That's quite an interesting take on how to counteract depressive states. Do you know if there are any academic publications that have similar findings? I think this needs to be explored further, because this sounds prima facie credible.
I've lived in the Bay Area since before starting kindergarten. No way the average IQ of software engineers here, or anywhere, is close to 130. Software engineering might be one of the only STEM disciplines that gives credibility to the Ortega hypothesis.
How so? I don't see how the average software engineer IQ being 100 vs 130 affects the (rather questionable) proposition that the large mass of average/mediocre software engineers MIGHT outperform the handful of Jeff Dean's (the claim made by the Ortega Hypothesis). Just based on the IQ population distribution alone, it's not unreasonable to think that Jeff Dean has a 160-170+ IQ.
It is still a questionable proposition -- "10x engineers" are a thing, and brilliant singular insights that unlock billions of dollars in productivity like the concepts of convolutional neural networks and MapReduce are the brainchild of rare chart-defying individuals, rather than a product of the masses working in tandem. The Pareto Principle still seems to hold, even for software engineering (just ask any Bay Area software company's HR department).
Regardless, as an appeal to intuition, there is some sort of minimum bar (software engineers are still a VERY scarce commodity, as evidenced by market dynamics), suggesting that the average individual (100 IQ) is ill-equipped to take on the sort of abstract reasoning and novel thought processes so readily discarded by billions of years of prior evolution (indeed, knowing C++ would not have helped you as a primordial human fighting off that hungry sabertooth tiger) needed to comprehend and write robust code wading through some of the most complex systems (the Linux kernel is millions of lines of code) ever fathomed by humankind. This is the whole premise behind IQ theory, which really just boils down to a simple statistical argument.
Haha, in my various jobs I always considered myself fairly gifted in intelligence. Then one day I met a guy who is actually clearly damned intelligent - a technical cofounder of a company. The speed with which he would comprehend a problem and approach it was off the charts in comparison to me. Quite remarkable, really, and it sort of made me realize how smart some people can be. It was like going to college again and finding out that while you were exceptional in school, you’re now with a lot of people just like you. Love it.
>From a street hobo, that gets you instantly dismissed, but there's a counter-intuitive aspect where if you're a Jaron Lanier, it just further underscores that you're Jaron Lanier and can do as you like. Because he is not trying to maximize trust in any way, he comes off as plausible even when expressing stuff that's unusual.
Those studies have generally shown liberals to be only somewhat less tolerant, as an aggregate. Most liberals are still tolerant, as are most conservatives.
What is intolerance anyway? It's not believing that a certain behavior is wrong. That's not intolerance. Intolerance is shouting people down because you don't agree with them or creating a hostile environment for opposing viewpoints. That's a behavior that reminds me of one side much more than the other.
I'm not putting blame here. One side just takes politics more seriously, for now.
You just called out one side as worse and then try to claim you're not putting blame? That's not really believeable.
If we're just throwing out reasons too, then how about how the Republican party decided to not compromise on anything anymore after Obama was elected? When one side refuses to compromise on anything, the other side can only lose by attempting to compromise. This situation is the only possible result from turning politics into a verbal form of total war
I've been flagged four times now for correcting the person I responded to on who is acting intolerant. That's an example of intolerance. Liberals are very intolerant, as the studies show.
> You just called out one side as worse and then try to claim you're not putting blame?
I said one side takes politics more seriously, that's what I said. But sure, if you believe in democracy then their behavior isn't exactly conducive to a well functioning democracy, now is it?
> When one side refuses to compromise on anything
That's hilarious. The republican party is the democratic party, just 10 years behind. It compromises on everything. The beautiful Republican party features the likes of marxists turned neocons because they took an interest in Israel (or so Wikipedia says).
>Here’s John Boehner, the likely speaker if Republicans take the House, offering his plans for Obama’s agenda: “We're going to do everything — and I mean everything we can do — to kill it, stop it, slow it down, whatever we can.”
It was a public and documented plan by the Republican party to not compromise on a single issue with the Obama administration. You're evidence that liberals are less tolerant is also a study of a single college campus. Bring some more evidence if you are going to make claims that have gone against the past 10 years of public discourse
Finding a good tenured position is comically difficult now. I know an assistant professor of engineering at Princeton who just left for Renaissance Technologies because he couldn't secure a long-term professorship there.
The USSR achieved more than just the same thing. When you say more hostile environment, I'm assuming you mean they were in an essentially autarkic condition, unlike contemporary China. But beyond that, the Soviets produced far greater, actually novel results in sciences, mathematics, and technology while having only one-fifth of China's population.
