What a wonderfully constructive comment. This is a great model for me to remember when I encounter things I like the substance of but dislike some of the specifics. Thank you!
137 karma · joined October 8, 2013
Admittedly, I wrote this post 3 years ago when I was seeking clarity around disagreement during a wild time. Re-reading it now, in yet another wild time (3 years "wiser" aka having learned how to change a diaper or two), I missed out on compassion for those who are offended. Like you said, if it's important to find a mutual way forward, then it is also worth addressing the fears + emotional lives of those that are offended.
1. I agree, during debate, put the offense monster to the side.
2. In an effort to spare words, I compressed the Galileo story into something that missed important details. My bad. My understanding of the saga was that many members of the Church did engage with good faith in the emerging science of the time. What happened was mostly a political spat (though I still think there was an element of "offense" involved).
Question away! If I don’t stick the landing on the follow-up email (which I’m still working on - original email got too long hence the truncation), you can say that you were right ;)
Thanks for your comment, not a fan of the snark but the content is great.
Really hope you enjoy it :)
https://www.shinzen.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/08/AnOutline...
We have to earn the generalist label - the generalist has his own form of specialization.
From what I’ve seen, the successful generalist’s command over the basics is so strong that you wonder why they never specialized deeper. The generalist has a good mental map of the territory and solves problems very proficiently, though perhaps not as quickly or rigorously as someone more specialized in a specific sliver of the problem domain.
(anecdotal from my own journey learning how to program and initially feeling frustrated by the lack of market for generalists)
My understanding is that many spiritual traditions have historically viewed psychedelics as ego’s way of “grasping” for enlightenment, for many before they are prepared for what they may experience.
A “bad trip” can leave someone in a state of confusion that they aren’t quite prepared to deal with.
I’m all for content marketing like this but if your competency is creating culture through design at least make sure the reading experience isn’t painful
Money is a useful way to buy accountability for your goals. Most of what you need to know is already out there for free, it's just really easy to get discouraged or not scope your goals well enough.
Three (free) resources:
- https://www.theodinproject.com/
- https://teachyourselfcs.com/
- https://github.com/danistefanovic/build-your-own-x
Stuff you gotta pay for:
- https://www.newco.app/bootcamp
Just a few here to get you started. Good luck! You got this.
The “Hippo” irony comes from a story from the incredible Ernesto Sirolli:
“SIROLLI: It was a project where we Italians decided to teach Zambian people how to grow food. So we arrived there with Italian seeds in southern Zambia in this absolutely magnificent valley going down to the Zambezi River. And we taught the local people how to grow Italian tomatoes and zucchini. And of course, the local people had absolutely no interest in doing that so we paid them to come and work, and sometimes they would show up. And we were amazed that the local people in such fertile valley, would not have any agriculture. But instead of asking them how come they were not growing anything, we simply said, thank God we're here. Just in the nick of time to save the Zambian people from starvation.
And of course, everything in Africa grew beautifully and we had these magnificent tomatoes. In Italy, a tomato would grow to this size. In Zambia, to this size. And we were telling the Zambians, look how easy agriculture is. When the tomatoes were nice and ripe and red, overnight, some 200 hippos came up from the river and they ate everything. And we said to the Zambians, my God, the hippos. And the Zambians said, yes, that's why we have no agriculture here. Why didn't you tell us? You never asked. I thought it was only us Italian's blundering around Africa, but then I saw what the Americans were doing, what the English were doing, what the French were doing. And after seeing what they were doing, I became quite proud of our project in Zambia because, you see, at least we fed the hippos.”
The ways in which we organize and make sense of the world calcify with the repetition of certain memes.
The idea at least is that psychedelics add entropy to this habituation. Perhaps this itself causes a lot of trouble for people (like myself) who think they have this world figured out in a significant way, only to start seeing God/Satan/Hades and throw that all up in the air.
Going on that journey without an experienced guide would be the dangerous part methinks (Pollan discusses this in another podcast he was a guest on recently)
Hey guys,
We're a bootstrapped + profitable polling startup trying to definitively answer the following types of questions: "Did the United Airlines / Uber / NFL scandals actually harm a brand in the longterm?" "When, if ever, does Twitter represent anything other than the outrage of coastal elites?"
We've got a small team of engineers punching in above their weight class and looking for people with experience building things from the ground up + going end-to-end from prototype to production. There is no separate devops team because we are the devops team. It's been a fun ride so far, many hiccups along the way (I'll be transparent about what we are good and not so good at), and we're excited to be on the lookout for more people to join.
Looking for people who have been programming professionally for 3+ years
Email me at amian (at) morningconsult (dottt) com if you are interested in any of these roles!
Edited for brevity
We're a public opinion startup. Bootstrapped and profitable. Running daily polls on politicians and thousands of brands, all of which can be granularly explored by date/geo/demographic/etc (Uber was a fun one to watch). Some better explanation here: http://www.businessinsider.com/morning-consult-election-poll...
We aren't looking for engineers who:
* require a lot of externally-imposed structure or process to succeed
* want to spend most of their time working on bleeding-edge technical challenges
* enjoy architecting systems more than writing code/tests
These perks will come with time as we grow, but we're only 6 devs right now, and most of our pressing challenges are frankly pretty standard problems that we're solving for the first time for a historically low-tech industry.
