Natural born programmers • Hacker News Board

Re: Natural born programmers

#111

Post by tptacek » Sat, Oct 12, 2013, 4:50 PM UTC

steveklabnik wrote: post #105

gruseom wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Individuals and stories are part of good conversation. Skraushaar's comment was relevant and enjoyable. Reflexive ideological dismissals, on the other hand, are just tedious.

Absolutely. For conversational value, it's great. But in a discussion about empirical research, it's misleading at best.

I agree. Nobody would have realized that this was just a single person's story if it hadn't been pointed out. Thank you; I was almost about to add a "biological mother's profession" and "biological father's profession" field to our recruiting questionnaire, and have been spared an embarrassment.

Re: Natural born programmers

#112

Post by dragonwriter » Sat, Oct 12, 2013, 5:28 PM UTC

v21 wrote: post #76

chroma wrote: post #47

Let's say I grant the author his points about harming gender balances and programming culture. That still doesn't address the most important question: Is it true? Is programming an innate ability? It's unclear whether programming can be taught, but the most depressing study in this area is called The Camel Has Two Humps [1]: We have found a test for programming aptitude, of which we give details. We can predict succe…

At the risk of sneering at science for it's own sake: why is that the most important question? What extent is programming an innate skill doesn't seem to have many obvious utilities, but finding effective methods to address gender disparities in STEM fields does. Not to mention that these studies also indicate that a belief in effort rather than innate skill improves performance for both genders.

Why would you want equal representation in the field if the unequal representation were due to genetic differences producing different abilities or inclinations?

I don't think most of the current inequality in representation is due to those reasons, but certainly understanding the extent to which those may exist and play a part in determining outcomes has something to say about the results that should be hoped for.

Re: Natural born programmers

#113

Post by wellboy » Tue, Oct 15, 2013, 11:52 PM UTC

pg wrote: post #36

"belief in gift and natural born ability is toxic to all, and by eliminating it, we won’t alienate so many from technology" There is certainly some inborn variation between people. Anyone with children is aware of it. Two children of the same parents can have very different personalities. So what exactly is it supposed to mean to "eliminate a belief" in variation in inborn ability? That we're supposed to believe some…

Well as with many things there is no black and white thinking here either.

As my dad always used to say, 50% is talent, 50% is effort. Someone with the 100% talent, who's a lazy fuck (50% overall) will be outperformed by far by someone with 50%/mediocre talent putting in 100% of work (75% overall).