"But the essay causes concern. I worry that lots of small ISVs will read his article and believe that they need to hire great hackers."
Why does this rise to the level of concern? If these small ISVs take what the author considers misguided advice, they will be less competitive and his dreary SourceSafe-based business will do even better.
The author Elliott is miserable, negative, hateful, boastful and self-righteous. Don't forget (now there's a patronizing phrase, as if anyone forgets the obvious) that the article is entitled, "MY, MY, MY (not someone else's: MY) Interview with (that god damned) murderer Hans Reiser." The article is about Elliott's feelings, primarily. Who cares? Elliott has the psychological insight of a paramecium.
To be fair, Elliott's hatred of Reiser is a little further up the phylogenetic tree, at least on the invertebrate branch. Other than that, the article doesn't say much about the crime or the trial, about Reiser's marriage to a venal Russian bride, or much of anything else. What we do learn is that Elliott is an opportunist who hung around Reiser's trial, managed to get an interview, and gets miffed because Reiser didn't give him what he wanted. The whole purpose was to give readers enough of a bad taste to purchase his book. Elliott is so unsympathetic, he unintentionally forces the reader's identification with Reiser when he turns his back to Elliott and asks the guard to be returned to his cell.
The author misses the point that PG's essays are not intended to be understood literally, but as literature, to be appreciated on an aesthetic level only.
The idea of a static mindset is itself limiting. One needs to have a mindsheaf, which could be a time-varying sheaf of mindsets. This would be a contravariant functor F from the real line, with its usual topology, to the category of sets. The value F(U) for an open set U of the real line would be one of the mindsets of the mindsheaf. Of course, other topological spaces are possible, and the functor could have values in other categories. I mention only one possibility to illustrate the primitive inadequacy of the notion of a static mindset.
It's expensive to raise a family in the United States. The economics and the culture are against it. Add to that the cost of raising a family with someone who turns out to be the wrong person: your expected income after marriage must be reduced by the probability of divorce times the cost of divorce. Children necessarily complicate matters.
The problem would be alleviated somewhat if more and more people owned their own businesses, instead of the situation we currently have, of numerous workers employed by a wealthy class. At some point, these workers should simply refuse to work for anyone substantially more wealthy than they are. The value to an employer of having a large pool of interchangeable labor is calculable. Who created that value? Not the employer: the people. And it is the people who should and who must demand that value they created for themselves.
The article claims that "...a number of intellectuals—including Aitzaz Ahsan, Noam Chomsky, Michael Ignatieff, and Amr Khaled—mounted voting drives by promoting the list on their Web sites."
This is false about Noam Chomsky: there were no "voting drives" on chomsky.info or zcommunications.org, where Chomsky has a blog. Chomsky has never paid any attention to the Foreign Policy vote. I wonder what possible motive Foreign Policy has for making this false claim.
Thanks--I hope the experiment works also. It seems as though it should, based on my experience. It's also an opportunity to record the results of an experiment in Google docs, using their fancy spreadsheet gadgets.
I've had lifelong problems maintaining anything remotely resembling a normal, consistent sleep schedule, coupled with chronic insomnia. Two sleep studies several years apart and a CPAP machine have done nothing. Scientific findings of a "food clock" that can override the circadian rhythm for sleep leads me to experiment. For the next 30 days I won't eat 16 hours before I intend to wake. On waking, eat breakfast. I hope this works.
As for $35, it pains me to mention libraries...it was a source, with a link so that you could see something about the book.
I can't say I know of a single public intellectual or professional philosopher who takes Rand seriously. I do know of a well-regarded mathematical logician who does, but this is an aberration.
"Isn't that more relevant than your personal, negative opinion of her philosophy?"
No, because it's not only a personal opinion, but a statement that Rand's philosophy of rational self interest is logically invalid ('rational' does not imply 'self interest'; the basis on the reflexivity of identity could fairly be called desperate) and scientifically incorrect. Rand's philosophy is incompatible with findings of reciprocal altruism in evolutionary biology and experimental game theory.
"So, out of curiosity, do these "results in evolutionary game theory" have a source?"
Who is Ayn Rand? An utterly dreadful writer and philosopher who believed that the axiom of reflexivity of identity had substantive ontological, social, moral and political consequences. It's no accident that Objectivists sought to justify their belief in the "virtue of selfishness" in the law of reflexivity; they have no use for altruism. Rand's philosophy glorifies the sociopath homo economicus, whose sole objective in life is to maximize his expected utility.
However, results in evolutionary game theory show that a society of self-seeking, self-regarding agents will generally face conditions that ultimately lead to its collapse.
Gary Cooper's goofy speech in The Fountainhead ( see http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zc7oZ9yWqO4 ) typifies Rand's attitudes. Among other preposterous propositions, Cooper is made to utter the nonsense that great inventions are uniformly the work of sole inventors, selfishly and reflexively seeking their own interests. This is ahistorical; see Against Intellectual Monopoly by Michele Boldrin and David K. Levine ( http://www.dklevine.com/general/intellectual/againstnew.htm ) for the history of inventions such as the steam engine, radio, telephone, and so on. In each case, ideas were in the air, and there were a number of people who came up with similar inventions more or less at the same time.
Cooper argues the basic notions of intellectual monopoly, which are that intellectual property is essentially indistinguishable from tangible property, and that all copies of ideas "belong" to their creator. These arguments come straight from the RIAA legal playbook. I'm surprised that any culture of hackers would want to subscribe to notions more commonly associated with corporate monopolists.
There are opportunity costs either way. When I was your age (I am now, on one leg), I didn't have my degree. After my father's premature death, I went to work to help support my mother and two brothers. I was working in videotex--this was before the WWW. (You might be amused to know that one of the prototypes I worked with was written in lisp.)
While I was always able to find work, it certainly was more difficult finding employment before I finished my degree. It raised questions--the rhetorical kind (interviewers would raise them but weren't interested in the answers).
Now that I have my Ph.D., it's more difficult again.
The point is that timing matters. I don't have the same choices now--and that's without having a family to support.
If you like category theory, the lectures by The Catsters on
YouTube at http://www.youtube.com/user/TheCatsters are entertaining. Their latest video describes Lawvere's example of generalized metric spaces as categories enriched over the set of nonnegative real numbers interpreted as a monoidal category.
It's pretentious to say that it's pretentious; in fact, any use of the word pretentious is extremely pretentious, including this one. The use/mention distinction also breaks down for the word 'pretentious': it's not even possible to mention the word without being fatuously pretentious. This is especially true if the criterion for pretentiousness is whether "most people" would know what it is.
Why does this rise to the level of concern? If these small ISVs take what the author considers misguided advice, they will be less competitive and his dreary SourceSafe-based business will do even better.