That's quite an interesting take on how to counteract depressive states. Do you know if there are any academic publications that have similar findings? I think this needs to be explored further, because this sounds prima facie credible.
I've lived in the Bay Area since before starting kindergarten. No way the average IQ of software engineers here, or anywhere, is close to 130. Software engineering might be one of the only STEM disciplines that gives credibility to the Ortega hypothesis.
>From a street hobo, that gets you instantly dismissed, but there's a counter-intuitive aspect where if you're a Jaron Lanier, it just further underscores that you're Jaron Lanier and can do as you like. Because he is not trying to maximize trust in any way, he comes off as plausible even when expressing stuff that's unusual.
Those studies have generally shown liberals to be only somewhat less tolerant, as an aggregate. Most liberals are still tolerant, as are most conservatives.
Finding a good tenured position is comically difficult now. I know an assistant professor of engineering at Princeton who just left for Renaissance Technologies because he couldn't secure a long-term professorship there.
The USSR achieved more than just the same thing. When you say more hostile environment, I'm assuming you mean they were in an essentially autarkic condition, unlike contemporary China. But beyond that, the Soviets produced far greater, actually novel results in sciences, mathematics, and technology while having only one-fifth of China's population.
There is a massive, massive asymmetry between men and women when it comes to sex or romance that exist even when you're not in an area with a skewed gender ratio.
It's profound what utter doublethink (not cognitive dissonance, because these people can literally say two egregiously hypocritical and contradictory statements in the same breath and not consciously recognize the inconsistency) people in China often have about what standards they should hold their own country to, versus standards for other countries.
This guy is one of those insufferably left-wing Jews who are borderline tankies most of the time. Most Jews, both my mom and dad, for example, either are indifferent or outright dislike other groups more than they do modern day white supremacists. My dad, who by the way isn't some country bumpkin, but is a senior VP of engineering at a company HQ'd in Palo Alto which I won't name, has made so many passionate rants about blacks, Hispanics, Asians, communists/socialists (both my parents are from the Soviet Union), etc., that I couldn't even remember the individual instances anymore. Funny enough, Benjamin Netanyahu's son recently said the left is currently a bigger threat to Jews than white supremacists currently are. In my own life, I've heard way more antisemitic remarks from blacks and mestizos, and even Asians, than from whites, even though I've been around many more whites in my life.