mik3cap

I'd like to see reputation or karma or achievement based currencies that are convertible between online communities, and a currency exchange that lets me buy and sell equivalent values. I could then take Reddit karma and exchange it for Stack Exchange points and "buy in" to another community at the going exchange rate, transferring the good will or community mindedness I earned on one site into another.

I find it very distasteful whenever anyone suggests that certain people have or don't have certain types of minds. Down this slippery slope lies the path to elitism and snobbery, and gender and ethnic stereotyping.

Minds are plastic, and people choose to fill them however they like. If you practice musical performance, you become more musical no matter how much "natural talent" you start out with. Though there are people with physical limitations and true tone deafness, they are few and far between.

Becoming better with practice holds for the development of problem solving strategies and heuristics as well; all anecdotal evidence aside, improving visualization ability and learning from experience is the formula for making "those who code well". What we lack in our education process today is teaching the ability to think critically and logically and the process of breaking larger problems into smaller, manageable ones - and this is why we have people who think they can't code, or simply won't code even if they have the honed mental tools to do the job well. The fact is, it is very hard to think in the abstract for extended periods and most people just don't want to do it.