Hmm... now that is indeed an interesting idea, and it sounds like it could be worked into something that works.
What I had in mind was more Bayesian. You know, in much the same way you can get a computer trained to translate texts by feeding it texts and translations (Google is doing just that), one could feed it various gaming situations from a enough testers to have it learn all sorts of stuff. E.g., to recognize when a game flew off the hook in your description, or is about to fly off the hook, or what situations are working and aren't working for certain play styles. Or, say, historical forts so it can design one itself.
It doesn't even have to be all pre-trained, it can just collect the anonymized data from players daily to a central server, and refine the story engine data for the clients. So even if you're an early buyer, at least you'd eventually have a reason to replay it, as by then the game had been retrained a lot.
The more I think about it, the more I think the two can be combined. Your genetic approach could be driven by a statistical engine.
E.g., we have already played games with _awful_ fortresses, for example, even designed by humans.
Take Fort Moonmoth from Morrowind for example. (Or whatever the one right east of Balmora was called.) Among other pieces of awfulness, it was built right into a hill side. So you could climb up a gentle slope up the hill, and actually rain arrows _downwards_ on the defenders in the towers. Or you could just keep walking over the hill and... find yourself on the walls. Forget about bringing a ladder to storm the walls, it had that hill as a bloody natural ramp onto the walls.
It's a fortress that makes absolutely no sense from a military point of view. It's a waste of stone and manpower. For that matter, it's also a logistics disaster, it lacks the basic services which would be needed in either a castrum or proper defensive fort, etc.
Take the walled towns in Morrowind. They make no bloody sense. They don't even have gates, or ramparts or towers. They can't even keep wild animals out. Seriously.
Plus, what sense does it make to build a city wall, in a world where every mage and their friends can (A) fly, and (B) teleport inside to the fort's chapel? Forget ballistas vs trebuchets, those two problems make the whole fortress obsolete in one go.
This isn't meant as an attack on Morrowind, but just as an illustration of the kind of nonsense we put up with in games. It's not even just Morrowind, anyway. Most cities and forts in games are, simply put, non-functional decor. They are to the real thing, well, what a plastic flower is to a real flower. It looks like one, but doesn't actually function like one, and even the looks are there only as long as you don't look too closely.
So, well, what I'm really trying to say is: I'm sure we could live with imperfections in a computer-generated one too. If it built a wooden palisade in an age of cannons, I'm sure most RPG players wouldn't give that problem a second thought.
Very much so. You'd need a monster of an AI for that. Still, AFAIK statistical approaches are finally starting to show some results in the AI arena, so it might not be as impossible as it used to be. A far way off? No doubt. But after decades of "it needs arithmetic compression because I am TEH GREAT GURU and I said so" approaches to AI that led nowhere, we _are_ finally seeing some (small) results. So, you know, at least I can dream:P
Note that I'm not even asking for it to write _good_ prose. God knows there are plenty of games that did well enough with mediocre plots, uninspired delivery, and bland repetitive soulless prose. Morrowind, for example. If the AI can at least write gramatically correct English, that's already a start.
You'd be surprised how much more _can_ be made with a CPU.
E.g., sure, we like to use the stereotypical old mom as an example of someone who only sends emails to the kids and old friends. Unfortunately it's false. It was true in the 90's, but now digital cameras are everywhere and image manipulation software is very affordable. And so are the computers which can do it. You'd be suprised the kind of heavy-duty image processing mom does on hundreds of pictures of squirrels and geese and whatever was in the park on that day.
And _video_ processing isn't too far out of reach either. It's a logical next step too: if you're taking pictures, why not short movies? Picture doing the same image processing on some thousands of frames in a movie instead of one still pictures.
E.g., software development. Try building a large project on an old 800 MHz slot-A Athlon, with all optimizations on, and then tell me I don't need a faster CPU. Plus, nowadays IDEs aren't just dumb editors with a "compile" option in the menus any more. They compile and cross-reference classes all the time as you type.
E.g., games, since you mention the graphics card. Yeah, ok, at the moment most games are just a glorified graphics engine, and mostly just use the CPU to pump the triangles to the graphics card. Well that's a pretty poor model, and the novelty of graphics alone is wearing off fast.
How about physics? They're just coming into fashion, and fast. Yeah, we make do at the moment with piss-poor approximations, like Oblivion's bump-into-a-table-and-watch-plates-fly-off-superso nic engine. There's no reason we couldn't do better.
How about AI? Already in X2 and X3 (the space sim games) it doesn't only simulate the enemies around you, but also what happens in the sectors where your automated trade or patrol ships are. I want to see that in more games.
Or how about giving good AI to city/empire building games? Tropico already simulated up to 1000 little people in your city, going around their daily lives, making friends, satisfying their needs, etc. Not just doing a dumb loop, like in Pharaoh or Caesar 3, but genuinely trying to solve the problem of satisfying their biggest need at the moment: e.g., if they're hungry, they go buy food (trekking across the whole island if needed), if they're sick, they go to a doctor, etc. I'd like to see more of that, and more complex at that.
Or let's have that in RPGs, for that matter. Oblivion for example made a big fuss about how smart and realistic their AI is... and it wasn't. But the hype it generated does show that people care about that kind of thing. So how about having games with _big_ cities, not just 4-5 houses, but cities with 1000-2000 inhabitants, which are actually smart. Let's have not just a "fame" and "infamy" rating, let's have people who actually have a graph of aquaintances and friends, and actually gradually spread the rumours. (I.e., you're not just the guy with 2 points infamy, but it's a question of which of your bad deeds did this particular NPC hear about.) Let's not have omniscient guards that teleport, but actually have witnesses calculate a path and run to inform the guards, and lead them to the crime. Etc.
Or how about procedurally generated content? The idea of creating whole cities, quests and whatnot procedurally isn't a new one, but unfortunately it tends to create boring repetition at the moment. (See Daggerfall or Morrowind.) How about an AI complex enough to generate reasonably interesting stuff. E.g., not just recombine blocks, but come up with a genuinely original fortress from the ground up, based on some constraints. E.g., how about generating whole story arcs? It's not impossible, it's just very hard.
And if you need to ask "why?", let's just say: non-linear stories. Currently if you want, for example, to play a light side and a dark side, someone has to code two different arcs, although most players will only see one or the other. If you add more points and ways you can branch the story (e.g.
Honestly you simply are stereotyping cats. And you are being silly for the sake of making a joke but I have to correct you.
Very much so. It was _supposed_ to be a thoroughly silly illustration of anthropomorphising animals, and anthropomorphising all wrong at that, to make fun of people who do that to draw some conclusions about human behaviour.
So I'm not going to disaggree with your corrections there. E.g., yes, I know what they really wanted when they curled up on my book. Very much so.
So, on the whole, you wrote the perfect second part to my message, probably better than I could have myself. You illustrate just the kind of stuff that gets deliberately ignored/skipped/hand-waved/etc to make one of those points about comparing humans to animals. That was just the point: once you start looking at that stuff that got skipped over, the whole analogy goes to pieces. Thank you very much for taking mine apart.
That said,
only untrained cats left to act like antisocial misfits do. you train your dog, Why dont you train your cat?
The obvious reason: because I actually like them as they are. I don't consider them "antisocial misfits", I just consider them "cats". I don't expect them to act by human standards, I want them to just act like a cat would. And I don't want them reprogrammed into something they weren't supposed to be. If I wanted a dog, I'd get a dog. I don't need to get a cat and then teach it to be a dog. (Though I did involuntarily teach a dog to be a cat.) And if I wanted something "scripted" to fake a more human behaviour, I'd get a tamagochi.
And also from a pragmatic point of view: I haven't yet had one which I really had problems with. They were social enough even if they occasionally need some time alone, or had an upper limit of how long a petting can take. So, well, I don't see any reason to pay some money and stress the cat, to "fix" something which isn't a problem (for me.)
Sounds to me like the poor guy was bringing his girlfriend gifts and/or taking her out to lunch to get any action. If the bonobos were any more evolved, they'd probably have also seen him taking her to a movie;)
As usual with such issues, the answer is: yes and no. Depends what you're looking at and at what level.
Yes, you can say that many individual humans are not much better than trained monkeys. But that's a different topic.
No, IMHO, you can't compare:
A) a human behaviour that evolved over 40,000 years, and based on concepts refined and formalized over all that time, to
B) a monkey behaviour that exists only because someone trained them to do that.
Even if many of the individual humans involved at point A don't really understand that evolution and those concepts, nevertheless, some smarter humans before them did. Joe Sixpack may not understand Keynesian economics in regard to, say, government spending, but Keynes did. It's not a random behaviour that came out of nowhere.
Saying, basically, "haha, human traders act like monkeys" would be valid if we were talking behaviour which the monkeys genuinely discovered on their own. Not when it's monkeys trained to reproduce a human behaviour. Then it becomes, basically, "haha, human traders act like monkeys trained to act like human traders"... err... what's the surprise or revelation there, then?
Even if you talk about the individual "trained monkey" humans, the best you can say that something is simple enough so both a human and a monkey can be trained to do. That's a valid observation.
But reducing the behaviour itself to, basically, "it's the same that monkeys do", isn't saying that much when those monkeys only do it because someone coaxed them to. It's not really monkey behaviour, it's _human_ behaviour that the monkeys have been trained to imitate. It's not really comparing human behaviour to monkey behaviour, but really human behaviour to the same human behaviour. Whop-de-do, big surprise that it ends up the same.
Even if you view humans as trained monkey, it's really comparing:
A) a human trained humans to do X, vs
B) a human trained monkeys to do X.
The real common denominator there isn't "humans act like monkeys", but the fact that a human trained both to do the same.
sorry to break your party but EVERYTHING you know and do as a human comes from the TRAINING you received... a school for humans works on the same basic principles as a school for dogs, gorillas, etc.. the only diff is that humans seem to have a way better capacity to assimilate that training.. or it's just that the methods are better suited for them.
Sorry to break it to you, but if all that school left you with is a bunch of pavlovian reflexes, like a school for dogs would, then you probably shouldn't be a human to start with. I will assume you were just going for a figure of speech, instead.
