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overpaidgoogleron The Supreme Court's Crucial Mistake About Sex Crime Statistics

I don't closely follow which articles are flagged, but I think that articles with a tech angle or some novel statistical or scientific analysis are favored over general politics. The reason I flag general political articles (eg articles about race or gender issues without any of the above) is that I don't find the discussions interesting, and I think that the posters are coming from a viewpoint of "this stuff is important so it should be discussed everywhere, whether people want to or not"

overpaidgoogleron GitHub threatens to shut down a repository for using the word 'retard'

When I see someone who doesn't care about language I think the following: "I'm too stupid..."

The ironing.

overpaidgoogleron GitHub threatens to shut down a repository for using the word 'retard'

For me the main issue is not that github removed offensive content, but the politicization of the concept.

The most glaring discrepancy to me is that even though the word "nerd" is used to incite physical violence, that word is not considered inappropriate. The reason is that progressive political ideology asserts that violence that is perpetrated by "powerful" groups against "powerless" groups has an additional significance and importance, and violence against nerds falls weakly into this category, if at all.

overpaidgoogleron [dead]

It's not that white privilege is real or not, but that there is no reason for constant articles about it on hn. In this case there was a "life hacking" angle, but as far as I can tell the author is applying this label to someone who isn't really related to the life hacking movement. So while not intentionally click baity, the title makes the article seen more relevant than it is.

overpaidgoogleron Show HN: A career test for people who want to have a social impact

You're right I should have looked at the website before posting.

overpaidgoogleron Show HN: A career test for people who want to have a social impact

If you look at a graph of world GDP, you'll see that it grows steadily and exponentially. The full set of causes is this is not known, but it can be shown not to be merely due to the gradual accumulation of capital. A large part must be due to technological growth.

So if you want to measure social impact I would also include the positive externalities of various jobs including working in technology. Even though I will probably be ridiculed as a typical silicon valley cultist, I think that anything that advances technology, including software, has a big positive economic externality.

overpaidgoogleron The MIT Gang

DSGE models are precisely "dynamic discrete-time simulations with evolving state" and they are the workhorse of modern macro.

overpaidgoogleron Uber Makes Its Pain New Yorkers’ Problem

Yes, restrictions on prices indirectly redistribute wealth. But what I was saying was that the government should only redistribute wealth directly, via welfare and taxes (eg income, sales or vat).

overpaidgoogleron NUMMI 2015 – Why are most American cars still not as good as foreign cars?

While hn is full of orientalism, I don't think it's helpful to call out a specific poster, especially one who is trying to back up their claims with actual evidence. I usually post a top level comment when I see a lot of posts from an orientalist perspective.

overpaidgoogleron Uber Makes Its Pain New Yorkers’ Problem

"Society has decided" is not a good substitute for an actual reason for a policy. I'm not arguing against democracy here. I also think you are confusing minimum pay with minimum qualifications. A medallion is not a qualification, it is an arbitrary limit (yes there are other reasons for the limit like congestion, but the article discuses pay)

overpaidgoogleron Functional Programming in C++ (2013)

I get that. But the two ideas are very closely related. See also my final sentence.

overpaidgoogleron The Death of Cash

While I agree with most of your points, I think the informal economy mainly exists for tax avoidance, and not because very short term jobs involve an onorous amount of paperwork. If this is correct, then those jobs would still exist in a cashless society, it's just that they would have to pay tax.

overpaidgoogleron Functional Programming in C++ (2013)

One difficulty with functional style c++ is just how verbose it is. Every time I tried to use std::transform (the equivalent of "map") I had to delete it and rewrite as a loop because it was just too hard to read. Functional style on a large scale is still possible.

overpaidgoogleron Uber Makes Its Pain New Yorkers’ Problem

People support Uber because they support the logic of the free market, which is that the government should redistribute wealth, but not fix prices, including wages. Yes it's tough being a taxi driver, but the real problem is that it's tough being a person who for whatever reason can't get a high paying job. Fixing high wages for taxi drivers doesn't solve this problem, because it doesn't provide jobs for those who don't get to be taxi drivers.

overpaidgoogleron The MIT Gang

Economic models are computer simulations!

The difference between conventional models and the kind of simulation you would like to see lies in the kind of assumptions that are made about agents and the environment they operate in. What they have in common is that both try to simulate a world in which individuals act in response to their environment.

The simulation in your paper might be more complex, but that in no way guarantees not faithfulness to reality.

I would suggest your check out mainstream micro and macro, eg a first year graduate textbook. Then you will see that the "representative agent" models of economics are really just simulations based on a specific set of assumptions.

overpaidgoogleron The MIT Gang

First, can you describe what the predictions were and what you consider their significance to be?

overpaidgoogleron The MIT Gang

I don't see any fundamental difference between what your call simulation and what economists call models. The only difference is that your believe in the possibility of models so accurate that one could easily verify that they give correct predictions, as opposed to existing models which are subject to continual debate.

The reason it is so hard to stimulate the economy is that it represents the sum total of a large part of all human activity. So for example to test the impact of a particular kind of fiscal stimulus, you would have to accurately model the response of individuals to their new circumstances, as well as the response of markets (which involve individuals with conscious knowledge of the new policy, and thus their own beliefs about its effects). It is this last factor that makes the economy so hard to stimulate. You are not only simulating actions, but beliefs, and beliefs about beliefs, etc. It's ironic that economics is criticised for following physics to closely, when it is precisely this last factor that makes economics fundamentally unlike physics. The closest thing to modern macro if mean field theory.

overpaidgoogleron The MIT Gang

The problem with Krugman is that he used a very "old school" Keynesian intellectual framework, while the rest of the field has moved on. The ideas of Keynes were not abandoned, but they were rendered in a form that is more consistent and coherent with neoclassical economics. Meanwhile Krugman has never been a prominent researcher in macroeconomics, but his Nobel prize and outspoken views on macroeconomics lead many people to that erroneous conclusion.

overpaidgoogleron The MIT Gang

The distinction is usually referred to as saltwater vs freshwater economists (referring to the geographical location of the university's). Apart from MIT there is also Princeton and Stanford in the saltwater camp.

