> I know when I was a kid, I was smart enough for BASIC and Pascal but C++ just looked weird and complex and hard. HTML, CSS and Javascript were awesome and I jumped into that instead.
When I was a kid, C++ was easy and I didn't start learning javascript until a few years ago. I also learned TI-BASIC in AP Calc, and Java (CS II-Honors) was presented at my school as harder than C++ (CS I). A lot of what is labeled difficult is very very subjective. A coworker of mine stumbled over Intro to CS/Programming because he was stuck trying to understand how to program hello world without understanding how the compiler worked first. Without a teacher to talk to, this very intelligent student could be seen as one who can't even grasp 'the basics'. I stumbled over my programming languages class because I confused the machine interpretation of Scheme, while we developed a interpreter in Scheme. I'm still confused over it.
> What drives a divide is when you go build an entire ecosystem and hand it off to a cloistered priesthood.
It's not so much that it's handed off to, it's more that people aren't very vocal about what they don't understand. This leads sort of to a 'survival of the fittest' cycle of development, on a macro scale, with the people who have a direction, at all, making important decisions, and the people who are most cautious, staring blankly in confusion. The reality is that everyone is probably missing some part of what is considered 'the basics' to someone else.
A responsive community dedicated to bringing people into development is also what lowers the barrier to entry. Students that are so afraid of their teachers and the 'scary aesthetic' of the material raises the barrier to entry. If you have someone to ask "what does this symbol mean?" or "am I thinking in the right direction, or am I making this lesson more complex than it was intended to be?" then complex and hard become more approachable (not more simple, however). Sometimes having a person reply back, "I don't know" can actually help a lot.
When I was just learning to program, I was afraid to ask questions, to talk about what I knew or thought. I don't know if many young developers struggle with that today, given how much the landscape has changed. Then I wonder, has it changed so much, or did it just take me about 15 years to become comfortable in chaos?
I was late diagnosed with ADHD. I used to be on Adderall for years. I'm now on a non-stimulant medication, as well as an anti-anxiety anti-depressant.
Adderall helped me in college. It helped me get every homework done, even if the homework was pointless.
I spent some time trying to switch medications, as I personally did not like feeling glued to whatever activity I was doing. I like having the choice to focus, or not focus.
I switched environments, where I could experiment with this new way of approaching learning and working. I don't mind iterative, mundane tasks, because at the end of the day and before I begin them, I try to think about why it's interesting, novel, and different, for me to perform this iteration of task. I try to think that the fact that I have gotten my mind to this state without dramatic intervention is as well novel, unique, and worthy of self praise.
In a world where I already felt distracted and slow, Adderall offers a quick fix. But I would have never built those parts of myself, of my mind, that can find novelty in what superficially appears to be 'boring'. I just try to change everything else in my control, to help myself see 'boring' in a different perspective. If I work in java at work on jsp pages, at home and during my 'web surfing time' at work, I teach myself about unikernals, clojure, the curry howard isomorphism - with serious intent, over long periods of time. And then I begin to see connections in the ordinary that are extraordinary.
As for nootropics, I'm trying to look for research in anything that uses language such as 'relaxing / calming' and 'focus'. I think there is a serious slant in literature that truly believes, and primes it's audience to believe stimulant -> better concentration. Stimulant -> temporary concentration. I am firmly confident that stimulants either prevent or override the creation of neural connections that are less explicit.
Regarding nootropics, gwern has an excellent writeup on different ones, and how he tested them http://www.gwern.net/Nootropics. You might already have seen it, in case it might be helpful to others.
I agree absolutely. Categories like these imply discretely definable differences across something uniform. That which initially begins as a uniform definition (human beings, mammals, things that have consciousness, individuals, individual life) is then examined for 'properties', in which a collection of 'properties' define not only a label, but implicitly defined, correlative associations to that label (cultural assumptions).
