Steven[0461] and I would like to come up from Chicagoland for a Madison meet-up sometime, but we could only make it on a weekend. We would only be occasional attendees at any rate, but perhaps you could also do a weekend meet-up every once in a while, in addition to whatever weekday you settle on. Also, the date in the title doesn’t currently match the date in the text.
Airedale
Karma: 941
Sorry for the late notice. Steven and I usually try to give about a week or so notice, but it didn’t work out this time. We figured it’s better to have one now even with late notice than to wait until the next time our schedules cleared. Also, we have a Google Group where you can sign up to get e-mail notifications rather than relying on catching it on the site. Hopefully you can make it to the next one!
I think there are some interesting ideas here, and I agree that analysis of art can (and sometimes should) be done at a high level. But I’m doubtful that The Hangover or even The Hangover 2 is the best example to hang your hat on. I agree with Kevin that the first movie is actually pretty funny. Plus:
Analyzing humor is like dissecting a frog. Few people are interested and the frog dies of it.
Maybe that the quote is not completely true (that is, there are situations when analyzing humor may lead to insight or even more humor), but to some extent, I think White is correct that humor is challenging to analyze without taking the joy/humor out of it. I enjoy laughing, including sometimes stomach-hurting laughter at “lowbrow” comedy, and I prefer to keep laughing at what makes me laugh rather than analyzing it.
Steven0461 and I would like to come up from Chicagoland for a Madison meetup sometime (and weekends are better for that), but we will unfortunately be out of town that weekend. Have fun!
It’s not a fashion magazine, but I find a lot of the fashion advice in Real Simple to be quite helpful, and some (although not all) of the featured clothes are affordable. The website looks like it has some good resources too.
I enjoy (and learn from) What Not to Wear, although it’s probably not the most efficient way to learn about clothes, make-up, hair styles, etc. It’s often pretty amusing though. Also good is the original BBC version. There appear to be some resources on both of those websites, and a number of related books, but I haven’t used/read any of them.
ETA: One of the things the show taught me is that, especially if you’re not that experienced with fashion, you often have to try on a lot of clothes to find something flattering. Unfortunately that can be both frustrating and time-consuming; but to some extent knowing some of the “rules” that the show teaches about what’s flattering (and the different rules for different body types) can at least help that process go a little more smoothly.
The post appears to have been removed. I hope that means that he changed his mind, but have no information either way.
Edited to add:
It’s often good advice, other things being equal, to go to the best school you get into. Of course, other things are rarely, if ever, equal. (Where best means most prestigious.)
The Harvard name, particularly internationally, is probably without peer among U.S. institutions. On the other hand, I think it’s at least possible that for certain fields, including engineering, that an MIT degree, for example, would be viewed just as positively among those who are most likely to matter in terms of career advancement, etc. But people in engineering could speak better to that than I.
It’s also my impression, based on conversations with friends who are alumni of the school, that one of the primary criticisms leveled against Harvard is its lack of focus on the undergraduate school as opposed to the grad and professional schools. One good friend of mine, while very happy to have the Harvard name on his resume, was somewhat disappointed in the academic experience at Harvard because of that. Of the schools I’m most familiar with on your list, Swarthmore, for example, would be the very opposite of Harvard in terms of its attention to the undergrad experience.
I do interviews for my undergrad college, and always advise people, once they’ve narrowed down their list using whatever criteria they’ve determined are most important to them, that they won’t go wrong by going with their gut in choosing among the remaining contenders. Maybe that doesn’t sound like rationalist advice, but again, this is after you’ve already applied your rational analysis and narrowed your list down to just a handful of schools. (Of course, your analysis may leave you with only one school on your list anyway, in which case, no need to resort to the gut.) At that point, I recommend going with your gut, particularly if your gut feeling is informed by visits during admitted student events, which I highly recommend if you can swing it, and which, while not giving you perfect insight into the school, give you a different way to evaluate than just comparing schools on paper. Talking to current students and alumni is also useful.
