I really resonate with this. I've also struggled with perfectionist mindset when it comes to learning, especially in mathematics. Recently, I tried to meticulously add math problems to Anki for better retention, only to realize the time cost was too high. This perfectionist mindset often maximizes one variable (retention in my case) at the cost of all others (time as the most important one).
I've grown to really like this Richard Feynman quote: “Study hard what interests you the most in the most undisciplined, irreverent and original manner possible.” It feels like I've been finally granted permission to embrace my natural, messy way of learning.
Memorization often gets a bad rap as the underachiever's shortcut. However, it's a fundamental component of any learning process! Our ability to reason, solve problems, and innovate is all built upon a foundation of memorized information. In fact, it's precisely the reason humans have thrived for so long; we were able to memorize and pass down knowledge culturally long before the written word, not because we were 100 times smarter than our nearest cousins. Without memorization, be it in our brains or AI algorithms, there's no foundation to build upon for higher reasoning.
Just because the benefits of sharing DNA data appear large, doesn't mean we should take potential drawbacks lightly. Imagine this: a future where a specific gene is linked to hard work. Companies start screening job applicants based purely on their genetic makeup -- if you don't have the gene, you don't get the job. Or even more worryingly, imagine the government starts surveillance on a group of people with a particular gene, claiming they're more likely to commit a certain crime based on some obscure study. It would lead to moral and ethical havoc. DNA data might not seem worth protecting right now, but unchecked, the misuse could be catastrophic.
>Under the health care law, insurance companies can account for only 5 things when setting premiums.
>Age: Premiums can be up to 3 times higher for older people than for younger ones.
>Location: Where you live has a big effect on your premiums. Differences in competition, state and local rules, and cost of living account for this.
>Tobacco use: Insurers can charge tobacco users up to 50% more than those who don’t use tobacco.
>Individual vs. family enrollment: Insurers can charge more for a plan that also covers a spouse and/or dependents.
>Plan category: There are five plan categories – Bronze, Silver, Gold, Platinum, and Catastrophic. The categories are based on how you and the plan share costs. Bronze plans usually have lower monthly premiums and higher out-of-pocket costs when you get care. Platinum plans usually have the highest premiums and lowest out-of-pocket costs.
As a generally healthy person it's very disappointing that catastrophic plans are only available for under 30s. [0] For me it makes the most financial sense to pay out of pocket for incidentals/annuals, but be covered for catastrophes e.g. get hit by a bus and wake up in a hospital.
What magical event happens to people at age 30 that led the legislators to ban catastrophic? Would love to see the actuarial data on that. I have no knowledge/evidence of the reasoning but to me it definitely smells like lobbying.
I imagine this was a political compromise to let politicians advertise the availability of low cost insurance plans for low earners like young people in jobs without health insurance so they were not hit with the tax penalty that used to exist for not having health insurance.
Over 30 is likelier to be making more money and in jobs that do subsidize health insurance so they are likelier to buy it. And since the whole scheme is actually a mechanism to tax, you cannot let everyone opt out of the tax.
It's pretty hard to hide cigarette usage (smell, color of teeth). Vaping is likely to be much easier to conceal though (does that count as "tobacco" though?)
The age one is completely insane considering the amount of unchecked age discrimination that American employers engage in. We decided to fire Bob because he’s 51 and it’s cheaper to employ a 27 year old. Oh Bob, sorry, BTW your market place plan is now also $1500 a month.
Everyone pays for everyone else’s healthcare, whether it be insurance pools, Medicaid, CHIPS, Medicare, etc. In America, we just do it in an especially dumb, cruel, and expensive way because it makes some assholes a lot of money.
We is in quotes because various demographics/political tribes want to pass the hot potato.
The beauty of the health insurance system is it allows you to deliver differing qualities of healthcare to different voter groups.
For example, high voter participation groups like old people can get Medicare that pays providers more and hence more providers are available. And Medicaid for poor people on the other end that pays much less and has stricter rules on prior authorizations. And you can give Senators healthcare that pays providers more than other federal employees, and so on and so forth.
No, we do it that way because both political parties are bought and sold by the assholes who run insurance companies. They use this corruption to impose a private tax on everyone. No one in the US is saving money. We spend more than most wealthy country for worse outcomes.
The insurance companies are not that powerful. Pharmaceutical companies are far more profitable, as are healthcare software, other tech, doctor groups, hospital groups, etc. You may want to look into liability laws and tort reform for other big reasons for why healthcare in the US costs a lot.
Do you work in the industry or something? Yes, all of for profit healthcare is a monstrosity that should be abolished. Everyone I’ve ever met knows the first part of that and it does not excuse how awful health insurance companies are or all the terrible things they’ve done, both past and present. Tort reform has been tried on the state level and it has no impact. It’s just a canard trotted out by those who are trying to keep the human suffering money pump pumping.
If I had to chose between making more money off screwing over an unemployed middle aged person seeking medical treatment or less money not doing that, I would choose the latter. As would most people, because they’re not depraved.
That's not true at all. No need to speculate, insurance companies are real. In fact, you're complaining about the fact that most people have already chosen the former. Is the medical industry really filled with depraved individuals? I suspect you're looking at this differently than them, and I'm interested to know where you think that disconnect might be.
Most people don’t work in the health insurance industry…? But the management of health insurance companies are almost certainly filled with depraved individuals. They’re repeatedly caught engaging in all kinds of evil and deceptive tactics to deny people necessary treatments, including those in quite desperate circumstances. The lower-levels? Who knows. Like a lot of other human suffering industries in the US, they probably just compartmentalize it away or are steered away from thinking about by the c-suite sociopaths who run them.
