moldbug

Reality check: in 1962, every American city, north or south, with a substantial black population had a thriving black business district and a commercial middle class. Example: Bronzeville in Chicago.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Douglas,_Chicago#Bronzeville

Enlightened white people destroyed these worlds and the people who lived in them. The replacement was this:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Taylor_Homes

In San Francisco those neighborhoods were Third Street and the Fillmore. Pictures of Third Street from the 1950s show fancy cars, fancy clothes, fancy shops, not a white face in sight. Pictures of Third Street today show someone about to sucker-punch the photographer and steal his camera.

In 1962 there were no no-go zones anywhere in America. Today I could walk five miles from my home and be in a place where my life wasn't safe. Black America in 2012:

http://tosh.comedycentral.com/video-clips/uncensored---video...

Upside: black people can vote. For the same party, every time. For a black (or, well, half-East-African) president whose campaign office looks as white as a Romney family reunion:

http://freebeacon.com/minority-report/

I think the enlightened people of 1962 might be a little incredulous at all the back-patting going on in 2012. Nice job you've done of uplifting black America, 2012. With successes like this, who needs failures?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/San_Francisco,_Cebu

As someone who has done research in the field, did you read the Gizmodo review of Siri?

http://gizmodo.com/5864293/siri-is-apples-broken-promise

The set of "knowledge graph" problems which is not, in fact, AI-complete, strikes me as much smaller than most doing research in the field would like us to think.

I hope you won't try to argue that "book me a room" etc. isn't AI-complete. There's an uncanny valley there, and it's deep. You can use Siri for lots of trivial tasks in which bizarre failures are hilarious rather than disastrous, but booking hotel rooms isn't in that set. She can be the best secretary in the world 9 times out of 10 or even 99 out of a 100, but the other times she's an insane robot who wouldn't at all mind sending you to Cebu to get kidnapped by the MILF...

Make sure when you read a press release like this, though, that if there isn't a press release saying the courts have convicted an innocent man, there isn't a press release at all. Which means Professor Liebman and his students have wasted their time. Which they don't want to do, so they are anything but disinterested investigators.

I mean, you're not going to see a headline that says "Murderer walks free in Texas, probe says." I mean, duh. That happens all the time, so who cares? There's certainly no market for an independent, open-source prosecution...

Your whole vision of the way "the right-wing media" "controls the message" could uncharitably be described as a "conspiracy theory," a term I'd like to avoid (not least because real conspiracies do exist in real history). It's perhaps more neutral to say that it has nothing to do with reality.

The reason that American conservatives believe the things they believe is that those things seem obvious to them, and no one has yet succeeded in convincing them otherwise. In the long term (by your "decades" definition) we see a gradual retreat, as you can see from evidence like this:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/California_Proposition_14_(1963...

(Yes, in 1963 it seemed obvious to an overwhelming majority of Californians that segregated housing was a good idea. Fortunately, the new enlightened Californians have proved them wrong with the enlightened rainbow society we've created. If only 1963 could see how great California is today! Ha, ha, ha.)

Fox News is an entirely demotic, grass-roots organization. Its goal is to make money, and it makes money by showing its viewers a reality they find credible. You could say it reinforces their existing beliefs, but even this would be ascribing some conspiratorial intent beyond making money. Murdoch sure does make a lot of that.

It's only the American left that has genuine leadership institutions which work to frame the debate. There is no right-wing Harvard. There is no right-wing New York Times. There are various small scattered circles of intellectuals, generally poorly funded. The only professional conservatives are neoconservatives, ie, post-Trotskyists. Nothing at all survives of either McCarthyism or isolationism, the two even remotely effective oppositions to the New Deal heritage - both comical by pre-20th century standards, American or European. In short, American conservatism is a pathetic joke, and any liberal who worries about it is a paranoid.

Why do so many liberals have this vision of Dr. Evil cleverly twisting the minds of innocent Ohioans? In a word, projection. It is simply impossible for the liberal to fathom how pathetic and inept his so-called opponents are. In part this is because he wants to think of himself as the oppressed underdog, rather than the ruling establishment.