Chicago Meetup—Sunday March 13
Not the complete story, of course, but here’s an interesting recent Slate article suggesting that female professors seems to have a positive effect at the university level:
They measured, for instance, how often each student responded to questions posed by professors to the classroom as a whole. At the start of the semester, 11 percent of the female students attempted to answer questions posed to the entire class when the professor was male, and 7 percent of the female students attempted to answer questions posed to the entire class when the professor was female. By the end of the semester, the number of female students who attempted to answer questions posed by a male professor had not changed significantly: Only 7 percent of the women tried to answer such questions. But when classes were taught by a woman, the percentage of female students who attempted to answer questions by the semester’s end rose to 46.
. . .
Finally, when Stout and Dasgupta evaluated how much the students identified with mathematics, they found that women ended up with less confidence in their mathematical abilities when their teachers were men rather than women. This happened even when women outperformed men on actual tests of math performance.
. . .
These experiments suggest that subtle and unconscious factors skew the “free choices” we make. The career choices of men and women are affected far more by discrimination than by any innate differences between men and women. But it is not the kind of discrimination we usually talk about. We ought to assume that male math professors at the University of Massachusetts were just as committed to teaching young women as they were to teaching young men. And those professors were just as talented as their female counterparts. (The professors and students were not told the purpose of the experiment beforehand, so the female professors and female students couldn’t have entered into some kind of pact to boost test scores.)
I very much agree with siduri’s comment, as well as grouchymusicologist’s below. I don’t know for sure which way the pros and cons of the proposed post go, but I do think it’s important to consider not just the possible benefit to the current “average Less Wrong Reader” but also the other effects Siduri and grouchymusicologist identify—as Siduri says, not attracting women to the community/possibly driving women away, and as grouchymusicologist says, communicating the message “that the typical reader of LW is 20-34 and heterosexual and single and male and we prefer it that way.” I think those effects are real—I would personally feel that LW was just a tiny bit less welcoming with such a post—even if I don’t have a good sense of how to measure them.
I’m torn because I’m sure that lukeprog’s post would probably benefit some members of the LW community. I’ve read enough of the comments about PUA here to recognize that the PUA community is diverse and some of the voices that are most known/infamous outside of the community (e.g., Roissy) are not representative of what a lot of members of the PUA community (and certainly the LW community) study and admire.
I’m also sympathetic that to those PUA members who don’t like the Roissy-type approach, it must be frustrating to be lumped in with him. But, at least from what I can tell, that kind of PUA is all a lot of people casually familiar with the subject know, and so the mere mention of PUA evokes negative feelings for a lot of people. So I fear lukeprog’s post would evoke those feelings and turn people away from LW, even if it also had the more agreeable effect of providing more balanced information to those who stuck past the original negative reaction to “PUA” and read on.
Anyway, lukeprog, if you’re collecting votes, I would have to vote no. At any rate, thank you for asking for input from the community.
Q: Won’t working in Australia prevent me from gaining experience in my narrow professional sub-field, thus reducing my total lifetime earning power?
A: This is almost certainly not the case for anyone under 30. Companies pay professionals more based on their abilities and their age as opposed to their actual years of experience. And, they pay more for older professionals than young ones just starting out cause they know these people really do have higher expenses and are less likely to quit. So taking a year off in your 20s to work abroad is only exchanging a year in which you would have earned the lowest salary you’ll ever have during your career for a year of higher earning power in Australia. You can always come back to your career in a year and pick up where you left off. Besides; who follows a straight-up-the-ladder career path anymore? Almost nobody.
Although I think that in the case of taking off only a year these sorts of concerns are probably pretty minimal, this doesn’t seem like an accurate view of the hiring process as I know it. First, many (although not all) companies have no methodology in place for evaluating abilities other than through experience. Indeed, many job ads include experience as a requirement. And the more a company uses HR to evaluate candidates, the more they will use experience as a proxy for ability. Second, although I agree that companies will generally pay older professionals more than younger ones, because of that very reason, many companies will prefer to hire younger cheaper workers, even if they realize this may risk greater turnover because the workers may be less loyal.
