What Long Hours Really Mean

"I refute you!"

Joking aside, I feel Solipsism is immature. Do you know which demographic also comprises Solipsists? Two year olds. "Mommy doesn't exist when I close my eyes." This gives Solipsists an excuse to stop thinking critically about things like ethics, et al. So in this sense, Solipsism's just a cop-out which justifies laziness. When someone says "objective reality doesn't exist", what I really hear is "everybody's equal; you all get a trophy; we all have a right to our opinions". You might recognize this as the Red Herring Fallacy. I think Solipsism is a subtle version of this same fallacy.

Paul Graham says something similar about the subjectivity of aesthetics * : "Your mother at this point is not trying to teach you important truths about aesthetics. She's trying to get the two of you to stop bickering." I think this applies to Moral Relativism, Solipsism, and generally most philosophies which deny the existence of objectivity.

* http://www.paulgraham.com/taste.html

Post Modernism is often said to have been a reaction to Modernism. But I think it's even more important to realize that Post Modernism is a reaction to World War I and II. After WWII, I imagine people realized "Science and objectivity gave us cars and electricity, but it also gave us mustard gas and nuclear weapons. Maybe this whole Modernism gig isn't so great after all..."

According to Literary Post Modernism, there's lots of conflicting narratives rather than a single objective perspective. During the chaos of World Wars I and II, I imagine war-stories naturally contradicted one another. I like the conflicting POV aspect because it can encourage the reader to question the author's reliability, like in Edgar Allen Poe's The Tell-Tale Heart. Unfortunately, Post Modernism can also have the opposite effect: encouraging readers to quit thinking too hard and to accept the text as it is since "it's all equally valid". This negative aspect fits really well with the self-esteem movement, which (I'll say again) I think is a cop out for thinking critically.

You may notice I'm not refuting Solipsism per se, but ulterior motives for believing Solipsism is valid. This is because going down the road of "formal proofs" probably won't yield anything convincing. We'd simply talk past each other, and in circles, and bicker over definitions. But at the end of the day, it's pretty difficult to disprove abstractions and ideologies sin finding an inherent contradiction. And I'll even admit, maybe Solipsism actually is true. Who knows? I won't claim outright that Solipsism is false. But in my own experience, I find it very unlikely that Solipsism is true * . And I do want to acknowledge a possible bias for believing "Solipsism is true" due to it's convenience.

* http://yudkowsky.net/rational/bayes

p.s. I do find the Harry Potter fan-fic kinda weird...

wrote Phil Greenspun[1], here's the rest of the quote:

"... Suppose that a programmer needs to spend 25 hours per week keeping current with new technology, getting coordinated with other programmers, contributing to documentation and thought leadership pieces, and comprehending the structures of the systems being extended. Under this assumption, a programmer who works 55 hours per week will produce twice as much code as one who works 40 hours per week. In The Mythical Man-Month, the only great book ever written on software engineering, Fred Brooks concludes that no software product should be designed by more than two people. He argues that a program designed by more than two people might be more complete but it will never be easy to understand because it will not be as consistent as something designed by fewer people. This means that if you want to follow the best practices of the industry in terms of design and architecture, the only way to improve speed to market is to have the same people working longer hours. Finally there is the common sense notion that the smaller the team the less management overhead. A product is going to get out the door much faster if it is built by 4 people working 70-hour weeks (180 productive programmer-hours per week, after subtracting for 25 hours of coordination and structure comprehension time) than if by 12 people working 40-hour weeks (the same net of 180 hours per week). The 12-person team will inevitably require additional managers and all-day meetings to stay coordinated."[1]

[1] http://philip.greenspun.com/ancient-history/managing-softwar... (halfway down the page on this)

Just because you believe reality doesn't exist outside your own mind doesn't mean you can't die.

I am aware of phenomenology and I've read some Merleau-Ponty. To my taste, however, the situation where an objective/"objective" scientific truth makes consistent predictions about my sensory experiences that suggest a physical outside world and another where that truth makes consistent predictions about the outside world itself, which in turn causes the sensory experiences, don't seem different in a meaningful way. Why make that distinction?

WRT #2, the impact on income when viewing a career over a long period of time is clear. It appears you're being dishonest by refusing to acknowledge this rather obvious fact. You can say "it's not compensation" until you're blue in the face but at the end of the day people who do more will on average earn more.