Bright.com - Algorithm Might Help You Find A Job

The trick—and it is quite a trick—is taking a host of ingredients, from the highly tangible (location, education, salary level) to the highly intangible (right level of experience, right background) and cooking up a single value that matches people with the jobs they not only want but can get.

The point of the algorithm is to have information that the individual user or human-resources executive can’t possibly access. Bright.com mines social- media contacts, and suggests jobs that come through people you already know. It pushes users toward companies that are more likely to hire from their college or grad school. It crunches numbers to determine a person’s preferred career path, even if she hasn’t thought it through herself, and suggests jobs she could be right for but may not have picked out of a search lineup. Salary is taken into account—applicants won’t be put up for jobs that are not in their desired range. (Users don’t have to share how much they make—the algorithm will guess.)

To make the whole system work, Goodman hired dozens of human-resources professionals to evaluate piles of résumés and train the Bright score algorithm in how to think like the world’s fastest HR exec. He also hired a neuroscientist, Jacob Bollinger, as well as a former nuclear physicist, a geophysicist, and other data crunchers to build and test it.

- More Here

Quote of the Day

By three methods we may learn wisdom: first, by reflection, which is noblest; second, by imitation, which is easiest; and third by experience, which is the bitterest.

- Confucius

Use Less Plastic To Save Our Oceans

- Take the pledge at SaveMyOceans

Daniel Kahneman On Adversarial Collaboration

Kahneman describes an intense aversion to anger as part of his natural temperament:

Daniel Kahneman: I happen to be an extreme case...for me, anger goes into depression very quickly.  I hate being angry and so I hate the adversarial exchanges that you frequently find in the social sciences and actually in the physical sciences as well, where people are snide and they use sarcasm.  I haven’t initiated that much, not because I'm a saint, but because I hate being angry.

His modesty aside, Kahneman makes an important point, one rarely addressed so directly in academic circles – that the ego-clashes we tend to excuse among high-achievers are dangerously counterproductive when it comes to advancing human knowledge.

- More Here

Quote of the Day

“Perfection is not when there is no more to add, but no more to take away.”

-Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

Five Reasons Why Stoicism Matters Today

• It was built for hard times - While it’s natural to cry out at pain, the Stoic works to stay indifferent to everything that happens on the outside, to stay equally happy in times of triumph and disaster. It’s a demanding way of life, but the reward it offers is freedom from passion–freedom from the emotions that so often seem to control us, when we should control them. A real Stoic isn’t unfeeling. But he or she does have a mastery of emotions, because Stoicism recognizes that fear or greed or grief only enter our minds when we willingly let them in. A teaching like that seems designed for a world on edge, whether it’s the chaotic world of ancient Greece, or a modern financial crisis. But then, Epictetus would say that–as long as we try to place our happiness in perishable things–our worlds are always on edge.
• Stoicism is made for globalization - The world that gave birth to Stoicism was a parochial, often xenophobic place: most people held fast to age-old divisions of nationality, religion, and status. If openly embracing those divisions sounds strange to us, we have Stoicism to thank. It was perhaps the first Western philosophy to preach universal brotherhood. Epictetus said that each of us is a citizen of our own land, but “also a member of the great city of gods and men.” The Roman emperor Marcus Aurelius, history’s best-known Stoic, reminded himself daily to love the world as much as he loved his native city.
• If you’re Christian, you’re already part-Stoic - It makes sense that Christianity is a deeply Stoic religion. Stoicism dominated Roman culture for centuries—and Christianity went mainstream in the same culture. What’s more, many of the leaders of the early Christian church were former Stoics. Of course Christianity borrowed much of its thought and terminology from Stoicism–because thinking about religion in the early 1st millennium meant thinking like a Stoic.
• It’s the unofficial philosophy of the military - In her book The Stoic Warrior, Nancy Sherman, who taught philosophy at the Naval Academy, argued that Stoicism is a driving force behind the military mindset–especially in its emphasis on endurance, self-control, and inner strength. As Sherman writes, whenever her philosophy class at Annapolis turned to the Stoic thinkers, “many officers and students alike felt they had come home.”
• It’s a philosophy for leadership - Stoicism teaches us that, before we try to control events, we have to control ourselves first. Our attempts to exert influence on the world are subject to chance, disappointment, and failure–but control of the self is the only kind that can succeed 100% of the time. From emperor Marcus Aurelius on, leaders have found that a Stoic attitude earns them respect in the face of failure, and guards against arrogance in the face of success.

- More Here

Oct 2nd - You Be The Change You Want To See In The Wolrd

Cannot be a better day to join Tyler and Alex's MR University - the first course is on Development Economics. They have brilliantly distilled and made info-packed 10 minute videos (it took me months if not years reading those pillow sized books to get the exact same information). Join today and take that small step towards a much better world.

Happy Birthday Gandhi!!

Quote of the Day

The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposing ideas in mind at the same time and still retain the ability to function. One should, for example, be able to see that things are hopeless yet be determined to make them otherwise.

- F. Scott Fitzgerald

Democracy Is Not A Truth Machine

Our ability as individuals to get to true facts merely by considering different arguments is distinctly limited. If we only know of one account of the holocaust - what we were taught in school - we are likely to accept it. But whether it is true or false is a matter of luck rather than our intellectual capacities. Now it is reasonable to suppose that if we were exposed to a diversity of claims about the holocaust then our opinions on the subject would become more clearly our own, and our own responsibility. They would be the product of our own intellectual capacities and character instead of simply reflecting which society we happened to be born into. But so what? Holding sincere opinions about whether the holocaust happened is all very well and Millian, but it has no necessary relation to their truth. As Harry Frankfurt notes*, sincerity is concerned with being true to oneself, not to the nature of the world: from the perspective of truth seeking, sincerity is bullshit.

Knowing this, we can have no faith that the popularity of certain factual claims among people as ordinary as ourselves is any guide to their truth. Democracy is no more equipped to evaluate facts than rational truths. We can all, of course, hold opinions about the civilisational significance of the holocaust and its status as a justification for the state of Israel, and debate them with others in democratic ways. Yet, when it comes to the facts, neither the sincerity with which individuals believe that 'the holocaust' is a myth nor the popularity of such beliefs can make them epistemically respectable. 10% of the population denying the holocaust is irrelevant to its truth status. So is 95%. And vice versa.

- Read rest of the 3QD philosophy prize 2012 winner - here

Quote of the Day

Yet to see one another as reason-givers doesn’t mean we must perceive one another as emotionless, unintuitive robots. It is consistent with the idea, rightly emphasized by Haidt, that much rapid-fire decision making comes from the gut. But it is also consistent with the idea that we can get better at spotting when the gut is leading us astray, even if the process is slower and more ponderous than we’d like. Giving up on the idea that reason matters is not only premature from a scientific point of view; it throws in the towel on an essential democratic hope. Politics needn’t always be war by other means; democracies can, and should be places where the exchange of reasons is encouraged. This hope is not a delusion; it is an ideal — and in our countdown to November, one still worth striving for.

- Michael P. Lynch