elohesra

Yes, but this is interns rather than apprentices. Interns are typically, as you've said, graduates. They're inexperienced, but they've had 3 years of theoretical training. Apprentices have had no training, much like the end user of askadev.

I agree it'd be fairly preposterous to hire a CS graduate for a very low or no wage salary. It just wouldn't be effective, what with the demand for CS at the moment.

EDIT: typo

Thanks for that information, that's interesting. Either way, I thought it was an interesting article, and it was well written too. I also agree with the core point that growth without retention is meaningless. I suppose I just take issue with the term 'viral' here, although your point stands even with business-to-business: if you've had a sudden influx of customers, then you'll need to fight to keep them rather than just considering them an unchanging constant of your business forevermore.

Not to sound like a naysayer, but while the idea that education shouldn't cost money is laudable, it seems fairly untrue given the fact that education as a professional sector exists.

I think the site is a good idea, and it'd be great if it takes off. But I presume it'll briefly take off due to the novelty/pride value of being a mentor, and then see an exodus of mentors as they figure out on their second lesson that education is difficult, and that's why people usually get paid for it.

It's essentially the concept of an apprenticeship as it works in the UK. The apprentice is paid a far below minimum wage salary, and is ostensibly trained by the company they apprentice with as part of their remuneration. The apprentice then works on commercial projects, again ostensibly with mentors.

Heck, throw in a ~$5/h wage and it's basically the UK apprenticeship model except with the guarantee of an actually qualified mentor. I agree that working for free is a bit of a steep ask, but I know I'd prefer to work for free with a properly qualified mentor than work at $5/h for someone totally unqualified (as my own apprenticeship turned out some years back).

EDIT: Yes, my last line is a false dichotomy. Ideally you'd be working for some sort of wage with a qualified mentor.

The article states that some startups succeed because "they’ve found some viral loop, the crack cocaine of startup-land". My question is whether these things actually exist? The only kind of business I can think of where something like this really applies is media-styled companies aimed at young people. But this type of company doesn't really seem to be the kind of company the article is talking about. I can't think of any business-to-business companies (as 'upselling' implies) that have any kind of viral loop, so it seems to me that the article conflates high-growth media-companies with high-revenue business-companies, and then argues against a hypothetical business company working on user acquisition as if it were a media company.

Am I wrong here? Is there some sort of viral concept for business-to-business companies?

EDIT: Just to clarify what I mean by the fuzzily defined term 'media companies', I mean companies whose product is in one of the low/no fee media spaces, like social media or digital media.

Yes, obviously.

If the reply is fallacious, then show that it's fallacious. If it is fallacious then it shouldn't be used as an argument irrespective of whom it's aimed it. If the reply doesn't contain some logical flaw, then it simply doesn't matter whether its opponent is black or white or anything else: neither truth nor logic are subject to whether people like them.

There is no way of 'redistributing power more equally': you will always answer to someone. In the case of any political system which pretends to 'redistribute' a given thing, then the person you answer to is the redistributor. Any philosophy which pretends it can halt ambition and greed is nothing more than a utopian philosophy, and any philosophy which relies upon a central authority to enforce fairness must first answer how it will halt that authority's ambition and greed.

> It's hardly a fair market when they're forced to compete with free though

Surely, as a member of an entrepreneurial-focussed community, you can trivially see why this argument isn't valid? The content holders are only competing with free if they're offering the same service as the free service.

The games industry has managed to cleverly counter 'competing with free' by making their paid services such as Steam value-added over simply providing the same content as the free content. The rights holders just have to find something that they can add that pirates cannot. As Steam gives community and ease of storage, and Spotify gives recommendations and playlists, so too must Hollywood find something that they can give.

Netflix already goes a long way to being the Spotify of the film and television industry, but it's hampered by only being allowed to show out of date content, and having its content culled fairly often. If the film and television industry were to introduce a Netflix+ with all the newest films and television shows, then I expect that they could attract a much larger number of people at a much larger price.

Of course, they could always just sit around whining that they "can't compete with free" and stick ever greater restrictions on the public until the public finally grow sick of them and force politicians to move decisively against the film and television industry.

> And finally - although unscientific, the high upcount of this article suggests that it hit a nerve and that many here are unsatisfied with the quality of their friendships.

See, you used the term 'suggests' rather than 'proves' because you know that claiming a stronger relationship between upvotes and motive would be affirming the consequent. But this is precisely the sort of weasel-wording which I've seen in observational studies, and it seems deliberately crafted to trick an uncanny reader ill-versed in logic into misinterpreting 'suggests' as 'proves'. Of course, we both know that we cannot infer anything from a consequent other than one of the possible antecedents must have occurred, and we both know that the antecedents in this case -- motive for clicking upvote -- is huge, and thus nothing meaningful can be inferred about the consequent. I'm happy to have a discussion about almost anything, but if someone comes to the party with nonsense evidence pretending the discussion has already been studied and decided, I'm going to call them on it.

I also feel like you've also dodged every point I've raised (or perhaps I didn't explain my objections very well). With regards to #1, the issue wasn't that I think researchers are deliberately crafting leading questions, but that in order for the study to be valid they'd have to show that their questions either do not lead thus aren't confounding (which I've argued is impossible), or that they lead predictably thus can be countered in the analysis (which I also argued is impossible).

With #2 you're correct that this is an issue for all studies, but it's a particularly large issue for studies of things which are irreducibly complex, like people. Since we can't (easily) take specific facets of a person and study those in silo from the rest of a person, controlling confounding variables becomes a bigger issue. Even in other observational sciences we can usually demonstrate the core parts of our assumptions in a controlled experimental manner. For instance, in the study of global warming, we can demonstrate in a controlled, experimental way that the combustion of fossil fuels releases CO2. With studies of human behaviour this is rarely possible.

