strongly believe the striving doesn't actually do anything.
I'm reminded of Scott's old homeschooling post where, iirc, he proposes that in early childhood there's just an underlying brain maturity process that can't be meaningfully accelerated toward basic educational attainments, such that you could either spend every day from, say, age 5 to 7 strenuously trying to teach a kid how to read and do arithmetic before their brain is ready for it, or you could spend those years doing basically anything else and by the time they're 7 they'll pick up reading and arithmetic easily in a couple of weeks. (Some version of this has to be true -- you can't teach a baby to read).
I was "unschooled" through elementary age myself and I don't think I learned to read til I was 8, but when I did it barely required any instruction and I was reading at a college level by 12, possibly because I hadn't learned to resent the attempt.
So much of this striving for early acceleration is probably pushing rope, physiologically, putting in 10x the effort to get to (at best) the same result marginally faster.
lemongrab
9mo ago
The market will price in the value of it and you'll be able to pay a premium not to have sex with your boss.
I don't think the market prices this well at all, outside of very broad "that whole sector (e.g. Hollywood) has a bad reputation" strokes.
When I think of typical workplace sexual quid pro quo, it's not an upfront "perform sexual favors to get this job", where the negotiation is open and transparent -- it's an eventual and unexpected "perform sexual favors to keep this job", often targeted specifically at an employee who the employer suspects lacks options at that time. And I'd guess it correlates positively, not negatively, with other unexpected and costly-to-the-employee behaviors like illegally withholding tips.
The market mechanism against this behavior is that employers who behave like this will have high turnover, but it's often ones in naturally high-turnover sectors who are doing it in the first place -- "guy who manages lots of young women who are working their first shitty service job" is like my central example of a workplace sexual harasser.
lemongrab
10mo ago
My best guess would be that it's something to do with the note at the bottom of the table where it says that all model results are adjusted for baseline SNAQ score. Like maybe the pre and post values are raw averages in each group, but the differences are model outputs from a model that includes an additional variable? I don't know though -- I was thrown off by the first line of that table, where the estimated coefficient, 0.58, isn't inside its own 95% CI, (1.08, 2.24).
I won't pretend to have read it all, but Moldbug wrote a whole book about this in 2007, https://www.unqualified-reservations.org/2007/09/how-dawkins-got-pwned-part-1/
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