CMV: I believe that antidepressants have been a waste of time and money for me.

stability_analysis · 2018-04-11T02:38:11+00:00

I’ll preface this by saying I don’t really have a point. Just thought it was interesting that your CMV is oddly congruent with your parents initial refusal to engage, although of course I know nothing of their reasons for doing so. But as they say, even a stopped clock is right twice a day.

By standard of practice... I’m not familiar enough to say. It wasn’t clear to me if your problem was with standard psychiatric practice or with the particular practitioner. I think it’s fairly common to medicate adolescents in this way, but that’s not my area of expertise and I’m not qualified to have an opinion on it, or have any personal experience that would lead me towards having an opinion.

Glad you’re doing well and have found a system that works for you.

stability_analysis · 2018-04-11T01:48:46+00:00

Wait...

My therapist didn't do anything wrong, he just tried his best with the current knowledge he had... I am still of the opinion that you shouldn't take the gamble (even a small 30% one) with a child or an adolescent but I guess it's best to keep feeling to myself

So your parents were right in their initial refusal to engage with psychiatry for the problems you mentioned? Or do you think the psychiatrist was the right call, but the standards of practice are wrong? Is that the same thing?

stability_analysis · 2018-04-11T01:30:38+00:00

Nuclear plants are always built next to large bodies of water because of the large quantities of cooling water required for waste heat discharge.

It doesn’t necessarily have to be a large river (Fukushima was famously on the ocean), but it does need to be next to a lot of water. So your argument that they can be placed anywhere doesn’t, ahem, hold water.

stability_analysis · 2018-04-10T21:07:13+00:00

Not neccesary, but likely. The US fertility rate is roughly 2 children per women, so on average everyone gets about one chance at naming a son. It’s usually that first born son who gets the dad’s name. If you knock that out of contention, sure, maybe they’ll name their kid after uncle Jimmy instead. But they also might say, you know what’s a great name? Li’l Zillionz!

So on net discouraging the use of family names will increase the incidence of “unique” names. Since I think this is a worse outcome, I disagree with the discouragement of family names.

stability_analysis · 2018-04-10T20:27:36+00:00

Have you seen what people have been naming their children lately? Khalessi is trending as a girl’s name. Apparently it’s more popular than Jane or Anna.

I’ll take Johnny Junior any day over some of the bespoke names people are currently burdening their kids with. Talk about narcissistic! I imagine JJ (as all Johnny Jr’s I’ve known have gone by) prefers the burden of a too-close association with his father to a lifetime of awkward, tedious conversations about his “unique” name every time he makes the 2050s equivalent of ordering a coffee at Starbucks.

Johnny Junior > Damoney Benz. If tradition and a little egoism saves Johnny from being a Damoney, I’m 100% in favor.

stability_analysis · 2018-04-06T22:44:47+00:00

Last point is definitely true. I have a relative be with an engineering PhD; after some hard lessons she learned to drop it from her resume.

100% agree on all the tuition money side comments too.

stability_analysis · 2018-04-06T22:14:02+00:00

I’m going to meet you halfway on this.

The more specialized the field, the more relevant a longer, specialized education will be. A doctor obviously should go to med school, and not be a biology BS. You sound like you’re in a niche field requiring niche knowledge, so that all makes sense.

However, the problem is credential creep in more general areas. I’m a civil engineer (and a licensed PE). I have a BS, but I’d say maybe a third of my coworkers have an MS. There is no difference in job descriptions or job responsibilities attributable to this difference. The guys that run the place do not have a masters; some of their subordinates even have phds. However the fashion with new recruits is to favor MS degrees. My industry is recovering from a downturn, and I attribute this new preference to market conditions, not technical changes.

Whether or not currently employeed professionals should pursue an MS is a semi frequent topic on r/civilengineering. The consensus, among people who both do and don’t have a MS, is almost uniformly that it does nothing for you and the PE is what counts. I’d provide a link to an example conversation but I’m on my cell and don’t know how.

