Brute force is how much scientific discovery happened. I don't think it makes the point you want to make.

Have you seen the prime TV logo ....

Thanks for the clarification. That was helpful. I now see that the contradiction I perceived was a parsing/wording issue, not an actual conflict over the underlying ideas represented by the wording.

Your first sentence is correct, on average.
I bolded the parts which I do not think are proven. I believe that the real explanation for those portions is a combination of sample bias and reversed correlation-causation error.

I think the only claims we could confidently make about this issue are:
-The mathematical mindset makes it easier to program (ie write procedural instructions which rely heavily on basic algebraic expressions, ie math).
-People who have a mathematical mindset are more likely to enter math/science schools in college.
-People who have a mathematical mindset are more likely to understand and succeed at math/science curriculum.
-People without a mathematical mindset are unlikely to pursue math/science beyond the bare minimum (college algebra), so not only will they lack the mathematical mindset, they also will never have reason to seriously engage with extended formal logic like proofs.
-People with a mathematical mindset will, through their own choices, be exposed to curriculum and situations where their existing mathematical mindset can be honed.

That is-- those with a higher capacity for mathematical reasoning will self-select into and persist to graduation/completion of situations where their capacity has been harnessed into functional skill.

However, the above statement does not at all mean that the mathematical mindset itself is being created/implanted by math/CS departments.

The person makes the degree. The degree doesn't make the person,
But we have to pretend it does, for ideological reasons.

Over the past 50 years we've seen the establishment of a socially-motivated (as opposed to factual/scientifically-informed) belief that "you can be anything you put your mind to" and theoretically every kid could get that CS degree if we give them enough support/funding/nutrition/affirmation/social services/parenting/intervention/accommodation. It's a really clumsy and poorly thought out but well-meaning, egalitarianism.

Unfortunately, being well-meant doesn't make something true. Human beings are NOT simplistic algorithms and do not behave in deterministic ways. Math reasoning is not the same as reading a history book and reasoning through a dialectic narrative. Exclusion runs counter to the modern social belief system, so people get nervous and start backing away if you were to make a statement like: "Mathematical reasoning is a trait possessed by a small subset of the population. We do not understand its origin. Some people have it and some don't. For those that have it, developing their skill through practice can give them access to specific career/salary advantages that are simply inaccessible to 90% of people, the same way no 5'9" man is going to be a starting Center or Forward on a successful NBA team. even if you had a blank check to give him world-class professional sport-specific coaching and general athletic training from age 8 onward. Indeed, it would be gross mismanagement of resources to pour that into him and expect him to succeed." Of course, the reason that statement makes keyboard warriors reach for their "Problematic Post Alert" button is because, unfortunately, it is chiefly brought up by people whose underlying beliefs are in fact problematic.

Not that it can't be believed, but that it should not be taken as definitive reality rather than temporary aberration.

Covid showed the huge fragility of most systems, but perhaps most frail was the process of learning.
We are now at the peak of a time interval during which nearly all college students are people who had their education and experiential development terribly disrupted right when they would be learning must-have foundations in logic, mathematics, and rhetoric. I would bet that even if we made no other changes from what we are doing today, 2022-2028 will turn out to have local minima in a wide variety of education performance metrics.

I have wondered how long until we see people wearing stickers/shirts that say, "NOTICE: You are currently under audio/video surveillance" the same way most retail stores have those posted at the entrances and throughout the store.

That claim does not seem supportable, as written.

1) It is not true that all businesses are private property. That is, the property may be privately owned, but retail businesses and the parking lots which are operating on private property are considered public spaces for all sorts of legal situations. Simply post a "no women allowed" sign in front of your store to find out just how legally private your business property is.

2) What do you mean by "right" in this context? If you pull out your device and start recording someone walking down the aisle at the grocery store, that person can not legally prevent you from doing so. That is, that person does not have a "right" to be free from being recorded there. They may choose to get the store owner involved. And the owner can tell you that they do not allow the use of recording devices on their property (other than their own recording devices), and that you need to stop recording or leave. If you refuse either option, when the police show up, any citation/arrest they enact will be for trespassing. It will not be for using your camera. In other words, you do in fact have a personal right to record your surroundings, including at a private business. However, you don't have a right to physically be on someone else's property if they've told you they do not want you to record while you are there.

