From the Wikipedia article about him:
> Frederick Douglass (born Frederick Augustus Washington Bailey; c. February 1818 – February 20, 1895) was an American social reformer, abolitionist, orator, writer, and statesman. After escaping from slavery in Maryland, he became a national leader of the abolitionist movement in Massachusetts and New York, gaining note for his oratory and incisive antislavery writings.
"Frederick Douglass taught that literacy is the path from slavery to freedom. There are many kinds of slavery and many kinds of freedom. But reading is still the path."
Also, perhaps my favourite part describing the reaction to a speech by Douglass:
"His very appearance and demeanour destroyed the then- prevalent myth of the 'natural servility' of African-Americans. By all accounts his eloquent analysis of the evils of slavery was one of the most brilliant debuts in American oratorical history.
William Lloyd Garrison, the leading abolitionist of the day, sat in the front row. When Douglass finished his speech. Garrison rose, turned to the stunned audience, and challenged them with a shouted question:
'Have we been listening to a thing, a chattel personal, or a man?'
'A man! A man!' the audience roared back as one voice.
'Shall such a man be held a slave in a Christian land?' called out Garrison.
'No! No!' shouted the audience.
And even louder, Garrison asked: 'Shall such a man ever be sent back to bondage from the free soil of Old Massachusetts?' And now the crowd was on its feet, crying out 'No! No! No!'
He never did return to slavery."
I believe this same thing holds true for coding and the modern day African American ( of which I am one ). I earn 6x more than my father ( Fisk University / TSU - BS/Masters ), 3x more than my sister ( Yale / Columbia Educated Architect - BS/Masters ) and an even greater multiple more than the rest of my family - yet I have no college education. I truly wish more African Americans saw that coding is the new literacy and IMO a real path to freedom.
Edit: e.g. as a product manager, product manager, graphic designer etc...
If anything, seeing more and more NBA players (who tend to be extremely savvy businessmen, at the high end) getting into tech as investors--Steph Curry as a founding investor of Slyce, as an example--might bring visibility into that. A few years after the NBA dress code implementation--and there are things to talk about with regards to that, but that's kind of orthogonal--you saw players like Kevin Durant consciously dress "nerdy", with glasses and sweater vests and the like. I thought Wesley Morris wrote a beautiful piece[0] on the topic, and how, reluctantly or not, those NBA players who are themselves aspirational targets are trying to redefine the possibility space for the people watching them. Maybe that'll help.
You are correct, and you should expand my statement past black communities. I apologize for my bias here as I grew up in an all black poor neighborhood so I often associate this with race but the truth is that its much more socioeconomic than it is racial.
I do wonder what can be further done; the social consciousness of the NBA is one of the reasons I feel good about watching it, and I have anecdotally heard it's made some inroads, but that seems like it's bailing out the ocean. Structural problems, structural fixes...
It is a different kind of coding that software engineering, to be sure, and there will be a grey area between data work and actual coding. But based on what I'm starting to see (I work regularly with academics who struggle with this), it is reasonable to call their analytical work a kind of coding - in fact, I'm not sure there's any other way to describe it. I'm starting to see the amount of R, Python, or other languages analysts need to write to truly dig into complex data, to the point where you can really get insight into it. We can debate where the line between coding and mere analysis starts and ends, but what I'm seeing ventures well into the territory where it is most accurate to call it coding.
I do think differently about problems well outside the realm of CS because of my background in CS. You don't strictly need to code to develop this kind of thinking, but coding is a good way to develop it. For me, it has been as fundamental as literary analysis or mathematical proof.
This is very clearly false. I'll sidestep the semantic argument regarding pen/paper vs a keyboard, but the bottom line is that reading and writing are fundamental communication skills that represent the bedrock of civilization and while computers are obviously a revolutionary and world-changing technology the likes of which we've never seen before, the same can be said of physics, chemistry, metallurgy, agriculture etc. These skills just aren't a requirement for being a productive citizen (like reading and writing); they're just not.
> I think people really overlook how fundamentally algorithmic thinking structures your mind
People overlook lots of important insights about psychology, biology, and physics, it doesn't mean those things are fundamental skills comparable to literacy.
