igonvalue

It's a funny article, but I was actually disappointed that the sincere question of how to "moneyball" college admissions was not explored. I don't think there exists much evidence that college admissions officers at places like Harvard add much value beyond merely sorting students by grades and test scores (which themselves are highly predictive of future performance). My suspicion is that admissions officers have about as much predictive acumen as active fund managers (i.e., not very much), but I would be interested to see this tested empirically.

> According to a gruesome statistic from a 2013 article in Poultry Science, if humans grew as quickly as the Chicken of Today, “a three-kilogram (6.6-pound) newborn baby would weigh 300 kilograms (660 pounds) after two months.”

How is this an appropriate comparison? A quick google search attests that birds grow faster than mammals, and that humans grow especially slowly; I'm sure you could conjure up a similarly "gruesome" statistic with any wild bird.

> By 2009, Yelp found itself in talks about a possible takeover by Google for at least $500 million, the Journal reported at the time.

An interesting bit of history is that the acquisition offer was scuttled when Yahoo put in a competing bid that Google could not match. Supposedly the management team did not want to work with Yahoo, but the board had a fiduciary duty not to accept an inferior deal, so both offers fell through.[0] In retrospect, it was a good outcome for Yelp; the market cap is now several times higher than either of the acquisition offers.

[0] http://techcrunch.com/2010/10/01/the-ugliest-girl-at-the-dan...

This sounds great! Would you mind writing up some of the logistics of working in Tahiti? (For example, visas, accommodation, internet access, meeting people?)

In this case, a Google search didn't turn up any results on an official website, but didn't turn up any any definitive proof that it was a scam either.

How's this for annoying? I once received a call from a bank's (Citibank?) fraud department, but wasn't sure it was really them or a scammer. I asked for a callback number and then called the known number on the back of my card to verify that the fraud department call was legitimate. The Citibank representative said that they were unable to either confirm or deny that that was a valid Citibank number.

The real travesty is the last paragraph:

> Well, as we were eating I glanced up at the Keno board and Sara had won $7500.

> The downside of this is that Sara gained $7500, I lost $7500, the government gained $7500 and the casino lost $7500. You see, I had to fork out the $7500 to my daughter and collect the winnings myself. But about half the winnings would be paid by me on my taxes as income, and other half of $7500 would be paid as gift tax for giving the winnings to my daughter (I'd already transferred the maximum yearly tax free gift of $10,000 to each of my kids).

In a sufficiently frictionless economy, people will hire each other to do the things they'd rather not do themselves. This is generally acknowledged as a net positive for society[0], and surely the author doesn't manufacture her own electronics, build her own house, or grow her own food. What's so extraordinary about delivery services?

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparative_advantage

Who also happens to be the great-grandfather of Armie Hammer, who played the Winklevoss twins in The Social Network.

> The energy kite simulates the tip of a wind turbine blade, which is the part of a turbine that makes most of the energy. The kite is launched from the ground station by the rotors, which act like propellers on a helicopter. Once in the air, the kite generates power by flying in large circles where the wind is strong and consistent. Air moving across rotors mounted on the kite forces them to rotate, driving a generator to produce electricity, which travels down the tether to the grid.

Are the rotors that launch the kite the same as the ones that generate the electricity?

Previous discussion on Hacker News of a similar article by the same author:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9039274

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/02/15/magazine/how-one-stupid-tw...

Maybe 50kg is too much, but you wouldn't be happy with a 1.4kg increase in lean mass? I assume that most of that is an increase in bone density and muscle mass, both of which are good things.

Yes, I understand that 2kg is the total change, and I've read the full text that you've helpfully linked. I'm not sure what your point is?

Speaking of diet, I'm wondering what your thoughts are on macronutrient composition (e.g., low-carbohydrate) diets? I didn't find anything in your essays, just this series of tweets.[0]

[0] https://twitter.com/gwern/status/456548028745129984

> if they are so unusual, doesn't that make confounding more plausible?

