How did I know that there would be a comment like this at the top, someone criticizing the research for not being science?
What is wrong with making up and using a narcissism metric and seeing what it correlates with? It's how social science is done, and how you discover results that are worth exploring. Get off your high horse.
Erm, because the first thing a real scientist would do would be to test the narcissism metric and check that it does, you know, actually correlate with narcissism? You can't just invent metrics and hope that they work.
> It's how social science is done, and how you discover results that are worth exploring.
Do you see the problem here? If you invent metrics, assume they work, then only pursue the ones that produce results "worth exploring"... can you see the problem?
How would you do that check if the metric the author chose was the best he could come up with to measure the quality of narcissism? If you want to check your metric correlates with narcissism, what metric B do you check your metric
A for correlation with?
Well, obviously there are more painstaking and accurate ways of determining whether a person is a narcissist. No doubt this is hard work. Sit down, talk with them, ask their employees, etc. Do the really hard work for a subset, check that the subset you've tested correlates well to your made-up metric, and only then can you use the made-up metric. You can't just use it without any evidence it works.
What you're describing is just as 'made up' as the metric you're opposing - your 'hard yards' are still based on people's opinions, politicking, and ulterior motives.
Keep in mind that even the GP's original quote included at least two references to the difficulty in measuring the trait ('tricky' and 'had to use indirect measures'). It's not like the researcher boldly strode forth and said "This is the way, have faith!". The results are also suitably couched. It seems like this "bad science!" thread is making a mountain out of a molehill.
>What you're describing is just as 'made up' as the metric you're opposing
So are you telling me that the very best way we have of establishing narcissism is the "the frequency with which the CEO’s name appeared in company press releases"??
If not, then a scientist is required to either:
a) Use the best method.
or...
b) Develop a proxy and calibrate it against the best method.
You can't just postulate a proxy for narcissism out of thin fucking air and then use it.
Nice false dichotomy there. Where did I say it was "the very best way"? And I can see just as many ways for your suggestion to be corrupted as the method in question. If it 'scares you that you have to explain this', then you should be offering some actual method that is good as you demand, because what you offered is, frankly, subject to terrible bias on the part of the respondants, and still has the bias of the researcher in deciding what means what.
Your method much less robust than the method in the article, and it might not even get past an ethics committee, for that matter - formally questioning people about whether their boss was up themselves? Think about how could that possibly backfire and significantly harm the subjects. Where would you question them - at the workplace as a job lot? Or would you track them individually outside of work, where these kinds of questions about the boss could now be seen as an organised attempt at harrassment, given the effort required?
This was an exploratory study trying something out, with explicit mention that the measures were indirect. It's not like there's an international treaty being based on it. Calm the fuck down.
It is the easiest thing in the world to read about a scientific study and then hand-wave about how it should have been done better. Actually doing a study is quite a bit harder, for all the typical reasons that things are harder to get done in real life than on paper.
To pick at one example, do you think it is easy to get time to just sit down and talk with a CEO or their employees? Particularly when the subject of your research is how narcissistic the CEO might be?
If that's how social science is done, then the "science" part should be dropped. My guess is that social scientists are (hopefully) more rigorous than that.
>I like his disdain for targeted ads, in spite of the fact that this could probably be profitable for his company.
I don't agree with the idea that all a company has to do is tack on ads and they'll be wildly profitable. I think that ship has sailed; the more ads we're bombarded with, the less effect each individual ad has on us. There are diminishing returns to ad optimization. We can only buy so much stuff.
There will be some interesting times in the near future surrounding this ad-driven ecosystem.
I don't know what SnapChat will end up "being", but the idea that the worst-case-scenario is, for all intents and purposes, "incredibly successful" is so far off the rails. How people can read things like this without at least contemplating a tech bubble is beyond me.
I don't think this is evidence of a tech bubble at large, but it is evidence that tacking on monetization onto a mass-popular app/service/site isn't always a slam dunk
>It's sad that 538 has turned into a pop-stats site that runs on volume and snappy headlines.
It's our fault, they're catering to our demands. You can't run a media company any other way. No one wants to read read (although I'd bet on average everyone spends far more time reading). So you get wham-bam, buzzfeed-esque content. Even on HN, long form articles will inevitably be met in the comment section with a "tl;dr?".
There's nothing wrong with asking for a tl;dr when you're trying to find out if the long form is worth your time. (Most are not.) In academics, the tl;dr is called the abstract, and it would be silly to think that they should be eliminated because people ought to just read everything.
The real problem seems to be that Nate Silver's (and 538's) brand value exceeded the available payment from NYTimes. So he did the rational thing and tried to capture it in the open market.
But Nate's a stats guy, not a marketer. Brand dilution is a thing. I don't begrudge him for selling out. I just wish my domain-based trust filter hadn't been broken in the process.
I sure hope they put together some solid election coverage.
Monetarily, perhaps -- which if true makes the subsequent devaluing all the more disappointing.
But content quality was higher (and volume lower) at NYT than post. I've been a reader since well before the NYT imprint, and I don't think the quality went down significantly at NYT.
>you realize that all those people suckered into ARM loans they couldn't afford during the housing crisis was precisely because they couldn't read between the lines?
Maybe, just maybe, there were a few who said, "I'm going to flip this house before the interest rates adjust, so who cares what it says between those lines?" or "I'll live in this house while I can afford it, and when I can't I'll mail in the keys and leave the bank hanging for a loan I agreed to pay back in good faith."
I never said they were. But requiring clear, obvious warnings on things is a large fraction of regulation and the relevant part to "helping people who can't read between the lines".
Regulation is rarely an outright ban, especially in this context.
>Do you think he is a liar and if so what do you think he is lying about and why?
