Hell yes, because the free market needs it!
on
Should IT Unionize?
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· Score: 1
So what is the non-union remedy to the issues noted in the original question (of 60 hour work-weeks, etc.)?
I ask, because for as much as I like free markets, the free market currently isn't fixing these issues, and it is *precisely* because of the "lone gun" culture IT has.
A true free-market argument states that the labor side of the labor/capital tug-of-war would do something to create its own power to negotiate for better terms. And guess what? This is precisely what a union would do.
A critical distinction must be made: unions != licensure organizations (call them what they are: guilds), like the ABA or AMA. They serve different purposes, even while their effects on labor utilization sometimes appear similar.
Both unions and licensure organizations would have the effect of driving at least *some* -- but obviously not all -- IT work offshore, to nations with lesser labor power, regulations, and equal or lesser pay rates, with a secondary or tertiary eye towards quality-of-deliverables. But unlike a union, an IT licensure organization modeled after the AMA or ABA *would* kill the innovative spirit of the IT industry and artificially drive-up the costs of those services (just as the AMA and ABA have done).
I argue that we need a union, because it's the free-market's labor-side alternative to regulation. But should stay VERY far away from statutory licensure requirements. Let the market reverse-course a bit, and more-closely and accurately seek its labor vs. capital negotiation equilibrium...
One thing you must realize about software development as a career are that:
* The industry and profession changes more quickly than any other -- Tools change and go in/out of fashion. True, the concepts carry-over, because a lot of tools re-invent the wheel; it's both the stupidity of work-duplication and the evolutionary process of proving/disproving the effectiveness and usability of those tools.
* The culture of IT, and development in particular, says having a life outside of geekdom is akin to being a "cool kid" - and geeks were almost universally never cool kids. If you're not wholly-focused on being a geek in your spare time -- giving up time you could spend with friends, family, your own personal projects, etc. like the rest of the civilized, white-collar non-IT workers of the world -- you're branded an outsider. Go read DZone for a week if you need examples of people spouting such insanity.
* Business knows that developers are usually willing to give away their free time for nothing (OSS is a great example), even to for-profit organizations, and so will take every advantage of you they can.
Combine these 3 points, and you will realize that you either work in software development out of an unbridled, uncontrollable passion for it - or you don't work (or, at least, do enjoyable work, and probably sub-in for sysadmins, who suffer similar problems).
Because American taxpayers (including me) are suckers enough to subsidize flood insurance nationwide, creating the moral hazard of greatly reducing the incentive not to live there -- or, at least, to build in a more hurricane-sustainable way.
Thank whoever said "insurance companies won't pay for these poor persons' flood-ravaged homes, so now government (read: taxpayers) must do it!" That's more of a Democrat's line...
You really think you can compete at, say, $30/hour (or $150/hour, if consulting) with people in India earning 1/4 of that? Or in China, at 1/10 that?
Business in the real-world is all about the bottom-line; it's all about who can get X done faster and cheaper. Quality? No business really gives a shit about quality; the proliferation of horrible code (and languages like VB and Perl) exemplify this fact. Management is selfish and short-term oriented; long-term solutions don't help the manager whose job plan in a given organization doesn't involve sticking-around longer than 18-60 months.
Sure you do things your way. But you won't be doing much your way, because you're more expensive than your overseas counterpart. In the long-run, your wages (and the wages of richer countries) will stagnate, while those in developing countries (like India) will rise, reducing the income disparity of people in those countries, and gradually making you more-competitive on price relative to foreign competition. But, as J.M. Keynes told us, we will all be dead by the time that long-run in which that state of comparative advantage can reasonably be claimed to have occurred.
Welcome to the global economy. Now, return to the back of the Starbucks barista employment line...
What this exec *really* is bemoaning is that OSS developers aren't writing software that he can just download for free, repackage as IBM's, then sell for-profit to their customers.
This is why it perpetually boggles my mind that OSS developers would release their code with a license under which their unpaid -- but far from costless -- work can be sold for-profit by anybody willing. Unless you truly don't care about your code, it seems stupid to me...
Since it will be Sept. 11 somewhere else in the world, clearly this "CERN" group are a bunch of radical Swiss terrorists bent on destroying the world! We must stop them!!!
