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patrickcollison.com

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Re: Questions

#321

Post by twblalock »

trimbo wrote: post #191

> The Empire State Building was built in 410 days At least one reason is that we have substantially different safety regulations since we're not accepting of deaths on a project like that. 5 people died on that project. 11 died to build the Golden Gate. Original Bay Bridge? 24. They actually had a rule of thumb at the time: 1 death for every $1M spent on a project[1]. Any metric like that would be absolutely unaccept…

There are plenty of places, such as western European countries and Japan, that have strong safety regulations and still manage to complete large-scale infrastructure projects quickly.

Another way to look at this is to ask why the United States seems incapable of even maintaining existing projects. For example, look at the current state of the New York City subway.

I suspect slowness in building new infrastructure, and poor maintenance of existing infrastructure, have the same root cause: lack of political will.

American voters don't expect their governments to be good at this kind of thing. European voters would vote politicians out of office if their transit systems got as bad as the NY subway has become. It would be seen as a failure to execute one of the basic duties of government.

Re: Questions

#322

Post by tzs »

trimbo wrote: post #191

> The Empire State Building was built in 410 days At least one reason is that we have substantially different safety regulations since we're not accepting of deaths on a project like that. 5 people died on that project. 11 died to build the Golden Gate. Original Bay Bridge? 24. They actually had a rule of thumb at the time: 1 death for every $1M spent on a project[1]. Any metric like that would be absolutely unaccept…

Death rates are probably better than absolute number of deaths for comparison. Here are death rates per 1000 workers of some well known construction projects:

  80    Transcontinental Railroad
  80    Suez Canal
  50    Brooklyn Bridge
  17.46 World Trade Center
   6.4  Sydney Harbor Bridge
   4.47 Hoover Dam
   3.37 San Francisco Bay Bridge
   3.33 Eiffel Tower
   2.67 Titanic
   2.5  Sears Tower
   1.47 Empire State Building
   1.17 Trans-Alaska Pipeline System
   0.75 City Center Las Vegas
   0    Chrysler Building
Topping all of those by a large amount are the Panama Canal and the Burma-Siam railway, which I did not include because I don't have numbers--they are literally off the chart. I mean that literally. On the bar chart I'm getting the numbers from [1] the bars for those are so big they are clipped and the number is not visible.

[1] https://www.forconstructionpros.com/blogs/construction-toolb...

Re: Questions

#323

Post by xg15 »

lisper wrote: post #106

> Why are programming environments still so primitive? Because we as an industry made a strategic decision in the late 20th century to value run-time efficiency over all other quality metrics, a decision which has manifested itself in the primacy of C and its derivatives. Everything else has been sacrificed in the name of run time efficiency, including, notably, security. Development convenience was also among the co…

> Because we as an industry made a strategic decision in the late 20th century to value run-time efficiency over all other quality metrics

Except if that were the case, we wouldn't have so many bloated framework code and towers of abstractions, dragging runtime efficiency to the bottom.

Re: Questions

#324

Post by _emacsomancer_ »

singularity2001 wrote: post #296
seanmcdirmid wrote: post #240

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The same is basically true with Seattle. Well, not so dark (the sun is out til 4:30), winters are quite mild, but wet enough to keep everyone focused.

the most boring weather is reflected in the most boring software

it's always raining in windows?

Re: Questions

#325

Post by _emacsomancer_ »

bnt wrote: post #299
petra wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm an Israeli and it comes from a few factors: 1. Israelis basically have no choice. If you want to make a good income, working hard in a technology startup(we have very few big tech companies) is one of the very few good options. 2. The army: at a very young age,a decent percentage of Israelis who join the army lead, in high value, high risk situations. That creates a sense of responsibility and strong ambition at…

Jews were forced into banking, because they were forbidden to do agriculture or cattle back in Europe. Banking was considered dirty, so Christians didn't want to do it. Jews did what they were allowed - banking, philosophy, medicine, science - and they became masters of the craft.

I thought it was also about usury not being allowed (for Christians, Jews, or Muslims) intrareligiously but only extrareligiously, i.e. Jews could loan money to Christians, but Christians couldn't loan money to Christians.