A characteristic of humans is that you can also think about it later, and change that training. You can later realize stuff like, to use that old joke as an example, "wth, mom's cutting off the end of the pot roast was only because she didn't have a bigger pot. I have one, so I can change that recipe." Or you can move to another country/group/whatever and realize stuff like, "oh, here it's impolite to blow your nose at the dinner table, like dad kept doing, let's refrain from doing it." You don't continue doing it for the rest of your life, like a trained dog would.
The difference basically is that you also have the intellect to understand _why_ something is done, _when_ it's done, and when _not_ to do it. It's not just stimulus-reaction reflexes based on pure association. You have the mental power to realize when an existing reflex is stupid, and force yourself to stop or develop a better one.
Well, or _should_ have the mental power. Maybe I'm assuming too much;)
That's how all human progress happened too. Some guy had been dragging stuff around all his life, and then comes up with the idea of rolling bigger stuff on logs. Some other guy had been pushing stuff on logs, and notices he doesn't really need the whole log: the end discs will do. Voila, you have wheels now.
And to get back to the economy: some guy had been dealing with gold coins all his life, then he figures out that you don't need to actually carry the coin, a note saying "this is worth X ounces of gold" will do the trick just nicely. Voila, now you have paper money.
_That_ is the point. While an animal might just blindly apply a reflex again and again, a human can choose which reflexes to apply and which not. There is usually some rationale and logic behind whether you do something or not. Whereas training an animal to mechanically do the same thing, doesn't really tell you much about the humans. As long as the monkeys just apply some trained reflexes, as opposed to having a reason for it, you can't really say, "heh, day traders act just like monkeys." That's only because you trained the monkeys to imitate it. No more, no less.
Yes, but, see, the trick is to know when it's just a funny metaphor which shouldn't be taken seriously. Nothing against the human species coming up with entertaining metaphors, similes and other figures of speech, but the trick is to know that that's not, in fact, an accurate model of reality.
Yes, if we couldn't dream, fantasize, whatever, we'd probably be less successful than snails. But equally if we took all phantasies to seriously, we'd be even less successful. The trick is to _not_ jump off the house just because you dream of flying.
Same here. It's ok to read about monkeys trained to enact a silly pseudo-economy game, and to be entertained by it. What I'm saying is: but please _do_ remember that it's essentially only entertainment. It may be packed in some pseudo-scientific and all revelation babble, but do come back to RL when you're done with it anyway. Realize that, once that entertainment is over, the RL economy still doesn't work like that. Judging RL economy by what silly play a bunch of trained monkeys do, is about as productive as judging RL warfare by D&D rules.
That may well be so, but that sorta misses the point that it's useless to compare a human to an animal that has been _trained_ to do something, as a way to draw conclusions about the human. E.g., sure, you can train a gorilla to understand sign language, and it sure says something about its intelligence. But then you can't go and write a book on the premise that, basically, "hey, what mutes do is exactly the same sign language as these gorillas are using! Mutes are just like gorillas!"
Basically it's bullshit to then compare a community of gorillas arificially _trained_ to do X to a community of humans who have a rationale behind doing X, as if there were no difference there. Whatever X may be.
In this case, "monkeys using washers/caps/whatever as money" conjures an image that is thoroughly misleading. It's not like those monkeys just saw a heap of washers and went, "I know, let's use those as money". They were _trained_ and coaxed to play a game they don't even understand.
Money was a hard concept to figure out even for humans. It took tens of thousands of years to figure that one out. Even if you look at the economy of, say, the Old Kingdom (an ancient Egypt period), it was based on barter. If you had some extra grain (e.g., you were a farmer) and wanted a pot, you'd go to the potter and ask, basically, "how much grain do you want for that pot?" Then the potter wanted a knife and went to the smith and asked, "can I trade you some pottery for a knife? What if I gave you some of this grain I earned too?" And so on.
Discovering money wasn't just an accidental seeing a round piece of metal and going, "oh, you know, we could use a bunch of those as money." It was a long and rocky road in itself, for example, discovering first the artificial value of jewellery and other rare luxuries. Then the fact that a golden chalice could be stored longer than a ton of grain, which would eventually rot. And only then the money wasn't just some rounded bits that could be traded, but a standardized quantity of such a valuable, non-decaying metal.
E.g., the value of the Roman Solidus, wasn't just being a round piece like a washer, but being a standardized quantity of gold. There wasn't some arbitrary assigned value to it, like when playing with washers or Monopoly money, the value was the exact value of the 4.5g of gold in it. Two pounds of Solidi weren't just an arbitrary value multiplied by the number of coins, it was the exact value of two pounds of gold.
Floating paper money with floating values are a _very_ recent invention, and it took lots of growing pains to wrap the human mind around _that_ notion. It took first assigning a value in gold, and getting people to believe that they can actually go and redeem a 100$ note for 100$ worth of gold. I.e., the value was _still_ tied to the idea of having an inherent value. It took a Great Depression to finally decouple money from an intrinsic value in precious metals, and some people _still_ can't really wrap their mind around it.
That was, in a nutshell, 40000 years after humans got out of Africa. Yep, 40k years. That's how long it took humans to arrive at the modern concept of money as just tokens.
So it's silly to believe that a bunch of monkeys would just see a bunch of worthless (for them) washers and immediately come up with the exact same concept. "Hey, we'll use these as tokens whose value is dictated by supply and demand." Nope, sorry, it's just not going to happen.
What you can have is monkeys _trained_ to play with washers in a mockery of an economy. We don't even know how much they understand there, and how much is mindless imitation and "pavlov's dog" kinda reflexes.
E.g., did someone actually figure out prostitution in all its human implications? Or more likely, a bunch of monkeys trained to give tokens to the researcher on all occasions, e.g., when they're fed, started also giving tokens as a reflex to anyone, including to the female they're mating with?
Or maybe, it just shows that you can compare anything to anything, if you carefully choose only the aspects that sorta superficially support your idea, do a lot of sophistry to make them look even more supportive, and keep your fingers crossed that noone notices all else you've ignored.
Let me tell you a joke: "A researcher puts a flea on a piece of paper and yells, "JUMP!" The startled flea jumps. The researcher cuts off the flea's legs, puts it back on the piece of paper, and yells, "JUMP!" The flea doesn't jump. The researcher notes, "Fleas hear with their legs. A flea whose legs have been cut off can't hear any more.""
Or here, let me offer definitive proof that cats are nerds, or at least nerds act just like cats. Cats:
- are naturally attracted to books and keyboards. Mine always used to come curl up on the book I was reading.
- aren't very social, and don't deal well with extended periods of social interaction. (Keep petting one too long after it signalled "I've had enough," and it might just scratch.) They also actually need periods of being alone or left alone. Also, bringing a new cat home might just result in a fight over who's alpha, instead of, "hi, welcome to the team."
- except for a few modified/selected races, only "talk" when they actually have something to say and/or when all else failed. (See the widespread myth that meowing is somehow only for communicating with humans.) They're also not good at telling you what they want or why. How introverted is that?
- have a problem with authority and obeying orders. (See, "herding cats.")
- have unbalanced diets, by human standard, and would rather not eat their veggies
- have weird sleep schedules, by human standards.
- like it warm. I can just see a cat coming to the office in mountain boots and a sweater in July, if it were anthropomorphic.
- really dislike being stuffed in a suit and tie.
- really don't like showering, or being given a shower. Actually, "loathe" just about starts to describe it.
- play (with) all sorts of stuff that makes no sense for a normal human.
- never discovered complex courting rituals.
Etc. There you go. I've proven beyond all doubt that nerds act just like cats. Funny how similar we are to animals, eh?
In practice it just shows how easy it is to find _some_ animal that matches whatever you want to match, if you just look hard enough and ignore what is _really_ happening there. E.g., I've thoroughly ignored the fact that a nerd surviving on say, chocolate or pizza/chinese food only, is doing it because of taste preferences or being too lazy for anything else, while a cat is actually biologically made to be a meat-only eater. ("Obligate carnivore.") E.g., I've thoroughly ignored the fact that a cat's attraction to books isn't because it actually wants to read, and to your keyboard isn't because it wants to program. Etc.
To get back to the topic, yeah, you can compare anything from the real economy to a monkey play-economy, but it's just material to make Joe Sixpack feel better about his not understanding the real economy. Day trading especially is a complex phenomenon, including such aspects as being, basically, a form of gambling. I.e., when you see monkeys playing cards/dice/3-cups/whatever, then you'll have an essential ingredient in it. Sure, you can look at it superficially being just like monkeys and bottle caps changing hands, but that's the kind of superficial over-simplification that's outright useless except maybe as an emotional metaphor.
Well, seriously now, just the thought of any kind of brain-enhancing medicine makes me worry. How long until some dumbass parents stuff their kids full of such medicine, in the name of giving them a future?
I know my parents, for all the other good and (plenty of) bad things they did, pretty much buried me alive in extra homework. I'm not even sure it was as much for a future as such, as because in the circle of mom's and dad's equally nerdy friends they could brag about my achievements. I even pretty much ended up teaching dad physics so he can brag that he taught me. How's that for a stupid way to get your childhood stolen?
But at least thankfully no chemicals were involved. If such medicine existed, would I have been pretty much pickled in it?
Plus, much as I despise the western world aversion to learning in high school, in this scenario I'd worry more about the parts of the world that do take school seriously. E.g., most of Asia. After one guy starts taking this kind of stuff, how long until half the class gets marinated in it? You know, just so their grades don't look any worse. Little Tanaka is getting all A+, why can't you? Time to start giving you medicine each morning before school.
And if someone wants to say, "so what? It just makes them finally learn something in school"... how about the side-effects? E.g., how about remembering clearly and in detail, for the rest of your life, each time the school bully humiliated you? That's a scary thought.
What about later? With the drive since the 90's to find a way to write programs with cheap, summarily re-trained ex-burger-flippers instead of expensive nerds, how long until this kind of stuff becomes almost mandatory at work? Hey, think of how much the company could save if you don't keep forgetting (and having to rediscover) what each piece of the code does. How long until you have to drink the kool-aid before getting any training, or before each meeting? Hey, they're discussing important stuff there. (E.g., the boss's vacation.) You can't go and forget everything after a couple of hours. Or immediately, due to the wonderful effect of crap Powerpoint presentations.