The comment I replied to specific medical insurance.
When governments restrict insurers underwriting criteria, they are providing a subsidy from one subset of the population to another. I think those are best accounted for as taxes and government benefits.
In the United States, my understanding is that your medical & employment discrimination scenarios are already illegal due to the Genetic Information Nondiscrimination Act of 2008.
There was already an effort to weaken this law in 2017. It didn’t pass, but if corporations are lobbying for loopholes it would be entirely unsurprising to see some slip into future legislation. https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2017/3/13/14907250/h...
Any law could be subverted via these justifications. "Why should I register my gun when the government itself breaks laws, and its politicians corrupted by bribes!"
They'll get sued immediately by everyone who is denied a job following a genetic screen.
There's a reason companies who require a physical or medical history (usually done to find pre existing conditions to protect against future workman's comp claims) do it after the job offer has been extended (it's risky to rescind an offer for no reason by the way) - if they did it before, every applicant with a disability (and their pro-bono lawyers taking a slam dunk case) who did not get the job would sue.
> Medical insurance - oh you have cancer/hear attack/etc gene. You premiums skyrocket.
This is how insurance is supposed to work. It should reflect your actual risk levels.
Now, if what you actually want is socialised healthcare then implement that, trying to backdoor it via insurance gives you the worst of both worlds.
> Job opportunities - oh so sorry you have bipolar gene...
Then the company that looks at actual behavior rather than genes hires people slightly under market and makes bank. Then other companies start copying them.
> This is how insurance is supposed to work. It should reflect your actual risk levels.
Of course not. This is how perverse insurance works. Proper insurance systems work by pooling risks into large groups so that the few who are unlucky to have problems at a given point in time are covered.
The whole custom risk factor at the individual level is pure exploitation and a travesty of what insurance systems used to stand for.
> Of course not. This is how perverse insurance works. Proper insurance systems work by pooling risks into large groups so that the few who are unlucky to have problems at a given point in time are covered.
No just regular insurance before insurance companies figured out they could make more profits by making individual customization, which should be completely forbidden by regulations in the first place.
I'm not sure that I follow. Whats wrong with insurance companies factoring in DNA markers to put people at risk of cancer or heart attack in a higher risk pool?
That's not a custom risk factor at the individual level. Its just using data they believe indicates risk to decide what larger pool the person gets put into.
I don't know insurance law well enough to say if that's legally discrimination.
Now if you're asking me personally, I dislike the insurance industry in general. Insurance shouldn't be required, legally or otherwise. At that point insurance companies can use whatever data they want to price policies, as long as the terms are clear customers would actually have a choice whether they want insurance or not.
Companies use many forms of data to change premiums, many you don't have much control over (e.g. what area of the country you live in). Why is that wrong?
So car insurances shouldn't account for past driving experience?
Are you talking private insurance or socialised risk mitigation?
The goal of private companies is to make profits. There is space and use cases for both models. Of course large private companies put efforts into making people believe that's not the case.
Don’t compare car insurance with health insurance. Past driving incidents are perfectly okay to take into consideration for car insurance, some people need incentives to drive safely. But genetics is nothing people can change, it’s fixed.
This all assumes two perfectly definable categories of characteristic - fixed, unchangeable category, and incentiv-isable behaviour / changable category.
It's not always that clear e.g. genetic disposition to alcoholism is linked to actual alcoholism and related behaviours.
All the evidence I have seen points to “what you were born with”, including the parent(s), family, neighborhood, etc to be very heavily correlated with GPA.
Right, but for some reason it lets claim the moral high-ground. Right now individual taxes account for more revenue than all companies combined, perhaps barring payroll taxes.
Socialize medicine, please. A million dollars for a cancer treatment is insanity, when nearly 50% of the US population will get cancer at some point in their lives.
In the Netherlands insurance is provided by for-profit insurance companies. However, there are very strict rules - they are not allowed to refuse any applicant based on any medical reasons (including preexisting conditions), there is a list of treatments they have to cover, there are rules for the minimum/maximum deductible, etc.
I would not say that this is the 'worst of both worlds'. I actually think it has the best of both worlds, - namely coverage for everyone that needs it (benefit of social healthcare) and competition between insurance companies on price, convencience/reliability of apps, service, etc.
No, that isn't exactly how insurance works, and it would be almost pointless for individuals if it did work that way.
Instead, it works by bucketing risk. In the simplest form, everyone is in one bucket, ignoring individual risk. That means that all other things being equal (e.g. size and value of your house), despite you have low risk of your house flooding, you would be paying exactly the same premium as the person who who has very high risk because their house is built on a flood plain.
Of course people paying more for their risk than it warrants may see that as unfair - so insurers use more buckets - e.g. bucketing high, medium and low risks.
But there's a delicate balance here - for instance, insurers may just decide not to insure the high-risk category. Or even if they do, the premiums may be unaffordable or the insurance benefits substantially restricted. And the natural extension of categorizing like this is to put an individual in a category by themselves - and then to limit payout. Essentially making the insurance not any better than a savings account, and probably worse if you don't claim at the beginning of the policy, before there's a large pot in the savings account.
From the point of view of perfect capitalists, the insurers would like to insure people with negligible risk, for high premiums, for low benefits - to make the most profit. From a social-good point of view, we would like insurers to cover risk that people cannot control (e.g. genetic risk) for reasonable premiums and good benefits. Categorizing lives somewhere between these two - a kind of necessary un/fairness.
> From a social-good point of view, we would like insurers to cover risk that people cannot control (e.g. genetic risk) for reasonable premiums and good benefits.