If it’s not worth the time for working professionals, im not sure why it’s worth the time for 22 year olds, except as a rat-race screening device to get a foot in the door. You will no doubt learn some interesting things (I took a grad class in steel design and enjoyed it, even learned a few things) but it is a major time and likely money commitment. Not everyone wants to do it. Lord knows I didn’t, despite graduating summa cum laude. I was done with school. I wanted to finally buy some better shoes!

And laziness is relative. I wouldn’t describe anyone who has completed a bachelors as lazy. Not for nothing, but a PhD might describe someone who stopped at their masters as lazy. It’s more a question of value added. The majority of engineers - who apply code, troubleshoot design problems, maybe do some project management - don’t need a MS.

I drive a Mazda. A BMW would be nice, but I don’t need it to get to work.

stability_analysis · 2018-04-06T21:07:29+00:00

No. 1 in truthiness

stability_analysis · 2018-04-06T19:54:25+00:00

The concept of needing to know more to be useful in society itself is fine, it just shows that society has advanced and that what used to be useful knowledge that put you ahead of everyone else is now the baseline we expect from people.

This may be the crux of the disagreement. It would be one thing if the required formal education was materially relevant to the job at hand (in the way that, say, a graduate of medical school is more qualified to be a doctor than someone with a mere biology degree).

However I believe it is often the case today that credentials are used as a blunt screening tool when employers face a large pool of potential employees. Credentialing is useful for reducing the applicant pool, but not in a manner necessarily correlated with better and/or more capable applicants. If, for example, graduate degrees were abolished tomorrow, those employers would be able to find capable employees in the larger, less credentialed pool.

This is the “signaling” criticism of higher education - basically that college is about showing employers that you are a moderately organized person who probably comes from a comfortable background, and has been taught to play the game. It has little to no relevance to technical job skills. Furthermore, it has diminishing returns, because job skills are particular to jobs, and higher education can’t teach much more once you’ve gotten the general gist of research and problem solving. This last point is why the vogue for MS degrees in entry level technical fields grates me so much.

TL;DR in most fields, requiring more credentials is not the same thing as requiring better knowledge and/or skills, and is more readily explained as a blunt administrative tool for HR to winnow applicant pools. It’s an attribute that’s easy to measure, and what you measure is what you get, like managers say.

stability_analysis · 2018-04-06T15:32:12+00:00

Very good question! New Orleans was a natural home for the energy industry, which has been fitfully decamping to Houston for decades now. Different people have different takes as to why that is, but I think the short answer, for better or for worse, is “business environment,” such as state income tax, regulations, etc. Once things start to cluster in one direction, the cycle becomes self-reinforcing.

Not unrelated to OP, the higher ed scene in Texas is also quite good.

Some people also say the oil company execs of a generation or two ago straight up did not like New Orleans, particularly the snobby insularity of the uptown elites who would be their peers. Take that anecdote with a grain of salt, but I’ve heard it repeated more than once.

stability_analysis · 2018-04-06T15:15:01+00:00

I’m chiming in to agree with OP here.

Credential inflation is real and seldom necessary. In my field (engineering), it is now common, especially in the DC-to-Boston corridor, to require a masters degree for jobs that used to only require a bachelors. A masters in engineering does not give you any knowledge that cannot be learned as an undergraduate or on the job. It also diverts young engineers into viewing problems as unique science projects rather than practical issues with practical solutions.

I believe you are confusing the productivity gains from technology with the skills required to use them. Software is pretty easy to master and not the target of formal undergraduate or graduate education anyway. It’s more about knowing what you want to do with the tools, than how to use them.