Here's a wonderful example of the "framing" mentality I recently found, in the wild, by a respected and intelligent commenter on the extremely erudite Crooked Timber:

But I’d say, just because affirmative action is a lonely and isolated victory doesn’t mean we should abandon it. I also think that fighting for other lonely and isolated victories is… the best we can do. This is basically what I took away from MLK’s letter from a Birmingham prison. We are never really going to get the apathetic white moderates on board with a radical change, but we can hope to somehow create a new more radical status quo and then over time get apathetic white moderates on board with what’s now the status quo. So each policy we manage to get enacted is shaky and not well-supported for, like, 50 years. Then it will have become normal enough that we can repaint the landscape: the policy will probably still be contentious, but if we gradually repaint things right, it will be the people trying to undo the policy that will look like radicals.

http://crookedtimber.org/2012/04/14/needless-to-say-part-ii/...

I find this an extremely representative picture of the complexity and deviousness of the 20th-century American "liberal" mind. You're playing 3-D chess. Your opponents are playing tic-tac-toe, and not very good tic-tac-toe at that. Is it possible that if you can first overcome your fear, you can later learn to overcome your hatred?

Can I stereotype you again? You've read a ten-page excerpt of Burke in your sophomore poli-sci reader. Like claiming to know all about Mexico because you once spent a week in Acapulco. The rest of the country being, of course, "horrible." Why risk Montezuma's revenge? Go read the Regicide Peace, cover to cover, then come back and talk about Burke:

http://archive.org/details/thoughtsonprospe00burkiala

What was offensive about your post was not that you claimed certain views were "horrible," but that you assumed this position on the way to an entirely separate argument. Moreover, your approach to those who held these views was not to argue with them, but to patronize them.

You even appeared touched by great and tender concern for the poor Fox News viewer - a concern which can't possibly be genuine, because we can only be genuinely concerned with those we actually know and interact with. If you knew and interacted with ordinary American conservatives while talking this way about them, you'd receive a swift punch in the nose or at least its digital equivalent.

In short, you've seen the usual story about the "brogrammer" who talks about women as if there were no women in the room. s/women/conservatives. While I am not even slightly deluded as to the health of American "conservatism" (the scare quotes, for once, are entirely appropriate), I consider the importance of good manners all the greater when the victim doesn't have the iron fist of the EEOC in her back pocket.

You were being patronizing, which is an easily recognizable form of contempt. I'm taking the same attitude toward you, in the perhaps vain hope that it might help you see how rude you're being. I'm also quite happy to classify you culturally as a function of your belief system, which is once again good for the gander.

As it happens, I don't have a problem with either "torture" or gay marriage. However, because I have been exposed to plenty of perfectly intelligent arguments for waterboarding and against gay marriage, I can tell you haven't been. No, I would not recommend Fox News as an introduction to conservative thought - try Burke. Or better yet Maistre. And have some more arugula, preferably with the chevre.

(Also, if you think there's a meaningful difference between American communism and "socialism" or "radicalism" or "progressivism" or "liberalism," I suggest the following exercise - pick an arbitrary NYT obituary of anyone over 80, ie anyone who was an adult in the '40s, and try to classify your subject as "communist," "socialist," "progressive" or "liberal." Unless you say that only a card-carrying CPUSA member can be a "communist," which is an abuse of the English language, you'll find no basis for any such distinction.)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pw5pZpGh5Hg

One of the strange things you might discover, if as an American communist ("liberal" being, of course, a euphemism) you try living abroad, is the number of cultural tropes you share with American fundamentalists and don't share with European communists. (This discovery is forced on all Foreign Service brats by the fact that our embassies, while staffed by State Department communists, still have to be guarded by Marine fundamentalists.)

Your sympathy could be quite easily mistaken for contempt. And you don't think NPR is ever manipulative, at all, ever? When you try watching Fox News, you're eating very, very low off the hog. Try reading, say, the Claremont Review of Books.

Or here - test your open-mindedness in one step. Read a book by a Confederate:

http://archive.org/details/serviceafloatwar00semmrich

Nyah nyah nyah, I dare you.

I can't be sure whether your country's mind was changed by our Eighth Air Force, or by our allies in the Red Army. Perhaps the first seeds of "change" were planted even earlier, by the British Navy. And of course we can't forget about Napoleon, now, can we?

What's certain, however, is that with the right application of military force, this same enlightened populace could be compelled to either return to its old views, or adopt new ones even more enlightened.

You should read more old books. It would teach you to be less confident in condemning people who disagree with you - as just about everyone born before the 20th century, in any country, did. Do you hate them all, and consider yourself morally superior? Really?