As I said, in the case of taking off only a year, I don’t think these concerns are going to have much effect. But even in the case of taking off a year right after college, for example, to the extent that one’s school has on-campus recruiting, applying for jobs will turn out to be a much more difficult and time-consuming endeavor, and some companies will reserve some entry-level jobs exclusively for on-campus recruiting.
The other caveat I have is that in a difficult economic climate, even a slight blemish (or something that can be characterized as a blemish) on one’s résumé may negatively affect one’s job search. With a surplus of qualified applicants, companies will often be looking for reasons not to interview someone, and HR professionals will not always be fair or accurate in finding these reasons. For example, some HR professionals may look at taking a year off to work in the hospitality industry as evidence that the candidate lacks seriousness of purpose or passion for the company’s industry. Now it’s true that others may look at it as adding interesting life experience, of course, but even there, there are probably candidates who took a year off in a way that HR companies view as more meritorious (even though they are less lucrative for the candidate), such as working with the Peace Corps or teaching English in a foreign country.
Fair point, but that’s no guarantee that something as high profile as a Hugo award nomination wouldn’t raise flags with the legal team.
Edited to add: Having seen the cost and disruption of litigation from the lawyer’s side, I may be more cautious than typical on such matters. But as the article states, JKR still holds the copyright, and even if statements like that in the paper could be used to argue for a safe harbor, I don’t think that’s a slam dunk response that would automatically get one out of the lawsuit with a minimal expenditure in time and money. Plus ,something like being nominated for a Hugo for Best Novel may still be non-commercial activity (there’s no monetary prize), but it’s getting closer to the line. [This is still not legal advice.]
I am not an IP lawyer, and this is not legal advice, but isn’t there a risk that successfully placing HPMOR on the Hugo ballot for best novel could attract legal attention from JK Rowling and Co? They previously sued the HP Lexicon when it achieved a higher profile (although that situation included the factor of professional publication and compensation, which is not present here), so they’ve already shown that they’re not adverse to lawsuits in the right instance.
Lastly, if this is something that could/should be a top level post either for assisting me in finding Minnesotans, or giving others ideas for organizing since it will receive more publicity, let me know. I’ve only posted twice and don’t have a good sense for what warrants posting at the top level.
I think posting in the discussion section is probably a good first step to see if there is some interest (and to mention Group-o-matic), although any responses would likely understate interest since the front page gets more views than discussion, and some readers probably rarely if ever check discussion. That being said, once you’ve decided to actually have a meetup on a specific date, I would post that on the main page to maximize the chances interested people would see it. I would expect that you would get sufficient interest for a meetup in the Twin Cities.
Our Chicago meetup group also has a google group for announcing meetups, discussing venues, etc. That way, some people who may be interested in Chicago meetups but who may forget to check LW (or not check at the right time) can also receive notice.
This seems like an interesting article, but I’m having a little trouble parsing the post. Was there supposed to be another sentence/paragraph before the one starting “Now, NYC City . . .” that talks about where else this methodology is used? Maybe the first sentence of the article?
Given a quote like this, I think the best/most obvious interpretation is to read the quote in its famous historical and political context. Divorced from that context and read literally, it is obviously false. To the extent people are parroting those words to invoke a literal interpretation, that is obviously wrong. That being said, I think that in most cases where the term is used with even the slightest thought and consideration, it is steeped in at least a bit of the political flavor of the original and is used as a statement about how people interact with each other, government, and/or society.
I don’t think people are generally using the phrase to mean that for the very reasons that it is so obviously and trivially false if used in that way. The phrase is part of a very famous historical document, and I think the most natural reading is in that original context.
I agree with you on the skeeviness of the terminology of “scoring” a one night stand; interestingly, version 1 of the post instead states that Luke “had [his] first one-night stand.” Although I haven’t compared the versions carefully, it therefore seems like version 1 may make more of an attempt to avoid that sort of language.