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Performance being bimodal doesn't mean that aptitude is bimodal, though. Different teaching styles may have different transfer functions, as it were.

Trivially, consider a teacher who only teaches at the level of the highest-aptitude students and allows no remedial or catch-up work for the lower-level ones, versus a teacher who only teaches at the level of the lowest-aptitude students and allows no enrichment for the gifted ones. We'd expect the former to produce bimodal levels of student performance given normally-distributed aptitudes (because almost everyone is left behind and performs very poorly, while the top students excel), while the latter would tend to produce performance distributions that were flatter than the aptitude distribution (because nobody is really allowed to excel).

Hah. In discussing the methodology of the "camel has two humps" study with a friend who's an okay programmer, the idea came up that what they might have been measuring was overconfidence. People who are ignorant but overconfident would exhibit a consistent (but possibly wrong) model, whereas people who are ignorant and know it might hedge their bets by not answering consistently. Some courses and instructors (but not all) certainly do favor the overconfident student.

Coding aptitude clearly exists

The 2006 study I'm referring to is entitled "The camel has two humps", and attempts to establish that coding aptitude not only exists, but is bimodally distributed ("two humps") and can be predicted accurately before the student has taken any coursework or written any code. IOW, that you can discern, pretty unambiguously, who is worth teaching before you try teaching them.

And that is what didn't replicate.

Sure, aptitude exists. But there probably isn't a bright line, or even a bottleneck, between natural coders and everyone else.

Coding is a highly specialized skill not useful to most people in everyday life.

That's what they said about literacy a thousand or so years ago. If you're not a scribe or a priest, why bother? Today, though, a person who can't read is effectively mentally incompetent to deal with ordinary, expected situations in society. Within a hundred years, the same will be true of a person who can't choose and apply algorithms to solve problems. It's not about getting a job slinging Java; it's about being able to tell (increasingly-omnipresent) machines what you want them to do for you.

No idea what makes you think that. Coding is a highly specialized skill not useful to most people in everyday life.

Coding in the sense of banging out a thousand lines of C++ to validate XML or talk to a backing database or perform OCR or something is a pretty specialized skill, but scripting languages and the basics of algorithm design are at least potentially useful for anyone that does a lot of repetitive work involving computers. Which is an awful lot of people, including some you might not expect -- if you're a mechanic, for example, you can squeeze out a lot of comparative advantage if you're good at talking to a car's onboard computers.

I expect it to become even more generally useful as computers get smarter and more pervasive.

There are a lot of people who want to believe that anyone can do anything, that we're all equals in every way. One can sometimes run into really nasty attitudes when talking about intellectual differences, clear examples of fluff like "we're all gifted" and myths like "giftedness goes away when children grow up". Granted, it would be kind of weird to see that on LessWrong because these guys seem pretty in touch with reality when it comes to acknowledging that intellectual differences exist. Perhaps it is, instead, mind projection fallacy. Most of these guys can program, so maybe they figure most other people can learn to program the same way they did. I've noticed that a lot of gifted people have this problem - they have an ability, think of it as normal, and they assume average people will be able to do it.

Thinking algorithmically should be a basic course taught in school. Many people muddle through a life filled with magic and not causation.

Good question. The bimodal distribution (vs. normal for math) was the claimed observation, but I don't know if there's solid statistical evidence for it existing beyond the specific classes they gave examples for or if its just anecdote. At any rate, if it's real, no-one knows why it exists. Anecdotally, when I did my first programming class there was a guy who was much better at math than me but seemed to have a harder time grasping the concept of programming than I did.

Sorry, I now realize that my phrasing was misleading. I wasn't suggesting that people self-medicate: my point was rather that they should try standard treatments for depression before considering more speculative treatments. I have altered my comment accordingly.

I am familiar with the meta-analyses you cite, and that was partly the reason why I myself didn't try anti-depressants for years. However, I now realize that this was a mistake, since the evidence for SSRIs is still stronger than the evidence for all the non-standard treatments that I spent countless hours reading about. Anecdotally, SSRIs did work for me, while Roberts' "morning faces therapy" didn't.

Note that "SSRIs are only slightly more effective than placebo" means they are still pretty good, as placebos also work pretty well on depression.

Actually, if you're reading this forum, you have a high chance of being misdiagnosed with a mental disorder and there's a book you should read - so in addition to the prescriptions being risky, they might have been unnecessary in the first place. If you really are suffering from depression, consider checking out the book referenced in my misdiagnosis link, and looking up "existential depression" in it's pages.

