alz
@alz_zyd_
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Tweets != investing advice. pfp by @ShizzyAizawa
Joined August 2013
The basic issue with Asian parenting in the West is that it tries to forcefeed a scarcity mindset into kids obviously living in a post-scarcity society.
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17-year old fashion design high school student randomly reads a bunch of math textbooks for fun and gets 12th place in an international math contest, scoring higher than a bunch of math majors at top universities.
The feel good đŸ’•story of the year: . China's Good Will(a) Hunting, Vocational Fashion Student and Improbable Math Genius. 17-year old vocational high school student Jiang Ping, who spends her days studying fashion design and literally making clothes, places 12th out of 801
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Once during COVID, I was at a virtual conference; a PhD student was presenting and was like, "it's 3am here and I'm really tired, so, here's what I'm going to do. I'll play a prerecorded video of me giving me talk, and if you have any questions, I'll pause it and answer".
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Sometimes history just puts the right people in the right place at the right time. You thought you were cancelling a fresh PhD grad; instead you've created what looks to be one of the great posters of our era.
A gorgeous and talented woman, undoubtedly, and I am in no position to question this tweet. The desire to present oneself as odourless, though, could be seen as a preventative measure against disgust, which speaks to the widespread association between women and malodour.
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Computer scientists more or less rewrote statistics without learning it well, just rediscovering everything useful and ignoring everything that isn't useful. Stats guys are still mad about the renaming of everything.
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The mathematics textbook cartel is incredible. Every mathematician in the world knows the intuitive interpretations of all the theorems, but nobody bothers writing them down in the textbooks.
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Whiplash is an excellent movie because the non-grinders see it as a warning message of the horrors that can happen to you if you grind too hard, whereas the grinders see it as a grotesquely triumphant celebration of the grind.
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1. This was hilarious.2. This actually raises an interesting question. It's 2024, video recording exists. What in the world is the point of us all making slides, prepping and memorizing 30-minute talks, when we could just. do it once and play the recording.
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reminder, the entry-level tech job market is still totally cooked, like 4.0's from Berkeley are getting 0 job offers
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One of the nuttiest things I've ever heard: apparently Terence Tao got bored at some point and decided to spent a little time doing some applied math and. and yea he then just goes back to doing pure math
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Why are Americans, on average, so incredibly good at presenting/selling/ (you could uncharitably call it) BS-ing? Is it something about early/middle/high school education? Culture? Parents teaching their kids?.
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I literally gave an 11 yr old kid a college set theory textbook and he's making decent progress, 1.5 sections in two days, like he is smart, but like I think with a little guidance kids can be pushed _way_ harder than they are in school.
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When I used to hire part-time RAs, any time someone listed python on their resume, in the Zoom interview I'd open up python and define. x = [1,2,3,4,5]. And ask them for code to get all elements of x greater than 3. ~80% of people I interviewed could not do this.
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Fun fact: when you get a mortgage against your house, the bank orders an appraiser to estimate how much the house is worth, since regulators like the loan to be less than 80% of the house value so the loan is safe. The appraisal values have a very curious distribution.
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There is a brute-force learning method which is the following. - Take a frontier paper in a field you want to learn but know nothing about.- Try to read the paper.- Pause every sentence you're confused and look for older papers/books/etc until you understand it.
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One thing LLMs make you realize is how poorly many math books are written. Literally just asking the LLM for what a theorem does tells you more than many math books. So. why couldn't the author just do that?
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The stereotypical 20's SWE nerd doesn't even have expensive hobbies, just plays videogames all day. where does all the money go.
I don't understand how some software engineers don't have savings. You've been earning five median household incomes and you spent all of it?.
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What are some things with easy entry-level learning curves? Things you can spend ~10-20 hours learning, and feel like you've improved significantly relative to someone who's never learned before?.
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If you want to teach yourself CS at the bachelors degree level, these two books seem essential; what other books should you not miss?
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The software-engineer-on-twitter thing where they just ignore prior literature/experts and just try to first-principles figure out all of human knowledge is quintessentially American. The reason America is great is because whenever one of these folks finds a convoluted mess of a.
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There's a common mistake young people make across many fields, which we might call "Goodhart overhang": sticking too long to old and familiar goal-metrics when the objective function has changed, and the metrics are no longer relevant. Examples:.
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San Francisco window breakers have apparently learned game theory, and discovered that a strategy more profitable than breaking windows and stealing things is to nicely threaten to break windows and steal things.
