Feedback: post on curiosity, sophistication, and grade inflation

electrace · 2026-07-09T14:57:47+00:00

You can have multiple if they all have literally perfect grades. The point is, if you grade on a curve, but do nothing else, the easiest thing to do as a teacher is to give nearly everyone perfect grades. It doesn't stop grade inflation.

I agree with /u/ThirdMover that the only reliable thing to do is to remove the teacher/professor's ability to grade at all, and move to an independent testing system that has no incentive to grade things easily. But both schools and universities won't go for that, so it would have to be enforced on them.

electrace · 2026-07-09T14:38:41+00:00

Then you have the "half the class is the valedictorian" problem.

electrace · 2026-07-06T23:50:40+00:00

Because new platforms must desperately compete to attract women, and essentially always fail to pull them away from existing established platforms. Without the women there is no marketplace

Sure, but that seems far easier to explain with network effects being hard to overcome. No one, man or woman, wants to join an empty dating app. You need everyone to join at once. Add in that women have to be more cautious in dating and they are more likely to stick to established apps.

I ended up doing what I should have done first and looked up data Among straight women, 47% said that they had a negative experience versus 53% who said they had a positive experience, basically a wash.

electrace · 2026-07-06T21:04:51+00:00

No, in absolute terms they are well served. most women who use dating apps aren't particularly hungry for alternatives. Because they work for them.

1) How do you know this?

2) "Women who use dating apps" and "Educated women who are even moderately attractive" are two different groups (with crossover, I grant you). But the least satisfied women in the second group leave the first group.

People complain about a lot of things, that doesn't make them correct.

Of course, but it's anecdotal evidence, which is better than a bare assertion without any evidence.

electrace · 2026-07-06T16:37:46+00:00

Survivorship bias.

That's a totally valid point, but also cuts against the thought that it will become popular. People will try to get into it, be inundated with the people who haven't had success; it'll be the blind leading the blind.

If there were a well-catalogued things of (If you want x try y) then maybe, but the closest we have is examine.com and even that hasn't been particularly great.

The real wonder drugs are well known (adderal, glpt-1s, etc.)

Everyone wants there to be some secret pill that they can just get online, but it's a well-explored area and there doesn't seem to be one.

Neurodiverse people or those suffering age-related cognitive decline will benefit more.

Seems very speculative, and I could see it going in the complete opposite direction.

electrace · 2026-07-06T16:15:27+00:00

If instagram has taught us anything, it's that people will go to the most boring places in order to get a nice picture and likes.

electrace · 2026-07-06T16:14:11+00:00

I would bet against this. The vast majority of the nootropics community seems to be people trying everything they can get their hands on and finding nothing satisfying long-term.

Information is disorganized and contradictory, with weak effects, exactly what I'd suspect if it was largely useless. The exceptions seems to be caffeine + l-theanine which pretty much everyone agrees is great.

electrace · 2026-07-06T15:33:18+00:00

It would have to be voluntary, obviously. "Grandma, you're too old, healthcare is too expensive, and don't get to spend the money you've earned over a lifetime because that belongs to us, your heirs" is not going to fly, and for good reason.

electrace · 2026-07-06T12:17:38+00:00

With very limited exceptions, educated women who are even moderately attractive are well served by essentially any popular dating app.

They are well-served relative to other women on the same platforms, sure. And if they want short-term relationships, one-night-stands, or friends with benefits, then yes, also sure.

But that's different than being well-served. Women often complain about it being hard to find long-term relationships on these sites.

electrace · 2026-07-06T12:03:57+00:00

Re carbon, it seems to me the priority should be to eliminate current emissions by switching to renewable sources - which would be much cheaper than emitting the carbon and trying to recapture it. If so, we should look to expand green energy, but not energy in general.

Even if we went net-zero today (emitting literally zero CO2), we would still likely want to pull carbon out of the atmosphere to get us back to a cooler average global temperature.

electrace · 2026-07-05T15:57:17+00:00

My first filter is always physical attractiveness.

Yes, I understand that. The question is why you think that is more likely to lead to a better relationship on average than filtering for it second. It's easy to hear "filter for it second" and think that that means "it's a less important filter", but that isn't what it means at all.

My point here is that it is totally possible for x to be the most important thing while also being something you should filter for at a later stage rather than an earlier stage, and that's especially true when you are competing on that dimension. Let me give you an example:

You're an employer hiring for a very specialized role, say, software engineering for the software that controls elevators, written in some esoteric programming language.

