Randy Olson

check out this article that was posted here a while back https://www.randalolson.com/2026/02/07/the-are-you-sure-problem-why-yo… The article's main idea is that for an AI, sycophancy or adversarial (contrarian) are the two available modes only. It's because they don't have enough context to make defensible decisions. You need to include a bunch of fuzzy stuff around the situation, far more than it strictly "needs" to help it stick to its guns and actually make decisions confidently I think this is interesting as an idea. I do find that when I give really detailed context about my team, other teams, ours and their okrs, goals, things I know people like or are passionate about, it gives better answers and is more confident. but its also often wrong, or overindexes on these things I have written. In practise, its very difficult to get enough of this on paper without a: holding a frankly worrying level of sensitive information (is it a good idea to write down what I really think of various people's weaknesses and strengths?) and b: spending hours each day merely establishing ongoing context of what I heard at lunch or who's off sick today or whatever, plus I know that research shows longer context can degrade performance, so in theory you want to somehow cut it down to only that which truly matters for the task at hand and and and... goodness gracious its all very time consuming and im not sure its worth the squeeze

> Sure, but it seems more than a little convenient that the male-chosen professions seem to generally pay significantly more, on average, than the female-chosen ones. They don't. Most men have to work in order to earn money and attract a partner. You think all of us love sitting in open offices, following our Scrum Master? Of course not, we just don't have the luxury, as do women, to follow our 'passions' in lower paying jobs. We can't marry a breadwinner too easily. We don't receive subsidies from the state, unlike women who are a net tax loss. We aren't able to attract a mate simply by being young, as can women, due to biological differences between genders. In Scandinavia, where salaries are progressively taxed and women have tons of opportunity to do what they want, women still choose not to sit in front of computers all day. Why the hell would they if everyone's salary is essentially equalized, regardless of whether you're a part-time teacher, social worker or a talented computer engineer working 60/hours a week. All salaries are taxed down to a median $75K / year, with the same health insurance, subsidized parental leave, etc. Thus, Scandinavian women follow their 'passions' which is what most Western women do, as we see from their choices in college majors, all of which are unarguably 'easier' but pay less. If society were to equalize my salary at $75K year whether I coded all day or worked for a charity or NGO or a music teacher or artist or actor, I'd dump my…

It's a somewhat interesting read, but one that I cannot agree with the conclusions as the author seems to have not bothered to read up on the data with regards to gender ratio in other careers. For example the following claim made by the author: >Women are less likely to be interested in programming than men. But if you ban the smart women from every other occupation – well, they’ll take it. Once you unban them, they’ll go to other things they like more, like being veterinarians (80% women) and forensic scientists (74% women). My guess is in 1980, neither of those careers had many women in them. Where did all those super-smart women who now dominate the fields come from? Probably places like schoolteaching and programming! Can have doubt immediately cast on it by examining the percentage of women graduates by all degree types [1]. If we presume this to be true, then in the 80s we should see a large tick up in other degrees followed by a large tick down in computer science. And well, the data doesn't exactly support that. In fact, Computer Science is one of the few that bucks the trend of the other degrees. His entire argument essentially boils down to 'women are interested in these degrees, and men are interested in these degrees' which is a soft-argument saying that genetic or gender-related differences is why we see such large disparities between various careers. He handwaves away the statistic relating to the drop in the 80s, which makes me have trouble taking him…

> Girls are discouraged from pursuing math and hard sciences through pre-college education, explicitly, culturally, and socially. The social blockers between girls and engineering are particularly acute compared to those between them and law or medicine. You can look at college degree numbers for example. Women now outnumber men when it comes to college enrollment and graduation, but women are far more likely to pursue "soft sciences" like psychology or sociology. This point keeps getting brought up, but the actual statistics are quietly ignored. Women make up over 40% of math and statistics graduates; A majority of accountants and biologists are women; Chemistry majors are evenly split between the genders. If girls are socially discouraged from pursuing math and hard-sciences, why does this not actually manifest itself across fields requiring math and hard science? Does a math major require less mathematics than an engineering one? Is accounting not mostly about math and numbers any more? Are chemistry and biology no longer considered hard sciences? I'm not saying the cause is necessarily not societal pressures, but this popular assertion being repeated ad-nausea seems to be, at best, incomplete. Women that have been told their entire lives that math is for boys seem to have no problem pursuing a higher-education in math in droves;…

I've begun to regard statements of "decrease funding" by media reports with skepticism. Usually "cuts in spending" means "reductions in the projected growth rate of spending". I believe that absolute state funding of public universities is on the decline though in the last few years, but its important to note the levels in a historic context. If you increase spending substantially, and then proceed to decrease it in the following years, that's not the same as a steady erosion of funding over decades. It appears as though there was a huge spike in funding around the time of the financial crisis, and now it has been dropping over the last few years back to levels closer to that of the 1990s [0]. Not sure why most articles point to the high water mark of the last 5-10 years as the benchmark for cuts. [0] http://www.randalolson.com/2014/05/20/skyrocketing-student-enrollment-…