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I feel like a mid-career "local minimum trap" is that you can get addicted to being an "operations guy". You manage a bunch of resources, back-to-back 30 min meetings, every dollar and human under your command utilized to full efficiency. like playing real life factorio.
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This does not really work. The kid is more or less scared into developing discipline and work ethic, and tends to drop all these things when they grow up and realize that the material value of success in a developed society is much lower than they were scared into believing.
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The funniest answer was someone, with a perfectly straight face, gave the answer. y = [4,5].
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A tragic recent event in Korea: a huge landlord, owning hundreds of properties, suddenly passed away. This landlord managed to borrow hundreds of millions of dollars from his tenants - many were lending over 10x their annual salary to their landlord!.
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The economics of running hedge funds are pretty rough. Say you have the skills to make $500k in big tech or finance or something. If you charge industry standard 2%, you need to manage $25mil just for your annual fee to equal what you could make in a full-time job.
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How beautifully ridiculous that one dude overpays for Twitter, fires 80% of workforce, and it still works, and thus single-handedly kills the tech entry-level job market.
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If you're a poor, under-networked kid who doesn't know how rich circles work, and you go to a fancy college, you meet a bunch of richer kids with better networks, and get to watch how people who have networks use them, which is a very useful skill in US industry these days, IMO.
College is a scam, you don’t need it. - Stanford ‘00, ‘04, ‘05, ‘06.
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Is there. not a more efficient way to do science communication? Thread inspired by this tweet, which I basically agree with.
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At some level this is understandable. The West sometimes fails to realize just _how_ poor Asia was, as recently as when your canonical Asian parents grew up. This is a set of people whose worldview was formed on a lower level of Maslow's hierarchy.
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It turns out when you are dirt poor, the idea of potentially making yourself and your kids less dirt poor is a fantastic motivator. Passion? Interests? Silly and selfish distractions, sacrificing your childrens' future for your own fleeting happiness.
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OK one of my favorite interview questions, which trips up 95% of top undergrads from top schools that I interview, has fallen to Claude
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Papers are online. Talks are mostly online. If you have questions about a paper, you can email the author. There is no function of a conference talk which is not substitutable by something which doesn't involve spending tons of $$ on flights and hotel for a 30-min talk.
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"But conferences are really about talking with people and networking and etc.". Sure, then, why pretend it's about giving talks? If this is true, and you believe socially useful, we should be thinking about how to optimize conference format for productive discussions.
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Hahahahaha awesome paper. Tl;dr: .- Praying for rain is common across religions.- Prayer _actually predicts_ rain in some places!.- This is because, in some places, rain isn't Poisson: when it hasn't rained for a long time, it's more likely to rain.
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"I write code because I think it's the coolest thing in the universe" is ascension to the highest level of Maslow's hierarchy. Material abundance having been attained through our parents' sacrifices, the natural duty we owe society and ourselves is only to live beautifully.
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You look at your kids and wonder why they are lazy and don't struggle as much as you did, and the answer is simply that due to what you've accomplished, they have nothing left to struggle for.
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If you want the kids to develop work ethic, discipline, in kids in such an environment, material well-being as a motivator is entirely the wrong strategy. Harvard's admissions committee, as much as I hate to say it, has the right one: the answer is passion.
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I just don't get why people are trying to detect whether AI is being used for writing instead of just grading whether the writing is good or bad. If student A uses AI and writes better than student B, student A should get a better grade than student B.
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In a post-scarcity environment, the only people who persistently work hard are those who maintain the delusion that some kind of scarcity exists - a path which leads with high probability to dissatisfaction and misery - or those who find some sort of intrinsic motivation.
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There's an interview with her where she finished being like "yeah doing fashion design is my plan A, and my plan B is going to be doing math".
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Simple horror videogame idea: Turing-test Among Us. - Players communicate by typing.- Some players get "infected" and replaced by AI zombies trained on their text input.- You have to find and kill all the clones before everyone becomes zombified.
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But Asian parenting also involves some degree of PTSD. You've made it! Because of your struggles and sacrifices, your children, and your childrens' children, are more or less with high probability ensured material abundance.
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A bunch of relative amateur CS guys then destroyed the whole academic field of protein folding. Yes, programmers are arrogant, but programmers also have humiliated a nontrivial number of groups of in-principle experts on their home turf in recent history.
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The humanities people haven't kept up with the historical development of economics as a field. We got mathematicized in the like early mid 1900's, went super "neoliberal" in the 80's, and more recently figured out we could just take over all of empirical social science.
