I think you mean you'll project it everywhere. I say this to my kids as well, not to signal anything but to engage their creativity. A lot of kids these days can't figure anything to do if they don't have a device in their hands. I had to routinely ride in a car for 8+ hours as a kid and mobile devices either didn't exist or were so expensive as to may as well not exist. A lot of my creativity today stems from techniques I developed in those times.
The only requirement for what? Financial success? Celebrity?
Seems your example only applies to a very narrow demographic: wealthy socialites. Does it apply to doctors, lawyers and software engineers? How often does it apply and how often does it not?
I think these nuances are important to answer before generalizing.
> >This is a fair point, but in many cases you need to be rich, hard working, and smart.
> Like Paris Hilton, Kim Kardasian, etc.? No, rich is still the only requirement. Those other things just give you more options.
For every person you cite as being wildly successful only because of the money they were born into, you could also cite people who came from nothing and became multi-millionaires. Or people who were born rich and didn't succeed.
You're not wrong - there are people who only needed to be rich to begin with. But giving examples like you have doesn't counter the above point.
If you have 10 rich people with a 50% shot of making it : 99,990 people with a 0.005% shot of making it then the number of people with both backgrounds who made it is reasonably balanced. But, in no way is this a meritocracy.
I'd lump beautiful women and gifted athletes into the "smart" category. While not necessarily the same in practice the effect of being either is basically the same as being incredibly smart except there's more luck involved. Neither are common enough to get their own category IMO
Being gifted is being gifted, yes, the area is important but secondary. And there is no more luck involved. It's probably the same mechanism, too (low mutational load).
The thing you have to keep in mind is that this kind of naked mutation is probably the main source of bugs in programming today. One of the main advantages of OO was that it demarcated which functions could modify a "global" variable. But if I get a weird value in one of my fields, I still can't trivially tell how it got there, I can only narrow down to methods of the class (and possibly the inheritance tree, depending on variable visibility).
Due to that, there is more ceremony in modifying things in Haskell. The language works best if you write most of your code in a way that doesn't mutate anything and then limit mutation to a small area using the advanced techniques developed in the language. But doing all this requires a pretty substantial investment so you probably need something to convince you that the end will be worth it before you start. I don't know what you tell you, what got me interested was something like:
> fibs = 1 : 1 : zipWith (+) fibs (tail fibs)
and
> max = head . sort
but I understand that's not going to motivate most people to completely change how they approach programming as a discipline.
What I would be afraid of, here, is that if there are signs that big data can uncover that peel out some catastrophic disease from your workout data that would mean your insurance company knows you're very ill long before you do... It would extremely tempting not to do something about that knowledge that helps the company even if it hurts a soon-to-be-dead-anyway person.
In general, any time you point to others and say "they did this to me" you remove your own power to change the situation. You may have to be creative, but personally I never want to give others that power.
> but I don't think you can (or should) take responsibility for what you feel because you don't have control over that.
I disagree with this. I consider the mind a muscle like any other. It can be trained and taught more productive ways of thinking [1].
Of course you don't. But sometimes the laws of physics leave you no choice, in which case accepting that fact can save you a lot of heartache and frustration.
> I consider the mind a muscle like any other. It can be trained and taught more productive ways of thinking [1].
Of course it can. And I submit that one of those "more productive ways of thinking" is to understand the laws of physics and the constraints they impose on your agency, because if you don't do that you will be frustrated when reality doesn't live up to your expectations.
> please ignore that the author of this speech later shot himself in the head
And why should I ignore that? It seems like a pretty salient fact in the context of this conversation.
>But sometimes the laws of physics leave you no choice, in which case accepting that fact can save you a lot of heartache and frustration.
Different views of the world, I guess. If the laws of physics "leave me no choice" I'm personally going to still consider that my responsibility and look for ways to prevent that situation in future, if possible. Sometimes there really is nothing you could have done (e.g. fired by a scumbag boss who didn't reveal their nature until it was too late to do anything about it) but there is nearly always something you can do to respond.