You're using the wrong tool for the job there, if you want people to be supported regardless of their actual risk levels then you should get socialised medicine rather than artificially restricting what factors insurance companies can take into account (and there will be plenty of information leakage from due to other factors they are allowed to consider correlating with the banned ones).
> This is how insurance is supposed to work. It should reflect your actual risk levels.
This assumes the relation correlation between genes and adverse health outcomes are actually known. By definition that ignores personal
behavior and epigenetics.
If an insurance becomes to specific to the individuals it stops spreading the risk.
(Potentially in some US states): Your biological material was found in the bio-waste can of a facility that was performing illegal gynecological operations. You're under arrest for the murder of a fetus.
In general, a person's performance in their job is the best evidence for their future performance, followed by tests you can give them, followed by their genes. That's not to say that there aren't pointy haired bosses who could be sold a load of snake oil on the subject but that's probably nowhere you'd want to work anyways. And with medicine pre-existing conditions are a much worse problem than genetics could ever be but thankfully in the US at least our existing laws seem to have that in hand.
> sue the first two, get $$$. This is textbook discrimination
Ah but they did no wrong! They just licensed the AI du jur that functions pretty much like a black box, but just so happens to feed on multiple sources of data from dozens of data brokers. One of those brokers aggregates data from other brokers, including DNA data from DNA services.
Meanwhile, all the recruiter saw was "37% match" before reading your resume and moved on.
I don't think the first two are necessary a big deal in a western liberal democracy. We already have fairly strict legislation around data protection and selective hiring based on certain characteristics (like ethnicity - which is really just a much less accurate form of genetic classification).
There might be a period where we haven't legislated against that sort of stuff. But once we do there's going to be a pretty big paper trail if a potential employer or insurance provider is searching a genetic database for you.
Dictators? Yes, they could do that. But they could already send you to the gulag because of how you look, who you're friends with, what you said in the pub etc. It's another tool in their arsenal maybe, but it's not like they don't have a lot anyway.
Now imagine a future where not only we are screening job applicants based on their genes, that police targets a specific genetic profile, but we also mark people with the "bad" genes so that anyone can recognize them. Some sort of color coding, like white for good, black for bad...
Yeah... see where I am going...
Gene-based discrimination is not new, in fact, it used to be the norm. Now, it is called racism, and we are actually in a much better situation than we once were. Not perfect of course, but we have laws in place to limit such abuse.
If discrimination based on "non color-coding" genes is not already illegal in first world countries, I suspect the existing laws will soon be updated to reflect that once it starts being practical.
And I think it will be more readily enforced than for traditional racism. Racism is a natural, quasi-instinctive bias that you actually have to fight against, because there is no way you can ignore the skin tone of the person in front of you, but you can simply not use a genetic sequencing test. Plus it sounds like eugenics, something that became kind of unpopular since the 1940s.
Gattaca is fiction, with more attention given to having a good story than to realism.
Which was a success, it is a good story, and a movie I recommend.
What I think is that Gattaca, like most good dystopian fiction feels much more realistic than it really is, almost visionary. It is by design, it is a reflection of real world issues that readers/spectators are familiar with at the time of the writing, pushed to the extreme, and our natural negativity bias tend to make us forget the parts where the story was wrong in its terrible predictions.
Anyone can lose the genetic lottery (and everyone might lose it in some way). Even if you're considered fine by the genetic standards of the day, you can never be sure that your future kids or grandkids will be. Everyone will know someone, a close friend or family member, that's been negatively impacted by the laws so it's much harder to boogie man or "other" them.
Those laws would be wildly unpopular and would never survive in a democracy or even a populist dictatorship.
Gattaca while a great movie always rubbed me wrong as at the end it turns out society was "right" and he probably doomed the mission. His heart was "bad" it turns the whole movie from someone overcoming societal limitation to someone ruining the space mission so they can see space.
"The poors who somehow got into this fine dining establishment through all the obstacles we have carefully constructed are really ruining the vibe here!"
The space mission may not be the perfect allegory, but that's just nitpicking. How many people watched Gattaca and thought, "Oh no! That crippled tool ruined the space mission! Not my tax dollars oh my stars!"
And many people get well from placebo medication. We don’t fully understand human willpower and its ability to overcome the cards we were dealt at birth. The whole movie is literally about how genetics is not destiny.
I thought the point was that society was completely wrong and was basically overhyping the thing they'd all bought into. They had decided their method was so superior that naturally born people wouldn't live past 30. He'd already well beaten that, outlived his parents and didn't seem sick now. Society was far removed from reality and somehow forgot that natural birth worked fine for all but very recent human history. I find this statement about how society works more compelling than the cautionary about genetic discrimination.
The world is already GROSSLY, AWFULLY unfair due to genetics. This amount of unfairness is immensely larger than the amount that would be caused by genetic information being more widely available.
Making genetic information more widely available has likely benefits far far larger than the costs.
The world is as unfair as it is even _with_ us pushing back a lot on sources of unfairness. If we didn't push back because "it's already unfair", it would add up quick and be a _lot_ worse.
Can someone explain why they’re downing this? As Someone with schizoaffective bipolar disorder and Asperger’s, which is definitely affected by genetics because I seen in my genetics, I don’t see what the disagreement here is?
Can I ask, what would be your ideas about how DNA information could be used? For example, shared with the person themselves, and no one else -- so they know what the reasons can be, for problems they run into later in life.
Or do you see any government agencies that it'd be good if they had access to the DNA info? The health care system maybe? (If they didn't share the data against ones will, say)
I agree, but the other behaviors and sensitivities I have made extremely difficult in my life not because I couldn’t handle it, but because other people couldn’t.
