Patrick Collison's Questions • Hacker News Board

Re: Patrick Collison's Questions

#131

Post by raverbashing » Mon, Aug 24, 2020, 5:26 AM UTC

calinet6 wrote: post #103

paxys wrote: post #97

The infrastructure one really stands out to me, and I'm always astounded by it. Adding yet another example - The Golden Gate Bridge was built in 4 years for $1.6 billion (inflation adjusted), under budget and ahead of schedule. 11 workers died during construction, a safety record matching or surpassing most modern projects. In contrast, a project to install suicide nets around the bridge has been under development fo…

I would bet it’s tied to the neglect of work in both real wages and respect for workers. We no longer take pride in work. We pay people less and make them compete for the mere privilege of holding a job. Then, we tell them what to do, disrespecting their intelligence and autonomy and ability to make something they can be proud of. For the brilliance of this strategy, we pay leaders ten times more than we did before,…

And we let more politicians have a hand at bikeshedding the project (to their interests, of course)

Re: Patrick Collison's Questions

#132

Post by raverbashing » Mon, Aug 24, 2020, 5:28 AM UTC

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…

And to be fair that graph is weird

-100%? If something lost 100% of its value it is now free? I don't think TVs are free now.

Re: Patrick Collison's Questions

#133

Post by gorgoiler » Mon, Aug 24, 2020, 5:28 AM UTC

bryant wrote: post #3

> How do people decide to make major life changes? Most days, people don't decide to change their lives in big ways. On a few days, they do. What's special about those days? How much is it about the stimulus versus their own inner state? A recognition of self was what it took for me. Changed my life situation pretty recently for the better after a realization following a personal conversation with a close friend. The…

This is a very heartening comment to read and I would love to know more, or to receive advice to be pointed in the same direction as you.

Re: Patrick Collison's Questions

#134

Post by icelancer » Mon, Aug 24, 2020, 5:30 AM UTC

asah wrote: post #89

drcode wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree Japan is awesome (visited twice) but let's not overlook this: https://www.businessinsider.com/world-suicide-rate-map-2014-...

Or homogeneity.

It's shocking how HN is just overlooking this trait in addition to the very many related things in this regard that we would consider in America VERY "right-wing" to put it kindly. Having Japanese family members over there and listening to their remarks amuses me since I hear their candid opinions on race and such, but uh... Americans who idolize the country and identify as "progressive" or "liberal" would probably do well to think a bit more before praising their society while condemning the conservative wing of the US political alignment.

Re: Patrick Collison's Questions

#135

Post by raverbashing » Mon, Aug 24, 2020, 5:31 AM UTC

sudhirj wrote: post #27

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

Feels like the Khan Academy apps do something like this. You progress through a tree of knowledge and can’t move to any next node until you master the one you’re on, demonstrated by solving problems. It also gives you all the help you need to achieve that mastery.

> and can’t move to any next node until you master the one you’re on

Oh that's the absolute worse way of teaching people (or, ok, that's my pet peeve in education)

"but how do you expect to learn stuff without knowing the basics blah blah blah" well, because maybe actually knowing how it is used in the end helps with learning. Instead education seems to focus on wasting a lot of time with "basics" disconnected from reality then finally teaching things how it is.

Re: Patrick Collison's Questions

#136

Post by hyperpallium2 » Mon, Aug 24, 2020, 5:32 AM UTC

  Is Bloom's "Two Sigma" phenomenon real? If so, what do we do about it?

"the average tutored student was above 98% of the students in the control class"[1]

As a tutor, my goal was to identify gaps and misunderstandings. Consider: how can you give a driver helpful directions if you don't know where they are?

As a student, I noticed that teachers are routinely ambiguous in ways they cannot understand. And mostly, these alternative interpretations work... mostly. So when they cause problems many layers later, the learner can see no clues to the cause. But an attentive tutor can.

Subtle gaps and misunderstanding have an outsize effect, and maybe could account for 2σ?

OTOH teachers accidentally trained me to disentangle ambiguity, and that is a valuable real-world skill.

The mentor relationship has magic in it and I remember the moment I learnt certain things. So maybe social aspects contribute too, as wiki suggests.

What to do? Like mandatory military service, mandatory tutoring service. We appear to be wasting obscene quanities of human capital. Imagine the economic productivity unleashed by a more fully realized workforce.