> "Students, prisoners, pacifists and whistle-blowers"---at least two of these, students and whistle-blowers, have been primarily attacked by the leftist university administrations and the current American executive, also on the left. What you call "left" in this argument is actually centre right. Sorry but the left barely exists in the US, compared to other nations. Your confusion is probably due to the binary party system where, interestingly, 0 = 1. Anyhow, though they share some common grounds, the left is not and cannot be "liberal". (For example, no leftist would argue for the corporatization of free speech in their right minds, as you did in your liberalist comment, excusing it as "not perfectly ideal".) For classical leftism, see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marxism For modern leftism, see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Left > leftist university administrations and the current American executive, also on the left Leftist university administrators do not exist in the US. No leftist university administrator would take an active (pro/supporting) role in a system that depends on the exploitation of adjunct faculty, the active sabotaging of unions by universities, and the overall commodification[1] of education. The current American executive is not leftist either, as demonstrated by their trend towards building a surveillance system for elitist / corporate US dictatorship. In light of the above, you are in no position to call any article "idiotic." edit: [1]…

To add to andylei's comment, I've pasted my own reply from Randal Olson's follow-up article (http://www.randalolson.com/2014/06/15/the-double-edged-sword-of-gender… I agree that men and women most likely do make different career choices. Yet, choices aren't made in a vacuum. We have a culture that reinforces ideas of innate gender roles. Little boys are told every day that they need to be tough when they get hurt, that they shouldn't be a crybaby. Little girls are told that they can't handle rough housing, that math is too hard for them. Little girls are told they should be friendly and "nice", that they should play well with others and build communities, mediate between friends. Little boys are told that they need to be responsible and be able to take care of people. These attitudes are shifting. I am glad that they are shifting. When we tell boys and men that they have to be tough, we create a culture that makes it harder for men who are struggling with things things like depression and addiction to seek help or even admit that they have a problem to their friends. When we tell girls and women that they are weaker and less capable in certain fields, they begin to internalize those values. They begin to believe that they really aren't cut out for it, that it is too hard. There is a lot more that can be said on this topic, and to some degree it can be debated about just how "innately" different men and women are. However, the problem is that this…

URL now points to Teaching an AI Agent to Make Beautiful Charts https://www.randalolson.com/beautiful-charts-with-ai/ I'm guessing one of the referenced insurance companies threatened to sue. Archive link: https://web.archive.org/web/20260621173215/https://www.randalolson.com…

Yes! There used to even be a site that would predict your age by your first name, with scary (to the user) accuracy. Funny how names trend... edit: This might have been it, trying to find it within edit window https://randalolson.com/name-age-calculator/

This may be true, but I suggest you keep this to yourself. We also see that college majors with the highest average IQ (like Physics, Engineering) have the least women: http://www.randalolson.com/2014/06/25/average-iq-of-students-by-colleg…

They choose not optimal collage majors is one of the answers: http://www.randalolson.com/2014/06/25/average-iq-of-students-by-colleg…

http://iqcomparisonsite.com/SexDifferences.aspx http://www.randalolson.com/2014/06/25/average-iq-of-students-by-colleg… Richard Feynman is the exception that proves the rule.

If the average IQ of a STEM graduate is a standard deviation or more above average [0][1], then how does a more educated populace result in something besides the stratification we see today? STEM education can help a person get on the right side of the tech split, but the STEM education itself is already prohibitively difficult. [0] https://thetab.com/us/2017/04/10/which-major-has-highest-iq-64811 [1] http://www.randalolson.com/2014/06/25/average-iq-of-students-by-colleg…

/u/rhiever also published some code on transforming an image into a travelling salesman path: http://www.randalolson.com/2018/04/11/traveling-salesman-portrait-in-p…

Well, there's these visualisations about polio and measles in the United States, which are very compelling for the last two points. http://www.randalolson.com/2016/03/04/revisiting-the-vaccine-visualiza…

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>Having worked outside the software world, I absolutely do not believe that software people are any smarter, on average, than anyone else The average CS major has an IQ of around 125[1], meaning the average software engineer is somewhere around the top 5% of the population in terms of intelligence. The average IQ at the top tech companies is probably a standard deviation higher than that. Despite this, the consensus is that the majority of software developers are pretty terrible at what they do. If you've ever tried to help people learn to code you would realize a good chunk of the population doesn't have what it takes to do anything beyond basic programming. If it was easy more people would do it and salaries would drop. 1. http://www.randalolson.com/2014/06/25/average-iq-of-students-by-colleg…

> People don't avoid things because of future negative experiences Oh, people do, all the time. How many times have you avoided doing something because of the fear of pain, failure and shame? It isn't a marketing problem. http://www.randalolson.com/wp-content/uploads/percent-bachelors-degree…

Drug makers spend more in marketing than R&D, and I strongly suspect that most of their marketing dollars are spent in the US. So all we're really subsidising is more marketing to doctors via our high cost health care system. http://www.randalolson.com/2015/03/01/design-critique-putting-big-phar…