I heard that, but it's like the end of days, it's always said to come soon, but doesn't no matter how much you wait. Conveniently, the prophecy doesn't have an exact date.
We already did these things, we discriminated against women, racial minorities, skin colors, and even more, religious minorities etc. We already have laws against these things, we never asked people to hide the color of their skin.
What's problematic right now is that only law enforcment has unrestricted access to the dna data. I actually want such data to be open source.
> we never asked people to hide the color of their skin
We have a bunch of regulations around "you can't even ask the person about that", specifically because companies cannot be trusted not to discriminate based on it.
Just take all the criminal cases in which DNA was used to convict innocent people. Now imagine that with a DNS database in the background as huge as 23andMe.
And of course selling DNA data was the idea from the get go...
The age old question: how many innocent people we are ok with convicting in order to convict the guilty ones. Personally, I don't think a for profitbcompany should even play the smallest role in that.
if there is more data, the dna identification will be more precise and correct also. Ideally i want this data to be open source, and thankfull you can download your data
Akin's Laws of Spacecraft design apply. If you want to have the biggest effect on how something shakes out become an artist.
And ideas have a flow. Nentally disturbed/child->Artist->Scientist/Engineer/Academic/Professional->Everybody else. Some other diversions may apply.
The mentally disturbed are the most sensitive to society at large's edge cases, but largely incomprehensible to everyone else due to divergent world view. The Artist breathes the surreal and unarticulated, in the practice of their work articulating that which defies the aggregate capability of the majority of society to manifest. That seeds the way for elucidation, exposition, and enumeration for the current flight of society's operant effectors, who implement it, which then trickles into the pool of common knowledge.
If you're seeing an artistic work in your life, and not keeping an eye out for it's implementations. You're running half-asleep to be frank.
You can release your DNA with an open (source) license. I personally would be hesitant, similar as I would not open source my fingerprints, health records etc., even if it is forbidden to abuse them.
I've noticed that negative comments often float to the top. That’s a bit of a bummer. No one's entrepreneurial success should make you question your life choices or become a reason for your frustration.
Congratulations Tony! I remember the time you quit your job and set a goal of reaching $10K/mo with a few products on twitter, it seemed crazy. But you pulled it off! Hats off to you.
It's ok for folks to express skepticism in response to someone selling shovels and dreams. Despite any insinuation in their marketing, luck isn't repeatable. All that said congrats to them on seizing the opportunity.
(I too sell trinkets ;) yet am too ashamed to sell dreams)
It would be nice to see a survey of all those who quit and it didn't work out compared to those who did, and their strategies. My guess is the losers tried most of the same things yet just didn't get lucky, or ran out of money before luck could come along.
Math as we know it, due to Gödel's Incompleteness Theorems, is not fully consistent - we can't even prove everything that is true with our current mathematical framework. This means that our understanding of math is indeed limited, not just by our intellectual capabilities, but by the very structure of the math we currently use also.
This makes me wonder, will we be able to develop new mathematical frameworks that bypass these issues? And if so, what will they look like?
If we can only prove that an inconsistent system is inconsistent, and we can never prove our (presumably) consistent system is consistent, then it is incomplete.
We can't say it's inconsistent just because we can't prove otherwise. We can say it may be incomplete (or inconsistent, and we haven't noticed yet)
Even with heavy licensing in the medical field, research cites medical errors like wrong diagnoses and surgical mishaps causing over 250,000 US deaths yearly [0]. Granted, some studies argue over the exact number, but the core truth remains. Licenses don't eliminate human error.
After carefully reading the comments and going back to the post, I take back my argument. It was flawed and did not represent the whole picture. I apologize for that. I think it wasn't a threat, but rather an unsuccessful attempt to sell Apollo before time runs out. I apologize for the confusion I created with my poor argument. I need to read more carefully.
---
I initially clicked on this post fully prepared to be outraged at Reddit and its CEO, but after carefully going through the audio, I just can't share that sentiment. I've listened to the recording multiple times, making sure that I'm not missing any crucial points in the conversation. It is evident to me that this statement, "if you want Apollo to go quiet," did come across as a threat.
Yes, the developer tried to backtrack later in the call by adding "in terms of API usage," but the damage was already done. Steve's side even provided several opportunities for him to clarify his statement, claiming that he couldn't hear him properly. I understand that many members of this community are rightfully upset with Reddit and its actions in recent years (me included), but we cannot turn a blind eye to the fact that it really felt and sounded like a threat.
---
In the most charitable possible interpretation for Christian, he spoke in a way that was misinterpreted, conclusively clarified it at the end of the call, both parties shared an apology for the misunderstanding, and then Steve made public comments of the original misinterpretation only (with an editorialized paraphrase).
In the least charitable possible interpretation for Christian, he made an implicit threat that he would continue to raise community clamor if not bought out, then backtracked it as soon as he was asked about it, both parties shared an apology for a misunderstanding neither believed was really a misunderstanding, and then Steve made public statements of the original interpreted threat only, with that editorialized paraphrase. In responding to that statement, Christian announced his app would close in 22 days, so it sounds like he can't be doing much with Reddit's community by then regardless.
I don't see the point in either of these situations for Steve to have said what he did, and he must have been aware of how this call could be interpreted in transcript and did it anyway. If I was hearing about this as a disagreement between business partners retold in a bar conversation, I might give reddit's team the same benefit of the doubt as you. In this case, it doesn't seem to matter much. The question remains WTF was spez thinking even making those comments.
