They defined the idiot as the least competent person. It's possible that a team full of idiots might think the one smart person is the idiot, but it's usually possible for the smart person to win out in the end, whatever that means (i.e. because they are smart). The article doesn't really go into the subject of objective evaluation of individual competence, as undoubtedly there will be differences of opinion. But I don't think it is (or should be) controversial to acknowledge that there is going to be a least competent person in every team, and often there will be no disagreement as to who this person is.
It is extremely rare for me to find someone who is genuinely dull
Someone doesn't need to be genuinely dull to be the "idiot". The article just defined the team idiot as the weakest member. Every team has a weakest member regardless of whether the team is all geniuses or all idiots.
And she also attributed her high success rate to luck (the luck of being on teams with other really talented people).... Not traditionally a way to claim credit you don't deserve.
It's much better to come up with a euphemism that idiots can't understand, that way we still have a way to refer to the problem ("Elliot's special needs", etc), without hurting his feelings.
By actually calling Elliot an idiot and a dummy, the author carelessly describes the "challenged" person in question with the most concise words in the English language for this condition. Because of this the reader immediately understands what the author is talking about, without needing to decode the meaning between the lines. He's undermining the system that society has engineered to allow us to call people idiots without feeling the guilt of calling them idiots.
We all know that everyone has equal intelligence and ability. It's just that some people need a little extra help to reach their full potential.
And yet the Klingon language was not a failure because it's goal was never to achieve widespread adoption among the general public. The fact that there even were people trying to teach their kids a fictional language is remarkable.
This is what people probably said to Gene Roddenberry: "OK sure you invented a language for the fictional race of people in your fictional TV show. I'm sure it's awesome. But nobody will use it."
1. Some people will use it and like it.
2. Widespread adoption is not the only redeeming quality a creative endeavor can have.
Seriously, do you expect people to use this? Or is it purely an intellectual exercise?
3. You're probably one of those people that doesn't get the point of philosophy also.
What has clearly been true about the natural world for a very long time (and what we have only recently discovered in the least couple hundred years), is that things can be competent without comprehension, to borrow a phrase from Dan Dennett.
Darwin discovered that no one needs to know how biology works in order for life to exist. It can just happen through evolution.
Turing proved that you can have a machine do math without it understanding math.
I think it is clear we will make an artificial intelligence long before we understand how intelligence works. We've been making biological/natural intelligences without knowing how intelligence works for hundreds of thousands of years. It's a pretty old idea to just copy nature when you don't know how to do something. We can simulate a bunch of neurons. If we do it right, I don't see how this wouldn't be any intelligent artifact.
If something a human can do can not be automated, it is not because it is not automatable in principle. It is most likely a failure of humans to understand what it is that they themselves are doing (i.e. they are not able to successfully translate their abilities into a an algorithm).
You might say "Aren't humans so special? there are things they can do that they cannot program the computers (that they made) do.
This is like saying: God is *so* powerful that he was able to make a rock so heavy he couldn't lift it.
Why would you hire white people and pay them more when you can hire Indians instead and make more profit?
Pro tip: Some questions are rhetorical.
In fact if you look at the other sentence in the paragraph (the one that preceded the one you quoted)
And the racist practice of paying white people additional money for no good reason is the thing that would cut into their bottom line.
It becomes clear that I was not in fact asking why people might hire white people and pay them more in general (one trivially obvious reason being racism). I was suggesting (via a rhetorical question) that someone indulging their racist proclivities is necessarily sacrificing potential profits. Maximizing profits requires abandoning all forms of irrationality including racism.
#1 we shouldn't be giving specific companies tax breaks to create jobs, especially when there is no requirement for them to do so.
#2 it doesn't bother me if Indian people are getting jobs instead of other people. People are people. It doesn't matter to me if an American gets a job rather than an Indian or vice versa, any more than it would matter to me if person from Los Angeles got a job that a person from San Diego would have otherwise gotten. Nobody should be entitled to a job or a certain salary.
As consumers we benefit from companies reducing their own costs.
As employees we should be trying to make ourselves more valuable by becoming more skilled, not inhibiting our competition.
We live in a global economy and a global society. The sooner we realize this the better off we will be. We can keep living in a bubble and try to keep our own salaries inflated compared to that of the developing world, but eventually the world won't need the USA anymore and it will just pass us by.
Imagine if Apple kept demanding high prices for the Iphone 5 and never came out with any new iphones. People would still buy iphone 5's for maybe a few years, and eventually even apple loyalists would abandon them. You can only exploit your brand and marketshare so much.
A human being (e.g. a parent) is and will always be better at determining when a situation is dangerous and the best way to mitigate the danger.
