QuantumGravy

Religions and denominations of the same religion won't even agree on the nature or existence of free will. Why everyone else is so concerned about the same, I don't understand. It's more philosophy than science in most discussions. If acting as if your actions had internal agency offers better chances of survival, that's a good enough fudge for nature.

I find this unnecessarily aggressive and dismissive of people's (willfully chosen) social responsibilities. Yes, "the wife" is a convenient excuse for many things, including why you can't go out drinking tonight, even though you're really just tired from work and don't want to admit it. But presumably, if you're a decent person who has chosen to marry in this day and age, you take that choice seriously and choose your risks carefully.

Vicious cycle / feedback loop.

I recall there being a few studies suggesting that being poor can lead to poor decision making, and I certainly agree that poor decision making reinforces negative outcomes such as credit card debt. Thus they are individually responsible for what they've done, but the impoverished middle-class as a whole shouldn't be blamed for where they're headed.

Poverty Impedes Cognitive Function

http://science.sciencemag.org/content/341/6149/976

Even if they are accepting of you earning more, their own boss and/or Human Resources may well have a different opinion. Woe unto those whose supervisors are also underpaid.

Viable long-term survival strategies on Earth have some pretty hard limits. Even if we master famine, disease, our own worst impulses, and asteroids, there's still the expansion of the Sun. Even if we don't expand beyond our own solar system, the technological advances gained in doing so could be invaluable for maintaining our home planet.

Perfection is a particularly anthropocentric concept. Earth was clearly a local optima, but our very capacity for trashing the planet suggests it was rather shallow. We've changed the fitness landscape like so many bulldozers in a landfill. There's no way to know what lies among the slopes beyond. Maybe we really are stuck here and defending our crapsack position from asteroids is as good as it gets. That just sounds depressing, though.

I expect we won't evolve our thinking, but if we could somehow reproduce the same problems wherever we go enough times, there's an opportunity for evolution and natural selection to operate on our societies at a galactic level. We'd buy ourselves the chance to roll the dice many, many, many more times. There will be misery and suffering along the way, sure, but that's been the cost of our existence thus far.

Assuming artificial gravity generators, who needs planets?

We stay on this rock, we die on this rock. Confining ourselves to Earth isn't a survival strategy, it's giving up. Rebuttals would be appreciated, though!

To be fair, only some do. Others just assume endless reincarnation is a thing and promise escape. Whether you see that as real distinction is something else entirely.

From the moment those copies exist, I'm not them and they're not me. We do not share subjective experiences. If you think we're equivalent and expendable, you'd best murder me in secret and pretend it never happened. You know, like incinerating me inside a teleporter or someth... oh crap, we're going there.

Yeah, I have a few issues with that comic.

> The man was not a murderer.

This is one of a few logical leaps I can't accept. His past selves are already "dead". His future selves do not yet exist. If, for example, all my ancestors are dead and my offspring not yet conceived, how does my suicide harm them in any way? None will so much as feel the grief of losing me, but I'm supposed to feel guilty over "murdering" them? (Let's not follow up on what this would mean for topics such as abortion!)

If future and past selves are of such importance that we not murder them, how can present copies be valued any less? If destroying the original is not necessary, then that must surely be murder as well. It's worse, actually, because then it's not even hypothetical; "The Machine" would be intentionally and unnecessarily ending a life.

Why do I possess the subjective experience of me, not you, and not some other me separated by time or space? Barring notions of a soul, either those other instances are not real in some sense or else there's something phenomenologically special about each, which I can only attribute to being uniquely present at a particular point in space-time. If the teleported me is a clone, their existence ought to have nothing to do with me, thus I should not be murdered for their sake. However, if the teleported me instead can only exist as a function of my past-self ceasing to be, then that's little different than how I am from any moment to the next.

TL;DR: If it works like the movie version of "The Prestige" where one copy is murdered purely for convenience, I'm not stepping into that teleporter.

If everyone has similar memories to conceal, problem solved. Who's ready to sign up for Total Recall style memory implants?

> 1. It needs a fake calendar that is randomly populated with meetings.

Not enough to compete with the real deal. Has to have multiple team calendars, so it can support conflicting mandatory meetings so people can bitch at you on Google Hangouts and Slack afterward for missing the ones you didn't attend, even though you'd told everyone in advance that you couldn't make it.

If employable programmers are as rare as brilliant young mathematicians, we have a serious problem.

> Alcohol is a poison.

A meaningless blanket statement.

Methanol is a poison, far worse than ethanol, yet you've likely consumed it in small quantities from what you would think of as non-alcoholic sources. If there's no safe level alcohol consumption, you'd best stick to consuming your fruit unripened or avoiding them entirely. Again, relative toxicity is meaningless without also taking dose into account.

You could easily say the "correct" amount of oxygen is toxic, much more so than nitrogen even at sea level, and not be technically wrong. Change up the pressure and mixture and you might find the nitrogen causing more immediate (though not toxic) danger.

