whack

> Pill’s words were more blunt in suggesting that workers must shoulder more of the burden. That puts the BOE in conflict with thousands of public sector workers angry at the government over its decision to restrain pay.

When economists talk about market distortions, they are talking about free markets. One where there are many competing producers/consumers all of whom are trying to maximize profits, minimize costs, and compete against one another if someone is underpaying/overpaying. Pill's comments here seem to be directed at government workers, many of whom are also unionized. Wages for such workers are driven as much by politics as by free markets

"The Coddling of the American Mind" is a great book that explores this subject in depth.

Very bad overview that is a poor substitute for reading the book: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Coddling_of_the_American_M...

> The book goes on to discuss microaggressions, identity politics, "safetyism", call-out culture, and intersectionality.[1] The authors define safetyism as a culture or belief system in which safety (which includes "emotional safety") has become a sacred value, which means that people become unwilling to make trade-offs demanded by other practical and moral concerns. They argue that embracing the culture of safetyism has interfered with young people’s social, emotional, and intellectual development.[2] Continuing on to discuss contemporary partisanship or the "rising political polarization and cross party animosity", they state that the left and right are "locked into a game of mutual provocation and reciprocal outrage".[2]

> The authors call on university and college administrators to identify with freedom of inquiry by endorsing the Chicago principles on free speech,[2]: 255–257 through which university and colleges notify students in advance that they do not support the use of trigger warnings or safe spaces.[3] They suggest specific programs, such as LetGrow, Lenore Skenazy's Free Range Kids, teaching children mindfulness, and the basics of cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT).[2]: 241 They encourage a charitable approach to the interpretations of other peoples' statements instead of assuming they meant offense.

> the world's bottom billion already have skills worth very close to $0

This is the context of the response you were commenting on. There is a distinction between "this person is earning close to $0 because they are living in a poorly functioning country and economy" vs "this person's skills are worth close to $0". The latter implies that even if that person moved to another country, they wouldn't possess any skills worth paying $7/hour. Which is false.

For perspective, if you took Bill Gates and parachuted him into an uncontacted tribe in the Amazon, they would consider him to be useless. But few would agree with an absolute statement that "Bill Gates has no valuable skills."

I agree with you that we shouldn't be using anecdotal evidence to drive outrage and public policy. There are a whole host of biases and errors that pop up when using anecdotal evidence as you pointed out.

The flip side is that people have zero interest in statistics-based discussions. Even supposedly data-driven engineers. If you find that property-crime has increased by X%, of which Y% can be attributed to specific public policy decisions, you will get zero traction if you frame this as a data-driven discussion. People grok stories. They may somewhat understand statistics and numbers, but they don't grok it. Hence why almost all discussions revolve around anecdotes with some statistics provided as supporting evidence.

Ironically, for-profit companies are far better at having data-driven discussions and decisions. I have little hope that this will ever be the case in public discourse.

> In the last century, prominent scientists spoke out against U.S. militarism and called for the end of war. Scientists like Einstein, Linus Pauling, and the great skeptic Carl Sagan. Where are their successors? Noam Chomsky is still bashing U.S. imperialism, but he’s in his nineties. He needs help! Far from criticizing militarism, some scholars, like economist Tyler Cowen, claim war is beneficial, because it spurs innovation. That’s like arguing for the economic benefits of cancer or slavery.

The author brings up some good points, but the above attack on Tyler Cowen comes across as either bad-faith or a severe lack of critical thinking skills. You can read Cowen's article for yourself, it is linked below. Cowen never once recommended that any nation pursue war or militarism. He was merely pointing out a possible causal link between war and innovation. Which is exactly what every scientist should aim to do - find causal links, even if we wish those links didn't exist. As a reader of the article, I would hope we are wise enough to understand that even if a causal link exists, there are still many other important reasons to not pursue war.

I know this sounds nitpicky, but I only bring this up because I notice this becoming more and more frequent. People repeatedly attack and shame researchers who find facts and causal links that we wish didn't exist. This is classic shooting-the-messenger. Do we really want to live in a world where researchers are too afraid to publish any studies that yield inconvenient truths? Because we're halfway there already.

https://www.nytimes.com/2014/06/14/upshot/the-lack-of-major-...

The Iraq invasion was not morally justified and an idiotic decision to boot. But on the evil spectrum, invading to annex/colonize a territory is far worse than invading a dictatorship, deposing the dictator, and giving power back to the native people.