Even at present this is not always true. In the future it may very well be the case that computers are much better at assessing danger than human adults. If/when this becomes the case, it will actually be reckless to override the computers decision making process.
You refer to a "simple hack" of an automated car causing havok. Cars are controlled by computer now. Why aren't we seeing this kind of havok right now? Will computers in the future be easier to hack?
Wow I hope you aren't driving any recently produced automobiles. There is no manual override for the computer that controls the car. All you can do is make suggestions as to what you think the car should do, and it will decide ultimately whether to follow your suggestions.
I'm not exactly sure what you are trying to say. Are you saying that schools in affluent areas deserve more money because the students at affluent schools are inherently better students?
Of course there's no inequality in private schools. Right.
Private schools are not supposed to be equal. Public schools are. I don;t know why you inferred anything regarding private schools form what I said.
Non sequitur. American slaver owners were racist but were happy to have more Africans imported into the country to enslave.
So in this way no matter what kind of people you hire, you can be accused of racism. You are racist for not hiring people, and you are racist for hiring them too.
Not at all. In a racist and sexist environment, where folks who are not white males are generally underpaid compared to us white guys, a company maximizes profits by continuing that underpayment, perhaps just doing it slightly less than their competition.
And the racist practice of paying white people additional money for no good reason is the thing that would cut into their bottom line. Why would you hire white people and pay them more when you can hire Indians instead and make more profit?
No, I am saying that if your only goal is profit (i.e. you are discriminating based on profitability and not discriminating based on race), and you assessed each applicant for profitability (i.e. skills=X salary=Y without even knowing their race), you may end up hiring certain races more than others because those races are more profitable to hire.
The NBA isn't racist for hiring so many black people. It's that a very high percentage of good basketball players for various reasons happen to be black. The NBA would hire mostly Asian people if they somehow became the best at basketball.
If Indian people have the best skills and are willing to take the lowest salaries, then that's who google is going to hire. It doesn't matter to Google that they are Indian. They just happen to be Indian.
Slashdot Mirror
If you continue to fire the person that is the slowest and most wrong, you eventually end up firing your whole team.
If you have more than one person on your team, one will be the weakest at any given time.
They defined the idiot as the least competent person. It's possible that a team full of idiots might think the one smart person is the idiot, but it's usually possible for the smart person to win out in the end, whatever that means (i.e. because they are smart). The article doesn't really go into the subject of objective evaluation of individual competence, as undoubtedly there will be differences of opinion. But I don't think it is (or should be) controversial to acknowledge that there is going to be a least competent person in every team, and often there will be no disagreement as to who this person is.
It is extremely rare for me to find someone who is genuinely dull
Someone doesn't need to be genuinely dull to be the "idiot". The article just defined the team idiot as the weakest member. Every team has a weakest member regardless of whether the team is all geniuses or all idiots.
And she also attributed her high success rate to luck (the luck of being on teams with other really talented people).... Not traditionally a way to claim credit you don't deserve.
It's much better to come up with a euphemism that idiots can't understand, that way we still have a way to refer to the problem ("Elliot's special needs", etc), without hurting his feelings.
By actually calling Elliot an idiot and a dummy, the author carelessly describes the "challenged" person in question with the most concise words in the English language for this condition. Because of this the reader immediately understands what the author is talking about, without needing to decode the meaning between the lines. He's undermining the system that society has engineered to allow us to call people idiots without feeling the guilt of calling them idiots.
We all know that everyone has equal intelligence and ability. It's just that some people need a little extra help to reach their full potential.
says the anonymous coward....
And yet the Klingon language was not a failure because it's goal was never to achieve widespread adoption among the general public. The fact that there even were people trying to teach their kids a fictional language is remarkable.
It doesn't matter what you care about, you'll be dead soon.
'I was born back in -20, lo those many years ago'
You're old, why should I care about you?
This is what people probably said to Gene Roddenberry: "OK sure you invented a language for the fictional race of people in your fictional TV show. I'm sure it's awesome. But nobody will use it."
1. Some people will use it and like it.
2. Widespread adoption is not the only redeeming quality a creative endeavor can have.
Seriously, do you expect people to use this? Or is it purely an intellectual exercise?
3. You're probably one of those people that doesn't get the point of philosophy also.
I'm afraid I don't see the point.
4. Then don't use it.
What has clearly been true about the natural world for a very long time (and what we have only recently discovered in the least couple hundred years), is that things can be competent without comprehension, to borrow a phrase from Dan Dennett.
Darwin discovered that no one needs to know how biology works in order for life to exist. It can just happen through evolution.
Turing proved that you can have a machine do math without it understanding math.