PS did pc receive one-on-one tutoring? Intelligent parents often tutor their children, conferring this outsize headstart.

https://wikipedia.org/wiki/Bloom%27s_2_sigma_problem

Re: Patrick Collison's Questions

#137

Post by raverbashing » Mon, Aug 24, 2020, 5:35 AM UTC

ghaff wrote: post #56

kevindong wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've only been to Switzerland once and that was during a When I pay for something with an American credit card in Europe, the machine prints out a receipt for me to sign. I was buying a snack at a store in the Zurich airport and the clerk actually compared the signature on the back of my card to the signature that I scrawled on the receipt. That was the one and only time I've ever had someone do that. I generally don…

So they have an archaic system that requires comparing a signature? I'm pretty sure I couldn't match my credit card unless I were trying to do it while looking at the card signature. I hardly consider that a benefit. And I've been through Zurich. I don't consider it anything special better or worse than going through most major European or American airports. [Oh. I take that back. I had my luggage lost on the way the…

No the archaic part of the system is actually the American Credit Cards

And to add about Zurich airport, it is indeed very nice but the price of things isn't.

Re: Patrick Collison's Questions

#138

Post by hn_throwaway_99 » Mon, Aug 24, 2020, 5:37 AM UTC

paxys wrote: post #128

hn_throwaway_99 wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So, in other words, your statement "a safety record matching or surpassing most modern projects" is something you made up. Bringing up the stadium in Qatar only further highlights that point: I remember that building project getting tons of press outlining how shockingly bad the safety record was compared to what should be expected.

Take some time to research safety and deaths in large construction projects happening today at the scale of bridging the Golden Gate back in the 1930s. E.g. Channel tunnel - 10 deaths, Panama Canal Expansion - 7, Three Gorges Dam - 100+, Gotthard Base Tunnel - 8, Hong Kong–Zhuhai–Macau Bridge - 19, Istanbul Airport - 55. I'm not sure what statistics you are looking for, but construction isn't a no-risk profession eve…

You made a very straightforward statement, that the 11 deaths on the Golden Gate Bridge is "a safety record matching or surpassing most modern projects", but that statement is actually complete and total bullshit. I didn't ask for arguments that construction is dangerous, or that people die on construction projects.

And considering the primary argument is about why we can't build infrastructure project cheaply in the US anymore, bringing up international projects is pointless. Nobody is surprised that 3rd world countries and authoritarian regimes have looser labor safety standards than the US. But if you do take one of your examples from a Western country the Gotthard Base Tunnel, it had 8 deaths, but the project lasted 17 years, over 4 times the Golden Gate's timeline, and the tunnel is 95 miles long.

Re: Patrick Collison's Questions

#139

Post by 082349872349872 » Mon, Aug 24, 2020, 5:38 AM UTC

tempsy wrote: post #100

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…

homogenous societies are inherently more efficient? the reality is the beauty of America is that we are a heterogeneous one, but there are of course some downsides to that.

Considering that I use at least four languages[1] every day, and am thankful[2] to be living someplace that has not yet been completely overrun by chains and big box stores, I'd argue the assertion of a "heterogenous" US might need defending.

On the original question: I think switzerland is nice for two reasons. (a) we didn't blow ourselves up twice last century, which meant that even with little absolute growth we went from being a relatively poor european country to a relatively rich one, and (b) putting more emphasis on quality of life than on hustle results in, well, more quality of life.

[1] It doesn't work for francophones, who have a general swiss (or at best cantonal) idiom, but in swiss-german there are several isoglosses just within my valley that allow me to place a speaker. Granted, my valley has been historically universally catholic, but these days that just means that our protestants and muslims get lumped together in the "not christian" bucket :-)

[2] a french friend put it this way, earlier this century: "Modern europeans are too busy feeling sorry for those poor benighted savages who had the misfortune to be born a few villages over, to bother travelling halfway around the world to bring their superior way of life to people at gunpoint." À mon avis, c pas faux.

Re: Patrick Collison's Questions

#140

Post by actuator » Mon, Aug 24, 2020, 5:41 AM UTC

donw wrote: post #121

actuator wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hey, thanks for taking the time for answering that. Your answers are realy helpful. - Definitely an interesting way to look at it, I am not sure whether I would be able to convince myself of this though, based on the cultural difference I have grown up with. - The US company thing sounds great, even entry level tech roles have $150k+ comps, and I think in Japan that should still be really good. - I can live with a li…

USD 150k is roughly JPY 16M, which is 2-3x an entry-level salary here. Google might be laying that down for new graduates, but they'd be the only ones that are.

Ah, thanks. Will check levels.fyi to get a better estimate.