Bookstaber, Will the Unemployed Really Find Jobs Making Robots? here. This High Frequency Chicken Deboning sounds dangerous. What can we possibly do with so much deboned chicken but trade it, and for whose benefit but Ivy League trained High Frequency Deboned Chicken Traders who front run traditional mom and pop chicken deboners? They don’t even intend to eat some of the chicken. I’m calling for the FDA to institute a chicken deboning fee so we can give High Frequency Chicken Deboning the funeral it deserves.

Whatever analogue there is to the Industrial Revolution, workers do not play much of a role in it. It is interesting that u to this point much of the displacement from computers has been in the mid-level jobs, like bookkeepers. These medium skill jobs that focus on rote but quantitive tasks are the easiest for a computer to do. Replacing workers doing relatively unskilled, manual tasks is actually more difficult. But the rubicon is being crossed. For example, Meyakawa Manufacturing is shipping robots that can debone chickens at the rate of 1,500 per hour, replacing ten human workers. As one commentator put it, “if you can do that, you can do most anything.”

Scott Aaronson, Shtetl-Optimized, Why Many-Worlds is not like Copernicanism, here. I never have this much fun waiting at the airport; I must be doing it wrong.

Proponents of MWI, such as David Deutsch, often argue that MWI is a lot like Copernican astronomy: an exhilarating expansion in our picture of the universe, which follows straightforwardly from Occam’s Razor applied to certain observed facts (the motions of the planets in one case, the double-slit experiment in the other).  Yes, many holdouts stubbornly refuse to accept the new picture, but their skepticism says more about sociology than science.  If you want, you can describe all the quantum-mechanical experiments anyone has ever done, or will do for the foreseeable future, by treating “measurement” as an unanalyzed primitive and never invoking parallel universes.  But you can also describe all astronomical observations using a reference frame that places the earth is the center of the universe.  In both cases, say the MWIers, the problem with your choice is itsunmotivated perversity: you mangle the theory’s mathematical simplicity, for no better reason than a narrow parochial urge to place yourself and your own experiences at the center of creation.  The observed motions of the planets clearly want a sun-centered model.  In the same way, Schrödinger’s equation clearly wants measurement to be just another special case of unitary evolution—one that happens to cause your own brain and measuring apparatus to get entangled with the system you’re measuring, thereby “splitting” the world into decoherent branches that will never again meet.  History has never been kind to people who put what they want over what the equations want, and it won’t be kind to the MWI-deniers either.

VLDB 2012, here.

mathbabe, When to quit your nerd job, here. mathbabe is smart.

I get lots of emails nowadays from quantitative people who are unhappy in academics, or in finance, or in tech, and want to know what they should do next, and specifically if they should quit their job. Most of them have Ph.D.’s or are even professors or well-established in their profession. They’re interested in switching fields, or at least jobs, and they want advice.

Maybe I get so many emails like this because they’ve read my advice post and realize I’m all about these three rules:

  1. Go for it! (this usually is all most people need, especially when talking about the crush type of advice)
  2. Do what you’d do if you weren’t at all insecure (great for people trying to quit a bad job or deciding between job offers)
  3. Do what a man would do (I usually reserve this advice for women)

I’m going to concentrate mostly on rule #2 today in giving job advice.

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