So insightful! This idea that some people just like the puzzles and some people like the control struck me. I get why Factorio is addictive but I can't really stand to play it much. I'd rather be refactoring something useful. And the idea that the same mentality covers forum mods. This is incredibly helpful to understand some of my friends and colleagues a little better.
It's funny, I read all through that with my rose tinted glasses thinking they'd created a local IMAP server on the phone, which would have been clever (and, I think, doable)... in fact I was running this perception until
"Our proxy server is written in Ruby using EventMachine, which allows it to efficiently handle many concurrent IMAP connections"
And I thought, why the heck would one phone be issuing so many concurrent IMAP connections. Oh my naiveté.
Great perspective. There are some celebrities who seem to live and die by the hype associated with those sorts of stories. And there are other celebrities who have a distinguished body of work and only incidentally appear in those rags. Which kind of startup would you rather be: the Kardashian or the Helen Miram?
If anyone here remembers the game Netstorm, we're doing a remake of it here, http://risingstormhq.com. It's not entirely opensource at the moment (and built on unity), but I'm the only coder and I'm releasing components (especially generic ones) as I go (as they are cleanly separable). In the end, I'll release all the code I feel I can without making the team unhappy.
The evidence is this: Words can alter perception. This is the purpose of rhetoric. For condescension to be successful the speaker must appear above his subject. Someone insecure assumes he's the worst or near the worst. By using condescension he can with words alter the perception such that he's not as bad as the subject. Thus definitely not the worst.
This isn't a water proof argument, however. A waterproof argument for human emotion isn't yet possible.
It would be funny to ask someone who was affecting that something like "Then what have you accomplished?" See I could picture Linus being completely oblivious to celebrity, there's a seriously big deal that he came up with while he was busy not watching popular movies.
If the person saying "oh football what's that?" hasn't actually done anything really impressive then what are they doing if too busy to notice pop culture? Just living in a cave and staring at the shadows?!
But that's after the point at which anything can be done educationally. My point wasn't helpful and friendly, illiterate people aren't any less helpful or friendly than literates.
Here's a very tiny "company" anecdote. I'm volunteering on a remake of an old game for fun. So far I've been the only programmer. I've had conversations with two other programmers who considered joining, and the conversations went similarly. That they seemed eager to tell me about something I was doing wrong and needed to do differently. I'm not really against that (even less if it comes with a patch...) but I guess it was the delivery that got to me.
For instance, in one conversation the first thing the other programmer said to me (after chatting with the guy introducing us) was "I've found tons of bugs in the build." My initial reaction was "well duh" :) But it didn't really set a good tone for the rest of the conversation. Haven't heard back from either of them. But it got me thinking in part about why I had such a negative reaction to it, but also what draws people like that. I figured it was because it's a game, but after seeing this I guess it's common in the industry (I'm not sure if I should be happy or sad).
Perhaps it's because we're working in relative anonymity on this game and a large corporation has a similar feel that it still would remain only there. I hold out hope.
It's too bad because it could take one more step and do something slightly cooler.
I just do counting in MapReduce, but it was to use Expectation-Maximization on mixtures of Gaussians to cluster a data set of 16 million documents. Although computing the Guassian's isn't really trivial, all you do at the end is sum up and normalize.
It's very cool and isn't much more than counting (replace the map step). In fact the paper I took it from (and the whole Mahout on Hadoup thing) is a bunch of machine learning algorithms that are just big summations at the reduce step.
Respectfully (very respectfully, because your book still haunts my shelf like a specter of how little I understood what was happening to my brain when I took Quantum Computation...) I disagree. At least in part.
The ideas you point out are not at all easy to have in the first place, they also, I think, required proper execution to bring them to fruition.
Now, Adams is speaking much more to, I think, artistic creativity than mathematical creativity, but that first blush of an idea which starts with "What if I..." is the same and requires a carefully executed (but wildly different) follow through.
Imagine the scenario where some guy, say Joe, said to Turing, "What if a machine did it?" to which Alan goes through the effort of building the formalization of the machine. But Joe comes back to say "Well, that was my idea."
To come back to my partial agreement. In retrospect, people looking back and may tend to think "well I could have thought of that." And yet the necessary background to effectively wade through the ideas that rage through ones head as he thinks about a problem is non-trivial.
Perhaps that's true of either process. When a writer takes what appears to be a really lame idea and says "I can make that work" he or she has probably already, automatically, in the back of his or her head taken a few steps imagining how it would execute.