Find the population variance of the price differences. If the population variance is low, then the cause is likely systemic: perhaps due more to foreign exchange rates or costs of translation to non-English languages than causes you might find under high population variance, such as price discrimination and/or lack of competition in a given product's market.
Determining the latter causes would likely show up in comparing the sample variances of products categorized as existing in markets of high competition vs. low competition...
I haven't the time to do such an analysis, but I'm sure there's an Econ. or Stats major out there willing to do it.:)
Is it irrational to hate somebody who rapes and murders your wife/gf/S.O.?
No?
Then hatred is not, necessarily, irrational.
If your answer was "yes", BTW, then your wife/gf/S.O. is apparently no more than a piece of meat to you; a replaceable sack of flesh, bone, and blood. For the rest of us, such people have deep meaning -- and those individuals, acting in whatever capacity they may (of their own whim, or on behalf of a government, or whatever) who take that loved one away from us, are taking away that thing - that human being - who means so much to us.
That person who gives us our hope and happiness; these, in turn, contribute to good physical and mental health.
These are hardly irrational factors. Nor are they rationalizations for the seemingly-irrational: study after study shows the obvious: that such close personal relationships tend to improve our health.
And to have somebody take them away from us -- is that not deserving of outright hatred? That it is so undesirable for such a thing to happen that one should feel very strongly -- perhaps, unfortunately, even violently if necessary -- opposed to it? I should think so. I should *hope* so!
Emotion *can* be rational -- but you have to find the basic instinctual, evolutionary reason(s) from which the emotion derives, and not simply assume the response is not grounded by a reason (now, the *degree* to which the emotional response exists relative to the stimulus may be unreasonable. But that's a different question)... (Marvin Minsky also views emotion as simply a *different* form of rationality.)
You misread my paragraph; re-read it. Where do I say that all of Islam is evil? I said that the probability that the next attack will be from a Muslim is higher because previous attacks were by Muslims -- it's a question of filtering. Most Muslims, if the more-stringent filter were designed correctly, would pass through without incident. But the fact that more attacks have been by Muslims than not implies a practical need for more filtering/scrutiny of Muslims than people of other religions -- particularly since the violence is driven in part by religion.
You're naive to think terrorists are soley Muslim.
And you're naive to think that terrorists attacking the U.S. are not, predominantly -- though certainly not solely -- Muslim, and therefore, the probability that the next terrorist attack will be by a Muslim will be higher than for a non-Muslim -- and that finally, therefore, that we ought to focus our anti-terrorist attention on Muslims.
You'll have diversity and counter-examples and exceptions in any sufficiently-large population of data. That's not the point; no rational person cares about that.
The point is prioritization: the point is to deal with the cases whose expected value (probability * cost) are the greatest. And to-date, the evidence suggests that Muslims tend to both attack more-frequently and cause the most damage. We can't ignore the occasional crazy white Christian guy, but it's clear he's less-likely to cause a problem domestically than his Muslim and/or Arab counterparts...
(The same argument above could be inverted and used in an Arab or Muslim nation: a WASP from Britain or the U.S. is more-likely to violate their religiously-derived laws than a local...)
Indeed; you see such behavior on corporate proxy statements all the time. "Support putting my friends on the board with me!" they basically say.
Of course, FDR tried to do the same thing in attempting to pack the Supreme Court with his cronies (by attempting to expand the court from 9 to 15 justices during his term in which, presumably, he would be involved in selecting the justices), and Presidential candidates inherently do the same thing. "Elect me and my friends who won't tattle on me!" (unless there is a book deal involved after lame-duckness is achieved, e.g. Scott McLellan on G.W. Bush).
Packing powerful positions with one's own close accomplices is a natural human behavior; we select those whom we trust most and/or agree-with most...
Using the web is very different from developing a web app.
The industry is nerdy because it must be. This is an industry with its fundamental technical roots in math, physics, and logic. Its less-nerdy side is still considerably nerdier than average. Project management, for example, involves explaining nerdy concepts to (potentially) non-nerds, and using nerdy subjects like economics to try to keep projects on-track and/or invent jargon to make CxOs feel like they're part of the "in" crowd.
Non-nerds need not apply; non-nerds have political "science", journalism, sociology, business, and other such areas to occupy.
