A friend of mine wanted to give back and started teaching programming to disadvantaged kids.
He was shocked to ultimately discover that for most of his students, they simply didn't seem to be fundamentally capable of the abstract thought required, and it didn't matter how much time he spent with them. He came away from the experience fairly disillusioned, and I also never expected the difference in ability to be so extreme.
I personally really wonder -- is this something "genetic", like an athletic ability? Is it something learned, but somehow acquired at a young age? Is it a mindset, that we just haven't figured out how to communicate? Or a question of motivation, if it seems "hard" to think that way?
Homeless in my city has grown by 200% in the last 4 years. We regularly have new homeless show up in Bloomington, IN because we try to care for and support getting out of poverty and homelessness... However this is exacerbated by communities all around shipping us their homeless. Greyhound Therapy is a thing, and it happens more than you think.
The homeless problem is getting worse, by far. Wages have stagnated, rents inexorably go up, and overall cost of living goes up as well. Sure, some company makes more money, but the result too is people move. Sometimes it's to a different apartment, and sometimes it's to Main St. The big problem why "we" don't see it are the city, municipal, and state governments don't want to make a count of it. It's embarrassing - and the thought is 'If we don't count it, they'll go away'.
We in IT have been relatively immune, but I too suspect that will go by the wayside in the coming decades with the factorization and commodification of programming and IT administration.
For me, the biggest such time was being a conscript in my small European country. Not a great time, but holy shit, did it open my eyes to the existence of people I would never have thought were real!
Emigrating to California was comparatively a mild culture shock. Turns out I had more in common with muslim Pakistani software engineers than farm boys from half an hour outside my home town.
Are you are Muslim ? If I dropped you in the middle of Pakistan I am pretty sure you would have nothing in common with most people in Pakistan.
BurningFrog is not Muslim. BurningFrog was pointing out that religious difference between BurningFrog and BurningFrog's coworkers (muslim Pakistani software engineers).
>If I dropped you in the middle of Pakistan I am pretty sure you would have nothing in common with most people in Pakistan.
That's pretty much the point BurningFrog was making. BurningFrog has a lot of similarities with software engineers willing to move to California even if they're of different religions and nationalities. But BurningFrog was very different from "most people in" "[BurningFrog's] small European country". And BurningFrog is similarly very different from "most people in Pakistan".
To be fair, one reason I got along so well with people from every corner of the planet writing software in Silicon Valley was just that I had learned about strangers in the military.
What is the solution? I haven't a clue. Maybe an education system similar to Germany's, though I doubt that would catch on in the US.
I also say that the problem people are bothered by is human suffering. Even if you don't like how meritocracy is conducted today, like maybe you feel that 50% of positions in society are not sufficiently merited, and even if you could snap your fingers and magically sort people by potential like an oracle, you are still left with a meritorious race where few people win and losers suffer bad.
As a society we should contemplate more deliberately the fate of losers.
I met my wife, who helped “smooth out” my moods, and went from someone who couldn’t hold down a job at Walmart to a software engineer making many multiples of what I did just five years ago.
Even with the stability it mostly allowed me to take adderall without horrible behavioral side effects like compulsive gambling.
You’re right though, for me I was basically forgotten and nobody cared at that point. It wasn’t until I hit rock bottom sleeping on my moms couch that things got better. I feel like I was pulled up out of a hell I didn’t know I could escape from.
Then you have the old problem that in many companies HR will still want a degree cert.
I think technical and professional education should be always available to people - it helps us all if people can reach their potential after all.
So I do think it is to a large question of motivation and time. That is why so many programmers, even those with qualifications, are self-taught. Of course it helps to be smart, but programming isn't unforgiving enough that you can't be average. So that isn't really the barrier.
I think that's really important. Most good programmers are very persistent.
The saddest part is dealing with those who weren't cut out to do this yet somehow ended up in the profession. They may well have missed their true calling in life and go on to wreak havoc in organizations where you get to witness their frustration and perpetual confusion on a daily basis.
For him it seems way better than the alternatives, really. Dev work pays really well.
We might not be good at augmenting intelligence but it’s pretty easy to ruin potential, and all of these things are far more likely to happen to a disadvantaged child.
The reason the book's controversial is that it builds a case that intelligence has a genetic basis, and some races are smarter (on average) than others (although there's tremendous individual variation, and environment / upbringing plays roles too).
If that's indeed the way the world actually is, would that be a truth our society could accept?
On the one hand, I'm no racist, nor do I aspire to ever be one. On the other hand, I want to say that I aspire to a proper scientific worldview, understanding the world according to evidence and reason. If I dismiss The Bell Curve's argument, am I being properly skeptical of unproven claims, or am I just going along with societal pressure and my own wish to live in a world where race really doesn't matter?
Not a statement hiding in a question :|
That kind of early exposure made it much easier to understand vector fields later on.