Drew Yates

(from an email exchange)

It’s insulting to be a “nice guy.” “Nice guy” means “steadfastly ambivalent about” to “lacks acknowledgeable negative qualities.” Usually, these “negative qualites” tend to be low-status signals: insecurity, nerdy hobbies or interests, poor posture, submissive body language, class discrepancy, etc. But because it’s awkward to criticize obsequiousness, especially when it’s directed towards you, “nice guys” simply quietly incur disrespect (and anyways, said he was “sorry” about a dozen times) Logically, that’s fair enough: girls want the best guys —just like how guys want the best girls —just like how anyone wants to associate with the “best” of anyone else. Practically, it’s in one’s own best interest to do the best for oneself.

There is an entire “discipline” about how to hack one’s behavior to signal high status to “pick up” women. More intellectually, the discipline is not really specifically about women, but how people work generally. The same tactics work in most social situations. For example, how do you know that one is “important?” You pass maybe thousands of people every day, maybe consciously notice only a few dozen, and maybe only interact with a few. What is the qualification process by which you mind decides who to notice? Given three men, about 30, about the same build and ethnicity, how can you recognize immediately which is the CEO, which is doing floor-work for some fund, and which is an employee programmer?

This must be something actors and directors have mastered. Think Matt Dameon in “The Talented Mr. Ripley.”

(SPOILERS)

The ending to “The Talented Mr. Ripley” was lame. I much prefer the idea that Matt’s character was able to vault into aristocracy and live happily ever after better than the idea that those who “act out of place” are doomed by “hubris.” I think that it’s an interesting statement about American culture that my happily-ever-after ending would be “morally unacceptable”… and I don’t think that’s because we were meant to feel too sorry for the victims.

Think Gene is a bio blog about genetics, genomics, and biotechnology. I started ThinkGene with my cofounders of ByGene, Kevin and Josh, as a way to positively contribute to genomics community (and because it’s fun!)

Please visit ThinkGene and let me know what you think! I’m still working on the website, so changes and bugs may happen.

A few people have been recommended that I see Mike Judge’s Idiocracy. I’ve already seen the movie, but here are some clips:

Idiocracy Intro

Idiocracy, about half-way in the movie

I’ve been awake for over 24 hours working on this goddamn website layout, and I’ve discovered the secret to concetration:

Get so little sleep until you’re dumb enough such that the work you’re try to do is challenging enough to keep your attention.

That’s also the secret to massive leveling success in World of Warcraft and Everquest, just in case you ever needed to know.

From “The best investment advice you’ll never get” at “San Francisco magazine:”

Don’t try to beat the market, [Burton Malkiel] said, and don’t believe anyone who tells you they can—not a stock broker, a friend with a hot stock tip, or a financial magazine article touting the latest mutual fund. Seasoned investment professionals have been hearing this anti-industry advice, and the praises of indexing, for years. But to a class of 20-something quants who’d grown up listening to stories of tech stocks going through the roof and were eager to test their own ability to outpace the averages, the discouraging message came as a surprise. Still, they listened and pondered as they waited for the following week’s lesson from John Bogle.

The advice seems to be:

1. Not everyone can be above average.
2. Financial services try to be above average so that they can charge fees.
3. You as an individual are probably ill-equipped to invest any better than anybody else. You simply don’t have the access, information, time, focus, resources, and tools.

So given that, on average, every investor performs averagely, the strategy is to achieve “maximum average returns” by minimizing costs (fees, taxes). It makes sense, though I wonder what would happen to the market if “too many” people adhered to this strategy…

About YouNoodle.com:

From the New York Times:

SAN FRANCISCO — Is your start-up worthy of investment? Ask the venture investor in a box.

Two former Oxford University students are getting attention (and seed money) in Silicon Valley for developing new technology that automates aspects of the venture capital decision-making process.

“We don’t want to replace investors,” Mr. Goodson said. “We simply believe that industries of comparable size have utilized artificial intelligence to inform decision-making.”

“Give us some information, and we’ll give you some idea of what the company will be worth in five years,” he said.

Given the investors (Paypal co-founders engineer Max Levchin and hedge fund manager Peter Thiel, and the Founders Fund, a venture capital firm), I believe this.

So, especially given that Peter ran a hedge fund himself, the idea seems to be like hedge fund for startup companies. But because hedge funds often work by narrow margins between weak correlations over very large, very accurate, near-real-time datasets, I’m unsure how a “startup hedge fund” would work. Why?

• Data Source: From where do you get your data about startup success to build your model? And what data do you collect? Unlike, say, the stock market, there is no obvious data set like “historical set of prices” and no obvious data feed source like the New York Stock Exchange.
• Data Fragmentation: Various existing ventures funds and entrepreneurs have data, but it’s very proprietary and often, not even communicatable (a “gut feeling” may have merit for experienced investors, but it can’t be quantified.)
• Data Relevance: Since each startup exists in unique technological and market circumstances, how can that data be relevant as conditions change? The success of a startup itself drastically changes its own environment. For example, there will never again be another Apple, or another Microsoft, or another Google. Why? Because these companies already exist, and to a lesser extent, because people tend to expect the next big startup success to be just like the last one.
• Data Size: Startups simply aren’t that big in terms of capital invested and consumable data produced.
• Data Reliability: Who is reporting this data? Who is accountable for its accuracy, completeness, timeliness? The startups themselves? In what, a web forum?
• Data Availability: Startups don’t record, report, and publish data. Lol.
• Survivor Bias: Only startups that survive past a certain threshold of success can produce data.
• Nature of Investment: Startup equity is not a liquid, fungible, easy-to-value asset until it has a stock price, and by then, it’s not a startup.
• Difficulty of Measurement: How do you quantify things like “ability of a team to work together,” “creativity,” or “energy?”
  

