I love this comment because it’s just so indicative of “rationalist”
brain: this poster is asking a whole series of legitimate questions,
which disciplines like sociology and history have had answers for for
decades. However, because he dismisses sociology/history as “SJW
nonsense”, he imagines that he alone must be this brave thinker asking
all the hard questions on his own.
Even his attempt at comparison to programming is fucking stupid. Asking if 'Agile is better than functional programming' is like asking if skillet frying is better than tofu. These are not mutually exclusive things, functional programming relates to the manner of composing code while agile (ostensibly) relates to organizing people composing code, or nowadays even building fighter planes or really anything as long as you're willing to pay Agile consultants to talk to you about doing it.
Furthermore, the question when the options relate to the same thing - e.g. "is Functional Programming better than Structured Programming" or "is Agile better than whatever the fuck people actually end up doing when the consultants take their money and go away" is not answerable not because there is no fixed definition of 'good' - there absolutely is in this case: developing working software faster and on a smaller budget - but because none of the things in question seem to be able to guarantee it. But you can't exactly sell that or write books about it (at least, [more than one book](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Mythical_Man-Month), at most [two](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/No_Silver_Bullet))... so it goes.
Jesus these people are fucking dumb.
> Jesus these people are fucking dumb.
They're very poorly read and have essentially 0 intellectual curiosity. They imagine themselves to be very smart because they did problem sets in college rather than read books. They never developed some habits one can get from a humanities education to do things like look up references or dive further into a reading. The end result is arrogance and ignorance and these tendencies mutually fuel each other.
Also, as someone who writes some code for a living, I was also confused by this agile vs functional programming. Shouldn't he minimally be comparing object-oriented and functional programming? Not that any of this matters -- the only point is to sound smart.
Also, it’s important to ask *what* you’re building.
I used to work at pivotal labs, which was one of the places pushing hard on the triad of agile, TDD, and pair programming. They were so convinced that they’d found the one true way to program, but they remained baffled why they couldn’t scale into “the enterprise” despite being so good at their jobs.
They never really did grok the fact that development needs to match your domain and organization. Pivotal excelled in helping small startups with VC money scale. Pivotal’s style works great in this situation; the company is small so communication is easy, you’re starting with a blank slate, and you’re explicitly willing to trade off some quality for speed. That’s not a situation that exists everywhere; try that in a 10,000 person company and you’ll never get all the right teams moving together. Try that while making cars or airplanes and you’ll get innocent people killed.
The “right” way to make software is continent, not universal.
What if all this stuff about sexism driving away women is all a big
hoax? And so after we make women feel safer, stamp out prejudice,
enforce common decency, and encourage everyone to treat each other with
compassion – darn it, we created a better world for nothing! If the goal
is “eliminate malignant sexism” – and surely it should be – why be so
upset about one argument for eliminating malignant sexism which might
not be entirely accurate?
First, because I’m a heartless thing-oriented systematizer, and I
despise bad arguments on principle, and I don’t care if you
people-oriented empathizers think they serve a prosocial
community-building function.
Oh really, Scott? Are you also a heartless thing-oriented
systematizer when you blame feminists for male suicidal tendencies, and
ask for more empathy towards male nerds?
The reason that my better nature thinks that it’s irrelevant whether
or not Penny’s experience growing up was better or worse than
Aaronson’s: when someone tells you that something you are doing is
making their life miserable, you don’t lecture them about how your life
is worse, even if it’s true. You STOP DOING IT.
When Aaronson talks about his suffering on his own blog, he gets
Amanda Marcotte. He gets half the internet telling him he is now the
worst person in the world.
This was my experience as well. When I complained that I felt
miserable and alone, it was like throwing blood in the water.
Or is it maybe that no normal human being is exclusively a
systematizer or an empathizer, and you just like to adopt one attitude
or the other when it suits your argument, you machiavellian TWAT?
More importantly, in Untitled, he was complaining that people were doing to Scott the exact thing that Scott had done to warrant criticism in the first place.
Damore and all the other whiny jerks who hate not being around people
who constantly agree with them got way more tolerable after that clip of
my countryman, Ted Cruz, wailing “Why am I so persecuted?!” got
popular.
Talking about “Fabian” tactics and all that other manful bullshit, in
the context of a guy getting fired because he doesn’t think people who
aren’t cisgender heterosexual white-identifying men deserve to have
prestigious and lucrative careers, is a true smoking gun that can be put
on top of the other smoking guns revealed over the years.
People like Siskind can’t help but reveal, over and over again, that
what they fear most is losing power.
https://www.reddit.com/r/slatestarcodex/comments/6rv2ib/did_the_ssc_post_on_gender_imbalances_and/dl98iqu/
I love this comment because it’s just so indicative of “rationalist” brain: this poster is asking a whole series of legitimate questions, which disciplines like sociology and history have had answers for for decades. However, because he dismisses sociology/history as “SJW nonsense”, he imagines that he alone must be this brave thinker asking all the hard questions on his own.
Oh really, Scott? Are you also a heartless thing-oriented systematizer when you blame feminists for male suicidal tendencies, and ask for more empathy towards male nerds?
Or is it maybe that no normal human being is exclusively a systematizer or an empathizer, and you just like to adopt one attitude or the other when it suits your argument, you machiavellian TWAT?
Damore and all the other whiny jerks who hate not being around people who constantly agree with them got way more tolerable after that clip of my countryman, Ted Cruz, wailing “Why am I so persecuted?!” got popular.
Talking about “Fabian” tactics and all that other manful bullshit, in the context of a guy getting fired because he doesn’t think people who aren’t cisgender heterosexual white-identifying men deserve to have prestigious and lucrative careers, is a true smoking gun that can be put on top of the other smoking guns revealed over the years.
People like Siskind can’t help but reveal, over and over again, that what they fear most is losing power.