The worst thing to come out of the pycon event is that reasonable people like the OP are trying to "get" why this was a case of sexism. The answer is that it wasn't, and many posters, including women, have pointed out why. It's an issue of professionalism, not sexism. This kind of post of is exactly the reason why some have remarked that Adria may have set back her cause.
So this article is addressed to the people that have the option of working from home but choose not to because they think it makes them less productive, and haven't factored their own happiness into that decision. Are there really that many people that fall into this category?
It's not hard to think of counter examples to this. Seeing a rival die isn't that funny. A child walking into a glass wall is pretty funny. The interesting question is how we can understand humor generally and fundamentally.
I'm not saying programmers are always right or rational. I'm saying they care more about truth and logical consistency. Or at least they care more about being the kind of person that cares about truth and logical consistency.
Let's say there was a box containing a piece of paper that has the answer to the question, "Does God exist?" or "Is my view on nutrition or pharmaceuticals correct?". The atheist and the programmer would almost certainly look inside that box even at considerable cost. Many religious people would not. Some people could save a lot of time if they realized that.
I don't think this example helps much, because it's not that we don't know what an unpleasant truth feels like. Everyone knows what that feels like. The difference is in what comes next. Do we accept a painful truth or accept a happy lie? To me, rationalists like Sam Harris, and probably most programmers, truth wins over feelings by quite a long shot. A better way to understand the other side, is to realize that for a lot of people this isn't the case.
Here's a better example. If you were being cheated on, but this had no affect on your otherwise perfect relationship, would you want to know? What if it was a one time thing that your partner was extremely regretful about and would never happen again. What if you're in your tenth year of the relationship, the cheating occurred nine years ago, you currently share a mortgage and two children.
I would still answer yes, and you probably did too. But many people don't care about truth that much. And I don't necessarily think they should.
"Hey there, coding is actually pretty hard, and while there are some really great perks to knowing it, you'll probably fail at getting there, and even if you don't fail, you might not end up at the place that has all of the awesome perks, just some of them, so you basically shouldn't even try."
"You basically shouldn't even try" doesn't necessarily follow because we don't know if the person we're talking to is one of the people that will fail. Otherwise, I'd say that quote is exactly what most people should hear.
Luckily some people's minds are quite resilient to becoming irreparably warped by logical thinking. :) I think you're overestimating how easy it is to fundamentally change the way someone thinks, as are the people who think anyone can get good at programming. There's practically no downside to letting everyone try programming because many will either quit or fail. But the upside is that some people will find out they're good at it.
I don't think what you're saying is all that different from what the article is saying. It never says there's an actual conspiracy or that any specific person designed anything. But as you yourself said there seems to be a difference between what we think we want and what makes us happy in the long term and economies will tend to grow by maximizing on the former, not necessarily the latter.
But I really think that I never learned those concepts in the first place. All I learned were rules to solve the problems given to me. For example I actually did remember the "chain rule". But those rules had no meaning to me, just moving numbers around. Which means I would never be able apply it to anything. For example, calculus clearly has applications all across basic physics. But I never really made that connection. All this makes me think that exams are much, MUCH less effective at measuring comprehension than we think.
Agreed. I had an interesting experience recently when I decided to "relearn" math. I had taken calculus courses in high school and university, and aced all the exams. But when I eventually came back to calculus out of personal interest, I realized that I didn't know what a derivative was! I didn't know what a limit was! How did I pass those classes? And if someone who got the highest marks didn't learn anything, what about the people who were actually struggling? How many people in that class actually learned anything?
And I could say the same for my science classes, foreign language classes, etc. I don't think you really learn anything unless you really want to understand the material and you work hard to do so. And if that were the case, hour for hour you'll get what you put into it. You wouldn't be studying to an exam. You wouldn't be satisfied with 60%+ on that exam. You wouldn't restrict yourself to a specific curriculum. You wouldn't put time limits on your learning. Instead you would learn the thing that you decided you wanted or needed to learn, and however long it took for you to really understand it, that's how much time you would spend.
Why is the idea of innate IQ still taken seriously if there's so little evidence for it? If intelligence is just the ability to think in a structured abstract way, doesn't it make sense to think of it as a skill developed over time? I mean, it's not hard to think of spending most of your time in a different mode of thought. I'd say that for most people their normal day to day tends to require concrete or social/emotional information processing.
If it seems that intelligence (specifically abstract structured thought) seems to stabilize early in life, maybe it's something that starts developing even earlier. A strategy for prioritizing, filtering, and processing information from a world of endless stimuli (of which abstract/structured would be only one such strategy) would start developing the moment we're born. By the time you're 10, you'd already have 10 years of "practice".
I think this is the most important point left out of the article. How hard it is to admit that you don't know something is dependent on the costs of doing so. Sometimes it's harder to pretend you do know.
The better real world example isn't poker, but it comes up anytime you're talking with someone who knows less than you: your boss, customers, friends. The cost of being caught at wrong answers is often quite low.
And often the cost isn't only low to yourself, but to all parties involved. The article's author makes the leap to academic dishonesty right away. But, especially in this field of work, we talk a lot about the value of social skills over pure technical skills. BSing has a bad connotation but you can also think of it as consistently leaving good impressions or presenting things in the best light. It's not a rigid distinction.
A good example is the post below who said he probably got passed up for promotions because saying I don't know made the boss think he lacked "confidence". It's not surprising that the person in charge might disagree with the value of "I don't know". It's probably part of the social skill set that put him in charge in the first place.
Of course in the technical field the cost of a fudged truth can be very high, but the potential benefits are equally high, because you're often dealing with people who don't have the background to judge anything on its technical merits. The less knowledgeable they are, the more they have to rely on your presentation.
The "courage" to say I don't know is a good standard in academic and technical fields, but in the fields of business and politics (and social interactions in general!) it's not so clear-cut.