It's not even as much wild guesses or slippery slope: it already happened in sports. The reason for forbidding steroids and other doping isn't only because one guy might get an undeserved medal, but because it creates a pressure for everyone to do the same. Once Mr X wins a medal based on being pickled in chemicals, then everyone else gets told by their trainer/manager/whatever, "you start drinking this stuff, or I'm finding someone else who does."
Not much to disaggree with, but mostly for the sake of clarification:
So I'm going to say that your argument, while well-worded, fails, because this syndrome affects.02-.03% of the population.
My argument would fail if I had made the blanket generalization that all nerds have Asperger Syndrome. Which I didn't. All I'm saying that Paul Graham's generalization that, basically, "you're unpopular because you want to be unpopular" is also false. There _are_ people (not all, obviously, but there are) which just can't take part in these popularity games even if they wanted to.
At the scale, of, say, a country with 300,000,000 population, 2..3 out of 10,000 means that some 60,000 to 90,000 people will have the condition. Obviously it doesn't cover all nerds, but it's a non-negligible enough fraction to be a counter-example to his generalization.
Unfortunately, most nerds continue to ignore this fact, and end up living unhappy lives and working underpaid jobs, because they lack the charisma and intuition to progress.
Here you seem to assume that everyone has the same goals. If your measure of happiness is measured in money, by all means, go ahead and engage in social games for a promotion.
Thing is, that's what some of us actually try to avoid. Hard to believe as that might sound.
The thing is, in most places the most accessible way upwards is a promotion to management. Which pretty much means changing jobs completely. That's the point where you cease to be an engineer/programmer/whatever, and start being a manager. They're as unrelated as switching a job as a gardener for a job at MacDonalds. You'll have to do different things, interact with different people, and have completely different kinds of interactions.
If you see that job as just an interchangeable way to get money, sure, go ahead and change job X for job Y just because it pays more. Why not? If however you happen to love job X and hate job Y, at some point you have to ask yourself if it's worth it.
Happiness is a function of many variables, and money is just one variable there. Being more happy is more of a min-max problem in a multi-dimensional space, not something where you can maximize X and not even care about what happens to Y and Z. Sometimes gaining an extra 1 unit along X, is not worth it if you lose 10 units on Y and Z. It might actually be a _less_ optimal solution than what you started with.
The problem is even less trivial when the scale isn't even linear. More money is less and less important when you're already well past the bare necessities range, even past the conveniences, and already well into luxuries range. A little more money won't make me signifficantly happier. On the other hand, moving into a job I dislike (I've tried it, I know I dislike it) will make me signifficantly unhappier. It's just not worth it.
Now I'm not saying _you_ should apply the same, of course. That's a judgment you'll have to make for yourself. I know what _I_ chose, though.
And to get back to the point: so not being social means I'll be forever trapped behind a computer, doing the same job? Well, _good_! Yippee! You just gave me the perfect reason to be unsocial.
Laws usually aren't worded that vaguely. Noone ever passed a law fobidding something as vaguely defined as "attacks". If you've ever read a law or a contract, you'll notice that they're very verbose things, and go into painstaking detail as to what is included in that definition, what isn't, what are the situations when it doesn't apply, etc. You're not the only one who noticed that if something can be mis-interpreted, someone will deliberately mis-interpret it.
In other words, just because a dumbed down article is worded vaguely, doesn't mean that the law also will. The real law will likely go on and on like the energizer bunny, using a dozen paragraphs as to exactly what kinds of attacks are meant.
That, of course, doesn't mean that they'll get it exactly right. If you want to criticize exactly what they do define as attacks, by all means, please do. But going on a whole "auugh, they're taking away our liberties" panic just because an unrelated text uses a vague word, seems kinda unproductive.
Sorta off-topic, but methinks that Paul Graham misses the point by a mile, and just manages to add insult to injury.
The fact is, a number of kids (and adults) suffer from Asperger Syndrome. In a nutshell, it's missing the whole input circuitry for "body language". An aspie simply doesn't have the equipment to deal with those popularity games. He can go on for years talking about the wrong topics, or wearing the unfashionable clothes, or looking bored at the wrong time, and won't even know that he offended anyone. Or why is everyone else avoiding him.
Incidentally, Asperger Syndrome also creates "nerds". People with it end up more interested in stuff like maths, physics, programming, etc, for which they don't lack the input. If you will, "how the world works" as opposed to "how people work, and how to game it."
By the sound of it, Paul Graham wasn't one. If he _could_ tell who's popular, and who gravitates around whom, he probably wasn't. Good for him.
But then it's pretty stupid to tell one, basically, "you're unpopular because you don't want to be popular." It's like telling a paraplegic, basically, "you're in a wheelchair because you don't want to walk." If the nerve connections aren't there, you can want it all day long, it just won't happen.
Yes, you can learn to function in society with it. But it takes a lot of time, and a lot of shooting in the dark, and whole days of acting based on guessing what the others would react to this and that. Because you just don't see the reactions. But you'll never be anywhere _near_ in the same class as the local prom-queen or jock. The best you can do is play it safe not to offend, and maybe tell a few non-offensive jokes and wisecracks, not go for being the popular kid.
You'll _never_ be in the A category of popularity, in his giving popularity grades to cafeteria tables. You can at most work your way to being tolerated in a C category instead of D. Or more practically, find yourself a group where you all like each other enough, and don't give a damn if you're all D grade as popularity goes
And it takes a lot of missing the mark and some outside help to even realize that you're doing anything wrong. E.g., in retrospect I used to go into whole tirades about how, say, a radio works, starting with the transformer and ending with the speaker. Good grief, how boring it must have been for the poor victims of it. It never occured to me at the time. Unless you have someone to tell you "dude, you bored everyone stiff" or "dude, wtf, you told that joke the 20'th time this week", you just don't even know that something was wrong. And most people will avoid telling you something like that.
And reading something like "you're unpopular because you don't want to be popular" is just blaming the victim, and frankly cruel. It just adds an undeserved helping of guilt and insecurity, to someone whose self esteem is taking kicks every day as it is.
Jesus F. Christ, not the "free speech" OCPD cases again. "Free speech" never included the right to libel and slander and verbally assault even for adults. Go to your neighbour and tell him "you're a cock-sucking faggot" once too often, and you'll find yourself called to court.
"Free speech" is defined strictly in your relation to Congress. No, really, go actually read that ammendment some day. It doesn't give you a right over anyone else, and it doesn't mean anyone else has to tollerate it.
If you want to use your speech to criticize the government, go ahead. Noone will stop you, regardless of whether you're adult or kid. Rant about Bush or the war in Iraq or about "fascist neo-cons vs bleedin' heart liberals" all you want, and noone will stop you. _That_ is what freedom of speech was supposed to protect.
But that doesn't mean you have a right to verbally bully, slander or libel anyone. Making your neighbour's or classmate's life miserable is _not_ what those founding fathers had in mind. The concern was about being able to tell the king or president to fuck off and change an unpopular policy, not about having a right to go call your neighbour a cocksucker.
And, frankly, it's not how rule of the law was supposed to work. It's supposed to be rule of the law, not rule of the meanest thug or bully. If you don't like what your neighbour is doing, go petition the Congress for a law that forbids it. Letting people intimidate each other into submission is frankly such a huge step backward, it's just not worth it. It's a return to year 3000 BC. Especially if you like your liberty and fear government tyranny, I see no reason to bend over to the even more arbitrary rule of local thugs and bullies.
If by "problem" you mean, "people should be smarter than to judge someone by anonymous rumours", well, yes, it would be nice if people changed and everyone was sane and logical. It won't happen any time soon, though. In the meantime, we _are_ stuck in a world where anonymous rumours do a lot of real harm.
You know, sorta like "it would be nice to have summer right now." Yeah, it would be nice, but it's not going to change just because I wish it would change.
And in a sense, they _are_ logical, just not to the end they proclaim. That's how people manage to seem illogical: they proclaim one goal, when they're really after another. Or they present a (somewhat bent) line of reasoning from facts to logical conclusion, when they really worked backwards from what they _really_ want to what excuse they can present as axioms to reach the desired conclusion. E.g., they don't really start from "the facts are X and Y, therefore it follows logically that I actually need a pony", they start from "I want a pony" and work backwards to what excuse they can sorta base it on.
In this case, _if_ the goal was to find the absolute best employee, yeah, it would make no sense to first trim the pool based on rumours and even worse. The real goal usually is to not have to work much at it. Trimming the pool _is_ the goal, so to speak. Some boss can't be arsed to judge 10,000 CVs, so he'll find arbitrary ways to get rid of 90% of them.
If you think rumours are a bad way, there are worse. Some are proud that they first discard half the pile without any further reason. Some use, literally, tarot and numerology. Seriously. Assign one number for each letter in your name, sum that to a number, sum that number's digits, keep at it until you have a single digit. If you match the digit for the company's name, you qualify for the next round, if not, you're not a good match for the company anyway. Nice way to get rid of 90% of the applications in one fel swoop. Easily automatable too.
Next round, google them for an excuse to not hire them. Ah, he posted some stuff about authority that's not to my liking. Probably some immature malcontent, he'd probably question my authority too. Next applicant. Google, click, click, ah, he has a MySpace page. MySpace is only for kids and paedos. Grow up buddy. Yep, another resume goes into the garbage bin. Next applicant. Geesh, he has an AOL address. No need to even google him, AOLers are infamous for being clueless noobs. Get a real provider if you claim to be a techie, buddy. Yep, another resume bites the dust. (Repeat ad nauseam.)
For the neighbours, much the same applies: they _are_ logical, but not to the ends they proclaim. The goals might just be to be a fashionable prom-queen of the community, so it's better to join in the crowd shouting "boo! drive the pervert out of town!" than to be the unfashionable one playing the devil's advocate.
Etc.
That's how humans work. We're driven by petty goals, laziness, etc, and from there we work backwards to find some excuse for it.
What are you going to do? Change the whole world? Noble goal, no doubt, but ultimately doomed to fail.