That seemed less like "all cases of depression are due to chemical imbalance" and more like "try medication and other common solutions to see if they work before investigating uncommon solutions"

It's a very generic P/S/A , amenable to being understood in a multitude of ways :-)

Though my personal interpretation tends towards the resistance to conformity pressure (aka "going with the crowd") and/or defiance of authority.

Do you have (or could you point to) more specific advice on investing in index funds?

The recommendation I often hear from some of the smarter people I know is one of Vanguard's index funds.

Also, is there somewhere that discusses the evidence and reasons for favoring index funds?

Perhaps see Malkiel's A Random Walk Down Wall Street.

See the efficient market hypothesis.

I attempted to do this on a few occasions, but I don't know if it really worked. It wouldn't have worked during the middle period during which I was experiencing sleep paralysis attacks, where I was also clenching my teeth, and I could feel my teeth clenching. It felt like my teeth were going to explode. Very unpleasant.

Here's my solution. Not 100% sure it works.

Nyy dhrfgvbaf ner nfxrq gb nal tbq.
Dhrfgvba 1: Vs vafgrnq bs guvf dhrfgvba, V nfxrq lbh jurgure Gehr'f nafjre gb gur dhrfgvba bs jurgure qn zrnag gehr jbhyq or gur fnzr nf Gehr'f nafjre gb gur dhrfgvba bs jurgure Gehr fng gb gur yrsg bs Snyfr, jbhyq lbhe nafjre or lbhe ynathntr'f rdhvinyrag bs gehr?
Nafjre vagrecergngvba: Vs gur nafjre vf qn, Gehr fvgf gb gur yrsg bs Snyfr.  Vs gur nafjre vf an, Snyfr fvgf gb gur yrsg bs Gehr.
Dhrfgvba 2: Vs vafgrnq bs guvf dhrfgvba, V nfxrq lbh jurgure Gehr'f nafjre gb gur dhrfgvba bs jurgure qn zrnag gehr jbhyq or gur fnzr nf Gehr'f nafjre gb gur dhrfgvba bs jurgure Enaqbz fng orgjrra Gehr naq Snyfr, jbhyq lbhe nafjre or lbhe ynathntr'f rdhvinyrag bs gehr?
Nafjre vagrecergngvba: Vs gur nafjre vf qn, Enaqbz fvgf orgjrra Gehr naq Snyfr naq lbh'er qbar.
Dhrfgvba 3: Vs vafgrnq bs guvf dhrfgvba, V nfxrq lbh jurgure Gehr'f nafjre gb gur dhrfgvba bs jurgure qn zrnag gehr jbhyq or gur fnzr nf Gehr'f nafjre gb gur dhrfgvba bs jurgure Enaqbz fng ba gur sne yrsg, jbhyq lbhe nafjre or lbhe ynathntr'f rdhvinyrag bs gehr?
Nafjre vagrecergngvba: Vs gur nafjre vf qn, Enaqbz fvgf gb gur yrsg bs Gehr naq Snyfr; bgurejvfr ur fvgf gb gurve evtug.

rot13

The first time I read that I thought “what difference there is between speaking truly in a language where da means yes and ja means no, and speaking falsely in a language where ja means yes and da means no?” and assumed that the solution was that there's no solution. (I was wrong.)

This looks superficially similar to the Three Princesses.

They all speak the same language?

Does each god know which god is which? And can I ask the same question twice to the same god?

Hard to say, but a few key pieces of information might lead you in the right direction. Is the inability to make progress project-specific? You can test this by doing something small on the side. Is it accompanied by an "ugh field"? Do you have non-programming-related signs of depression?

You're asking me for advice? That was the first time I've looked at code in my life. I'm sure the textbook recommendation thread has something on programming. From what I understand, though, halfway-decent programmers are very employable at the moment, so either you're overestimating your ability, there's some other factor you haven't shared, or my intuition on the employment prospects of halfway-decent programmers (I assume this means close to, if slightly below, the level of the average pro) is incorrect.

You don't provide enough information here. Your problem, and therefore the solution, could be pretty much anything. (Get enough sleep? Solve your emotional problems first? Find another job? Read the official specification? Get medicated? ...)

No, it just means that P(feeling religious experience|God does not exist) is not far lower than P(feeling religious experience|God does exist). Meaning, that although you should take feeling that as weak evidence of the existence of God*, it should not drastically change your opinion.