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Cancel all talks; do field-specific discussions/focus groups; do the law school thing where everyone's expected to read the paper and goes in to have a real discussion rather than try to back out what the speaker wrote from what they say (hahahahaha as if).
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Programmers are the spiritual successors of the physics mindset. The physicists, at one point - maybe still now - quite earnestly think they can walk into any field and quickly dominate it. Perhaps, for quantitative finance, in some sense they did.
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Is it just me or does CS require a lot less math than say, mechanical engineering. I'm looking at a mech eng textbook and feel like the median (pretty good) SWE would not have the math skills to get through this.
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I troll but this is an incredibly important skill, and for some reason observationally, America, which has a early education system few are generally jealous of, seems to systematically produce ppl with a much higher distribution of presentation ability than anywhere else.
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Passion can be discouraged and destroyed, but also developed. Passion is different from the fleeting interests that children develop; it's interests combined with mentors teaching how to invest further in these interests, and convincing children that these investments do pay off.
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People complain about the arbitrariness of college admissions and say we should do the European/Asian/etc system of a college entrance exam but there is a cost. Life is unfair and arbitrary, American kids learn that at 18, everyone else learns that at 22.
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I'll be honest I did not expect that the machines would start thinking and the humans would more or less just ignore the rather obvious fact that the machines are thinking.
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At some level isn't it incredible that billionaires use the same $1000 iphones as the rest of us? And that a 7-year old top-of-the-line iPhone functions about as well as a $50 USD new Android phone in a developing country?.
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Science maintains its decades-old rituals in the face of dramatic shifts in communication technology. We're long overdue for some format experimentation.
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The issue is that the Asian parenting strategy goes in the opposite direction. At a lower level of Maslow's hierarchy, the skill needed is to be willing to put insane hours into something without any emotional investment. Passion is a distraction and a liability.
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I think the test format is open, so you might worry that she cheated, e.g. had her teacher do the test for her or something. And your worries would be unsubstantiated, because (according to some rando on the internet) the teacher also took the test and ranked 125th.
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End result of my participation in ConstitutionDAO: I paid $140 in round-trip gas fees to make Ken Griffin pay an extra $200 on his $42mil.
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So I don't object to engineered environments for kids; I do think the standard Asian choices for environment engineering are not good. Classical piano/violin are basically devoid of creativity, strategic thinking, teamwork. They basically train rote memorization and hard work.
my parents did this and i will be forever grateful. by age 3 i was enrolled in piano, violin, ballet, art, reading, and math (kumon). my mum sat down every week and reviewed my progress roadmap with my teachers to make sure i was on the right track. she did this without fail.
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I just tried out decentraland for the first time. It's. small? Like there must be like 500 people online total atm?.
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Fun fact, I did a quick survey in my law/MBA student crypto class:. - Roughly 100% of the class has heard of ETH.- Roughly 80% of the class has invested in ETH.- Roughly 5% of the class has held ETH in a hardware wallet.- 2-3% of class had used smart contracts.
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1. Grades matter in high school for getting in college. Some college students naively optimize for high GPA, assuming it's the same game as high school, in fields where networking/interview prep/github, etc matter more for job finding, and are surprised when this doesn't work.
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Compare the distribution when the appraisal is done before the transaction price of the house is known.
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IMO the fact that the US sucks at the humanities may actually contribute to its success. Humanities is a nerd trap, intellectually enjoyable but unproductive. Smart people in the US build stuff, rather than pontificating about 2000-year-old unresolvable philosophical puzzles.
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Random presentation tip for econ/finance PhD students, esp. for technical/theory ish stuff:. When I first started presenting, I assumed a distribution of audience expertise that looked like this. Roughly normally distributed, most people know something about your topic matter
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The year is 2023. A US fintech startup product manager, on a 3-hour layover at Narita airport, drops by a little convenience store to buy a coffee. As he's about to check out, he hears the cashier muttering, softly and slightly ominously:. "Forty-eight, forty-eight,
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We think this in economics. We more or less assume we can disrespectfully invade the other social sciences, ignore prior work, and win in the market for public attention. Sometimes we do.
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The common thread is that people are bad at pivoting. It's easy to have a target metric in mind and tunnel-vision-grind maximize it; sometimes in the process you forget the target metric is not the goal, just a proxy, and the proxy changes as you move through life's stages.