> but coding is a good way to develop it
I totally agree that writing code is a guaranteed way to enhance logical and critical thinking skills but the same is true of studying logic directly, or physics, biology etc
That goes well beyond "simply a lucrative trade", though, doesn't it? Even if we disagree about whether it is fundamental in and of itself (akin to algorithmic thinking), or just similar to physics or studying logic directly.
Sure. When I say it is "simply a lucrative trade" I don't mean to characterize programming as sterile or mundane, I only mean to suggest that the programmer's vaunted status as a profession is a function of the current labor market and not a function of some quality specific to the ability to write software. Writing software is a trade-skill subject to market forces, literacy is a critical thinking skill more akin to logic itself.
False dichotomy, these things you distinguish are just two sides of the same coin:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Curry%E2%80%93Howard_correspon...
If the total number of senior engineers on the market increased 10,000% overnight, the value of programming as a skill would instantly plummet, given the same scenario for rates of literacy, the value of literacy would remain the same or perhaps even increase. This is because literacy is a force multiplier in all aspects of career advancement while software programming simply isn't.
If you glance anywhere outside the IT echo-chamber to examine the value of literacy vs programming the point I'm making becomes very obvious. Nearly every high prestige profession (lawyer, doctor, scientist, architect, author etc) is amplified by literary skills whereas this is obviously untrue for programming.
I think you are playing semantics, my argument is simply that coding can be as fundamental to earning a living as literacy and unlike many other occupations there are no gatekeepers that tell you what/when you can code - thus it gives you the freedom to work to improve yourself and your situation in ways that other occupations do not. I have no interest in debating the fundamental building blocks of learning etc... only the tactical dat to day skills that can add value to ones life but I would like to see your GitHub profile. Here is mine - https://github.com/ArionHardison. I also have 0 interest in your supposition, do you have any empirical evidence to back up the assertion that coding in 30 years will be akin to being a lawyer?
Note: To assert that someone would be able to code well enough to hold a job whole also being functionally illiterate is simply moronic.
Perhaps it is moronic to reduce "literacy" to a binary attribute. Are you deliberately misinterpreting my statements or do you honestly believe I'm here arguing for a definition of literacy that stops at 1st grade language arts? Increased literacy translates into increased ability to communicate effectively and intentionally. Increased literacy translates into faster knowledge acquisition and higher productivity gains.
Many engineers I've worked with have excellent literary skills, but many have poor literary skills and it is very obvious when those poorly developed skills are holding them back; it is especially noticeable among those who have an aversion to books or dense technical literature and supplement their experience almost exclusively with videos and by following tutorials. I'm not knocking videos or tutorials, I use them and I think everyone should, but if you're not also utilizing and improving literary skills you will always be overshadowed by those who are.
Consider the example of the developer who jumps into a new framework on the job and just starts hacking away until they've got a functioning MVP, but in the process also wastes 8 hours trying to demystify the behavior of a complex API by running tutorial code rather than spending an hour doing a comprehensive read through the documentation after which everything makes sense. Consider the missed opportunities for otherwise talented individuals who simply lack the literary skills necessary to participate in ongoing written communication with non-technical management, executives, and business partners. Consider the loss of productivity from poorly written or non-existent documentation. I see this kind of thing all the time.
> I think you are playing semantics, my argument is simply that coding can be as fundamental to earning a living as literacy
I am not "playing semantics", I explicitly disagree with the notion that "coding can be as fundamental to earning a living as literacy", it simply doesn't get any more "fundamental" than being able to read and write and there is nothing "fundamental" about code writing skills that cuts across almost every track of occupational advancement the way that literary skills do. Don't misunderstand, I'm not suggesting that logical thinking skills do not cut across all domains, I'm saying that coding skills do not, they are not at all the same thing.
> there are no gatekeepers that tell you what/when you can code
Such is the case for all artisanal skills, it is only that writing code happens to be in very high demand at this time so it is a smart economic choice given the available options, but that obviously won't last forever and is clearly contingent on a market demand for the skillset. Literacy, on the other hand, is a timeless skill that pays dividends indefinitely in the advancement of one's career regardless of the industry.
> it gives you the freedom to work to improve yourself and your situation in ways that other occupations do not
Not true. Practice makes perfect with code, just like anything else, it's only that nobody is going to pay someone with 1 year of experience a 60k salary to produce hobbyist level paintings and music, thus "the freedom to work to improve yourself" becomes "things I don't have time to do because I'm working".
