思考与写作patrickcollison.com编辑精选
问题清单
Questions
2018 — 2020，它一次次回到首页
黑点是上首页（≥ 50 分）的那次投稿，空心点是没冲上去的投稿，点越大分数越高。
导读
这是 Patrick Collison 个人网站上的一页问题清单，只列出他认为值得深究、但至今没有定论的开放问题，例如：为什么有些东西越来越贵，为什么斯德哥尔摩冒出那么多成功的创业公司，Bloom 的「两西格玛」辅导效应是否真实，以及帝国大厦为什么 410 天就能建成。页面本身只是问题索引，真正的讨论发生在 Hacker News 评论区，读者围绕每个问题给出数据、经验和反驳。
为什么经久不衰：这些问题横跨经济、教育、城市建造与创业生态，十几年后依然没有定论，每个都能引出扎实的事实与争论，是「靠提问驱动思考」的范本。
HN 评论精选
斯德哥尔摩的创业繁荣其实是国家级现象，源自家用电脑税补、光纤基建和英语环境等历史偶然。
原因有好几个。首先要意识到，任何瑞典创业公司一旦在国际上有了名气，都会在斯德哥尔摩设办公室，所以真正的基数不是 100 万人口的城市，而是 1000 万人口的国家。另一个常被提到的原因是 90 年代和 00 年代一连串偶然决策：1998 年瑞典政府推出 Hem-PC 改革，允许雇主免税把电脑卖给员工，几乎每个瑞典家庭因此都有了一台往往性能过剩的电脑，1998–2006 年间长大的孩子几乎人手一台；瑞典还大力铺设光纤，偏远地区也能用千兆网；加上瑞典没有给影视配音的传统，孩子从小接触英语，瑞典科技公司也不怕招募国际人才。
chucky查看英文原文
> Why are there so many successful startups in Stockholm? Several reasons. First, you need to recognize that any Sweden-based startup will, when it gets to be known internationally, have a Stockholm-based office. So it's not about a city of 1 million inhabitants, it's a country of 10 million that's the true number here. As an example, I believe Spotify opened their original offices in both Stockholm and Göteborg more or less simultaneously. With that said, a commonly stated reason for why Sweden in general has such a high prevalence of tech startups comes from a bunch of fortuitious decisions in the 90s and 00s. In 1998 Sweden's government started a program that allowed employers to sell their employees computers under a tax free scheme (the so called Hem-PC-reformen https://sv.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hem-PC-reformen). This was extremely popular, and led almost every Swedish home to get an often extremely overpowered personal computer. Thus, practically everyone who was a kid in 1998-2006 (the rebate was cancelled in 2006) grew up with a computer. This gave Sweden a huge advantage compared to other countries in the early Internet revolution. Sweden has also invested heavily in building a fiber network, you have access to gigabit Internet even in some extremely rural areas. Another thing is that Sweden doesn't have the tradition of dubbing movies. That means kids will be exposed to English from an early age. This leads to Swedish tech companies not being afraid of hiring talent globally and generally use English as their business language. Finally, out of the 5 examples posted, one is Mojang, which is clearly an outlier. I'm not saying what Notch accomplished wasn't extremely impressive, but it was essentially a one-man operation, and probably shouldn't be held as an example of a trend.
「越来越贵」可用鲍莫尔成本病解释：劳动密集的刚需行业彼此抬价，解药是放开住房供给。
那份清单大致是按照每单位中不可替代的人工劳动量排序的。几乎所有标为红色的类别都是刚需：医疗、教育、托儿、住房、食品；而蓝色类别大多是可选消费。我们需要医疗，而医疗需要大量人力；这些人力需要住房，但很多地方住房供给受限；他们需要受教育，但大学学费在涨；他们还需要托儿，而托儿工作者又要去看医生……如果能降低生活成本，我的主张是大幅放开可建住房的许可，这种效应就会传导到所有这些行业。高昂且不断上涨的成本和工资，使劳动密集型行业相对而言贵得多。
pchristensen查看英文原文
"Why are certain things getting so much more expensive?" That list is pretty much rank ordered by the amount of non-substitutable human labor involved per unit. Everything in red is a pretty universal need (health, education, child care, housing, food), while the blues are mostly wants. So we want medical care, but that requires a lot of labor, and each of those workers requires housing, but that's supply constrained in much of the country, and they have be educated, but college cost is rising, and their employees need child care, and the child care workers need to go to the doctor ... If there was a way to reduce the cost of living (my hobby horse is dramatically increasing the amount of by-right housing permitted to be built in an area), then that would ripple through all of these industries. High and increasing costs and wages make labor-intensive industries much more expensive by comparison.
拿建造速度作对比，忽略了当年以人命为代价的安全标准。
至少一个原因是，如今的安全法规已大不相同，我们不再接受这类项目出现死亡。帝国大厦项目死了 5 人，金门大桥 11 人，最初的湾区大桥 24 人。当时甚至有经验法则：项目每花 100 万美元就死一个人。这样的指标今天完全不可接受。
trimbo查看英文原文
> The Empire State Building was built in 410 days At least one reason is that we have substantially different safety regulations since we're not accepting of deaths on a project like that. 5 people died on that project. 11 died to build the Golden Gate. Original Bay Bridge? 24. They actually had a rule of thumb at the time: 1 death for every $1M spent on a project[1]. Any metric like that would be absolutely unacceptable today. [1] - https://www.npr.org/2012/05/27/153778083/75-years-later-building-the-golden-gate-bridge
一对一辅导的价值在于定位学生具体的理解偏差，其效应或许足以解释两西格玛，值得制度化推广。
接受辅导的学生的平均水平，高于对照组 98% 的学生。作为辅导者，我的目标是找出知识缺口和误解，毕竟如果你不知道司机在哪里，又怎么给他指路？作为学生，我注意到老师常常在自己察觉不到的地方表述含糊；多数时候别的理解也能走通，但等问题在几层之后爆发时，学习者已经看不到起因，而细心的辅导者能发现。细微的缺口和误解影响巨大，也许足以解释两个西格玛。另一方面，老师无意中训练我去厘清歧义，这是很实用的现实技能。那该怎么做？像义务兵役一样设立义务辅导服务——我们似乎浪费了巨量的人力资本。
hyperpallium2查看英文原文
Is Bloom's "Two Sigma" phenomenon real? If so, what do we do about it? "the average tutored student was above 98% of the students in the control class"[1] As a tutor, my goal was to identify gaps and misunderstandings. Consider: how can you give a driver helpful directions if you don't know where they are? As a student, I noticed that teachers are routinely ambiguous in ways they cannot understand. And mostly, these alternative interpretations work... mostly. So when they cause problems many layers later, the learner can see no clues to the cause. But an attentive tutor can. Subtle gaps and misunderstanding have an outsize effect, and maybe could account for 2σ? OTOH teachers accidentally trained me to disentangle ambiguity, and that is a valuable real-world skill. The mentor relationship has magic in it and I remember the moment I learnt certain things. So maybe social aspects contribute too, as wiki suggests. What to do? Like mandatory military service, mandatory tutoring service. We appear to be wasting obscene quanities of human capital. Imagine the economic productivity unleashed by a more fully realized workforce. PS did pc receive one-on-one tutoring? Intelligent parents often tutor their children, conferring this outsize headstart. https://wikipedia.org/wiki/Bloom%27s_2_sigma_problem
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