We've been looking at the payments infrastructure in New Zealand recently and have discovered that, unless you find whoever wrote something 30 years ago, most of the senior payments people have limited and ofter contradictory understanding of the capabilities of the underlying systems.
In general international agreements don't override national law, they just oblige the countries in question to pass laws that bring them in line with the agreement. Which they commonly fail to do in all sorts of interesting ways. Part of the mechanism in the New Zealand case has been closer to redefining what software is rather than what patents are.
For New Zealand to add software patents back in would require back tracking and quite a loss of political capital.
I suspect what's happening with all the people who this works for is that given there are some people who have a psychological component to their pain and some who have a mostly physical component.
Even if there are far fewer suffering from the psychological version, they are the ones who physical treatment will fail for. So they will be the ones that get as far as trying the pseudosciencey approach to dealing with the pain. So the mind body approach will have a high success rate amongst the people trying it even if it would be a terrible initial remedy to try.
This is really the kind of thing where A/B testing is both necessary and straightforward. Decently intuitive arguments can be made for both sides and there isn't really overwhelming strength on either of them.
This is the point where it's worth pointing out that the portion of the population involved in food production has collapsed massively over the last couple of centuries. People generally seem to find new things to value when their time frees up.
Philosophy of Science is an extremely broad field. And like any academic field it's easy enough to find crazy stuff at the edges.
I do think far more scientists would benefit from a bit more of a look at some of the more established philosophers of the last century. It seems that most gained some knowledge of Popper but nowhere near enough people are really familiar with Kuhn's work(http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/thomas-kuhn/). Taking the time to think critically about what you're doing and what it would really take to change your views is critical to actually being open to broad possibilities.
Poor Economics - Changed my views on some areas of how to combat poverty and poor education. As well as relating a huge amount a detail regarding the unexpected ways people with different backgrounds behave.
There is an interesting issue in the philosophy of science regarding the "hard center" of theories. Basically any prediction about a reasonably complicated situation will rely on a large number of premises.
If you happen to be committed to one premise more than the others, you will always blame one of the other premises when an observation doesn't fit your hypothesis.
In the case of sexism there are so many confounding factors that you'll never be able to say with certainty that sexism is the root cause, only that there is a good chance that it is.
If there is a good chance that something bad is happening then it seems like you could reasonably be expected to produce a non-zero amount of effort in avoiding it.
It seems to me that people that don't read self-help books lump a lot more books into the genre and that causes them to miss a number of books they should read.
Earlier this year I recommended Bargaining for Advantage to someone and they responded that they don't really read self-help books. There are a number of books like this that deal with particular topics inside of the broader self-help genre, many of them going to a much more useful level of depth.
In bookstores I regularly find very good books on particular areas of business mixed in with self-help in the more populist style.
Reading a number of these expert titles is very valuable. From the popular group often only one book is enough to cover the common sense side of things, for instance I recommend that all my friends read "how to Win friends and influence people".
Unless the thing I "should" be doing is immediately necessary or massively more important than the secondary thing I end up doing I'm generally pretty happy to follow my motivation around.
I normally seem to get back to the important thing when its deadline or reason for happening actually becomes so important that it really needs to be a focus.
It might be the issue isn't that you're focussing on the wrong thing, it's that you stop after having done the first thing. When the code based work starts closing in on me I start picking targets of what I will do before I'm allowed to sleep. I can do as many other things as I want, but that has to be done. I also seem to focus better on boring tasks when I'm tired. It mostly works.
If you want to seriously consider this kind of cash back deal then you should look at the amount of money you're giving up as an exceptionally high risk investment.
What kind of a return would you want the upside to be for you to walk out right now and gamble 3 months of salary on a 25% chance of winning bet. Unless you've got significant wealth already then most measurements that take into account the diminishing returns of wealth will probably suggest a that you'll want the win to be at least 6 times that mount.
That's quite a lot of cash for a startup and it makes no sense to a startup that's worried about cashflow to make that kind of an offer when they could give out nice free equity.
Liabilities are much worse on a balance sheet than having employees with stock. Employees with stock in the company have an ongoing alignment with the company; employees who are owed cash are going to be slowly getting more irritated.
A terrible deal, you're seeing a bunch of downsides and no upsides.
Unless the work is absolutely fascinating to you then you shouldn't even be considering this. I'm impressed that someone had the balls to put an offer like this on the table. Honestly, even if you loved the work I'd suggest telling them off because it's kind of an insulting trick when some people try to get geeks to work cheaply on "interesting" projects.
If they're somewhere where giving you shares triggers auditing requirements, which is the only reason I can think of them giving for this, there should still be plenty of workarounds. Significantly increased pay back over the following few months at least being the immediately obvious one.
Beef is a case where there are some very obvious things(texture, fattyness, chewyness etc) that make eye fillet a much more pleasant eating experience than other cuts of meat and there's a lot less of it per animal. If you can pull that off you can make the general case of decent meat much more affordable.
Of course, there'll always be Wagyu and Kobe, but that's a much smaller market than just the high end of normal meat.
The level of security knowledge required to do decent penetration testing is a relatively rare skill and therefore often necessitates bringing in a third party which can skew the cost/benefit quite badly.
You're often much better off saying that your site has a certain level of security because it's built in default thing X until it grows a bit.
Generally you'll know already if you're in a market or field where penetration testing is absolutely necessary(finance, health, well known brands etc) and it won't be a question.
One of the things people talking about reputation seem to miss is how easy it is to establish that base level of reputation. A couple of decent talks at local user groups will be enough in most tech areas that have job openings for employers and people with other opportunities to start querying you before they move onto more blanket searches.
On top of this I really dislike the argument that the skills are transferable from a big company to a small one easily. It seems like a much better argument for going towards something like a small-medium company. In the web space I'd suggest that the plethora of 10-40 person bespoke web dev shops that float around are a very good option for gaining broad skills and being less risky than startups.
People who are interested in startups should join something that looks pretty similar to a startup. People who are interested in making 10 million dollars should join a big company and live cheaply.
The problem with "teh womenz" is that up until that point I was thinking of adding that list to a set of programming resources I'm sending to a friend of mine who's been learning programming recently. And sure, she'll have to deal with that kind of attitude eventually, but I'm not going to throw it in with the basic training resources.
Talking about "teh womenz" is a good way to end up with a dearth of women in your general vacinity.