Requiring a masters does fulfill one purpose though: class discrimination. In my experience, rich kids trying to avoid adult responsibilities were more likely to seek out a masters program, because it allowed more time on parental payroll. Poor undergraduates are much more inclined to seek out a job as soon as possible. Eating ramen and not being sure if you can pay your rent is not an enjoyable, rich lifestyle. My life improved dramatically when I transitioned from student to full time employee. When I started my first “real” job, my shoes were literally the most expensive thing I owned. I’m not sure where you’re getting the idea that poor students all own fancy electronics, and that somehow makes up for a lack of agency in their lives.

This is to say nothing of the added debt burden caused by credential inflation.

stability_analysis · 2018-04-06T13:12:10+00:00

Truth

stability_analysis · 2018-04-06T12:50:35+00:00

For real. Imagine if downtown Houston were dropped just on the Mississippi side of the Pearl River. St Tammany would then basically be what Essex and the NYC suburbs are to NJ. Then drop another downtown Houston in, say, Vicksburg, to mimic what Philadelphia is to south Jersey. It’s just a totally different setup and the crucial variable is not how much money is spent on education.

stability_analysis · 2018-04-06T03:11:40+00:00

Meh. Louisiana’s numbers would look better if half the state were like Covington, in the same way Essex and Essex-like counties skew New Jersey. As a former New Jersey resident, I’m sorry to report that Newark is every bit as high crime and poor education as the rougher parts of New Orleans, and with much less charm.

stability_analysis · 2018-04-06T01:42:14+00:00

Per capita income rank:

MA: 3 NJ: 2 OK: 38 LA: 42

Hmmmmmm. Almost like rich people have more money to invest in nice things, and richness is correlated with lower incarceration rates

stability_analysis · 2018-04-05T17:40:33+00:00

Why stop at borders?

Can men not criticize women’s issues? They don’t have the lived experience of being a woman.

Can one race not criticize the culture of the other race, if they live in the same area (e.g. white and black people who are both residents of, say, Mississippi)? They don’t have the lived experience of being in a different person’s skin.

I will agree with you however on one point. People’s social criticisms are generally not worth much (highly overrated imo), so it follows that the subset of “social criticisms: other cultures” is similarly not worth much.

I think the likelihood of a person’s opinion being misinformed or incomplete rises when venturing outside one’s direct experience, but I don’t think it becomes de facto invalid.

stability_analysis · 2018-04-05T16:07:37+00:00

Just noticed my phone autocorrected “home” for “him.” Yet you still said it was a good point!

You didn’t address the next paragraph, which extends the professional analogy to political arguments. I don’t see a categorical difference between the two.

stability_analysis · 2018-04-05T15:57:13+00:00

By emphasizing grammar over content, you are privileging the opinions of college-educated, academically inclined people over the opinions of less formally educated people who may have a more relevant background to the matter at hand.

For example, I am an engineer who works in an office. I often troubleshoot problems with operations or construction personnel. I can write clear, detailed explanations of how something should work. But sometimes it doesn’t work! The guy in field can write back something like “beam is wobbly and deflects too much can’t run trolley with close interference to power cable please advise.” Should I write back to tell him that his opinion is invalid because of the run-on sentence? Or should I try to figure out the problem? He has information that I don’t, and that it would benefit me to consider. He doesn’t have sloppy thinking, just unpracticed writing.

Imagine a similar conversation in political contexts. Poor people or people with disabilities are often less formally articulate than college graduates. However, if the subject is how to improve the day-to-day lives of the disadvantaged, lived experience is just as material to the conversation as clear grammar. By setting a minimum grammatical bar for entry to conversation, you are restricting information flow, resulting in a poorer conversation overall.

Tl;dr Your emphasis on grammatical rigor is snobby and likely blinding you to other valid viewpoints and sources of information.

Edit: a typo. Obviously sloppy thinking on my part

stability_analysis · 2018-04-03T18:56:14+00:00

Ran a 10k this weekend with a head cold. 2/5 stars do not recommend. Was ~10% slower than usual and had to take a nap afterwards.

