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You have to love what you're serving. I produced over 70 public events for people wanting to learn voiceover. We had a feature roadmap and wishlist, and we worked our way through it over the years. Many (talent, recording, and advertising) studio owners came and coached at minimal cost because we had such a great reputation for doing it right at low cost to attendees. The great people who wanted to be associated with it, and the enthusiasm of everyone involved was incredibly fulfilling.

We expanded to the point that we recorded 350 sessions in a single day, each with a coach with decades of experience, a professional studio engineer (usually), a studio room, and short lectures throughout the day. We had to move to bigger and bigger conference hotels to get enough rooms until Covid shut everything down. There were tons of "unknown unknowns" that had to be solved over time.

We were focused initally on protecting the people who probably shouldn't be spending money on training (very frustrating to watch them be ripped off), and produced the event both as a place they could learn a bit at low cost, as well as serving the mission of providing bite-size workshops for people who didn't want weeks or months (or years) or training.

I didn't want to be an "event provider". I wanted to figure out how to do something for people I saw being served poorly in an industry I loved, and then to find ways to give more and more to the people who were showing up.


I use the Monty Hall problem to test people in two steps. The second step is, after we discuss it and come up with a framing that they can understand, can they then explain it to a third person. The third person rarely understands, and the process of the explanation reveals how shallow the understanding of the second person is. The shallowest understanding of any similar process that I've usually experienced is an LLM.

I am not sure how good your test really is. Or at least how high your bar is.

Paul Erdös was told about this problem with multiple explanations and just rejected the answer. He could not believe it until they ran a simulation.


In my experience, as Harvard outlined long ago, the two main issues with decision making are frame blindness (don't consider enough other ways of thinking about the issue) and non-rigorous frame choice (jumping to conclusions).

But an even more fundamental cause, as a teacher, is that I often find seemingly different frames to both simply be misunderstood, not understood and rejected. I learned by trying many ways of presenting what I thought the best frame was. So I learned that "explanations" may be received primarily as noise, with "What is actually being said" being replaced with, incorrectly, by "What I think you probably mean". Whenever someone replies "okay" to a yes or no comment/statement, I find they have always misunderstood the statement, and learned how often people will attempt to move forwards without understanding where they are.

And if multiple explanations are just restatings of the same frame (as is common in casual arguments), it's impossible to compare frames, because only one is being presented.. It's the old "if you think aren't making any mistakes, that's another mistake".

Often, a faulty frame clears up both what is wrong with another frame, as well as leading to a best frame. I usually find the most fundamental frame is the most useful.

For example, I found many Reddit forums discussing a problem with selecting the choice of audio output (speaker) on Fire TV Sticks. If you go through the initial setup, sometimes it will give you a choice (first level of flow chart), but often not the next level choice, which you need. And setup will not continue. Then it turned out that old remotes and new remotes had the volume buttons in a different location, and there were two sets of what looked like volume buttons. When you pressed the actual volume buttons, everything worked normally. When you pressed the up/down arrows where the old volume buttons had been, you had to restart setup many times.

The correct framing of the problem was "Volume buttons are now on the left, not the right". It was not a software setup issue. Or wondering why you're key doesn't work, but you're at the wrong car. Or it's not a problem with your starter motor, you're out of gas. Etc.


I don't know who Paul Erdös is, so this isn't useful information without considering why they rejected the answer and what counterarguments were provided. It is an unintuitive problem space to consider when approaching it as a simple probability problem, and not one where revealing new context changes the odds.

Erdös published more papers than any other mathematician in history—and collaborated with more than 500 coauthors, giving rise to the concept of the "Erdős number," a (playful) measure of collaborative proximity among mathematicians

I often ask first, "discuss what it is you think I am asking" after formulating my query. Very helpful for getting greater clarity and leads to fewer hallucinations.

Since typical blood tests start at under $10, can you codify the value that the company at that link provides that makes their list price $1,490?