If you have a work schedule that changes every week, I have all the compassion for you. That tends to cause all sorts of real problems. Duly noted. I don't think most people who read Slashot are in a situation where they have to work night shift every third week, though.
Heh. Oh please... Is cyber-bullying some made-up thing? No, it's not. We're in the age where employers routinely google their employees, neighbours google each other, and the village gossip googles the whole damn village for gossip material. We also live in an age where people might glue posters to your door just because someone found a sex offender by the same name via googling (yep, it happened) or run you out of town just because your business card says "paeditrician" (hint: it's a doctor for kids, not a paedophile.) Someone can do a _lot_ of harm that way.
E.g., if someone were to poison the web and the boards with some fake "I love fucking pre-teen boys" fake homepage for you, or troll a lot of boards with stuff like "melikamp said he's working hard to overcome his kiddy-porn addiction" or "read melikamp's guide to surfing the porn from work and using the corporate app server as a warez ftp site", it would cause a lot more damage than you seem think.
It might come to bite you in the ass at the next time you're looking for a job, for a start, and you might not even know it. Noone does a thorough search to filter libel from actual info, and put it all in the right context. You're not worth that kind of effort. They're just looking for an excuse, any excuse, to trim the candidates pool before they even start. They'll just google until something bad comes up, then stop.
Even if they suspected it's bogus, a lot of people and companies are basically just prom queens anyway. It would be unfashionable for them to be associated with someone with that kind of a reputation. They have some PR image of being a responsible family-friendly company, and it's just not worth the effort to answer once a week, "then why do you associate with that pervert?" protests.
More importantly, it does cause real grief. It's not as simple as "then don't go to that MySpace page." When your friends start avoiding you, or asking "wow, did you really do _that_?", it's damn hard to just blissfully ignore it.
As for the "free expression" rant... well, basically I'm just going to say, "pfft... who cares?" The _spirit_ of those liberties was to provide a possibility for _political_ change. (See the "petition for redress" part.) It was not supposed to be a god given right to slander the neighbour, bully the classmates, troll the boards, cheat on WoW, and whatever else some people imagine. If it ends up used just as an excuse to bully, harrass and cause grief, we'll put some limits on it. It's that simple.
You _can_ still affect plenty of change even without singling out and bullying individuals. You can campaign for a reform of the school system, or whatever. Attack the idea or the organization, not bully individuals. Or maybe you have a genuine problem with an individual? Well, we have courts of law, they have superiors, etc. If they're that bad, probably everyone else feels the same about them, and you have enough people backing you to go the civilized route. We don't need self-appointed thugs individually terrorizing and intimidating people, thank you very much. Online or offline. If you can't come up with anything better than bullying that teacher, then excuse me if I don't think you should be allowed to.
Yes, slippery slope, fascism, authority is doubleplus ungood, etc... who cares? Democracy isn't just a buzzword to whip people into a frenzy, it's really the ability to affect change. The notion that, basically, "article/ammendment X is sacred and beyond any meddling" is what theocracies do, not what a democracy is all about. If one liberty was poorly enough defined to end up just an excuse to bully, harrass and cause grief, we'll have it changed, thank you very much. We'll reword it or put limits on it, until it serves its original purpose, and stops being a liability.
Yes, we all like being free to say stuff like "we should pull out of Iraq already" or "the president is dumb" without fear. You know, _political_ stuff. No, we don't think that it should extend to "the principal said he likes to
I was one of the kids who were hard to teach, I guess, but I'm not sure if it was the "bad habits." I'm guessing it's more like being the kind of personality who'd rather deal with computers or a physics book than with humans, that also caused it. I would have been just as hard to teach in any other subject, and in fact I've been just as hard to teach in subjects that didn't interest me. In fact, worse. At least in computer-related classes I was willing to acknowledge a neat new trick on the rare times when I saw one, in the classes that didn't interest me I was more like "wtf am I even doing here in the first place?"
Being bored stiff in half the classes, and there only because my parents said that a diploma is good for me, also didn't help. I had to sit through classes (and take exams) about how to compile a Pascal program, or what a for loop does, or later what a hash table is, etc. I took classes for reasons ranging from having no choice if I want a diploma, to basically, "I guess it's good to have that spelled out on the diploma too." It's not very motivating. And let me tell you, it takes all the fun out of ADHD;)
Believing we know it all... well, some of us actually occasionally proved that we do. I remember one exam when two of us came up with the same solution that differed a lot from everyone else's and the professors'. So we get to explain why. Well, his solution had a race condition. I'm not saying that he was stupid or anything, probably just tailored to judge what the exam problem was about: proving you can use shared memory at all. Well, me and the other guy also proved that we know how not to thrash that shared memory.
A lot of time, what we were taught or asked to do, actually genuinely made no sense... either for the purpose of those 100..1000 line assignments, or for the purpose of a RL sized program. E.g., hearing a professor ranting and raving about proving everything correct, just asked for the objection: how are you going to do that for a 1,000,000 line program? That's actually a pretty small one by RL standards.
I have all respect for what Steve Jobs did: dropping out and taking the classes that really interested him. I'm not an Apple fan, or a Steve Jobs fan as such, but I can respect a sane approach to learning.
I realize that that might come out arrogant. Heck, it _is_ arrogant, but, well, now you know why some of us are hard to teach:P
What happens when it takes you four hours to get to sleep?
Well, here's how it worked for me: keep at it.
If you're used to staying up until 6 AM, yeah, you won't immediately switch to going to sleep at 10PM or 12PM or whatever you have as the new schedule. It will involve some laying in bed and not being able to sleep, because your internal clock is set for another hour.
The worst thing you can possibly do there is just get back up and sit at the computer. (Or whatever else) Then smack the clock in the morning and get back to sleep. That's the way to just prolong the problem.
So go to bed at, say, 10 PM and rise and shine at 6 AM. (Or 12 and 8, or whatever schedule you decided.) Do rise and get your morning coffee at that hour, even if you only slept 3 hours. It's ok. It'll make it a hell of a lot easier to fall asleep early the next night. Keep at it.
Eventually you just get used to that new schedule.
Don't start shifting it, no matter how tempting it is. As I've said, the average human clock is actually set for 26 hours and reset each morning. It actually works somewhat like a PLL. It's damn easy to start shifting a bit forward every day, and end back at the starting "I'm not a morning person" square. Essentially that's how I ended up with a 6AM to 2PM sleep schedule back then. You just shift forward until you hit a limit where you can't shift any further. (E.g., your boss would _really_ start minding it if you show up at 5 PM, when everyone else is leaving.) Then you stop at that, and start making excuses as to why that's somehow your natural schedule.
And don't start finding "oh, I can live on just 6 hours sleep at night" excuses, no matter how tempting it is to prolong the day that way. A lot of people who have trouble waking up are actually in this category. No, you can't live happily on 6 hours a night, not in the long term. Not unless you're very old, anyway. You just start being a bit more tired each day, and it piles up. Your body (or rather, brain) is trying to tell you something if you're having to roll for willpower to wake up. You're still tired. That way lies the temptation to start shifting your bedtime, too.
Basically, it just takes discipline. Yeah, it's an ugly word, but that's what everyone else has to do. Don't think it's some nerd-only gene that makes only you have trouble keeping the schedule. A lot of those poor buggers at the assembly line would start shifting their schedule too, if they had a chance (e.g., flex time.) But they already hit the forward limit, their boss complains if they're not at work at, say, 8 AM. So they just apply a bit of discipline, and go to bed at the right hour so they can be up and running at 6 AM. That's all.
Where are you getting the "uninterested" from? Curious, since that has no bearing at all to the people we're discussing. If they are uninterested, they'll change programs and/or fail out.
I'm getting the uninterested part from the "they're put off by the nerdiness of it" theme in TFA. I'm sorry, but someone whose chief concern with choosing carreers is how fashionable it is, doesn't strike me as particularly passionate about that line of work.
As for bad habits, needing to teach them out of someone at the collegiate level is as bad as needing to teach them basics at the collegiate level -- this is what I was referring to, not what happens at the professional level. You really think that bad habits brough into college are immaterial since they might pick up additional bad habits in caollege?
My point was rather that anyone I know who was passionate about programming, was (A) capable and willing to learn more, in fact, glad to learn some new tricks, and (B) got _better_ habbits via real-world experience than what the university taught them.
_That_ is the point. Not some, "it's immaterial because you'll pick out more bad habits", but quite the contrary, "you'll bring more good habits than the university will ever teach you." While the university is busy teaching bad habits, unavoidably while teaching basics, someone who's passionate about it will bring some RL experience and some better habits with them. Compare
A) College teaches you how to write 100-line write-only spaghetti-code programs, because the main focus is teaching you basic syntax and algorithms. For most assignments, you can even implement it all in main() with gotos and you'll still pass. To,
B) Someone who programs in their spare time might already have worked on 10,000-20,000 line programs, and already discovered stuff like (A) why it's important to comment it right, (B) why it's important for it to be structured right, (C) why it's important to keep it coherent, etc. (It's stuff you don't discover when you work on 100 line programs that you can print on 1 page and read them, and you don't even need to re-read them again, but when you worked on a program that's already too big to keep it entirely in your head, or to read it all in one go when you need to rediscover how and why it works.)
And I hope you're not telling me that someone has to forget the latter, in order to learn the former.
I think you're working off the assumption that it's impossible for someone to not be highly interested in high school (or earlier) and then to develop an interest while at university. This is the entire point of opening up the admissions process, to capture those with a latent interest and aptitude. You can still fail out the weaklings.
I'm not. I'm just against the idea that RL experience and passion is somehow a disadvantage. That's my problem. The (otherwise PC) notion that ignorance and inexperience are actually somehow good for you.
In other words, if you're just trying to tell me that maybe they'll discover a latent talent _and_ work hard to overcome that lack of experience... ok, we're going to aggree there very quickly. Yes, it's possible.
But it will be overcoming a handicap, and it will involve a lot of hard work. And, yes, they can do it. Lots of people did.
But it's possible to say that without insulting everyone who has years of experience under their belt. That experience isn't just a bunch of bad habits that will have to be unlearned anyway. And definitely not for a bunch of half-arsed college assignments. Someone who's programmed since they were 9, isn't going to be handicapped by bad habits in those 100 line assignments, they're invariably going to run circles around someone who's just now discovering what a for loop does.
