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There is no problem in education. Our only problem is that we keep lying to ourselves about it. Not all children are equally gifted. Not all _groups_ of children are equally gifted. The only reason we have such a hard time tackling with contemporary social problems is that their real solutions are at odds with political correctness.

The challenging task isn't coming up with solutions that will help, but finding solutions that will both help and not violate certain taboos.

Never in all of history has society ever benefited from lying to itself.

> lots of the work developers are tasked with doing is really quite repetitive, intellectually unchallenging and uninspired.

Then why the fuck isn't work automated away? We're developers, for God's sake! We develop things!

Alternate theory: "BigCo"'s internal processes have poor ability to distinguish talented developers from commodity developers, so all the good developers evaporate away, leaving BigCo with a poor of mediocre developers and a higher overall cost of getting things done. (This greater cost and reduces flexibility makes them vulnerable to smaller companies that can distinguish talent and attract it.)

Well, they are, aren't they? Cynicism isn't somehow automatically wrong.

> What skills in which areas are routinely worth north of $250k?

Anecdotally, it's not a specific skill, but a talent for solving problems using any tools and skills necessary. The 10x developer is real, and he's not afraid to read a damn textbook or go to the library and study CS papers if that's what it takes to do the job.

$200k doesn't stop incompetents from applying. It does, however, tempt competent people to add themselves to the running.

I've always viewed these persistent and ridiculous claims of a tech-industry worker shortage through a lens of class. To a Harvard MBA, that we programmers earn six figures is prima facie evidence of a worker shortage, since there's no way that ugly nerds should be earning that kind of money for typing into a computer.

Programmers are workers, so investors and management should be able to siphon off their productive value the same way they siphon off the productive value of other works. That they can't right now is an aberration, a disease to be cured with massive immigration.

That we're not doctors or lawyers and make decent money is something that simply does not compute for these types.

Why shouldn't I be able to mention biographical details in a personal account? I should be able to mention being from Milwaukee, liking hot dogs, or working on Redis if I want to.

The issue hinges on the meaning of "represent". Merely mentioning in the bio of a personal account that I work on a certain open source project is not the same as asserting that this personal account represents the project. Reasonable people do not confuse these concepts.

SJWs willfully conflate these ideas, though, and that's because they're not working in good faith. In reality, they're trying to blacklist people whose political views they find abhorrent, and one weapon in their extensive arsenal is the unreasonable interpretation of reasonable-sounding policy.

How exactly is this effort supposed to demonstrate that Hunt is wrong?

My brain does biometric identification. Are you going to outlaw my brain?

And a big segment of the French public loathes nuclear: http://www.seattlepi.com/business/energy/article/French-bill...

The shortsighted and fearful German Greens are making that country shut down nuclear plants and switch to filty brown coal: http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2014-04-14/coal-rises...

ITER isn't getting nearly enough funding, and it took a fucking decade to decide on the place to build it.

Europeans have the same fearful attitude toward GMOs.

Irrational and emotional European paranoia on privacy chills technological development. Look at all the silly cookie warning on the European web. Now imagine having to "warn" users before applying basic algorithms to data they willingly provide.

> we need the US to catch up with Europe

Europe is on a path to technological stagnation and demographic collapse. There's a reason its economy is depressed, its electricity fantastically expensive, its people angry, its programmer wages depressed, and its startup scene anemic.

Europeans refuse to embrace modern technology like genetic modification and nuclear power, much less allow the flourishing of information technology. They'd rather comfort themselves with their pseudoscience and their precautionary principle and their Luddite privacy regulations than join the rest of world in imagining something better.

Europe is absolutely no model to emulate.

> It isn't because people who do well on IQ tests tend to be wealthy and well-educated, which produces better life outcomes.

If IQ tests worked as you described, then in studies of twins going adopted into different households, we should see life outcomes correlated more with foster family than with each other. It turns out that twin life outcomes are very closely correlated with each other and strongly with IQ tests than they are to rearing family.

Your beliefs are the ones that are false, sorry.

Whatever you think IQ tests measure, it correlates incredibly well with life outcome.

What chart? The linked PDF goes back to May 2012. The title claims 15 years.

Not per capita it doesn't. Come on, that's a novice error.

> Historically, IQ tests have "proven" that whites are smarter than other races.

Why the scare quotes? On average, whites score a standard deviation higher than blacks on IQ tests, and East Asians score half a standard deviation higher than whites. IQ is strongly heritable (0.5-0.8) and is strongly correlated with lifespan and income.

These are facts. They do not disappear merely because they disagree with your worldview. If you start with an incorrect premise, there's no limit to how wrong your conclusions can be.

I don't care. Our goal should not be to equalize rewards to effort, but match talent to opportunity. It doesn't matter where that talent comes from. Trying to account for these "unfair factors" is itself hugely unfair, creates perverse outcomes, and in the end, reinforces our biases instead of eradicate them. Even if you begin these measures with the best intentions, they decay to favoritism and resentment. Fair testing has legitimacy. Your ad-hoc patches do not.

Yes. You can't distinguish that case from a lack of innate ability, and history is full of examples of poor people doing well in academia and elevating themselves. Standardized testing, not affirmative action, is the great equalizer.

There is no higher ideal than a pure meritocracy. We want to allocate the best educational resources to the people most able to put them to use benefiting all humanity. I'm not willing to compromise on this principle. Admitting the less qualified because of their ethnic groups or gonads is simply antithetical to the entire project of civilization and progress.

Please, just leave. You're not doing the world a favor by shaming single men.

Popescu is waging a pathetic little personal war against FetLife [1]. He's a textbook example of a self-deluded crypto-narcissist who, if there's any justice on this earth, will see his comeuppance. People like him always do.

[1] He's been scraping the profiles of young women (specifically) and posting links, names, and hometowns on his blog. Yes, as technologists, we know that this kind of indexing is trivial. That's no reason, as a decent human being, to terrorize innocent people.

> Would "Two pairs of RSA keys having a common factor found" do?

Yes, that works. There's potentially a serious RSA keygen issue here, but nobody's broken RSA itself, and the headline does a very poor job of communicating this fact.

You shouldn't be surprised to see blatant lies from Mircea Popescu, who also claims that he's a billionare, that English literature literally does not exist, that bitcoin literally makes states and laws obsolete, and that nuclear weapons are ineffective.

How about "work on the same project"?

"Deliverable" is one of words that provokes a "nope" reaction from me. I am not a resource that produces deliverables. I am a human being.

The previous period with a comparable employment-population ratio was before women entered the workforce in large numbers.

You're never going to educate away the intuitive identification of payroll deductions proportional to income with the phrase "income taxation".