Levels of aspiration

This is a bit self-serving.

Food can be art. Both visually and through taste and smell. But 90%, no, 99.99% of food is food - the ingestion of basic nutrients so you don't starve to death and die.

You can be at the top of the pyramid posted here (teaching, publishing, "innovating"), but if you don't understand utility then the reason you can't have a conversation with someone at the bottom of the pyramid (I see he takes a back-handed jab at Automattic, producers of one of the most successful pieces of software this century) is because you're a masturbatory pedant who lacks context, doesn't understand the historical role of technology in business, and doesn't understand how to fulfill people's direct needs.

In short, only someone sitting in an ivory tower staring at his code and thinking "This is the best thing ever." could write such an ignorant blog post.

  To help someone move up the hierarchies, they have to have an intrisic (sic) 
  desire to do so. Arguments like “but it works” or “it gets the job done” are 
  tell-tell signs of someone happy at the lowest level of the technical 
  hierarchy and your cue to just quietly back out of the debate.

For an article that claims we need software "in all shapes and sizes" the amount of smug superiority exhibited here is amazing. Yes, different people have different priorities when it comes to software choice, but applying an arbitrary one-dimensional quality pyramid to it and assigning users to levels corresponding from 'absolutely clueless hillbilly' to 'latte-sipping Ruby poet' is just wrong.

And the pyramid itself doesn't follow any logical ordering either. E.g. the implication that "beautiful code" is also fault tolerant is a total non sequitur. We get it, 37signals is moving the industry forward, it says so right in the infographic. I'm not even disagreeing with the fact that this company has been extremely influential, and I did enjoy reading their book - but appointing yourself king of the hill while casually dismissing technology you don't agree with as being lower level, that's just bad form.

It’s close enough to Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs to work for me. I’m more concerned with whether the general idea adds some value to my thinking than trying to take them down a peg for any perceived smugness.

And speaking as an ex-salesperson, this general model is extremely relevant when attempting to persuade someone to change. Within the narrow confine of a single decision, different people are at different places in a hierarchy like this, and you are wasting your time if you argue at the wrong level.

It’s important to remember that placement in the hierarchy with respect to a specific choice is not a value judgment about a human being. I spend a lot of time daydreaming about programming languages, but when there’s a plumbing problem in my house I just want it fixed. Someone might be a latte-sipping derivatives poet but happy to hack together some Perl to process some data feeds.

It’s up to you of course, but I find I get a lot less out of essays I read if I get sidetracked into making value judgments about the authors. If there’s something there worth thinking about, why let the other stuff distract you?