Maybe? It's not that they're *necessarily* likely to do so, so much as that they are probably statistically much more likely to do so. And really, the only thing that can be said definitively from that study is that the ones who are still going to counseling as adults are considerably more likely to do so. It's not an absolute given that the pattern also holds for the ones who didn't feel that they needed counseling, i.e. it could be that the effect is influenced by the extent of the trauma.

The hard problem is that there's really no way to know the odds for child abuse victims who didn't continue to get therapy and whether they are more likely to become abusers, because the health system wouldn't have any data for them. So you could work your way back and show that a large percentage of the abusers were once victims, but that doesn't fully get you the percentage in the other direction.

It is also likely that guys who are abused and who later decide to abuse others are more likely to get counseling than people who only fall into one bucket or the other, which means there's a very slim but probably not nonexistent possibility that the whole correlation might regress to the mean if you could include all of the other abuse victims who aren't still getting counseling. I seriously doubt that this is the case, given the correlation from the opposite side, but it is probably not impossible. Or maybe it is. I'd have to think too hard about the numbers to say for sure, and it's late at night. :-D

I think the studies were about abuse involving boys who were touched by someone significantly older. I have no idea whether there would be any correlation with sexual activity by kids with kids. I have always kind of wondered if the kids who initiate that sort of sexual play are more likely to have been previously abused by an adult, but I have no data to support or refute that hypothesis.

Yeah, this has been done, and what happens is that some of them get to college, and have trouble relating, and end up either traumatized or badly confused by things that wouldn't phase someone who grew up in a normal, mixed-gender school system, and they seem to frequently end up in unhealthy relationships, or are scared to actually get into relationships, or inadvertently send signals indicating an interest in relationships and then get traumatized when someone of the opposite sex responds when they didn't expect that person to respond, or use their sexuality in various ways to "prove" that they are mature, or... Basically, I'm pretty sure I've met the whole spectrum of behaviors from single-gender schools, and the more people I meet who have attended single-gender schools, the more certain I am that they are a mistake almost across the board, and that we're much better off finding a way to keep young people actually interested in learning that doesn't involve destroying their socialization.

Much like kids who attend single-gender schools, I have little doubt that the children of parents who would do something like that are pretty much guaranteed to end up badly scarred for life by the experience, and unable to form any sort of serious relationship because of the lack of trust that comes from that level of paranoia. And a decent number of the children that they play with will likely be similarly scarred for life. That attitude is seriously not healthy, IMO.

We live in a society where parents are terrified that something is going to happen to their kids because of the media amplifying relatively rare situations and making them sound common. The "stranger danger" attitude that results from that is harmful to adults and children alike, because it has resulted in a whole generation of young people who later become traumatized adults that are scared to trust others, and whose natural inclination is to see men as predators, who see strangers as someone to be afraid of instead of someone to meet and get to know, and who assume the worst in others instead of the best. And that, in turn, results in society falling apart at the seams.

If there's only one thing that I could impress upon others, it would be this: Teach your kids to assume good intentions until proven otherwise. This is not to say that they shouldn't learn to protect themselves, or that they should immediately fully trust everyone, just that they should not immediately distrust everyone, and that they should not assume bad intent every time someone does something that they don't understand, don't agree with, etc. This would make politics a whole lot less distasteful, would pretty much put an end to cancel culture, and would result in a generally better world for everyone if people would do that consistently. Just saying.

The thing is, men are stepping back from relationships in many cases precisely because they feel like women automatically assume that they are predators. That's hard to fix. And there may actually be a psychological safety element, where nicer men feel safer around younger women who haven't become quite as jaded and don't automatically assume that they are predators, though that's mostly speculation, and presumably it wouldn't apply to taking an interest in kids. (Or would it? I mean, I would assume that more often than not, the ones who prey on kids are interested in the power dynamic of being in control, but what if that desire for control is not because they crave power, but because they are still scared because of that childhood trauma? Thinking out loud here.)

Making that situation doubly problematic is the seemingly automatic assumption that after a guy gets beyond a certain age, if he isn't married, it is because there's something wrong with him. So the ones who do step back from relationships because of trauma often find themselves unable to realistically try again. I'm really not sure how to fix that, or any of it, really.

Yeah, laws stopped being about protecting children a long time ago, and became about a combination of punishing people who other people think are icky and protecting companies, schools, and churches against lawsuits. Basically, when it comes to this subject, society needs to be rolled back to probably about 1980, and we need to start over, thinking about solutions to the problems while keeping in mind the lessons learned from all the things that we collectively did wrong the first time. But that's hard to do, because everybody automatically assumes that the laws and rules wouldn't have been created if they didn't work, and therefore assumes that removing them would be a net harm to society. There's always a strong tendency towards passing more laws, and rarely do any bad laws get rolled back. (This isn't specific to laws protecting children, to be clear; it's a general defect in the human way of perceiving the world.)

But it can echo the aggregate behavior of mass morons and trolls and shove it into more places faster.

The "telework revolution" is at least part of the reason for shrinkage. They still "work" in Seattle, just don't live there.

We are addicted to bloat because we are surrounded by bloat.