*Not everyone feels fuzzy when they go to religious events, while I would expect that were God to exist, everyone would feel something. So, that experience does favor God existing.

Now that I type that out, I realize the very fact that not everyone has those experiences is evidence against God existing.

The condom boxes say there's a 2% failure rate. That's 2% per year. Considering that most people are sexually active for far more than one year, that 2% rate is completely meaningless.

Do people actually interpret that 2% to mean 2% per lifetime? If I didn't know what it meant, I'd interpret it as 2% per intercourse.

The 15% "typical use" failure rate is the failure rate for people who use condoms most of the time. I'm disinclined to call it a failure of condoms myself that they don't work when people don't use them, though perhaps it could be considered a defect in the method that people apparently have such trouble using them all the time. Do note that birth control research does not involve researchers observing people in their bedrooms to see how and how consistently they are using their methods. The research is based on people's reported use, so since those reports are obviously not perfectly reliable, the 2% "perfect use" failure rate almost certainly is also partly (perhaps mostly) due to occasional failures to use the condoms.

Please cite your sources for those numbers, they look like the ridiculously fudged one Catholic sources come up with.

Indeed! Even assuming I'm somewhat better than typical, condoms make me a bit nervous.

Considering that most people are sexually active for far more than one year, that 2% rate is completely meaningless.

(Frivolous nitpicking) Yeah, but I think it's probably one of the better units of measure they could have chosen. "Per intercourse event" would probably be so low that people wouldn't grok the fact that their overall chances were much worse. But any unit more than a year doesn't make much sense.

I can point you to a book which substantiates it; "New Visions of Crime Victims" by Hoyle, Young, and Young. It's actually common advice on men's abuse sites -not- to call the police for this very reason. And some of them even have the statistics. For reasons of personal emotional stability I'm not currently willing to go there and get them, however.

Don't assume because I didn't provide more examples of how this information applies doesn't mean there aren't any. That was deliberate. If you want a hint, you can look into gender sentencing bias, plaintiff gender bias, and maybe, to see the far end of it, how courts have ruled on child support payments from statutory rape victims when the victim is male - those aren't the only cases when rape victims have paid child support to their rapists, but they're the easiest to find and the least horrifying to consider. You probably don't want the full picture. The shape of its edges is bad enough. Just know that in any legal exchange you'll be severely handicapped and there exists effective blackmail material against you at all times regardless of your actions and if you -do- get attacked you should have no expectation of legal support.

And yes, I do speak somewhat from experience, and this is information I -really- could have used about four years ago. No, it's not as horrible as it could be. Yes, it has scared the crap out of me, in large part because I didn't even realize there was a hazard there. Hence the PSA.

Stream it on YouTube/Twitch.

If you genuinely think you are the best in the world at a particular videogame, there are probably competitions for it which you could win fairly reliably.

Relevant SMBC.

Is this true? Aside from the fact that getting "your body language in order" is easier said than done, it would be pretty easy to do an experiment to test this hypothesis. You could approach one hundred women in this way and see how many responses you got of each of the following nature: active hostility, passive "please go away" politeness, friendliness, perceived actual sexual desire. You could even get, say, five different men from different quintiles of physical attractiveness to see how it varies.

• I'll volunteer to try this if anyone else want to set up an empirical test of this. Somebody else will have to evaluate attractiveness, though.

The one time I went on Omegle everyone kept next-ing me almost instantly, and maybe one out of five times they next-ed me as soon as I said "hello" or the equivalent. I can't think of any characteristic I have that would make me exceptionally next-able, so I concluded that Omegle was a really frustrating waste of time. I'm confused as to why other people concluded otherwise.

Anecdata: I've been dating someone I met on Omegle for 8 months. However, I'm not sure I would recommend it as a means of meeting interesting people. Finding good conversations on Omegle seems to depend mostly on luck, but also on what keywords you enter as "interests," and on what time of day you use the site.

I've not tried it myself(at least, not often enough to have useful data), but from all I've heard it can work. It's low probability - single-digit percentages for most guys, it seems - but the investment of time and effort in doing it is sufficiently low that it can still be a good strategy, as long as you have a high tolerance for rejection.

The one time I went on Omegle everyone kept next-ing me almost instantly, and maybe one out of five times they next-ed me as soon as I said "hello" or the equivalent. I can't think of any characteristic I have that would make me exceptionally next-able, so I concluded that Omegle was a really frustrating waste of time. I'm confused as to why other people concluded otherwise.

