fatdog

While IQ is a blunt instrument, saying giftedness doesn't matter is like saying money doesn't matter. It doesn't, but it does.

Compare the purchasing power and variety of options for solving problems of a millionaire to someone who earns low hundreds of thousands a year. Compare those to that of a billionaire.

Then compare how someone who inherited the money to someone who saved it, and again to someone who got it as part of an exit.

Intelligence is analogous to money this way in that you can acquire it from inheritance and upbringing, slog through work/academia and study, or get it as the result of drive and experience/risk.

Someone who had money who becomes poor is a different kind of poor, and someone who is poor who becomes wealthy is a different kind of rich.

Giftedness is a kind of class that has its own pitfalls and outcomes. When you have money, like intelligence, it's not something you think about much, even if it is weirdly revered by a lot of other people.

A lot of people think they could solve a lot of their problems if they were only richer or more intelligent, but when you are rich or intelligent, you realize quickly that these are not so much solutions as they are excuses that keep their circumstances bearable.

I've been in a number of companies where there was an obvious IQ-gap. Some people could watch everyone else like mice running a maze but couldn't explain to them how to succeed in a way they would understand.

Someone with an average IQ, when compared to someone on the higher end of the curve, has all the tools to assert their interests but without much ability to reason abstractly about them or to recognize or interpret meta patterns.

Gifted education is only partially to help intelligent kids, it's just to protect the order among the other ones. It isolates intelligent kids from the people they might otherwise learn to lead. Yes, gifted kids can be disruptive or withdraw in normal classrooms, but removing them to a "special" class is about helping crap teachers.

Enriched education is valuable, but doing it at the expense of a childs development in the hopes of engineering better kids is awful. If you want to help them, teach gifted kids leadership skills, they'll figure out the rest.

So the reason men kill themselves is "because, men?" I get that is sufficient for the sort of people for whom, "because, women," or "because, men," is explanatory, but maybe something social changed in the last 40 years?

When you control for hard drugs like the mari-huana, heavy metal music, D&D, violent video games, rap music, marylin manson, the fast and the furious sequels, and toxic masculinity, surely there is something that must shake out.

Some design patterns for founder equity allocation based on these principles would be useful.

I'd say diversity and immigration are separate things. America does a good job of assimilating immigrants into the american tribe. Diversity tends to mean giving power to people who have for whatever reason identified as outside that tribe, and the results are predictable.

Low trust societies with little immigration could be explained by strong local tribal identities within it, particularly ones which supersede identifying with shared institutions and narratives. Those tribes could be ethnic, class, regional, linguistic, gangs, families, villages, etc.

Village identity in places like Italy and Portugal is often stronger than national identity, mainly because their families are larger and more connected, and their national institutions are fairly recent appearances in those older familial narratives.

Diversity situations where you mix people from different tribes without a convincingly powerful umbrella narrative is when you get situations like Somalia and Mexico. They are power vacuums in which the violence continues because nobody is able to win.

Ironically the colonial history of places like India and South Africa may be what holds them together, as either you have someone take the reins of those colonial institutions and manage a transition to local rule, or fight a bloody semi-permanent conflict to resolve the power vacuum that not having them leaves.

Diversity as we know it today, for all its ostensibly noble goals, is just an attempt at resource redistribution from the tribe who inherited it with the institutions that preserve it, to some people smart enough to make off with it without too much violence. Not sure how people will react when they wake up and notice their stuff is missing and they are now debt slaves, but until then, kum-ba-yah.

Most of the examples of trusting strangers I have seen reduce to some kind of internal notion of tribe and tribal continuity.

Conference goers are a great example population, since they are from everywhere and have no connection other than a shared interest in the conference proceedings, but the degree of trust among them is extremely (if recklessly) high.

Ethnicity, or "race," is a strong indicator of trust, since what is trust but a default line of credit you extend to someone with the belief that it will be reciprocated.

The U.S. has an american tribe, which includes anyone who seems american enough, and it can easily cross ethnic boundaries. A middle class black person, or an ethnic japanese person whose family has been in america for a few generations can become a part of a "white" trust network with only a few words in the right accent, with the right cultural references.

People trust each other based on their shared and demonstrated perceptions of power and authority. Belief in the same god is often enough, but barring that, alignment to the same institutions (rule of law, english "fair play," property, marriage, etc) will make someone initially trustworthy.