> But consider that in order to get a job as a programmer, I first had to spend 4 years taking relatively intensive courses in math and computer science (even longer if you go back to elective courses in high school), and empathy was not an important factor in getting through my coursework or examinations. Sure there are other paths into the industry, but no matter how you get here, the fact is that learning to code is intensive. If you look at the number of maths majors compared to the number of computer science majors, this argument isn't very persuasive. The former had more than 40% women in 2012, the latter less than 20%. [1] http://www.randalolson.com/2014/06/14/percentage-of-bachelors-degrees-…

* institutionalized discrimination: Policies that explicitly favor one group over another based on phenotype differences. For example, Jim Crow laws or "diversity" hiring policies. * "institutionalized discrimination": The hypothesis that society is skewed by the vast conspiracy of "bias". For example, for the past 10 years, computer science graduation rates skew under 20% / 80% for female / male graduates [0]. Presumably females are kept down by "bias". [0] http://www.randalolson.com/2014/06/14/percentage-of-bachelors-degrees-… Does anyone have more recent data than 2012? I've remember skimming a link recently...

I feel you are misrepresenting the male/female balance of various disciplines. Here are male/female distributions of bachelor degrees across many majors. Few of these sit right at 50%: http://www.randalolson.com/2014/06/14/percentage-of-bachelors-degrees-… Are you arguing that every field that doesn't sit right at 50% is sexist against the underrepresented gender? (I don't dispute that sexism in tech exists. I just dispute the expectation that representation will always be equal absent sexism.)

Well said, I would only disagree with the treatment of Gilead and pharma in general. The moral outrage is against greed. Even when the cost-benefit relation works to other (similarly overpriced) treatments, their margins are way too excessive from the patients' pov imo, because 1. manufacturing cost next to nothing 2. pharma spends way more on marketing than r&d [1] [1] http://www.randalolson.com/2015/03/01/design-critique-putting-big-phar…

The graph often shown about the gender breakdown of Computer Science vs. other studies is misleading - the reality is that the percentega was unusually high in the 80s, and now it's converging to the gender ratio of engineering. http://www.randalolson.com/2014/06/14/percentage-of-bachelors-degrees-… In fact, as another article by the same author shows, this concern is probably overblown, if not outright irrelevant - women are heavily overrepresented in many college degrees, but noone cares. Sexism? http://www.randalolson.com/2014/06/15/the-double-edged-sword-of-gender…

There are numerous metrics out there showing that Python 2.7 is far more ubiquitous than 3.x Here is one recent one: http://www.randalolson.com/2016/09/03/python-2-7-still-reigns-supreme-… If you have counter statistics showing that Python 3.x is more popular than 2.7 I would very much like to see them.

The "involved in STEM" can also go too far. For example more than half the bachelor degrees in biology are earned by women these days[1], which is nice. But why do we still need special girls/women events to promote biology to women, when in fact we should promote biology to all? Also, where are the programs to get boys interested in education or psychology, both of which are over three quarters female? This simply does not happen, at least not at scale, because the idea that it is women and women alone who must be "interested" in various things is too prevalent at the moment, for the right reasons but the wrong outcomes, if you ask me. [1] http://www.randalolson.com/2014/06/14/percentage-of-bachelors-degrees-…

People with graduate degrees have higher than average IQ, but people with higher IQ do not necessarily have graduate degrees. That is, intelligence is a necessary (but not sufficient) condition to get a graduate degree in STEM. The other necessary conditions you mention (training, interest, etc.) are also important, but still require a baseline ability. Even looking at undergraduate degrees, IQ is a significant factor in what degree is obtained. Physics and astronomy majors have an average of IQ [1] of over 130 -- that's 2 standard deviations above the mean. If interest, training, and hard work alone were sufficient to get a physics degree, we'd see a much lower average IQ among physics students. [1] http://www.randalolson.com/2014/06/25/average-iq-of-students-by-colleg…

You're making my point for me. Demographics matter. The older bubble demographic nearing retirement, and the new bubble demographic is not taking up the slack. http://www.randalolson.com/wp-content/uploads/united_states_population… Unemployment also ignores the disability insurance bubble.

There's a key statement here that most will either miss or never reach. The second last paragraph > Machine Learning Automation Tuning models is a pain, and if you don't understand the model and all its parameters (like most software engineers who's job is the write software and not build models!) it takes time and can be immensely frustrating. Randal Olson[1] just announced TPOT[2], a Python tool that "automatically creates and optimized machine learning pipelines using genetic programming". This is going to be a huge lever for engineers wanting to experiment/implement with ML algorithms. [1] http://www.randalolson.com/2016/05/08/tpot-a-python-tool-for-automatin… [2] https://github.com/rhiever/tpot

"H/T" is this newspeak for "all content from" http://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2014/10/the-divorce-proof-ma… No wait, maybe it's "we got the idea to plagiarise this from" Original source http://www.randalolson.com/2014/10/10/what-makes-for-a-stable-marriage… Either way it's a very silly article "If only you spent less on your wedding he wouldn't have started beating you." I mean really. Correlation is not causation is the most overused phrase in analysing anything but that doesn't really excuse this.