While I agree with the sentiment of memorization of content losing value compared to the process of finding it, I will say that there is value in memorization: access time. The hardware architecture analogy is that memorization (and the ability to immediately recall that information, of course) is like "RAM" for your brain, whereas performing a search on Google (akin to accessing data off a slower, but larger-capacity HDD) is many, many times slower than your brain's memory.
The more you have memorized, the more-quickly you can recall it, and the easier it is for you to form your own connections between the material. That, indeed, is the point being made made by the article: if you can't form those connections, you literally are losing your ability to think critically -- or even to think, period.
It's much the same problem as we've seen in math classes over the last 15 years (speaking as somebody in his mid-20s), in my opinion: over-reliance on calculators means few people know how to crunch numbers without a machine. "Let the calculator do that!" teachers tell us, not wanting to do the work themselves either.
Google, like a calculator, is a damn fine - no, kick-ass - *tool*. It is something you use to get work done, or to automate the work of some otherwise-manual process you already understand very well.
But those tools must never become *crutches*. We must never allow ourselves -- as seen in Idiocracy -- to say to people "well gee, the computer says something, so it must be true!" That is, we must never allow ourselves to become so lazy as to let machines do all our thinking for us.
Unfortunately, the human nature is like electricity: it tends towards the path-of-least-resistance. Kids use calculators to graph functions on a Cartesian coordinate system rather than calculating a table of x/y values. [1] Cash-register operators can't count change without the register calculating it for them. McDonald's employees don't even use numbers - they use a register with a set of food icons to indicate the items being ordered. 200-level physics students can't roughly estimate the value of another sample data point while it's being taken, given (say) 4 prior data points (guys, seriously, I'm not even close to being the "Rain Man"). [2]
And on and on. People are stupid because we *want* to be stupid, non-intellectual culture (which is pretty much the *other* 85%) rewards it, and our economy is designed to enable convenience/stupidity as easily as possible ("is there profit to be made in simplifying X for mere mortals? Then do it!"). Most people implicitly desire to slouch towards mediocrity, because the alternative is harder.
Google, tell me what to think! *groan*
[1] Except as a brief demonstration for perhaps a section or two in a middle-school or early high-school math course of how to manually graph a function. This would be great by my preference, if it weren't for the fact that nobody is as secure in that sort of process knowledge immediately after learning it as they believe. That sort of task must be repeated several times, in several different contexts (other sections/chapters) to allow the brain to recognize and establish a pattern defining the process...
[2] Yes, of course 4 data points is often much too small to be statistically useful. But so long as the variance is not too great, the very least one can do is estimate a rough mean of the data, and use that as an estimate of the next value.
"People are unwittingly trusting the information they find on Wikipedia, yet experience has shown it can be wrong, incomplete, biased, or misleading," she said.
Of course! By contrast, information disseminated from those fonts of truthiness, i.e. professors and other experts, are never wrong, incomplete, biased, or misleading.
Bullshit? Yes, obviously.
No individual nor a collective of them will ever be perfectly-accurate; therefore, we are talking about error rates here. And to that end, there was a study a couple years ago published in Wired indicating that Wikipedia a rate of factual inaccuracy similar to that of Encyclopedia Britannica.
Now, Britannica is not great by encyclopedia standards -- World Book is reputed to be better. But given its tendency to be referenced in schools, and given the dogmatic criticism heaped upon Wikipedia by those people who have a vested interest in maintaining barriers-to-entry to valuable knowledge -- i.e., professors and other so-called "experts", and given the borderline anarchistic model of page-maintenance used on Wikipedia, this is is nonetheless quite an achievement.
I will add that I would guess the factual accuracy on Wikipedia varies more-widely as one departs the realm of the provable. That is, bias is unlikely in fields of low controversy: math and hard science, possibly excluding biology. But it is much more likely where the flames of emotions and passions are fanned, e.g. particularly on topics of political controversy...
I will also add that I tend to trust professors and experts before I trust unknown, i.e. random-to-me people on the Internet. But not by a wide margin: I still think Wikipedia is a powerful aid, and, where such an expert presents a statement that contradicts the content of Wikipedia, that expert ought to be challenged to defend their statement in light of Wikipedia's content -- provided the content is not in a state of dispute at the time of reading... (Wikipedia and similar sources have been useful to me in recent years in shooting-down claims made by an "eastern" doctor (read: witch-doctor, allegedly an "expert" on the field of medicine for which I saw her) and those of a MLM-peddler from Quixtar.)