> I would like to see your GitHub profile
Why? I don't measure my career success by a matrix of green squares displayed on a corporation's website. Seriously, who cares? This is kinda what I'm talking about. Your github profile is just self-aggrandizing noise in the technocratic bubble of the software industry, it's not inherently important.
> I also have 0 interest in your supposition, do you have any empirical evidence to back up the assertion that coding in 30 years will be akin to being a lawyer?
I didn't say it was a proven fact, only that it is something I suspect - but to offer some reasoning for this suspicion
1. Year over year developers are able to produce more and more, with less bugs, at faster rates and cheaper costs. 30 years ago, you couldn't pay an experienced team of 10 to do what a single mid-level dev can accomplish with Rails and AWS today (i.e. doing more with less = less demand for engineers = lower wages)
2. Open source greatly exacerbates this effect and it is compounding as more and more open source software matures and is able to do more. (i.e. tools that get better and easier with 0 cost = lower barrier to entry in the industry = higher supply of engineers = lower wages)
3. An explosion of interest in the field spurred by high salaries, high prestige, popular media, deliberate awareness campaigns, a burgeoning bootcamp industry and an unlimited springwell of high quality resources for free online. (i.e. large influx of new engineers * explosion of free high quality learning resources = big spike in supply of quality engineers = lower wages)
4. Increasing saturation of software markets. We see it pretty much across the spectrum of software from apps and games to office and web; the only area that isn't saturated yet is B2B but that won't last forever either. How many times in how many languages can we remake the same CRUD application before companies start to realize that open-source or off-the-shelf software can be much more cheaply deployed and maintained by an agency as opposed to recruiting and managing an expensive software department? Obviously, software companies can't really do that, but it is becoming increasingly viable for every other industry to do so as the software gets better and better.
All these trends are increasing in intensity and amplifying each-other, the golden era of the engineer won't last forever.
2. There is actually no #2. I have work to do, the things I build help people so while you may take this reductionist attitude toward me and my work it really does not matter because as long as I can push code and use that as a mechanism to distribute my ideas at scale to cause measurable change in the lives of others my code matters - I suspect Fredrick Douglas would be proud of that as where you are just all talk.
Also, https://dietmanager.com - my work is FAR from a simple CRUD app but good luck w/ that.
lol, come on man, do you honestly think I care about proving my accomplishments to random internet strangers? I don't even care about proving it to IRL strangers.
> that "self-aggrandizing noise" is social proof and as I suspected you refuse to provide any
I don't feel like I need to prove anything to you; my statements stand on their own. I also hope the irony of asking a black guy to dox himself in order to prove that he's actually real isn't lost on you. If I had said I was white would you feel the need to ask for proof of my accomplishments? A successful black engineer who disagrees with you is not a unicorn.
> There is always someone like you that attacks what I have done and claims the same but can never provide a single piece of evidence to support their claim.
I'm not sure why you're being so defensive. Seriously, please copy and paste ANYTHING I've said that is attacking you or any of your work. I simply disagree with your assertion that coding is as fundamental to career success as literacy, that's it. I wrote a really long reply with a lot of details explaining my specific reasoning and you completely disregard it in favor of some twisted caricature of my reply that you've decided is a personal attack against you and your work. You're not even hearing what I'm saying so I'll stop here. Good luck on your app.
Meanwhile coding IS a way of communication in itself (as is something like math), but it boils down to being a specification for the behavior of an agent. The versatility that it grants you in the job market, or the algorithmic thinking that it cultivates on the day to day just doesn't seem comparable to the advantages of reading. Text is a literal inscription of the languages used to express the entirety of the human experience verbally. Any programming language just can't compete with the value of being able to read general text (the value added just isn't the same).
Actually, according to the Wikipedia article, "The exact date of his birth is unknown, and he later chose to celebrate his birthday on February 14. In his first autobiography, Douglass stated: 'I have no accurate knowledge of my age, never having seen any authentic record containing it.'"
In 150 years people may well be saying the same thing about the major figures in today's anti-abortion movements.
Even if it was not a fetus but an adult with a fully formed conciousness and personality, this would be a hard demand to make, and our laws reflect that.
Abortion is not about killing, it's about not having a being in your body, potentially wrecking it and killing you. In the same vein, you can stop supporting dependent adults, as an individual (doing that as a society is a different matter). You can just stop. It won't kill them in that case, but that is not what this is about.