Here, being able to code gets you a long way because it has demonstrated a commitment to understanding, work, incremental success, among other things.

Someone who signals alignment to, or directly against those shared perceptions and institutions will make themselves untrustworthy. If you dress like a criminal, people will treat you like one. Similarly, if you dress like an oppressor, people will treat you like one.

There is nothing mysterious about trust. It only becomes complicated when untrustworthy people insist that they deserve your trust and that you are somehow deficient for declining to extend it.

Companies in Canada don't pay as much because a) there is a talent pool who will take what they are offering, b) they don't make enough revenue from a given dev to justify high salaries, or c) their investors do not see the risk/reward payoff of investing in top tier devs.

As for a), yes, Canada's multiculturalism attracts migrants, who in spite of their talent have a crappy negotiating position and are easily taken advantage of. Everyone has a story of the guy who barely speaks english but who can code getting worked like a dog for peanuts.

for b) for software in Canada, you sell to the 5 banks or government. it's recurring license fees from stable customers but in a limited market.

And c) there is no market for software in canada that would justify a billion dollar valuation. Those valuations were based on cornering a user base to use as a sales channel.

Further Canada's de-facto official policy of currency debasement to keep industrial exports afloat means limited purchasing power for citizens, therefore anything that succeeds has to succeed somewhere else.

It's a great place to outsource your dev shop, kind of like a more reliable India or Belarus, but as a market it's just not large enough for to reap the network effect / micro-margin/infinite scale benefits of software solutions.

What are the attributes of a crappy manager? A lot of people say what they hate, but there is a theme I have seen in tech.

When you think of these managers, you need to ask, who are they? Where are they from? How did they get the job? What did they do before (large/small org)? What is their social background? What is their style?

At the root, I suspect it's shitty leadership at the top. The Valley execs I have met, let's just say they are not the sort of guys you would willingly go into battle for. Tech lacks a real officer class that commands respect.

I have also yet to see a non-white person quit over company culture issues. Thar be some elephants in thar rooms.

Encryption is political engagement. Loosely translated, TLS and PGP have historically been computerese for "get a warrant."

Of course the deep state will use politicians to assert its power, and if politicians do not work for us instead, people will use networks, technology, and trade (or the alternatives) to defend their freedom.

It is a reasonable question to ask, how long does a typical nation really maintain its territorial sovereignty, and which ones are outliers?

Kamp misinterprets the fact that because some states have begun to fight means that they will win. It does mean, however, that crypto facilitates freedom, and it forces the discussion in regard to the limits on elite powers. The crypto genie is out of the bottle. It is on states to rethink how they engage, not us.

Consider that to verify these ID's they would need bi-lateral agreements AND api access to each issuing authority for the cards to lookup up the card to verify it against the "real" data. Unlikely they have achieved that given governments are not in the business of offering this service to the market these days.

The question becomes, who takes on the liability for the identity asserted by the user who has presented the card? They could compare it to all previous images of the card, but again, was that original?

All eID solutions have a bootstrapping problem related to the "fons honoram" that creates the legitimate "original."

The use cases for ID are all law enforcement related, and the integrity of these processes does not withstand even basic scrutiny.

What is the problem they need to solve? Limited liability broker for proof of legal identity over a communications channel.

Here are the things that matter:

- "liability" - "broker" - "proof" - "legal" - "identity"

Here is what other companies in that space do:

"ah takez teh picturez of teh cardz and ah sendz to tehm."

This company may have solved these other problems. If they have, I would be yelling it from the rooftops because the technology doesn't matter, they would literally have been given the right to print money.

Few object to fascism when it was _their_ fascism. When you use it as a catch-all euphemism for evil, sure it sounds bad. But more often than not, fascism is a trope held up to make otherwise totalitarian ideas seem moderate.

I have no love for people who identify as fascists, as to me they are just morbid personalities fixated on a nostalgia for ugliness. Same type of people who like slasher/torture films.

But, some alt-right'ists (trigger warning) have put some recent thought into the topic: http://www.jack-donovan.com/axis/2013/03/anarcho-fascism/

It is fairly well considered. These days, Eco is an old hack doomed to the museum/prison of being a national treasure. He has become too precious to edit, and his books are mainly didactic posturing for middle brow book clubs. His criticisms provide a kind of hall of mirrors for people who already believe in them, and don't provide actual illumination.

a blockchain social network?

Someone has to have done this already and then abandoned it because it failed to thrive.