Would you hire my extremely sweet computer illiterate grandma as a software developer? No? There's your answer.

At a very minimum, you can make it illegal to price a product below its marginal cost. This would have prevented e-commerce/rideshare/delivery companies from using VC-funded discounts to gain market-share and destroy less-funded competitors.

> We value people who are loyal. We think about them in positive terms. They get awarded often. It's not just the negative side

If the managers also award loyal workers in various ways, it would hardly be exploitative. As a manager, if something absolutely needs to get done outside of normal work hours, of course I would lean towards asking the person most likely to say yes. And of course I would also give that person a larger end-of-year salary increase, bonus, or fast-tracked promotion to recognize their efforts and commitment. It seems odd for the study to focus purely on the additional work the loyal workers are doing, and ignore the various ways in which they would be rewarded for it.

I recall Amazon used to do something similar. Executives would sometimes take customer service shifts. The goal isn't PR or worker morale - most people see through stunts like that. The real goal is to help leaders better understand their product, its problems, and customer frustrations.

Ca you imagine people's reactions if gas prices dropped 10%? Or if food prices fell 10%? Or car/university prices fell 10%? Society functions best when it actively tries to minimize cost of living. Unfortunately we have created an political-economic system where half the population is incentivized to push housing costs as high as possible, or at least prevent it from falling, because it will enhance their personal wealth.

I hope for my childrens' sakes that there will be a massive boom in medium/high density housing construction over the next few decades, that brings house prices and rents to all-time lows. But this will never happen because homeowner-voters will never allow their personal nest egg to be threatened.

I've been a huge proponent of self-directed self-paced learning using techniques such as flipped-classrooms. I'm skeptical that today's AI is good enough to replace a human curriculum creator or hands-on tutor, but I suppose the best way to know is for some brave soul to try it out! The author is trying this out with their own children, so I applaud them for having skin in the game. Looking forward to seeing a 1-year and 3-year follow-up post

This is fascinating. What is your process for scouting amazing developers? Do you just go to random repositories, look at random commits, and identify people who are writing clean code?

The following paragraphs were especially powerful:

> The chattering class is using poor kids as pawns to eliminate standardized testing. Which helps their own kids. Rich kids who “don’t test well.” But they know how to strategically boost their GPAs, get recommendation letters from important people, stack their resumes with extracurriculars, and use the right slogans in their admissions essays. They have “polish.”

> Applicants from the most affluent families excel at these games. A study at Stanford found that family income is more highly correlated with admissions essay content than with SAT scores. Applicants from well-to-do backgrounds are especially adept at crafting their essays in ways that please admissions committees.

If equity is so important, why not grant preferential treatment to all children coming from families that aren't upper-middle-class? Or ban legacy preferences at the very least? This is a simple and effective way of achieving the goals they claim to be championing. The author hit the nail on the head. Every other metric used for admissions is far more easily gamed by rich families. Hence why they are being preserved. Standardized test scores are the hardest metric to game, and hence, are most under attack. All this talk about equity is the most convenient and cost-effective way to eliminate the one barrier that most vexes rich parents.

I initially thought this was a bad idea. If we followed GW's recommended ratio of 30,000 constituents to 1 representative, the house today would consist of ~10,000 representatives. Which seems ridiculous. You would need a sports stadium just to fit all of them in one place.

But as I think about it more, I'm coming around to the idea. Instead of voting in representatives that we are completely disconnected from, we would instead vote in representatives whom we have some form of personal connection with. 30,000 constituents is about the size of a medium-sized university. Whenever someone runs for office, you would most likely know someone who knows that person on a personal level. Someone who can either vouch for them, or tell you all their red flags. And as the author pointed out, candidates wouldn't need to worry about fundraising nearly as much, since they can rely on their personal network to campaign effectively.

In theory this should mean that the average representative would be smarter, more capable, and of better moral character. And a house comprised of smarter, more capable, and more morally upstanding representatives would function a lot better than what we have now.

The house would need to be fundamentally changed of course. The "office-oriented" culture would need to evolve into something that is more remote, decentralized, and distributed. And for starters, all voting would have to be done digitally. It would be a radical shift, but one that has real potential.

I think the person you're replying to has a valid point. Attraction isn't a binary, it's a spectrum.

