forkandwait

I think "the inelegance of Matlab" is MUCH overstated. It has some weirdnesses, some of which are fixed in Octave (it's gnu cousin). But some apparent bad choices (anything to do with cell arrays, especially) are really quite powerful when you get to know them.

(If you ask me, R/SPLUS is the inelegant language, especially when doing serious matrix -- yuck! But it's trendy....)

Matlab is a lot like SQL -- people love to hate on it because it isn't perfect and they know it really well (because it is ubiquitous and pragmatic).

I like the idea that notation is a tool of thought, but I think that J (and APL) are actually rather crappy notations.

I FAR prefer matlab for matrix work, as it is closer to actual math than any other language I know. For logic ish programming, Prolog or AMPL or SQL (I like SQL, even though people hate on it all the time).

But, in my humble, J and APL are interesting historically, but rather crappy in comparison to more recent languages

Everything I have heard says that the US spends a lot more per pupil than most of the developed world, and yet... has shitty schools.

Here is my worthless .02c:

One sure way to know you have failed at managing a process is when you measure employee performance by their adherence to rules rather than their record on delivering results.

NCLB is all about rules...

... as are most US institutions, public and private....

It isn't that rules and standardized processes don't have their place, but (1) if rules have to be enforced regularly, you have totally f'ed your incentive structure and (2) if you build "standardized processes" the right way, employees "naturally" follow (and contribute to) them because they are the best way to deliver results (see above), not because some hardass is enforcing them.

So, we should reward teachers who have good results, collectively and continuously make their best processes into standards, and punish the teachers with bad results (by which I mean fire them, and eliminate tenure, at least in the extreme).

Not so easy to do, but I think we need to get away from more and more rules, while never rewarding individual results.

"Often you need someone to perform a dull role."

If you see your company as a machine in which you and a few select managers are the controllers, and everyone else is, somewhat literally, just a tool. This is the subconcious model that permeates our society, for better or for worse.

"There are plenty of people, even knowledge workers, who are satisfied with a steady paycheck and a low level of workplace stimulation."

Really? That sounds a lot like somebody in power justifying to themselves why the other people are not in power -- because they are "satisfied" with their lot. This is a very, very old trope, including the whole White Man's Burden thing, etc.

It is whatever gives us a challenge to be more than we are -- richer, smarter, funnier, cuter, etc. Nietszche would call the drive to "overcome ourselves" just as instinctual (and fun) as the desire for soft, warm pleasure.

I disagree that "those of us who wish to work in an intellectually challenging environment are ... a minority".

I think what is true is that most people don't have the opportunity to be truly human at work (challenged, interested, etc) because the current system doesn't hire human beings, but just "function-fulfillers". Then we get disappointed when the human beings we hired don't act like simple robots... go figure ...

(I don't know how true to life the books are, but the Toyota Way series makes a big point about how important it is to allow -- demand, in fact -- people to grow and challenge themselves, from the engineers to the production workers. It is the US unions insistence on highly constrained work rules and job functions that made Deming hate them, rather than anything to do with wages.)

Also -- nobody wants to work with an arrogant asshole who "thinks they are a superstar", whether they are "a clever" or "a stupid". But it is only folks with low self esteem or power trips who willingly surround themselves with people of less talent themselves.

Knowledge worker? Innovator? -- that could be anyone, including a fry cook at McDonalds, if it was allowed to them. I have worked some shit, shit jobs, and I was always struck by how the spread in raw intelligence was about the same as in my elite private high school (now study skills and entitlement, however, is something the "non-clevers" just don't have at the moment, but that is a cultural thing that could be changed, if we cared.)

"Clevers"? Plural, as a noun? Give me a break.

Maybe I missed something in my 3 second skim, but this guy sounds like he just wants to ride some asinine gimmick like "Seven Habits.." or "The Southbeach Diet".

Here is my take on managing people, "clevers" and "non-clevers" (stupids? muggles? non-college?...) Remember that the people you hire are, in fact, people, rather than cranky forklifts. People need challenge, creativity, and growth to thrive, though they are often willing trade some time doing monotonous bullshit if there is a decent tradeoff; if you do have do monotonous bullshit, make sure they get to some cool stuff that follows from that. Figure out their "will-to-power" and how they view themselves, and align your goals with their own.