Some tips for using Omegle: Choose the text chat option. Put in at least 40 interests that might appeal to someone who thinks (ideally you'll have enough interests so that you're never getting random strangers). Open 2-3 browser tabs so you can fish for interesting people in parallel and use ctrl-tab and ctrl-shift-tab to cycle tabs (or don't do this, if you don't want to get sucked in). Press escape three times to get a new person. Generally do this if the person you're chatting with asks your gender within the first 5 messages they send.

I have had success with Omegle's video option, but I think you just have to accept the fact that a lot of people are going to next you just so that you won't next them first. Could be good for building a thicker skin.

The one time I went on Omegle everyone kept next-ing me almost instantly, and maybe one out of five times they next-ed me as soon as I said "hello" or the equivalent. I can't think of any characteristic I have that would make me exceptionally next-able, so I concluded that Omegle was a really frustrating waste of time. I'm confused as to why other people concluded otherwise.

My experience was similar. The main exceptions were guys who next'd when they found out I wasn't going to send them pictures of the "hot chick" they were hoping to meet, and one person advertising benaughty.com who I'm not convinced was not a bot.

Re: B12 - Actually, new PSA.

But don't start taking it without actually testing first. Hypervitaminosis D doesn't sound like any fun at all.

As the article points out, even a conservative estimate is that the upper limit is probably ~10k IU (and if you look at the earlier sections, it's safe to inject as much as 600k IU). 1k IU is going to be safe for everyone who isn't already popping 9k IU...

But don't start taking it without actually testing first. Hypervitaminosis D doesn't sound like any fun at all.

It feels uncomfortable to be advising Less Caution but in the case of vitamin D supplementation most people who don't supplement vitamin D already and who don't spend their lives naked in the sun would be well served just adding daily vitamin D3 to their schedule. The safety risk is negligible and for most people the value of information over assuming based on priors and just supplementing is low.

You need to take more than 4000 IU/day (probably for quite some time) to have any hope of toxicity. I knew a man who accidentally took 50,000 IU daily for one week (meant to be weekly per his prescription) and suffered no ill effects. Some people may even require doses above 4000 IU/day to get their Vitamin D levels up to target.

no, it's just that orange juice is an easy transition for someone who has been drinking soda. You can even mix with sparkling water if you have a real soda addiction.

I would recommend eating oranges over drinking orange juice.

Are you saying that no one expected the printing money (bidding up gold) before it happened, or is there a more subtle reason why the only relevant comparison is from the moment the policy called QE started?

Someone who bought gold after the Lehman fiasco (08), but before any of those QE milestones would have had several options since then to redeem for 2-3x gain.

It's an even bigger gap if you compare to any year before, back to ~98. S&P has had a horrible volatility/return performance going back to at least then.

The S&P 500 has outperformed gold since quantitative easing began. I don't believe there has been a time past four >years where a $100 gold purchase would be worth more today than a $100 S&P 500 purchase.

According to Wikipedia, QE1 started in late November 2008. Between November 28th 2008 and December 11th 2012 these were their respective returns:

Gold: 110% S&P500: 47,39%

Now Index-funds are normally better, but just look at the returns from late 2004 to today:

Gold: 165% S&P500: 45%

Gold has been rising more or less steadily over all those years except for 2005 and 2012 (stagnant) and 2013 (falling). It hasn't tripled, but for the 2004-2012 it was a good buy.

Gold has declined more than 30% so far this year.

Gold is about jumping the gun, both on the way in and on the way out, because it is bubble prone in highly predictable ways. This sort of trade can be entertaining, but it is not investing. You are engaging in a zero-sum game of skill against all the other participants and might as well be playing poker.

Well, it was a pretty safe bet in '08 given typical reactions to economic crises, and the prevalence of advice like this P/S/A that "oh, there totally won't be inflation from the printing money".

Thoughtworks' interview process involved a test which I thought did a great job of testing programmatic thinking while not requiring previous knowledge of anything beyond arthimetic. Unfortunately it's not publically available, but I may write up a couple of similar questions.

If you have Magery 3 in programming

.. then this PSA does not apply to you, as you would have been programming already, given the abundance of situations where you accidentally step into programming, from Lego Mindstorms to the javascript in "view page source" in your browser. Do you know any M3 programmer who did not know that until the age of, say, 18?

