Comment The conversation moved to Twitter (Score 1) 29
Yeah, a bunch of us here on Slashdot moved much of the conversation to Twitter. Unfortunately, Trump seems to get a bunch of the bandwidth there too.
Is Believing In Meritocracy Bad For You? (fastcompany.com) 480
An anonymous reader quotes Fast Company:
Although widely held, the belief that merit rather than luck determines success or failure in the world is demonstrably false. This is not least because merit itself is, in large part, the result of luck. Talent and the capacity for determined effort, sometimes called "grit," depend a great deal on one's genetic endowments and upbringing.
This is to say nothing of the fortuitous circumstances that figure into every success story. In his book Success and Luck, the U.S. economist Robert Frank recounts the long-shots and coincidences that led to Bill Gates's stellar rise as Microsoft's founder, as well as to Frank's own success as an academic. Luck intervenes by granting people merit, and again by furnishing circumstances in which merit can translate into success. This is not to deny the industry and talent of successful people. However, it does demonstrate that the link between merit and outcome is tenuous and indirect at best. According to Frank, this is especially true where the success in question is great, and where the context in which it is achieved is competitive. There are certainly programmers nearly as skilful as Gates who nonetheless failed to become the richest person on Earth. In competitive contexts, many have merit, but few succeed. What separates the two is luck.
In addition to being false, a growing body of research in psychology and neuroscience suggests that believing in meritocracy makes people more selfish, less self-critical, and even more prone to acting in discriminatory ways.
The article cites a pair of researchers who "found that, ironically, attempts to implement meritocracy leads to just the kinds of inequalities that it aims to eliminate.
"They suggest that this 'paradox of meritocracy' occurs because explicitly adopting meritocracy as a value convinces subjects of their own moral bona fides."
This is to say nothing of the fortuitous circumstances that figure into every success story. In his book Success and Luck, the U.S. economist Robert Frank recounts the long-shots and coincidences that led to Bill Gates's stellar rise as Microsoft's founder, as well as to Frank's own success as an academic. Luck intervenes by granting people merit, and again by furnishing circumstances in which merit can translate into success. This is not to deny the industry and talent of successful people. However, it does demonstrate that the link between merit and outcome is tenuous and indirect at best. According to Frank, this is especially true where the success in question is great, and where the context in which it is achieved is competitive. There are certainly programmers nearly as skilful as Gates who nonetheless failed to become the richest person on Earth. In competitive contexts, many have merit, but few succeed. What separates the two is luck.
In addition to being false, a growing body of research in psychology and neuroscience suggests that believing in meritocracy makes people more selfish, less self-critical, and even more prone to acting in discriminatory ways.
The article cites a pair of researchers who "found that, ironically, attempts to implement meritocracy leads to just the kinds of inequalities that it aims to eliminate.
"They suggest that this 'paradox of meritocracy' occurs because explicitly adopting meritocracy as a value convinces subjects of their own moral bona fides."
Submission + - AmigaOS 3.1.4 released for classic Amiga (hyperion-entertainment.com)
Mike Bouma writes:
The new, cleaned-up, polished Amiga operating system for your 68K machine fixes all the small annoyances that have piled up over the years. Originally intended as a bug-fix release, it also modernizes many system components previously upgraded in OS 3.9.
Contrary to its modest revision number, AmigaOS 3.1.4 is arguably as large an upgrade as OS 3.9 was, and surpasses it in stability and robustness. Over 320K of release notes cover almost every aspect of your favourite classic AmigaOS — from bootmenu to datatypes.
Comment Re:Is this just Specter, etc? (Score 1) 70
Muhahaha! There is no protection from me!
Comment Not surprising (Score 1) 497
iPhones are for people with more money than brains.
I would be more interested in a correlation with intelligence. Or with tech skills.
Comment Maybe, but (Score 1) 59
1. repulsor beams are more energy efficient, so they are likely to be used first;
2. this device repels, so is kind of like a repulsor beam;
3. a true repulsor beam or tractor beam is gravito-magnetic, not sonic;
4. a true repsor beam will generate an off axis tractor beam of equal power, but with that power dispersed over a wider arc (most likely a full 360 degree dispersal in the plane perpendicular to the beam, with additional dispersal above and below that plane), so there is a small possibility of using that tractor beam for a secondary purpose. That is the most likely way tractor beams will be used.
Comment Re: What's the point? (Score 1) 343
I completely agree. If they were motivated to learn, they would have done still so on their own. That's the thing with IT, self teaching (especially when you already know the management frameworks and principles) is not only easy, but the most effective way to learn.
You are wasting your time. If the work is not there, they are redundant. Act accordingly.
(IAAL, but not your lawyer. See your own lawyer to make sure you do this right and don't risk a claim. I was in IT for 20 years before becoming a lawyer, including at executive management level, so my evaluation of that part comes from direct experience)
Comment I really wish Linus would grow up (Score 1) 272
His statement might be right (and probably is) but there is no need for him to express himself that way. He's not a teenager anymore, he's in his late 40s and ought to be able to better control his impulses (or even be centred enough not to have them in the first place). His words would carry far more weight of he expressed himself more maturely.
Comment Re: Complete Bullshit (Score 4, Informative) 268
Exactly. The shortage was of employers who understood the technical difficulty of coding, and were willing to pay accordingly. I am now in law, which pays better, but coding at any reasonable level of quality (so, better than offshore minimal skill code monkey ships provide) is more intellectually demanding than law.
Submission + - OK Cupid bans white supremacists (twitter.com)
AmiMoJo writes: OK Cupid, a dating site, has banned white supremacist Chris Cantwell for life. In a follow up tweet they vowed to ban any other members of the supremacist movement that are brought to their attention.
Comment Re: Brains Different, or Not? (Score 1) 694
In Australia, women are now in the majority In the legal profession, an outstripping men at the entry level 2 to 1. However, they are still a minority among barristers (who specialise in court work), who are required to be self employed.
In tha past few weeks I have been In a court with a lot of high school legal studies classes coming into the gallery. There the girls seen to outnumber the boys 10 to 1.
Comment Re: I mean I got this article through RSS (Score 1) 438
Me too. If the site is a news site, and there is no RSS, I either construct my own RSS using wget, cron and shell scripts, or just don't read the site. If
Comment Re: PasswordSafe (Score 1) 415
Use keepass2 Android with an InputStick. It looks like a keyboard on both the device and the desktop.
Comment Re: Javascript (Score 1) 383
Actually it's JVM. It can run more than just Java. I have ported GCC to it as a target (fully featured for at least C and C++, including pointers, trampolines and long jumps). I only lacked standard libraries to make it useful.
Comment You are using the wrong encryption format (Score 1) 216
PGP and OpenPGP are obsolete. You should be using S/MIME - that is where all the work on getting the process right has been going on, and for that protocol the set up is accessible in anything modern.