Ah, but then companies would deploy VMs with browsers over RDP, and the users would use some cheap or free solution, and that would defeat the purpose of this category of product, which is to sell more Office 365 subscriptions.

...Mad Max fiefdom companies?

It's certainly more effective than asking AA to change your tire, I suspect. (I'm assuming that was a typo.)

Blame is one of those things that can be spread around:

• It is partly the fault of the drug user for trying the drug.
• It is partly the fault of the dealer for pushing the drug.
• It is partly the fault of whoever put the drug user into a psychological state where he/she was tempted to use the drug.
• It is partly the fault of the person's genes for making the person particularly susceptible to addiction.

Notice that none of those are inherently a moral failing. And that's the problem with blaming the addict; it tends to imply a moral failing that may not exist. For some people, having faith as a foundation can make it easier to give up drugs. For others, faith and moralizing can drive them to do more drugs. For some, organized religion is even the root cause for them getting into drugs in the first place. There's no one silver bullet that works for everyone.

Basically, religion-based approaches are likely to work for people who are already strongly religious, and they're likely to backfire for people who are atheists, and in between, there's a spectrum.

It's an interesting question. To my knowledge, no such correlation exists, so this is purely hypothetical. And there's a part of me that agrees with you. There's also a part of me that recognizes that being a victim of abuse, crime, etc. changes people. I remember how angry I became after somebody stole my camera bag out of my car while I was parked at church. If I had found out who it was, I would probably be in jail right now. If something that minor can cause that much of a psychological change in someone for O(months), I'd hate to imagine how being the victim of sexual abuse could change someone. It probably wouldn't involve increasing their empathy, but rather completely obliterating it for O(decades).

I mean, it's also possible that men who have some other characteristic that makes them ripe for abuse also makes them become abusers. Correlation is not causation, and all that. But the pattern is surprisingly strong.

What's interesting is that the whole correlation where abuse victims are more likely become abusers exists *only* for men. Female abuse victims do not show a higher propensity for becoming abusers. I'm not sure why that is, but I have a feeling it may have something to do with biology and beta males having a drive to become alpha males at a primitive level that's hard to repress without ongoing psychological counseling. But this is just a hypothesis, and I'm not sure how you would test it (ethically, anyway).

Don't know. But young people having crushes on older people is pretty common, so I assume they would consider that normal. For that matter, older people being (non-exclusively) attracted to younger people (young as in teen, not child) is also considered normal, psychologically speaking. What makes it problematic is acting on those feelings. And I guess that last part is at least arguably true for attraction to kids as well, though with a much bigger ick factor, and without the "considered psychologically normal" part.

That's what makes the CSAM dragnets a bit disconcerting from a psychology perspective. With the exception of the thirty-odd people who were known to be actively abusing children and probably some percentage of the others who uploaded new CSAM not previously known to law enforcement, there's not necessarily any real reason to assume that any of those 1.8 million are any more likely to abuse children than any other random person who has those same feelings (which, with 8 billion people on the planet is probably in the high tens of millions to low hundreds of millions, or if you count attraction to teens, is several billion).

"Cool" has a lot of dimensions with respect to code. It can mean "clever", which most experienced programmers learn to use as an epithet, not a compliment. It can mean "impactful" (in the sense of its effect on the world), in which case the coolness of code is largely orthogonal to its quality or other internal characteristics, since impact is mostly about time and place. It can also mean "provokes good feelings", which is more about the context of the author's life journey. I'm sure you can come up with many meanings.

In this case, I think Gates was referring to the feelings it provokes in him.

I'm not saying he regrets his choices, only that it was a unique time and project that he has nostalgia for. For example, if you built your own dinner table you may both admire your work and have fond memories of doing it. But that doesn't necessarily mean you want to become a professional carpenter. One can have nostalgia for one-off projects they've spent a lot of time on.

> Don't think about increasing taxes or we will leave.

And go where? The best and brightest don't want to live in Texas or Sticksville. They beat up nerds and other "oddballs".

It's because we are expecting young children to perform. They should be outside playing with other children rather than sitting in classrooms day in and day out. Educational performance can wait until they're older.

We are trying to compete with Asia, the land of suicidal prodigies. But outside of very specific specialties, people skills matter at least as much as technical skill, as products have to be usable by non-experts, as one has to communicate with non-experts to understand their needs and perspective. Take it from somebody with insufficient people skills.

"Perhaps there is a rule engine on the market or one that could be developed to radically improve implementation and reduce complexity."

Great idea!

While not quite the same, I wrote a question-asking application for an insurance company once where a lot of the code was generated from a tab-delimited spreadsheet, with a row for each question. If I did even that over I might do it differently (even text spreadsheets are hard to version control).

This turns up some interesting results:
https://duckduckgo.com/?q=rule...

Such as: "Top 10 Open Source Rule engines"
https://www.nected.ai/blog/ope...

One from there: "Drools is an influential and widely recognized open-source business rule management system (BRMS) tailored for the Java ecosystem. It excels in the development and management of complex business rules, decision processes, and workflows. Drools distinguishes itself with its comprehensive set of features that facilitate sophisticated rule and decision management capabilities, making it an ideal choice for enterprise-level applications across various industries."