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Patrick Collison's Questions

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Re: Patrick Collison's Questions

#61

Post by vore »

verroq wrote: post #29
akirakurusu wrote: post #18

"Why are so many things so much nicer in Switzerland and Japan?" Figuring out why this is without fully attributing it to culture has been of great fascination to me. It really is mindblowing just how _good_ things are in Japan, perhaps they're just highly optimized for tourism? The cleanliness, the service, the great care people place in doing things and in their work is just amazing. Anyone here have more insights…

Ethno states with shared culture and little internal division due to racial tensions tend to run quite well. See: China, Korea, Norway, Denmark, Czech republic

Pretty sure China's not an ethnostate, as much as the CPC would want it to be, and pretty sure the lack of internal division is from their atrocious suppression of minority groups.

Re: Patrick Collison's Questions

#62

Post by zuhayeer »

I find the replacement rate question really interesting. Is there an aligned way we can allow companies to decay once they have stalled in innovation? What do we do about companies that have reached a point of monopolistic advantage but provide no real new innovation (PG&E comes to mind)? In some cases like Internet access, is competition the only driver of affordability or do we eventually have to find a way to regulate pricing on things that evolve to become general public needs. This question likely comes up a lot in healthcare and pharma, but I'm not sure there's a good answer. It's sort of muddled in between providing enough incentive to creators to start things and ensuring that once things do get created, that privatized commercial interest doesn't work to remove the very value it helped create (which happens when the company stops innovating).

Re: Patrick Collison's Questions

#63

Post by mef »

verroq wrote: post #29
akirakurusu wrote: post #18

"Why are so many things so much nicer in Switzerland and Japan?" Figuring out why this is without fully attributing it to culture has been of great fascination to me. It really is mindblowing just how _good_ things are in Japan, perhaps they're just highly optimized for tourism? The cleanliness, the service, the great care people place in doing things and in their work is just amazing. Anyone here have more insights…

Ethno states with shared culture and little internal division due to racial tensions tend to run quite well. See: China, Korea, Norway, Denmark, Czech republic

if you care to look you'll find it's often at the expense of those who aren't part of the homogenous culture. It can be hidden or minimized, but it doesn't make it go away.

Re: Patrick Collison's Questions

#64

Post by ISL »

mark4 wrote: post #41
ISL wrote: post #28

On the Chinese research question: Just wait a decade. In all likelihood, I am permanently departing academia in about a month. The underlying reason is structural -- neither our funding agency nor our institution is willing to yield on a fundamental sticking point that is causing all of our young researchers to leave. I am about to join them. There is literally no path forward. In the decade that I have watched my wo…

Your answer resonated with me a lot. Can you elaborate on this? What is that structural reason? > The underlying reason is structural -- neither our funding agency nor our institution is willing to yield on a fundamental sticking point that is causing all of our young researchers to leave.

The National Science Foundation (for good reasons) will not fund more than a month or two of a Principal Investigator's annual salary. They'll fund many other types of position, but not that one.

Our University (for good reasons) is reticent to hire into faculty positions, where the state/university would fund a PI's salary. Furthermore, any research professors must fund themselves through grants.

NSF is the only serious game in town for our grant funding.

Even though we have the country's best infrastructure for these experiments, are leaders in our field, can attract grants, and have done so since 1987, we haven't been institutionally capable of retaining promising early/mid-career researchers since ~1999.

The big losers in this situation are the country's experimental capability and science in general. We easily have at least another decade's advances ahead of us. The issue isn't really one of total amounts of funding, but rather whether we are allowed to invest in retaining skilled and knowledgeable leadership.

Re: Patrick Collison's Questions

#65

Post by bohemian99 »

hn_throwaway_99 wrote: post #47
pchristensen wrote: post #30

"Why are certain things getting so much more expensive?" That list is pretty much rank ordered by the amount of non-substitutable human labor involved per unit. Everything in red is a pretty universal need (health, education, child care, housing, food), while the blues are mostly wants. So we want medical care, but that requires a lot of labor, and each of those workers requires housing, but that's supply constrained…

The answer linked to in Collison's question, https://medium.com/@arnoldkling/what-gets-expensive-and-why-... , is really insightful and interesting in my opinion and goes to a deep level of analysis.

