I opened a 2007 with a synthetic cork a couple nights ago. It was great. I can't say if they hold up well for decades, but I've encountered no problems with them in the <10 year time scale.
"Having a space to work that you can ignore people is key to getting work done. Constantly being interrupted by people you live with or other people will kill your productivity."
"We wrote the first scoring algorithm at Goalee based on the red-green light. Within a couple of weeks we made our first algorithmic change, and made several quick fix releases to update the scoring methods in the following weeks. By the end of the month, a whole section of our testing suite was almost completely worthless. In a world where cash is king, I wouldn’t mind having those dollars back."
What I don't understand about comments like this is that a whole section of your code, both runtime / deliverable code and test code had become worthless. But, you only seem to view the discarded test code as wasted effort. Either the tests have value or they don't. And, if you write tests, and then discard the code they test, you'll likely also discard the tests. But, that doesn't change whether or not the tests had value, nor whether the new tests that you'll write for the new code have value.
> What I don't understand about comments like this is that a whole section of your code, both runtime / deliverable code and test code had become worthless
Not so. The code demonstrated that the first algorithm wasn't good enough and provided the experience needed to write the second one. The tests (hopefully) made the first algorithm's code maintainable, but it turns out there was no need to maintain it.
You're arguing against a strawman. The article states that no one is suggesting that students not learn Standard American English. The point it is making is that it is more useful in teaching SAE to recognize that some students arrive at school speaking a different dialect rather than with an incorrect understanding of SAE, and that acknowledging that explicitly is more productive than telling them never to speak their home language.
>>and that acknowledging that explicitly is more productive than telling them never to speak their home language.
Home Language... Hahahahahahahahah. Seriously, you guys need to lower the BS. It is no more a language then the Spanish Puerto Ricans speak (Some people claim Puerto Ricans speak a dialect of Spanish. Seriously, what the hell? I've had to argue with people that it is just a different accent and some of them are simply mispronouncing some words because of the accent which they quickly loose if they go international). I have a bridge to sell all of you.
You sound far stupider than someone speaking Ebonics, and all else equal, I would certainly hire an intelligent and peceptive Ebonics speaker and than someone who displays muddled thinking in grammatical SE.
While parents do, of course, have a huge impact on their children, I think it's overly simplistic to lay the ultimate responsibility at their feet. As raganwald points out (in the other direction), when there are feedback loops at play, the system can re-enforce other traits than you might hope for. Parents with no education in nutrition or no real supermarkets in their neighborhood can't be expected to feed their children well. A father in prison will have highly limited influence on his children. A teenage girl with limited access to contraceptives or abortion (or sex education) may end up a mother well before she's financially, emotionally, or intellectually prepared to perform that job well. Low-income, blue-collar communities may have perverse incentives to tie their children to their existing social and economic status, and resent and resist "modern society" in it's various guises.
Which is to say, I don't think you can approach this from a purely reductionist viewpoint. Yes, a given institution is limited to a degree by its inputs, but it's also the case that each component has the potential to make improvements, even if marginal.
I didn't mean to say only one is responsible; this is in the context of raganwald's essay about how quality meritocracies (presumably not needing much improvement) don't choose the best because they only maximize their inputs and don't necessarily work with all of those with the most potential. So I wrote about improving the inputs by examining the prior systems.
What I completely missed, and what you alluded to by mentioning people in prison, with bad parents, and so on, is that the present generation of families also have inputs -- the systems that they went through (education, military, commerce, etc.) and their own parents. The issues we have today are partly the results of mistakes made by parents living a hundred, five hundred, even a thousand years ago.
It's a depressing thought when expressed that way, but on the bright side, if we do as well as we can given our limited inputs today, we at least give the next generation of parents, teachers and employers a chance to do better than we could possibly have done.
"Unmarried twenty-somethings are more likely to be depressed, drink excessively, and report lower levels of satisfaction than their married counterparts"
Let's all say it together: Correlation is not causation.
I've seen elsewhere that financial troubles often herald divorce. If the only marriages that can last are ones where someone's making a premium, then of course you'll see one.
I'm sorry, but that seems to be about earnings, not about happiness or drinking habits. Am I missing something? (It also says that women experience a penalty, whereas the original article asserts positive correlations for both men and women.)
The alternative theory being (1) that marriage causes men to invest more in their jobs and women to invest more in children, but (2) that the correlation between women's marriage with happiness, and between the historical decline of marriage and raising of children with increasing female unhappiness, is acausal?
Unfortunately, making understanding the real world is not easily reducible to propositional logic. Since you seem interested in pedantry, the technical thing to say is that you must use Bayesian inference and reasonable priors.
In this case, explanations for A and C being correlated without A causing C are strongly related to explanations for why A and B might be correlated without A causing B. (E.g., people who get married are predisposed to be successful.) Evidence, which necessarily can't be in the form of a randomized controlled experiment and yet can still be very strong, that A in fact causes B greatly reduces ones belief that A might not be causing C. My previous comment was asking whether you would defend alternatives that I find to be very unlikely, like a hypothetical predisposition for people to both get married and be happy but which is completely independent from the increase in earnings.
