samd

The objection is he making is essentially the objection a rule-consequentialist would make. Which is that although in this particular situation it would produce better consequences to kill the innocent man and save the 5 people, overall it would produce worse consequences if everyone followed the rule that killing innocent people is an acceptable means to some end.

Looks are almost always relevant to people's opinion of you. That's true for men and women, but it's only in articles about women that it seems to be pointed out as if to undermine their accomplishments.

It's depressing that the article has to start with an exposition of her looks and dress.

I've never read an article about a male luminary that focuses so much on looks.

I'm just surprised hosts have enough marketing wherewithal to do that on their own. Though maybe AirBnB makes a point of telling people to get professional photos done.

One of the most compelling things about AirBnB is the gorgeous photos of all those unique places. I don't know how they get them. Do they just have lots of hosts with amazing photography skills or do they send people out to take pictures?

It also seems like if you're good enough for a startup to want you then you're good enough to start your own startup.

You're right, I simplified for the example and assumed only one canonical job for each major. However, that doesn't undermine my criticisms. You'd still have to multiply each job by the amount that the degree helps you get that job.

So it's probably pretty hard to become a quant without a degree, so multiply that by some high number like 95%, but it's really easy to become an entrepreneur without a degree, so multiply that by some low number like 20%.

You're also right about the relevant question being "what is a degree worth to me?" That makes prediction even harder because the value of the degree is largely going to depend on the person's opportunity cost of going to school. Consider Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook was the opportunity cost of his getting a degree, which would make the degree's "value" be several billion dollars negative.

Yeah, sure it is, because that's horrible advice. Does anyone actually believe that all degrees are equally valuable?

I think people have a general idea of which degrees are more valuable than others, a flawed and vague idea to be sure, but it's not obvious that this data is more accurate than that.

I wonder if you couldn't get very similar results by asking people on Mechanical Turk to rank degrees by what they thought was their value.

Regardless of how it fares against other advice, it still has flaws that can significantly affect its accuracy; and I'd want anyone I cared about to understand that before making decisions based on it.

If I'm understanding your methods correctly, you only have data for earnings by occupation. So when you say "Computer Science majors earn x." it actually means "People who do the same jobs that computer science majors tend to do earn x."

If that's the case then the data is not really actionable unless we also know the probability of getting a job with and without some degree.

For example, if computer science majors all tend to get job A, but having a computer science degree makes you no more likely than people without computer science degrees to get job A, then the value of the computer science degree is 0.

Of course having a degree does usually provide some advantage at getting a job, and in some fields it's impossible to get a job without a degree.

But still, for this data to be truly meaningful and actionable you must multiply the value of each degree by the amount that the degree aids you in getting a job, which is a hard value to determine.

Edit:

Here's an example of why this is important. Let's compare physical therapy and programming.

According to the data, a Doctorate in Physical Therapy has a value of about $1.2 million, while a Bachelors in Computer Science has a value of around $1.5 million.

You might conclude that the computer science degree is a better value, especially since it costs less than the doctorate.

However, you cannot be a physical therapist without the degree. So the value of the P.T. degree is $1.2m * 100%, or $1.2 million, because without the degree you have a 0% chance of getting the job (and assuming that having a P.T. degree guarantees you a job).

You can be a programmer without a computer science degree. So the value of the degree is going to be $1.5m times some percentage less than 100. In order for the C.S. degree to be more valuable than the P.T. degree you'd have to be 80% more likely to get a job than a programmer without a C.S. degree. (1.5 * .8 = 1.2)

It doesn't seem like people with C.S. degrees are 80% more likely to get jobs. Especially when you factor in the opportunity cost of going to school. That's a lot of time you could spend working on open-source projects, building websites and businesses, etc. which are all things that count more than a degree.

So the value of a C.S. degree could very easily be less than the value of a P.T. degree.

Another thing I like to see is when the posting talks about what sort of projects you'll be working on.

The latest example of this was GazeHawk's job posting:

"Eye tracking gives you a ton of data with a lot of dimensions. We want to show that data to our users in a way that's easy to parse. That means interactivity: HTML5, Canvas, JS."

Just a single sentence, but it engaged me, got me thinking, and gave me a good idea of the sort of projects they're working on.

You definitely kept your book fun, and thank you for writing it. Though some mention of Lisp files would be handy. You sort of have to figure it out on your own now, or get through the entire book in one long REPL session.

In other words, Google is a monopoly. Their strategy is to monopolize markets and charge artificially high prices for advertising.

It's a weird sort of monopoly though, their users can go elsewhere, but their users are not their customers. Their customers are advertisers, and they are basically forced to use Google.

You're right, it does depend on people's perception of quality.

I can only recall being frustrated with the scraper sites when they don't have the answer I need, because when I go back to the Google results and try another page I find that they have the exact same scraped content. Out of the first ten or twenty results there are only a few unique pieces of content.