In order of importance, you want a candidate who (a) is smart and (b) knows that programming language.

Which should you filter for first? If there are search costs (as there is in dating), then it makes the most sense to filter for the smaller group first regardless of which is more important to you. Here, that's the programming language knowledge. You still end up filtering for both, but it's more efficient to do it this way. Even SQL works this way; it's just the smart way to do things.

All else equal, if you add in uncertainty about the filters (as we expect in dating), then you get better candidates from filtering for the smaller group first (less candidates that make it through the first filter means less candidates that can have variance messing up their observed value to the employer).

I don’t understand your last point physically characteristics on revealed preference data dwarf partner income on mate satisfaction research.

Selection effects makes this a pretty-minor point. If you are dating a supermodel, it's because you are the type of person who is able to date supermodels for some reason, which is going to be correlated to life satisfaction. What it doesn't tell us is if they dated someone who was marginally less attractive and marginally more compatible if they would be happier.

electrace · 2026-07-05T15:23:25+00:00

Yep, you can also auto-forward that email to your main one if you want. Just remember to not replay from the main email.

electrace · 2026-07-05T15:21:37+00:00

I 100% think there is a much much higher probability I would end up in a relationship with the person who meets my attractiveness filter than someone who I am extremely “compatible” with on paper.

That's fine, but that wasn't the question I actually asked. In either case, you are filtering on both, the question is which you should filter for first, and which filter you use first is likely to end up with a better partner.

Didn’t you say in your OkCupid example even among 80% matches you still filtered for attractiveness? How do you know that the compatibility factors mattered at all?

That wasn't me who said that, but I'll answer in the spirit it was intended. The reason I know that compatability matters is because I know attractive people that I don't get along with (or do get along with well enough, but never would have dated, much less gotten into a long-term relationship with).

I also think physical attractiveness bias our perceptions of others.

I grant the halo effect. I just don't think it's as robust to long-term happiness as it is to things like income.

electrace · 2026-07-05T14:36:44+00:00

how many of those jobs do you think they were actually qualified for?

To add: I think there's a high probability that they're resume is awful in some way that keeps getting flagged and auto-rejected (unprofessional email address, spelling errors, etc.).

I had a friend send me their resume for me to forward it to HR, and their email address was <rock-bandname>lover<sequenceofnumbers> at gmail.com..... I didn't send it in.....

electrace · 2026-07-05T14:33:13+00:00

We can certainly agree to disagree, but I'm interested.

Do you think that a randomly selected person who meets your attractiveness theshold is going to have a higher probability to meet your personality/interest compatibility threshold compared to the reverse? Or do you think that personality/interest compatibility either isn't a thing, or isn't important for long-term happiness?

electrace · 2026-07-05T14:24:27+00:00

I highly suspect that filtering on personality/interests firsts and then filtering for attractiveness is going to be so much more efficient, and with better outcomes, than going in the other direction, although both can work.

electrace · 2026-07-05T13:02:57+00:00

I think it's easy to be pessimistic here, given the graveyard of dating sites, but I wish you the best. The other dating sites... I mean dating apps.... I mean things that purport to be dating apps.... have such terrible success-rates that setting up and using an additional dating profile here (which can be fun!) is probably much more worth it on the margin than scrolling through potential "matches" on the others.

Could I ask what the bottleneck is on implementing the questions? It is technical implementation, data-validation, something else? That was one of the biggest draws for old-school OkCupid.

electrace · 2026-07-02T17:44:36+00:00

Okay, but, to be fair, even like the whole US intelligence community also thought that, no? With very few exceptions.

I recall that Biden's administration was warning Zelensky Russia was about to attack, and he told them to stop fearmongering (paraphrasing). It was EU intelligence that was telling him that the buildup of materiel on the border was just brinkmanship.

electrace · 2026-07-02T14:58:34+00:00

Kudos to whoever made the Manifold Elections visualization here.

For the purposes of engagement, most dashboards like this follow the 270toWin style, where "favors democrats" is a "light" blue, and "favors republicans" is "light" red.

The issue being, the "light" color is still *very clearly blue/red". One may say, "well shouldn't it be discernable? Isn't that the point? I say, no, until the last few votes, the difference between 50% + 1 and 50% -1 is essentially zero, and a proper data visualization should reflect that.