Brings up the question of what are some good tools to manage this kind of risk.

You need your contacts, email archive, another credible email address to re-establish contact, alternate credentials for SSO sites, and it needs to be somewhere outside the political sphere that could cause this.

What does a resilient online identity look like? These companies own the primary media of your relationships, which are the things people need to survive.

Patterns are descriptors for how things relate, and arguably what makes someone smart or stupid is their ability to parse the dynamics of relationships among things.

There are a bunch of concepts from multiple disciplines that get used in companies every day. Some of them are stupid euphemisms used by managers who don't understand things, but a lot of them are about getting everyone to understand the importance of how one thing affects another.

Here are some:

- elasticity (of demand) - sunk cost - diminishing returns - scale - long poles - optionality - convexivity - long tail - fat tail - short position - indexing (over) - leverage - advantage - decisive power

These are fairly standard concepts for architects. Engineers deconstruct problems into implementations. Architects abstract problems into the rules that govern them. Both arrive in similar places, but usually for different reasons.

Agile, like anything, is perfect when you implement it perfectly. Nobody does, but it's not the method's fault, the method is perfect. What I have seen is it used as a chip on the shoulders that makes product meetings feel like dealing with communist border guards.

Working in Agile shops can be a lot like watching lab mice running a maze. You try to say, "hey, so this path you are working on, there is a map for it when it was solved in <discipline x>." and the response was, "this is Agile, we don't take grand designs or waterfall requirements, and we don't need anymore chickens in our standup."

Or you say, "hey, so this thing you are building, for someone to buy it, we're going to have to explain to them why it's good and how it meets their expectations, can we create a sequence diagram or a model so I can plug in how it meets standards and regulations and code and such?" and the response is, "we don't need documentation, the code is documented, and if you had provided us with the requirements we could prove it in our unit testing."

The trouble I have with a lot of engineering and dev culture is what it lacks, and often irrationally rejects, is balancing the technical understanding with a top down view. The best engineers have or at least appreciate this, and they bring it with them. Unfortunately this gets them immediately promoted to roles where they aren't actually writing code.

I've used this house building simile in Agile shops before, where any bunch of carpenters, electricians, plumbers and brick layers can build a fine house that will stand up, but the matter of whether anyone will want to live in it, buy it, insure it, legally sell it, live anywhere near it, or trust that it won't be knocked down by local climate or regulations - is an equally complex problem you need someone with expertise to solve.

Everyone has complains, devs about managers, managers about devs, it's an age old problem. A lot of Agile gets used to formalize an adolescent culture. I look forward to the pendulum swinging back to a more balanced equilibrium.

Why do people sleep on benches instead of shelters? When you look at a typical homeless person nest, it is arranged to protect them from theft and violence. It's either in a well populated place, usually with middle class people who will report violence, or where they can hear people coming, has good visibility, a corner for their back, etc.

When you look at a typical homeless shelter, it has bunks or cots, no security, people with no reason to report violence, and it's full of desperate homeless people with addictions and erratic mental illness. They don't want to be around each other because they know it's dangerous. Why would you go to a shelter unless you were looking for trouble? It's full of predators.

Charitable organizations don't give homeless people privacy for fear of the human things they will do, like drink, use drugs, have sex, etc. The street or a park provides relative privacy and freedom, within walking distance of services.

Given most homeless people are men, the solutions are more likely to involve providing basic physical privacy and security than comfort or sympathy.

TL;DR; What you learn in an Economics degree.

The naivety of warrant canaries shows a kind of desperate denial, especially in the wake of Snowden. Warrant canaries are more about preserving the myth of a principled legal system than a real rebellion against deep state surveillance.

I think people cling to the fiction because the alternative is too awful for them to bear. We've gone from denial to a bargaining phase, where we come up with little technicalities that might preserve our beliefs. Next will be anger, and then a polarization of how people act on their eventual acceptance.

As someone who has seriously evaluated buying a blackphone and support SC in principle, I couldn't bring myself to do it. It's not just them, they're just the most viable and so they catch all the criticism from nerds like me. I wanted a physical lens cap, hardware switches for all microphones and all radios, a removable microSD key module, an option to use the 2nd sim slot as a custom javacard crypto module, a hypervisor for android versions (which I think they have something like) a key management spec published in BAN logic, and the moon. The moon would do.