Yes, I want to be around those 20 year olds when I'm in my 40s. I want to be around a few 60 year olds as well. I don't want to just talk about diversity, I'd actually rather like to live it. Those who insist on living in bubbles can have it, even if it means I have to face unemployment after 40.

Personal anecdote here, which may mean absolutely nothing in the bigger scheme of things.

I had encountered, from time to time, a certain category of recruiters who seemed to be hunting for brogrammers. The type looking for passionate ninja rockstar hackers to work for free beer, free food, and night life in an exciting high-energy startup. These recruiters just also happened to be young blonde women in low-cut tops who were rather overplaying their ditziness. They also preferred video conference to phone calls.

My assumption is this was all quite engineered to hit their mark.

> Recruiters typically don't want to waste their time with folks who aren't going to get selected.

My spam folder says otherwise. There are still enough bad recruiters out there (or bad recruiter spam-bots) hitting me up for positions that don't remotely match any skills I've ever listed anywhere. Not worth my time.

> "Why not just build a faraday cage?"

Then my very next thought is, "Who is going to notice my house-sized faraday cage, who are they going to tell, and what are those people going to do in turn?"

For that exact reason, I am incredibly thankful my kid's interests are currently sufficiently geeky. Terrified for when those interests are dumped in favor of appeasing boys.

In my purely anecdotal observations, there hasn't been a great demand for entry-level work, especially so following the last recession. A college degree and no experience won't even earn you the benefit of a rejection letter. People instead find themselves "sustained" on low-paying jobs that don't count as entry level for anything but fast-food and retail management. If you're lucky to come from a family with some money, maybe you get an unpaid internship or two before landing that first entry level position.

That's a perfect illustration of what I'm getting at. You can just keep redefining whatever 10x means to make your point. In your example, minus the the initial "Haha", this might as well be lifted from a cover letter or a consultant's sales pitch:

"I have a highly unique track record of delivering entire projects that would take longer schedules or larger teams to complete. Clients have called me a force of nature, a prolific creator that delivers when the job must get done and one who lifts up entire teams to be better when they work beside me. I provide the right kind of compounding experience that goes a long way."

Such confidence. The hiring managers are swooning over here.

But that's beside the point. Where's the study that meaningfully quantified that type of performance? Especially at an individual, repeatable level? If we can't answer those questions, I must conclude that the current usage of 10x developer is about as meaningful as "passionate ninja rockstar".

The wonderful thing about 10x developers is that you can keep redefining what 10x means to make your point. The 10x developer is a mythical beast that changes with every retelling. There's only one definition with any experimental weight behind it—10x the worst and 2.5x average—which isn't quite terrifying enough to keep telling stories about 'round the campfire.

- man nurse

- man housekeeper

- man secretary

- man escort

Wow, these all sound absolutely awful. How did the female, err, woman version become such an accepted construct?

The paper clarifies that this means being unable to reach a solution, as in, you can't figure it out. You've hit a brick wall. Perhaps your intellect is insufficient or maybe there is no solution, but you're definitely not smart enough to know the difference. That's what's instilling unhappiness.

Hope it was obvious that I understood who holds the purse strings. Regardless, if such sales people make themselves the enemy of those who'll be held accountable for the purchase, they'll get the fight they're asking for.

Wait, that's a thing? (Quickly Googling...) OMG, that's a thing.

People in the office are still using old-school typewriters for certain official documents, so I expect I can get away with it. If I can't concentrate due to existing office noise, I may as well have some fun. Thanks!

Less than a decade ago, by my reckoning. Pretty sure there was a rash of ambiguous medications between 2007 and now. You're absolutely right about today's drug ads being too much information, of course.

This strategy can be taken too far.

You can claim that your "comprehensive fractional imperial unit helical matter extraction system" will turn me into a sexy master craftsman all you want, but as much as that's a better version of myself, it still doesn't tell me how you're going to help me drill that quarter-inch hole.

The most obvious example of this extreme is those drug ads with exuberant actors smiling in ecstasy and jumping in slow motion to an idyllic summertime setting. No, I'm not asking my doctor about Xymbaltrix™, and I probably don't want it in my search history either. Similarly, on the tech side, if my project on Platform X is stuck because of factor Y, I want to know what your product or consultants can actually do about it. Don't care if you call yourselves the world's leading Platform X Solutions Provider, spell out your capabilities please. Management, of course, eats up the "better versions of the themselves" talk, but if the goods aren't provided, our necks are on the line for not talking management out of it.

Honestly, the amount of empathy here is encouraging. I'm not in the best position to take all the advice given just yet, but knowing I'm not completely surrounded by sharks is reassuring.

Other than time spent programming on platform X, I'm at a loss as to what values I'd bring. Would I hire myself, based on my job history? Probably not. I'm hardly going to impress anyone with such an attitude!

Any suggestions on alternate roles to look for? I'd worry that just because it's a software organization, it doesn't mean I wouldn't be filling their own version of cog in a cost-center.