Jimmy

>The generational declining male labor participation rate. The economy is being geared towards knowledge work and has been going that way for some time, yet men are participating less, and women are participating more.

That doesn't mean that all women are participating in "knowledge work" jobs though. K-12 education and healthcare are also two fast growing sectors that have a high proportion of female workers. I doubt that all jobs in those sectors should be considered "knowledge work".

Participation stats for women could also be due to sectors like HR, or just generic office work. Obviously I don't deny the existence of female programmers and scientists. I just don't think there's evidence to suggest that they can do those jobs strictly better than men can.

>a large portion of our society is incapable of doing the type of work the economy is geared towards and rewards most heavily (outside of finance).

I think this is plausible.

>Women are actually pretty good at that.

But are they just flat out better at it than men? What data do you have to support that assertion? Remember that the majority of programmers are men, and the majority of STEM faculty at research institutions are men. You may struggle with certain things, but there are many men who don't. And of course there are plenty of women who struggle with CS as well.

>Honestly, I think a lot of them will become more involved in child care than their wives over the coming decades

While the wives do... what? Work white-collar jobs? We've just been talking about how hard it is for a certain subsection of men to get these jobs, so why are their wives able to fair better? Is it because women are smarter than men? Some other factor?

Meh. If your code works, then it's good.

Of course I don't literally mean that; you can write code in a way that makes it easier to debug, extend, etc. But too many developers get wrapped up in engineering the perfect system and forget that they're supposed to be, you know, writing a program. I think this is why a lot of hobbyist projects run out of steam.

>Deep down, psychologists suggest, impostors appeal to us because we suspect that we are all, to some degree, faking it.

No, I've never had this fear.

Lisp has always been like that. Seriously, always.

This was to go-to answer when I started learning Lisp a decade ago. Glad to see nothing's changed.

>One approach to development in CL is to evaluate a form you would like to have. You end up in the debugger. You write the implementation until the error goes away.

This doesn't sound very sustainable or effective to me... almost all the bugs I encounter in programming are algorithmic in nature. The code compiles without error and runs without crashing, but it just happens to do X instead of Y. The code fails because I didn't understand the problem well enough. That's one thing that computers can't really help with yet.

>I'll find out rapidly, and bluntly with citations, when I'm wrong (and, yes I'm often wrong on the Internet!), usually learn something new on the topic

If you stay off the default subreddits and only go on the intellectual/debate subreddits, then I honestly think reddit is better for this. The amount of expertise on reddit is astounding. It's very easy to find someone to rigorously challenge any view I have. I'd go so far as to say that it's the smartest place on the internet (except for maybe places like MathOverflow and some other specialty blogs/forums). They do have a natural advantage because of their huge userbase.

Don't worry, Hououin Kyouma will show up to save the day. ;)

>Thiel understands that should Clinton win, there will be war

Why is this?

Cioran is certainly the most boring and derivative philosopher I'm familiar with. I don't know why any of his works are remembered at all.

>"Can art change the world?"

People, even those who should have an ostensibly "humanistic" outlook, have largely forgotten the possibility of any activity that is not subordinated to utilitarian concerns. The fact that this question was asked in the first place betrays a certain level of insecurity and even guilt over the way one chooses to spend one's time. It is not asked out of idle curiosity, it is not an honest question that will follow the arguments where they lead, rather it is a question for which an affirmative answer must be manufactured if one is not forthcoming.

Healthier questions include "how can we change the world so there is more time for art?", "why doesn't everyone understand how great art is?", etc.

I've known that I've had an internet addiction for years. I've tried to break it multiple times but always relapse. Something that makes it hard is that there are real, tangible benefits to spending time online, even just aimless browsing and stumbling into things. I would not be the person I am today if it weren't for certain random links I clicked on at certain times.

The important thing is that I need to always remember that it's an addiction and I need to get it under control. I think limiting myself to a half hour or hour a day would be best.

I was implying that we'll one day have the technology to selectively erase memories with high precision and reliability.

I don't know what Goldman Sachs did and I don't know who should pay for it. I'm not very informed about economics.

>>How would one repossess an education?

>You can't.

Yet. ;)

>Am I the only one who hates the notion of being forced to pay for other people's bad financial decisions?

Not at all! These people are called "conservatives".

>handsets without headphone jacks long before Apple did

This is not an innovation. Not every change is an innovation. In fact, this is the straw that broke the camel's back for me, and I intend on never buying an Apple product again.

I'm not sure if I want to go into details, since I haven't decided if I want to link any of my internet accounts to my professional identity yet... perhaps when it's released I will come back and make an announcement. :)

On the face of it, this is nonsensical, and highly offensive to people who are actually suffering. My first intuition is that no safe, warm, and dry college student could be "attuned to the sheer horror of the world" on the basis of their intelligence alone.

On the other hand, you clearly have to be in a lot of pain if you're driven to kill yourself, and we shouldn't underestimate the degree of torture that one can inflict on oneself with one's own mind.

I hope to release my first project in 4-5 months.

You have a very limited conception of what video games are capable of.

This is like going up to an aspiring writer in ancient Greece and saying "The Odyssey has already been written, there is nothing more to be done." Not realizing that 2,000 years later, authors like Joyce and Nabokov would still be breaking new ground.

Assuming the human race endures long enough, video games are at the very beginning of what is going to be a very long and interesting history.

One of my further goals is to disabuse people of notions such as this.

As it happens, though, I'm already too late to be the initiator of this sort of cultural shift. Universities like NYU and CMU already offer MFAs in game design. There are conferences and journals dedicated to game studies. So the wheels are already in motion.

>Shouldn't your goal to be to make great games?

That was an implied sub-goal. The verification criteria I gave was merely to illustrate what the concrete results of my endeavors might look like. If I said flatly "I want to make great games," then someone might reasonably respond "how do you know you're succeeding?"

>For goals like yours, politics and personality can matter as much as the work itself.

This is quite true. But Paul Graham has a great quote which I think might be applicable here: "Everyone in the sciences secretly believes that mathematicians are smarter than they are... And so there is a great temptation to work on problems you can treat formally, rather than problems that are, say, important."

I'm 24.

My goal is to be one of the most influential video game designers of this century. I may not be considered the absolute greatest (rankings like that are very fickle anyway, and never universally agreed upon, even in the sciences). But I do want my works to be considered necessary for any future survey of the major works of this period.

I have an extremely specific set of projects I want to implement.

Sure. It depends on what definition we're using for "gifted". Practice may not make you into von Neumann, but it may very well make you into a professional mathematician with stable employment.

My intuition is that if someone is interested enough in a career in mathematics that they begin putting regular practice into it, then they're already likely (but not certainly) past the minimum IQ threshold.

I'm a strong believer in the idea that some people are born better, you don't have to convince me.

The extent of my abilities is still unknown to me. I know what I want to achieve and I will continue trying to achieve it until I succeed or I am dead. To accept anything less is equivalent to death.

Well, that's simply unacceptable to me. A stable six-figure job is failure. If I'm fated to try and fail for the rest of my life to break into the 1 in 10,000, then so be it.