Basically, I wanted the AR-15 platform of smart phones, where the baseband processor is just the lower receiver. Said nobody who wanted to make money ever.

i am not against them, but I do think SC, wickr, whatsapp, firechat, and privacy companies like them need a narrative pivot. The tech will be valuable, but real market fit depends on popular acceptance of a state level threat model - or at least a desire to be seen as against it.

Today, it's the electronic equivalent to wearing a motorcycle club patch. Yeah, lots of military and law enforcement and regular folks are in motorcycle clubs, but it's a statement. Privacy apps today are a shibboleth with negative skewed optionality.

One of these companies could become the harley davidson of privacy platforms, (whatsapp is close) but that's the upside. An aging rebel brand torn between loyalty and relevance.

The user base for these niche, qualitative difference apps is not unlike the story of indie record labels back in the 80s. Outsider identities, alternative social networks with their own shibboleths. If anyone can figure out who ever got rich off goth, the business model for privacy tech might be within reach. For now, privacy is just an effects pedal and some shitty makeup for bland suburban consumer apps.

The warrant canary issue is a romantic misunderstanding of law, markets, and politics, and the issue is the least important thing about a company like Silent Circle.

If engineering were lower status work than a lot of people think it is, it would provide a more viable explanation than the effect of a conspiracy.

Men in engineering on average aren't as smart as they think they are, and given the perceived barriers, mostly it is exceptionally smart women go into engineering.

The underlying problem is that engineering is lower status work than its participants believe it is. Women in it recognize this and switch to roles that provide the benefits of equivalent or greater status for an equivalent or lesser amount of effort.

Sexism does sound more interesting, but reality tends to be less dramatic.

Before reaching for explanations to reinforce hackneyed oppression tropes, there might be a more economic reason women leave engineering and STEM fields in general.

Engineering is about developing skills, and all technical skills have a relatively early inflection point of diminishing marginal returns on effort.

Engineering has a high barrier to entry, and women who are in engineering are necessarily in the 80th percentile of intelligence, so let's say they are smart. Smart people have a different apprehension of risk than less smart people.

Roles that involve management, finance, and relationships, have infinite upside, where the benefits of roles that involve skills tend to have a fairly well defined peak.

A woman who is ambitious enough to pass the high bar for engineering is probably smart enough to recognize that for an equal investment of time and effort, if she switches to management or a non-technical role, she can achieve a management role with greater perceived stability, a multiple of salary, bonuses and eventually equity.

Depending on her motivation in regard to having children, a job that requires skill maintenance requires much more effort if she is caring for a child, but _with the same limited upside_. The divided commitment means she has to work some coefficient of effort harder toward the same result. Can she? Of course, but why would she?

Some women are content with this, but I think women avoid STEM work because, decades as a code monkey is not the most productive use of their time. If boring aspies and loud talkers chased women out of jobs, they wouldn't have stuck with "traditional" jobs that include handling rooms full of 40 screaming children, caring for violent drug addicts, serving drunks, etc. Outside academia, women aren't delicate flower petal snowflakes.

The more plausible explanation is that if it were worth it to them, they would do it. For some reason, engineering is still not worth it, and the answer is likely more uncomfortable for men than it would be for women.

Yes, the problem with societies is the security of their voting mechanisms.

Physical ballots are manipulated and forged all the time. Doing it online just dispenses with the pretense of legitimacy altogether.

In the majority of elections, voting is an empty ritual that dresses up a transfer of power that was already decided among a tiny minority of essential power brokers.

Voting should be done online if onlyso that people will stop believing the fairy tales it facilitates.

What precisely could benefit from clarification?

Seconded on risk aversion. Toronto is just not sexy. When you go to pitch a client in a top tier city and you are from one, the client assumes that if you can survive in SF/NY/DC/LON etc, that they should hear you out.

In Toronto, it's like you can't type 'hello world," without some cringeworthy reporter going on about how it's by a sparky _canadian_ startup taking on the big bad world with their local blend of quirky charm and _moxie_.

I'm sure that's warm and fuzzy to people who live on grant money, but to the rest of the world it means "derivative and subsidized."

Toronto is a good place for dev shops, but innovation needs to be in places where it is valued by people who actually pay for it. If you are doing enterprise dev, it's great.

But nobody here is going to Mars, except maybe a scrappy group of girl engineers who take no guff, and are writing codes with a critical take on whether colonizing other planets is problematic in the face of our own colonial history and need for healing and reparations...