Applied Divinity Studies

I said, "After looking through Lambda School’s curriculum, I’d say students are going to struggle with very basic questions you’ll get on first phone screens," and "Out of ten student projects available, five should have failed."

Yes, you had a page in the curriculum on memory management. You also rubber-stamped through people who didn't understand it, and even contracted one of those people to not-help other students on the topic.

Anyone can link someone to a page about a topic and say it's covered, but the difference between a Udemy course and $30k worth of training is the expectation that someone will actually look at homework.

Anyway, the reason you won't explain the 86% placement number claim is that it was true for one cohort in 2018. That's why you only submitted a single report to CIRR. At scale, the number has always been somewhere between 30% and 50%, but that's easier to obfuscate by coming up with your own methodology.

There's a strong parallel with the time you claimed 100% of your UX cohort was hired, without disclosing that only one student graduated. You said it's ok because you tweeted, "VERY SMALL SAMPLE SIZE."

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26813371

And I'm sure you'll argue you didn't lie moments ago about the Fellows program due to what the word "launched" should mean. You have shown a pattern of deflecting the substance of criticism by focusing on technicalities.

Maybe this worked out for you in a different life. I suspect you've gathered…

A lot of the tech ones I follow have already been listed so I will try to list some that others may not be aware of.

1. Applied Divinity Studies. Rationalist adjacent. Obviously influenced by Scott Alexander, but less optimistic, a bit more cynical. - https://applieddivinitystudies.com/

2. Scott Locklin's blog. He used to post on HN. Mostly covers tech related things (but physical tech, not web stuff). Many HN readers will find him too abrasive and will miss the point. - https://scottlocklin.wordpress.com/

3. Granola Shotgun. Hard to pin down what this blog is about exactly, but generally focused on tradeoffs between different configurations of the built environment. The author will baffle the ideologically prejudiced. He's a gay guy in SF who has nice things to say about Mormons and rednecks. - https://www.granolashotgun.com/

I strongly encourage y’all to look into the rate of shoplifting in San Francisco over the last ten years. Some references:

https://www.businessinsider.com/san-francisco-shoplifting-numbers-doubled-after-store-changed-reporting-method-2021-12

https://applieddivinitystudies.com/sf-crime-2/

http://www.cjcj.org/mobile/news/13219

I know it’s possible to write all that off as liberal bias, but consider: the linked article has no data at all. Shouldn’t we, as engineers, be wary of news stories that report problems without underlying data? This one doesn’t even tell us how many people are usually arrested for retail theft. It’s just a single data point.

Here is a more nuanced, data-oriented analysis which concludes that Walgreens probably left SF for normal corporate planning reasons: https://applieddivinitystudies.com/sf-crime-2/

> Overall, it doesn’t look like Walgreens’ 2021 closure rate requires explanation beyond pandemic effects, their own 2019 cost management program, and broader economic trends. Additionally, it appears their 2020 closure rate was below, or at best on par with, their 2019 closure rate, indicating that the new DA, who took office at the start of 2020, did not accelerate the decline of Walgreens in San Francisco.

One response I haven't seen yet in this thread: invest in individual people.

Consider:

1. Investing in (pre-seed) startups, whose founders possess the potential to catalyze an exit from contemporary scientific-technological stagnation (c.f. https://rootsofprogress.org/technological-stagnation, https://applieddivinitystudies.com/1970/) *

2. Effective altruism with a long-termist/X-risk view; one possible mechanism involves micro-grants to individuals (e.g. https://www.climategrants.earth/)

*assuming you believe the stagnation thesis.