Perhaps if Google eliminated redundancy from their results I'd never even notice whether the content was scraped or not.

Perhaps it is important for them to maintain an aura of neutrality and cold calculation. Though if we are supposing that Google is intentionally crippling it's algorithm, would it be so much to suppose that they would just clandestinely run the spam sites themselves to eliminate the middle-man? Though perhaps the cost of secretly doing it themselves is higher than the AdSense payments made to the sites.

This all assumes that Google's reputation remains untarnished by merely linking to spam rather than filling their own site with spam, but I don't think that's quite the case. Google's reputation is intricately tied up with the quality of the results it gives.

If promoting spam sites filled with ads was so profitable why wouldn't Google just put more ads on its search results page and cut out the middle man

Whether they were demonized or not would require some studies as I mentioned in the last sentences of my previous post. Who demonized them? How much of the population demonized them? How strongly did people feel towards them? And how did these sentiments compare with people prior to Teddy Roosevelt?

Without answering those questions we can't rightly draw any conclusions about people's attitude towards the self-made man.

Well I'm glad the last 100 years of business history can be summed up with a single strawman. It's such a relief that there was no nuance or complexity in history, now I won't have to do any of that nasty "thinking".

Sarcasm aside, you present an entirely simplistic view of history perfectly tailored to the point you're trying to make. The only people who are going to believe anything you're saying are the people who already agree with you, because people tend to be less than critical when it comes to their pet theories.

As a counter-point, here are some of those grey-suited company-men from the post-Teddy Roosevelt era:

Henry Ford

Alfred Sloan

Thomas Watson

Walt Disney

Will Kellogg

Warren Buffett

William Boeing

Gordon Moore

Henry Kaiser

There are more. So what exactly is your point? There were clearly self-made men after Roosevelt. Are you arguing that there were more self-made men before Roosevelt? I'd like to see some evidence to that. Or maybe you're arguing that the general "sentiment" was against self-made men. Again, I'd like to see evidence of that, and good luck finding it. First you'll have to define just what the national "sentiment" is, then find scientific studies of people both before and after Roosevelt that tried to discern it.

The formula for writing on the software industry is to turn your personal experiences into general principles. It provides no knowledge about the world, all it gives us is one person's perspective of a handful of situations.

OkCupid tends to use the contents of private messages for their juiciest research. I suspect if Facebook started talking about what people were saying in private there'd be quite a shit storm.

Edit: Oh yeah, and OkCupid loves to make bold pronouncements on shaky data.

You are probably right that it makes more financial sense to go into one of those careers than to start or work for a startup.

Yet it's still perfectly acceptable to join the startup world, so long as you're getting something else out of it besides money.

Maybe more people need to realize that they are in fact making a trade-off.

When I first saw the contest I was only thinking about indexing all the existing data from some website, but clearly it's better to just start indexing the new data, and get a website up and running. Later I could write another program that fetches and indexes the old data in the background. Thanks for writing this, it gave me some new ideas.

Like System76.

I've yet to have a problem with drivers on Ubuntu, in fact it's better than Windows. Windows seems to have separate drivers for each USB port. I have to plug my peripherals into the same port they were installed on or it doesn't work. Ubuntu doesn't care, it detects everything no matter where it's plugged in.

How to Win Friends and Influence People, because you're going to have to sell yourself better than the people with degrees.

Apparently, just like real people, programmers just want shit to work when said shit is tangential to their project.

Ubuntu does a mostly good job at that, at least for me.

Sorry Josh, it's them not you.

It doesn't sound like you lived in a place all that bad. The problem with the sprawl that I've lived in is that there is no chance for the community to develop. For a community to form there has to be some place where members of the community gather and see each other enough times to form relationships. That doesn't exist in my hometown, everybody gets in their car and drives to some place miles away then drives home. Even if you get to know people at these places the sprawl is so massive the odds are that they live miles and miles away from you. The closest (geographically) friend I had in high school lived 7 miles away; and I didn't live in a rural area, that was 7 miles of sub-divisions and strip malls.

I don't think were talking about startups on the weeks to months scale. That's the time period where it's a couple people in an apartment. Yeah, you probably don't have time to train people at that stage.

You jump from that stage to Google as if there's nothing in between, but almost every other company is in between. Plenty of startups have been around for years, and plenty of them have enough funding to ensure that they'll still be around for years. At that point it becomes possible to make the short-term sacrifices necessary to ensure long-term success, like training.

It wouldn't need to actually measure your weight. Bathroom scales are just there to collect dust in the corner and make people feel bad whenever they look at them.

I meant you couldn't hire all senior engineers, or at least enough to fill every position you'd want.

Well, because you can't, as all these posts whining about how hard it is to find people allude to. Since there aren't enough senior engineers to go around the next best thing is to hire some talented novices and turn them into senior engineers.