Glassdoor, uMap, morality, privacy, Pandas

Glassdoor ratings widely gamed; another instance of Pearson's Law (or Drucker's or Kelvin's or whatever): "what gets measured, gets managed." I know that Glassdoor got kinda useless for me when picking a job. Oh well. Maybe we should call this "Yelp's Law," after the review site that has similarly become useless.

Anyone used uMap? I so much want a very simple "put a few dots and maybe polygons on a map and share it" tool. I've used Google My Maps before, but: A. it's such a UI mess; is it part of google maps or not? how do I just *get to my map that I made*?, B. it's on google, C. it loads slow.

7 parts of morality from a study by Oliver Scott Curry and Et Al, cross culturally: family values, group loyalty, reciprocity, bravery, respect, fairness, property rights. Compare to Haidt's care, fairness, loyalty, authority, sanctity. I guess we have (Haidt on left, Curry on right):
care (harm reduction) = ?
fairness = fairness + reciprocity + property rights
loyalty = group loyalty + respect
authority = family values + respect + property rights
sanctity = ?
? = bravery
Now, they're probably looking at subtly different things. Also, I'm disinclined to take either of them too seriously.

Privacy is a commons. YES. I do feel worried by ideas like Newsom/Steyer's idea that you should get a cut of the proceeds from Facegoogapplezon - feels like, if that comes to pass, Facebook will pay $7/user (so, $7 or 14B; vs Facebook's $460B market cap, it's a chunk but not a company-killing one) and just keep doing the same ol' nonsense. The analogy to votes is spot on. We don't let you sell your vote, because that corrupts democracy for all of us; we shouldn't let you "sell your data", because that corrupts privacy for all of us. (Also, what the hell does "sell your data" even mean!)

Minimally sufficient Pandas. I feel like especially deduping "pivot", "pivot_table", "crosstab", "melt", "stack", "unpivot", "unstack", "reshape" would be helpful to my state of mind and fluency when dealing with all these things. I often think "I need to make my data look like this: ___" and then google around for a while and settle on one of the above verbs.
I was getting closer to this with dplyr in R! That ecosystem seems like it will get you to think in sane ways. But then I mostly quit using R :-/

Less Wrong and Rationalists and etc; Sabbathing and Act Two of your life

Ok so years ago I first stumbled upon the Less Wrong world and I was very turned off because it all seemed like so much navel gazing. It was also 30 year old nerds, talking about the world as it appears to 30 year old nerds, to other 30 year old nerds. I was afraid to spend all this time hanging out with 30 year old nerds, out of fear that I'd become a basement-dwelling forever-alone m'lady fedora troll.

Since then, I've realized a few things:
- ok I am a 30 year old nerd.
- this is not so bad. Being a 30 year old nerd, and indeed hanging out with other 30 year old nerds, doesn't automatically turn you into a troll.
- the downside is not the "nerd" as much as the fact that so many of them are 30, white, American, richish, and male. This can warp your perception of the world a lot. Maybe don't draw so many conclusions about how The World works based on the opinions of 30 year old rich white male nerds.
- however, it can be good to draw conclusions about how your world works for you based on the experiences and thoughts of many people who are like you. As a result, this community is more useful to me than I had first thought.
- Eliezer Yudkowsky is maybe the first name you'll read on Less Wrong stuff, and he is IMO on the dense and navel-gazey end and therefore maybe not a great introduction.
- Scott Alexander is maybe the second name you'll see a lot, and I find his stuff much more approachable. I don't know how dude's so prolific. Not to say he's always right, but he's usually got a lot interesting to say.
- like me, most of the bloggers in this world write 90% chaff, so it takes a little bit of picking through the noise. But unlike me, every so often they write some gems.

Like these two on Slack (concept, not chat app) and Sabbath Harder:
"If something like the Orthodox Sabbath seems impossibly hard, or if you try to keep it but end up breaking it every week - as my Reform Jewish family did - then you should consider that perhaps, despite the propaganda of the palliatives, you are in a permanent state of emergency. This is not okay. You are not doing okay."

Or, is Venkatesh Rao (Immortality Begins at 40 and The Key to Act Two) the blogger that I need to be reading in my 30s, or is he completely insane?
Similarly, and more concretely (thus less woo): on Wordpress and the lack of blogs anymore.

Anyway, I'd love to discuss any of these posts if you read them too.

Househusbands

The title of this article is clickbait but it's a pretty good argument for househusbands.

(note: the article talks about "housewives." I'm instead saying "househusbands" because:

- makes you think for a second, I guess

- makes me sound not totally backwards and reactionary when I talk about this

- also avoids the common-knowledge problem with "housewives": the author knows she's not totally backwards and reactionary. I know the author's not totally backwards and reactionary. The author knows that I know she's not totally backwards and reactionary. I know that the author knows that I know etc etc. But each of these steps we have to make sure we're clear on; if we just avoid the term, we can stop doing all this work.

- uh and maybe if we use the term "housewives" we're more likely to slip back into backwards and reactionary modes of thinking accidentally

- "househusbands" works as well as "housewives"

- but like I'm not gonna fight you if you say "housewives", whatever, gosh; so long as you don't accidentally or purposefully slip into backwards and reactionary modes of thinking)

Premise: Life today is pretty mentally taxing. Maybe if you're a married couple, one of you staying home might help you manage the stupid taxingness of modern life.

Point 1: Life today is very mentally taxing.

There seem to be uncatalogably infinite challenges. Some recent ones include "how do I manage these stock options" (cry me a river, I know, but they can actually create more hardship than they're worth if you're not careful and very unlucky), "I gotta fill out this form for my therapist", "we have to get someone to watch our cat", "I have to pester my landlord to fix our washing machine", "I have to pester my landlord to get someone to check on my old neighbor so he doesn't get bedbugs again", "I have to figure out how to get my bike to a shop so they can fix a flat tire", etc etc.

Meanwhile I would like to do some things like cook food and see my friends sometimes. This might be more practical than it seems; if I don't do those things then I am less able, not more, to manage all the dumb stock options and stuff.

And this is before kids!

Counterpoint: "Dan, just simplify"

Counter-counterpoint: I agree that many of these are brought on by life-as-career-tech-person-in-SF, and that kind of life is not very simple. However, it seems to be the simplest life that at-least-somewhat fulfills me right now. Other options include independent working (oof!), startupping (double oof!) and academicizing (nevermind!). None of these are simpler. My backup coffeeshop plan sounds nice, but I'd actually probably be bad at that, and once I jump off the tech-career track it'd be hard to get back on. (And being poor in the US suuucks, so I am trying to Make That Money now in order to prevent that happening.)

Point 2: you kiiinda might need a full-time (or at least part-time) house manager, or else you'll both be exhausted all the time.

I guess this doesn't need much explanation, but I do find Tati and me both working Monday-Friday, then doing *tasks* all Sunday, leaving much less time to refill and be myself than I'd like.

Where does this leave us? I guess in the future, especially post kids, it'd be really nice to trade off the full time career life. It'd be good to be able to say, I'm gonna work part time for a few years, and also do all the *tasks*, and that will still leave us plenty of time to be humans.

But like I said, that doesn't feel fulfilling now! Argh. Well, hopefully that will change.

Extra rant: If I ask someone to do a thing, why is it still my responsibility to make sure they don't just forget it forever? Argh! I don't expect everyone to do everything that I ask, but even simply responding to my email/text with "no" would be so helpful! Ok, whatever, life is stressful.