Something you have,
something you know,
something you are:
SSN!
442 karma · joined January 16, 2009
As you practice a craft, you build up positive knowledge - what works. And you build up negative knowledge - what doesn't work. But you also build up humility; the more you learn, the more you realize you don't know.
Knowledge increases sub-linearly, assuming a modicum of curiosity, but humility is like a parabola. The "experts" of this article are those at the bottom of the humility parabola. They have quite a bit of positive knowledge, some negative knowledge, but they don't really know yet what they don't know.
_Many "experts" don't consider themselves experts._ They all too often say "Hmm, interesting question, I don't know, but...". They are defined by humility and curiosity.
Imagine the question "Why is the sky blue?". Somebody who has just finished an undergraduate degree in theoretical physics and happens to have learnt learnt about Rayleigh scattering will sound much more like an expert than somebody who says "Hmm, interesting question, I don't know, but..." and then spends fifteen minutes figuring it out on the spot.
Like the phenomenon of the newish driver: nobody seems more of an expert driver than somebody who passed their test three months ago. They have learnt all the rules, they think they know everything, they often don't have much curiosity, and they have yet to learn humility.
Of course, this often doesn't matter. Many people don't want an actual expert - they want somebody who sounds like an expert _to other people_. Oracle don't advertise to people who buy software. They advertise to the people who second guess the people who buy software.
To quote a wonderful ex-co-worker, "Most people need a generalist. But they want - and are willing to pay for - a specialist."
(Taleb's "Skin in the game" talks about this a lot. _Great_ book.)
The lack of shared downside is pretty much universally objectionable - nobody likes anybody getting something for nothing - and different societies deal with it differently. Some societies just flat out banned lending for interest. Most societies today allow lending, but have get-out clauses, like bankruptcy, to prevent de facto slavery. The US has particularly generous (to the debtor) bankruptcy laws, AIUI.
Aside: Europeans are often horrified at the US's putative bankruptcy system for surprise medical bills, because they imagine bankruptcy is like it is in their country - where you lose everything, including even your home, you have basically no way of starting over, you can't be e.g. a company director for potentially years, and you carry a stigma for life, and even your kids might carry the stigma. Yes, the US's medical bankruptcy thing is pretty horrible, but bankruptcy in the US isn't anywhere _near_ as terrible as it is in e.g. Ireland. You likely won't lose your house; you're not going to starve; you can totally start over, there needn't be _any_ shame involved. Most debts will be just ... written off, some will be "restructured". It's very pragmatic, AIUI. (ICBW about all this, and I've no doubt there are horror stories, but I suspect they are very much the exception. Counterpoints welcome!)
Still, most states in the US ban "usury" - "too much" interest.
[0] Even societies that tolerated slavery didn't want it for "people like them".
All thanks to the hunting lobby, I expect.
(Is it possible to meaningfully debate with a closed mind?)
Nonetheless, my point stands. Bigger than Texas, a sixth the population, yet a housing crisis. I’m sure there are good reasons - like the Rockies - and managing not to sprawl is commendable, but still: surreal.
Similarly I love how in go error plumbing is front and center, at least as important as data plumbing, usually more important.
For some problems, one wants to gloss over things that might go wrong. Don’t use go for those. Go is for when how something fails is more important than how it works.
Of course, a headline such as “car with electronic handbrake breaks down mid-turn…” wouldn’t have had the same clickability. I’m shocked - shocked! - to find a “news” organization sacrificing truth for outrage!
[0] E-handbrakes aren’t a great fit to a manual transmission (or are they?) but I suspect the days of manual transmissions are numbered: electric cars no more need a manual transmission than they need a buggy whip.
There is somewhere out there a synopsis of linux filesystems from quite a while ago that describes reiserfs as no longer being actively developed as its creator is "pursuing other interests".
(Technically AC has the same problem, but the problem is much more acute for DC at the same voltage.)
You know the joke/story about how nasa spent millions of dollars developing a pen that can write in space, and the soviets used a pencil? Well, the circuit breaker version of this is that the west built crazy complex huge high voltage circuit breakers, and the Soviets just built, uh, “single use” circuit breakers. With explosives.
