Comment by helicase on Happy paths and the planning fallacy · 2022-08-14T15:47:35.346Z · LW · GW

one theory that seems to work is people are pretty good at median time estimates, but a lot of uncertainty + how time estimates can never be negative = there's a huge right-tail skew, so some tasks will blow up and completely dominate your average/total time.

(based on https://erikbern.com/2019/04/15/why-software-projects-take-longer-than-you-think-a-statistical-model.html)

Comment by helicase on No, Really, I've Deceived Myself · 2014-10-06T03:28:46.014Z · LW · GW

Your entire post is basically redefining words. You specify that Christian "faith" is really "faith in things that cannot be proven". A Christian who "knows" is really "one who feels extremely confident". And "belief" is now "fight or flight response". These aren't the concepts the original post is about.

Comment by helicase on Terminal Values and Instrumental Values · 2014-10-02T13:28:54.580Z · LW · GW

This actually seems to be explicitly represented in (Mandarin) Chinese:
"须要" cannot be used with nouns, and prescribes that something should be done in a certain way (instrumental values)
"需要" is mostly for nouns, and indicates that you need it/should have it (terminal values)

Or, the difference between these two programming paradigms:

• Imperative languages specify how you want the computer to do something (sometimes down to the machine code level)
• Functional languages specify what kind of result you want (add these two sets of numbers together, I don't care how, multithread if appropriate)