As a man, is there anything I can do or avoid doing in the workplace to make it easier for coworkers like you? Let's assume I don't know and don't suspect anything specific about my coworkers. I just want to know if there's anything that would be pretty easy to implement, that would make a difference.
This wouldn't be Hacker News if someone didn't comment that ACTUALLY a random walk of n steps will get you sqrt(n) in some direction, which is much better than log(n). I guess my special skill is being pedantic.
There's a good chance Netflix is behaving rationally.
Shows are like startups. The payoff is a very skewed distribution, i.e. median and mean are vastly different. After one season, I'd argue you have a pretty good estimate of the earning potential for a show. Maybe you're even off by a factor of two or three, but since the goal is to find a show with 10x or 100x the viewership, you're better off canceling a show with median success.
Actually it's probably a lot easier to predict the payoff for a show after one year, than for a startup. Startups can take multiple years to find product-market fit; shows rarely pivot dramatically.
[Update: I got the facts wrong with the following example, as someone nicely pointed out below! I think the general principle still stands.] Tuca & Bertie, for example, was canceled after one season, but the same people went on to make Bojack Horseman, which was a much bigger hit. Bojack would not have happened if Tuca were renewed, and Tuca would never have gotten as popular as Bojack.
The opposite is true. If you are a freelancer, healthcare premiums are an above-the-line deduction, which practically has the same effect as a business expense. This is better than a regular deduction because you get it even if you don't itemize deductions. See https://turbotax.intuit.com/tax-tips/home-ownership/deductin...
"Neurons, brains, space … these are just symbols we use, they’re not real."
Such bullshit. Yes, they are symbols, but "just" symbols? They don't approximate reality at all? If so, how would he even know?
Edit: Let me elaborate. Yes, it's possible the world is just one big movie set, and nothing is remotely what it seems to be. It's possible everything is just a dream. But this is among the most banal of ideas. We have only made progress as a species by identifying deep, universal consistencies that have proven more reliable than anything else we know. Various scientific revolutions do not change the fact that the game is the same: to account for our observations parsimoniously. Now this guys says, it's all "just" symbols. Such bullshit.
Something's going on that's more than just network effects. Google was arguably not the first dominant search/advertising company, and Facebook was not the first social network, etc. But these companies can convince very good engineers that it's more profitable to join them than to compete against them, whereas their predecessors failed to do that. How they do this merits more investigation.
I would love to read an account of the games that administrators play, or of how businesses use universities to "launder money", if you know any. We've all seen numerical analyses that suggest that administrator compensation is way out of whack, but I've yet to read a good ground-level account of it.
The pictures stopped loading halfway through, but up to that point, I was entranced. Even the writing, by itself, is fun to read. It's rare to see someone with talent in both visual and textual forms.
Edit: Blame rests with my crappy Comcast connection, not with the website.
I generally sympathize with homeschoolers, but these parents seemed pathologically unable to doubt themselves or admit to mistakes. They were unable to see that their son, James, needed help learning to read, and even seemed to minimize his unhappiness. They did nothing to prepare their children for public school, despite professing to know how unpleasant the social environment can be. When James was picked on by his classmates, he never let his parents know — presumably because they were so unattuned to their children's experiences that it would have been pointless.
These parents doubtless believed they were virtuous in rejecting the culture of the times, but they went quite a bit farther and were basically delusional. People like that should not homeschool.