(I don’t know if this is true, I have never found a source, but it feels true, it should be true, I so desperately want it to be true.)
Toyota do this. In fact, all PHEV manufacturers seem to do this: they keep their batteries between 15% and 85% and only advertise this range.
Insofar as they advertise it at all: the battery size in eg a Prius prime is buried in a footnote, and the range - miles/km - is what’s advertised, and is real, and corresponds to the 15-85.
I guess it is more important in a PHEV to never fully charge not discharge their batteries: most cycle from full-ish to empty-ish much more than a BEV. And so it is more logical for them to publish their 15-85. But the honesty is refreshing; BEV numbers feel disingenuous to me.
I ignore all breathlessly excited battery “breakthrough” headlines, but I ignore any from Toyota less!
'Watching people meltdown over a Black Santa in the Mall of America. "Santa is white!" Well, in our interment camp he was Asian. So there.'
So, in that vein, both the solution *and the problem* are fair game for attack.
There is a wonderful, wonderful short essay by Michael Jackson (the other one) called "Brilliance" in his book "Software Requirements and Specifications". It is poignant, even painful, in the way that the the TV shows Silicon Valley or The Office are exquisitely painful. It is, alas, impossible to find unless you know exactly what you are looking for, but...
*Brilliance*, by Michael Jackson (from "Software Requirements and Specifications")
Some time ago I spent a week giving an in-house program design course at a manufacturing company in the mid-west of the United States. On the Friday afternoon it was all over. The DP Manager, who had arranged the course and was paying for it out of his budget, asked me into his office.
"What do you think?" he asked. He was asking me to tell him my impressions of his operation and his staff. "Pretty good," I said. "You've got some good people there." Program design courses are hard work; I was very tired; and staff evaluation consultancy is charged extra. Anyway, I knew he really wanted to tell me his own thoughts.
"What did you think of Fred?" he asked. "We all think Fred's brilliant." "He's very clever," I said. "He's not very enthusiastic about methods, but he knows a lot about programming." "Yes," said the DP Manager. He swiveled round in his chair to face a huge flowchart stuck to the wall: about five large sheets of line printer paper, maybe two hundred symbols, hundreds of connecting lines. "Fred did that. It's the build-up of gross pay for our weekly payroll. No one else except Fred understands it." His voice dropped to a reverent hush. "Fred tells me that he's not sure he understands it himself."
"Terrific," I mumbled respectfully. I go the picture clearly. Fred as Frankenstein, Fred the brilliant creator of the uncontrollable monster flowchart. That matched my own impression of Fred very well. "But what about Jane?" I said. "I thought Jane was very good. She picked up the program design ideas very fast."
"Yes," said the DP Manager. "Jane came to us with a great reputation. We thought she was going to be as brilliant as Fred. But she hasn't really proved herself yet. We've given her a few problems that we thought were going to be really tough, but when she finished it turned out they weren't really tough at all. Most of them turned out pretty simple. She hasn't really proved herself yet - if you see what I mean?"
I saw what he meant.
I couldn’t unsee it. This pristine suburbia, optimized for families, perfect weather, but no kids to be seen. It seemed so weird to us who’d grown up mostly outdoors. In Ireland.
Revoking naturalization or a green card involves a huge legal effort, but if it can be shown you lied on the application, that’s a much easier case.
Many US laws seem to be designed for ease of prosecution than for strict fairness. For example, open container laws are probably easier to prosecute than drunk driving.
I sometimes wonder how much of the way things are is because that's just how the US legal system is, and how much of it is because that's the worldview of the childless twentysomething singles who built these systems. (No judgment: I know when I was a twentysomething childless single building things, I had a person-centric world view, not a family-centric one.)
(An extreme example of this problem is the oculus quest, a device that is begging to be shared between family members, but it requires a Facebook account to use. Further, it is a breach of the terms to have a family facebook account. Nobody in our family with a facebook account - i.e. the older people - wanted to sacrifice theirs to the quest.)
It's weird/sad that a family doesn't have any sort of legal personhood, but a corporation does. A joke solution here might be to incorporate my family and have all these digital assets belong to the family corp. I'm not even sure if I'm joking.