With #3 you're correct that the media is far guiltier of this than the scientists, but I'd argue that scientists need to be more vocal about this issue. I appreciate this treads a fine line between asking for more scientific social responsibility, and holding scientists responsible for the behaviour of society, but I feel this is a valid concern due to the way that politicians like to fund studies such as these to validate their personal opinion. The reason I believe this important isn't that I think scientists are trying to dupe us, far from it, but because it worries me that as burden the of proof for a posteriori logic falls from the strongly codified and philosophically justified rules of empiricism and falsifiability, so scientists move from being discoverers of truth to yet another controllable authority figure.

Also, thank you again for citing evidence for your point. I apologise that I have not done so, but I seriously doubt any scientists actually agree with me here. Having read your linked study, I would say it both stands to reason and doesn't really seem to prove the point it claims to prove. If you set out to prove that self-reporting isn't invalidated by confounding variables, and you do so by invoking self-reporting which contains almost exactly the same confounding variables, then you can't really claim to have proved anything. Relatives and friends of a sample in such a study would be just as likely to change their answers, consciously or subconsciously, to avoid internal conflict, and because they're tied to the sample in such a way that would produce a similar personality and similar self-identity reprisals if the subject's life choice were cast in doubt, it's also not a large leap of logic that their changed answers would usually change along the same lines as the sample.

Again, I can't really think of a better way of studying complex issues like human behaviour, but since we started at the point of 'science agrees self-reporting is fine' and are now at 'we agree it is the best we can get', I feel we're moving in the right direction. I do agree that well-controlled self-report studies are probably the best we can get in this field, it just seems to me that the best we can get isn't as valid as the best we can get in experimental sciences, and should be noted as such.

Wow, arseholes. It's hard to recommend any course of action really, because I can't think of any coworkers I've ever had who'd refuse a reasonable request like that. I guess I'd offer to buy them some flavoured nicotine gum and ask them to try that for a while?

Yes, this is correct. Most self-reporting relies on having the same question asked in different ways and places to catch people whose inconsistent answers suggest they should be removed from the sample.

However, my objection is that I don't believe language can be easily classified in terms of the response it'll elicit. Obviously, one can (usually) correctly guess the response that'll be received if one were to run up to a stranger and yell "You're a [swearword of choice here]", yet the fact that I've had to preface this with the modifier 'usually' betrays my point; some people will get aggressive if you swear at them, some will laugh, some will respond in kind, and so on. My concern is that if we can't even predict the effect of language in its most obvious state, we probably can't predict its effect in subtler states.

This unpredictability of language leaves us in a tricky position when it comes to asking questions on a self-reporting study. In order to solve that one objection, we'd have to come up with a method of using language which manages to communicate its point, without causing that point to make people feel emotion. This is further complicated by the fact that people are complex beasts with internal and external factors playing in to how they behave, such that a question formed neutrally for one person would probably not be so neutral with others. This also makes avoiding 'fear of reprisal' for one's response to a question impossible, as we can only remove external reprisal. It would not be possible for us to, for instance, removal the internal upheaval of a conflicted homosexual admitting to a survey that they were gay.

> All of that is analogous to existing regulation regarding cigarettes

But this is why e-cigarette campaigners say that politicians are just meddling out of personal distaste, rather than any scientific backing. The two core reasons why cigarettes cannot be smoked indoors are:

1) Doing so (potentially) causes deleterious effects to people who inhale the second-hand smoke. At the very least, it can be agreed that it's not preferable to breathe smoke.

2) It makes it likelier that the smoker will give up their dangerous addiction.

Neither case can be particularly easily applied to e-cigarettes, which emit harmless water vapour, and are to many smokers a means of giving up their dangerous smoking addiction.

I must say I agree with the e-cigarette campaigners that attempts to apply the same laws to e-cigarettes as cigarettes is just yet another example of politicians wanting to control something absent of any scientific proof that they need to do so.

Oh, very well. Thank you for proving that the scientific community disagrees with me, and proving evidence for your point. I can't say I actually agree with those criteria; especially since one is wholly impossible: there is never a possibility that there's 'no fear of reprisal' when the reprisal can take the form of conflicting with one's self-identity. To be honest, to accept a self-report I'd have to see the following:

1) A study which shows that the questions themselves do not introduce bias. An actual study, where multiple groups of participants were asked the same questions in different forms so as to prove the language of the question cannot influence the result. Of course, this would cause every questionnaire and interview study to fail, because the language does indeed affect the results and is thus a confounding variable (which cannot be controlled without pretending that some language "just doesn't affect people", and yet still functions as language).

2) A proof that the demographic of the sample was controlled for all controllable factors other than those measured. For instance, in this study it wouldn't be good enough to test for the correlation between gender and friendship satisfaction by just getting a bunch of men and women: they'd all have to be the same class, race, wealth etc.

3) The study cannot draw conclusions, nor interpret its results as causative. This is really quite self-explanatory: correlation does not imply causation. Yet, especially in sociology and psychology, this logical maxim seems to get forgotten amongst the excitement of having produced a study.

I'm sure there's more objections, but you've already put up with me arrogantly berating the scientific community for 3 points now. If I were allowed to edit my post to state that the scientific community disagrees with me regarding the validity of the 2007 study, I would.

As for an experimental methodology for studying friendship, I can't say that I can think of any studies which would do so and get past an ethics committee (bloody ethicists), but making the study longitudinal over childhood through to young adulthood would help, as it would show what age-bound variables affect the output. It might just be that young adult men are, for instance, too busy developing a career to have friends, or too busy drinking beer to have friends, or whatever; either way, making it longitudinal would allow some of the uncontrollable confounding variables (such a life experiences) to become more apparent.