There's always been something wrong, and I couldn't quite put my finger on it, with the idea of getting a degree solely in "business"... I think I get it now.
Reminds me of a shirt I saw somewhere from a cartoon I've never seen: "What's this? I'm going to go do some Science on it!" Seems very similar to: "I'm a business man"
I'm not sure I'll have the time to do this, but I've had some good results running Latent Semantic Analysis and Latent Dirichlet Allocation on a similar problem. In my case, I have data from people playing a negotiation game and having a conversation with a human actor. I have scores from a human judge going from 1 - 5. Using LDA on the transcriptions of the dialog I can predict the results of the human judge to a correlation of .5 There was a previous study with essay's a teacher grades that got .8 with LSA. The LSA study used a much larger training corpus outside the individuals.
For slightly more details, here's a sketch of the algorithm:
Treat each comment as a "document" input to LDA. Use the theta matrix that represents the distribution of topics over each document. Then use the inverse dot product between two document theta vectors and perform k Nearest Neighbors to predict IDs. You should be able to tune the rank and k values from all the labelled data.
When it comes time to infer I suggest running the with the whole set through LDA instead of reusing the discovered alpha and beta. For some reason (which I'm not entirely sure of), my results seem much better that way.
For some reason I want to read heavily between the lines of the wikipedia summary, and I find it incredibly sad. I mean in the first place my knee jerk reaction is to equivocate "I'm still good enough, even if I didn't solve diffeq problems at 6. My son's okay even if he still doesn't read at the age of 4."
But I don't want to imagine the kind of expectation people put on this kid (when he was a kid). Cynically, I suppose as I read I thought "oh yeah what's he done now? We still have cancer and no unified field theory. Does P=NP?! huh?" and yet under that was the expectation "well this guy should be curing cancer and resolving open problems!"
No wonder he escaped to something ordinary (poor Civil Engineers, though, what a bad rap that is ... my profession is the most ordinary!) People haven't changed much since the dark ages (or before). They still expect miracles and magic to cure their woes, they just expect it now from Science.
It agrees with me that accomplishment comes after the 120 IQ...heck I'm barely above the marker.. shwoo. But it comes in increments. It comes in mostly in pieces we have to put together. Einstein didn't make the world a better place single-handedly, it was the engineers who came after and created GPS (for instance) that did it. There's no reason this guy should have created miracles with his IQ, we probably don't have enough of the base research to solve that (whichever) problem, yet.
Instead, he's improved the world a bit (quite a bit in the sector of civil engineering apparently). Honestly, the universe is miracle enough. The fact that we can make it slightly better by our actions and increase joy in the miracle of existence at all is a good thing. Some people do a better job of that with much smaller IQs.
After the game jam (An event where everyone tries make a game in one weekend, hence the correlation to topic) wrap up, one of the guys there said something very interesting: they thought it was such a good idea to pound on a concept for the weekend to see if it was viable, they were going to do it for every idea including those in the business that weren't game related (not sure if that meant software or what...)
So while I see the simplifying assumption that says "I could do that in one weekend" and that it's really not that simple. There's the other side of the coin. Maybe some ideas don't need to be so complicated. We evolved our game idea three times that weekend as we completed something we saw what was boring or was failing and modified it.
In both our case and the guy above, we aren't planning to continue the game. I know I tend to sit and idle on ideas for months or years at a time. This is a terrible thing to do. Why not, for the cost of one weekend decide to throw it in the trash and never think of it again. One weekend is way less than months and months of planning and task lists and bug trackers and code repositories... etc etc.
Edit: In case anyone is interested you can find our game on http://globalgamejam.com called "Maid of Dishonor" or on our site, http://tosos.com under the "Unity Games" page.
The fact that developers are not the target audience is, I think, a problem. It means that apps will be created that developers think people would want to buy, NOT apps that developers would want to use.
I must use a different machine to build applications for this, which means on the gradient of iphone to macbook, it's much closer to the iphone. If the only niche it fills is for grandmothers, secretaries and managers, how will the developers ever really grok it? It seems like they'd only be monetarily driven... and that just sounds like iFart.
You should have kept reading. It was a fairly nicely written satire of the "he" referred to in your quote.
On a broader point, although it is efficient to quickly dismiss the ludicrous, it's unwise to universally ignore every such instance. Rather, consider using a heavier dose of skepticism. After all, some discoveries really are weird.