252 karma · joined July 3, 2023
A while back, when I was just beginning therapy, my therapist recommended I take an online personality test, which unbeknownst to me, was authored by Jordan Peterson. After I took the test, it gave 5-7 paragraphs explaining what each individual personality trait meant. Pretty boilerplate, but for some traits, when you got further down the explanations, it started feeling less and less like a personality test.
For example, for the "agreeableness" trait, it would talk about how it was testing how "compliant, nurturing, kind, naively trusting and conciliatory" the person is, and that it generally found women scored higher. Sure, I can believe you've found that during your surveys.
But then you scroll down a little more, and it starts saying things like "This difference in agreeableness between men and women is largest in countries such as Norway and Sweden, where the most has been done to ensure equality of outcome between the sexes. This provides strong evidence that biological factors rather than the environment and learning account for the dissimilarity."
Uh... Why are we talking about Norway and Sweden suddenly? Scroll down a little more, and it makes more sense: "Agreeable people, [...], are more likely to enter professions associated with people, such as teaching and nursing, which are dominated by women. This is true even in the Scandinavian countries, where attempts to produce gender-equal societies has reached a maximum."
Ah. So what we have here is, regardless of whether you agree it's true or not, a political agenda masquerading as a personality test. It's purpose is to argue Peterson's vocal political belief that the gender pay gap is not an issue, because women are biologically better at being nurses instead of engineers. His proof? Just look at those Scandinavians, they have completely solved sexism (citation needed) and still see this gap!
Peterson may have genuinely good self help books and lectures, but the issue is it's not for the purpose of actually helping people. It's to push people closer to his world view, to agreeing with his political agenda. If you truly gained something from reading his books or watching his lectures, don't let me take that away from you. But be mindful of when his self help veers towards political beliefs.
None of that has anything to do with "Time thinking about the problem", nor does either one imply that its questions are easier or harder to answer in all scenarios. They're just very different questions, but some devs prefer dealing with the issues a greenfield project presents.
If so, that's missing half the picture. "People don't care about performance" isn't why devs gravitate towards Electron. Devs and managers gravitate towards Electron because it means they don't have to hire extra people and do more work to get their native apps working on whatever operating systems they ship to and rewrite the whole app for the web. Yeah, it'd be nice not to have the performance penalty, but some teams have accurately calculated that the performance loss the customer realistically notices is worth the benefits of writing and maintaining the app.