EDIT: Huh, may have worked for at least one person here, though probably not an M3.

EDIT2: The parent was edited after I replied, so this reply may look out of context.

The guy you're linking to seems sketchy as hell.

I agree. The reason I chose that specific page is because I did not find an adequate alternative list. I tried Googling site:.gov "symptoms of MTHFR" and site:.edu "symptoms of MTHFR" and only one result comes up - but it's specifically for homocysteinemia. That one result is reputable (nih.gov) but I know that it does not contain a full list of symptoms. It has left out important symptoms like depression and fatigue, which I know to be associated with MTHFR because I know people with the condition whose medical professionals have said that those symptoms can be caused by MTHFR and whose fatigue and/or depression symptoms were helped immensely by MTHFR treatment, and because I saw research on PubMed (searched it again since I have no idea where it is) linking MTHFR with depression and finding that using methyfolate as part of the treatment has an effect on depression. I could go with the shorter symptom list for homocysteinemia, but since I know that it is inadequate, I figured the longer symptom list would likely result in more people getting MTHFR tests and useful treatment.

There's an elephant in the room here: why doesn't there seem to be a good symptom list? If the fact that there are 5073 results for MTHFR on PubMed means anything at all, MTHFR is probably a real mutation with the potential to cause health effects. I suspect that it's because we discovered MTHFR fairly recently and research results can be confusing because most of them are wrong, so perhaps the credible sources don't want to take the chance on listing symptoms that they're not completely certain are associated with MTHFR. This of course would not mean that people are not sick. It would just mean that the only people who have the guts to try to give people some idea of what MTHFR does to you are people who don't have that kind of credibility to lose.

Perhaps your point here is to give me a heads-up along the lines of "people might get confused and think you are recommending the this guy". That would be a good heads-up if so. Since it has occurred to me, I decided to add a disclaimer to my P/S/A comment.

if you have MTHFR, taking more folic acid...

As a non-medical doctor having a discussion with a psychiatrist to humor curiosities:

My understanding is that if you have MTHFR, you've got a reduced ability to process folic acid into methylfolate, and methylfolate is the usable version. Therefore taking additional folic acid isn't necessarilly going to result in you utilizing the folic acid. Additionally, if you cannot process the folic acid, it sits around in your system waiting for you to clean it out. If your folic acid is synthetic as opposed to food-based, there can be issues with the synthetic folic acid sitting around not being utilized. The claim I heard was that it's this unutilized synthetic folic acid that causes autism.

the implication being that in countries with folic acid supplementation

That's interesting. Have you taken an interest in MTHFR or were your perspectives formed based on research you did after reading this PSA? I'm asking you because if it turns out that you've got a significant interest in MTHFR, I'd be interested in hearing what else you know about it. If not, I should probably regard your forays into MTHFR research as being about as useful as mine since, without reading a ton of research, any perspectives we build are going to be suceptible to the "most published research findings are false" problem.

sign up for 23andMe and get all your common mutations sequenced in one go for $99

I chose not to recommend that for the following reasons:

A. (As a non-lawyer) I believe that it is now illegal for U.S. health insurance companies to discriminate against you based on the results of genetic testing, but there may be no protection in other countries that LessWrong readers are from (and 50% of them visit from outside the U.S.).

B. (As a non-lawyer) I believe that it is still legal for U.S. life insurance and disability insurance companies to discriminate against you on the basis of genetic testing.

C. If I remember correctly, the 23 and me test is is not an official medical test. I was told by a doctor that when comparing the 23 and me results to a different test that uses blood instead of saliva and does qualify as a medical test, that the results are very close. I was also told a lot of things about it by a person with a biology degree that made me realize how complicated genetic testing is. I'm not sure whether 23 and me should be recommended in place of a medical test.

D. I was initially very squicked by 23 and me because the only PDF of theirs that I could find that has an accuracy citation produces a 404 error when you click it. I have since gotten citations from them, after bugging the heck out of customer service and explaining what "real citation" means. Upon reviewing the citations, I realized that I was in over my head because I didn't know a lot of the terms they were using. I am no longer squicked, but it's mostly because a few people I think are probably trustworthy told me that 23 and me is useful. I still wonder whether I should consider them dodgy due to the failure to provide a real accuracy citation in their PDF.

In any case, you can supplement with MTHF if you want

Self-treating with methylfolate may not be a good idea. Here's why.