That is a very good point.

> Also very interesting, and counter to the usual narratives about health. (Everything is heritable...)

And yet this need not lead us to the conclusion that self-improvement is futile. Consider the scenario where diet is highly heritable and also extremely important to health outcomes. If people could be convinced of the latter, they would, to varying degrees, improve their diet and therefore their health. After smoking was tied to lung cancer, I imagine that people (at all levels of genetic predisposition to smoking) greatly reduced the amount that they smoked. Smoking levels could have been 100% heritable both before and after the revelation, but would have been reduced over time.

> 5. fat percentage: -3.3 (!)

I'm not sure why you singled fat percentage out as the least significant (in the colloquial sense). The -3.3 is a reduction from 24.0, so the percentage change is ~14%.

> 2kg of weight? I fluctuate more than that on a weekly basis...

To take your quip seriously, I don't think this is a good comparison. If a specific intervention increased lean mass and decreased fat mass by equal amounts (say, 10kg), it would be highly beneficial and yet count for absolutely nothing with respect to BMI or weight. The specific changes cited here are 1.4kg lean mass and -3.3kg fat mass. I would actually count that as a 4.7kg improvement!

Inspired by this tweet[0], I'd originally submitted this story as the more pointed "Ex-Homeland Security chief hired to suggest competitor's stadium is a terrorism target" or something to that effect. It was changed by the moderator, probably because the article itself didn't go nearly as far. But what other conclusion can one draw from the facts? I suspect most of votes were for the original submission title.

[0] https://twitter.com/AdamMinter/status/571549778389049344

One of the most interesting things I've read (or listened to) about expertise is a podcast interview with the author of The Sports Gene[0].

> So in my second chapter I sort of tell a story I call the 'Tale of Two High Jumpers,' in which I sort of profile two high jumpers, one named Stefan Holm, who over the course of 20 years--and by his estimate, 20,000 hours--made incremental progress every year, to the point where he became one of the best high jumpers in the world. And then in 2007 he travels to the World Championships, and is met by a total unknown, a Bahamian jumper by the name of Donald Thomas, who just recently had started high jumping, basically because he had found out he was good at it on a lunchtime bet at his college. And so, Donald Thomas is closer to 0 hours, and Stefan Holm is closer to 20,000 hours. So they average 10,000 hours. But Donald Thomas actually wins that competition. And so I thought it was a good story to explain the fact that not only is there huge variation, but different athletes can get to the same place with both different biology and different training programs.

[0] http://www.econtalk.org/archives/2013/09/david_epstein_o.htm...

Here are the complaints for Harvard[0] and MIT[1].

According to the complaints, the relevant laws are Section 504 of the Rehabilitation Act of 1973 and Title III of the Americans With Disabilities Act. The former deals with institutions that receive federal financial assistance and the latter deals with places of "public accommodation".

[0] http://creeclaw.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/02/2015-02-11-MI...

[1] http://creeclaw.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/02/2015-02-11-Ha...

Is there an http download link that would allow downloading from the browser (or with curl)?

That reminds me of Edward Glaeser's point from Triumph of the City about the relationship between electronic communication and face-to-face meetings:

> Today, information technology is changing the world, making it more idea-intensive, better connected, and ultimately more urban. Improvements in information technology seem to have increased, rather than reduced, the value of face-to-face connections, which might be called Jevons’s Complementarity Corollary. The nineteenth-century English economist William Stanley Jevons noted that more fuel-efficient steam engines didn’t lead to less coal consumption. Better engines made energy use effectively less expensive, and helped move the world to an industrial era powered by coal. The term Jevons’s paradox has come to refer to any situation in which efficiency improvements lead to more, not less, consumption—one reason why low-calorie cookies can lead to larger waistlines and fuel-efficient cars can end up consuming more gas. Jevons’s paradox applied to information technology means that as we acquire more efficient means of transmitting information, like e-mail or Skype, we spend more, not less, time transmitting information.

