5,594 karma · joined July 19, 2009
We have incredibly complex apparatus in our brain with a dedicated purpose of socialization. Empathy, language, and cooperation are things which humans would not be capable of if we didn't evolve to do them.
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39699 http://www.ted.com/talks/arianna_huffington_how_to_succeed_g...
Besides your counterpoint being blatantly wrong, I don't understand why something being an "affront" to what you feel is the entrepreneurial "spirit" is a valid argument at all.
It's like Christians saying evolutionary theory is an "affront" to Christianity. It very may well be, but that doesn't mean that evolutionary theory isn't correct or have merit.
I do think that "imperative" is a little strong. But males are biologically different from females in all species, and in all species this translates into behavioral differences. There's no such thing as a species where males and females don't show behavioral differences, and in particular in regards to mating behavior and reproduction.
Certainly humans, as a whole, in first world countries are failing to mate effectively. Children are being had later or not at all. But women still show a comparatively greater interest, despite this overall trend. It would be foolish to claim that the 21st century has made natural behavioral differences irrelevant.
My understanding is that in women, a lack of reproduction causes cancer. Basically, each period you have adds to your risk of breast cancer. Did the BBC just get it wrong or is there something I'm missing?
Not to cherry pick or anything, but most cancers still have a fairly high death rate. And chronic leukemias, for instance, are incurable.
Obviously there's individual variation. Any individual person with AA could have more prosocial behaviors than any individual person with GG.
It's still cool that a difference in behavior is detectable by others even in a relatively small sample.
I'm AA, meaning I have the least empathetic phenotype.
He disclosed this to me before we had sex. I told him "no big deal" because I had the antibodies. So just because the girl is having unprotected sex and hep B positive doesn't mean she's irresponsible, as long as her partners have had a successful vaccination.
(It is important to verify that your vaccination "took" however, before having sex with a hep B pos person.)
Quite simply put, in almost all professions you're paid for being there for 9-5. If you show up and do your work poorly or not at all, you might get fired. If you do well, you will get a small raise. So to a small extent productivity is correlated. But the salaries aren't proportional to productivity; the biggest predictor of salary is if you're fulltime. You're getting paid for your time, not what you're producing.
This is not strictly true. The elite group were taken from students who were violin performance majors. The non-elite group were taken from students who were education majors but played the violin.
There may be bias from teachers built in, but there's the added component of their assessment of their own abilities as well.
I would hope that those excelling as violin performance majors would actually be better performers than education majors that the instructors thought were poor players, bias or no bias.
It's not a graph? Of COURSE it's a graph. It's just a very complex one. Just because you could make many such graphs representing the same relationships doesn't mean it's not a graph.
And it's not social because you're missing someone's crush? Uh, no. It's still social, just incomplete.
A better title for this would have been "The Social Graph is incomplete and complex."
If you write code you're a programmer. End of story.
"Programming, and then there's programming" and "code plumbing" are, in fact, semantics.
You're right, I probably wouldn't work out at most programming jobs. I do contract work; the web app I'm writing now I had about 3 weeks to knock out, will be used by 2,000 people, and will only be used for about a month. But I'm still a "programmer," because I program.
We're not all writing mongodb or working at Google or whatnot.
A programmer is someone who programs for a living. I program for a living. I have never programmed in C, have no idea what generic programming is, and I really couldn't care less about hardware memory protection.
Not all programming is cutting edge computer science.
I could not get through those three books but I get paid to program. My code is repetitive and shitty but I can produce a working web app as long as it doesn't have to support too many users, and it's fine.
My husband never read any books about formal programming and taught himself from those random "learn Java" or "learn python" books. He's a mathematician and programs to write simulations/solve equations, and he gets paid for it too.
If you can't get through those three books maybe you can't hope to be a computer scientist, fine. But you can certainly program, in the same way you don't have to be an English major to read or write.
Yes, obviously there are many non-hackers who have this problem. Just thought it was funny it wasn't one of the hypotheses listed, given that it's directly related to the cause of this guy's insomnia.
Then I took data structures and programming because I liked that first class so much. In between the two classes I taught myself from material for a 1 credit course that converted matlab people to Java.
On the whole, though, I do agree that humans are basically the same.
Personally I respect Bill Gates a lot more. He basically spends all his time working on his charity nowadays; he really couldn't care less about the future of his company. Jobs is good for Apple, but I think Gates is better for the world.