projektir

I went to poke at Wikipedia just for giggles: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Age_and_female_fertility

Love the [citation needed] and lack of clarity in that second paragraph.

Sounds a lot like optimistic nihilism. Not my philosophy of choice but certainly not the worst one, either. :)

Wonder why math is such a problem. Growing up in the Ukrainian school system I was doing very well in math for 3 years and was doing double exams in the span of one.

Moved to the US, math was easier and it kinda fell off. Was back to Ukraine for some time, but it was never the same afterwards, and now I have the same math anxiety many other people do.

Yeah I agree but I've been using it for 5 months now and it's great and I can't say I care about the name that much anymore.

Yeah, I'm never too impressed by these. Once I have control over my depressive states, I can start looking at things like exercise or diet. But if I'm highly depressed, those things end up on the back burner and I'm much more interested in solutions to _that_.

Hmm, yeah. If I'm sufficiently depressed, things like diet become very negligible. Sense of belonging is much, much more important. I don't recall if anyone ever did a study for that in particular.

From what I've seen this attitude often actually creates and reinforces this harsh reality, though.

Most of our reality is composed of humans doing things, and if you dig deep enough into why humans are doing various bad things, you'll find a lot of confused, closed up people chasing odd status markers because they need it to survive against other parties chasing odd status markers. It's an error that endlessly feeds itself, and the only escape is to cancel it somewhere - do something else.

The point is kind of moot when the people you are supposedly protecting against are of your own kind.

It IS a meritocracy problem. If you are unable to measure who has the most merit, if you're not concerned with this problem, how can you possibly be having a meritocracy?

Connections and the ability to play politics seem to be much more important for getting to the top. Current systems, managers, etc., are just not setup to evaluate skill from what I've seen, you have to sell yourself, which means "ability to sell yourself" is how the system is stratified, and that's not merit.

So when you say "the best", often what you get is "best at selling self", which is not actually the best.

Want to chip in here, love Endless Space 2! It takes a bit to get used to but it's so fun to just play even if I'm not winning.

Only if your definition of "best developer" is extremely narrow, maybe, since a typical "best developer" would want someone around they could learn from, no? And why would this issue be more common among "best" developers over the, err, non-"best" developers.

*ample use of scare quotes because I found "different developers work well in different situations or best with certain people" to be more true than "there's this 'best' developer let's clone them".

Being on the other side of the process has only convinced me more of how broken it is. There are lots of baseline errors, biases, and insufficient attention given to the process that are quite obvious but a lot of people either fail to see them or refuse to see them because they don't want to admit that their hiring process is not better than rolling dice.

As a basic example, in a lot of places you get very little advance warning that you're going to interview someone.

Test problems or assignments are often not tested or even looked at by existing employees, so often you don't even know that your current team would do well on them.

Sometimes interviews happen without any intention at all to hire the candidate (wtf).

What if most people are not good at what society currently appears to value?

I don't think most people are against doing what they are good at (or even, what they like), it's just that discoverability is poor and in a lot of cases the most important thing ends up being a certain brand of social or political skill, and not the other secondary skill you might posses. For people to play to their strengths, we need a society that can detect and nurture those strengths, and I don't think we have that right now.

Yeah, if I only ever did things that I rejoice in doing I'd be getting nothing done. Not everyone is a super naturally passionate type.

This, to me, sounds personal.

There are wonderful games being made and I even found new titles to call my favorites as the years go by. I do not at all believe games are getting worse.

That being said, there are a lot more games now and there's less hard curation, and some genres have shifted (RTS and classic style MMORPGs are both dormant atm).

Generally I'm quite sensitive to that stuff but not really seeing that with this article (besides the phrase 'pool of women' maybe). Can you give some examples?

I find things like Leetcode very hard and my memory on it does not keep at all. I have to relearn all the relevant things every single time I start studying for interviews.

Don't assume something is easy or straightforward for everyone because it was for you.

> The universe is full of puzzles that mean something to solve. Why not work on those instead? Why would those be less interesting than a contrived set of rules?