That's all I'm saying: it's possible to acknowledge that someone can start from scratch, without insulting everyone who has a head start and worked hard for it. If you want to tell them, "you too can work and learn to be a good programmer", go ahead. But when it becomes, "unlike those guys who just learned bad habits until now", that's where I draw the line.
Actually, it was number 4 in that list. But you're right. I should have called it "FUD, PR and bad science" instead of just "PR and bad science", since FUD was certainly the bigger igredient there.
Slashdot Mirror
Hmm... now that is indeed an interesting idea, and it sounds like it could be worked into something that works.
What I had in mind was more Bayesian. You know, in much the same way you can get a computer trained to translate texts by feeding it texts and translations (Google is doing just that), one could feed it various gaming situations from a enough testers to have it learn all sorts of stuff. E.g., to recognize when a game flew off the hook in your description, or is about to fly off the hook, or what situations are working and aren't working for certain play styles. Or, say, historical forts so it can design one itself.
It doesn't even have to be all pre-trained, it can just collect the anonymized data from players daily to a central server, and refine the story engine data for the clients. So even if you're an early buyer, at least you'd eventually have a reason to replay it, as by then the game had been retrained a lot.
The more I think about it, the more I think the two can be combined. Your genetic approach could be driven by a statistical engine.
As I was saying, you'd be surprised ;)
E.g., we have already played games with _awful_ fortresses, for example, even designed by humans.
Take Fort Moonmoth from Morrowind for example. (Or whatever the one right east of Balmora was called.) Among other pieces of awfulness, it was built right into a hill side. So you could climb up a gentle slope up the hill, and actually rain arrows _downwards_ on the defenders in the towers. Or you could just keep walking over the hill and... find yourself on the walls. Forget about bringing a ladder to storm the walls, it had that hill as a bloody natural ramp onto the walls.
It's a fortress that makes absolutely no sense from a military point of view. It's a waste of stone and manpower. For that matter, it's also a logistics disaster, it lacks the basic services which would be needed in either a castrum or proper defensive fort, etc.
Take the walled towns in Morrowind. They make no bloody sense. They don't even have gates, or ramparts or towers. They can't even keep wild animals out. Seriously.
Plus, what sense does it make to build a city wall, in a world where every mage and their friends can (A) fly, and (B) teleport inside to the fort's chapel? Forget ballistas vs trebuchets, those two problems make the whole fortress obsolete in one go.
This isn't meant as an attack on Morrowind, but just as an illustration of the kind of nonsense we put up with in games. It's not even just Morrowind, anyway. Most cities and forts in games are, simply put, non-functional decor. They are to the real thing, well, what a plastic flower is to a real flower. It looks like one, but doesn't actually function like one, and even the looks are there only as long as you don't look too closely.
So, well, what I'm really trying to say is: I'm sure we could live with imperfections in a computer-generated one too. If it built a wooden palisade in an age of cannons, I'm sure most RPG players wouldn't give that problem a second thought.
Very much so. You'd need a monster of an AI for that. Still, AFAIK statistical approaches are finally starting to show some results in the AI arena, so it might not be as impossible as it used to be. A far way off? No doubt. But after decades of "it needs arithmetic compression because I am TEH GREAT GURU and I said so" approaches to AI that led nowhere, we _are_ finally seeing some (small) results. So, you know, at least I can dream :P
Note that I'm not even asking for it to write _good_ prose. God knows there are plenty of games that did well enough with mediocre plots, uninspired delivery, and bland repetitive soulless prose. Morrowind, for example. If the AI can at least write gramatically correct English, that's already a start.
You'd be surprised how much more _can_ be made with a CPU.
E.g., sure, we like to use the stereotypical old mom as an example of someone who only sends emails to the kids and old friends. Unfortunately it's false. It was true in the 90's, but now digital cameras are everywhere and image manipulation software is very affordable. And so are the computers which can do it. You'd be suprised the kind of heavy-duty image processing mom does on hundreds of pictures of squirrels and geese and whatever was in the park on that day.
And _video_ processing isn't too far out of reach either. It's a logical next step too: if you're taking pictures, why not short movies? Picture doing the same image processing on some thousands of frames in a movie instead of one still pictures.
E.g., software development. Try building a large project on an old 800 MHz slot-A Athlon, with all optimizations on, and then tell me I don't need a faster CPU. Plus, nowadays IDEs aren't just dumb editors with a "compile" option in the menus any more. They compile and cross-reference classes all the time as you type.
E.g., games, since you mention the graphics card. Yeah, ok, at the moment most games are just a glorified graphics engine, and mostly just use the CPU to pump the triangles to the graphics card. Well that's a pretty poor model, and the novelty of graphics alone is wearing off fast.
How about physics? They're just coming into fashion, and fast. Yeah, we make do at the moment with piss-poor approximations, like Oblivion's bump-into-a-table-and-watch-plates-fly-off-superso nic engine. There's no reason we couldn't do better.
How about AI? Already in X2 and X3 (the space sim games) it doesn't only simulate the enemies around you, but also what happens in the sectors where your automated trade or patrol ships are. I want to see that in more games.
Or how about giving good AI to city/empire building games? Tropico already simulated up to 1000 little people in your city, going around their daily lives, making friends, satisfying their needs, etc. Not just doing a dumb loop, like in Pharaoh or Caesar 3, but genuinely trying to solve the problem of satisfying their biggest need at the moment: e.g., if they're hungry, they go buy food (trekking across the whole island if needed), if they're sick, they go to a doctor, etc. I'd like to see more of that, and more complex at that.
Or let's have that in RPGs, for that matter. Oblivion for example made a big fuss about how smart and realistic their AI is... and it wasn't. But the hype it generated does show that people care about that kind of thing. So how about having games with _big_ cities, not just 4-5 houses, but cities with 1000-2000 inhabitants, which are actually smart. Let's have not just a "fame" and "infamy" rating, let's have people who actually have a graph of aquaintances and friends, and actually gradually spread the rumours. (I.e., you're not just the guy with 2 points infamy, but it's a question of which of your bad deeds did this particular NPC hear about.) Let's not have omniscient guards that teleport, but actually have witnesses calculate a path and run to inform the guards, and lead them to the crime. Etc.
Or how about procedurally generated content? The idea of creating whole cities, quests and whatnot procedurally isn't a new one, but unfortunately it tends to create boring repetition at the moment. (See Daggerfall or Morrowind.) How about an AI complex enough to generate reasonably interesting stuff. E.g., not just recombine blocks, but come up with a genuinely original fortress from the ground up, based on some constraints. E.g., how about generating whole story arcs? It's not impossible, it's just very hard.
And if you need to ask "why?", let's just say: non-linear stories. Currently if you want, for example, to play a light side and a dark side, someone has to code two different arcs, although most players will only see one or the other. If you add more points and ways you can branch the story (e.g.
Very much so. It was _supposed_ to be a thoroughly silly illustration of anthropomorphising animals, and anthropomorphising all wrong at that, to make fun of people who do that to draw some conclusions about human behaviour.
So I'm not going to disaggree with your corrections there. E.g., yes, I know what they really wanted when they curled up on my book. Very much so.
So, on the whole, you wrote the perfect second part to my message, probably better than I could have myself. You illustrate just the kind of stuff that gets deliberately ignored/skipped/hand-waved/etc to make one of those points about comparing humans to animals. That was just the point: once you start looking at that stuff that got skipped over, the whole analogy goes to pieces. Thank you very much for taking mine apart.
That said,
The obvious reason: because I actually like them as they are. I don't consider them "antisocial misfits", I just consider them "cats". I don't expect them to act by human standards, I want them to just act like a cat would. And I don't want them reprogrammed into something they weren't supposed to be. If I wanted a dog, I'd get a dog. I don't need to get a cat and then teach it to be a dog. (Though I did involuntarily teach a dog to be a cat.) And if I wanted something "scripted" to fake a more human behaviour, I'd get a tamagochi.
And also from a pragmatic point of view: I haven't yet had one which I really had problems with. They were social enough even if they occasionally need some time alone, or had an upper limit of how long a petting can take. So, well, I don't see any reason to pay some money and stress the cat, to "fix" something which isn't a problem (for me.)
Sounds to me like the poor guy was bringing his girlfriend gifts and/or taking her out to lunch to get any action. If the bonobos were any more evolved, they'd probably have also seen him taking her to a movie ;)
As usual with such issues, the answer is: yes and no. Depends what you're looking at and at what level.
Yes, you can say that many individual humans are not much better than trained monkeys. But that's a different topic.
No, IMHO, you can't compare:
A) a human behaviour that evolved over 40,000 years, and based on concepts refined and formalized over all that time, to
B) a monkey behaviour that exists only because someone trained them to do that.
Even if many of the individual humans involved at point A don't really understand that evolution and those concepts, nevertheless, some smarter humans before them did. Joe Sixpack may not understand Keynesian economics in regard to, say, government spending, but Keynes did. It's not a random behaviour that came out of nowhere.
Saying, basically, "haha, human traders act like monkeys" would be valid if we were talking behaviour which the monkeys genuinely discovered on their own. Not when it's monkeys trained to reproduce a human behaviour. Then it becomes, basically, "haha, human traders act like monkeys trained to act like human traders"... err... what's the surprise or revelation there, then?
Even if you talk about the individual "trained monkey" humans, the best you can say that something is simple enough so both a human and a monkey can be trained to do. That's a valid observation.
But reducing the behaviour itself to, basically, "it's the same that monkeys do", isn't saying that much when those monkeys only do it because someone coaxed them to. It's not really monkey behaviour, it's _human_ behaviour that the monkeys have been trained to imitate. It's not really comparing human behaviour to monkey behaviour, but really human behaviour to the same human behaviour. Whop-de-do, big surprise that it ends up the same.
Even if you view humans as trained monkey, it's really comparing:
A) a human trained humans to do X, vs
B) a human trained monkeys to do X.
The real common denominator there isn't "humans act like monkeys", but the fact that a human trained both to do the same.
That is, basically, my objection.