The goal isn’t to be to always be right like some oracle, but to be right enough profit (and out-perform the market, which may be quite correlated in venture capital!) However, I’m unsure how a model that is even a 5% prediction improvement will make a fund. It may simply be yet another metric to be ignored / promoted as it fits with an investor’s existing biases. Finance dudes love em sum metrics, so this will probably be successful. Good job picking a rich target market!
I also suspect that this is somehow a potential deal-flow source for The Founder’s Fund, though I’m not sure how yet, as a “submit your idea via this free web form” seems like a sub par deal flow stream at best…

I (very) strongly believe in preserving, protecting, and managing the environment and natural resources. I simply am scientific enough to not believe in bullshit like home recycling programs (which, except for maybe aluminum, are net energy losers) and “natural” marketing hype.

I’m simply not willing to entertain any serious discussion about sustainability unless the first topic is “population control.” Otherwise, any discussion is going to be more about “feeling good about ourselves” rather than “realistically solving a problem.”

But hey, in causal company, of course I’ll pretend to accept at face value whatever stupid class-posturing masturbation, just like how I wrote obnoxious fluff papers in high school to get good grades.

Stuff White People Like

This reads like a missing manual to my life. I will never again be able to fully enjoy that $8.99 sandwich. I can’t even exclaim that I need to leave the country to acquire “cultural experience!” I’m trapped.

(Clarification: only about half of this applies to me because I’m not a liberal and I don’t believe in shit like home recycling and Priuses. But most people with whom I interact do.)

Gifted Education

One comment from Gifted Children that irked me:

I am a teacher and white people use this one to segregate their children from the less desirable children of color. It is really how amazing how many gifted white children there are when it means that your child can go into a special class set up for gifted children.

Oh! So gifted education is bad because it is RACIST!

Actually, the stereotypical pushy, richer white parents (and other races for that matter) don’t bother to press urban school districts, they move to expensive suburbs. When everyone is middle-class and whit(ish) at public school, the gifted program is for nerds. Further, word “on the street” (as in, you didn’t hear this from me and definitely not vicariously through my mother who may or may not be a gifted education director at a major urban public school district) is that urban school districts “adjust” gifted program admission to be less “objective” and more “representational.” Read: minorities with test scores and academic performance (grades) that would otherwise disqualify them are accepted at the expense of non-minorities.

Also:

AH HA! SO REGULAR TEACHERS DO RESENT THE GIFTED PROGRAMS FOR LEAVING THEM WITH “LESS DESIRABLES!” I will forward this to my mother.

Gifted programs are supposed to be more work, more difficulty, and more responsibility for children with greater, otherwise unserved potential. Fine, if a kid can benefit from a gifted program, then by definition, that kid belongs. But in my experience, many of these programs are marginalized with flimsy “creative exploration” NOT to accommodate inadequacy of the students (though that is a factor), but to accommodate the inadequacy of most gifted-program teachers.

Why? In part because of attitudes like the bitchy teacher quoted above ensures that gifted programs are politically unpopular. Thus, they are underfunded and neglected and gifted education teachers tend to be underpaid, less competent pariahs. That’s because the goal of public education is to realize every child’s potential to be measurably “above-average,” and greater achievement is beyond what is feasibly measurable on the factory floor.

Public education dollars per child are inversely proportional to child IQ. Therefore, public educational resources are disproportionately spent to obtain the least educational benefit. As public education should serves society as a whole, that is a serious social problem, and I do have every right to demand that public services are effective and efficient.

Interesting note: My father directs special (retarded) education for this same school district, and guess who has a better career? Hint: for which program, if it were neglected, would the most troublesome, least productive children default as the responsibility of the general school administration and teacher’s union?

I am going to pretend that recommending this excellent book humanizes this post… which otherwise would jeopardize my white-people-club membership.

Richard Feynman is a Nobel Prize-winning theoretical physicist who participated in the Manhattan Project, discovered an important method in Quantum Electrodynamics, discovered properties of liquid helium, contributed to quark theory, and was a key investigator in the USA Challenger shuttle explosion.

Yet, while Feynman’s contributions to science are significant and unquestioned, many scientists, —many of any profession— are equally accomplished. So what makes Feynman fascinating and inspiring?

What is it about Dick Feynman that gives him the courage to challenge everything?

What I noticed in Feynman’s memoir “Surely You Must Be Joking” is that while Feynman feels the same forces we feel to think and act particularly, rather than passively drift from discomfort, he can map the social flux. Push here, feel, map a line… here. It’s as if Feynman can see this map —where are the high maxima, where are the vistas between cramped ideas, where lie the private pockets of overlooked insights— and while walking along, he plucks a tune on the contour lines. It’s something odd, light-heartedly amusing, yet somehow deeply beautiful, like this is the best way life could ever be lived, and you feel better about life for having known about his.

Even Feynman felt guilty about success despite burn-outs, felt awkward around girls and class, suffered from bouts of nihilism, and often worried about being stupid or inadequate. He was human, and his book helped remind me that humanity is worth appreciating for its own sake.

http://log.drewyates.net/

This is a publicly viewable list of goals, todo lists, and tri-hourly time logs. I’m making this public because there is a certain sense of accountability that you can’t fake. Other “scrap paper” lists (and their software equivalents) don’t have that, and too often they are quickly “ignored” or “forgotten.”

As I note in my first post, I’ll track to see what works and what doesn’t, and then I’ll probably make some web app.