Ask HN: What were your naivetés in your twenties?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ji5_MqicxSo

Watch it. Many times.

Parenting should be assimilated (learnt if you like) gradually over time from those around you. Humans IMO function best as family groups within a [close-knit] tribal system: under such a regime one learns from one's own parents, parents of peers, parents of younger children, older intra-generation peers and peers as parents as well as from looking after younger children as a child, looking after younger children as a teen, ... you get the idea.

Even under such a regime it's possible that you can learn "better" parenting from outside the group but you're going to be able to actually do it already just like learning to eat or prepare food.

The thing is we mostly don't have such a structure.

It seems to me that society is in death throes; that as populations burgeon so we value one another and interaction with one another less-and-less. But perhaps this is just me; I tend to be too introverted and pessimistic for my own good.

I have been told by many people more successful than I that I should always try to be friends with people older than I. How can I do this?

a. the Bulls is show business; people pay to see characters like Rodman

b. celebrity tabloids/news pick up on "unstable" behavior and make a show out of it, which is good publicity and marketing for the subjects

c. a long-term steady relationship is not necessarily important; you milk the characters while they generate cash for your business, and try to make it last, but if they eventually leave (in most cases, including Rodman's; MJ would be an exception) there's no critical damage to the business, just less free publicity.

It's not about picking people on a "lack of flaws" generally. It's about avoiding people who've demonstrably, repeatedly, unabashedly violated the most important and intimate commitments they have ever made, and it's about reasoning from that basis that they may not value your professional relationship so much if they won't even value their marital relationship very much.

Adultery isn't necessarily the only case where this conclusion is valid, but I think you get the point. You should avoid "bad people", even if they are geniuses. Just look around -- Ulrich Drepper is a liability to libc because of his abrasiveness and that trait has caused fragmentation of effort, Hans Reiser wrote a mighty fine filesystem, but couldn't work with others and eventually murdered his wife, and so on.

I don't know the personal lives of Drepper or Reiser so it's unfortunate to implicate them in this post, but the point is, some things are more important than raw performance in a core competency. If we accept slightly-less-awesome code in return for largely-more-awesome demeanor, interaction, and maintainership, that's a great trade because while the code may run slightly less fast, it will attract many more users and contributors, prevent fragmentation, and progress quickly and more applicably than a project run by a close-minded or hostile maintainer, no matter how great that individual's code is.

The reality is that a person's behavior in their personal life is a reflection of their behavior in professional life. You can't really segregate the two and pretend that they're completely different animals. They bleed over, a person is one individual. I would never hire someone I knew to be a fraudster or adulterer because they have already proven that they are not worthy of trust from their closest friends and family members, much less their employer.