Sorry to break it to you, but if all that school left you with is a bunch of pavlovian reflexes, like a school for dogs would, then you probably shouldn't be a human to start with. I will assume you were just going for a figure of speech, instead.
A characteristic of humans is that you can also think about it later, and change that training. You can later realize stuff like, to use that old joke as an example, "wth, mom's cutting off the end of the pot roast was only because she didn't have a bigger pot. I have one, so I can change that recipe." Or you can move to another country/group/whatever and realize stuff like, "oh, here it's impolite to blow your nose at the dinner table, like dad kept doing, let's refrain from doing it." You don't continue doing it for the rest of your life, like a trained dog would.
The difference basically is that you also have the intellect to understand _why_ something is done, _when_ it's done, and when _not_ to do it. It's not just stimulus-reaction reflexes based on pure association. You have the mental power to realize when an existing reflex is stupid, and force yourself to stop or develop a better one.
Well, or _should_ have the mental power. Maybe I'm assuming too much
That's how all human progress happened too. Some guy had been dragging stuff around all his life, and then comes up with the idea of rolling bigger stuff on logs. Some other guy had been pushing stuff on logs, and notices he doesn't really need the whole log: the end discs will do. Voila, you have wheels now.
And to get back to the economy: some guy had been dealing with gold coins all his life, then he figures out that you don't need to actually carry the coin, a note saying "this is worth X ounces of gold" will do the trick just nicely. Voila, now you have paper money.
_That_ is the point. While an animal might just blindly apply a reflex again and again, a human can choose which reflexes to apply and which not. There is usually some rationale and logic behind whether you do something or not. Whereas training an animal to mechanically do the same thing, doesn't really tell you much about the humans. As long as the monkeys just apply some trained reflexes, as opposed to having a reason for it, you can't really say, "heh, day traders act just like monkeys." That's only because you trained the monkeys to imitate it. No more, no less.
Yes, but, see, the trick is to know when it's just a funny metaphor which shouldn't be taken seriously. Nothing against the human species coming up with entertaining metaphors, similes and other figures of speech, but the trick is to know that that's not, in fact, an accurate model of reality.
Yes, if we couldn't dream, fantasize, whatever, we'd probably be less successful than snails. But equally if we took all phantasies to seriously, we'd be even less successful. The trick is to _not_ jump off the house just because you dream of flying.
Same here. It's ok to read about monkeys trained to enact a silly pseudo-economy game, and to be entertained by it. What I'm saying is: but please _do_ remember that it's essentially only entertainment. It may be packed in some pseudo-scientific and all revelation babble, but do come back to RL when you're done with it anyway. Realize that, once that entertainment is over, the RL economy still doesn't work like that. Judging RL economy by what silly play a bunch of trained monkeys do, is about as productive as judging RL warfare by D&D rules.
That may well be so, but that sorta misses the point that it's useless to compare a human to an animal that has been _trained_ to do something, as a way to draw conclusions about the human. E.g., sure, you can train a gorilla to understand sign language, and it sure says something about its intelligence. But then you can't go and write a book on the premise that, basically, "hey, what mutes do is exactly the same sign language as these gorillas are using! Mutes are just like gorillas!"
Basically it's bullshit to then compare a community of gorillas arificially _trained_ to do X to a community of humans who have a rationale behind doing X, as if there were no difference there. Whatever X may be.
In this case, "monkeys using washers/caps/whatever as money" conjures an image that is thoroughly misleading. It's not like those monkeys just saw a heap of washers and went, "I know, let's use those as money". They were _trained_ and coaxed to play a game they don't even understand.
Money was a hard concept to figure out even for humans. It took tens of thousands of years to figure that one out. Even if you look at the economy of, say, the Old Kingdom (an ancient Egypt period), it was based on barter. If you had some extra grain (e.g., you were a farmer) and wanted a pot, you'd go to the potter and ask, basically, "how much grain do you want for that pot?" Then the potter wanted a knife and went to the smith and asked, "can I trade you some pottery for a knife? What if I gave you some of this grain I earned too?" And so on.
Discovering money wasn't just an accidental seeing a round piece of metal and going, "oh, you know, we could use a bunch of those as money." It was a long and rocky road in itself, for example, discovering first the artificial value of jewellery and other rare luxuries. Then the fact that a golden chalice could be stored longer than a ton of grain, which would eventually rot. And only then the money wasn't just some rounded bits that could be traded, but a standardized quantity of such a valuable, non-decaying metal.
E.g., the value of the Roman Solidus, wasn't just being a round piece like a washer, but being a standardized quantity of gold. There wasn't some arbitrary assigned value to it, like when playing with washers or Monopoly money, the value was the exact value of the 4.5g of gold in it. Two pounds of Solidi weren't just an arbitrary value multiplied by the number of coins, it was the exact value of two pounds of gold.
Floating paper money with floating values are a _very_ recent invention, and it took lots of growing pains to wrap the human mind around _that_ notion. It took first assigning a value in gold, and getting people to believe that they can actually go and redeem a 100$ note for 100$ worth of gold. I.e., the value was _still_ tied to the idea of having an inherent value. It took a Great Depression to finally decouple money from an intrinsic value in precious metals, and some people _still_ can't really wrap their mind around it.
That was, in a nutshell, 40000 years after humans got out of Africa. Yep, 40k years. That's how long it took humans to arrive at the modern concept of money as just tokens.
So it's silly to believe that a bunch of monkeys would just see a bunch of worthless (for them) washers and immediately come up with the exact same concept. "Hey, we'll use these as tokens whose value is dictated by supply and demand." Nope, sorry, it's just not going to happen.
What you can have is monkeys _trained_ to play with washers in a mockery of an economy. We don't even know how much they understand there, and how much is mindless imitation and "pavlov's dog" kinda reflexes.
E.g., did someone actually figure out prostitution in all its human implications? Or more likely, a bunch of monkeys trained to give tokens to the researcher on all occasions, e.g., when they're fed, started also giving tokens as a reflex to anyone, including to the female they're mating with?
Did they really understand the concept of _buyin
Or maybe, it just shows that you can compare anything to anything, if you carefully choose only the aspects that sorta superficially support your idea, do a lot of sophistry to make them look even more supportive, and keep your fingers crossed that noone notices all else you've ignored.
Let me tell you a joke: "A researcher puts a flea on a piece of paper and yells, "JUMP!" The startled flea jumps. The researcher cuts off the flea's legs, puts it back on the piece of paper, and yells, "JUMP!" The flea doesn't jump. The researcher notes, "Fleas hear with their legs. A flea whose legs have been cut off can't hear any more.""
Or here, let me offer definitive proof that cats are nerds, or at least nerds act just like cats. Cats:
- are naturally attracted to books and keyboards. Mine always used to come curl up on the book I was reading.
- aren't very social, and don't deal well with extended periods of social interaction. (Keep petting one too long after it signalled "I've had enough," and it might just scratch.) They also actually need periods of being alone or left alone. Also, bringing a new cat home might just result in a fight over who's alpha, instead of, "hi, welcome to the team."
- except for a few modified/selected races, only "talk" when they actually have something to say and/or when all else failed. (See the widespread myth that meowing is somehow only for communicating with humans.) They're also not good at telling you what they want or why. How introverted is that?
- have a problem with authority and obeying orders. (See, "herding cats.")
- have unbalanced diets, by human standard, and would rather not eat their veggies
- have weird sleep schedules, by human standards.
- like it warm. I can just see a cat coming to the office in mountain boots and a sweater in July, if it were anthropomorphic.
- really dislike being stuffed in a suit and tie.
- really don't like showering, or being given a shower. Actually, "loathe" just about starts to describe it.
- play (with) all sorts of stuff that makes no sense for a normal human.
- never discovered complex courting rituals.
Etc. There you go. I've proven beyond all doubt that nerds act just like cats. Funny how similar we are to animals, eh?
In practice it just shows how easy it is to find _some_ animal that matches whatever you want to match, if you just look hard enough and ignore what is _really_ happening there. E.g., I've thoroughly ignored the fact that a nerd surviving on say, chocolate or pizza/chinese food only, is doing it because of taste preferences or being too lazy for anything else, while a cat is actually biologically made to be a meat-only eater. ("Obligate carnivore.") E.g., I've thoroughly ignored the fact that a cat's attraction to books isn't because it actually wants to read, and to your keyboard isn't because it wants to program. Etc.
To get back to the topic, yeah, you can compare anything from the real economy to a monkey play-economy, but it's just material to make Joe Sixpack feel better about his not understanding the real economy. Day trading especially is a complex phenomenon, including such aspects as being, basically, a form of gambling. I.e., when you see monkeys playing cards/dice/3-cups/whatever, then you'll have an essential ingredient in it. Sure, you can look at it superficially being just like monkeys and bottle caps changing hands, but that's the kind of superficial over-simplification that's outright useless except maybe as an emotional metaphor.
Well, seriously now, just the thought of any kind of brain-enhancing medicine makes me worry. How long until some dumbass parents stuff their kids full of such medicine, in the name of giving them a future?
I know my parents, for all the other good and (plenty of) bad things they did, pretty much buried me alive in extra homework. I'm not even sure it was as much for a future as such, as because in the circle of mom's and dad's equally nerdy friends they could brag about my achievements. I even pretty much ended up teaching dad physics so he can brag that he taught me. How's that for a stupid way to get your childhood stolen?
But at least thankfully no chemicals were involved. If such medicine existed, would I have been pretty much pickled in it?
Plus, much as I despise the western world aversion to learning in high school, in this scenario I'd worry more about the parts of the world that do take school seriously. E.g., most of Asia. After one guy starts taking this kind of stuff, how long until half the class gets marinated in it? You know, just so their grades don't look any worse. Little Tanaka is getting all A+, why can't you? Time to start giving you medicine each morning before school.
And if someone wants to say, "so what? It just makes them finally learn something in school"... how about the side-effects? E.g., how about remembering clearly and in detail, for the rest of your life, each time the school bully humiliated you? That's a scary thought.