Exactly- people don't/can't really comparison shop when it comes to medical procedures. They don't know how good their doctors are at it, this is all unpublished information.

Similarly college textbooks- if your professors assigns work from their book, then you need that book. You can't competitively shop on that.

As the response points out, all of these groups and then backed by accreditation systems to limit new entrants.

Re: Patrick Collison's Questions

#66

Post by actuator »

donw wrote: post #20
akirakurusu wrote: post #18

"Why are so many things so much nicer in Switzerland and Japan?" Figuring out why this is without fully attributing it to culture has been of great fascination to me. It really is mindblowing just how _good_ things are in Japan, perhaps they're just highly optimized for tourism? The cleanliness, the service, the great care people place in doing things and in their work is just amazing. Anyone here have more insights…

I live in Japan, and have for about a decade. You're bang-on when it comes to culture, but it has nothing to do with being optimized for tourism. Japan is a very conservative country. Change happens slowly here, and Japan does a lot to ensure that people raised here share a common culture, with a strong focus on stability and harmony. To provide some examples: - NHK, the national broadcaster, has several series of po…

Few questions, would be glad if anyone can answer these:

- Would you know of good companies which have a good work life balance in Japan?

- I know among the big tech, Microsoft and Google have offices there. Both seem to pay well as well. Do they have similar WLB as their US offices?

- I have heard of racism, like certain apartments being off limits for non Japanese people. Some clubs only allowing white caucasians among foreigners. How true is this in your experience?

- I have no problem in learning Japanese over time, but without it at the start, is it very difficult to get by?

- Do most people live in Tokyo/Kyoto(where Tech companies seem to be) itself or can you live a bit in outskirts(a bit of greenery) and commute using the fast public transport?

Re: Patrick Collison's Questions

#67

Post by bohemian99 »

tylermenezes wrote: post #59
ajju wrote: post #5

“ Is Bloom's "Two Sigma" phenomenon real? If so, what do we do about it? Educational psychologist Benjamin Bloom found that one-on-one tutoring using mastery learning led to a two sigma(!) improvement in student performance. The results were replicated. " Does anyone know if this also true of learning & development in companies? For example sales training or training

I'm personally pretty confident that with the level of resources now available for learning almost anything online, you can replicate a lot of the benefits of tutoring by (1) getting students excited about a topic and then (2) teaching them the basic keywords and research skills for that topic. (We've seen a lot of success with this model at CodeDay, n~50,000. It was very exciting when we first tried this as a legiti…

Keeping and maintaining that excitement for self-driven learning is the most challenging part.

Re: Patrick Collison's Questions

#68

Post by verroq »

vore wrote: post #61
verroq wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ethno states with shared culture and little internal division due to racial tensions tend to run quite well. See: China, Korea, Norway, Denmark, Czech republic

Pretty sure China's not an ethnostate, as much as the CPC would want it to be, and pretty sure the lack of internal division is from their atrocious suppression of minority groups.

China is still vast majority Han Chinese, with 55 minorities. It does not invalidate the point.

Re: Patrick Collison's Questions

#69

Post by actuator »

vore wrote: post #61
verroq wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ethno states with shared culture and little internal division due to racial tensions tend to run quite well. See: China, Korea, Norway, Denmark, Czech republic

Pretty sure China's not an ethnostate, as much as the CPC would want it to be, and pretty sure the lack of internal division is from their atrocious suppression of minority groups.

Doesn't make what he said false though. If your state caters to mostly the wishes of the 93% majority suppressing others, you can effectively consider it to be an ethnostate for arguments.

Re: Patrick Collison's Questions

#70

Post by actuator »

bawolff wrote: post #48
verroq wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ethno states with shared culture and little internal division due to racial tensions tend to run quite well. See: China, Korea, Norway, Denmark, Czech republic

Counterpoint: North Korea.

I am sometimes baffled at how the leaders at NK can't have a look at just down the DMZ and see what they could have. The difference in social indicators is magnitudes better. Their ideology has been proven so wrong. I wonder what will take them to just give up.

If they are worried about punishments for what they have done, they could just cut a deal to let them have a lot of assets and be immune from judgement against past crimes.

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