As a guy in your early 20s who has left the the college bubble, your eligible dating pool is at its very smallest size. Women generally prefer not to date a guy significantly younger than them, so you're basically left with the girls your age. Guys don't have similar issues with dating younger women, so that 23-year old you just asked out is also going to be asked out by guys in their late 20s who are richer, have more impressive career accomplishments, and are more mature.

As you get older, your pool of eligible partners keeps growing. Whereas for women, their pool of eligible partners keeps shrinking. For the exact same reasons discussed above. This isn't going to radically transform your life and land you a supermodel. But it does improve your odds in a noticeable way. Someone who used to think of you as a 6 would now think of you as a 7. Maybe even an 8, depending on how you used your 20s. Going from a 6 to a 7 may not seem like much, but it makes a big difference in your dating life.

My initial hunch was also to calculate the answer as 1 + 4/3 + 2 + 4. Ie, "average tries to get 1st toy, plus average tries to get 2nd toy, plus ...."

However, my memory of probability is very fuzzy and I wasn't sure if my above intuition was mathematically rigorous. Ie, can the expected values of these 4 events be simply summed in order to get the combined expected value?

For anyone else curious about this, here's the mathematical proof that you can indeed do so. Ie, proof that E(X+Y) = E(X) + E(Y). Where X can be defined as the number of tries to get the 1st toy, Y is the number of tries to get the 2nd toy, and so on: https://www.milefoot.com/math/stat/rv-sums.htm

In this specific example, X and Y are independent random variables. But if my reading of the above proof is correct, you can still sum the expected values even if X and Y happen to be correlated.

Here's a hot take. VCs don't hate labor. They love money. They will do anything that makes the most money for them. If that means investing in people who they think will be successful (ie, impressive resume, past success), they will do that. If that means not investing in people who they think will not be successful founders, they will certainly not do that. Ultimately their drive to make money by backing the right horse, trumps any sort of power/status game.

Founders also don't hate labor. They love money. If they can hire good enough developers by paying them 0.5% equity, they will do that. If the market demands that they pay developers 500k/year and hire thousands of them during a bull run, they will do that. If they think paying a "superstar" CEO $200M/year creates even more value, they will do it. If they can get away with paying that same guy nothing, that's also exactly what they will do. If they can improve the company's long-term profitability by laying off thousands of developers during a downturn, they will also do that.

Labor for the most part doesn't hate anybody either. We love money. If a company hires me right after college, trains me, helps me build my resume, and another company comes around with a promotion and a 30% higher comp offer, I would take that offer. If the company has fallen on hard times and isn't able to pay me as much as another company, I would give a few months notice and then jump ship.

I find it hard to take these sort of conspiracy theories seriously. No one is purposely conducting layoffs in order to "put labor in their place." No one is purposely trying to underpay startup employees because they hate them. Everyone is trying to enrich themselves as much as possible. Partly by collaborating with their complements in order to create something of value. And partly by paying their complements as little as they can get away with. This is literally how every single free market works.

If you think your startup isn't paying employees enough, don't work for that startup. If you think all startups are paying developers too much relative to support engineers, try building a career for yourself as a developer instead. If you think all startups are too generous with its founders relative to employees, try building a career for yourself as a founder instead. If you're able to succeed as a developer/founder, great! If you're not able to succeed as a developer/founder, maybe you have a better appreciation for why they get paid whatever they do. You don't owe them anything, they don't owe you anything, nobody hates anyone, everyone's just trying to make the most money they can for themselves.

Was he "solidly mid level" in terms of years-of-experience or ability? I find myself conflating the 2 frequently, and have to remind myself not to. I like to periodically remind myself that Zuckerbeg as a 22-year old was a successful founder-CEO for a business over a hundred employees and a $1B acquisition offer.

Sure, he is not the norm. But I'm sure there are plenty of people equally as talented as him who didn't take the entrepreneurship route and are now languishing in the corporate ladder. Any company can achieve wild success if they are able to identify such talents and place them immediately in high-impact roles.