Remember that even though you went to an Ivy League school and they graduated from the local junior college, they need the same stuff as you.

"Clevers"?? really? he should be embarassed.

Many Postgres folks seem to think putting you rules in your database layer is a good idea, because you (1) get to deploy them automagically, (2) the commit logic is easier when there is no round trip, and (3) the PL/PGSQL language is actually pretty good.

I don't work on things big enough to think about this, and I would be curious if there were a summary of why/ why-not to put business logic in the DB, and where it SHOULD go.

Why I don't use Bing:

1. I hate the stupid pictures and the other stupid fluff.

2. It is called "Bing" (the only worse brand name is "Yaris"... what are they thinking?)

3. Microsoft doesn't help fund and staff a LOT of the Free software infrastructue I depend on.

Academic journals are gatekeepers of academic promotion, the prestigious old journals are the only ones that count today, and they are owned by Wiley and friends.

To make matters worse, academics are among the most tradition bound creatures in the universe, especially when there is no clear criteria for truth (which is like all of the social sciences and humanities). The only thing they have to calibrate against is consensus, and consensus favors institutions already in place.

I think discussions on performance go south because we all instinctively use Big-Oh ideas, but there are times when constant multipliers really matter: when the computation is really, really long (big scientific computations), or when microseconds matter (interactivity and real time stuff).

As an example, for big scientific computations, Fortran seems to be about 30% faster than C, its next fastest competitor (at least this is what some physicists who did huge jobs to process imagery data to look for planets told me once). If you are running a job that takes 15 minutes in C, this doesn't matter, but if you are running a job that takes 10 days it matters immensely, especially when you consider that you still have to debug. 30% is three more days you have to wait for output before tweaking your stuff and trying to beat the other guys to publication.

With interactive programming, performance means you either get under the perceived instantaneous threshold or not, which is often the difference between "this app is cool" or "this app sucks". If you can get a 2 fold gain using C versus Java or C#, you can do a LOT of stuff "instantaneously" that otherwise make the user tap their fingers impatiently. Not too mention the high speed work of quants.

In the work I do -- processing moderately large datasets into summaries on 12 hour deadlines -- 20% here or there doesn't really matter. I think this is kind of interesting

Just noticed that I cited "streetlights" as a social fiction -- I meant "traffic rules".

Hehe -- 10 min by auto, could be 20 min by bike. I work for the govt too.

While some of my best friends are libertarians ... they tend to oversimplify very complex dynamics that aren't really understood by anybody -- not Bernanke, Marx, Milton, or Keynes, much less Ayn Rand.

Flip comments aside: "ownership" of anything -- a ball, a company, a piece of property -- should be seen as a bundle of rights and responsibilities, and as a (overall) benign socially sanctioned fiction like streetlights. Then you can see that it is only in the trivial cases, like a ball that nobody cares about, that ownership is straightforward and implies "It's mine I can do anything with it I like".

So, duh, you pay taxes and have to conform to zoning codes. Get over it.

EDIT: Also, "government entities" aren't some weird uncontrollable force like the weather or an invading army -- you live in a democracy, so get involved.

Possible rent seems like a really useful metric in buying a house, and it would be really interesting to evaluate a market in these terms.

We just bought a house, in a peripheral part of a big urban market. Here is why:

The house was 3x our annual income (well, 2.5).

We can probably rent it for our mortgage. (This for me is the most important thing -- basically we bought the rental we would have lived in).

My job is moderately safe.

We don't expect to sell for 5 years (which is the conventional wisdom unless you are a professional and know what you are doing).

I hated our last four landlords.

We have to live somewhere.

No kids, so no worries about kid like things except in terms of n-hood value.

Not to be cynical, but I bet the devs at NPR are already working on interesting side projects about 20% of their time, because if they don't they quickly become obsolete, and if they are grown ups their managements isn't monitoring them so closely they would even know. It's just that management (often) likes to pretend that they are completely in charge; "giving" devs 20% is sort of like "letting" a teen age son or daughter drink an occasional beer at a party.

The forbidden truth is about poor people ("rural"=white and poor, "urban" = black and poor.)

