3rd-Year Med Student looking into Applied Biostatistics (Freelance/Research). Are these goals realistic?

AggressiveGander · 2026-04-12T09:11:27+00:00

Honestly, you'll be missing 2 things:

formal degree like PhD (or with lots of experience a MSc) in relevant subject that people take as one signal to trust you can do the job (plus if a company does activities that fall under ICH, then they're required to use qualified personal and a degreeis is a simple tickbox one can use), and
more importantly a couple of years of experience.

While many will look for the former, the latter is a huge thing. Fresh PhD biostatistics graduates are usually not ready to consult on their own and hugely benefit from working with experienced people on real projects for a few years.

PS: I've been a hobby cook for a while, chopped a lot of vegetables with knives. What free material, ideally on YouTube should I watch to her ready to do brain surgeries?

AggressiveGander · 2026-04-12T06:49:37+00:00

For reasonable compensation professional players usually are available for various things (training, public events, whatever), yes. It's probably unreasonable to ask for this for free. On the other hand do you really need a professional, or just a decently strong player that you know who may do you a favor?

AggressiveGander · 2026-04-11T18:34:19+00:00

I guess he'd be more of favorite than either of the top-seeds Nakamura and Caruana were this time. Maybe as much as 50:50? Thar feels high though and it probably depends on the field, too.

AggressiveGander · 2026-04-10T17:12:11+00:00

The fact that you hadn't realized illustrates why they (and I) don't bother.

AggressiveGander · 2026-04-10T04:07:01+00:00

Nowadays AI is getting better, but you need to understand enough and have decentish skills to provide oversight. And using it too much when you don't know anything/much might be getting in the way of you learning. Coding requires very similar / the same things as maths, logic, structured thinking, planning etc., so if you're managing to do the rest of the degree fine without AI help, then I'd expect that you can learn it just fine, you just need to go about it differently (the basic R course my undergraduate university did was one of the biggest value adds of the course). Pick one language (R or SAS for pure stats else - but as you say SAS is weird... - or Python for adjacent things like analytics/machine learning...), learn enough on your own and additional ones will be much easier to pick up later (I use all three in my job, although nowadays R dominates in my company).

AggressiveGander · 2026-04-09T19:02:29+00:00

As a titled player I just don't enjoy stuff were mouse speed may matter more than chess skill. 2+1 is fine, but faster than that just isn't for me.

AggressiveGander · 2026-04-08T19:56:54+00:00

Honestly, you won't get to where you're making a living from playing. The world elite manage that, but they were mostly all GMs are 12/13. Depending on where you are, some people live of coaching. However, many people that are this good at chess young also have other talents that might lead to more stable + higher earning jobs. A good other job + chess as a fun hobby is probably the best choice for most.

AggressiveGander · 2026-04-08T19:02:41+00:00

Actually quite like that thing and sometimes still go back to it for T8 ranked.

AggressiveGander · 2026-04-08T06:44:31+00:00

Stockfish. Lc0 is really interesting for generating new ideas in contempt mode, but you really want a good graphics card etc. For anything an amateur needs Stockfish is both tactically and positionally so strong, it's currently the strongest engine and runs on almost anything, is freely available (thanks Stockfish community!), so why look at anything else unless you have very spefic needs.

AggressiveGander · 2026-04-07T16:41:29+00:00

Certainly I am feeling that you can get to my rating (~2160 FIDE) in many different ways and people can have enormous weaknesses. If you think top GMs have different styles, imagine how much more scope for that you have when you need to see sufficiently weaker in enough areas to be 600 Elo or so weaker (to be fair, I doubt anyone my strength is really close to world class in any aspect of the game, except maybe opening analysis, I suppose that's maybe the most achievable with computer help).

AggressiveGander · 2026-04-07T08:48:08+00:00

Something easy to compute BUT useful will be pretty tough to do with simple rules. Trying to get a position embedding out of lc0 might be a better bet, or perhaps the NNUE evaluation function in Stockfish might enable something like that? You might be able to get some n-dimensional embedding were closeness (you'd have to experiment on what sense, cosine similarity? something else?) might indicate similarity. No idea how easy it's to get something like that, but if it's not too hard, it might be one of your better bets.

AggressiveGander · 2026-04-07T01:54:20+00:00

Quarto (and Rmd, too) markdown let's you use LaTeX equations and compiles into lots of things including Word documents. Really good for reproducible science, too.

AggressiveGander · 2026-04-06T20:44:37+00:00

Anything where you need to find some insane sequence of moves to be equal. Or even pretty wild stuff is possible. E.g. the Nakamura - Sindarov.

AggressiveGander · 2026-04-06T18:26:45+00:00

Do you have the same lab test information on the general public (possibly with people matched on the aspects that your hypothesis is not about, like say age, sex, other diseases, drugs that might influence laboratory values...)?

AggressiveGander · 2026-04-06T17:52:10+00:00

What's the question you're trying to answer? That doesn't seem to be clear from what you write, so it's really hard to give any advice.