I actually think the most charitable position doesn't require either one to have any negative intentions. This is quite possibly a very simple explanation: It is possible to apologize in the face of feeling threatened, even if you are not in fact under any threat, and then later reconcile one's feelings of being threatened in a space where they feel safer.
There's a common error where, because one believes they have been aggressed upon, they can behave as if they actually have been aggrieved without actually examining realistic positions of actual evidence. I've seen this sort of thing happen in a variety of circumstances. Whether or not the Apollo developer intended to threaten or not doesn't actually change the behavior of the person who took whatever was said as a threat, and acting in a reconciliatory manner when one feels threatened is actually a very reasonable thing to do.
Great charitable interpretations! I wish you had done this impartially for both parties, but no worries! Now, let's look at the situation realistically. Let's say that instead of Steve's side asking for clarifications, he had agreed to pay Christian $10M when he said "I could make it really easy on you, if you think Apollo is costing you $20 million per year, cut me a check for $10 million and we can both skip off into the sunset. Six months of use. We're good. That's mostly a joke." Would Christian then say, "Oh no, I was merely making a joke," or would he accept the offer?
And do you think if Steve had made this offer, would we have even heard a second of this recording?
I mean, come on guys. He literally said "I can make it easy on you," named a price, and then clarified that he was mostly joking.
edit: Thank you for catching that! I've now changed "Steve" with "Steve's side."
You are misinterpreting the whole situation. The price/selling is not even the “misunderstandable” part — there is no evil in telling a company that they could earn back half of their “lost” opportunity cost by buying out Christian’s app. It was quite clearly a joke (that didn’t land), but what exactly is evil about that, besides possibly Apollo’s community’s hurt feelings?
The misinterpretation came from the ‘quieting down’ expression, which referred to the API usage (I think quite obviously).
>I wish you had done this impartially for both parties
instead of your thought experiment, I'd request you just pose your impartial take on the most charitable view for Steve and explain why in that view it was a reasonable act of good leadership for him to make these comments. Otherwise I don't think we're really talking about the same thing.
You've quoted the transcript elsewhere for people to "decide for themselves" and I'm not sure how you could be convinced we all did in fact read it and already did, and just don't agree with you.
Well, I don't agree with myself too anymore! I stand correct, and I apologize for the confusion I created with my poor argument. I need to read more carefully.
Hey, for what it's worth I think it was valuable to take a critical look at the situation and where the real wrongdoing vs internet outrage snowball lies. And I think with this outcome I've experienced a civil and rewarding discussion of alternating viewpoints that is delightfully un-reddit!
Yes, the developer tried to backtrack later in the call...
You say it was later in the call, but it was an immediate request for clarification and then reworded and clarified once that statement was made. There wasn't some long back and forth where the developer finally relented and changed his mind.
If anything, the immediate response of "No, no, sorry. I didn't mean that to-" seems to indicate that he wanted to clarify what he meant.
And "if you want Apollo to go quiet" isn't the original quote anyways, not sure why you had to paraphrase but pretend otherwise.
Right, but the original statement that was meant to be the "threat" was "If you want to rip that band-aid off once. And have Apollo quiet down, you know, six months." where the wording lines up with "...it's quite loud in terms of its API usage".
I strongly disagree. First of all, in normal situations, you can't "threaten" a billion dollar company as an individual. The power balance there is so asymmetrical that any logical person's first thought shouldn't be "the individual has threatened the billion dollar company". Sure there might be exceptions, whistle blowing, etc. but overwhelmingly, this rule holds.
It is clear that Christian was asking Reddit to buy out Apollo. It was a business proposition. Pay me 6 months, and I'll shut off my app, which is what Reddit wants. They want more users on their official app so they can make revenue. The language he used was clumsy, but it is clear, and it was clarified afterwards. The natural easy response is to say no, we are unwilling to pay, end of conversation.
The problem here is that Reddit seems to be litigating free-flowing language from part of a conversation as part of its defense for its changes. That is not only ridiculous, but wildly inappropriate.
To be honest, reddit has all the justification it needs to do what they're doing. Do I think they're making the right decision? No. But they're free to raise prices however they want. It's their API. But a billion dollar company accusing an individual of threatening them and then continuing to litigate the words used even after clarifications have been made is indicative of a catastrophic leadership failure on Reddit's side.
> But they're free to raise prices however they want. It's their API.
They may not be. According to Christian's post, they told him they will not do that in 2023. Were he inclined to sue them, he might be able to hold them to that.
I believe what's happening here is that Reddit leadership feels like they've been threatened, and are acting accordingly without seriously considering the actual power imbalance. People under privilege rarely, if ever, actually consider their relative power when disagreeing with people in less power than them and have exaggerated responses when people in less power than them try to gain any leverage, such as an app developer trying to negotiate with the platform the app runs on. You can also observe this when people get very upset about $perceived_thing_that_people_less_well_off_than_them_get. I'd list exact examples but I fear I'd distract with people getting angry, lol.
From reading the transcript it reads to me that Reddit says Apollo is costing them $20 mil a year from lost opportunity cost, which I take to mean advertising/tracking et? The Apollo dev seems skeptical of that cost and is jokingly suggesting that if they cut him a $10 mil check, they can make it up in 6 months purely from getting that "opportunity" back with the added benefit Apollo just disappears.
I look at less of a threat and more of a calling the bluff...
I’m curious what the threat here is. Is the implication that they can pay 10 Million and he shuts down the app quiet or he shuts the app down revealing the cost of the API?
The implication is they buy the app and do what they like with it.
The alternative is that he has no choice but to shut down the app, given that they've announced what the price will be 30 days before it's introduction. Even if he'd said nothing there would have been a shitstorm; the timing would be obvious.