The current financial market crisis is considered by many economists and finance professionals to be due in part to the failure of such computationally-intensive risk-management models as those it sounds like IBM is creating.
And Japan supposedly has the fastest falling population.
I believe the claim is that Japan has the fastest decrease in the growth of their population. i.e., that it is growing, but their growth is slowing most-rapidly.
To that point, an increase of 1 million people -- 0.7% -- over the course of 7 years is hardly torrid growth (likewise for Italy's 0.5 million (0.8%) pop. growth).
Also, there is empirical evidence suggesting that Malthusianism is generally inaccurate. Take a look at the bet between Julian Simon and Paul Ehrlich. Paul Ehrlich, a biologist, bet that population growth would drive up the prices of 5 commodity metals over the course of a decade; Julian Simon, an economist, bet against him. Simon won.
What Malthusianists fail to recognize is the increases in efficiency gained through the use of new technology. Increased ability to discover new repositories of a given naturally-occurring material has historically (and in the Simon-Ehrlich bet) been a classic example.
Now, that said, now that we have higher inflation-adjusted gasoline prices than at any time in history, it's clear that the effect is not *always* true. Growth in oil consumption (particularly by emerging economies) is outpacing our growth in discovery of crude oil. But that's the only counter-example I know of...
Given that the world is already grossly overpopulated and rapidly becoming more so,
Wrong. Global population is widely-understood to be slowing in growth, and, as less-developed nations become more-developed (and, assuming similar trends to those in developed nations hold true of fewer children being born over time as the nation develops) is expected to stagnate by the middle of this century. Already, nations like Japan have negative population growth, i.e. a decline in the population count, i.e. they have a replacement rate below about 2.1...
Malthusianism is not a widely-respected position among serious social scientists anymore. Journalists, clueless as ever and seeking scare stories to boost story sales, still push it though...
Congratulations to the multi-billion-dollar telecom megacorp and the Ivy League university whose reputation is more for building social clubs of rich kids than producing people of competence: the Econ101 concept of "transaction costs" has finally been revealed.
So fantastically-new is this concept that in the early 1600s, English businessmen created a map of that island to try to optimize their shipping routes.
"It's a terrorist attack!"..rather than the more-mundane, Occam-compatible, reasonable, probable conclusion that power plants had shut down for less-than-terroristic reasons?
Congress routinely enacts laws that are only constitutional if justified by the "general welfare" clause of the preamble, not any part of the actual constitution.
Note, of course, that the "general welfare" clause was not intended to permit unrestrained growth of government services for whatever vaguely-collective reason Congresspeople might concoct in the service's defense. The "general welfare" clause was not intended to permit galloping socialism.
At least, that's true according to James Madison in Federalist 41. Alexander Hamilton, OTOH, took the broader view that Congress may spend as it sees fit, so long as it doesn't favor a particular party.
Of course, even according to Hamilton's relatively-leftist, pro-government position, expenses to pay for, say, private military contractors, farm subsidies (which mostly go to the largest 20% of farms, often owned by e.g. Tyson Foods), welfare checks for the poor, (benefiting a subset of the population is not necessarily a benefit to the whole population. This doesn't make welfare a bad idea (though its implementations thus-far have ranged from moderately-useful at best (e.g. the EITC), and idiotic at worst) - merely, it conflicts with the way the U.S. Constitution both stands and as was intended by its authors), etc. would, I suspect, be invalid reasons for government spending.
Luckily for American Congresspeople, the majority of the American public has neither read the Constitution or Bill of Rights, nor has been asked to think hard about those documents -- we can thank the public education that the Dept. of Education tries to manage -- and the 20% or so who might have given them more than a passing thought tend neither to abide by those documents nor care about their intent. Combined with incentives to ignore the meaning of the highest law of the land, Congresspeople thus trample the documents they are supposed to uphold...
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So what is the non-union remedy to the issues noted in the original question (of 60 hour work-weeks, etc.)?
I ask, because for as much as I like free markets, the free market currently isn't fixing these issues, and it is *precisely* because of the "lone gun" culture IT has.