What about later? With the drive since the 90's to find a way to write programs with cheap, summarily re-trained ex-burger-flippers instead of expensive nerds, how long until this kind of stuff becomes almost mandatory at work? Hey, think of how much the company could save if you don't keep forgetting (and having to rediscover) what each piece of the code does. How long until you have to drink the kool-aid before getting any training, or before each meeting? Hey, they're discussing important stuff there. (E.g., the boss's vacation.) You can't go and forget everything after a couple of hours. Or immediately, due to the wonderful effect of crap Powerpoint presentations.
It's not even as much wild guesses or slippery slope: it already happened in sports. The reason for forbidding steroids and other doping isn't only because one guy might get an undeserved medal, but because it creates a pressure for everyone to do the same. Once Mr X wins a medal based on being pickled in chemicals, then everyone else gets told by their trainer/manager/whatever, "you start drinking this stuff, or I'm finding someone else who does."
Duly noted, but TFA is about the Ontario in Canada.
My argument would fail if I had made the blanket generalization that all nerds have Asperger Syndrome. Which I didn't. All I'm saying that Paul Graham's generalization that, basically, "you're unpopular because you want to be unpopular" is also false. There _are_ people (not all, obviously, but there are) which just can't take part in these popularity games even if they wanted to.
At the scale, of, say, a country with 300,000,000 population, 2..3 out of 10,000 means that some 60,000 to 90,000 people will have the condition. Obviously it doesn't cover all nerds, but it's a non-negligible enough fraction to be a counter-example to his generalization.
Here you seem to assume that everyone has the same goals. If your measure of happiness is measured in money, by all means, go ahead and engage in social games for a promotion.
Thing is, that's what some of us actually try to avoid. Hard to believe as that might sound.
The thing is, in most places the most accessible way upwards is a promotion to management. Which pretty much means changing jobs completely. That's the point where you cease to be an engineer/programmer/whatever, and start being a manager. They're as unrelated as switching a job as a gardener for a job at MacDonalds. You'll have to do different things, interact with different people, and have completely different kinds of interactions.
If you see that job as just an interchangeable way to get money, sure, go ahead and change job X for job Y just because it pays more. Why not? If however you happen to love job X and hate job Y, at some point you have to ask yourself if it's worth it.
Happiness is a function of many variables, and money is just one variable there. Being more happy is more of a min-max problem in a multi-dimensional space, not something where you can maximize X and not even care about what happens to Y and Z. Sometimes gaining an extra 1 unit along X, is not worth it if you lose 10 units on Y and Z. It might actually be a _less_ optimal solution than what you started with.
The problem is even less trivial when the scale isn't even linear. More money is less and less important when you're already well past the bare necessities range, even past the conveniences, and already well into luxuries range. A little more money won't make me signifficantly happier. On the other hand, moving into a job I dislike (I've tried it, I know I dislike it) will make me signifficantly unhappier. It's just not worth it.
Now I'm not saying _you_ should apply the same, of course. That's a judgment you'll have to make for yourself. I know what _I_ chose, though.
And to get back to the point: so not being social means I'll be forever trapped behind a computer, doing the same job? Well, _good_! Yippee! You just gave me the perfect reason to be unsocial.
Actually, if I'm to be pedantic, it would mean dragging you alive into Cananda, since that's where Ontario is :P
Laws usually aren't worded that vaguely. Noone ever passed a law fobidding something as vaguely defined as "attacks". If you've ever read a law or a contract, you'll notice that they're very verbose things, and go into painstaking detail as to what is included in that definition, what isn't, what are the situations when it doesn't apply, etc. You're not the only one who noticed that if something can be mis-interpreted, someone will deliberately mis-interpret it.
In other words, just because a dumbed down article is worded vaguely, doesn't mean that the law also will. The real law will likely go on and on like the energizer bunny, using a dozen paragraphs as to exactly what kinds of attacks are meant.
That, of course, doesn't mean that they'll get it exactly right. If you want to criticize exactly what they do define as attacks, by all means, please do. But going on a whole "auugh, they're taking away our liberties" panic just because an unrelated text uses a vague word, seems kinda unproductive.
Sorta off-topic, but methinks that Paul Graham misses the point by a mile, and just manages to add insult to injury.
The fact is, a number of kids (and adults) suffer from Asperger Syndrome. In a nutshell, it's missing the whole input circuitry for "body language". An aspie simply doesn't have the equipment to deal with those popularity games. He can go on for years talking about the wrong topics, or wearing the unfashionable clothes, or looking bored at the wrong time, and won't even know that he offended anyone. Or why is everyone else avoiding him.
Incidentally, Asperger Syndrome also creates "nerds". People with it end up more interested in stuff like maths, physics, programming, etc, for which they don't lack the input. If you will, "how the world works" as opposed to "how people work, and how to game it."
By the sound of it, Paul Graham wasn't one. If he _could_ tell who's popular, and who gravitates around whom, he probably wasn't. Good for him.
But then it's pretty stupid to tell one, basically, "you're unpopular because you don't want to be popular." It's like telling a paraplegic, basically, "you're in a wheelchair because you don't want to walk." If the nerve connections aren't there, you can want it all day long, it just won't happen.
Yes, you can learn to function in society with it. But it takes a lot of time, and a lot of shooting in the dark, and whole days of acting based on guessing what the others would react to this and that. Because you just don't see the reactions. But you'll never be anywhere _near_ in the same class as the local prom-queen or jock. The best you can do is play it safe not to offend, and maybe tell a few non-offensive jokes and wisecracks, not go for being the popular kid.
You'll _never_ be in the A category of popularity, in his giving popularity grades to cafeteria tables. You can at most work your way to being tolerated in a C category instead of D. Or more practically, find yourself a group where you all like each other enough, and don't give a damn if you're all D grade as popularity goes
And it takes a lot of missing the mark and some outside help to even realize that you're doing anything wrong. E.g., in retrospect I used to go into whole tirades about how, say, a radio works, starting with the transformer and ending with the speaker. Good grief, how boring it must have been for the poor victims of it. It never occured to me at the time. Unless you have someone to tell you "dude, you bored everyone stiff" or "dude, wtf, you told that joke the 20'th time this week", you just don't even know that something was wrong. And most people will avoid telling you something like that.
And reading something like "you're unpopular because you don't want to be popular" is just blaming the victim, and frankly cruel. It just adds an undeserved helping of guilt and insecurity, to someone whose self esteem is taking kicks every day as it is.
Jesus F. Christ, not the "free speech" OCPD cases again. "Free speech" never included the right to libel and slander and verbally assault even for adults. Go to your neighbour and tell him "you're a cock-sucking faggot" once too often, and you'll find yourself called to court.
"Free speech" is defined strictly in your relation to Congress. No, really, go actually read that ammendment some day. It doesn't give you a right over anyone else, and it doesn't mean anyone else has to tollerate it.
If you want to use your speech to criticize the government, go ahead. Noone will stop you, regardless of whether you're adult or kid. Rant about Bush or the war in Iraq or about "fascist neo-cons vs bleedin' heart liberals" all you want, and noone will stop you. _That_ is what freedom of speech was supposed to protect.
But that doesn't mean you have a right to verbally bully, slander or libel anyone. Making your neighbour's or classmate's life miserable is _not_ what those founding fathers had in mind. The concern was about being able to tell the king or president to fuck off and change an unpopular policy, not about having a right to go call your neighbour a cocksucker.
And, frankly, it's not how rule of the law was supposed to work. It's supposed to be rule of the law, not rule of the meanest thug or bully. If you don't like what your neighbour is doing, go petition the Congress for a law that forbids it. Letting people intimidate each other into submission is frankly such a huge step backward, it's just not worth it. It's a return to year 3000 BC. Especially if you like your liberty and fear government tyranny, I see no reason to bend over to the even more arbitrary rule of local thugs and bullies.
If by "problem" you mean, "people should be smarter than to judge someone by anonymous rumours", well, yes, it would be nice if people changed and everyone was sane and logical. It won't happen any time soon, though. In the meantime, we _are_ stuck in a world where anonymous rumours do a lot of real harm.
You know, sorta like "it would be nice to have summer right now." Yeah, it would be nice, but it's not going to change just because I wish it would change.
And in a sense, they _are_ logical, just not to the end they proclaim. That's how people manage to seem illogical: they proclaim one goal, when they're really after another. Or they present a (somewhat bent) line of reasoning from facts to logical conclusion, when they really worked backwards from what they _really_ want to what excuse they can present as axioms to reach the desired conclusion. E.g., they don't really start from "the facts are X and Y, therefore it follows logically that I actually need a pony", they start from "I want a pony" and work backwards to what excuse they can sorta base it on.
In this case, _if_ the goal was to find the absolute best employee, yeah, it would make no sense to first trim the pool based on rumours and even worse. The real goal usually is to not have to work much at it. Trimming the pool _is_ the goal, so to speak. Some boss can't be arsed to judge 10,000 CVs, so he'll find arbitrary ways to get rid of 90% of them.
If you think rumours are a bad way, there are worse. Some are proud that they first discard half the pile without any further reason. Some use, literally, tarot and numerology. Seriously. Assign one number for each letter in your name, sum that to a number, sum that number's digits, keep at it until you have a single digit. If you match the digit for the company's name, you qualify for the next round, if not, you're not a good match for the company anyway. Nice way to get rid of 90% of the applications in one fel swoop. Easily automatable too.
Next round, google them for an excuse to not hire them. Ah, he posted some stuff about authority that's not to my liking. Probably some immature malcontent, he'd probably question my authority too. Next applicant. Google, click, click, ah, he has a MySpace page. MySpace is only for kids and paedos. Grow up buddy. Yep, another resume goes into the garbage bin. Next applicant. Geesh, he has an AOL address. No need to even google him, AOLers are infamous for being clueless noobs. Get a real provider if you claim to be a techie, buddy. Yep, another resume bites the dust. (Repeat ad nauseam.)
For the neighbours, much the same applies: they _are_ logical, but not to the ends they proclaim. The goals might just be to be a fashionable prom-queen of the community, so it's better to join in the crowd shouting "boo! drive the pervert out of town!" than to be the unfashionable one playing the devil's advocate.
Etc.
That's how humans work. We're driven by petty goals, laziness, etc, and from there we work backwards to find some excuse for it.
What are you going to do? Change the whole world? Noble goal, no doubt, but ultimately doomed to fail.
