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290 karma · joined May 9, 2014
Examples would be Jews in Israel and tribes of American natives. If you can assert membership in these groups, it would be a good investment to go through the process before hand.
If you don't have ethnic ties that are useful in that way, you could join a religious sect. The main example would be Mormons. They cluster in communities, have a persecution mentality, and encourage their members to store food and other emergency supplies. You'd have to at least pretend to believe their stuff though. I have trouble thinking of other examples. Perhaps Scientologists? Jahovah's Witnesses? I assume one doesn't just "join" the Amish. Mennonites?
If there are some survivalist groups that are already off-the-grid, that could be an option. Intentional communities, particularly of the survivalist strain, often care about ethnicity too though, particularly the ones in the US.
If you can't join a group, some countries might handle collapse better than others. One might invest in immigrating to a country that could tough out a collapse. Switzerland's canton-based political system seems pretty robust. Iceland has geothermal energy. The way the Japanese came together as a country during Fukushima was impressive (but you'd probably need to be ethnically Japanese to cash in on this). Rich folks seem to think New Zealand is a smart place to bug out.
New Zealand brings up another point. If a place, country or no, is a remote island has the ability to support itself without imports, it could also be a good option.
I don't think it's smart for the company. Just like I didn't think it was smart for Thiel to ask "Star Wars or Star Trek?" as a shibboleth for political leanings at Paypal. You are going to filter good people.
However, I think it might serve you. Being a closet conservative in a liberal culture sucks. Being a closet liberal in a conservative culture sucks. At the end of the day, you want to not have your work-life suck.
I'm black. Spent a while living in Southeast Asia. Once, I was going to meet a landlord about renting an apartment and a white friend tagged along. Got there, the landlord was like "Oh. Sorry, no blacks." I was like "Okie doke." My friend was outraged on my behalf. I told him, "That's bad. You know what else is bad? Figuring out your landlord is a bigot only after you've signed a year lease because it was illegal to just say 'no blacks' up front. At least now I only had 10 seconds of shit instead of a year."
Sometimes it's nice when people put their cards on the table. It might not be a good thing for society or for business, but at least you know what you're dealing with.
If you are not taking investment, or otherwise get investors that are in for the long haul, and you intend to fund yourself off your revenue, then cost savings matter. This is usually appropriate for small niche markets that are too small for institutional investors. Note, such niches can still be million dollar businesses.
You can sleep soundly knowing that most black people, lacking her fame, well have bad experiences at the FANGs and no one will give f*ck.
I wonder about this distinction. This seems it would make sense if all the players played the GTO strategy. Suppose one agent were to play the GTO strategy, but an other player was vulnerable to bluffing. It seems reasonable to "tune" the bluffs to that player.
In an extreme example, suppose every time a certain player would fold 100% of the time when another player played a certain way. It seems it would make sense for that other player to play that way when they wanted that player to fold, even under normal circumstances that play would be suboptimal.
reference: https://int8.io/counterfactual-regret-minimization-for-poker...
Here is a good post on bots, if you haven't seen it: https://int8.io/counterfactual-regret-minimization-for-poker...
1. Those R squared numbers in table 2 are quite low. The statistical analysis itself is painfully basic. I'm a statistician, and I've a bookshelf full of excellent books written by statisticians who publish in psychology, so they should have been able to find someone to beef up the analysis a bit. That said, psych publications is also notorious for bad data analysis. I'm an outsider to this field, but this feels like an omission.
2. The paper doesn't use any causal inference techniques despite making a clear causal claim in the title. They use simple linear regression, which is not a causal model unless causal assumptions are made explicit. In my book this is a grave sin, one avoids making causal assumptions that might be hard to defend, fits a model with linear correlation, then makes causal conclusions. To understand what I mean by causal model, read this (these techniques are well-known and if the authors' defense is that they don't know them, it reflects badly on them): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rubin_causal_model
3. It is worth thinking about what the intelligence assessment, the AFQT test, actually quantifies. One critique of AFQT is that it is more of a measure of literacy than intelligence. Read more here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Armed_Services_Vocational_Apti.... Maybe the title should be "Having parents that make sure you can read by age five has a greater effect on success than grit."
4. The AFQT and other intelligence tests have a pesky problem of having averages that change in time. This suggests that much of what they measure is not innate, but learned.
5. Social psychology is plagued by a reproducibility crisis. I'm sorry to say, their papers, no matter how provocative the findings, have to be viewed with great skepticism. https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/basics/replication-crisis
6. The paper says social economic background has a significant effect, but about the same effect on pay as intelligence. That seems to conflict with a pile of research that says that social economic background is the strongest predictor of success. To say that IQ is just as important as your parents' wealth is pretty eyebrow-raising.
That said, there could be other confounding factors. COVID-19 could in fact "drain" vitamin D in some way. We know elderly people are disproportionately killed by the disease, perhaps vitamin D deficiency is more common amongst the elderly. Causal inference from observational data is tricky indeed.
That said, vitamin D supplements are cheap (for now). And most people don't get enough anyway. So people should take it.
Besides, getting fired along with 3499 people has got to feel better than getting fired alone.
Japanese. Learned Chinese in early twenties then started with Japanese until life happened. Picked it up again, and trying to learn it as a third language with my wife. Making progress.
Reinforcement learning, but not the deep RL stuff as much as the fundamentals and theory. Really enjoying working through https://agentmodels.org/
Rust, with a colleague, but mostly because I like my colleague.
Will soon take a class on Racket with my wife.
Am I reading this wrong, or does actually mean 1/6 women founders were asked to exchange sexual favors for investment?
Holy shit.
A Westerner observing a typical 1920's Chinese person's life for the first time would have experienced the same assault on their fundamental values, especially more humanist values. It was a feudal society, where quiet tolerance in the face of extreme hardship is a cultural value, as is producing as many (male) offspring as possible. Moreover, given harsh standard of living and the large population, human life (especially those of children) was cheap and easily discarded. Finally, post-Qing China would have seemed extremely unsanitary to Western eyes -- even today Chinese authorities struggle with promulgating basic 20th century standards of hygiene (since hygiene is a norm, not a trait).
The foreigner would have been aware that 100's of millions of people lived this way (no one knew China's population was a billion plus until the CCP did the first modern census).
It would have been all to easy to take a dim view on the Chinese as people.