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patrickcollison.com

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Re: Questions

#391

Post by xyzzyz »

novaRom wrote: post #370
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…

>> and possibly higher intelligence I heard that a lot of times from mostly uneducated people. All nations have equal level of intelligence. The difference might be access to education, environment, common wealth, and social inequality.

> All nations have equal level of intelligence. The difference might be access to education, environment, common wealth, and social inequality.

Just like height. If you raise a Pygmy in a rich European environment, he will reach standard European height.

More seriously though, I'm really tired of people somehow believing that evolution only works from the neck down.

Re: Questions

#392

Post by icelancer »

foepys wrote: post #165
unixhero wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Good observations! You forgot one major thing. This goes for all of Finland, Sweden, Norway and Denmark. The winter is horribly dark and boring. (Unless you're super rich). Therefore most turn inwards, staying indoors, thinking deeply at problems, spending endless afternoons and nights on things. Be it software development, game development, car tuning, car engine work, engineering, knitting or just reading loads of…

I believe to have read somewhere that this is also the reason why so many Russians (and people born in the USSR) are great mathematicians and chess players. Math and Chess are both indoor activities and also absolutely unpolitical, which is a huge plus in an authoritarian regime.

>>Math and Chess are both indoor activities and also absolutely unpolitical, which is a huge plus in an authoritarian regime.

The history of chess is definitely very political, especially inside the Soviet Union. It was seen as the proxy for intelligence, and if Soviet players were better than Americans, it was their way of demonstrating superiority in yet another domain.

Re: Questions

#393

Post by icelancer »

twblalock wrote: post #321
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, an…

>> 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.

Americans often vote those people out of office and their replacements are equally useless or worse.

Re: Questions

#394

Post by tomhoward »

jacquesm wrote: post #45

Reading this I'd feel a lot better if YC was run by Patrick, I prefer people that know what questions to ask over those with all the answers.

As I understand it, Patrick and Sam are friends. You don’t think they’re discussing these and other hard questions socially?

Also, Sam founded YC Research and donated $10M of his own money into it to find answers to hard questions about AI, UBI, medicine/health and other big challenges. He also toured the country interviewing Trump voters to find answers to questions about what was underlying the political climate that led to the election result.

What makes you think YC’s leadership think they have all the answers? At least in Sam’s case, the evidence seems to point to the opposite.

For what it’s worth I think there are other questions that are more important and potentially valuable to society than Patrick’s or the ones YCR is currently working on, but that’s just from my own experience and contemplation, and I don’t criticise people whose own journeys have not pointed them to these issues/ideas yet. I commend anyone making serious efforts to understand and solve the biggest issues they can identify with their own experiences and best efforts.

Re: Questions

#395

Post by icelancer »

bpizzi wrote: post #31

> Will end-user applications ever be truly programmable? Emacs, Smalltalk, Genera, and VBA embody a vision of malleable end-user computing: if the application doesn't do what you want, it's easy to tweak or augment it to suit your purposes. Today, however, end-user software increasingly operates behind bulletproof glass. This is especially true in the growth areas: mobile and web apps. I'll pick this one: end users b…

Definitely. My company requires the use of standard Windows applications - no apps on mobile devices - that have fairly intuitive interfaces for me (a late 30's former software developer), and while they have quirks, I get around them decently enough.

Many of my younger employees have never owned a computer. Literally. They use mobile for everything and only used the computer labs to do word processing and the like in college, or had work computers. And they are incredibly inefficient and basically useless when they encounter these applications for the first time; it is a huge training cost that I didn't expect going into it.

But it makes sense, of course. My industry doesn't make applications for today's end users, it makes them for the people that suffered through the DOS/Windows 3.1/Novell Networking era, because most of their consumers are 30-50 years old in academia or large business.

This split is happening in more than just my industry; it's happening in a lot of others due to the fast pace of mobile adoption and abandonment of the traditional PC. The real fear is that my employees are no better at using mobile devices than I am; in theory they should be, but in reality they're just technologically far worse than anyone else who had to grow up using complex systems. I have long-term fears about what this will do to the population; many people have long assumed that generations continue to get smarter and more tech-savvy, but I have found this to be very, very false in my limited experience.