The man-brained and man-handed ground-ape, physically

The most repulsive of all hot-blooded animals

Up to that time of the world: they had dug a pitfall

And caught a mammoth, but how could their sticks and stones

Reach the life in that hide? They danced around the pit, shrieking

With ape excitement, flinging sharp flints in vain, and the stench of their bodies

Stained the white air of dawn; but presently one of them

Remembered the yellow dancer, wood-eating fire

That guards the cave-mouth: he ran and fetched him, and others

Gathered sticks at the wood’s edge; they made a blaze

And pushed it into the pit, and they fed it high, around the mired sides

Of their huge prey. They watched the long hairy trunk

Waver over the stifled trumpeting pain,

And they were happy...

http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poem/176425

While it's hard to fault Jeffers in this judgment, I would nonetheless insist that the chimpanzee is at least #2. Even gorillas are just plain vile. Last month I took the kids to see the gorillas at the SF Zoo, and one female took deadly aim at the audience with a pile of poo - missing, but barely. Perhaps the entire primate clade is just a mistake.

I think you'll find that in all functioning societies everywhere, including the United States today, the weak are ruled by the strong, and rebels are repressed and/or killed. Try setting up your own liberated zone in Montana and see how far you get. When this principle breaks down, the only thing that can follow is chaos.

Historical research is hard work, but hard work isn't always useful work. When the purpose of your hard work is the service of a political agenda, it's just busywork. The perspective of Western academia in 2012 is a valid one, certainly, but also a very narrow one by historiographic standards. It is much more work to step outside this tradition - especially in the narrow area of Latin American studies - but when you do so you may be surprised at what you find.

(Note that in all Latin American countries, including frickin' Cuba, the governing caste looks like Gael Garcia Bernal and the governed caste is black, brown or both. See under: "Subcomandante Marcos." After the 20th century it should be difficult for any ideology to claim it has some magic solution to this particular problem.)

Without of course disputing the actual reality you've experienced, I would suggest two ways of interpreting this perspective.

One is that the constant low-level violence in these postcolonial societies is not a consequence of how similar to actual colonial societies they are, but how different they are.

You don't see constant low-level violence when formal power is identical to informal power. When the patron is actually an encomendero, there's no reason for forced labor (the distinction between "forced" and "unforced" labor is pretty academic to an unskilled agricultural laborer - either way, he has to work or he doesn't eat) to involve violence, because he has the formal right to command and can call on the lawful arm of the state to assist him.

Whether or not he should have this right, or rather power, is a separate question. But note what happens when you try to eradicate these feudal structures, which of course did not arrive with the Europeans but predate them: you're driving Nature out with a pitchfork. When the patron is just a big man, not an actual government official, his power is not in the form of policemen and soldiers, but thugs and more thugs.

Second, reinforcing this argument, consider the fact that everything you know about the colonial period comes from the enemies of colonialism. Imagine if everything you knew about Jews came from people who hated Jews. Every time a Jew committed some crime or abuse, this would be played up at maximum volume and associated with the entire Jewish race. Exactly how the Goebbels press worked.

In other words, the 20th century image of colonialism is just an extension of the good old Leyenda Negra tradition. I don't have to explain this to you, but for others:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_Legend

I agree - the story is very sad. I hope Mexico can find its way to a new Porfiriato sometime soon. The first step would definitely be expelling the US Embassy - and taking every other possible measure to pretend there's nothing but ocean north of the Rio Grande.

Mexico is blessed with energy and food security, so it really does have the physical strength to tell Washington where it can put all its fatherly advice. And we're certainly in no political condition to invade you! So the main thing that's missing is cultural self-confidence.

Perhaps it's not too late to reinvent some kind of Franquista Hispanidad, Falangism, sinarquismo, etc:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mexican_synarchism

Until that point, I'm quite confident, the beheadings etc. will continue. Political order is something you take for granted until you find you don't have it, and then it's quite difficult to restore without applying a level of force comparable to that at the disposal of the disorderly.

Or to put it differently, after its century of revolution, Mexico needs martial law the way a camel that's just walked across the Sahara needs a drink of water. It's not alone in this. A friend of my wife's recently spent nine months in Guatemala City on a State Department journalism fellowship. She left as impeccable a progressive as you'd ever see. She came back with the most amazing good words for dictators and dictatorship. If you know Guatemala City, you know why...