A true free-market argument states that the labor side of the labor/capital tug-of-war would do something to create its own power to negotiate for better terms. And guess what? This is precisely what a union would do.
A critical distinction must be made: unions != licensure organizations (call them what they are: guilds), like the ABA or AMA. They serve different purposes, even while their effects on labor utilization sometimes appear similar.
Both unions and licensure organizations would have the effect of driving at least *some* -- but obviously not all -- IT work offshore, to nations with lesser labor power, regulations, and equal or lesser pay rates, with a secondary or tertiary eye towards quality-of-deliverables. But unlike a union, an IT licensure organization modeled after the AMA or ABA *would* kill the innovative spirit of the IT industry and artificially drive-up the costs of those services (just as the AMA and ABA have done).
I argue that we need a union, because it's the free-market's labor-side alternative to regulation. But should stay VERY far away from statutory licensure requirements. Let the market reverse-course a bit, and more-closely and accurately seek its labor vs. capital negotiation equilibrium...
One thing you must realize about software development as a career are that:
* The industry and profession changes more quickly than any other -- Tools change and go in/out of fashion. True, the concepts carry-over, because a lot of tools re-invent the wheel; it's both the stupidity of work-duplication and the evolutionary process of proving/disproving the effectiveness and usability of those tools.
* The culture of IT, and development in particular, says having a life outside of geekdom is akin to being a "cool kid" - and geeks were almost universally never cool kids. If you're not wholly-focused on being a geek in your spare time -- giving up time you could spend with friends, family, your own personal projects, etc. like the rest of the civilized, white-collar non-IT workers of the world -- you're branded an outsider. Go read DZone for a week if you need examples of people spouting such insanity.
* Business knows that developers are usually willing to give away their free time for nothing (OSS is a great example), even to for-profit organizations, and so will take every advantage of you they can.
Combine these 3 points, and you will realize that you either work in software development out of an unbridled, uncontrollable passion for it - or you don't work (or, at least, do enjoyable work, and probably sub-in for sysadmins, who suffer similar problems).
If you want a life, pick another career.
(Yes, IIAD.)
Because American taxpayers (including me) are suckers enough to subsidize flood insurance nationwide, creating the moral hazard of greatly reducing the incentive not to live there -- or, at least, to build in a more hurricane-sustainable way.
Thank whoever said "insurance companies won't pay for these poor persons' flood-ravaged homes, so now government (read: taxpayers) must do it!" That's more of a Democrat's line...
Idealism is so cute.
You really think you can compete at, say, $30/hour (or $150/hour, if consulting) with people in India earning 1/4 of that? Or in China, at 1/10 that?
Business in the real-world is all about the bottom-line; it's all about who can get X done faster and cheaper. Quality? No business really gives a shit about quality; the proliferation of horrible code (and languages like VB and Perl) exemplify this fact. Management is selfish and short-term oriented; long-term solutions don't help the manager whose job plan in a given organization doesn't involve sticking-around longer than 18-60 months.
Sure you do things your way. But you won't be doing much your way, because you're more expensive than your overseas counterpart. In the long-run, your wages (and the wages of richer countries) will stagnate, while those in developing countries (like India) will rise, reducing the income disparity of people in those countries, and gradually making you more-competitive on price relative to foreign competition. But, as J.M. Keynes told us, we will all be dead by the time that long-run in which that state of comparative advantage can reasonably be claimed to have occurred.
Welcome to the global economy. Now, return to the back of the Starbucks barista employment line...
What this exec *really* is bemoaning is that OSS developers aren't writing software that he can just download for free, repackage as IBM's, then sell for-profit to their customers.
This is why it perpetually boggles my mind that OSS developers would release their code with a license under which their unpaid -- but far from costless -- work can be sold for-profit by anybody willing. Unless you truly don't care about your code, it seems stupid to me...
Since it will be Sept. 11 somewhere else in the world, clearly this "CERN" group are a bunch of radical Swiss terrorists bent on destroying the world! We must stop them!!!
(not a great attempt at humor...)
...since if that's how they're spending their time, they won't be penetrating anything (or anybody) else!
*ducks*
Find the population variance of the price differences. If the population variance is low, then the cause is likely systemic: perhaps due more to foreign exchange rates or costs of translation to non-English languages than causes you might find under high population variance, such as price discrimination and/or lack of competition in a given product's market.