Evidence? Seems plausible or common knowledge, but lots of wrong things seem plausible or common knowledge (remember Columbus and falling off the side of the earth?)

You posited that in "sales, technology, trading, marketing" there is no value to a degree as credentialing, but you didn't offer any evidence that I can find. Please correct me if you cited a study.

My evidence, to be fair, is the graphs I have vaguely seen associating educational outcomes with salary and "higher" job classifications.

No, I am arguing that my lack of a good argument does not imply that the converse argument is true.

So ... retract your argument that college has no credentialling value in getting a white collar job (outside of the professions) ;) You have no evidence.

(Heuristically, I have evidence, but it is poor. But poor is better than none.)

>I'm talking about the minimal value of a degree as a credential outside the Professions; you're arguing with a fictitious third party who says they have zero importance anywhere.

Umm, wrong. I am arguing with the "minimal value of a degree as a credential outside the Professions". I have made that clear, by statements to the effect of "granting the professions are a different case."

I am saying -- I have limited evidence for causality in the effect of a degree (outside the professions), and you have no evidence for the absence of causality .

It's all good though...

Let's look at this as a logic problem.

You say college has no causal effect, I say college has a causal effect (granting that we aren't talking about credentialing degrees, blah, blah).

The best you have done is destroy my argument in favor of causation; however, this doesn't imply that you are correct for NO causation, just that my argument doesn't work (maybe correct). To prove no causation you would have to evaluate all possible arguments for it, and show them all to be wrong. (good luck)

However, I do have partial evidence for causality based on the association between college and white collar jobs. I am basing this on the "warrant" that P(causation| association) >= P(causation) -- if there is association, the likelihood of causation is higher or the same.

So how about this: neither of us can say for sure whether college helps, but I have a little bit of faulty evidence and you have no evidence whatsoever.

We are in the same situation as most social scientists -- the evidence for anything really sucks, and is nowhere like the evidence for hard science propositions. However, very important policy decisions have to be made based on this faulty evidence. What most people do is pretend be sure and so guarantee they act foolishly.

I don't think you have any real evidence for whether the association of white-collar job and degree is post-hoc or not? Do you? Without evidence, it's kind of a cheap shot.

There might be verbiage like "B.A. or equivalent experience" on the description, but if it is a managerial position I think 90% is B.A, 10% is equivalent experience. So, there may be no literal requirement, but there is still a de facto requirement.

Sales may be an exception here -- though I would hazard a guess that to sell software for IBM to governments and businesses, my above comment would apply. To sell real estate, though, nobody really cares (same for cars, etc).

Getting a job as a mid-level manager in government service is very difficult without a degree, unless you are old enough to grandfather in when things were different. And even if you do get a job, there will be a noticeable level of weirdness around you because you didn't finish college.

Note that you don't have to go to a particularly good school -- it is government service, after all.

I think a similar thing is true -- I would be interested in knowing how many people at supervisor or above at, say, Netflix (or an oil company) don't have a degree? I don't know... hopefully other people can share anecdotal evidence ;)

Forgive my reply to myself, but I have been thinking about this all day. Here are some random thoughts, partly for my own edification, but partly because the conversation seems to be lingering:

I actually think the "core" of the democratic part / left is the marginalized on one hand, and those that minister to them on the other. The white working class aren't really marginalized like they were in the depression and earlier, so don't fit in anymore -- but the super poor are marginalized, so they fit. Non-whites are interesting -- 40 years ago, blacks and latinos were marginalized as weirdos, except they were poor too (double whammy -- like being gay AND broke all the time). Now that we are actually becoming a less racist and homophobic society (slowly and imperfectly, but definitely) these folks lose their marginalization and drift away from the core since social conservativism and personal character ideologies become more appropriate, unless they go to college and become social workers and join the ministering class rather than the ministered-to class. The Republicans see this with latinos and keep trying to bring them in; they haven't succeeded yet, but they will, just like they did with Italians and Catholics.

