I could try, but I live in a small midwestern town which is mostly blue-collar (living here to be close to family, also LCOL). The odds of overlapping interests nearby are pretty low.
There is a major metro ~1 hr away but the commute would be killer.
I live in Victoria which is one of the tech hubs in Canada, although definitely one of the smaller ones. The cost to living vs salary is not in a great spot right now but it's definitely doable.
If you are single or don't have any kids I think it is a lot more reasonable -- it's quite difficult to find housing for larger families. Even so, if you are capable of getting a good job working remote for a company it is possible to make it work.
I will say that Canada is in a bit of a flux right now. We are having an affordability crisis, and the cost of everything is going up.
It's not impossible to make a good life in Canada, but I think it's becoming increasing difficult and definitely not something that should be taken for granted.
I moved away from Victoria to the US 5 years ago and don't regret it at all. Even as someone with only about 10 years of experience I felt like I was nearing the ceiling of earning ability in Victoria. Paired with the ridiculous cost of living for a small city it didn't make sense to continue living in Victoria.
The "tech hub" is kind of laughable with most of it being small startups and only a handful of established companies that may offer more career growth.
Victoria is one of those scenes that is very bimodal. You have almost two entirely different communities that don't often interact. If you can make the jump out of the larger group of companies that are playing at lower stakes you can do pretty well.
That being said, the opportunities are limited, and I'm not surprised that you found more success elsewhere.
You make a great point about finding remote work. I lived in the Victoria area before I left Canada and found that a lot of my peers worked remotely for US-based companies. During the pandemic, some were even able to get a US market rate salary instead of being paid based on the Victoria location. This made living in Victoria much more manageable.
With all the stats available I wonder if it would be possible to show which zone the ball went into.
I did a little bit of work on pitch prediction and we were able to get a pretty good result predicting which zone the ball would go into. I think we were around 36% accurate with a specific pitcher. I built a realtime predictor on live games which was pretty fun. Wish I had know about this.
I think the surprising thing is that you can learn how to do it.
As for that, it depends on your what your social circle looks like. I learned how to cook a couple great meals and how to make a couple fancy cocktails. I invited a few friends over that told my other friends. I slowly integrated different people from different areas of my life and now I'm that guy that throws fun cocktail parties.
It's not the same sort of social status as driving a fancy care, but it has increase my social status amongst people I actually care about.
If my friends have more friends than me, do their friends have more friends than them? And if I'm my friend's friend, am I not included in their friends that have more friends?
If you select a random person, and then select a random friend of that person, most of the time, the latter has more friends.
This is because friendship graphs tend to have a small number of highly-connected nodes and a large number of less-connected nodes. Therefore most of the connections are between a less-connected node and a more connected node. So, if you just select a random node, you are highly likely to select a less-connected node, which also means that if you follow a random connection from that node, you are likely to reach a highly connected node.
Indeed. Say you have a graph where nodes have different amounts of connections. You pick a random node, and from there, go on a random walk, always picking a random edge to another random "friend" node. After some amount of jumps, it's more likely that you've ended up on a node which has a higher than average amount of connections.
That summary is still confusing to me. Rather, "If you select a random person, and then average how many friends all of their friends have, most of the time the latter will be higher." I don't think it holds nearly as strongly in the case of selecting a single neighbor. (I can't say it doesn't hold.)
Let's simplify this a bit. Divide people into "lots of friends" (L) and "few friends" (F). Most nodes are F, most edges are F<->L.
Therefore if you randomly select a person, you probably end up with an F. Since most edges are F<->L, following an edge from an F is likely to get you to an L.
I could see a plurality of edges are actually F<->F, though? Such that most people you connect with are connected with everyone else you also connect with. You will just have a few people in any large group that are hyper connected outside of that group. Such that, as likely, you have the same number of friends as any given friend. Similarly, though, most likely you will have fewer friends than the average of all of your friends.
Do you, though? I think I can agree that you are most likely to select an F with your random initial choice. And since the degree of your average L is >> the degree of your average F, it just takes a single L in a highly connected group of Fs to make the general statement true. As such, if you pick an F in a connected group and make a single jump, you are probably not on an L, but another connected F.
This would be similar to how famous you are compared to your friends. On average, your friends are more famous than you. But only because you likely have a few much more famous friends. Such that, a random choice of your friends is not likely to be one of these few. (Agreed that it is higher than that initial selection. But would still be low.)
Edit: Reading your post, I think I can easily agree that you /increase/ your chances of selecting an L by taking a single hop from a random node. I'm more asking if it is better than 50% at that point. Seems like it shouldn't be.
Yes, if the plurality of nodes are F<->F and F >> L then the odds are less than 50%.
In a simple case, consider a subgraph with one L connected to all F, and every F is connected to 2 Fs (in addition to their connection to L). You have a 1/3 chance of selecting the L in this case (but since there must be at least 3 Fs to draw this graph, you have no better than a 1/4 chance of selecting an L at random and thus you still find more connected nodes on average by using this algorithm).
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The above example was too simple as the majority of edges do not contain an L, and in fact you don't improve your odds in the 4-node case (they are the same in that case, but at 5 and more nodes you do). It still shows how a small number of highly connected nodes can dominate rather quickly though.
Cool, that matches my current intuition for this. I'm curious on what the numbers say in realistic social networks. My gut call was that the distinction between "most of your friends have more friends than you do" and "your friends have more friends, on average," is one that is confusing to most people. Myself included.
The result actually doesn't depend on any special properties of social graphs. It works for any graph that has a component with non-constant number of edges per node.
The real title and the principle are "your friends more likely have more friends than you". It's not true in every case, and obviously not on both sides of a reciprocal pair.
Exactly. The heavy lifting in this case is being done by the phrase “on average.” They could have just said “a small number of people have WAY more friends than usual.”
> They could have just said “a small number of people have WAY more friends than usual.”
They do say that, but that's a way to explain why the friendship paradox is true. It's not some trivially equivalent statement. If the statements were trivially equivalent, then people wouldn't be complaining that one is counterintuitive while the other is obvious. The whole point is that one fact is a counterintuitive result of another more intuitive fact.
No their friend's friends do not have more friends than them. Some people have an unusually large amount of friends, what this means practically is that they are more likely to be one of your very few friends, because they touch so many smaller groups, yours included. When they say most people's friends have more friends than them, it's the same very popular people being counted again and again by each unpopular person.
Well, no, it doesn't work like that. There's already not some guarantee that your friends will have more friends than you do. Obviously some of the people have to be the ones that have lots of friends, and you could very well be one of those people. The point is just that most people aren't those people, so most people who read these articles and check their friend graphs will go "whoa, it's true!"
Celebrities are a much less counterintuitive example. The effect is quite obvious if you look at asymmetric relations like being aware of a famous person (or, say, Twitter follows). It's pretty obvious that a lot more people know Justin Bieber or Barack Obama by name than the pop star or U.S. President know by name.
What's slightly less intuitive about the friendship paradox is that this also tends to be true with symmetric relations.
As someone that struggled with envy as a kid, this story spoke to me. It made me think twice about trying to tear people down that I thought were hogging the spotlight.
Although, I'm sure there were people in my class that identified with Harrison and thought that everyone else was holding them back.
> I work on a product which just clones other similar products with a slightly better price point, so it’s hard to really care about the goal, but it would be nice to shift that mentality slightly.
Building something that has already been built at a better price point can be an interesting challenge. Obviously there's only so much control you have over the project, but learning how to deliver solid software on a budget is a super valuable skill. If you want to shift your mentality I would suggest that you approach it as it's own learning process.
