yarky

> "... What matters are connections, professional experience, and the ability to raise large sums of money."

That's kinda true about everything though and it's called business. I still remember a speaker from my stem undergrad first year who came in and asked whether we were more interested in :

A. Learning stem theories. B. Making money.

Maybe 3 out of 100 raised their hands to go with option B. Most of us where like, this guy doesn't know we're not in a business school right...

It took me a long time to realize it's all about business :/

I really like armadillo's syntax, it feels like your doing R/Matlab.

> Some then have it beaten out of them by a slow, routine, inhuman education system that crushes individual creativity.

...created by/for those who are trying to get it, not by those who did.

> Everything I do day-to-day is either stuff that I need to do to pay the bills and support my family

That's the universal trap.

> people like Feynman are born with a burning passion for learning that most people just don't have.

I am not sure about that. I'd say most people lose sight of their true passion. Mine happened to be programming, which now helps me pay my bills. But I'd be screwed if my true passion was drawing...

Wait, I used to love drawing, until I took drawing "lessons".

> Now, at halfway through my 50s, I would not be able to answer the standard interview question "what are you passionate about?"

I once heard this logic which did guide me a lot : if you were older (say 80), what would yo regret not having even tried ? If you haven't even tried, let's try.

“The only way to deep happiness is to do something you love to the best of your ability.”

That's sums it up pretty well.

> The unstructured doctor's notes may be where the best signal lies.

Or where the raw data is corrupted ...

> it doesn't help that almost nobody learned R as their first computer (as opposed to statistics) language.

Aside from two statisticians I had as professors, I am yet to meet someone with deep understanding of statistics who doesn't speak R as first language ...

I found it way easier to grasp the meaning of statistics by playing with R than by reading the maths.

I've had to translate a lot of Matlab to R in college (physics and econometrics).

I rarely found an important difference between the languages besides having to transpose some matrices here and there.

Mind giving an example ? The only time I faced this was due to an autoregressive model, which was super easy to delegate to c++.

I've been working with Python for the last year and appreciate how much it helps with general IT problems, but I would still stick to R for statistical/data analysis.

> they just have enough money and culture to escape the label.

Exactly. But isn't that true about everything ? Isn't economic/cultural capital what makes us call someone a Doctor/Sir? An expat/immigrant ?

> is a certain obstinacy to not "go native", to maintain a separatedness from the local culture even after years or decades.

Not exactly, I've met tons of immigrants who never wanted to "go native" as well as several expats who adopted their new culture as theirs.

All of this happens in people's minds and whether they ever end up leaving isn't really in the equation.

> one person can not create as much value as 3 other reasonably competent ones.

That's the key behind that reasoning : If your so skillful, go right ahead and create your own business. Otherwise, it's your place in the hierarchy which dictates your salary.

Exactly, that's one of the main issues I encountered in "academia" : you're expected to play along and ignore cheating because the goal is to have more students for as long as possible, not less.

> Pre-Columbian societies (e.g., Actecs) were quite fond of gold for jewelry, but were puzzled by the Spanish fetish for it.

At the beginning, but later they realized what was going on. They first "traded" their gold for mirrors, a new technology to them. Once they learnt that gold could be easily created by humans they stopped and started to hide their gold. Eventually it became clear what they were there for : to steal their gold. It ended, of course, in a war.

They even got a saying out of it in Spanish : "El vivo vive del bobo". It's sad but empirically true.

So we must trust that money printing is better, yet I have not seen any evidence of such a system being any better for average people than a gold-based system.

Do you mind explaining with an example what could potentially happen ? I don't see it. This is all I see :

1. Group A has tons of gold because it's the ultimate (physical) store of value. Group B has nothing.

2. Group B gets nano bits of gold in exchange for goods/labor.

3. Group A realizes the limits of their wealth.

4. Group A tries to convince group B of exchanging back their nano bits of gold for nano bits of paper + x%. They can also exchange their land and other assets for micro bits of paper + y%.

5. The system falls, everybody and nobody get blamed with no-one taking financial responsibility.

6. Group B ends up with tons of paper, zero assets and zero gold.

...

This has already happened several times and even though it's quite unlike in a modern economy, it looks like the world's historical evidence does not support the theory that this is any better for average people holding average nano bits of gold.

> Would you say that there isn't a housing shortage?

There isn't, the problem is everybody thinks they must be owners despite their financials. Truth is, offer is limited because not everyone can afford a house in most cities.

From a bank perspective, the bank wants more from both sides : deposits and loans and that's the truth driving the "demand" : let's give away more loans !

> broken enough to not be usable without buying premium support or the enterprise edition.

How does kubernets do this ? I haven't hit that spot yet but I'm pretty sure I will.

I guess I'll also find an open source solution to avoid switching licenses.

> as the historical record in the US shows; see the first chart.

The Greeks didn't print money out of paper. But let's be us-centric and focus on a short span of history to keep your point.

> a monetary system based on fixed currency often leads make deflation a problem for the average person

Why is this a problem? The problems arise from rising prices not the contrary.

Yeah we've moved on for a reason : to print more "money".

After years in finance/economics, I've never heard a real argument against deflation. It all comes down to : trust me it's better. And that's why we use fiat currencies, "trust".

I don't get what's so confusing about gold. It's limited because it was created by the universe and it can be easily stored. If we had some gold-backed system, a real one, then where's the inflation ? Where's the problem for the average person ?

Next time just fill out the "forgot your password" form.

Well now you make me wonder if there's some noble technology I don't know about. Oh wait, are they still running on mainframes and will just switch to aws, is that the whole CBDC point ?

Ok that one was a joke, but I am honestly curious about your literature review since all I see are banks trying to upgrade old databases, yet relying on the same old economic principles.

Cheating is a serious issue, but you won't stop it relying on more potential cheaters.

And out of curiosity, what's been making you feel so safe around ATMs since 1982? COBOL ?

I agree, they'll just use a blockchain to replace some old database and that's it, let's digitally print some more ...

I agree, I also expected the whole office365 ecosystem to do what's supposed to, but I also found it useless due to the slowness and errors the whole team kept getting while working on the same file. That and the fact that it somehow feels like the Mac version of their products always comes with a bonus bug. Don't event get me started on their web versions.

It's the little things...

I was actually surprised : last time I used Git Bash on Windows it did work quite well with .docx files.

Then I switched jobs to avoid touching .docx files ...

The best alternative I've found to generate .docx output is R markdown, which uses pandoc under the hood and let's you program the whole document the way LaTeX would.

> to prevent those from looking even worse and causing more permanent damage to the economy.

What makes you think that temporary measures will avoid a permanent impact on the economy ? These measures only delayed the impact.

What's the logic here? Do you somehow think that taxes will encourage innovation ?

Anybody can compete, but apparently most of us choose not to. Who forces a young talent to settle for a job instead of taking the risk to innovate ? Maybe risk-taking for innovation is what could be the encouraged through taxation.

That’s why they say Bayesians can’t be atheists by definition. At least that’s how all atheists in my stats 101 class starting calling themselves agnostic. Another way to put it I learnt in a finance class : financial models behave alright, the problem comes from our lack of imagination, i.e. assigning a null probability to a future event :/

> I have no idea how people can ignore evidence they dislike so easily.

Isn’t this the natural response to the unknown? Denial? I guess not everyone likes Bayes’ theorem!

Way better than the n=30 they teach in stats 101 anyways

Not sure what your point is, but that's exactly how surveys work : take a sample of size n (10000) and do some statistical inference based on the observed statistic, i.e. either reject or accept a hypothesis based on the sample.