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AustenAllred's profile
Austen Allred
Austen Allred
Austen Allred
Verified account
@AustenAllred

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Austen AllredVerified account

@AustenAllred

CEO @LambdaSchool (YC S17): A CS education that's free until you get a job. I have made remarks that I do not agree with.

San Francisco, CA
lambdaschool.com
Joined December 2010

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    Austen Allred‏Verified account @AustenAllred Feb 10

    A new thesis I’m trying out: people have no sense of scale. Related to our inability to understand power laws. The difference between “Facebook has 1B users” and “FB has 10B users” doesn’t feel like much because 1B is so many, but it’s enormous. Literally *30* Twitters.

    12:47 PM - 10 Feb 2018
    • 5 Retweets
    • 56 Likes
    • Alex Bowles #3CommaGang fredzannarbor Kelvin Beachum Martin Dunphy Taylor Grant Tim Beiko Eldritch NPE Startup Diazepam
    13 replies 5 retweets 56 likes
      1. Austen Allred‏Verified account @AustenAllred Feb 10

        I remember when I was younger and I didn’t understand a difference between $10 million and $100 million, because to me it was just an unfathomably large amount of money. You have to spend some time at that scale before it becomes meaningful.

        6 replies 2 retweets 21 likes
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      2. Ryan Lackey‏ @octal Feb 10
        Replying to @AustenAllred

        The wall street version of "law of large numbers" applies at 10B users, though (due to population being what, 7B?)

        1 reply 0 retweets 1 like
      3. Austen Allred‏Verified account @AustenAllred Feb 10
        Replying to @octal

        yeah there was some prediction as to how many users they'd have in 2040 or something stupid like that

        0 replies 0 retweets 2 likes
      4. End of conversation
      1. New conversation
      2. Eldritch NPE‏ @TheWizardTower Feb 10
        Replying to @AustenAllred

        I can vehemently confirm this, for a very specific reason: I've interviewed at both Twitter and Facebook. Twitter has two floors of a building in SF, plus satellite locations. Facebook's MPK campus is bigger than the town I used to live in.

        1 reply 0 retweets 10 likes
      3. Eldritch NPE‏ @TheWizardTower Feb 10
        Replying to @TheWizardTower @AustenAllred

        I was utterly unprepared for the titanic difference in scale.

        0 replies 0 retweets 7 likes
      4. End of conversation
      1. New conversation
      2. Tristan Homsi‏ @homsiT Feb 10
        Replying to @AustenAllred

        Scope insensitivity! Have had it best explained (alongside most cognitive biases...) by @ESYudkowskypic.twitter.com/S8EGTgxUvD

        1 reply 0 retweets 9 likes
      3. Gates VP  💙  💜  💖  🏳️‍🌈‏ @gatesvp Feb 10
        Replying to @homsiT @AustenAllred @ESYudkowsky

        "Scope insensitivity" perfect, this is the name I was looking for.

        0 replies 0 retweets 2 likes
      4. End of conversation
      1. New conversation
      2. David Woodland  🌴‏ @DavidSven Feb 10
        Replying to @AustenAllred

        This whole concept is what makes China terrifying.

        1 reply 0 retweets 1 like
      3. David Woodland  🌴‏ @DavidSven Feb 10
        Replying to @DavidSven @AustenAllred

        Terrifying is the wrong word. But the probability of us keeping up in the long term seems like 0.

        0 replies 0 retweets 2 likes
      4. End of conversation
      1. Perfect Little Soup Boy‏ @gabegundy Feb 11
        Replying to @AustenAllred

        I think I get it. That's like 60 Twitters back when it was a 140 chars max length. But I see what you're saying.

        0 replies 0 retweets 2 likes
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      1. Alex Bowles‏ @alexqgb Feb 10
        Replying to @AustenAllred

        Here's a fun concept: logarithmic grounding (it's how you develop a feel of scale by maintaining your sense of one scale while seeing / working with others)

        0 replies 0 retweets 2 likes
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      1. Ezra S Abrams‏ @Ezra_Abrams Feb 11
        Replying to @AustenAllred

        wow you have an idea:people have no idea of scale that is just so original darling !

        0 replies 0 retweets 1 like
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      1. Dundon‏ @TedDundon Feb 10
        Replying to @AustenAllred

        Our minds just can't conceive large numbers very well. It's why people will look at a stat like: 99.999% of planes land safely and agree... ...but that would mean one fatal crash per day.

        0 replies 0 retweets 1 like
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      1. Sagar Kandhari‏ @sagarkandhari Feb 11
        Replying to @AustenAllred

        Echoes the excerpts from Black Swan @nntaleb . Our brains have been trained on the Gaussian hence inability to understand power laws. Mandelbrotian provide a better framework to understand areas that are scaleable (‘extremistan’).

        0 replies 0 retweets 0 likes
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      1. Corey 🇨🇭 🇺🇸‏ @coreyblaser Feb 11
        Replying to @AustenAllred

        http://spacecollective.org/theundying/5970/Big-numbers-and-the-human-mind …

        0 replies 0 retweets 0 likes
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      2. Gates VP  💙  💜  💖  🏳️‍🌈‏ @gatesvp Feb 10
        Replying to @AustenAllred

        My number one beef with journalists. They regularly list very large numbers with no context. Part of it might be power laws, but I really think it's just that they don't know what divisor to use to understand the number.

        1 reply 0 retweets 0 likes
      3. Gates VP  💙  💜  💖  🏳️‍🌈‏ @gatesvp Feb 10
        Replying to @gatesvp @AustenAllred

        Like there are a handful of numbers you need to know for where I live. 330M = US pop 126M = US households 040M = CA pop 007M = Bay Area pop 000.7M my county pop So $25M means anything from "a lot" to "nothing" based on context. And it's really easy to confuse context.

        0 replies 0 retweets 0 likes
      4. End of conversation
      1.  🏴Bro-binson 🏳️‍🌈the 🏳️‍🌈Bro-scialist 🏴‏ @RobinsonBrain Feb 10
        Replying to @AustenAllred

        So there's quite a bit of research in cognitive psychology about this. And as far as I know, it seems there's a lot of good evidence to support your thesis. However, we are remarkably sensitive to framing effects when dealing with scale.

        0 replies 0 retweets 0 likes
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