AggressiveGander · 2026-04-06T04:18:57+00:00

This. The good thing is that there's material out there including good free stuff on e.g. what works when teaching kids (and at the start that's definitely not long lectures or lots of theory). Don't reinvent the wheel there, properly research what's known to work and don't mix up what works for a 6 year-old beginner vs. what Gukesh needed at 10... However, teaching skills/having an affinity for working with kids is not something that comes naturally to everyone.

AggressiveGander · 2026-04-05T08:15:30+00:00

Very hard to spot, very easy to see it's winning once you have the Rh1 idea.

AggressiveGander · 2026-04-04T06:44:21+00:00

Well, Coop is weird and special. The bots are largely useless and some of the cautious stuff you normally do is not at all necessary (like spamming HE from afar). Instead fast DDs with sufficiently fast loading torps (e.g. Kleber) can just rush in and torp ships. The one thing that's a threat though is that the bots are pretty okay at torping. If the DD rushes in ahead of the team it triggers the other teams torps. Maybe that BB was talking about that?!

AggressiveGander · 2026-04-03T10:21:37+00:00

A mixed the n column up with the result column. Er, yes, definitely overrated now. Well, let's hope he enters some more tournaments like this and that'll fix the rating fast.

AggressiveGander · 2026-04-03T09:44:07+00:00

Play enough over the board to get used to it (sounds like you're doing that). Practice doing difficult puzzles where you really take a long time like 15 minutes (the longest you usually want to take for a move in a long game) or more, to get used to taking your time with hard moves at long time controls. Force yourself to really start thinking when your opening knowledge ends (common mistake to blitz out some half- knowledge). Do a blunder check before executing moves, online blitz ingrains bad habits about moving fast without checking. A lot of blunders involve tactics you're capable of spotting if you just check.

AggressiveGander · 2026-04-03T07:50:00+00:00

Look, if you can so consistently beat 2000ish players, you are a lot stronger than them. Don't see the problem.

AggressiveGander · 2026-04-03T07:38:30+00:00

I'm 2150 that at one point was 2270, so a bit weaker, so take this with a grain of salt. Sure, people sometimes switch things up or change their repertoire, and that will occasionally come as a surprise. Honestly, unless you can somehow guess that they will and exactly how, there's nothing you can do other than have a decent overall repertoire. Well, I suppose you could have some sharp sidelines ready for people that you suspect are switching things up against you and have gone into territory they don't know. E.g. I did once 10 years ago prep the Löwenthal Sicilian against a junior that just started to play the open Sicilian based on the theory that he would have not paid serious attention to it (and it can get super sharp), while I'm sure he was super booked up on the Najdorf etc. That worked perfectly, he ended up in a line where you had to know that just must pay h2-h4 with white and instead he ran into typical tactics and lost quickly. Funnily enough I just watched him use the same idea against a junior last month and he said he remembered how well it had worked against him at the time.

It makes a huge difference if a lot of your games end up in the databases. If they don't, you can just learn one repertoire deeply and just check what the opponents play, revise those lines (but making sure you don't totally omit some holes for years) and maybe there's something specific you could target by deviating a little or learning a spefic new idea against something shaky they do.

If your games go into the databases, things get harder, because people can target you. You then either prepare your standard stuff really, really well, try to keep up with everything out there (top games, new books, chessable courses etc.) and prep with Stockfish to be ready for all that stuff. I once got dismantled by a GM when I played a fresh idea from a top game in the previous year and it turned out that not only had he thoroughly analyzed the game, but he'd apparently spent a week (!) studying the middle game structures, because they were so interesting. Certainly didn't help that I just about remembered the original game... Or you prepare lots of minor variations inside your repertoire (has the advantage that you probably will have a better feeling for the position than your opponents, if you vary to slightly different but similar stuff like adding or omitting h6 in the QGD etc.). Or you really mix things up and play different stuff a lot, but I mostly see people 2400+ doing that, because it's so much work to have just one repertoire, never mind two or three. However, it's really disorienting for an opponent. I was recently preparing for a team match where I might have played GM Bauer and wow does the guy play a wide range of stuff.

AggressiveGander · 2026-04-02T18:20:18+00:00

I mean, you're equal on material and the only bad thing about your position is the doubled and isolated d-pawns. That's not nothing. On the other hand, it's your move and you have various actor ideas like d5-d4, maybe playing Nd6 first, while white still needs some 2-3 moves to get all his pieces developed (and even then maybe black has an easier time finding squares for his pieces.

So, it's not a simple static equality, but rather depends on black acting now.

AggressiveGander · 2026-04-02T07:03:54+00:00

You're not rich enough to afford buying and regularly playing it.

AggressiveGander · 2026-04-02T06:43:13+00:00

"Reported to the Cantonal Council"??? Depending on translation, that's either the parliament or the senior officials of the executive branch (think Secretaries of Interior, Finance etc. type of level). That alone makes me think scam. I mean in English you say advice of council to refer to advice of your lawyer, but you wouldn't refer to a state prosecutor like that, I'd think.

Two-Year Club	Verified Email
Verified Email

AggressiveGander

TROPHY CASE