supermw

Especially the 21st century and onwards.

In Star Wars very few people know how to read, let alone read and write code.

This is a consequence of a world where technology advances faster than people are able to understand it, and abstractions build on top of abstractions to the point where everything just seems like magic and nobody needs to concern themselves with how things actually work.

In fact, pretty much nobody writes code except droids. The droids are instructed on what to write by a programmer, who is usually some old gray wizard in a hooded robe that speaks about what needs to be created and how it should be done at a very high level, then the droids get to work. Nobody actually understands the code the droids produce, and trying to is mostly a waste of time since you can just tell a droid to rewrite it anyway. As a result, most UI is also built by droids. That's why it's more likely to resemble something like ncurses or maybe vim with a powerline plugin, rather than MacOS or Windows.

Because nobody actually understands technology, they tend to develop crude mental models about how things work, and you end up with people doing things the hard way just because they don't know there is any other way to do it. In fact, Star Wars probably wouldn't have even happened if the Empire had better IT security.

It's also likely that people in Star Wars don't understand the concept of one technology being more "advanced" than the other, as they have no skills to evaluate that. So you sometimes see better technology in older times and worse tech in newer times.

When you look at Star Wars this way, the world actually seems very futuristic, because it is the end result of thousands of generations of people who have come to accept technology as a magical black box where you simply give inputs and get outputs. We can even begin to see this effect in our own world today.

A lot of those things are conscious choices... I suppose getting good grades is tough if you are not intelligent and were born with a bad brain, or paying attention might be tough if you had ADD.

Some of it may just be a result of having decent parents that instill good values in you, like warning you about hanging with the wrong crowds or teaching you right from wrong or showing you interesting stuff.

I guess if one is looking for an excuse for their shitty upbringing, your parents are the first place to start, not society. Maybe if someone is a shitty parent we should be more aggressive about taking their kids away, instead of letting them reach maturity in their sorry state where it becomes increasingly harder and more expensive to get them back on their feet. Maybe people shouldn't be entitled to raising their kids automatically if they can't demonstrate they'll be a good parent. It may be the only way to solve the problem of poor and underemployed people breeding out of control and creating more poor and underemployed.

My choices were nothing special: Pay attention in school, do my homework, get good grades, pick a meaningful hobby, don't drink or do drugs, don't beat up other kids for fun, read books, work in a retail store, stay away from drama, get into a decent college and choose a good major, do internships, network, pick up recommendations, get interviews at tech companies, get tech job, start paying debts, save and invest money, move and get better tech job, save and invest more money, pay more debts, keep learning new skills, get even better tech job, pay off debt, save and invest even MORE money, get promotion, save and invest TONS of money... by now you can see compounding effects are kicking in and not much can stop me. All this from a poor boy born in Raleigh.

As an individual I am hardly responsible for others doing badly.

If I put in my time, if I learn valuable skills, if I make smart choices, if I choose to do something complex over something menial, then I would want to see myself doing better than people who did not choose to do those things, no matter how nice and kind they may be.

Anything else, would be unfair and make me question the point of my efforts.

Demanding proof before continuing a discussion is a way to avoid discussions, not elevate people's understanding of a topic. Many people here do not have the same knowledge of the topic and may simply agree with the first theory that makes logical sense to them if no other data is presented.

Being that this is an internet forum, where people come to discuss things, there is no harm in preemptively presenting evidence to show why Forrester is wrong. There is nothing at stake here.

If he is wrong, it should be fairly trivial to find evidence showing why. I personally await this evidence because I find Forrester's model to be sound.

I was fortunate that my highschool offered a choice between PE and weightlifting classes.

PE has clearly always been for suckers, I remember seeing kids playing volleyball or soccer or running 3 times a week in the hot sun with no sunscreen, half of them not really even giving a fuck, and thinking how I had NO desire to be a part of that mess.

Weightlifting by contrast, was not only an easier class but also much more educational. It was like going to the gym and having a personal trainer plan your workout and give you advice. The coaches wrote up an exercise plan on the whiteboard and you just went and did it on your own, occasionally they walked around making sure people weren't goofing off.

If you wanted to slack off it was easy to just do light weights and go through the motions but most people actually did put in effort to see physical change in their bodies (and of course there's always peer pressure to be strong and fit, especially with girls watching). And because weightlifting has natural downtime in between reps you could socialize freely.

The stuff I learned in that class helped me to not be clueless when I went to an actual gym by myself. In fact, I've been going to the gym regularly ever since that class ended.