hammerzeit

vor 8 Jahrendiscuss

If you see a piece in the NYT that's making fun of those weird tech nerds, odds are high it's in the styles section. Choire Sicha, formerly of Gawker, took over the section last year, and since then there's been a rash of pieces akin to this one. Not exactly hit pieces but it's hard to miss the wry condescension throughout.

hammerzeit

vor 9 Jahrendiscuss

Please, before this degrades into the inevitable shouting match, let's please consider that there are two things that can both simultaneously be true:

1.Tech is less bad than many, many other industries. I can personally speak to overt, even illegal sexism in the field of medicine at a level that would cause riots in tech. I’ve heard similar stories in academia, to say nothing of fields like manufacturing. We live in a sexist society, and the professional world reflects that.

2. Being “less bad” than other industries does not mean we don’t have an obligation to do better. We as an industry need to be doing more to make sure that the vast majority of stories are like this one. We’re not there yet.

hammerzeit

vor 9 Jahrendiscuss

My spouse is a doctor as well, and I've also observed the issues the author discusses. I don't think your read of the causes here is correct.

It's worth reading more about the history of medicine to truly understand what's going on here -- the culture of abusive overwork in American medicine goes at the very least back to Osler and the invention of the modern residency program, and has as much to do with cocaine than any corporate malfeasance. Certainly hospitals and the medical industry profit from this culture, but they hardly created it.

Also, on what basis do you say that longer hours with fewer tradeoffs don't improve patient outcomes? You frame it as though it's obvious but is there any evidence to back that up? My wife and most other doctors I know all claim they'd rather have longer hours with fewer handoffs.

hammerzeit

vor 9 Jahrendiscuss

I really enjoyed the frustration of the article's author in trying to attribute Ted Chiang's writing to his personal life or history.

We as humans seem to have this unceasing tendency to essentialize -- to believe that everything we do comes from deep-seated psychological needs. We project every action onto some event from years past with a parent, a lover, a friend.

I feel like this is borne out of a desire to believe that behavior is deterministic. That if only we too had undergone the experiences of the person who we're reading about, we too would be that acclaimed sci-fi writer, or famous entrepreneur, or asshole president. It excuses, to some extent, the fact that we are not that person.

But sometimes that's not the case. Sometimes we just build shit for fun. It doesn't all have to be us coming to terms with our distant father.

Zuckerberg, of all people, once had a quote vis-a-vis The Social Network (can't seem to find it) that basically amounted to the idea that they had to make the entirety of Facebook be about his rejection by a girl because the idea of people building something cool for its own sake doesn't make a good movie.

What's interesting for me is I feel like this armchair psychologizing we all do is getting worse. I don't have any evidence to back this up, just a feeling -- as we're exposed to more people's behaviors, we fall back to essentialist attributions of that behavior more and more.

hammerzeit

vor 10 Jahrendiscuss

This is a really interesting question to ask, but survey-based responses only tells us how venture capitalists think they make decisions. Obviously this is a secretive industry but I think the far more interesting question to answer is around revealed preferences rather than self-assessment.

hammerzeit

vor 10 Jahrendiscuss

This is a problem we've managed to solve for dozens of other dietary preferences, from kosher status to gluten-free, without insisting on mandatory labeling. Why is GMO so special?

It's hard to believe the sincerity of your claim, given that you can reasonably infer anything not advertising itself as "non-GMO" contains GMO.

hammerzeit

vor 10 Jahrendiscuss

That's ridiculous. Excluding the subway, there's still approximately 110k riders each way on the LIRR[1] and 90k each way on NJ Transit[2]. Plus amtrak, you're talking about ~450,000 daily rail passengers. That would still make Penn Station one of the 3 busiest train stations in Europe, for context.

[1] http://transitdocs.com/files/data/lirr/2012RidershipBook.pdf [2] http://www.njtransit.com/pdf/FactsAtaGlance.pdf

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