peace.

Hi crazygringo,

I was intrigued by your estimation procedure and was thinking of a way of playing around with it:

(1) Create a random bit vector of size 45,000. (2) Pick 40 positions in the vector at random and use those positions to estimate the proportion of ones in the original bit vector (so far this is easy). (3) Select an additional 120 positions and use the more sophisticated procedure to refine the estimate from part (2).

I was wondering if you have code or pseudo-code for how you implemented part(3) specifically how you choose the 120 words for extra testing. It seems there are a lot of different natural ways you can do it. Did you write an academic paper about this?

Thanks!

My PhD was in computer science and my experience was quite similar.

I wrote probably around 3000 lines of code on 4 separate projects (mostly MATLAB, C and Java). This code was never shared with anyone, my advisors were not interested in the code, all they cared about were the results. To be honest it wasn't very good code, I would have a hard time understanding it now (although I could probably figure it out eventually).

And after I graduated I took the code with me and I am the only person who ever verified the working of the code.

This bothers me on some level, since no one can really verify and inspect the results of my publications (unless they tracked me down to ask me for the code some of which has been lost) - but it is pretty much the norm in my field.

There was an interesting discussion about this on the Theoretical Computer Science Stackoverflow a while back:

http://cstheory.stackexchange.com/questions/5361/code-in-aca...

Bottomline: Yes, we should probably do it (especially in areas where the research is simulation and the code encapsulates all the results) but we probably won't unless we're pushed.

They used PPP for the GDP per person comparison (but not for the GDP)

They are not trying to say Qatar is generally comparable to Uttar Pradesh, just pointing out that it has the same nominal GDP. This can be interpreted in any number of ways but that is all that the chart claims to show.

And of course they did a similar thing with United States and China:

http://www.economist.com/blogs/dailychart/2011/01/comparing_...

http://www.economist.com/content/chinese_equivalents

The entire success of Khan Academy rests on providing simple quick introductions to different topics. If Khan made the videos longer or went into more details the students would get bored and it might as well be a History channel documentary or a NOVA science show (fun for certain people but unlikely to capture the interest of many 8th graders).

As to this specific video I actually thought it was very good - precisely because of Khan's conversational breezy style that managed to keep my interest even though I was quite familiar with these events. A longer lecture would have me closing the tab pretty quick and I imagine the same reaction from the target audience.

Lastly, Khan Academy videos in their current form are probably not going to replace the entire educational system, but if you want to get a quick introduction to a certain topic they seem to be effective. For example I just watched this video a few minutes ago and approximately doubled my knowledge of diabetes: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rPLjSY00JlE and I would guess some of the viewers have similar increases in their knowledge in other topics. THAT is where Khan Academy currently excels and it is a perfectly worthwhile contribution.

In Norway all tax returns are public: http://skattelister.no/

In fact I just looked up an old high school classmate and was initially surprised at how much she was making - until I realized 280,000 Kronor is only about 50,000 USD.

This paper fills a much needed gap in the literature.