I think that society might eventually find itself moving past linguistic categorization to process absolute information about reality, if the computational calculation of lots and lots of data about the individual becomes so individually defined, so complex, and so multidimensional, that words can not express meaningful information - both generally and specifically, because it is derived from abstracted layers of object data points [data] and the abstract relations that structure and organize them [composition of theory].
Generally speaking, we need the ability to compose correlations from data in order to infer information about day to day things. This is generally called common sense, or rational knowledge. Sometimes it's wrong. Sometimes it's totally irrational. As a ---, I don't see the point in companies pointing out how diverse they are. All I care about is how much I'm going to learn about code, math, and computer science. I want the assurance that I will be treated equally. Otherwise, it's like trying to get a pendulum to stop swinging by pushing it equally hard, the opposing way.
Any advise for a person who had success, then had compound PTSD surface, get mingled with the concept of ego, leading to a negative sorts of ego death, and is still trying as hard as they can to become genius? I can't get the concept of being past my prime, out of my head, and I think that is precisely what is holding me back.
Start actively looking deeper into yourself to discover your fears. Your mind has built up a bunch of reasons why you can't do something, and you've become so accustomed to them that you don't even think to question their validity. At the core, it is your fears that hold you back, and those "reasons" exist only to mask that fear. You must dig deeper and expose the ugly fear underneath. Then you must face and walk into that fear, alone. You must discover that you are not a victim. A victim has no power over their circumstances. A victor controls their circumstances. This transition is VERY HARD to make, and it's not too uncommon to fail on your first few attempts. Good luck.
This resonates with me to an extent. I squandered some serious talent early on. I'll never know the answers to all those "what if's".
It's easy to be bitter or resentful of circumstances and opportunities -- I think of all the people entering the job market in the past 10-12 years. Get the wrong year in the wrong industry and you'll stagnate at just the wrong time.
For myself, I do not regret the past. I accept responsibility for not capitalizing on my talent, which is itself a talent. I am not bitter for not being luckier in opportunity as I have been luckier than so many. Today, I will sit down and accomplish what I can.
My company's CEO passed away last week. During her memorial I found out that she was 70 when she died, and had founded the company 25 years ago, when she was 45. Which I think shows that people's "prime" actually comes a lot later than they think.
The way I look at it is that if you start a business in your 20s, the odds are against you. You may be young and full of energy, but you don't know shit about the world yet and will make a ton of mistakes. If you do it in your 30s, the odds are neutral. You are more seasoned and possibly have some domain experience under your belt that you can leverage. If you do it in your 40s, the odds are in your favor. You probably have significant domain expertise as well as connections you have established earlier in your career that can help you. It's only in your 50s that you can justify feeling like you're past your prime. Then again, that hardly stops some people.
How can you define action? Is it the summation, selection, and order of thoughts leading up the action, or is a web that connects possibly every observation and thought you've had?
Acting is easy, its simply answering the question, or at least attempting to. That is the part where you can't just ignore it and go on with your life.
> If you'll notice, gluons "hang on" to the rest of the particles by merely one interaction. If this interaction was not present, as far as positivists are concerned, then gluons don't exist. But that seems entirely unreasonable to me. I could imagine plenty of particles that could "exist" that simply don't have an interaction with the ones in the standard model that constitute our reality.
A problem is that when we use concepts to describe new concepts, lots of little assumptions tag along each referenced concept that may be different to every person. So, when I explain a concept, many people may understand my concept differently, while some may understand my concept precisely.
There is a difference between 'what could exist' versus 'what is assumed to exist'. When we communicate, we have to be very careful about the definitions of terms and their context.
I say "tree", we both may think of a tree in our minds. Your tree may come with assumption that the tree must have leaves in order to be a tree. My tree may come with the assumption that a tree does not need to have leaves, in order to be a tree. Neither of us may touch upon this point, while we are busy communicating about trees, and I think that is what is most important to recognize.
The rest of what you say though, did click for me, so thank you.