The only exception is that if your psychiatrist recommends it for depression, you will need the MTHF version since the normal version can't directly enter the brain.

I see now that MTHFR.net actually did not list depression as a symptom by itself. They've got depression in post-menopausal women and "Infant depression via epigenetic processes caused by maternal depression" but not plain "depression". Is your take on it that MTHFR can cause depression and/or that methylfolate can be useful for treating depression?

As far as I know, the MTHF you can get off Amazon for $15 works exactly as well.

I have checked out dozens and dozens of supplement review results on consumerlab.com, perhaps over a hundred. My findings are that many of the brands tested were shown to offer one or more supplements that contain lead, spoiled ingredients, or they did not contain the amount of the substance(s) advertized. I would not go get a random cheap one on Amazon.com. Instead, I would find one of these brands:

Brands with 30 reviews each and a perfect record on consumerlab as of June 2013:

• Solgar

• Puritan's Pride

• Vitamin World

• Nature's Bounty

Brands with an acceptable record as of June 2013:

• Jarrow (17 reviews, all passed except one with a labeling issue)

Note: Puritan's Pride, Vitamin World and Nature's Bounty are all related. I think they're all owned by the same company.

I plan to start a blog containing my supplement research and other life optimizing research at some point in the future (or perhaps find a relevant one to post on, since LessWrong is about rationality, not optimizing one's life). I can update you when my supplement data is posted if you'd like.

Hmm. Good question. I think they'd have to test for the methylated versions, not the regular versions, and I do not know whether the standard procedure is to test for the methylated versions - but this is just me reasoning it out, not medical advice. To my knowledge, if MTHFR is suspected, they generally test for the MTHFR mutation itself.

Caution is warranted for a few reasons:

1. I've been told that the liver uses methylfolate for detoxification. If you take too much too soon, or ramp up too quickly, you will end up really feeling like hell because of the detoxification process. This may be more of a problem for people who have toxins built up in their system due to inefficient detoxification.

2. I've been told that methylfolate can increase your blood pressure. Your doctor may need to be monitoring this.

3. I've been told that if you do need all three of methylfolate, methylcobalamin and a homocysteine regulator but do not get all three, or if you get them in the wrong amounts, treatment can be ineffective (the risk here is that you will become disheartened and give up on a treatment that could have changed your life).

4. I've been told that if your digestive system is a mess, you may need to fix it up before the treatment will work. Once again, the risk is becoming disheartened and missing out on a useful treatment.

5. Other reasons I may not know about because I am not a medical professional.

You have to remember, everything is connected - your body is a system. A very, very complicated system. Change one thing over here, and there can be unforeseen consequences over there.

Unfortunately, doctors are tasked with the unrealistic expectation of learning about thousands of diseases and thousands of symptoms and trying to match each disease to each symptom... and, on top of that, all of them are complicated to treat... to be really honest, I don't think it is possible for any human to do a good job of diagnosing every disease, or treating every problem. From what I've seen, when people use the "throw a doctor at it" approach, it can fail pretty hard pretty often. What you want is the "find the exact right doctor for this specific problem" approach. Don't expect a GP to solve everything you bring to them. Instead, find someone who specializes in your set of symptoms or diagnosis and has lots of experience with it. That's much more likely to get you a functional treatment plan.

You have a point, there might be something more customized to people who have never programmed, but I like the simplicity of it.

with imperfect knowledge it's a solid choice for nearly every situation

I see no reason to believe so. Do you have evidence or arguments to support this naked assertion? What other choices are you comparing it against?

It is never going to be worthwhile for a personal investor to attempt to beat the market.

That statement looks very iffy to me. I see it as a strong claim resting on a bunch of unstated assumptions and with no evidence to support it (don't forget about the difference between "a personal investor" and "an average personal investor").

The amount of effort an individual investor should need to exert to beat the market should be somewhere around the average amount of effort individual investors exert into the market (you may need to weight that average for the amount of money at stake - i/e, a large investor counts more than a small one) - once you've beaten the average you've beaten the market.

As the number of people pursuing the no-effort strategy increases, the amount of effort necessary to beat the market goes down. At some point of strategy saturation the strategy stops being effective.

(In general, the market is a chaotic reactive system; any well-defined strategy is exploitable, and given the nature of the market, is exploited.)

They were certainly closely correlated in my mind until I realized I was, in fact, being emotionally abusive to both myself and my partner. I'm not sure that it's -common- to be wrong about this, but I do realize that it's very -easy- to be wrong about this.