I'm going to go on a rant here. Most times when I hear someone invoke Goodhart's law, it's because they are opposed to transparent and metric-driven decision-making. It's easy to find the flaws with this approach, as the article has effectively done. But what they inevitably ignore is the flaws of not using this approach. Without a transparent metrics-driven decision making process, what you end up with one of the following:

- A totally opaque use of metrics to make decisions. You as a customer-support rep are trying to answer as many customer tickets as possible with a reasonably high satisfaction rate, because you think that's what you're supposed to do. Except that management has decided that you will secretly be judged based solely on satisfaction rates, and not the volume of work done. So you keep getting passed over for promotions and raises, losing out to others who are closing far fewer tickets but with a marginally higher satisfaction rate. And you have no idea why

- A totally subjective decision-making process filled with all manner of cognitive biases. You have an accent, so you get passed over for promotions. Your buddy comes to work dressed very sharp, so he gets great performance reviews. The new guy goes bowling with your boss every Sunday, and gets fast tracked for promotions. Nobody knows or says these reasons. Everyone can point after-the-fact to some piece of data that explains why the guy with an accent would not be a good leader, and why the manager's best friend deserves a promotion. And yet, you keep noticing consistently that some people get ahead far more than their talents would suggest

- No decision making process at all. The guy next to you who spends half the work day hungover? Still around 10 years later. The guy who customers hate talking to because he's barely helpful? Clocks in 9-5 everyday with no problems at all. Both of them have abysmal work output or customer satisfaction ratings? Well, you've heard of Goodhart's law right. We can't just go around evaluating people based on these very flawed and could-be-gamed metrics

Yes, it's extremely hard finding a good measure to optimize for. And yes, there are second order effects where people will try to game any metrics you start measuring. But how does this compare against the problems involved in NOT doing this? To use the article's parlance, overfitting is bad, but underfitting is also bad. Instead of trotting out Goodhart's law every time someone suggests transparently using metrics to guide decision-making, perhaps we should be discussing how to find the right balance between underfitting and overfitting. And what combination of metrics will produce the best proxy for the goals we're trying to achieve, while avoiding the problems of overfitting to a single metric.

IMO, the solution offered in the article is not realistic. If you're getting a job offer from Coinbase that's 30% higher than Google's (tweet referenced by the article), neither company will agree to you working both jobs concurrently. Even if they astonishingly did, they would likely require at least 30 hours each, which is extremely bad for your mental health.

Here are a couple more realistic options to consider:

1) If you're not born in India or China, prioritize landing a job at a stable employee-friendly company that is willing to start your green card petition asap. Stay there till you get your green card. If things go smoothly, it should only take ~2 years

2) If you're born in India or China, live extremely frugally throughout your 20s and save up as much money as you possibly can. Worst case scenario: use your savings and supplement with personal loans to apply for a EB5 visa (costs about $800k)

3) Apply for permanent residency in places like Canada/Australia/NZ. If you're a FANG caliber developer, you'll be welcomed with open arms in most countries besides USA. You'll most likely take a big hit to your compensation, and being forced to move countries is never fun, but at least your life would be somewhat similar to living in USA

Why so angry? This "looser" was a guy who built a company from the ground up into something that is now a unicorn. a16z is hardly a gullible investor that is falling naively for some schmoozer. Who exactly are you worried he's going to exploit?

Yes

For some reason, people online seem extremely angry towards attention grabbing titles that are also 100% accurate and descriptive of the article. If you don't go out of your way to pick the most drab title imaginable, you are an evil scammer robbing people of their precious internet bandwidth.

Even the author initially decided not to use "10% of the top million sites are dead" because it seemed "flashy, gimmicky, and potentially clickbait." Well yes, it is flashy, but it is certainly not clickbait. Why on earth do people hate on titles like that, when it accurately describes one of the central findings of the article.

I swear, one day someone is going to find a cure for cancer. They will publish something with the title "I have found a cure for cancer." And the first thing they will hear is some misanthrope complaining about their title being clickbait.

We use soft-deletes extensively at our startup. Here's a couple reasons:

- Feature creep. "Sometimes our users accidentally hit the delete button, or change their minds a minute later. We want to give them a way to undo the deletion." Or "I know we said last quarter that we users want to delete stuff, but they also want to see a list of everything they've deleted in the past." Soft-deletes handle feature-creep a lot better than hard-deletions

- It simplifies foreign-keys management. If you want to hard-delete something that some other entity is referencing, you'll have to hard-delete or modify that other entity first. And potentially repeat this process recursively for their own references. This is a pain. One could argue that if you really want to delete something, you should be deleting all children as well. Such arguments are highly domain specific, and very bad universal claims. We've seen some use-cases where such pedantry is not necessary