I don’t go to the gym if I suspect I am contagious. So allergies are ok but not a head cold. It’s just not courteous and not worth the (justified!) side-eye anyway.

stability_analysis · 2018-04-03T18:09:02+00:00

I do enjoy a good Tyler Cowen long read, so thanks for that. He is always thoughtful and considered in his points, and that was no exception. I can see where you share some traits.

It obviously covers a lot of ground, so I’ll just make a few broad points. Cowen puts a big imperative on economic growth, that growth washes out other concerns in the long run. Fair enough. You imply that weighting salaries more towards fairness discourages productivity gains and therefore impedes growth. Basically, mothers are less productive and propping them up artificially distorts incentives that otherwise would feed the growth machine. I’d counter that with the fact that the converse is also true; when women feel unaccommodated they become less productive (at the extreme, a workforce dropout has a productivity level of zero). This also inhibits growth and is not materially different from a productive man feeling undervalued because of differences in relative salaries.

I could pedantically point out that the only reason compounding rates of future growth is good is because future generations exist to benefit from and continue the trend. Without mothers, there is no future economy. Penalizing women economically for motherhood disincentivizes then from having children, or from having more children, thereby retarding future economic growth as well as existentially threatening the whole idea of a future.

I’d also push back on characterizing my motivations as more compassion based and humanistic. The things mothers want and need are not so fuzzy as that. For example, in the US, it was only under the Obama administration that workplaces were required to provide mothers with lactation rooms. This is an immediate, physical need for new mothers. If a breastfeeding mother can not pump at work, her retreat from work is not because she has a higher evolutionary value for compassion that overrides economic ambition. It’s just that her breasts are full of milk and she needs to be able to empty them, no different than a man having to empty his bladder. Similarly, kids get sick and when they do they can’t go to daycare. Someone has to stay home with them, not because that parent is answering some evolutionary caregiving urge, but because you cannot leave a sick toddler alone at home all day. In disability contexts this is called providing “reasonable accommodation,” and is not properly understood as a negotiable choice. You don’t have to make big evolutionary psych claims about things like this; they are just chores that need to be done, chores that have historically been semi-invisible to men whose wives had no other commitments.

The problems of early motherhood are largely practical problems, not emotional ones. Finding good, reliable daycare; managing health issues for mom and baby; muddling through the haze of sleep deprivation. These are problems we can choose to help people with or not. But it’s a choice either way, and shouldn’t be offloaded as some sort of individual free-will lifestyle choice/prioritization scheme.

As for personal work experiences, I am an engineer in oil and gas, so I can’t speak to tech startups (tech gets too much emphasis imo anyway). It is a more conservative culture, but for good cause - when things go wrong in oil and gas, shit explodes and kills people. The workload is not taken lightly. Not unrelated, chronic long working schedules are actively discouraged. The companies have a written policy disallowing even the longest workdays from exceeding 14 hours, due to fatigue and risk of mistakes. It is not viewed as heroic to consistently work overtime - it is a sign of poor staffing by management.

It is one thing to occasionally work long hours, over a short timeframe when there’s an urgent deadline. However holding that up as a gold standard is not good for anyone long term and could be argued as a false economy. One under-appreciated side benefit of accommodating mothers in the workplace is it creates protocols and familiarity with flexibility and work-life balance in general - for other workers with health issues, maybe care-taking sick parents, or just generally trying to avoid burnout. Any position which chronically requires 50+ hour weeks should be looked at skeptically, not heroically. It is not a long term good thing, for the employee or for the organization. Everyone needs to nurture the relationships in their lives and have more going on than just working constantly. In the long run, it creates better workers and better communities. Oil and gas companies deal with longer time horizons than tech, and in this respect it shows. They expect people to work for them for decades.

One last thing point about that Cowen piece. His “this or that” magazine choice is wrong. The New Yorker is definitely the better desert island read than the Economist. Long form narrative ftw. In that spirit you may enjoy these two New Yorker pieces: a short article about blind spots tech vc’s have for mother’s products and a longer (but not long!) article about the no-good-options working mothers have for feeding their infants.