Determining the latter causes would likely show up in comparing the sample variances of products categorized as existing in markets of high competition vs. low competition...
I haven't the time to do such an analysis, but I'm sure there's an Econ. or Stats major out there willing to do it. :)
Is it irrational to hate somebody who rapes and murders your wife/gf/S.O.?
No?
Then hatred is not, necessarily, irrational.
If your answer was "yes", BTW, then your wife/gf/S.O. is apparently no more than a piece of meat to you; a replaceable sack of flesh, bone, and blood. For the rest of us, such people have deep meaning -- and those individuals, acting in whatever capacity they may (of their own whim, or on behalf of a government, or whatever) who take that loved one away from us, are taking away that thing - that human being - who means so much to us.
That person who gives us our hope and happiness; these, in turn, contribute to good physical and mental health.
These are hardly irrational factors. Nor are they rationalizations for the seemingly-irrational: study after study shows the obvious: that such close personal relationships tend to improve our health.
And to have somebody take them away from us -- is that not deserving of outright hatred? That it is so undesirable for such a thing to happen that one should feel very strongly -- perhaps, unfortunately, even violently if necessary -- opposed to it? I should think so. I should *hope* so!
Emotion *can* be rational -- but you have to find the basic instinctual, evolutionary reason(s) from which the emotion derives, and not simply assume the response is not grounded by a reason (now, the *degree* to which the emotional response exists relative to the stimulus may be unreasonable. But that's a different question)... (Marvin Minsky also views emotion as simply a *different* form of rationality.)
"Swiss" is not a country. But "Switzerland" is.
I *am* sure it's a path we should not tread...
When you have a religion that promotes spreading its word, by the sword if necessary, you have a problematic religion. Period. And Islam does that.
So does Christianity (not explicitly, but by way of other rationalizations than "for my god").
So would other religions (save Jainism, at least, but including Atheism), if they were big enough to be a significant force.
Religion itself is nothing less than a mental disease; Islam is but one variant of it (but a particularly violent one, in recent decades).
You misread my paragraph; re-read it. Where do I say that all of Islam is evil? I said that the probability that the next attack will be from a Muslim is higher because previous attacks were by Muslims -- it's a question of filtering. Most Muslims, if the more-stringent filter were designed correctly, would pass through without incident. But the fact that more attacks have been by Muslims than not implies a practical need for more filtering/scrutiny of Muslims than people of other religions -- particularly since the violence is driven in part by religion.
Some examples of Muslim terrorist attacks on U.S. targets. Notable among them:
1) 9/11
2) 1998 U.S. embassy bombings in Kenya
3) 1998 USS Cole attack
4) 1993 WTC bombing
5) 1988 Pan Am flight 103
And you're naive to think that terrorists attacking the U.S. are not, predominantly -- though certainly not solely -- Muslim, and therefore, the probability that the next terrorist attack will be by a Muslim will be higher than for a non-Muslim -- and that finally, therefore, that we ought to focus our anti-terrorist attention on Muslims.
You'll have diversity and counter-examples and exceptions in any sufficiently-large population of data. That's not the point; no rational person cares about that.
The point is prioritization: the point is to deal with the cases whose expected value (probability * cost) are the greatest. And to-date, the evidence suggests that Muslims tend to both attack more-frequently and cause the most damage. We can't ignore the occasional crazy white Christian guy, but it's clear he's less-likely to cause a problem domestically than his Muslim and/or Arab counterparts...
(The same argument above could be inverted and used in an Arab or Muslim nation: a WASP from Britain or the U.S. is more-likely to violate their religiously-derived laws than a local...)
Indeed; you see such behavior on corporate proxy statements all the time. "Support putting my friends on the board with me!" they basically say.
Of course, FDR tried to do the same thing in attempting to pack the Supreme Court with his cronies (by attempting to expand the court from 9 to 15 justices during his term in which, presumably, he would be involved in selecting the justices), and Presidential candidates inherently do the same thing. "Elect me and my friends who won't tattle on me!" (unless there is a book deal involved after lame-duckness is achieved, e.g. Scott McLellan on G.W. Bush).
Packing powerful positions with one's own close accomplices is a natural human behavior; we select those whom we trust most and/or agree-with most...
Using the web is very different from developing a web app.