Since we're talking about belief rather than what we can prove, I think it's extremely plausible for the causation in question to go the other way. Given the choice, would you rather date / marry someone who was happy and healthy or someone who was depressed and drinks too much?
All science is about belief. Randomized controlled trials are useful not because they convey mathematical proof, but because they give strong evidence for beliefs.
Your question doesn't help. For the sake of argument we have granted that marriage causes men to earn more money. And yet, I would still prefer to marry someone who was earning more money (or who had the potential to earn more in the future), all else being equal. This preference doesn't dispute the causation.
The causation could easily be backwards. Who wants to marry a depressed, unsatisfied drinker?
> Isn't it generally sound to assume causation until the position can be falsified?
Not really, no. Would you assume causation in the case of cereal consumption typically increasing 30% on the first Tuesday after a heavy rainfall? There are many similarly insane correlations that you wouldn't be so quick to assume causation about. It's biased to assume causation (based solely on statistics) when you want it to make intuitive sense.
>Would you assume causation in the case of cereal consumption typically increasing 30% on the first Tuesday after a heavy rainfall? //
I can't really conjure an imaginary causation because for your imagined one [?] I'm not sure what your claim is - do you mean 30% more breakfast cereal is eaten (as opposed to purchased) on the Tuesday following heavy rain, in all areas (globally??). If it were a local statistic to the USA then one could argue that when the weather is bad people stay in at the weekends and drink more, then they miss breakfast on a Monday because they're hungover, then on Tuesday they resolve to better health and so eat breakfast cereals, they of course give up on Wednesday on the whole and the cycle repeats.
There are no real causes for imagined realities so there is no gain in asking - or answering - the question if it is indeed made up.
It's entirely plausible that there is an explanation for a similarly absurd sounding but real statistic that relies on causation.
>you wouldn't be so quick to assume //
You're right, I try not assume much but FWIW I only asked if it were sound or not, not if one were likely to do it.
You say it's "biased", I don't understand what you mean. If you always assumed a causative chain when first encountering [direct, gross, longitudinal] correlation where would the bias lie?
Because unhappy people aren't fun to be around, so people don't choose to marry them? Or because depressed people are negative about their relationships, just like anything else, so don't see them as worth pursuing? It's really not hard to conjecture mechanisms for a correlation.
Absolutely not as assuming causation implies you know the directionality of the relationship. Cancer correlates pretty well with old age but you'd be pretty silly to assume that it causes old age.
By "assume causation" I meant "assume there is a causative link", which for cancer appears to be true to a degree. So if I specify and say "is it sound to assume a causative link [without specifying the cause and effect direction or that link] where a strong direct correlation is observed" (or similar wording) would you go for that?
There are many examples of course to prompt this clarification - fatness causes over-eating, bruises cause people to get hit, et cetera. There are also likely many examples where the direction of the causation is not clear - poverty and [minor] theft say.
Can you [or anyone] give an example where a causative relationship as a first hypothesis is ludicrous without questioning direction of the relationship?
I agree. Someone already in that situation will not be less depressed or more satisfied just by getting married. If anything, that's likely to make it worse in most cases.
There are a few paradigms I can think of off the top of my head that support it:
-The idea of 'temporary insanity' or 'diminished capacity' in our legal system. When invoked, it normally asserts that a situation was so overwhelming that the subject couldn't react as they normally would. The 'heat of passion' and all that. This implies that generally, we can control our reactions to most things, and uncontrollable reactions are the exception.
-The field of cognitive behavioral therapy, which does has scientific evidence of effectiveness [0], see cites. Perhaps 'control your reaction to anything' is less-than-supported in the case of CBT, but combined with point 1 that should be more than enough to get you started.
I don't think the law can be submitted as scientific evidence. (One generally hopes the law is informed by scientific evidence, but even that isn't a given.)
Fundamentally, my point was that there's no scientific basis I can imagine for the idea of free-will, in humans or anywhere else. There's simply no physical law that enables it. (It is, of course, an immensely useful fiction, but that's not my point, which was rather that the entire question of "how to behave rationally" seems to rest on an irrational basis.)
This article very early makes the statement that "while getting offended by something sometimes feels good and can help you assert moral superiority, in most cases it doesn't help you figure out what the world looks like." Implicit in this statement is that "figur[ing] out what the world looks like" -- and then accepting that status quo -- is, or ought to be, the goal of all people.
However, assuming one has an understanding of the status quo, and a desire to change it, "getting offended" can be a useful, and rational, response. (I include the quotes because there is an amount of subjectivity in what various people label as "getting offended".) In particular, such responses can serve to educate other people about behaviors which perpetuate the aspects of the status quo which the expresser desires to change.
So, while this article presents itself as a highly rational and neutral argument, embedded within it is actually a deeply conservative point of view.
> Implicit in this statement is that "figur[ing] out what the world looks like" -- and then accepting that status quo -- is, or ought to be, the goal of all people.
