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fyi80

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#5 "Echo their name back at them"

That is literally a specific advice to write low-quality "porn" content that stimulates superficially and then trigger an anger/betrayal reaction.

These "tricks" are copied straight from a used car sales lot, and we hated them there too.

Another horrible repeating of the "income inequality" trope, and then showing graphs of median income that don't get near the top l% of US earners, while citing a stat that the top 1% of earners are gaining.

200K income, you can easily afford to allocate 25% of that to a mortgage interest (plus 10% for principal, taxes, etc), $50K/year

3.5% mortgage -> 50K/yr * 100% / 3.5%/yr = $1.5M house price

interest rates are so low these days, you can spend 50% more on principal for the same interest, compared to 2006 when rates were ~6.25%.

> You are asking, gwern, a question about what people like about your writings.

tokenadult, do you have an Ed.D or Ph.D in Education? Or maybe something related to Social Work?

Did you know that this communication style, which you use rather consistently in your HN posts, and which is prevalent in the education community, is poorly-received rather outside that community?

Not saying your style is wrong, just that is extremely grating outside the Ed world. It sits in the uncanny valley of faux-familiarity, and as such it breeds mistrust.

> Erdos liked to tell another version of how Kummer computed 7 times 9: "Kummer said to himself, 'Hmmm, the product can't be 61 because 61 is a prime, it can't be 65 because that's a multiple of 5, 67 is a prime, 69 is too big-that leaves only 63.'

That's how I do problems like that, too (I am not a genius mathematician), and it is exactly the sort of thinking that kids should be doing all through K-12. Estimation, intuitive reasoning, analogy, pattern matching, logic, etc.

> that a course in introductory logic

This is barely touched in standard geometry text books. 2-column proofs and all that.

But most people don't notice it, and it deserves far more treatment. Many of the smartest people I know attended special gifted programs in K-12 that did teach formal logic and informal critical thinking skills.

(correlation != causation, though)

Or someone who has never used it, mocking its imagined failures, shows that when people gets there hands on it, they will see it wildly outperforming expectations and achieve mass-market appeal.

If only there were a way to predict that users searching for "taxi" tend to want local results, and users searching for "abortion" don't. You know, like that other search engine does, called, um, Google:

https://www.google.com/search?q=abortion

https://www.google.com/search?q=taxi

Or if you were willing to type more than 2 words into the search box before blaming Google for failing to read your mind, while you simultaneously tell Google to stop trying to read your mind.

Funny story: In 5th grade, on career day, the proprietor of an Army-Navy Surplus store explained margin to me:

I buy a shirt for $7, sell it for $10, and get $3 dollars profit and $7 to buy another shirt.

I was genuinely confused about the $10-3=$7 he was claiming he could use to buy more shirts, when it was already used to pay wholesale for the first shirt.

But maybe that was confusion about Return on Invested Capital, not confusion about margin.

"Exercising casually" is not the sort of "well-roundedness" that colleges select for. They look for "team captain", which, by the way, is far more common when your (expensive, private) school has 100 students instead of 1200 like a common public school.