Your premises are flawed. Human brain power is not an additive substance. So 1000 brains are in no sense of the term 1000 times more powerful than one brain.
Crowds don't actually have wisdom. All they really have is consensus.
As such, if a problem is the kind of thing that one person usually gets wrong, then it's also the kind of thing that the majority of a million-person crowd will also get wrong.
Cool! This will be awesome for implementing feature on cross-platform devices. I can definitely see a use case for standardizing mailing across, e.g., several different mobile platforms. Just keep the POST request object across all of them and send the request however is convenient.
I agree with skyo and aphexairlines. I've found Amazon a fantastic place to work and am, frankly, baffled by the flak it's taking here in the comments. My experience at Amazon has been fun and rewarding, and I'm thrilled to be a coder at such an awesome company.
I guess your mileage may vary, but I've found AMZN to be an awesome place to be a programmer.
Speaking as someone who has had to maintain code written by someone who "learned" from these books, I completely agree. What was there was certainly C++ in a purely linguistic sense, but as code it was complete gibberish.
You attack Libertarianism on the grounds that it has adherents that disagree widely on several topics. So does that mean that if I found some Objectivists that disagreed on points of policy, that Objectivism would "mean so many things that it means nothing?" Your argument certainly seems to imply as much.
I'm not sure there's anything one could say about focus/productivity that's particular to software engineers. When it comes right down to it, the sort of work we do is susceptible to the same procrastination pitfalls as any other knowledge worker, and so it can be avoided in the same ways.
The most helpful advice I've gotten on productivity has come from Merlin Mann of 43Folders (and other projects), and he mostly writes about writing.
This is an awesome take on the VC game. I imagine it's not the only opinion, however. The metaphor he sets up with regards to customers and shareholders could also be twisted (and I'm sure is, by some VCs) to a more hierarchical idea in which the VC needs to answer to the shareholders. Some VCs may even want to stretch that notion further and say that the startup is answerable to the VC.
I think this is a less accurate analogy, but I could certainly see it giving rise to the idea of "the Patzer" as something less like a business decision and something more like a sin against the VC.
Consider how much real achievement we would see if all the motivated hackers put down WoW and started up their development environment of choice.
But there's a lot of truth to the fact that human beings need recreation. We need down-time when we're not building, making, doing, etc. There's a lot of engineers who, if they put down WoW and fired up Eclipse would just stare at the screen for hours wondering what to build next. Or they'd disappear into an equally "unproductive" passed time like email, solitaire, or social news forums like this one.
It seems to me that this essay is based on a strained analogy and a whole bunch of convenient equivocation. His whole "achievement" link to video games seems to be a largely rhetorical one. What if those were called (as they are on some systems) trophies? Starts to make the rest of his essay sound a bit strange.
Furthermore, to compare arbitrary accomplishments in games and saying that the only thing which distinguishes them from achievements in life is that the video game ones are too easy or in some way "false" is to ignore that they're fundamentally different kinds of undertakings.
To play a video game is to, as Merlin Mann says, "move your hands a little and make small decisions". The activity is essentially medatative or recreational in nature and the results further that goal. The point of these "achievements" is to relax and have fun. The point of the "achievements" in real life is to better ourselves or our circumstances.
Furthermore, the in-game "achievements" are rigorously structured, those out-of-game are radically open-ended.
Both the structure and purpose of the two kinds of achievements are completely different. To conflate them and then deride video-game achievements for being inferior misses the point. It's like people who say that Guitar Hero doesn't make you a good guitarist.
Well, duh. But no one's making the argument that it will. We don't play Guitar Hero to get good at guitar. We don't play video games to accomplish anything.
An interesting idea. This would put it in the same class as a remarkably large number of emergent "senses" like our sense of distance or of weight, which are both effected by ancillary information.
Crowds don't actually have wisdom. All they really have is consensus.
As such, if a problem is the kind of thing that one person usually gets wrong, then it's also the kind of thing that the majority of a million-person crowd will also get wrong.