I don't understand what you're trying to accomplish. While I don't agree with user=irrigation's comments, I think he's been pretty clear: the claims don't jibe with his experience as a consultant and he's skeptical about the self-promotional aspects. It's hardly ambiguous.
So why are you demanding he come out and call patio11 a liar? That would be an asshole move. Instead he's saying "I don't believe it", and there isn't anything inherently wrong with that. We're all just "some guy" on the internet, who cares?
He hasn't come out and said I don't believe it (or hadn't as I wrote these comments). He's insinuated that it isn't believable, or that patio11 is lying, but he hasn't just made the claim.
That's what I'm hoping he will say instead of insinuation about a specific person. 1) make a claim. 2) put some counter claims along with it ("I've been doing consulting for X years and never seen a charge rate greater than Y") 3) and if necessary point out what it would take to change the position.
You are right though, I probably shouldn't care, but I really dislike the behavior in this case. It seems like simple trolling trying to hide behind dissent. Which is a disservice to all of us.
I've met him once, at a hacker news meetup. I've exchanged 7 emails with him, regarding a phone call he wanted to have with me, about something that is in one of my areas of expertise. We had said phone call that lasted around 1 hour. He asked me questions, I answered them. No money was exchanged (nor expected) and no quid pro quo's expected. Originally, it was meant to be lunch, but that didn't fit in our schedules.
This happened in the last month. Prior to that I had no interactions with him outside of his blog and hacker news. I've been following his blog for a very long time (in fact his blog introduced me to hacker news, not vice versa). I still read his blog via RSS but do not listen to his podcast or subscribe to his newsletter as the topics covered are largely outside of my interests.
I believe Patrick, not because I've met him in the last month, but because his writing is compelling, the things I can verify are truthful, and the things I cannot match my other experiences.
If I had any complaint about his post about money its that he is assuming that his readership understand implicitly concepts such as fully-loaded employee costs, bill rate vs utilization rate and bill rate in comparison to costs of delivery. I think that is largely untrue and he would have been better served with a summary paragraph describing appropriate ways to compare bill rate to employee take home pay.
None of that has anything to do with this particular post, which as I've mentioned, only adds to Patrick's credibility as it is an outside entity stating that the numbers, at least with regard to BCC, are truthful.
Funny how so many people with verifiable backgrounds, who are clearly not related to Patrick except through HN, vouch for him, yet we are apparently "shills".
Not sure what needs to happen for us to not be taken that way.
Dividing the world into "shills" and "skeptics" doesn't seem like a pleasant way to live. At any rate, it's no way to participate in a community, and you should (again) stop doing it.
Aside from "serious literature struggle" a nation that liked catch-22 and stuff like that would dig "Monday begins on Saturday". Its been out of print forever (in english), used copies sell for $50 on amazon.
Something to think about with "failed markets" is when you only have a microscopic hyper regulated oligopoly you can end up with tons of demand but if the small number of providers close ranks and refuse to sell that kind of stuff, well... doesn't matter if used or bootleg copies indicate market demand at $50, the general public simply will not be permitted to read. Its very much like recording company execs as gatekeepers, if you disagree with them well tough cookies you aren't going to hear what you want.
I suffered thru about half of "The Idiot" before I gave up, and I almost never give up on books, but Russia is really big and not all russian lit is like that (although there is a lot of old russian lit that obviously was paid for on a "per word" contract)
Apparently, a new version of Monday Begins on Saturday is due to be released in September, costing £4 and £10 for the Kindle and paperback editions, respectively.
It appears that you are misunderstanding Social Security, and you may think that the US federal government plays by the same set of fiscal rules that a household, a corporation or a state has to use.
That article doesn't actually counter what the OP says. In fact it ends by stating that SS is being more strained and giving diminishing returns as time passes by, which sounds disturbingly like a ponzi scheme. It's unsustainable by design even without free-riders, much less with min-maxers gaming the system to not put anything in.
I don't know why you think social security is necessarily unsustainable. It's been running a massive surplus since the 80s. Unfortunately it was borrowed from to finance wars in the middle east, but that's not a problem with social security.
but the rules don't work with people working for 10 years, and retiring for 60. of course this is not illegal, but such a life style choice would not be scalable.
What makes you think that the people involved in the disruption of the banks won't partake in the same shenanigans? Do you think "bankers" are inherently evil, while their replacements will be inherently good? The Bitcoin world says otherwise. "Tech people" are stealing people's money left and right.
>If the banks are "too big to jail/fail" then maybe we should make them smaller...
Sure, and then we'll let all the pseudo-government-controlled banks in say, China, or even Canada do all the large-scale banking business globally.
The business of banking is vastly larger than cheqing accounts and ridiculous ATM fees that people like us deal with day to day and complain about. That's why the industry is heavily regulated, and why the banks are so large, and why the local credit union in Podunk isn't underwriting the Facebook IPO. It's also why some SV startup isn't going to ride in and up-end the industry without itself becoming some financial behemoth that needs to be regulated.
> The business of banking is vastly larger than cheqing accounts and ridiculous ATM fees
Right, but until recently the various functions of finance were embodied in different institutions. Due to pressure from the banks themselves and from the threat of competing banks in Europe the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act[1] was passed in 1999. This allowed banks to get much larger than they were before and to operate as insurers, commercial banks, and investment banks simultaneously, which they were previously prevented from doing.
Now, I agree with you that these are reasons SV startups won't "disrupt" the banking industry. (Nor do I think this is desirable, but that is another topic.) However, the idea that it is good to have massive consolidation of bank functions into one large corporation is not immediately obvious to me.
What is wrong with making up and using a narcissism metric and seeing what it correlates with? It's how social science is done, and how you discover results that are worth exploring. Get off your high horse.