dissenter

> nypost ain't liberal

We would classify the the Village Voice as a very liberal paper, but send it to someone in Nebraska and they'll tell you it's pornography.

Political ideals may draw on universal principles, but the line of scrimmage is different in every district. Murdoch is a businessman first, and he likes to own news companies. He happens to prefer to play one side of the line of scrimmage. The combination means his mouthpieces say different things in different areas. In some areas they endorse Hillary Clinton for re-election to the senate...

I tried to sidestep this criticism, but I was wrong to even sound the terms. The point is that the NYPost doesn't usually run articles like this---otherwise I wouldn't have read it. This tidbit is so salacious it even got my attention.

> Wikipedia

Wikipedia indeed.

OK, fair point, the NYPost is not the gold standard in economic analysis.

On the other hand

1. The author, Stan Liebowitz, is "the Ashbel Smith professor of Economics in the Business School at the University of Texas at Dallas"---not exactly unqualified to speak on the subject.

2. The New York Post may run a lot of salacious pieces, but how often does the NYPost run an overtly discriminatory and salacious piece?

Remember, this is the paper your New York workers read on the train on the way to work. That's about as mixed a bag as you can get. The New York Post, like every other New York paper, does its damnedest to appeal to the widest possible spectrum. The Post is a liberal paper. You can call it conservative, but only when you're comparing it to the NY Times. This makes the article interesting, and it should at least give you pause.

It's easy to take a snotty attitude against reading something like the Post, but the article, which admittedly isn't that great, raises an interesting point. In America we purposefully overlook a lot of things in the name of equality. In underwriting you don't want overlook anything.

The financial analysts who failed to analyze this situation are responsible for the crisis. So are the former home owners who defaulted on their loans. And the people who issued them those loans. But when good analysis is restricted by federal law, and bad analysis is incentivized, how much blame can you place on analysts before next placing it on legislation? Regardless of how much blame you assign to the legislation, you must now multiply that manyfold. This is a little thing that has made a big difference.

The point is that we have to ask ourselves what level of abstraction we are willing to force onto the notion of a person. Are we willing to turn so much of a blind eye that it throws us into economic recession?

This recession is likely to be mild, but deep recessions are a time of great uncertainty. You don't have to read very far back in history to learn that people tend to stop overlooking things when their pocketbooks are empty. Equality, in other words, is a luxury item, and like many of the things we enjoy in America, it's contingent on our economy not exploding.

In a perfect world we would get rid of the CS major entirely and teach only math. Students interested in a computer career would take a maths course with a CS focus: very hard math and then data structures & algorithms, theory of computation, and some electives. Good programming is all about good design, and the way you learn good design is from spending a lot of time thinking about really hard math.

When two programmers are skilled in mathematics, there's no disagreement on the right way to do something since they both realize there is only one right way to do something. Minimal footprint, minimal dependencies, ease of change, minimal variable names, canonical structures, efficient run times...How can people have arguments over object-oriented programming semantics? The very notion is absurd.

When math is taught well computer programming falls out of it as a corollary. Courses like operating systems and programming languages are absolutely ridiculous. A bright student can pick up all of the useful concepts in an afternoon or two. At best they're excuses to have large programming projects.

The CS curriculum as designed is little more than a vocational school, one whose difficulty is increasingly ratcheted down to get somebody, anybody, to do the work that grows each year in complexity and tedium, owing to the previous class of terrible coders it was necessary to graduate. The demands on the software haven't gotten any more taxing, the existing codebase has just managed to grow in size without any new intelligence being added to its construction.

When you think about it, the CS curriculum, its practical side anyway, is basically just a massive toolset designed to cope with the fact that its students are bad at math. Constructs like object-oriented programming, they start out with the assumption that you won't see the canonical way to do something, and then everything that follows thereafter is damage control. How to program at the lowest common denominator.

That books on design patterns exist, and are so widely celebrated, is perhaps the most damning indictment of the field I can think of. If you can look at a design pattern book and learn something, it means you are missing the strong inner core of understanding that allows another, better designer to look at the table of contents and go 'duh', and that inner core is absolutely necessary to construct any sort of code that is going to work together with other code in a completely seamless, mathematical sense.

The curriculum, and these techniques, are heavily influenced by economic forces---this is not a secret. (Programmer churn, outsourcing, the never-ending cutbacks in the cost center.) You need to have all your programmers speaking the same language, and it's a lot easier to have them speaking OO than math. And so you get a product that sucks, and we're all using an internet in 2007 that still looks like a Model T, and everyone gets excited when they can update a calendar without refreshing their browser. You've got to be kidding me.