Re: Questions

#396

Post by smnrchrds »

ninkendo wrote: post #235
nkurz wrote: post #190

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not familiar with the statistics, and may be misreading them, but for what I can find with a quick search, 2-3X seems about right, possibly even low. Total expenditure per pupil in average daily attendance in constant 2016 dollars: 1959-60: $3,890 2014-15: $14,013 $14,000 / $4,000 = 3.5x https://nces.ed.gov/programs/digest/d17/tables/dt17_236.55.a... Separately, here's a link claiming a 3x increase for Nevada in…

Maybe it’s just poor phrasing? Because: > has increased by 2-3X per student per year reads to me like it’s saying that every year, the cost is 2-3x higher than it was the year before. Which is obviously impossible.

He must have meant "spending per student per year has increased by 2-3X".

Re: Questions

#397

Post by tomhoward »

_wzsf wrote: post #36

Not to be critical, but I pose this question in response: Why do billionaires so often love to muse about interesting things outside of their field, get attention and praise for their thoughts, and then publicly allocate only tiny portions of their wealth and time to these projects so ineffectually while passing down the majority of their wealth to disinterested heirs? e.g. Walt Disney, Henry Ford, Edgar Prince, Stev…

You list examples but don’t cite any references to prove that these people didn’t make substantial philanthropic contributions. Nor do you cite counter-examples like those other commenters have mentioned.

Andrew Carnegie, the richest person of his era, donated 90% of his wealth to philanthropic causes, most notably to local libraries, universities and scientific reasearch. He implored his fellow wealthy people to to the same, believing the only worthwhile purpose for accumulating wealth was to reinvest it in improving society. The Rockefellers seemed to do the same, as have many others since.

In Patrick’s case, his company is still in growth phase and his wealth is mostly on paper, so he’s not able to give much time or money. I’m sure he will when his company’s success becomes more assured and he can spare the time and money. His friend, YC President Sam Altman, has donated $10M of his own money to YC Research to help find answers to hard questions he cares about, which I think is a lot for him (I was surprised to learn he even had that amount to spare as his own company wasn’t a huge success).

Re: Questions

#398

Post by TheTrotters »

StanislavPetrov wrote: post #379
philwelch wrote: post #353

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So why are other things not getting much more expensive? Why are things not getting more expensive at the same rate? Monetary inflation affects all goods more or less uniformly, but the price of milk hasn't skyrocketed as much as the cost of education or housing or healthcare.

Because monetary policy is only one of a multitude of factors that influence inflation. Regulations, subsidies, tax laws, trade agreements, labor laws, immigration policy are just some of the other things that have wildly disjointed effects on industries, markets and prices.

You're confusing inflation with rising real prices. Inflation doesn't discriminate -- the price of everything rises by the same proportion.

Re: Questions

#399

Post by ntxy »

keithpeter wrote: post #91

"End-user computing is becoming less a bicycle and more a monorail for the mind." I shall steal this quote. The humble spreadsheet is just about the only 'programmable' application left on the typical corporate endpoint/educational client PC.

this plagues my sleep. yes, spreadsheets! I always wonder: what's so special about spreadsheets?

Re: Questions

#400

Post by ellyagg »

sakoht wrote: post #147

"Why are certain things getting so much more expensive?" Because we are lying about inflation. It's not a conspiracy, just a mutually agreed-to delusion. By pretending inflation is lower than it is, the poor feel like they are standing still instead of sinking ...though instinctively they know. And the people just keeping up get to feel richer. Since technology and efficiency improve, the people staying in the same p…

My dad was a programmer and I'm a programmer. I don't think I'll ever make a salary as high as he did[1], and that's in absolute dollars. Yet, my quality of life is definitely better. I take vacations all over the world. I can look up any fact I want instantly on the internet. I work from home 3 days a week. I've easily cured maladies that were huge nuisances when he was my age.

You're right that macroeconomic indicators don't seem to tell the story, but I can't square my experience with your claim.

1. He has a Master of Physics, I don't have a degree.

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