Reasonable notice of the price increase would have given 3rd party developers time to monetise and meet the new costs. A more reasonable price could have been borne by 3rd party apps with very little fuss. Making API access a premium Reddit feature would have put even more money in Reddit's pocket. Buying out the 3rd party apps would have been unpopular but would give Reddit the appearance of being less incompetent, underhanded, and duplicitous.
Instead, Reddit made literally the worst possible choice in this situation: alienating their users and the moderators that do most of the work on the platform.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but reddit is trying to do an IPO soon and this guy is projecting a lot of uncertainty about their business. He's offering to stop that if he gets paid off.
(for the record, I almost feel like he's in the right to do so. Still weird how this is being presented)
He jokingly offered that the whole situation can easily be solved — he shuts down/sells his app for half of the “lost” money reddit would make were Apollo’s users using the official app. Win-win for both sides. The other side of the phone call misinterpreted a “quiet down” expression, which was used for the API calls from Apollo servers (serving which costs Reddit money).
It's not extortion -- the whole point of the joke is that the pricing is so ridiculous that it would be a massive discount to Reddit if they just bought his app for $10 million.
Same, while it's blatantly clear that Reddit is trying to kill 3rd party apps, I don't get the sentiment that this is being misrepresented at all. The audio gives me a very strong "would be a shame if someone would stir up trouble, $10M can make it all disappear" vibe, just as how the CEO interpreted it.
It’s absolutely not that, not from a hundred miles. The guy was jokingly telling that if the free usage of reddit’s apis cost them $20million bucks in a year, than for half of that he can “quit down” the API calls by shutting down the app, letting the users back to the main site where they could generate that opportunity cost.
I think that interpretation is incorrect and based on Christian's attitude towards the whole thing. More likely it's projection on the part of Reddit's CEO.
The call wasn't with Steve, and it was clear to me listening that he wasn't making a threat at all. He was talking about the API chatter, it was obvious to me.
I think, for one, it is important to note that Christian doesn't say "go quiet". He said "quiet down", and those carry different interpretable implications regardless of context (the latter having much less potential implied threat imo).
Second, listening to the actual audio, it doesn't sound like a threat at all, and it all cleared up right away.
"You are claiming that my app is costing you $20M a year in API calls. Just buy it from me for $10M. Then it's yours to shut down if you want, or modify, or whatever you want to do with it."
That's not a threat. At that point it seems like he didn't have any obligation to do anything, and was offering them a mutually beneficial deal. Reddit's cost go down by $20M a year, he gets paid, and everybody (except probably the apollo users) benefits.
> It is always amazing to me how easily people will accept however an issue is framed for them on social media.
And it’s even more amazing when people think they are smarter “than the average” and go the exact opposite way just because, failing a proper evaluation.
Just run it by AI Text Classifier (OpenAI) [0], it said that it was likely to be AI-generated. I know the accuracy of such classifiers is nowhere near acceptable, but it really reads quite shallow.
Anki's key benefits stem from its utilization of two highly supported and extensively researched pedagogical strategies: (1) retrieval practice and (2) spaced repetition. In contrast, the practice of note-taking, which essentially entails summarizing information in one's own words, has been found to have 'low utility' in academic literature. [0]
Depends on the note-taking strategy. From the same paper you cited, section 8.4 Practice testing - Issues for implementation, pages 34-35:
> Another merit of practice testing is that it can be implemented with minimal training. Students can engage in recall-based self-testing in a relatively straightforward fashion. For example, students can self-test via cued recall by creating flashcards (free and low-cost flashcard software is also readily available) or by using the Cornell note-taking system (which involves leaving a blank column when taking notes in class and entering key terms or questions in it shortly after taking notes to use for self-testing when reviewing notes at a later time; for more details, see Pauk & Ross, 2010).
The Cornell note-taking system combines moderate and high learning techniques: elaborative interrogation, self-explanation, practice testing, and distributed practice.
If you think about it, creating Anki cards is note-taking in a specific format. Of course you can skip it and use a set prepared by someone else. It would be interesting to test: is creating your own flashcards better for studying than using ready-made ones?
Founder of StudyWand.com here, who received a 15k grant to develop an AI generating flashcard app in 2020 after an earlier prototype.
We've found students more consistently study ready-made cards that are at desirable difficulty (they get about 80% correct) and which are segmented by topic (e.g. semantic grouping of flashcards to tackle "one lesson at a time" like Duolingo). Students would prefer to use pre-made flashcards by other students in their class, then AI flashcards, then create and use their own.
There is limited evidence by Roediger and Karpicke who are the forefathers of retrieval practise that creating cards is also important. Frank Leeming (2002 study Exam-a-day) also showed that motivation when studying is peaked when you ask just a few questions a day, but every working day.
Now one of the vital benefits of retrieval practise with AI over creating your own cards is foresight bias - not mentioned yet in this thread - the fact that particularly in some subjects like Physics, students don't know what they don't know (watch this amazing Veritasium video, it also explains why misconceptions are so handy for learning physics): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eVtCO84MDj8 - basically, if you use AI quizzes (or any prepared subject-specific right/wrong system), you learn quickly where your knowledge sits and what to focus on, and reduce your exam stress. If you just sit their making quizzes, firstly you make questions on things you already know, you overestimate how much you can learn, and you consolidate on your existing strengths, and avoid identifying your own knowledge gaps until later on, which is less effective.