Can you give some examples? Most things I'm aware of that could be classified as puzzles require, at the very least, enormous time investment, if not specialization, and there's often lots of drudgery along the way.

I have somehow never heard of this and now I feel as if I've missed out.

Well, this reaction explains why people don't like to say it.

According to what? There are plenty of fairly trivial counterexamples to this. If what you say here is correct, what is mental illness? What is a solid marriage vs a terrible one? What is a good job vs a bad job?

For instance, lots of peoples' mental states improve when they are able to not live with their parents, for various reasons. That requires money.

> In a Polish restaurant, i had a starter of lard on bread

This sounds like something they could do in Ukraine. Was the large a solid piece, or a spread? Eating solid pieces of pork fat is very normal in Ukraine.

Isn't this exactly the problem we currently have?

Everyone is so focused on training their BS skills that nobody is real anymore?

I'd say that passage says a lot more things than that, and I'm responding to them. It's part of the fairly resilient narrative of "it was better before" that I think is extremely not true. In my view, it is also nonetheless still not good enough, so I don't want it to "stop", depending on what you are defining as "it" here.

Most problems we currently face are not a result of civilization itself. Count of laws or roads doesn't seem very material to me. Adding value treadmills just indicate some failure points of capitalism. But everything else we had before was even worse.

What is the purpose of this exposition? We have many problems to fix, but none of them will get fixed by going backwards.

> Longer breastfeeding suppresses ovulation and menstruation, so fertility is relatively rare.

> Childbirth works better squatting.

I would like to see citations indicating that these statements are true to a significant degree that modern improvements are of little value.

I can't even find data on maternal mortality before 1800.

As I've already said others don't have to approve or tolerate whatever it is you do or are by nature of being authentic. That is not related, why would it be? Being authentic is an end to itself, but it makes no guarantees, and the clash between the individual and society is often the point.

I am pretty sure menstruation and child birth are not farming age inventions.

What are those implications from your perspective?

This largely relies on the idea that pre-civilized life was preferable. And, for some groups, it was. All the women enjoying close to 0 sexual freedom and dying in child birth might disagree, though.

The danger factor with "be yourself" seems to be similar to the danger factor of "what do you want". These are meant to be interpreted deeply, not shallowly.

Most people are neither themselves nor know what they want, in the sense that both concepts are frequently constructed for them and not actually derived from the knowledge or best interest of the person. The first order of business when implementing either is to make sure they actually belong to you in the first place.

I.e., if your parents have pushed you to be an artist your whole life and you're actually meh on it, and if you go through social motions without seeing much value in them, neither of these is "you". Which is not to say that either of these things is somehow wrong or bad, but you should reexamine them for yourself to either see their value and keep them or identify them as of low value and discard them.

This is all completely orthogonal to the idea that other people should tolerate your behavior merely on the basis of it being authentic. That simply doesn't follow.

I think this kind of thing really comes down to the situation. You have not provided much detail here. There are cases where something like this can work very well (low scope project, low amount of proprietary information) and cases where it may end up in disaster (very large scope, misleading information, footguns). Particularly, fixing fires is one thing. Writing high quality code that follows good patterns is another, and leaving a junior to just "figure it out" doesn't actually make much sense. Often things like "accessibility" are just forgotten completely.

One can always try to pull themselves out of a bad situation, but that doesn't hide the fact that efficiency was lost, and from what I've seen, rather than creating lots of excellent engineers via such a trial by fire, you rather get a lot of missed old knowledge and reinventing the wheel combined with people getting high egos and thus getting very defensive over whatever it is they got attached to during their trial by fire.

Yes, the work gets done, but how well, and do we care? As an industry, we seem to do a poor job of gathering and reinforcing good practices. I still encounter completely opposing silos that often have no clue the other exists. And everyone seems very strangely certain in the correctness of their choices.

> My team races at a million miles per hour

I must ask, though, what is this magical company?

> My manager during performance reviews would heap praise on me for being so green and yet so low-maintenance.

And I'm very curious how much you're paid.