Re: Questions

#326

Post by d_burfoot »

xg15 wrote: post #318

Some of those questions already seem to contain assumptions about the answers. > Why are certain things getting so much more expensive? [...] How much of the cost growth is unmeasured improvement in quality and how much is growing inefficiency? Are there other possible causes as well? If the cost growth were 100% due to improvements in quality, would it stop being a problem worth thinking about? > How do we help more…

> To my knowledge ... the improvement meant that millions of people were lifted from far-below-western to only-slightly-below-western living standards.

Hong Kong and Singapore are substantially above Western living standards. Singapore has a PPP-adjusted GDP per capita of $90K/year, which is more than double the UK. Compared to the US, SG has better education, better health outcomes, radically lower crime and imprisonment, lower unemployment, higher incomes, and incomparably better infrastructure, all while spending only about 17% of GDP on government. Similar statements are true for Hong Kong, though it is no longer such a radical outlier, since it is under the control of Beijing.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_GDP_(PPP)...

https://www.hoover.org/research/hong-kong-experiment

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_life_expe...

Re: Questions

#327

Post by pchristensen »

singularity2001 wrote: post #303
mikekchar wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I tend to believe in some of Stephen Krashen's notions of language acquisition. Specifically that there is a difference between learning (being able to remember and repeat something) and acquisition (being able to use it fluently). Also that acquisition comes from comprehension. I also believe that language acquisition is no different than any the acquisition of any other skill. Many people don't agree with these ide…

> it takes 95% comprehension of the text in order to acquire new grammar and vocabulary strongly disagree. learning chinese by youtube. I comprehend 15% but I pick up new patterns and words all the time.

Any good sources you recommend for learning Chinese on YouTube? I’m just getting started with HelloChinese and Fluent Forever - watching video seems too deep for now.

Re: Questions

#328

Post by ball_of_lint »

raldi wrote: post #242
JauntTrooper wrote: post #233

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, it is rational. We should live in a society where the expected human sacrifice of a construction project should be 0. Pure utilitarianism leads to outcomes that are clearly out of step with almost everyone's moral codes. For example you could kill someone and take their organs to save the lives of 4-5 people. Is it rational that we're not allowed to do that? Why do some people get to keep 2 kidneys when there ar…

Do you believe we should make the national speed limit 25? If not, you're accepting that people will die needlessly, and that the value of a human life is not, in fact, infinite.

The value of a human life is not infinite, but that doesn't mean it isn't worth more than a certain amount of time spent on a construction project. The people who make executive choices about construction projects should not decide that it is acceptable for x people to die on this project in exchange for y fewer months construction time. Accidents happen, but we should not plan to trade lives.

Consider if by sacrificing someone on an altar you could magically cause several months of construction work to happen overnight. That would still be murder.

Re: Questions

#329

Post by _emacsomancer_ »

jim777 wrote: post #237
notdang wrote: post #162

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>and possibly higher intelligence Interesting what would happen if this is said about any other country

It's not about nationality: Ashkenazi Jews in general -- Israeli or not -- tend to be smarter. ~20% of Nobel prize winners are Jews compared to less than 1% of the global population. So either there's a Jewish conspiracy (which some people believe...) or Jews tend to be smarter. Some people would say that this is cultural. I doubt it -- I think it's genetic. Intelligence is a physical attribute determined by genes, j…

> It's really no different from the observation that Kenyans and Ethiopians win most marathons.

But don't most Kenyan and Ethiopian marathon winners also grow up in Kenya or Ethiopia? I.e. how do we discount at very least environmental factors (including, for instance, diet), even if you doubt cultural ones?

Re: Questions

#330

Post by carapace »

raldi wrote: post #242
JauntTrooper wrote: post #233

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, it is rational. We should live in a society where the expected human sacrifice of a construction project should be 0. Pure utilitarianism leads to outcomes that are clearly out of step with almost everyone's moral codes. For example you could kill someone and take their organs to save the lives of 4-5 people. Is it rational that we're not allowed to do that? Why do some people get to keep 2 kidneys when there ar…

Do you believe we should make the national speed limit 25? If not, you're accepting that people will die needlessly, and that the value of a human life is not, in fact, infinite.

FWIW, I would [make the national speed limit 25] if I could. (With some hopefully obvious qualifications.)

The current traffic system as an insane "death and mayhem lottery" that we force ourselves to play, with out respect of youth, age or anything.

The current interest and action towards bike-friendly cities is a symptom, I think, of a healing of societies' psyches. We have been pretty brutal to each other since the Younger Dryas, and it's only recently that we've started to calm down and think about what we really want our civilization to be like.

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