If pregnancy was nothing for your body, no stress at all, then carrying to term and giving it up for adoption would be a lot more common. This dimension is often overlooked by people, especially men, I feel. Pregnancy can be insanely hard and dangerous.
I will not go into details since that makes for boring reading for everyone else, but that's what I thought about.
Sorry for being so blunt, but then I thought you might want to know.
Two classes of human beings, slaves and women, each deprived of human rights, for valid reasons in the eyes of the supporters of the respective practice.
Unless you wish to argue that bodily integrity [1] is not a human right.
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/3-human-chimeras-...
It can also lead to someone being of 2 blood types - so that they are compatible with both.
The implication, stated roughly is the following: "A person can do what they want to their own body. And their body is defined by the DNA signature. Whereas a fetus has a different DNA structure than the body it is in, and therefore harming it is depriving it of human rights, because it has different DNA."
I proved this implication wrong. If you feel that this implied statement is not indicative of your intent, please post your implication as a statement rather than engage in obfuscated writings.
And corner cases like Dwight Schrute have nothing to do with it.
Portraying it as an accidental outgrowth, as if someone's body grew a second spleen as an adult, is intellectually dishonest.
1. If you don't want an abortion, don't have one.
2. Quit trying to shove your ethical system on other people.
Saying otherwise is equivalent to saying that under certain circumstances it's okay to force someone to keep another being alive for 9 months with continuous blood transfusions while exposing themselves to many dangerous, and potentially fatal, side effects.
They don't look human, they don't act human, absolutely none of them can survive as independent creatures (as most humans can).
If anything, they're kinda weird little monsters that invade women's bodies that could potentially become human, but human they are not.
Rather than call them human (which they're not), or a class of people (which they're not), call them fetuses and then the sophistry around controlling women's access to health care wears away a little.
The evangelical absolutism around abortion is historically new. Before 1980, plenty of evangelical Christians had nuanced views on the topic: http://www.patheos.com/blogs/slacktivist/2012/02/18/the-bibl...
Even some evangelical writers see this as mainly about a wedge issues used for political power, not morality: http://www.patheos.com/blogs/slacktivist/2018/07/03/the-con-...
So I think it's no coincidence that at the same time extreme anti-abortion views came to prominence on the US right, the US right became steadily more extreme, with centrists disappearing from the Republican side of the aisle in Congress: https://xkcd.com/1127/large/
My expectation is that this, like all positive feedback loops, will eventually break, and Christians will return to historical norms. And I'd further guess that this will be aided technological advances that make extreme antiabortion views untenable. Look, for example at the question that goes something like, "In a clinic fire, would you save a five year old or a tank with 1,000 embryos?". [1] Advances in medicine, AI, copying minds, and animal uplift would provide many more examples, forcing a debate around what really makes something a legally protected person. If an AI, a human mind moved to silicon, and a dog with a 140 IQ all get citizenship, it'll harder to explain why a nonsentient fertilized human egg gets those protections.
[1] https://www.quora.com/In-the-abortion-debate-isnt-the-5-year...
Abortion is condemned in the Didache (late 1st century/early 2nd century CE). There were already rigorously set penalties under canon law for abortion in the 1st millennium. It may be that American Evangelical Christians will return to the moderate views about the issue that they held several decades ago, but it is entire possible that the "historical norms" that any Christian community might return to are the ones even further back in time.
I like your examples for questions, because they are thought-provoking. Let me add two more: Should a baby born a (2/3..) month (or a day!) premature be less protected than a baby born 3 days late? Would you rather save a five year old, or 20 premature born babies? Or, what do you think about abortions done because the embryo is female.
It seems like the most notable milestone in the entire process, so what makes it arbitrary?
It is certainly the most perceivable milestone. But maybe we can define a status change which is more relevant to the question cell group -> human. Maybe "has consciousness".
My point is that this is a discussion which seems important.
This hinges on the definition of consciousness, which we really don't have a good definition for.
BTW the oath also forbids doctors to treat bladder stones (seemingly for anti-competitive reasons?), so all in all it should, as every ancient text, be interpreted in the historical context.
The deferral to (what I assumed to be) surgeons seems to indicate specialization rather than being anti-competitive. That is, there was a split between "doctors" and "chirurgeons" or surgeons.