Someone's insecurity is showing; might wanna hide it buddy
I'm not exactly a Musk fan boy, but it's clear he's just showing off a setup that they're working on over there. He says in the video, in case you're hard of hearing, that they put together existing technology to experiment with this UI. I didn't here him even insinuate that they're inventing it let a lone claim it.
Your mal-a-tete with people like Jobs and Musk isn't that they're taking all the credit - can't say the same for Jobs, but Musk seems to big up his team whenever he can. Your problem is that they demonstrate that the engineering isn't everything. At the end of the day you still have to attract people and people don't just drop their panties at the sight of new tech without the nuances of good presentation. Rather than PMS on hacker news, may I suggest some life coaching, sir?
Am I the only one who thinks this is unnecessarilly rude and abhorent?
The lady was just doing her job for duck sake. For someone whose main point of argument is that they show humanity, you seem to have very little of your own.
I think the point of the concept is actually an antithesis to doubt. It basically says you can believe x is x, yet continue to treat x like y. You could say this is "doubt", but then you contradict your belief that x is x. Just like the sterilized bedpan example. If you truly believe that it is indeed sterilized, why are you hesitant to drink from it?
Apparently, you're the less learned one. Hong Kong was a former property of HRH and still maintains, both culturally and politically, the civic values from their predecessors. As a matter of fact, judging from what I saw last time I was over there, one could reasonably argue that they handle civil dissent much better than us here in the states, both on the protesters' side and on the government's side.
I think people have invested themselves emotionally to this 10000 hours nonsense, so any mention of natural gifted-ness sets them off in a tirade, not because of any analytical opposition, but because their egos are somewhat threatened by the prospect that someone may be naturally better at something than they are.
Unfortunately, 10000 hours yadah yadah is not a "new finding" beyond putting a nice round number on a phenomenon that I'm sure your mommies and daddies told you when you were a kid - PRACTICE. Deliberate practice? Does "try doing the harder stuff" sound familiar? The fact that if you practice areas that you're not very strong at you will get stronger has been known for centuries. "Naturally gifted" people aren't those who are experts, neither are they those who have the best technique. 10000 hours on the piano will not make you Beethoven, neither will 100000 hours. Beethoven was Beethoven for many reasons - well known as a prodigy, highly regarded by the culture of his time, etc - merely playing the piano well didn't make him remarkable. For a less ancient example, take Jimmy Page. Anyone who plays guitar will acknowledge that Page's playing was quite sloppy. It's not technique that I would teach to someone. But he's Jimmy freakin' Page. The genius of Zeppelin was in the innovation. They brought a new sound, at the time - and they were really cool too, but don't tell anyone.
So, to wrap up, practice makes perfect, but perfect isn't genius. Which isn't to disparage anyone, but to see such pettiness automatically raise its head whenever someone brings up this 10000 hours crap as if it's something new - one guy goes boo-hoo people won't think I'm a genius anymore, the other guy goes, yeah I could be a genius too if only I practiced it - is just sad. No one cares about what you could be. I could be a freakin' Navy Seal if I just enlisted and worked hard and blah blah blah; I'm not a Navy Seal, so all that's irrelevant. All that matters is what you are, so if we're reveling in the fact that we could be better at something if we practiced, rather than actually practicing, well that says more about the human ego rather than human talent.
So you're comparing common decency and common sense to overbearing vanity imposed on people? If I remark about someone's weight to demean them, that's simply dick behavior. Wearing whatever the hell you like is not. Now imposing that one may be somehow inferior for not paying an exorbitant amount of attention to dress (for vanity, no less), that's dick behavior - which was the crux of OP's comment.
And please, tell me how "if you strip away the pretensions from these things, more people would take to them" is the same as "the pretentiousness is necessary and the untraveled, uncultured, blah, blah, don't understand that, because, you know, uncultured".
So basically, we need to engage in superficial nonsense, because people are so immature that they can't settle their differences amicably? I'll make sure to teach my child that.
I second this! or something similar, at least. Having not really gone to college, myself, I was lucky enough to have had so many varied life experiences and interests before I took up tech; so when talking to my colleagues who are cs-equipped, I find their methodology is often very CS oriented, and focused more on the tech than on the problem. I think that's why "design" has become such a big fad these days - it's almost as if we just figured out that people buy products, not tech.
That being said, after speaking with quite a few tech-inclined people, I feel they would be a lot more comfortable with less technically inclined subjects if they were stripped of the general cultural pretensions that they come with. There is a very strong resistance to "acculturation" among techies, as it is usually seen - rightly, for the most part - as a mechanism of enforcing a "cool kids' club", so to speak, rather than an actual venue for intellectual exploration.
I think, that as techies, we are in a unique situation, as far as intellectual development is concerned. The vast majority of the population can't appreciate technical phenomena because it is culturally viewed as "too hard" or "robotic" or "blah blah, boring". We, OTOH, actively refuse to engage with humanistic pursuits, but not out of any perceived difficulty so much as discomfort with the pretensions that come with "cultured society". If effort can be made to induct some history and philosophy, and heck, maybe even theology into the the techie culture, we could have the best of both worlds and possibly even have some truly fresh ideas put out.
In short, it's easier to teach a physicist to write essays than it is to teach a poet Diff Eq
a) OP had nothing to do with linguistics or math; it was simply pointing out that Lisp's approach to being general purpose was interesting in that you could take basic rules and restructure them to fit your domain.
b) I have read "The Math Gene" and many claims made vis-a-vis maths and linguistics are dubious, at best.
c) There is no "linguistic" way to attack anything, unless what you're attacking is a linguistic problem.
Is your rationale that when given a problem "mathematically overdeveloped" - by the way, if you were wondering about your perceived defensiveness, saying someone is "overdeveloped" in something you claim to not have ample ability in is a dead giveaway - people will first parse it for nouns and gerunds? Because most people think about the problem and only consider your diction if it is relevant to the problem itself.
>> "It's one thing to be a recluse who scorns 'normal, social people'"
This is not a stigmatizing statement at all. tone = {sarcasm: "implied"};
Perhaps people who would feel the urge to be reclusive would be more social if people like you kept your mouths shut every once in a while and didn't say pathetically pretentious things like "us normal, social people".
>> "so those with an overdeveloped math functional unit in the brain also have an overdeveloped linguistical unit. This leads to treating every problem as a linguisic problem, because that is what their brain is best equipped to solve."
Seriously, math envy much? Where is it that people formulate these absurd conjectures about mathematics and people who understand mathematics, because every time I hear one it sounds more like defensive attempts to disarm one's feelings of inadequacy by making another group seem inferior or "different" in some way. Furthermore, mathematical capacity and linguistic capacity have no strong links that I know of, so I'm going to need a citation before I swallow that claim, sir.
Sorry to piggy back on this thread, but can anyone give me an estimate of how much a freelance gig can earn per project? Also, do you take on more than one project at a time, usually?