- It makes it easier to recover from mistakes and bugs. Customer deleted something accidentally and emailed you begging for help? Your code has a bug causing stuff to get deleted when it shouldn't be? You'll be thankful you did a soft-delete and not a hard-delete. Is it going to solve every single problem where the data has system-wide ripple effects in a unicorn sized organization? No. But it'll still solve a number of problems where the data impact is more localized

- It makes debugging easier. You have a clear record of everything that used to exist. You don't have to go digging through your logs to find something that used to exist but has now been deleted

- Speed. All of the above problems can be solved in other ways too. The author suggests putting all deleted data in a "deleted records table." So now you need to maintain a 2nd table for every table that you may want to delete stuff from. All schema updates will need to be mirrored on this 2nd table. And you'll need to write and maintain code to populate this deleted-records-table every time you delete stuff from the original table. All doable and straight-forward but takes time away from other things you could be doing instead

The main benefit from hard-deletions is data compliance and liability. Ie, being able to tell privacy-conscious customers that you actually deleted their data. If you're handling any sensitive data, you should definitely do hard-deletions at some point for this reason. But the other reason the author gave - "it's annoying having to check for `deleted_at` when writing SQL queries" - seems pretty minor compared to the benefits.

> This would be fine, except that airlines have already sold an avereage of 101,500 tickets per day and seats are still on sale.

My understanding is that based on existing sales alone, there are already 101,500 passengers/day. And in order to get 100,000, they have asked airlines to not sell any more tickets at all.

If you imagine that airlines were previously planning to sell a further 20,000 tickets per day, and they cut that down to 0-100 per day, that's a huge drop that is sure to impact anyone looking to buy tickets at this time.

> loudly proclaiming "look at our charity"

They weren't touting their charity. They were touting their charitable franchise owners. That's a major distinction.

Imagine if Google made an ad saying "We donated $50,000 to charity. Look how generous we are. Come work for Google". That would be nonsensical.

Now imagine if Google made an ad saying "Joe is a Googler. Joe donated $50,000 of his own money to charity. Look how wonderful our Googlers are. Come work for Google alongside people like Joe." Very cheesy, but it makes a lot more sense. Domino's ad is the latter, not the former.

Amazon is a very decentralized company. Which means that Amazon's thousands of recruiters are all operating independently of each other, and have minimal systems/regulations to prevent multiple recruiters contacting the same person. The different recruiters are often recruiting for different teams/divisions as well, so if you're open to joining Amazon, you should certainly talk to a recruiter whose team matches your interests.

> It is not man's duty, as a matter of course, to devote himself to the eradication of any wrong; he may still properly have other concerns to engage him; but it is his duty, at least, to wash his hands of it, and, if he gives it no thought longer, not to give it practically his support.

Classic appeal to authority. The above quotation contains grand declarations with no supporting logic or evidence. Just because Henry David Thoreau said it doesn't make it true.

> in the real world you don't remotely get clean problem statements at all, let alone clean outcomes. Not only are the outcomes profoundly unknowable, but the world is full of other people pulling their own levers!

The outcomes of inaction are equally as "profoundly unknowable" as the outcomes of taking action. From an "unintended consequences" perspective, it's a wash. So we might as well focus on the first order known consequences, which are pretty clear.

If we're going down the road of appealing to authority, I'm partial to "The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing"

> As the Corner Office columnist for The New York Times, I've spent the last several years speaking with hundreds of top CEOs about their careers, their mentors, and their approaches to management. Over the course of these conversations, it's become clear that the best leaders share a common set of attributes — characteristics like emotional intelligence, the ability to think long term, and a commitment to serve multiple stakeholders at once.

> In my new book, I explain what he got wrong.

It seems odd to accuse Welch of poor long-term results. The guy was CEO of GE for 20 years. To put this in context, that's longer than Google's entire post-IPO history. And during these 20 years, he grew GE by 30x, and outperformed the index 3.3x, despite GE already being a large blue-chip corporation when he took over. How many of the people interviewed by this author have a more successful long-term track record?

If you're judging Welch by metrics such as "compassion" and "empathy" and "humanity", you can argue that he got a ton wrong. By that same lens, you can also argue that people like Steve Jobs, Elon Musk, and Alex Ferguson were absolute failures. But if you're judging Welch as a businessmen, using the same metrics that most businessmen aspire to attain, it's downright silly to condescend to him.