Erna Fergusson, an American no less progressive, visited Guatemala in the '30s and wrote this book:

http://books.google.com/books/about/Guatemala.html?id=fv5kAA...

She describes Guatemala as "like Mexico before the Revolution." Politically this is certainly the truth. And the capital, for instance, is described as impeccably clean and crime-free. This did not fit the author's agenda, but was just what she saw. Again, compare!

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ricardo_Flores_Mag%C3%B3n

In the Mexican Revolution you have the divide in America between mainstream and radical liberals (Woodrow Wilson and Eugene Debs) mirrored almost perfectly in Mexican factions (Carranza and Zapata). The only indigenous Mexican forces are, by definition, people like the Cristeros, who have no foreign base of support. Viva Cristo Rey!

Also, the period is a little different, but Walter Millis's The Martial Spirit is an excellent deconstruction of the Spanish-American War, which leaves both the imperialist and humanitarian strains in US interventionism (rather uniquely combined in that war) in hilarious tatters. It's 1931, but archive.org has it:

http://archive.org/details/martialspiritast008110mbp

I'm simply observing that the quality of government by the late pre-revolutionary period, ie, the 18th century, is a lot higher than the quality of government in the 19th and 20th centuries - by almost any sane metric.

For instance, it's my belief (maybe not yours) that the main purpose of government is suppression of civil violence. If your government fails at this, nothing it succeeds at much matters. Now, imagine the progress of Mexico over the last two centuries, absent pervasive political and civil violence. Don't forget - the first university in the Americas was founded in Mexico City in 1551, almost 100 years before Harvard.

You appear to have been inculcated with a lot of very complex explanations of the tragedy of post-colonial Latin America, whereas my views, obviously, are quite simple. This is no accident. I'm a big believer in Occam's razor. I don't feel it's necessary to construct any intricate explanations of why the Flying Spaghetti Monster doesn't exist.

It's not at all unusual for people living in a historical period to misunderstand it completely, generally as a consequence of political corruption. This is as true of the late Roman Empire as of the late Soviet Union. My feeling is that historians of later eras will understand our world much better, and much more simply, than we understand it ourselves.

I'd strongly recommend reading at least one anti-liberal history of this period into which you've put so much study. It'd be a shame to come away with such strong conclusions when you've only heard from the prosecution. Elsewhere on the thread I've recommended Waugh's Robbery Under Law (1939) - not hard to find and very easy to read.

One exception is Evelyn Waugh's Robbery Under Law (1939), which is fabulous, but only pertains to Mexico. I'd link you to it but Eldred and all that. I am also very, very fond of the great Colombian reactionary Nicolas Gomez Davila:

http://don-colacho.blogspot.com/

I actually prefer reading between the lines of liberal sources, but it's not for everyone. If you want to taste the crack straight from the source, try John Reed:

http://books.google.com/books/about/Insurgent_Mexico.html?id...

Don't smoke it all at once...

The truth about Latin America is that it's suffering from 200 years of revolutionary ideology exported from El Norte. All its functional institutions date to Spanish rule (which is why "colonial" is applied indiscriminately to anything that isn't ugly in Mexico). Things started to suck in the 19th century when revolutionary Enlightenment ideology, all of Anglo-American origin, destroyed first colonial, then clerical and aristocratic rule, in the process producing approximately a zillion very very nasty civil wars.

And of course comparing 19th-century revolutionary ideology to its 20th-century successor is like comparing strychnine to cyanide. Where did all these ideologies come from? Dude, do you really have to ask? Ergo "pobre Mexico, tan lejos de Dios, tan cerca a los Estados Unidos."

For instance, it's grimly hilarious that today, with Mexico the world capital of decapitation, anyone could conceivably praise the Mexican Revolution. If Woodrow Wilson and Americans like him hadn't been so intent on "teaching Mexico to elect good men," the Porfiriato could easily have lasted another century:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Porfirio_D%C3%ADaz

Instead, thanks to John Reed and his ilk:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Reed_(journalist)

You wind up with this dude:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Teodoro_Garc%C3%ADa_Simental

whom I'm pretty sure neither the Porfiriato nor New Spain would have wasted much time in hanging. Etc, etc, etc.

took a course on Mesoamerican colonial history from the former Honduran Minister of Culture, who fled to the US after the 2009 coup.