That panel costs $190 (and includes 85 biomarkers).

FWIW, similar bundles I've seen online are priced at $400-$500.

All 85 biomarkers, if purchased separately, would cost a total of $1,490. ApoB, for example, usually costs $60 if done in isolation, Lp(a) is $45, hs-CRP is $65 at Quest, etc. The bundles end up having lower pricing due to volume discounts and being able to amortize some of the cost across biomarkers.


Thanks, that's good information. What is your relationship to the company, if any? I wouldn't ask, but it's common when the answer is "none" to provide that info before anyone asks.

I believe eGFR (via creatinine testing) and sometimes HbA1c (if diabetes screening is ordered) are the only things listed may be part of a routine health check from a common/inexpensive blood test.


Co-Founder of the company (it's on my profile). Yes, you're right--of the biomarkers listed, only eGFR and HbA1c are standard in a routine health check.

Tape on the posters name:

about: Data for good. Co-Founder at Empirical Health (https://empirical.health).

Before: Risk Engineering at Brex


I appreciate these points of view, but it is of course not optimal when you see people simply making polar opposite statements with neither making an attempt at explanation.

LVM was a decent idea at the time, which was the early 1980s. But that locked in many architectural decisions that make it incredibly painful to use in practise, and its devs follow the "it was hard to write, so it should be hard to use" mentality, which make it even more painful.

Self-corrupting snapshots are considered a skill issue on the user's part, e.g., while ZFS simply doesn't allow users to shoot themselves in the foot like that. (And you rarely even need block-level snapshots in the first place!)

Encryption, data integrity, redundancy, are all out scope for LVM, so now you need a RAID layer and a verification layer and an encryption layer and if you stack them wrong, everything breaks. Skill issue! And not LVM's problem in the first place.

ZFS doesn't make you jump through hoops to manually calculate sector offsets to figure out how you can make an SSD cache that doesn't blow up in your face either.

So, no, LVM isn't underrated. It's a painful relic of a bygone age andif anything, overrated.


I see you were downvoted. Interestingly, on HN downvotes are considered as appropriate as explanations, from what I've read. Sure, you should be allowed to downvote, and can't be required to explain, but in a thread about lack of explanation, downvoting without explanation is hard to understand.

There is an entropic force that leads most organizations to optimize for survival of the organization over time, and worsen the ability to serve the ostensible purpose the organization exists to serve. Changing the type of the organization doesn't matter much if this tendency is not addressed honestly in the mission statement or somewhere similar.

I was totally with you until you proposed that a careful mission statement is the solution to organizational ossification. I've always considered them a symptom, and to the extent that they are prescriptive, you can safely assume that the operational reality is the polar opposite.

I said "honest" not "careful", but really it's about actual intentions, not paper promises. It's just a label for intentions, and as you point out, manipulated to hide intentions more than describe them.

  "People really need to open their eyes"
This is not a prescription when the diagnosis is propaganda. The "solution" for individuals is more akin to deprogramming, and a systemic solution is large organizations (including government) fighting the ability for any media to be nearly 100% propaganda. Unfortunately, for many reasons, including social media, and individuals believing that others could simply "wake up" being a solution, practical systemic solutions don't exist / require new approaches.

The "ecosystem" of polticial knowledge is balkanized in the U.S. (and elsewhere). "Making points" to those who are subscribed to a narrative fed from propaganda will not learn what they are told is not true. But noting causative "they say it's 'X', but it's actually 'Y'" feels more like simply properly labeling the information.

Rowing machines seem to be one of the best approaches to attempt it, though.

There is no strong method for predicting the future. Acquired/could have acquired in particular doesn't have predictive ability.

"Acquiring" is meaningless. Even "plans for the company after the acquisition" is meaningless. Credible reports of motivations that would lead the acquiring company to take a hands off approach to the company acquired means at least a little bit, having now seen companies taking that approach not immediately killing the golden goose.


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