The article is from lesswrong.com, where everyone focuses very much on figuring out facts, and less so on most of the other things that matter in life. In addition, by "facts" or "what the world looks like" they mean scientifically verifiable facts first and foremost. I don't think a lot of people would have a problem with the "status quo" if by that phrase you meant F=ma or E=mc^2.
In fact, I would say that the article (and the lesswrong.com community as a whole) subscribes to a radically progressive point of view, where any and every social institution (and our emotional attachments to them) should be subjected to rigorous scrutiny based on facts. The author will probably take issue with your assumption -- "assuming one has an understanding of the status quo" -- since, in his/her opinion, whether or not you actually have an understanding of facts is exactly what we're trying to figure out in the first place.
I'm not sure whether having such a hyper-critical point of view is actually better than having a conservative bias -- after all, there are other things that matter in life -- but in any case I think you missed the context.
Less Wrong is a place where folks try to discuss things with a high degree of technical accuracy. For example, if a respondent were to disagree with the linked article, they would try to avoid making an outrageously stupid claim such as "Implicit in this statement...[is] accepting the status quo"--which is in NO WAY implied by the article--and then smugly toppling the argument that no one made. Derailing conversations like that is a waste of everyone's time.
I imagine a world, the world I would like to live in, where people didn't attempt to manipulate disagreements or indeed policy discussions by appeals to emotion. I want to live in a world where it's taken for granted that you can advocate for a position through a calm meeting of minds. I'm an extremely emotional person and can reconcile the search for unbiased truth--which includes my actions and the polices of my communities coming to reflect that truth--with living an emotional life just fine, since emotion is not the opposite of reason that many people try to claim it is. Mainly the people I see making this claim are those who would like to substitute emotional manipulation for making a rational case.
"figur[ing] out what the world looks like" -- and then accepting that status quo -- is, or ought to be, the goal of all people
I don't see where the article says that you have to accept what the world looks like once you figure it out. Figuring out that the world is f--ked up and deciding to try and change it based on that knowledge is, it seems to me, perfectly consistent with what the article is saying.
such responses can serve to educate other people about behaviors which perpetuate the aspects of the status quo which the expresser desires to change
The article talks about this, under the heading of using "getting offended" to manipulate people. It's different because you are choosing to act offended to accomplish a goal, rather than involuntarily responding to something by being offended, even if it hinders you from accomplishing a goal.
It is somewhat difficult to divine the precise intent of the author of the article, or of the submitter of the article to HN; but I think it's important to acknowledge that some people are going to use this article to criticize and dismiss anyone who "gets offended" as someone who hasn't reached a certain ideal of detachment. Your very statement that you think it's okay to "act offended", as opposed to "getting offended", gets to my point of the subjective nature of the issue.
That's an important point to raise. There's another post (came across it reading the lesswrong.com comments to the submitted article) on how teaching about biases in the wrong order can lead to negative effects. http://lesswrong.com/lw/he/knowing_about_biases_can_hurt_peo....
As I let the words roll of my tongue, "acting offended" sounds just awful doesn't it? Only a Machiavelli would admit to acting offended to achieve their aims! "Getting offended" needs to be seen to be from the heart - as if you really had been torn kicking and screaming from the womb of rational detachment. Effecting this obviously requires extremely good acting.
Being offended is a good tool. It is much better tool when used logically and by choice. Don't think of it as acting in a performer sense, think of it as acting in a sense of taking actions.
There doesn't need to be any disingenuity there, it can be an honest response even though it is a logical choice to display that response.
Agreed. 'Accepting' doesn't even mean you have to like it. It's aligning your perceptions with reality. To get more mileage out of this horse, if you accept (especially if you are initially offended at the notion) that the world is unjust in its treatment of women, minorities, the poor, the rich, etc., then you can rationally determine if or how you can work to correct it.
Bullshit. You have to understand things, and particularly understand how things work, if you want to change them without making a hash of everything. Any programmer should know that by now.
There's a very important distinction between "ought" statements and "is" statements. Getting offended is a fallacy if it causes you to miss that distinction.
In practice, if you're blinded by outrage, you won't even be able to judge what to be outraged at, and then you'll be played for a fool.
There's very little advantage to responding to something with true emotional offence. Displaying offence to others can be a useful tool in pushing for change, but discussing something rationally is almost always a better choice.
If someone appears to be irrationally offended by something you said or did, you make a mental note not to say or do that to them again. If the offense appears to me to be irrational and no discussion of why it's offensive takes place, it doesn't change my overall behaviour. It doesn't change my belief that my action wasn't offensive. It makes me think that person is irrational.
To change someone's attitude to something you need to discuss it with them. You need to demonstrate to them why the attitude they hold might be harmful. Taking offence doesn't do that.
To change the status quo, you must find out what it is first. The idea that is deeply conservative is the opposite: that people are better off in ignorance of what the world looks like.
Implicit in this statement is that "figur[ing] out what the world looks like" -- and then accepting that status quo -- is, or ought to be, the goal of all people.
At least the first part seems like a perfectly fine goal. You can't know what needs fixing if you don't know what's broken. Even if you know what you want something to look like, you can't know how to get there if you don't know where we are.