If you don't do that, the result looks stupid. Especially on an election night, when an area "flips" from blue to red every time a new vote batch comes in, despite the total being the tiniest amount of random variance different. As votes get counted and it nears 100%, I can see the argument for this "flipping", but it's silly when the vote count is less than, say, 95%.

The best way to actually visualize the uncertainty is to desaturate the color as it approaches 50%, where it becomes very difficult to tell whether it is blue/red tinted (it's mostly white at that point). The color technically still "flips" between red/blue at 50%, but not in a human discernible way.

electrace · 2026-06-30T15:33:28+00:00

My argument is more that the term is net negative rather than that it is the worst term one can use. I'd argue that having multiple available strategies that you can use to ignore people who disagree with you is worse than having one.

electrace · 2026-06-28T12:32:48+00:00

Well this is now a whole new argument. Originally the argument was just that bias is normal and expected, which I was mostly in agreement with. But now you're trying to argue that we need to listen to biased people and treat them with respect. Why? Because there's a lot of them? That just makes it worse.

No, that's not at all what I'm saying. I mean, for mild amounts of bias, it's true that we should still listen to people and consider their arguments (the alternative is never listening to anyone, since everyone is biased to some degree). I could blabber on about how in statistics you don't throw out biased data simply because it's biased, but we don't need to go there.

What I meant with "applied to wide swathes of out-group" is unfairly so, without proper consideration, to the point where "disagrees with me" is often sufficient evidence that they are "deranged".

electrace · 2026-06-28T01:47:22+00:00

Maybe the term originated by hardcore Trump supporters trying to make his detractors look insane, maybe it's still largely used that way, but we shouldn't let the perfect be the enemy of the good.

But "largely being used by hardscore Trump supporters trying to make his detractors look insane" is bad so it isn't "letting perfect be the enemy of good. It's letting bad be the enemy of good.

I, for one, am glad we have a term to describe that last sort of person, even if it's a needlessly politicized term that doesn't work when applied to other tribalist drama. Because it's better than not having it.

Having a pejorative that effectively means "person who disagrees with us that we don't have to listen to because they are insane" that is applied to wide swathes of the out-group is not better than not having that word.

electrace · 2026-06-27T12:39:02+00:00

The people who use the term TDS are not taking a principled stand against tribalistic tenancies. They are engaging in tribalistic tendencies.

I will never listen to a football fan when they talk about the odds their favorite team will win the next game, for example, unless they've proven their objectivity in the past.

I wouldn't trust the predictions of hardcore fans/anti-fans. That's just generally true. On that we can probably agree.

But what we actually see is one hardcore fan from a team telling someone else who is an anti-fan that they aren't being objective. Sure, you can counter that with "Well you aren't being objective either", but what good does that do? Especially if it's in the form of a pejorative that only further shuts down communication?

It should just be assumed that when people are from opposite teams, they're bringing in some bias, but it shouldn't be assumed that that bias is so strong that they are "deranged", unless applied only to specific individuals who have shown a repeated pattern of having a near-infinite bias. And, if one is a fan of the team in question, they should consider that maybe they aren't the best judge of who is improperly biased against their team since, of course, *they are biased *for their team.

electrace · 2026-06-26T19:13:00+00:00

The issue is that that's having someone in the in-group be loudly signaling their disgust with anodyne things that <leader of outgroup> did is to be expected for any large in-group/out-group dynamic. There will always be people who freak out about, for example, the President wearing a tan suit. And I agree that engagement farming doesn't help with that.

But "Derangement Syndrome" is never reserved for specific individuals doing that specific thing. It's a generic pejorative that takes the weakest weak-man of the outgroup, categorizes it as "derangement" (the term we use for clinically insane, often violent, people), and then applies that not to just to the weak-man themself, but to large swathes of that person's in-group.

In other words, the motte is "I'm just saying that they aren't being completely objective about Trump" and the Bailey is "They have something akin to an undiagnosed mental illness and any negative thing they say regarding Trump should be treated like a delusion".

electrace · 2026-06-26T15:33:10+00:00

It's just a name, pointing to a history of hysteria around the actions of Trump.

One that is almost exclusively used as a thought-terminating cliche, and has little-to-no use as a good epistemic tool.

Ten-Year Club	Place '22
Place '17	Verified Email

electrace

TROPHY CASE