I did not consider it a good thing, when I had convinced myself and all my opinions to lay at a middle/neutral point where I couldn't select a single one. It made me feel as though I had no sense of self. I studied a bit of Zen with some folks, where I started simplifying every point of view to 'thinking about thinking', or a deconstructionist approach to every conceptual construction. This allowed me to assign a more weighted value to every opinion I could have, so I felt as though I was being somewhat more careful. With this mindset, I still feel as though I am tricking myself, but, I add concepts/values/ideas/understandings/acceptance of understandings much more slowly and less definitively.
Even then, there's the foggy feeling that remains, every thought exists in some context with some assumptions. You can continue to question what assumptions exist that you aren't aware of, and redefine your opinions through that vocabulary instead, and perhaps convince yourself into a point of view you would never consciously switch to given knowledge of the prior, through the trickery of time and language.
Trying to maintain a coherent view of the world assuming the possibility of relativism across all domains is insanity. Trying to function with that mass of unanswerables leading to possibly infinitely descending chains of undefined, fuzzy variables is like hitting a wall of meaningless symbols. It makes doing things in reality trivial. The task of coming to know what you explicitly, continuously define as unknowable is impossible.
In theory, logic is beautiful. But there's stuff that makes logic seem incomplete, when it comes to application. At the trail end of the thought, it still feels like thinking about everything all at once, while knowing nothing.
Not sure how good they are in practice. I just experimented a little bit with it ( https://i.imgur.com/pLyKKpg.png ) and there seem to be a pattern that destroys the uniform line pattern in certain directions (in the lower part), however, with most obstacles it left a lot of stuff behind (the upper part in the picture). The initial pattern is not very simple though: https://i.imgur.com/PfVjVOt.png
I think the Dunning Kruger effect has been a meme/cultural/conceptual construct long enough (like the measurement of intelligence) that we need to test for a Reverse Dunning Kruger effect, where knowledge of the Dunning Kruger Effect correlates with bias in self evaluation.
Knowing about the Dunning Kruger effect makes me more inclined to ask other people how good I am at something instead of relying on my own opinion. Which I think would make my evaluation more accurate.
Do you really think Michael Jordan needs to ask anyone in order to test his basketball skills? I'm fairly sure he doesn't do that and no matter people (some people) will tell him about this or that players being better, he firmly believe that he could win them in court, in his prime. IMHO Dunning-Kruger effect doesn't work if you reverse the claim.
When I was a kid, C++ was easy and I didn't start learning javascript until a few years ago. I also learned TI-BASIC in AP Calc, and Java (CS II-Honors) was presented at my school as harder than C++ (CS I). A lot of what is labeled difficult is very very subjective. A coworker of mine stumbled over Intro to CS/Programming because he was stuck trying to understand how to program hello world without understanding how the compiler worked first. Without a teacher to talk to, this very intelligent student could be seen as one who can't even grasp 'the basics'. I stumbled over my programming languages class because I confused the machine interpretation of Scheme, while we developed a interpreter in Scheme. I'm still confused over it.
> What drives a divide is when you go build an entire ecosystem and hand it off to a cloistered priesthood.
It's not so much that it's handed off to, it's more that people aren't very vocal about what they don't understand. This leads sort of to a 'survival of the fittest' cycle of development, on a macro scale, with the people who have a direction, at all, making important decisions, and the people who are most cautious, staring blankly in confusion. The reality is that everyone is probably missing some part of what is considered 'the basics' to someone else.
A responsive community dedicated to bringing people into development is also what lowers the barrier to entry. Students that are so afraid of their teachers and the 'scary aesthetic' of the material raises the barrier to entry. If you have someone to ask "what does this symbol mean?" or "am I thinking in the right direction, or am I making this lesson more complex than it was intended to be?" then complex and hard become more approachable (not more simple, however). Sometimes having a person reply back, "I don't know" can actually help a lot.
When I was just learning to program, I was afraid to ask questions, to talk about what I knew or thought. I don't know if many young developers struggle with that today, given how much the landscape has changed. Then I wonder, has it changed so much, or did it just take me about 15 years to become comfortable in chaos?
Just some thoughts.