--
To quote from my dissertation experiment on background reading for retrieval practise, the end is about foresight bias a little:
Retrieval practice – typically, quizzing - is an exceedingly effective studying mechanism (Roediger &
Karpicke, 2006; Roediger & Butler 2011; Bae, Therriault & Redifer, 2017, see Binks 2018 for a
review), although underutilized relative to recorded merit, with students vastly preferring to read
content (Karpicke & Butler, 2009; Toppino and Cohen, 2009). Notably mature students do engage in
practice quizzes more than younger students (Tullis & Maddox, 2020). Undertaking a Quiz (Retrieval
practice) can enhance test scores significantly, including web-based quizzes (Daniel & Broida, 2017).
Roediger & Karpicke (2006) analysed whether students who solely read content would score
differently to students who took a practice quiz, one week after a 5-minute learning session. Students
retained information to a higher level in memory after a week with the quiz (56% retained), versus
without (42%), despite having read the content less (average 3.4 times) than the control, read-only
group (14.2 times).
Participants subjectively report preference for regular Quizzing (Leeming, 2002) over final
exams, when assessed with the quiz results, with 81% and 83% of participants in two intervention
classes recommending Leemings “Exam-a-day” procedure for the next semester, which runs against
intuition that students might biases against more exams/quizzes (due to Test Anxiety).
Retrieval Practice may increase performance via increasing cognitive load which is generally
correlated with score outcomes in (multimedia) learning (Muller et al, 2008). Without adequate
alternative stimuli, volume of content could influence results, thus differentiated conditions to control
for this possible confound are required when exploring retrieval practice effects (as seen in Renkl 2010
and implemented in Methods).
Retrieval practice in middle and high school students can reduce Test Anxiety, when
operationalised by “nervousness” (Agarwal et al 2014), though presently no research appears to have
analysed the influence of retrieval practice on university students’ Test Anxiety. Quizzing can alleviate
foresight bias – overestimation of required studying time – in terms of students appropriately assigning
a greater, more realistic study time plan (Soderstrom & Bjork, 2014). Despite the underutilization
noted by Karpicke and Butler (2009), quizzing is becoming more common in burgeoning eLearning
courses, supported by the research (i.e. Johnson & Johnson, 2006; Leeming, 2002; Glass et al. 2008)
demonstrating efficacy in real exam performance.
I'm a long term (10 year+) user of Supermemo (and general fan of SRS stuff) and finally got around to checking out StudyWand today. This is the best experience I've had making flashcards and general study material ever. Hands down, nothing I've seen comes close.
It's wild because StudyWand took my sample notes and did everything that I would have done with them if I was going to use them to get a good grade in school. I was expecting some semi-decent cloze generated cards but got much more.
Literally, when I was in college I would take notes in class, and then spend about 20-40 minutes post class doing almost exactly what StudyWand does. The classes that I bothered doing that for, I always got a good grade in, nearly effortlessly. The hardest part was making the notes.
The part of this that I'm actually excited about is that this tool also works with any sort of documentation. For example, I can clean up any reference page from MDN as a PDF and get a usable (like actually well-made flashcards) set of 15-20 flashcards for it. Oh, you also get summaries and multiple essay questions too. The only way this would be better is if it gave you cloze deletions that were actual sample code to fill in the blank with.
I didn't really like your intro so I took a few days longer than I normally would have to look at your software (I normally check out every SRS software I see on HN). This software is insane. The value is so, so, so ridiculous. I half-hearted uploaded one poorly made PDF of a webpage and got flashcards that are comparable to what I would make as a 10+ SRS user. I almost stopped doing the initial reviews halfway through and looked for a way to pay for this.
Outside of Supermemo, this is the only other SRS software that I've seen that's worth my money. The hardest part is going to be convincing all my younger family members to actually use this. I've tried so many times to get people to use Anki (Supermemo won't happen), and they just don't get it. I think StudyWand might be able to bridge that gap. I'm going to try and see.
Whoa, awesome to see a fellow SuperMemo user here! I've been going for 17 years, I absolutely can't imagine life without SuperMemo and I've stopped trying to sell my friends on it. Have you tried integrating Study Wand with SuperMemo at all? I'm always on the lookout for ways to maximize my information intake (Aside from SuperMemo, which already does a nearly perfect job at it).
Nothing automated yet, but I may plan to. I don't regularly add that many new cards to my collection to where it'd be an immediate benefit for me. I may add more with StudyWand since it seems to do a good enough job of creating cards. Incremental reading is the primary way I add new material to my collection, but I don't really fully process articles that much into items these days. Most of my SuperMemo use is using incremental reading to ensure I always have something interesting to read as well as tasklists for planning/ideas. I have a lot of stuff that I like to revisit or review, which I find using SuperMemo great for too.
That's an excellent response. Thank you. I didn't think of the foresight bias and now that I do, it makes a lot of sense.
> Undertaking a Quiz (Retrieval practice) can enhance test scores significantly, including web-based quizzes
The way I understand it, retrieval practice increases test scores where you test information retrieval (quizzes, multiple choice, etc.). Which makes sense because you're practicing a skill that the test evaluates.
The follow-up question: does retrieval practice increase scores when you evaluate understanding of a subject, such as open tests or essays?
I'll ask Prof Roediger as we occasionally communicate and will aim to get back to you. However, I wouldn't be surprised if any correlation was not statistically significant.
One more thing. When you mentioned Test Anxiety it reminded me of frequent comments about anxiety during job interviews. I'm wondering if flashcards (or other retrieval practice) could help there too. Perhaps you can spin it into a product for professionals.