And no doubt wishes the State Department would repeat its usual trick of deposing all Latin American governments which aren't headed by Harvard professors, or completely Americanized natives acceptable to such. Strangely, this position is commonly referred to as "anti-Americanism" - possibly for the same reason tall men are called "Tiny."

Needless to say, the golpistas in Honduras are a hell of a lot more Honduran than anyone who has ever taught a course at Harvard (or wherever). If you prefer them to the Harvard professors, you're an imperialist. Hell of a world we live in, ain't it?

Disclaimer: my father was a US vice-consul in the Dominican Republic. Don't hate the player, hate the game.

If there were lots of competing App Stores with their own beliefs, filters, prejudices, ideologies, etc - no problem. Of course this is exactly the case in the CRM industry.

So your conscience should be patting itself on the back, not beating itself up, when it tells a patent troll to go fsck a porcupine. This is exactly the purpose of a conscience: telling you to do what's right, regardless of the official structure of law in your era and country. Patent trolls aren't illegal, but they're evil, and it's wrong to collaborate voluntarily with evil. If the powers that be force you to collaborate, of course, that's something else...

But "Poetry," capital P, is an entirely different and quite solid business. I wouldn't at all count this startup out. It's called a vanity press, honey! The profession of fleecing people who want to be Poets may not be the oldest, but it's got to be at least fourth or fifth.

(It's also worth noting that before, I don't know, 1850 or so, the distinction between a vanity press and a real one was by no means clear. Plenty of reputable authors invested in the production costs of their early works. It was almost embarrassingly easy for a good writer to acquire a reputation based on one work - Dr. Johnson went from nobody to lion after one 300-line poem, his imitation of Juvenal's Third Satire. Of course, the tennis court had a net then.)

"Most professionals" live and work within ten miles of this: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z5MGJ87hPGw. If you worked for me and weren't comfortable with this kind of diversity, I'd cap your ass. Period.

Tech culture keeping it realer every year. Throw down some rude JS or get your app-cache timed out. That's the way we live and die in the 415, neighbor!

Some of them died justly, others not. I'm not an Albanian and have no interest in investing emotional energy in multi-generational blood feuds. Eg, some of my relatives were killed by the Germans, who make a really fine motorcycle.

Also, life was pretty cheap before the 20th century. It's easy to appall kids these days with the death rate among chained slaves crossing the Atlantic. In fact the death rate among Europeans voluntarily crossing the Atlantic was quite similar. It also wasn't easy or safe to walk across half of North America, whether voluntarily or not. Basically, to anyone who lived in this era - regardless of race, color or creed - we're all a bunch of whining pussies.

Really the main difference between the expulsion of the Cherokees and my proposed ethnic cleansing of the Palo Alto patent lawyers is that the Cherokees didn't deserve it, whereas the patent lawyers do. Lawless force can work good as well as evil. And when we've already left law behind, what's the alternative?

It's commonly supposed that the Supreme Court could void these illegal patents - could dissolve this entire illegal industry - with a swish of their shiny polyester robes. Actually they already tried that, in Flook. Jedi mind tricks, which in the end is all the Court really has, worked about as well on Andrew Jackson.

I think this explains the disappointing result of Bilski. If you are supposed to have a magic power which in reality doesn't exist, make every excuse to avoid using it. You may still be suspected of impotence, but at least the suspicion is not confirmed.

Unfortunately there isn't really a solution to the patent problem that's compatible with the rule of law, mostly because the rule of law was so long ago abandoned for the rule of lawyers. Perhaps Andrew Jackson could round them all up and march them to Oklahoma - or at least, Marshall, Texas.

It'll sure be nifty when 2029 rolls around and the patent expires, so applications can actually use the algorithm. (No, I don't have any information that an sFFT patent has been filed, but this would be standard practice at MIT).

Tornado/fountain codes are a similar case. Pardon my bitterness, but it's an interesting question to wonder whether, by funding researchers to invent algorithms of this type and lock them away behind a patent-wall for two decades, USG is advancing the progress of technology or in fact retarding it.

My theory is that Haskell has a lot of usability problems. A programming language is a UI for programmers. Usability issues are always a sufficient explanation for market disappointments in any product or field.