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Rough tl;dr of 3AC situation, for tradfi folks interested. - 3AC is a >$10bil crypto hedge fund.- Borrowed money from a bunch of ppl to lever up a bunch of crypto-assets.- Crypto assets went down.- 3AC probably went bust.- Some ppl who lent to 3AC might also be in trouble.
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"I'm going to make martingale theory intuitive for students!" The 3 students in your class don't really care, all your colleagues will hate you, and if you cared about the money you would have joined a hedge fund out of your PhD instead of writing math textbooks for a living.
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If learning technology is getting so much better (video lectures, youtube, etc) why are the kids not getting smarter.
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lol Jane Street is hosting a post-Olympiad party in London for the high schoolers going to the 2024 IMO
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This post tries to "normalize" the "SAT scores are not enough" idea, but misses that one core reason why the US college admissions system is so "gamified", which is discussed surprisingly little, is that the standardized tests are way, way, way too easy.
Getting into Ivies is a different sort of academic eliteness (albeit still with high SAT scores etc) and process that has a lot of social class stuff associated with it and many start preparing for from early childhood. It’s much more a game than many realize.
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Starting to feel like a big barrier to undergrads reading "classics" is the dense English in which they're written or translated into. Is there much gained by learning to read "high-register" English (given some of these texts aren't even originally in English?).
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Gas fees by chain, for a basic token send transaction:. Avalanche, Solana: ~$0.1 USD.Arbitrum: ~$0.5 USD.BTC: ~$1 USD.ETH: ~$5-10 USD. Fedwire: ~$35 USD.
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Econ/finance PhD students sometimes have trouble coming up with creative ideas. Partly this is because on average nobody reads much other than papers on class syllabi. If you read the same 30 papers as the 15 other ppl in your class, you're going to come up with the same ideas.
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2. College grades matter for getting into econ/finance PhD. Some PhD students actually work hard in 1st year and try to ace their classes, not realizing that this basically has 0 direct effect on whether you'll find a job after PhD, it's all about writing papers.
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Does anyone still disagree with the obvious truth that LLMs are basically conscious and thinking entities.
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3. A common phenomenon in tech companies is that new managers do too much IC work: they view being a manager as basically being a "super-IC", and try to just personally brute-force everything, rather than realizing the goal has pivoted towards enabling team members.
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Game theory puzzle: . There are 3 people. Each person announces an integer. The smallest unique integer wins: e.g. if your opponents both pick 1, you win with any number. If all 3 pick the same number, the winner is picked randomly. Question: what's the Nash equilibrium?.
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@def__ai Some of our parents grew up in environments where eggs were a luxury eaten a few times a year.
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It's probably helped along by the fact that cartels break through profit-stealing price wars, the math textbook market has low profits anyways, and math professors are probably some of the people in the world with the lowest utility for money on average.
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Web3 yield farming is basically Silicon-Valley/Uber/Moviepass style highly-subsidized-usage growth hacking, except it subsidizes users through newly issued equity instead of discounts paid out of VC's pockets.
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Here's a fun paper by a Stanford econ JMC on grade school math teachers. Looking at AMC data matched to Linkedin, paper finds that even just decent, above-average middle/high school math teachers dramatically increase students' AMC scores: top AMC scorers increase by 165%!
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Personally, I read a bunch of classics in high register in college. I guess it was fun. I recently ChatGPT'd Aristotle into readable English, finished it around 5x as fast as a translation, and felt I got the main gist of things. idk does the pain incurred actually teach much?.
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Probably the silliest anti-blockchain argument, IMO, is that it doesn't have credit card purchase protection, chargebacks, etc. You are literally forcing everyone to pay 2% of _everything they buy with a credit card_ for purchase protection! 2%!!!.
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A lot of so-called "burnouts" of promising kids in college are really very happy situations. People was pushed by family/cultural circumstances to grind more than they would like to. Given freedom, they choose simply to enjoy the short time we have here on earth how they want.
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I'm advising the UChicago blockchain club now, so I know a bunch of very smart UChicago undergrads looking for web3 jobs. Devs and nontechnical positions. Anyone hiring? LMK and I'll send you a bunch of resumes.
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IMO a major flaw of standardized testing-based education is that it doesn't teach decision-making under risk. Poker does; sports does; etc. A student brought up in a test-based system might think of life as basically a series of probability-near-1 grindable challenges.
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A piece of advice sometimes given to econ/finance PhD students is to read the WSJ, FT, newspapers, etc. for research ideas. I think a sometimes better alternative is, whatever field you're working in, there's probably a regulator: go to their website and read stuff they put out.
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