201–210 of 371 posts
Linus' signature is shockingly relevant these days: "...The Bill of Rights is a literal and absolute document. The First Amendment doesn't say you have a right to speak out unless the government has a 'compelling interest' in censoring the Internet. The Second Amendment doesn't say you have the right to keep and bear arms until some madman plants a bomb. The Fourth Amendment doesn't say you have the right to be secur…
edit a little stream of consciousness follows Curse of being gifted is very real. I wonder sometimes how many people couldn't break out of it and have ended up in bad jobs, or worse. Probably like many HNers I also suffered from it mightily in K-12 and by the time I realized what was going on, I was already so far behind that escaping school, rather than redoing years of what I missed, was the easier option. It took…
This comment seems highly fantastical to me.
Furthermore, it's kind of weird to talk about intelligence in terms of levels. I know plenty of people who are smarter than me in certain fields, but I don't think I've ever met someone who was objectively smarter than me in every way, to the point where I could separate us into different classes of intelligence. In my experience, the IQ model is flawed: intelligence is much more fluid, and exists on many more axes, than we give it credit for.
There was a Reddit comment I read a while ago — I wish I could find it again! — where the author tried to describe what it would be like to have a Lex Luthor level of genius. You'd be able to effortlessly do anything you wanted. Ideas would immediately come together in your head. Even the most complex branches of science would be as easy as basic algebra. Everyone's problems would seem so simple and naive, but it would make it hard to relate to people. That's kinda what this comment read like to me.
(Sorry if I'm wrong, bane.)
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>Straight As can mask a lot of problems. I've got a room mate who was put ahead a grade in middle?late-elementary school and missed the whole foundation of algebra. They did so because he got straight A's so obviously he's smart enough; he could just skip that. (They promised to give him a text book so he could learn on his own that summer, but never got around to giving it to him.) Of course, he started struggling i…
I have never, ever, ever met someone who was well-served by skipping a grade. Myself included. Ever. Skipping a grade means giving up a full year of education. If that proposition doesn't give you pause, you probably don't have enough respect for the value of education. Even if you you get absolutely nothing out of that year aside from the soft skills you develop by sitting in a class with other kids and listening to…
Education doesn't stop with schooling.
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Torvalds is abrasive, but Raymond is just an asshole supreme, and if I had known this was an ESR post I wouldn't have opened it in the first place.
So you really didn't get anything out of the post because ESR wrote it?
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I remember when we were dating, we got in an argument about something, I don't remember what exactly, and a typical lover's debate ensued. In a debate I'm usually able to rationally disassemble another person's arguments and "win"...and I remember the moment that she presented her argument and it was different than mine and I realized she was absolutely correct and I had built a sloppy argument in my mind. I told mys…
Thanks for your reply. Wow that's really interesting and great as well. [1] Won't get into why I think my wife is "smart" and won't say anymore lest she reads this and the wrong thing happens! (I'll leave it at that). That said I'm always amazed at the number of people I've run into who think there is some downside to not having a basically "stupid" woman that is totally dependent on the husband. I've had people actu…
Yeah, I suppose that would be the metric then!
It's fantastic to have somebody, everyday, who constantly challenges me and forces me to exercise my mind.
I would definitely have had trouble with a "trophy" wife...and actually I find that I get along better with men who have highly intelligent wives better than men who have hot trophy wives.
Eric is plainly right. I once heard of a developer that wanted to make programming more interesting to himself, by using just three names for all his variables. They where banana, apple and another fruit. He used only those names. I am not sure what he did, when he needed more than three, but that was what he did. It might have made the thing more interesting for him, but made the things far more difficult for us oth…
Clearly I don't know all the context, and so I am not really sure what Eric is responding (in addition to the previous message), but it seems to me that Linus has solid technical reasons for his argument. He's even trying to avoid clever ideas of favor of simple code.
This should be required reading for any developer, if only to hopefully instill the belief that you will eventually reach a problem that you cannot lean on pure ability alone to solve.
What I got out of the thread was that Linus had a solid & rational argument justified by actual technical reasons, which was ignored by Eric.
I did not see where Linus was leaning on pure ability.
I wish I saw the response. That said, the "curse of the gifted" manifests itself in a lot of ways. One problem is also that "less gifted" see the "gifted" and say, "If they don't have to be disciplined, why do I?"
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This comment seems highly fantastical to me.
Maybe it's just the inevitable jealous response, but I felt the same way reading it. The deductive bit in the middle in particular — most people I know just aren't simple or predictable enough to guess their favorite music, car, or food. Decades have been spent trying to understand human behavior; how can one person have enough insight to definitively analyze someone's "limitations and patterns"? Not unless they're a…
This is actually a very well studied and successful field. In fact it's so successful, it makes those kinds of predictions possible, if you follow me.
Certain things are marketed to certain kinds of people because they're inclined to buy them, based on that person's self-perception.
The products/neighborhoods that are successful are the ones that are most successful at predicting what particular people will like, which in turn makes those choices more predictable for a given individual.
It's a Darwinian feedback process, almost. If the choices weren't predictable, they wouldn't have been available to have been made.
It's weird to see Linus on the other side of being disciplined, and a pretty stark contrast to his own slightly more abrasive style. For example: https://lkml.org/lkml/2012/12/23/75
I don't understand why people allow themselves to be spoken to like that! Incredicle...
I knew that stuff like this goes on in mailing lists; I've grown up in the computer culture. But seeing this as an adult, after learning some people skills and how interpersonal communication works, it's really shocking what to see kind of destructive tone prevails in some prominent tech circles.