The industry is nerdy because it must be. This is an industry with its fundamental technical roots in math, physics, and logic. Its less-nerdy side is still considerably nerdier than average. Project management, for example, involves explaining nerdy concepts to (potentially) non-nerds, and using nerdy subjects like economics to try to keep projects on-track and/or invent jargon to make CxOs feel like they're part of the "in" crowd.
Non-nerds need not apply; non-nerds have political "science", journalism, sociology, business, and other such areas to occupy.
While I agree with the sentiment of memorization of content losing value compared to the process of finding it, I will say that there is value in memorization: access time. The hardware architecture analogy is that memorization (and the ability to immediately recall that information, of course) is like "RAM" for your brain, whereas performing a search on Google (akin to accessing data off a slower, but larger-capacity HDD) is many, many times slower than your brain's memory.
The more you have memorized, the more-quickly you can recall it, and the easier it is for you to form your own connections between the material. That, indeed, is the point being made made by the article: if you can't form those connections, you literally are losing your ability to think critically -- or even to think, period.
It's much the same problem as we've seen in math classes over the last 15 years (speaking as somebody in his mid-20s), in my opinion: over-reliance on calculators means few people know how to crunch numbers without a machine. "Let the calculator do that!" teachers tell us, not wanting to do the work themselves either.
Google, like a calculator, is a damn fine - no, kick-ass - *tool*. It is something you use to get work done, or to automate the work of some otherwise-manual process you already understand very well.
But those tools must never become *crutches*. We must never allow ourselves -- as seen in Idiocracy -- to say to people "well gee, the computer says something, so it must be true!" That is, we must never allow ourselves to become so lazy as to let machines do all our thinking for us.
Unfortunately, the human nature is like electricity: it tends towards the path-of-least-resistance. Kids use calculators to graph functions on a Cartesian coordinate system rather than calculating a table of x/y values. [1] Cash-register operators can't count change without the register calculating it for them. McDonald's employees don't even use numbers - they use a register with a set of food icons to indicate the items being ordered. 200-level physics students can't roughly estimate the value of another sample data point while it's being taken, given (say) 4 prior data points (guys, seriously, I'm not even close to being the "Rain Man"). [2]
And on and on. People are stupid because we *want* to be stupid, non-intellectual culture (which is pretty much the *other* 85%) rewards it, and our economy is designed to enable convenience/stupidity as easily as possible ("is there profit to be made in simplifying X for mere mortals? Then do it!"). Most people implicitly desire to slouch towards mediocrity, because the alternative is harder.
Google, tell me what to think! *groan*
[1] Except as a brief demonstration for perhaps a section or two in a middle-school or early high-school math course of how to manually graph a function. This would be great by my preference, if it weren't for the fact that nobody is as secure in that sort of process knowledge immediately after learning it as they believe. That sort of task must be repeated several times, in several different contexts (other sections/chapters) to allow the brain to recognize and establish a pattern defining the process...
[2] Yes, of course 4 data points is often much too small to be statistically useful. But so long as the variance is not too great, the very least one can do is estimate a rough mean of the data, and use that as an estimate of the next value.
Of course! By contrast, information disseminated from those fonts of truthiness, i.e. professors and other experts, are never wrong, incomplete, biased, or misleading.
Bullshit? Yes, obviously.
No individual nor a collective of them will ever be perfectly-accurate; therefore, we are talking about error rates here. And to that end, there was a study a couple years ago published in Wired indicating that Wikipedia a rate of factual inaccuracy similar to that of Encyclopedia Britannica.
Now, Britannica is not great by encyclopedia standards -- World Book is reputed to be better. But given its tendency to be referenced in schools, and given the dogmatic criticism heaped upon Wikipedia by those people who have a vested interest in maintaining barriers-to-entry to valuable knowledge -- i.e., professors and other so-called "experts", and given the borderline anarchistic model of page-maintenance used on Wikipedia, this is is nonetheless quite an achievement.
I will add that I would guess the factual accuracy on Wikipedia varies more-widely as one departs the realm of the provable. That is, bias is unlikely in fields of low controversy: math and hard science, possibly excluding biology. But it is much more likely where the flames of emotions and passions are fanned, e.g. particularly on topics of political controversy...