The other, maybe dominant group now, in the democratic party are those folks who would have been "Rockefeller Republicans" back before Reagan and Goldwater redefined the party. My family is in this camp, and so are, I think, all the smart capitalists who run/ own businesses that require lots of infrastructure and educated employees -- the Hewletts and the Packards, Bill Gates, Hollywood, Google, the rest of the educated "blue" USA. These guys rightly understand that simplistic market bullshit and simplistic christian bullshit are not appropriate to a complex industrial economy. Remember, Carnegie ordered the slaughter of unionizing steelworkers, but he also understood his world was completely fucked without universities and libraries to make his engineers and managers. He could have been a Clinton democrat today.

A couple of replies to people:

Yeah, Eric Hoffer is great -- I only read the true believer, but it made a huge impression on me; I am sure I repeat him without knowing it.

To the guy who asks why the Joe Sixpack world doesn't evolve its own leaders (forgive me if I paraphrase too brutally): because they lack the training or they wouldn't be joe sixpacks in the first place... It is mostly the managerial class (myself) or the owning class (my friends at prep-school) who have the know-how to organize people into social systems like political parties, churches, businesses, and the like. The working class have great hand-eye coordination, but pretty crappy social and language skills (sorry for the gross generalization, but I think you understand what I am trying to say); those that do have these skills tend to drift upward into the managerial class. When there is no room for these smart organizers to promote, they get involved in union politics or communist cells (or avoid the question altogether by getting involved in the arts/ drugs/ weird religious things / whatever.)

So here is my parting thought: There is a vacuum organizing the working class today, and if someone put their finger on the cultural stuff like the Republicans do, but also fought for working people's actual interests, it could be a WILD ride. Just saying.

I keep trying to formulate my take on this, and failing, but here goes anyway:

The democratic party and American leftists no longer understand non-college working people and, for the most part, no longer reach out to them. Working people think that the left today advocates either for weirdos or for the completely screwed up, and wants everybody to pay for its programs to help said weirdos and fuckups. There is some valid reason for this impression, with the Great Society programs and affirmative action in the sixties and seventies being partly funded by taxes on the middle classes, along with fiascos like school bussing and over-compensated hiring practices screwing over people who didn't feel like they deserved it. (And poor management of government agencies making them ineffective at cost effective delivery of services.)

However, working people don't see themselves as fuckups (because they're not), and they don't have a lot of patience with weirdos. So they aren't going to feel comfortable with the gay marriage/ social worker part of the left (the old union guys were socially very conservative for the most part).

Also, most of the left today seems to me to be made up of people who really have no connection to actual poor working class people, so there is automatically a divide that is mobilized by the Karl Roves of the world.

Furthermore, if you have ever been lower middle class or "working poor", you learn early that very traditional personal character values can make the difference between you and your family living in a truly shitty situation or rising out of the muck around you to actually have a decent marriage/ nice friends/ safe home. So when college educated lefties come around and tell them to have pity on fuckups and weirdos because its society's fault, or that personal character and traditional values don't matter, any working class person is likely to tell them to go to hell.

So today's Republicans mobilize personal character rhetoric, traditionalism rhetoric, and the cultural non-understanding between leftist leadership and working people, and -- voila, working people voting against their own interests.

Until the left figures out the working classes again -- which means taking the time to show up in the middle of the country, go to church, eat ribs, etc, etc -- Capital will continue to screw everyone. So quit whining about how stupid working class people are -- nobody represents their interests today, neither left nor right, but at least the Republicans pretend.

The problem with Godel and friends is that they point to the limits of rationality. Without a transcendent rationality (and morality) upon which to discurse, philosophers are out of a job, so to speak. If you use logic to understand everything, the last thing you want to deal with is somebody telling you the limits to logic. So they blow him off.

At least I think the above is true for "analytic" philosophers. The "continentals", on the other hand, have been engaging in an extended attack on transcendent rationality since Nietszche who said, to paraphrase, that every transcendent metaphysics was an attempt to justify a morality, and every morality was facilitated a (usually inarticulate) "will to power." (This line sort of starts with Hegel, who posited that rationality emerged from history and the development of a collective human spirit, but wasn't "out there" before that). Godel seems like ammunition for these guys, but I don't think they have picked him up much. I guess if you are anti-rationalist, the last thing you read up on is advanced logic, even if it is so advanced it comes to its own frontier.