>And why should I ignore that? It seems like a pretty salient fact in the context of this conversation.
I was half joking with the comment, but the non-joking part was more to say that just because this guy wasn't able to take his own advice and contain his "horrible master" doesn't mean everything he said is invalid. It's still something to strive for.
>Damore and this article made a few points based on reason and science and logical arguments and such
No he didn't [1]. I strongly dislike SJWs, but this guy is no ally. He's, at best, shockingly ignorant (what do I keep hearing about how google only gets the best?) at worst a fascist or fascist apologist.
>To toss that all onto the same heap is disingenuous at best.
I feel like what people who behave as you are miss is that it could just be ignorance. Ignorance can be cured but not with aggression. Did you see the story where a black man befriended a bunch of KKK and they all ended up leaving the organization at the end? He didn't get that result with righteous indignation even if he had every right to be righteously indignant.
I don't mean physical aggression, I mean verbal bullying. And I may be projecting other "similar feeling" posts to yours too much.
But the kind of behavior I'm seeing now is a bit saddening. I remember when HN guidelines said something to the effect of "Instead of saying 'C++ was created after C, idiot' you can shorten it to 'C++ was created after C'". But I see posts in the tone of yours which say something like "The left has isolated incidents of violence by deranged people, blasted by leaders on the left while the right has much more dangerous and common events which seem to be supported by the leadership. To put these two together is disingenuous and could only be done by a fascist.", where that last sentence could just be left off.
The issue is assuming the absolute worst of everyone you talk to online that doesn't hold your opinion. Maybe the poster just has ignorant friends/family and really doesn't know any better. Maybe they have opinions right now that they're going to be really embarrassed about in 10-20 years. But if you immediately group them together with people like Hitler (didn't this used to kill the thread?) then you give up any hope of educating them (or, more importantly, other people on the fence who are reading the exchange). So I have to wonder what is even the utility of such posts except to signal to others which camp you're in.
You use quotes to show that I said something but I did no such thing.
> Maybe the poster just has ignorant friends/family and really doesn't know any better.
That's quite possibly true. But regardless, at least they don't stoop to putting words in my mouth that I never used in that particular order and with that particular goal.
> Maybe they have opinions right now that they're going to be really embarrassed about in 10-20 years.
Let's hope not, it would be painful for all involved.
> But if you immediately group them together with people like Hitler
Well, when Neo Nazis walk the land waving flags and re-living the past as much as they can invoking Hitler is fair game.
Mind you: The pre World War II Nazis of old (and their sympathizers) to some extent could be forgiven because they could claim they had no idea what it all would lead to.
But the present day Nazis and their sympathizers have no such excuse.
> So I have to wonder what is even the utility of such posts except to signal to others which camp you're in.
To try to convince someone to see things in a slightly different light. And if you had been reading this thread with a bit more attention you could see some of that at work. It's not going to be a large change but speaking out about this stuff is the least that we can do.
>You use quotes to show that I said something but I did no such thing.
No, I explicitly stated that I was grouping your posts in with others that seem similar to me (and acknowledged that I could be in error on that).
>But regardless, at least they don't stoop to putting words in my mouth that I never used in that particular order and with that particular goal.
You're a software developer, right? So think a bit more abstract. I suspect my point fits to things you've written in this thread.
>Let's hope not, it would be painful for all involved.
Why? Thinking stupid things is part of growing up. The much more important bit is eventually correcting as many of those things as possible.
>But the present day Nazis and their sympathizers have no such excuse.
Here we're in agreement. If someone identifies as a Nazi then the game changes. But I just see a lot of e.g. Trump supporters right now that I can't shake the feeling that they're not being evil they're just ignorant on a lot of things the rest of us aren't.
>It's not going to be a large change but speaking out about this stuff is the least that we can do.
Please don't take my replies as trying to shut you down. My point is entirely about tone. Nothing else.