> One might think that better information technology would reduce the need to learn from other sources, like face-to-face meetings in cities. But Jevons’s Complementarity Corollary, which follows naturally from Jevons’s paradox, predicts that improvements in information technology can lead to more demand for face-to-face contact, because face time complements time spent communicating electronically.

I haven't used Medium, so I can't speak to it, but in my experience the most frustrating instance of this behavior is from Stack Overflow. Keybindings such as `Ctrl`+`k` and `Ctrl`+`b`, which are native to OS X, behave completely unexpectedly in Stack Overflow textareas, to the extent that I sometimes just give up and compose my text in an external editor.

Somewhat off-topic, but why are we lionizing Reid Hoffman? It's well-documented that LinkedIn uses extremely shady growth hacking tactics. One of my friends granted LinkedIn access to her Gmail contact list, and LinkedIn proceeded to spam every single contact with an invitation to connect.

[0] http://marknugent.tumblr.com/post/98203319356/linkedins-evil... [1] https://gigaom.com/2013/09/21/linkedin-is-breaking-into-user...

I agree with the spirit of what you're saying, but I think it's more accurate to call what you're describing a "free market" than "capitalism"; the latter does not in fact preclude market failures such as oligopolies/cartels.

> Think of a cap table as a blockchain of a company’s liabilities.

Are crypto-currencies now so familiar that we are explaining other concepts in terms of them, and not the other way around?

> In addition to serving as the vice chairman of Japan's Olympic Committee, Tanaka is also the chief director of Japan's largest college, Japan University, and the president of the International Sumo Association

I was curious to learn more about Japan University, but it seems that there doesn't actually exist an institution that goes by that name! The Wikipedia page for "Japan University" does not exist, and a Google search for "Japan University" in quotes doesn't turn up any results for a Japan University on the first page.

It seems that he's actually referring to Nihon University; Nihon means "Japan" in Japanese.

I've noticed that discussions about the thermodynamics of weight loss almost invariably neglect to mention environmental temperature, focussing instead on diet and exercise. The prevailing paradigm is that exercise "burns calories". But if you look at the actual numbers, the number of calories burned is fairly insignificant compared to basal metabolism; as the article states, running an entire marathon only burns about 2500 calories.

It's not a zero-sum game. Increased wages for engineers would encourage more people to become engineers.

It seems plausible that there is a dearth of exceptional programmers, and that it would be difficult to rectify this by training more. But scarcity is a fact of life in any market; is there anything special about the labor market for high-end programmers? If the CEO that pg mentions really wanted 30 programmers tomorrow, why doesn't he attract them from other companies by offering them higher wages? Before you dismiss this as naive or impractical, let me point out that this approach has been empirically validated: Facebook was able to massively scale its developer workforce by poaching employees from Google.[0] I'm not even arguing for or against more immigration; it just seems strange to me that this essay is ignoring the elephant in the room, particularly when there's been a well-documented conspiracy among the biggest companies in the valley to suppress developer wages.[1]

[0] http://techcrunch.com/2010/11/11/google-offers-staff-enginee...

[1] http://pando.com/tag/techtopus/

> And yet if I had to write down everything I remember from it, I doubt it would amount to much more than a page.

This was reassuring to hear from someone else, because I've had this exact feeling about books I read, films I've watched, conversations I've had, work projects I've completed, etc. This is true even in cases when I was completely engaged in, for example, reading the book, and the book left a positive impression on me.

I've always felt guilty about this, especially when I see others who don't seem to have the same problem when they talk about the books they've read, etc. I've also found that recall can be greatly improved by repeatedly talking about the specific topic with multiple people.

The strange thing is that I have an excellent memory for certain things - information about people and relationships. In light of our evolutionary history as a social species, perhaps this is not so surprising after all.

I guess the username BarackObama was already taken?

https://github.com/barackobama