I will also add that I tend to trust professors and experts before I trust unknown, i.e. random-to-me people on the Internet. But not by a wide margin: I still think Wikipedia is a powerful aid, and, where such an expert presents a statement that contradicts the content of Wikipedia, that expert ought to be challenged to defend their statement in light of Wikipedia's content -- provided the content is not in a state of dispute at the time of reading... (Wikipedia and similar sources have been useful to me in recent years in shooting-down claims made by an "eastern" doctor (read: witch-doctor, allegedly an "expert" on the field of medicine for which I saw her) and those of a MLM-peddler from Quixtar.)
The current financial market crisis is considered by many economists and finance professionals to be due in part to the failure of such computationally-intensive risk-management models as those it sounds like IBM is creating.
I believe the claim is that Japan has the fastest decrease in the growth of their population. i.e., that it is growing, but their growth is slowing most-rapidly.
To that point, an increase of 1 million people -- 0.7% -- over the course of 7 years is hardly torrid growth (likewise for Italy's 0.5 million (0.8%) pop. growth).
Also, there is empirical evidence suggesting that Malthusianism is generally inaccurate. Take a look at the bet between Julian Simon and Paul Ehrlich. Paul Ehrlich, a biologist, bet that population growth would drive up the prices of 5 commodity metals over the course of a decade; Julian Simon, an economist, bet against him. Simon won.
What Malthusianists fail to recognize is the increases in efficiency gained through the use of new technology. Increased ability to discover new repositories of a given naturally-occurring material has historically (and in the Simon-Ehrlich bet) been a classic example.
Now, that said, now that we have higher inflation-adjusted gasoline prices than at any time in history, it's clear that the effect is not *always* true. Growth in oil consumption (particularly by emerging economies) is outpacing our growth in discovery of crude oil. But that's the only counter-example I know of...
Oh, sorry, I'm from the hippieville known as the north side of Chicago, where Obama is considered the second coming of Christ and can do no wrong...
Wrong. Global population is widely-understood to be slowing in growth, and, as less-developed nations become more-developed (and, assuming similar trends to those in developed nations hold true of fewer children being born over time as the nation develops) is expected to stagnate by the middle of this century. Already, nations like Japan have negative population growth, i.e. a decline in the population count, i.e. they have a replacement rate below about 2.1...
Malthusianism is not a widely-respected position among serious social scientists anymore. Journalists, clueless as ever and seeking scare stories to boost story sales, still push it though...
Congratulations to the multi-billion-dollar telecom megacorp and the Ivy League university whose reputation is more for building social clubs of rich kids than producing people of competence: the Econ101 concept of "transaction costs" has finally been revealed.
So fantastically-new is this concept that in the early 1600s, English businessmen created a map of that island to try to optimize their shipping routes.
*yawn*
"It's a terrorist attack!" ..rather than the more-mundane, Occam-compatible, reasonable, probable conclusion that power plants had shut down for less-than-terroristic reasons?
Note, of course, that the "general welfare" clause was not intended to permit unrestrained growth of government services for whatever vaguely-collective reason Congresspeople might concoct in the service's defense. The "general welfare" clause was not intended to permit galloping socialism.
At least, that's true according to James Madison in Federalist 41. Alexander Hamilton, OTOH, took the broader view that Congress may spend as it sees fit, so long as it doesn't favor a particular party.
Of course, even according to Hamilton's relatively-leftist, pro-government position, expenses to pay for, say, private military contractors, farm subsidies (which mostly go to the largest 20% of farms, often owned by e.g. Tyson Foods), welfare checks for the poor, (benefiting a subset of the population is not necessarily a benefit to the whole population. This doesn't make welfare a bad idea (though its implementations thus-far have ranged from moderately-useful at best (e.g. the EITC), and idiotic at worst) - merely, it conflicts with the way the U.S. Constitution both stands and as was intended by its authors), etc. would, I suspect, be invalid reasons for government spending.
Luckily for American Congresspeople, the majority of the American public has neither read the Constitution or Bill of Rights, nor has been asked to think hard about those documents -- we can thank the public education that the Dept. of Education tries to manage -- and the 20% or so who might have given them more than a passing thought tend neither to abide by those documents nor care about their intent. Combined with incentives to ignore the meaning of the highest law of the land, Congresspeople thus trample the documents they are supposed to uphold...