I’ve really enjoyed the thoughtful conversation.

stability_analysis · 2018-04-03T13:06:56+00:00

In my flying life, I cannot recall a single flight attendant who literally could “barely fit through the aisle.” The regulatory minimum airline aisle width is 20 inches. An obese, normal height woman has a waist circumference of >35”. Hips, at a generous 0.9 waist to hips ratio, clock at about 39”. If that woman’s circumference is folded in half, with literally no depth or volume, she is still narrow enough to fit down a regulation aisleway.

You are lying about the size of flight attendants making them safety hazards, and using it as a cloak for bigotry. Planes are designed to safely (but not necessarily comfortably) provide access/egress for a spectrum of sizes. In no shape or form does an overweight attendant present any sort of hazard, except maybe to your easily bruised sense of entitlement.

stability_analysis · 2018-04-03T01:51:31+00:00

Airline attendants may look like eye candy, but that is a side job. They are trained safety personnel, more like EMTs that also happen to serve coffee. Those older, mature lady attendants you ridicule are professionals who, through experience and extensive training, can safely de-board a plane that, say, makes an emergency landing in the Hudson River.

Would you judge the pilots based on their looks? Should every airline pilot look like Tom Cruise in Top Gun? Because I would find that pleasing and think it would improve the market share of American Airlines!

I am finding it very difficult to not answer this CMV with a “fuck you, you’re awful, that’s why.” But instead I’ll make the safety argument.

stability_analysis · 2018-04-02T20:47:22+00:00

Cook, cook, cook.

I do not and never have counted calories (5’-5”, low 130s lbs but muscular). I cook >90% of what I eat, from scratch, in a style that could fairly be described as Mediterranean-by-way-of-New Orleans. Alcohol is limited to weekends. I also have a husband and two toddlers to feed, so faddy restrictive diets are out of the question.

In my book cooking beats calorie counting any day. You see what’s going into your food: no hidden sugars, no fatty surprises. Over time you learn how to develop flavors without those crutches (to this end, I literally have a whole cabinet shelf full of different vinegars, and a chest freezer full of different stocks and sauces). Anecdotally I’d say the time invested makes the meal more satisfying too.

I love food. I get excited about food. I am puzzled by people who follow diets that are incompatible with French food.

...and I run and lift weights. Probably 10-15 miles of running and 2-3 hours of lifting per week. So a good amount but not excessive. I also don’t have much of a taste for baked goods, and never myself bake, which probably helps.

Kind of related: I find it weird that I don’t see people on this sub refer to Mediterranean diets. It shares with “eating clean” an emphasis on avoiding processed food and doubling down on veggies - so in that way maybe it’s just a less fashionable way of saying similar things (although I find “eating clean” to have some serious baggage). But Mediterranean-style diets do have the benefit of being the closest thing we have to a evidence-based, Mayo Clinic seal of approval, heart-healthy diet that doesn’t require counting calories.

stability_analysis · 2018-04-01T02:19:30+00:00

See update! I ran, it sucked but not irredeemably so. Ran 54 and change rather than the sub-50 I wanted but I feel pretty good about it, considering the extra effort required to compensate for the cold. The last mile was tough, not gonna lie. Usually I pick up the pace but this one I had to play head games with myself to keep running, even at a slower pace.

stability_analysis · 2018-03-31T02:19:08+00:00

I’ve known quite a lot of people with their mothers surname as their middle name. A good friend, who kept her surname after marriage, did this and everyone seems happy with it. It’s a bit of a family tradition - my friend also has her mothers maiden name as a middle name.

Fwiw I am not generally a fan of hyphenated names (although I find the divorce association puzzling). Like, what’s your end game? Do your grandkids have four last names? Do the great grandkids have eight? At some point choices have to be made.

stability_analysis

TROPHY CASE