And Krugman is right that the saltwater economists were vindicated by the recovery from the GFC.

However Krugman is not a good spokesperson for saltwater economists. Most econ professors I know from saltwater university's say they cannot even understand his points (note that Krugman did not win his Nobel prize for macro, but for trade).

In particular he is wrong to bundle together views on debt crises, recessions, and general attitudes to the free market. By the time you are in a debt crisis, it's a bit late to stimulate the economy with even more government debt. At some point you actually have to figure out a way to pay money back.

overpaidgoogleron The Singular Mind of Terry Tao

Not in any specific way, but he has a nerdy demeanor. There are many interviews of him online your can watch.

overpaidgoogleron The Singular Mind of Terry Tao

I met Terry in 2002. I had heard about him when I did the IMO training, but at some point someone said he was in the department so I should talk to him. He showed me some work he was doing related to what happens to the determinants of matrices when you sum then. I remarked on how I was surprised at how "elementary" this work was, and he replied that if math was really that deep, no one would be able to do research. I suspected then that this work was especially elementary and most research math was deeper (and thus more inaccessible for an undergrad), but I appreciated the sentiment.

I wouldn't read to much into how "normal" Terry is portrayed as being. Terry struck me as somewhat nerdy in his demeanor. Certainly not crazy or eccentric (and as the above anecdote suggests, a nice guy) but also different from the average person.

I say this because I feel like when people say "your don't have to be a weirdo to be a great mathematician" this actually denigrates the personality type that is common among most actual mathematicians including Terry.

On the other hand I do feel that all children should be given the opportunity to grow and express themselves in all aspects of their life. It was nice to see the positive and supporting attitude is Terry's parents.

overpaidgoogleron Cook rice in a coffee percolator to avoid arsenic

"Let then eat Quinoa"

overpaidgoogleron New York Plans $15 Minimum Wage for Fast Food Workers

You can't have it both ways. "in the meantime" there will also be cases where $6 an hour would have made the difference between having a job and not having one.

overpaidgoogleron Why I give my students a ‘tragedy of the commons’ extra credit challenge

Really odd that the professor does not mention carbon taxes in the story. It doesn't make sense to borrow game theory from economics but completely ignore the idea of taxing externalities

overpaidgoogleron [dead]

How about a rule title change to "poorly performing video gamers more likely to harass women". Not only is the title inaccurate and click baity, but as someone who was physically bullied in school for being an actual loser, it triggers me.

overpaidgoogleron On Self-Delusion and Bounded Rationality (2001)

Despite his verbal ineptitude, at six-foot-two Eric is one of the more desirable seniors, and many sophomores would, I suppose, have been flattered by the attention... [I asked] "What you're saying is tantamount to saying that you want to fuck me. So why shouldn't I react with revulsion precisely as though you'd said the latter?"

If she found him attractive, why would she react with revulsion at the suggestion of sex. The problem is not with rationality, but rather with her half hearted commitment to it. If you are going to think critically about the true meaning of asking someone on a date, then you should also think critically about the true reasons why asking for sex directly is considered rude.

overpaidgoogleron USA tops International Math Olympiad for first time in 21 years

I would not read to much into it. This is a very specialized competition that selected 6 people from an entire country.

Some aspects of soviet education are very conducive to these competitions (e.g. an emphasis on euclidean geometry). Because of this, a top 10% student from a former Soviet country will do much better than a top 10% American if neither have extra training in this sort of competition.

If anyone is interested in discussing women in STEM in general, this article is a very poor place to do it. Eg the US has done extremely poorly up till now compared with similar English speaking country's. There are just so many idiosyncratic features at play.

overpaidgoogleron USA tops International Math Olympiad for first time in 21 years

I would suggest "elements of statistical learning". If possible I would also try to study some econometrics which gives unparalleled insight into the correlation vs causation issue. You can think of econometrics as a branch of statistics that remained separate from the mainstream for historical reasons.

overpaidgoogleron Ex-Googler says she exposed company-wide pay inequality with spreadsheet

A lot of people here are saying that if job titles/pay grades are public (which they are not completely) then so should pay be. The problem with this is that promotions are already very political. People can and do get very angry when other people get promoted before them. Non public pay and bonuses give management some wiggle room to reward people privately.

There is always some question about whether management or popular opinion is fairer. On this I will just say that more extroverted people will tend to favor popular opinion while more introverted people will tend to favor management.

overpaidgoogleron USA tops International Math Olympiad for first time in 21 years

I hope not. When I did math Olympiads (including the IMO) I was presented with a false dichotomy of pure math or finance. This is really unfortunate because finance in general does not use very deep math. A tiny number of people might use SDEs but by now the techniques are standard and boring anyway. Furthermore, even mainstream economists doubt that this sort of finance has positive externalities. The amount of resources that go into finance is just way out of proportion to what seems necessary for price discovery.

In contrast, all of the science and engineering disciplines can make use of very interesting math. Not deep compared to research math, but used in a much more interesting way than in finance. E.g when you study the statistics of markets, you are just playing a game, and don't care that much about external reality per se. On the other hand if you study the statistics of DNA or gene expression, you are doing real science.

I think the best advice to a young person studying math is what was given to me at the age when I was doing the IMO (and interestingly, after I graduated by someone else): Don't neglect statistics.