I think it is clear we will make an artificial intelligence long before we understand how intelligence works. We've been making biological/natural intelligences without knowing how intelligence works for hundreds of thousands of years. It's a pretty old idea to just copy nature when you don't know how to do something. We can simulate a bunch of neurons. If we do it right, I don't see how this wouldn't be any intelligent artifact.
If something a human can do can not be automated, it is not because it is not automatable in principle. It is most likely a failure of humans to understand what it is that they themselves are doing (i.e. they are not able to successfully translate their abilities into a an algorithm).
You might say "Aren't humans so special? there are things they can do that they cannot program the computers (that they made) do.
This is like saying: God is *so* powerful that he was able to make a rock so heavy he couldn't lift it.
Things are automatically theoretical possibilities by default until they are proven to be theoretical impossibilities.
Why would you hire white people and pay them more when you can hire Indians instead and make more profit?
Pro tip: Some questions are rhetorical.
In fact if you look at the other sentence in the paragraph (the one that preceded the one you quoted)
And the racist practice of paying white people additional money for no good reason is the thing that would cut into their bottom line.
It becomes clear that I was not in fact asking why people might hire white people and pay them more in general (one trivially obvious reason being racism). I was suggesting (via a rhetorical question) that someone indulging their racist proclivities is necessarily sacrificing potential profits. Maximizing profits requires abandoning all forms of irrationality including racism.
Pro tip: I was suggesting that google *is* logical and therefore not racist.
#1 we shouldn't be giving specific companies tax breaks to create jobs, especially when there is no requirement for them to do so.
#2 it doesn't bother me if Indian people are getting jobs instead of other people. People are people. It doesn't matter to me if an American gets a job rather than an Indian or vice versa, any more than it would matter to me if person from Los Angeles got a job that a person from San Diego would have otherwise gotten. Nobody should be entitled to a job or a certain salary.
As consumers we benefit from companies reducing their own costs.
As employees we should be trying to make ourselves more valuable by becoming more skilled, not inhibiting our competition.
We live in a global economy and a global society. The sooner we realize this the better off we will be. We can keep living in a bubble and try to keep our own salaries inflated compared to that of the developing world, but eventually the world won't need the USA anymore and it will just pass us by.
Imagine if Apple kept demanding high prices for the Iphone 5 and never came out with any new iphones. People would still buy iphone 5's for maybe a few years, and eventually even apple loyalists would abandon them. You can only exploit your brand and marketshare so much.
What it sounds like you are saying is:
A human being (e.g. a parent) is and will always be better at determining when a situation is dangerous and the best way to mitigate the danger.
Even at present this is not always true. In the future it may very well be the case that computers are much better at assessing danger than human adults. If/when this becomes the case, it will actually be reckless to override the computers decision making process.
You refer to a "simple hack" of an automated car causing havok. Cars are controlled by computer now. Why aren't we seeing this kind of havok right now? Will computers in the future be easier to hack?
So this car is capable of catching terrorists too? That's seems like a pretty good feature.
Would you rather be struck by a kid riding in a taxi driven by a human driver or a kid riding in an automated taxi?
What exactly is the straw man argument being made?
Wow I hope you aren't driving any recently produced automobiles. There is no manual override for the computer that controls the car. All you can do is make suggestions as to what you think the car should do, and it will decide ultimately whether to follow your suggestions.
I'm not exactly sure what you are trying to say. Are you saying that schools in affluent areas deserve more money because the students at affluent schools are inherently better students?
It was a joke. My post was a criticism of the hypocrisy of attacking someone's post history while posting anonymously.
Of course there's no inequality in private schools. Right.
Private schools are not supposed to be equal. Public schools are. I don;t know why you inferred anything regarding private schools form what I said.
Non sequitur. American slaver owners were racist but were happy to have more Africans imported into the country to enslave.
So in this way no matter what kind of people you hire, you can be accused of racism. You are racist for not hiring people, and you are racist for hiring them too.
Not at all. In a racist and sexist environment, where folks who are not white males are generally underpaid compared to us white guys, a company maximizes profits by continuing that underpayment, perhaps just doing it slightly less than their competition.
And the racist practice of paying white people additional money for no good reason is the thing that would cut into their bottom line. Why would you hire white people and pay them more when you can hire Indians instead and make more profit?
No, I am saying that if your only goal is profit (i.e. you are discriminating based on profitability and not discriminating based on race), and you assessed each applicant for profitability (i.e. skills=X salary=Y without even knowing their race), you may end up hiring certain races more than others because those races are more profitable to hire.
The NBA isn't racist for hiring so many black people. It's that a very high percentage of good basketball players for various reasons happen to be black. The NBA would hire mostly Asian people if they somehow became the best at basketball.
If Indian people have the best skills and are willing to take the lowest salaries, then that's who google is going to hire. It doesn't matter to Google that they are Indian. They just happen to be Indian.