I'm not complaining about the repetition here though. It's an issue that clearly needs more exposure since nothing is done about it.

The coverall internal jargon would be something like: "we are a youthful company and they are a poor cultural fit". Or more of the fallacy that only young grads could possibly be "up with the latest" or "on top of trends".

Those two 50yo+ talents that you mention will probably move into consulting companies (I hope).

Funny, I seem to get *less* risk averse over the last 10 years. More confidence and I'm better at appraising complex situations I think.

That may explain some of their dumb crap. The Poulsbo GPA driver (losing that term loosely since it barely worked) comes to mind as one example.

Unfortunately that means the industry doesn't appreciate the value of experienced generalists who, unlike the pups, have very broad perspective and years of experience. Studies have shown that experience beats education alone: graduates are very green. For the industry not to get this is absurd, especially when the average age of the US workforce is probably increasing. More experienced oldies should actually be a *boost* to the industry. By all means, fill up the design and product development departments with cool kiddies but make sure an old fart is looking over the partition to ensure they don't wreck the company.

Cf some other engineering disciplines where experience generalists are actually respected. Management itself is a generalist (multidisciplinary) activity that pretends to be specialist. Field managers are often engineers who have moved sideways out of their original speciality. In a major company I worked for, senior site engineers would rotate over different disciplines with each new project. A civil engineer was expected to understand what the EEs were doing in broad strokes for example. That meant they all got tons of experience in tightly interconnected facets of the work and could step into each others shoes at short notice. Even specialists would get redeployed on occasion and put on site to take on a more general engineering management role - mainly tracking contractor work quality and negotiating solutions. When building a real product of some kind, you need generalists to manage the specialists.

Sorry I was confusing two different posts.

Then show me a strictly non-mathematical, testable model of any real system that provides novel insight into the workings of that system and that has predictive power. Doesn't exist.

That is not to confuse all of perceived reality with a single mathematical model. There is no single mathematical model of reality (a GUT) that does not fail at some point as yet. But we're not talking about reality, we're talking about modeling reality as closely as we can get, an enterprise which is called physics.

Yes that's all good mathematics but it may or may not have applications in physics. A mathematics built from an alternative logic system may not be of any use to a physicist since unless it works. But unusual mathematical structures have turned out to be useful in physics before.

The whole point of using symbols is to remove the ambiguity and inefficiency that english entails.

You don't consider statistics to be a field of applied maths? Wow.

But ask the question "what is a pattern?" That cannot be answered non-mathematically without ambiguity. Go on, try it. Therefore, the very notion of "pattern" is essentially mathematical. You don't know what mathematics is.

Wow that is amazingly naive. Mathematics is both necessary and intrinsic to the entire edifice of science and engineering and to the foundations of physics and has been since ancient times. This is not because somebody "made up" mathematics and "chose" it to provide tools for analyzing the physical world as physics. It was because it worked. It was not a choice of "convenience".

I went through the usual years of schooling enduring force-fed maths, all the while not appreciating its power or breathtaking beauty. That landed much later and only as a senior undergrad. But once the astonishingly successful mathematical frameworks for quantum mechanics and general relativity have been grasped I don't see how anyone could fail to be astonished and amazed at what the human mind can achieve.

I know it is difficult for someone who has never studied theoretical physics to get that mathematics is so fundamentally profound for any useful understanding of reality. One way of looking at quantum mechanics is to think of it as an attempt to build a mathematical representation of the basic kinds of physical interactions, those occurring on the Plank scale. The results of quantum mechanics seem bizarre and could never have been arrived at without mathematics. We have a poor physical intuition for what is going on at those scales, it's beyond our experience.

All most people have is painful memories of years of suffering math (mainly just elementary algebra and simple calculus) in a high school classroom. I hated those and this created years of math phobia that I had to work hard to consciously beat. Once the phobia was defeated (a question of mental attitude and confidence) pages of symbols were no longer scary! The beauty then shines through, for me it was once I could see the towering intellectual mountain of theoretical physics.

This speaks volumes about education systems utterly failing to impart the essential character of mathematics. I'm not sure society really wants the unwashed to start enjoying the intellectual beauty of mathematics. Mathematics is what enabled the industrial age, without it we would still be living as Neolithic farmers.

But the internet is continually being given more hooks into physical space, including remote operation of complex machinery and (probably) weapons systems. And there are security holes that we don't know about but that a super AI could detect.

Being done elsewhere and therefore insufficiently sexy.

And no collisions with space objects, yet that is something we know is a quantifiable, real extinction-level threat. No aliens needed.

Of course it's marketing. "Terminator Center" has a soundbite buzz to it. "UFO Center" would have elicited yawns and funds would have been short.