You'll enjoy working here if you want to:
* build full-feature systems end-to-end from prototype to production (being responsible for all aspects, from UI to server-side to unit tests to devops)
* grow with a team of mostly self-taught and rough-around-the-edges engineers in a town that still call devs the "IT guys"
* dig into interesting polling data (ex. "Is there a correlation between favorability and purchasing consideration among Internet Service Providers?")
Our tech: NodeJS, RethinkDB, Marko, Nginx, AWS, some other usual suspects
If interested, shoot me a note at the email in my HN profile! :)
i) The rule of "The Most Intolerant Wins", coined by gadfly Nassim Taleb
> The minority rule will show us how it all it takes is a small number of intolerant virtuous people with skin in the game, in the form of courage, for society to function properly.
Also works in the inverse.
ii) Mishandled Bags Rate vs. Bag Complaints Levied Against Airlines
On "Why do more passengers complain about United than Southwest even when the service is the same?"
> So why does United generate a higher rate of complaints than Southwest? I think it has to do with basic training and empowerment of frontline workers. When your bag doesn’t show up, your immediate recourse is not calling the FAA; it is speaking with an airline employee. If that employee can show a little empathy and try to help, no one will be rushing to call the Feds. Said another way, well designed recovery processes matter and that is true independent of niches the firm targets or how it prices.
If you look at the dataset, Frontier actually has one of the lowest mishandled bag rates of the bunch, but the highest complaint rate. That sucks.
---
https://medium.com/incerto/the-most-intolerant-wins-the-dict...
https://operationsroom.wordpress.com/2014/02/12/why-do-more-...
> As our shareholders know, we have made a decision to continuously and significantly lower prices for customers year after year as our efficiency and scale make it possible. This is an example of a very important decision that cannot be made in a math-based way. In fact, when we lower prices, we go against the math that we can do, which always says that the smart move is to raise prices. We have significant data related to price elasticity. With fair accuracy, we can predict that a price reduction of a certain percentage will result in an increase in units sold of a certain percentage. With rare exceptions, the volume increase in the short term is never enough to pay for the price decrease. However, our quantitative understanding of elasticity is short-term. We can estimate what a price reduction will do this week and this quarter. But we cannot numerically estimate the effect that consistently lowering prices will have on our business over five years or ten years or more.
> Our judgment is that relentlessly returning efficiency improvements and scale economies to customers in the form of lower prices creates a virtuous cycle that leads over the long term to a much larger dollar amount of free cash flow, and thereby to a much more valuable Amazon.com. We’ve made similar judgments around Free Super Saver Shipping and Amazon Prime, both of which are expensive in the short term and—we believe—important and valuable in the long term."
From the 2005 Letter to Shareholders: https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1018724/000119312506...
1. Shaky-but-improving public school drops from a B to a C in district grade. Top-performing students try and enroll elsewhere. School funding in this district is tied to enrollment; funding drops. To push enrollment up, school buses in kids who've been expelled from other public schools in the area.
2. Disruptive kid goes to another classroom, where he goes and disrupts another teacher's classroom. Kid learns that if he wants to phone it in for the day, he can act out and be told to leave class. Kid's parents might not be present. Teacher/principal put in difficult position to choose between the child and the school.
3. Kid gets expelled and becomes another school's problem.
edit: this echoes djtriptych's comments
but many people who go into these bootcamps, a bit naive about what it takes to gain deep technical expertise, either learn to gulp down the kool-aid (cultish) or bitterly reject it (jaded).
the third way (indifference towards the marketing) will probably lead to a stronger view of the industry itself, and will yield better programs + better mental model for those attending these programs.
hack reactor does an incredible job all things considered -- it takes BEGINNERS (which is different from entirely clueless "ive never coded before" types) and puts them on a path where, if they realize the depth of their ignorance, now have the tools to whittle away at it. they do this job much better than i think almost every bootcamp out there (based on extensive personal research)
bootcamps make these people employable, and considering many of these people are career switchers, that's pretty awesome for a 12-wk program. but we can't mistake "employable" with "good". the companies hiring bootcamp grads need to have the resources available to guide/mentor them. there are certain things bootcamp grads are great at, and others they are absolutely miserable at (see TripleByte's post: http://blog.triplebyte.com/bootcamps-vs-college)
my prediction is that the bootcamp industry is going to end up looking a lot like coursera writ large. you'll have "bootcamp prep" courses which, with another name, is just Intro to Web Programming. The next step up is the "web development bootcamp", which is Web Development 101. The next step up above that would maybe be different sets of intensives like "Python and Machine Learning" or a guided SICP/NandTetris course or Blockchain 101 or Functional Data Structures or something.
The idea being that in the grand scheme, if you are interested in programming and need structure, you can start with Codecademy, then attend a $1k bootcamp prep course, then attend a $5-20k online web dev course (depending on your goals), then a $5-20k deeper dive course (again, depending on your goals).
this path possibly lowers risk for people interested in programming -- at any stage of the path, you can drop out, and your time + $$ expenditure is lowered. the alternative is to pursue a CS degree and then realize halfway through you don't want it (at which point your stuck). or maybe it inspires you to go get a CS degree. or maybe inspires you to be ballsier and more self-directed and learn all this stuff yourself (which is tough but doable)