If you have a work schedule that changes every week, I have all the compassion for you. That tends to cause all sorts of real problems. Duly noted. I don't think most people who read Slashot are in a situation where they have to work night shift every third week, though.
Heh. Oh please... Is cyber-bullying some made-up thing? No, it's not. We're in the age where employers routinely google their employees, neighbours google each other, and the village gossip googles the whole damn village for gossip material. We also live in an age where people might glue posters to your door just because someone found a sex offender by the same name via googling (yep, it happened) or run you out of town just because your business card says "paeditrician" (hint: it's a doctor for kids, not a paedophile.) Someone can do a _lot_ of harm that way.
E.g., if someone were to poison the web and the boards with some fake "I love fucking pre-teen boys" fake homepage for you, or troll a lot of boards with stuff like "melikamp said he's working hard to overcome his kiddy-porn addiction" or "read melikamp's guide to surfing the porn from work and using the corporate app server as a warez ftp site", it would cause a lot more damage than you seem think.
It might come to bite you in the ass at the next time you're looking for a job, for a start, and you might not even know it. Noone does a thorough search to filter libel from actual info, and put it all in the right context. You're not worth that kind of effort. They're just looking for an excuse, any excuse, to trim the candidates pool before they even start. They'll just google until something bad comes up, then stop.
Even if they suspected it's bogus, a lot of people and companies are basically just prom queens anyway. It would be unfashionable for them to be associated with someone with that kind of a reputation. They have some PR image of being a responsible family-friendly company, and it's just not worth the effort to answer once a week, "then why do you associate with that pervert?" protests.
More importantly, it does cause real grief. It's not as simple as "then don't go to that MySpace page." When your friends start avoiding you, or asking "wow, did you really do _that_?", it's damn hard to just blissfully ignore it.
As for the "free expression" rant... well, basically I'm just going to say, "pfft... who cares?" The _spirit_ of those liberties was to provide a possibility for _political_ change. (See the "petition for redress" part.) It was not supposed to be a god given right to slander the neighbour, bully the classmates, troll the boards, cheat on WoW, and whatever else some people imagine. If it ends up used just as an excuse to bully, harrass and cause grief, we'll put some limits on it. It's that simple.
You _can_ still affect plenty of change even without singling out and bullying individuals. You can campaign for a reform of the school system, or whatever. Attack the idea or the organization, not bully individuals. Or maybe you have a genuine problem with an individual? Well, we have courts of law, they have superiors, etc. If they're that bad, probably everyone else feels the same about them, and you have enough people backing you to go the civilized route. We don't need self-appointed thugs individually terrorizing and intimidating people, thank you very much. Online or offline. If you can't come up with anything better than bullying that teacher, then excuse me if I don't think you should be allowed to.
Yes, slippery slope, fascism, authority is doubleplus ungood, etc... who cares? Democracy isn't just a buzzword to whip people into a frenzy, it's really the ability to affect change. The notion that, basically, "article/ammendment X is sacred and beyond any meddling" is what theocracies do, not what a democracy is all about. If one liberty was poorly enough defined to end up just an excuse to bully, harrass and cause grief, we'll have it changed, thank you very much. We'll reword it or put limits on it, until it serves its original purpose, and stops being a liability.
Yes, we all like being free to say stuff like "we should pull out of Iraq already" or "the president is dumb" without fear. You know, _political_ stuff. No, we don't think that it should extend to "the principal said he likes to
I was one of the kids who were hard to teach, I guess, but I'm not sure if it was the "bad habits." I'm guessing it's more like being the kind of personality who'd rather deal with computers or a physics book than with humans, that also caused it. I would have been just as hard to teach in any other subject, and in fact I've been just as hard to teach in subjects that didn't interest me. In fact, worse. At least in computer-related classes I was willing to acknowledge a neat new trick on the rare times when I saw one, in the classes that didn't interest me I was more like "wtf am I even doing here in the first place?"
;)
:P
Being bored stiff in half the classes, and there only because my parents said that a diploma is good for me, also didn't help. I had to sit through classes (and take exams) about how to compile a Pascal program, or what a for loop does, or later what a hash table is, etc. I took classes for reasons ranging from having no choice if I want a diploma, to basically, "I guess it's good to have that spelled out on the diploma too." It's not very motivating. And let me tell you, it takes all the fun out of ADHD
Believing we know it all... well, some of us actually occasionally proved that we do. I remember one exam when two of us came up with the same solution that differed a lot from everyone else's and the professors'. So we get to explain why. Well, his solution had a race condition. I'm not saying that he was stupid or anything, probably just tailored to judge what the exam problem was about: proving you can use shared memory at all. Well, me and the other guy also proved that we know how not to thrash that shared memory.
A lot of time, what we were taught or asked to do, actually genuinely made no sense... either for the purpose of those 100..1000 line assignments, or for the purpose of a RL sized program. E.g., hearing a professor ranting and raving about proving everything correct, just asked for the objection: how are you going to do that for a 1,000,000 line program? That's actually a pretty small one by RL standards.
I have all respect for what Steve Jobs did: dropping out and taking the classes that really interested him. I'm not an Apple fan, or a Steve Jobs fan as such, but I can respect a sane approach to learning.
I realize that that might come out arrogant. Heck, it _is_ arrogant, but, well, now you know why some of us are hard to teach
Well, here's how it worked for me: keep at it.
If you're used to staying up until 6 AM, yeah, you won't immediately switch to going to sleep at 10PM or 12PM or whatever you have as the new schedule. It will involve some laying in bed and not being able to sleep, because your internal clock is set for another hour.
The worst thing you can possibly do there is just get back up and sit at the computer. (Or whatever else) Then smack the clock in the morning and get back to sleep. That's the way to just prolong the problem.
So go to bed at, say, 10 PM and rise and shine at 6 AM. (Or 12 and 8, or whatever schedule you decided.) Do rise and get your morning coffee at that hour, even if you only slept 3 hours. It's ok. It'll make it a hell of a lot easier to fall asleep early the next night. Keep at it.
Eventually you just get used to that new schedule.
Don't start shifting it, no matter how tempting it is. As I've said, the average human clock is actually set for 26 hours and reset each morning. It actually works somewhat like a PLL. It's damn easy to start shifting a bit forward every day, and end back at the starting "I'm not a morning person" square. Essentially that's how I ended up with a 6AM to 2PM sleep schedule back then. You just shift forward until you hit a limit where you can't shift any further. (E.g., your boss would _really_ start minding it if you show up at 5 PM, when everyone else is leaving.) Then you stop at that, and start making excuses as to why that's somehow your natural schedule.
And don't start finding "oh, I can live on just 6 hours sleep at night" excuses, no matter how tempting it is to prolong the day that way. A lot of people who have trouble waking up are actually in this category. No, you can't live happily on 6 hours a night, not in the long term. Not unless you're very old, anyway. You just start being a bit more tired each day, and it piles up. Your body (or rather, brain) is trying to tell you something if you're having to roll for willpower to wake up. You're still tired. That way lies the temptation to start shifting your bedtime, too.
Basically, it just takes discipline. Yeah, it's an ugly word, but that's what everyone else has to do. Don't think it's some nerd-only gene that makes only you have trouble keeping the schedule. A lot of those poor buggers at the assembly line would start shifting their schedule too, if they had a chance (e.g., flex time.) But they already hit the forward limit, their boss complains if they're not at work at, say, 8 AM. So they just apply a bit of discipline, and go to bed at the right hour so they can be up and running at 6 AM. That's all.
I'm getting the uninterested part from the "they're put off by the nerdiness of it" theme in TFA. I'm sorry, but someone whose chief concern with choosing carreers is how fashionable it is, doesn't strike me as particularly passionate about that line of work.
My point was rather that anyone I know who was passionate about programming, was (A) capable and willing to learn more, in fact, glad to learn some new tricks, and (B) got _better_ habbits via real-world experience than what the university taught them.
_That_ is the point. Not some, "it's immaterial because you'll pick out more bad habits", but quite the contrary, "you'll bring more good habits than the university will ever teach you." While the university is busy teaching bad habits, unavoidably while teaching basics, someone who's passionate about it will bring some RL experience and some better habits with them. Compare
A) College teaches you how to write 100-line write-only spaghetti-code programs, because the main focus is teaching you basic syntax and algorithms. For most assignments, you can even implement it all in main() with gotos and you'll still pass. To,
B) Someone who programs in their spare time might already have worked on 10,000-20,000 line programs, and already discovered stuff like (A) why it's important to comment it right, (B) why it's important for it to be structured right, (C) why it's important to keep it coherent, etc. (It's stuff you don't discover when you work on 100 line programs that you can print on 1 page and read them, and you don't even need to re-read them again, but when you worked on a program that's already too big to keep it entirely in your head, or to read it all in one go when you need to rediscover how and why it works.)
And I hope you're not telling me that someone has to forget the latter, in order to learn the former.
I'm not. I'm just against the idea that RL experience and passion is somehow a disadvantage. That's my problem. The (otherwise PC) notion that ignorance and inexperience are actually somehow good for you.
In other words, if you're just trying to tell me that maybe they'll discover a latent talent _and_ work hard to overcome that lack of experience... ok, we're going to aggree there very quickly. Yes, it's possible.
But it will be overcoming a handicap, and it will involve a lot of hard work. And, yes, they can do it. Lots of people did.
But it's possible to say that without insulting everyone who has years of experience under their belt. That experience isn't just a bunch of bad habits that will have to be unlearned anyway. And definitely not for a bunch of half-arsed college assignments. Someone who's programmed since they were 9, isn't going to be handicapped by bad habits in those 100 line assignments, they're invariably going to run circles around someone who's just now discovering what a for loop does.
That's all I'm saying: it's possible to acknowledge that someone can start from scratch, without insulting everyone who has a head start and worked hard for it. If you want to tell them, "you too can work and learn to be a good programmer", go ahead. But when it becomes, "unlike those guys who just learned bad habits until now", that's where I draw the line.
Actually, it was number 4 in that list. But you're right. I should have called it "FUD, PR and bad science" instead of just "PR and bad science", since FUD was certainly the bigger igredient there.