It may be cynical from your point of view, yet realistic from his. Just by participating on LW at a young-ish age, you're highly probable to belong to the "privileged" reference class. If you were a transfer student from Russia who grew up in poverty and amidst alcoholism, your view may be different.

IOW, consider anthropic, or in this case, Qiaochuopic, arguments. Feel free to correct me if in your case the above heuristic turned out to be mistaken.

That's the optimistic version, which focuses mostly on things where reciprocity can even be possible. The last example is a hint at what the depressing* version looks like.

And in some situations you may already be indoctrinated into beliefs about your own capabilities and society's expectations that you use them which may be detrimental to your well-being or survival. For example, I know people who say they believe they should always stand up for victims in violent situations. In practice, real people are smarter than this, and keep their eyes down and their mouths shut - but occasionally you get a fool who actually believes it, because nobody actually told him any better.

I've known exactly three people who were actually capable of violence - real violence, not television violence - including myself. The basic rule is this: If you're not willing to kill somebody over it, you don't engage. If you are willing to kill somebody over it, you should put them at a disadvantage before they even know you're there, and be ready to end their life if they try to escalate back. Fighting fairly is another dangerous expectation society has for those foolish enough to listen.

But what is the advantage associated with being female in this particular example? The only thing I can think of is that women are better at the task of being satisfactory sexual partners for heterosexual men.

Gender normative females have a much easier task when it comes to finding casual sex partners than average males. This advantage could be said to have some similarities to the other advantages listed.

The n-th percentile woman tends to be more sexually attractive to men than the n-th percentile man is to women, at least for n not very close to 100. Dynamics between attractive men and unattractive women are similar to those between attractive women and unattractive men (see e.g. here), though the former are rarer.

You are of course right, it's not like the other three. One of the differences is that it is a perceived advantage, not a real one. (Like stereotypes of Asians being good at math, so hey Wei, can you calculate this tip for us?)

But that's not the reason I included it. The reason I included it is because it helps illustrate the issue with social obligations to say "Yes"; many women do in fact feel obligated to have sex with some guys, and guys complaining about rejection, even if they don't intend it, makes some women feel uncomfortably obligated to say "Yes" more frequently. If you don't grasp the dynamic behind the sense of advantage, people who react very defensively to these complaints - as if they were demands that women be* less picky about sex - make absolutely no sense; they seem to be denying the humanity of the person complaining, denying their right to be unhappy about their own situation.

It's not the only example, but it is the one I found most... instructive, as an explanation, and given that at least one of them was cause for a total psychological meltdown for me (which is part of why I've been largely quiet here for the past few weeks, and which I'm still not fully over), I think maybe sharing some of the examples freely might not be a wise move. I don't know that everybody would find any of them the crippling emotional basilisk I found the one, but I have no effective means of judging that.

That's part of the reason I wrote this the way I did; don't assume the strategy means "Making yourself unavailable for assistance". You do need to avoid making yourself nothing but a resource to other people.

And the existence of a strategy becomes quite necessary as you start dealing with the darker side of this entitlement mentality; when an expectation exists for you solely to your detriment, and may not even be recognized as an entitlement, but hides under another guise altogether.

Doesn't matter. The people who want you to write webpages generally don't know that (and in fact often don't know the difference between 'can program' and 'is generally good at computer stuff') :D

Speaking as somebody who, over the last couple of months, has literally experienced new emotions ("So that's what that feels like" has been an all-too-common sentiment lately) at the age of 26, depression is... really complicated. I'm still seriously wrestling with whether or not I want to be depressed or not. But I don't think I could again; the experience has been a bit like... stepping from a black and white world to a color one; the colors are blindingly bright and it's kind of unpleasant but I think in the end I'll find this side more satisfying.

That explanation is a huge part of what made me realize I was depressed (I never really got out of the "I'm invincible!" stage of depression, I think, in spite of not knowing what I was immune -from-, except that it made other people act crazy). In retrospect I guess all the people -asking- me if I was depressed should have been a giveaway, though.

What a great link! Thanks! And good to know that it did get better for you.

You will not be thrown in an asylum for discussing this with a professional

My experience disagrees. I went to see a professional for antidepressants, was emotionally stable at that moment, and was thrown in a psych ward for a week. I had to lie about my condition to be released. The whole affair failed to help in any way.