Most notably, Haskell is rooted in a theoretical foundation that's essentially a major subfield of 20th-century mathematics, using concepts and notations which most programmers (a) do not understand, (b) do not want to understand, (c) do not need to understand, and (d) in many cases are not physically capable of understanding (eg, they have IQs < 140, or other sorts of subtle congenital damage to the math lobes).

As "LYAH" demonstrates, it's possible to teach programmers (or at least a certain subset thereof) to use Haskell without fully understanding it. But this approach has serious UI problems of its own. It's not very comfortable to use a platform whose semantics you don't understand. There's no comparable hidden complexity in Ruby, Python, Perl, JS, etc.

Laziness is also a significant UI problem, inasmuch as it becomes cognitively very difficult to understand and/or control the performance of your program. Typically in UI, when you find one UI disaster you find more - it shows that usability was not a principal goal of the project.

One of the difficulties in diagnosing usability problems of this type is that people rarely complain about them directly, because their complaint would typically be of the form "Haskell made me feel stupid." My guess is that for everyone who's succeeded in learning them a Haskell, there are four or five who tried it and came away feeling stupid. Not a very pleasant sensation.

http://134.173.180.115/berger/pdf/Halpern2007.SciSexDif.Pub....

Unless you adopt a tautological definition, in which "science" does not include pseudoscience, "science" is whatever the people in your society who practice and organize it choose to call "science."

More specifically, since basically all "science" is government-funded, you'll find that your actual working definition of "science" is "whatever my government funds and calls science."

So your statement boils down to: climatology can't be pseudoscience, because it's funded by the US Government. And Washington (unlike Moscow) would never fund pseudoscience, and call it "science."

This is a pretty interesting epistemology to say the least. Do I have it right? If not, where's the error? If so, what information do you, as (no doubt) a rationalist, have about the US Government that justifies this extension of trust?

And if USG is not the institution you're trusting, what is? What set of human beings are you investing your trust in? If the field of climate science as presently practiced was not in fact scientific, but rather pseudoscientific, who would you expect to have stepped in and shut it down?

[Edit: see also the links to the actual funding levels a couple of posts down. If you're interested in reconsidering your position on this issue, the blog to read is Steve McIntyre's.]

http://tomnelson.blogspot.com/2012/02/with-tiny-budgets-like...

You're welcome. Actually, the funding for the actual climate skeptics who are actually fighting this goliath is so close to zero as to be indistinguishable. The significant players all basically amateur bloggers. I think Anthony Watts got $40K from Heartland, but AFAIK it was for a contract not officially related to his blog at all.

The good news is - there's really nothing wrong with being wrong by five orders of magnitude. So long as you keep an open mind and are willing to learn from it.

Neighbor, how much code is there in the world? And how many coders as good as you? Divide these numbers, and you'll see why the world can't possibly adopt Haskell.

Some people can climb Half Dome with their fingernails. That doesn't mean there shouldn't be a fixed rope, too - that is, if your goal is to maximize the climbers of Half Dome. (If its goal is to separate the men from the boys, Haskell is already doing just fine and shouldn't change a thing.)

Optimizing compilers run large numbers of algorithmically complex optimizations that are equally opaque. The abstraction is actually abstract.

If you're going to understand why the compiler rejected the program, you have to understand the reasoning process of the compiler. Understanding the constraints on the result is not enough - simply because the programmer, to be sure his or her program will work, has to follow the same algorithm as the compiler, or at least some equivalent calculation, in his or her own dumb head. This statement is not specific to Haskell, but true for all languages everywhere.

That for many individuals this is doable, with or without a formal understanding of PL theory, is true. Even for these individuals, I assert that it remains a heavy cognitive load. And many, probably most, are simply unable to lift it.

My general sense of the conventional wisdom is that Haskell has the reputation of being mathematically deep and difficult. It matters not at all whether this is a true or accurate perception, so long as it is indeed perceived. And indeed, I see plenty of references to this conventional perception on this very same thread.

The difficulty is that you can hardly ever get people to talk publicly about being intimidated by Haskell - because they feel like it's equivalent to admitting that they're stupid. Worse yet, that hypothesis is by no means precluded.

In the real practical world, you simply can't get things done without relying extensively on your poor fellow human beings who happen through no fault of their own to have been born with IQs of 0x7f or less. My theory predicts that Haskell usability among this demographic should be effectively nil. I believe the broadly perceived reality backs me up, and I welcome alternative interpretations of said reality.