I feel exactly the same way about the controversial opinions.
Solvent
Karma: 1,425
Zipfian Academy is a bootcamp for data science, but it’s the only non web dev bootcamp I know about.
I work at App Academy, and I’m very happy to discuss App Academy and other coding bootcamps with anyone who wants to talk about them with me.
I have previously Skyped LWers to help them prepare for the interview.
Contact me at bshlegeris@gmail.com if interested (or in comments here).
I don’t know for sure Alicorn and I would continue to disagree about the ethics of white lies if we talked it out thoroughly, but it wouldn’t remotely surprise me.
That’s a moral disagreement, not a factual disagreement. Alicorn is a deontologist, and you guys probably wouldn’t be able to reach consensus on that no matter how hard you tried.
I interpreted that bit as “If you’re the kind of person who is able to do this kind of thing, then self-administered CBT is a great idea.”
Of the people who graduated more than 6 months ago and looked for jobs (as opposed to going to university or something), all have jobs.
About 5% of people drop out of the program.
It will probably be fine. See here.
You make a good point. But none of the people I’ve discussed this with who didn’t want to do App Academy cite those reasons.
I don’t think that they’re thinking rationally and just saying things wrong. They’re legitimately thinking wrong.
If they’re skeptical about whether the place teaches useful skills, the evidence that it actually gets people jobs should remove that worry entirely. Their point about accreditation usually came up after I had cited their jobs statistics. My impression was that they were just looking for their cached thoughts about dodgy looking training programs, without considering the evidence that this one worked.
I suspect that most people don’t think of making the switch.
Pretty much all of them, yes. I should have phrased that better.
My experience was unusual, but if they hadn’t hired me, I expect I would have been hired like my classmates.
I did, but the job I got was being a TA for App Academy, so that might not count in your eyes.
Their figures are telling the truth: I don’t know anyone from the previous cohort who was dissatisfied with their experience of job search.
They let you live at the office. I spent less than $10 a day. Good point though.
ETA: Note that I work for App Academy. So take all I say with a grain of salt. I’d love it if one of my classmates would confirm this for me.
Further edit: I retract the claim that this is strong evidence of rationalists winning. So it doesn’t count as an example of this.
I just finished App Academy. App Academy is a 9 week intensive course in web development. Almost everyone who goes through the program gets a job, with an average salary above $90k. You only pay if you get a job. As such, it seems to be a fantastic opportunity with very little risk, apart from the nine weeks of your life. (EDIT: They let you live at the office on an air mattress if you want, so living expenses aren’t much of an issue.)
There are a bunch of bad reasons to not do the program. To start with, there’s the sunk cost fallacy: many people here have philosophy degrees or whatever, and won’t get any advantage from that. More importantly, it’s a pretty unusual life move at this point to move to San Francisco and learn programming from a non-university institution.
LWers are massively overrepresented at AA. There were 4⁄40 at my session, and two of those had higher karma than me. I know other LWers from other sessions of AA.
This seems like a decent example of rationalists winning.
EDIT:
My particular point is that for a lot of people, this seems like a really good idea: if there’s a 50% chance of it being a scam, and you’re making $50k doing whatever else you were doing with your life, then if job search takes 3 months, you’re almost better off in expectation over the course of one year.
And most of the people I know who disparaged this kind of course didn’t do so because they disagreed with my calculation, but because it “didn’t offer real accreditation” or whatever. So I feel that this was a good gamble, which seemed weird, which rationalists were more likely to take.
I took the survey.
I’m a computer science student. I did a course on information theory, and I’m currently doing a course on Universal AI (taught by Marcus Hutter himself!). I’ve found both of these courses far easier as a result of already having a strong intuition for the topics, thanks to seeing them discussed on LW in a qualitative way.
For example, Bayes’ theorem, Shannon entropy, Kolmogorov complexity, sequential decision theory, and AIXI are all topics which I feel I’ve understood far better thanks to reading LW.
LW also inspired me to read a lot of philosophy. AFAICT, I know about as much philosophy as a second or third year philosophy student at my university, and I’m better at thinking about it than most of them are, thanks to the fantastic experience of reading and participating in discussion here. So that counts as useful.
The famous example of a philosopher changing his mind is Frank Jackson with his Mary’s Room argument. However, that’s pretty much the exception which proves the rule.
Not only do I use that, it means that your comment renders as:
Hermione’s body should now be at almost exactly five degrees Celsius [≈ recommended for keeping food cool] [≈ recommended for keeping food cool].
to me.
I have made bootleg PDFs in LaTeX of some of my favorite SSC posts, and gotten him to sign printed out and bound versions of them. At some point I might make my SSC-to-LaTeX script public...