[edit: removed a point about variance which wasn't supported by more recent literate]
High stress (or anxiety) happens only periodically... like those job interviews you mention. It varies massively within individual subjects. There are some ways to reduce anxiety, but I wouldn't say anything has been conclusive yet. Here is an excerpt from my Dissertation about Test Anxiety... I found practise quizzes had a non-significant overall effect on Test Anxiety, and reduced only the "Tenseness" subscale of a relatively old measure sadly. The CTAS scale, referenced below, would probably be most useful for the job interview case.
"Test Anxiety is the additional stress felt when you must provide answers. It is prevalent, affecting students from preschool (McDonald, 2001) to taught university
level, and across demographics (Beidel et al 1994; Beer 1991; Mwamwenda,1993). Prevalence is
estimated at 20% (Ergene 2003) to 25% (Thomas et al, 2018) in current students. Test Anxiety often
involves pressure, highlighting a social, non-genetic nature, and high variance is recorded between
subjects (e.g. Keith et al 2010 longitudinal study showed low individual variation, but high between
subjects variation). Overwhelming Test Anxiety significantly impairs wellbeing (Steinmayr et al.,
2016). Interventions and online course design choices can markedly reduce Test Anxiety (Abdous,
2019). Unfortunately, few online learning studies record Test Anxiety, instead recording grade/score
differences. Yet, Test Anxiety interventions are efficacious – e.g. "test-wiseness training" (Kalechstein
et al., 1988), group counselling (Alkhawaja, 2013) and mindfulness training (Seidi & Ahmad, 2018).
Research often classifies students into High and Low groups. There are disproportionately
negative outcomes for High Test Anxiety students, whom more recently have been enrolled
automatically in targeted interventions (e.g. Psychoeducation Bedel et al., 2020). Test Anxiety is
related to Social Anxiety (Rothman, 2004; Sarason and Sarason, 1990). This manifests in a socialevaluative component, which appears in most scales, such as the Test Anxiety Inventory (TAI;
Spielberger, 1980). TAI was designed for assessing children (Ludlow & Guida, 1991). Recent scales,
including the Cognitive Test Anxiety Scale (CTAS; Cassady & Johnson, 2002), are adapted to
university participants. An example CTAS item is "I feel under a lot of pressure to get good grades on
tests.". CTAS has similar correlations with academic performance (Chapell et al., 2005) as those
utilizing TAI (such as Hunsley, 1985), without the concerns of TAI applicability discussed in
Szafranski (2012).
Test Anxiety is typically construed as a trait under Latent state-trait theory, despite short term
experimental intervention differences being observed (e.g. "looking ahead" immediately prior to
testing in Mavilidi et al., 2014; or taking practice quizzes in Agarwal et al., 2014). Test Anxiety should
not be confused with other forms of anxiety, such as General or Social Anxiety Disorder. Prevalence
of anxiety is rising in college populations (Zagorski, 2018), as is loneliness, with 1 in 5 young people
reporting having no close friends and feeling alone(n=2,522, Mental Health Foundation, 2019). Usage
of social media is also associated with greater loneliness (Wohn & LaRose, 2014). However,
artificially induced status updates have been shown to reduce it (Deters & Mehl, 2012), which aligns
with status updates requesting academic support reducing Test Anxiety as found in Deloatch et al
(2017) and findings linking higher wellbeing with greater academic outcomes (Public Health England,
2014). Research on social anxiety and social media is less clear, although recently Erliksson et al
(2020) correlated greater internet usage and activity with increased social anxiety. Despite wide
research on the negative aspects of social media usage (e.g. for university students, see Odacı &
Kalkan, 2010) - little attention has been paid to online helping, which is fundamentally social."
According to some people (Justin Sung on YouTube is where I heard it, probably, so no idea if credible) you can influence the forgetting-curve and make Anki more effective by having more context, putting knowledge into relationships with other knowledge, etc. It's a multiplier on raw/rote space repetition.
I have found that by adding simple etymologies I can improve my recall of Latin names for plants. The etymology connects an otherwise totally new word to existing word-concepts.
Really depends on how you’re defining context, since to me there’s concepts like memory chains/ladders, which simply fit sequential memories into a visualization — then there are applications contexts, which actually mirror reality of future use.
Great example of this is topic of memory sports [1], which do use techniques that work, but are likely less useful for actual remembering real world complex information.
As another experienced Anki user, I have found I get much more leverage out of spaced repetition (both in terms of efficiency of memorization, as well as in how useful the information is) when I've first made the knowledge my own and structured it in a way that makes sense to me before creating the cards, rather than just dumping a bunch of pure entropy into the Anki database.
That's not really note-taking per se, but it is ensuring that the stuff I'm trying to memorize isn't pure entropy (which is always more of a challenge to memorize in any event), but rather is part of a larger sense-making structure. The purpose of spaced repetition is to help prevent that structure from decaying; it's not a substitute for having it in the first place.
As others already pointed out, the linked article seems to say the reverse of how you interpreted it (though I would agree the terms are a bit ambiguous).
Note taking as parrotting is distinct from note taking as distillation. The latter has much more chance of getting results with proper spaced repetition, since it will help establish a concrete foundation on which to build more knowledge in an easily retrievable manner. The former may or may not benefit from spaced repetition at all.
I would say if GPT distills successfully, while this isnt as good as self-distillation, it may still be useful.
If not, or worse, actively bullshits, it probably won't be much help.
Could you elaborate on the definition of 'low utility'? Is it only in the context of memorization (retaining), or in the context of general understsnding?
Can't see how summarizing isn't a preprocessing step for learning in general. Spaced repetition is a natural next step. I don't see how they compete
I've grown to really like this Richard Feynman quote: “Study hard what interests you the most in the most undisciplined, irreverent and original manner possible.” It feels like I've been finally granted permission to embrace my natural, messy way of learning.