The same way you have a right to believe in Allah and talk to people about Allah, but if you're walking around a grocery store preaching to people, the property owner can ask you to leave. If you refuse to leave, the owner can call the police and have you physically removed/barred from the property -- and during the entirety of your removal, citation or arrest, you continue to possess your full legal right to believe in a religion and practice religious speech.

"must" is doing an awful lot of work there.
The fact that some of us at some point may have chosen to, is not the same thing as "must". If we are still free democratic people we can change our minds and choose differently.

However, the higher the level at which we make a choice, the harder it will be to make a different choice in the future, and the more likely the discussion is to become a contentious impasse as 350 million people will never agree on everything and at that scale every edge case has to be considered which leads to 800-page bill proposals that are inherently inescapably anti-democratic because nether we the people nor they the legislators can Srsly read, understand, be aware of, negotiate, and navigate such a system.

Federalizing everything is an effective way to ensure your preferred choices apply to everyone. It is also one of the most effective ways to strangle a democracy. The speed of the asphyxiation is the only variable, not the inexorable fact of its death. An individual human being with total control over their home can barely organize the knicknacks and miscellaneous boxes in their garage or on their dining table, and cannot remember what all is in the attic. Humans together completely lack the capacity to tend run a single government of 300 million people that is all three things: efficient, effective, and free. At that level all you end up with is the current tyranny of the bell curve, where only two kinds of things happen: 1) the fickle center-bell majority uses its numerical superiority to pass legislation/regulation enforcing its desires on various minorities. 2) the focused outer-bell individuals use their monetary superiority to pass legislation/regulation preserving their assets and power.

Large scale systems like the US Federal Government are inherently, inescapably anti-democratic, anti-minority, anti-individual, pro-plutocrat, pro-corporate.
That power gradient is built into the operational metastructure, regardless of what lofty words are inscribed in its laws and electoral rhetoric.

As I wrote back around 2000:
        "On Funding Digital Public Works"
          https://pdfernhout.net/on-fund...
        "The "new" model of making money with public domain content is actually an old one related to guilds. Doctors and lawyers both make excellent livings working with a large body of public domain knowledge, interpreting it, customizing it, and applying it to client's specific situations. Both doctors and lawyers create new knowledge that is effectively put into the public domain in the form of medical journal articles or court proceedings. While the average person can be their own doctor or lawyer to an extent, there is so much to know including certain ways of reasoning that in practice one is usually better off getting some assistance from a professional (as well as getting some self-education to work well with that professional) than trying to go it alone. ....
          To help a lawyer to understand free or open source software for example, just ask her or him to think about it in terms of the law itself -- from court proceedings to legislative records. While lawyers may pay for a service like Westlaw for convenience or practical necessity, they are not paying to use the law itself, say when they make an argument in court."

What does Directory Opus have that, say, Double Commander does not?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
        "The basic concept of operation traces its roots to the popular Norton Commander for DOS. While Double Commander can be operated by mouse just like other modern file managers, it also enables easy operation by keyboard only, like its conceptual predecessors did.
        The file manager features a highly customizable design with extensive and detailed configuration options. Many of its toolbars can be hidden or shown, configured in detail, colors changed, and keyboard shortcuts assigned.
        The usability of a dual-pane file manager depends on it providing an extensive amount of commonly desired functionality and features, and on quality of implementation of those functionalities and features. Double Commander attempts to provide a large number of well-implemented features. ..."

Maybe these: Internal MTP handling, Flat-file display, User-definable toolbars, menus, filetypes and filetype groups, File collections?

If so, would it take much to add the most important of those to Double Commander? Maybe you could put a development bounty on them?

Thanks for the recommendation! Based on that, I just got the Kindle version of Patricia Crone's book and look forward to reading it.

I can't tell if this is satire or not. Well done, sir.

Thanks for the insightful post. Yeah, if this was a practice test for our society on how to handle AGI, I agree we failed it.

As shown by the several of the AI company efforts (including OpenAI transforming into a for-profit), our current socio-economic system with its incentives to race ahead competitively regardless of the risks to society (so, privatizing gains, while socializing costs and risks) may ultimately just be incompatible with ever-more-high technology.

As Bucky Fuller wrote: "Whether it is to be Utopia or Oblivion will be a touch-and-go relay race right up to the final moment.... Humanity is in 'final exam' as to whether or not it qualifies for continuance in Universe."

I think we only have a chance of passing such a test -- whether it is about AGI, nuclear energy, nanotech, biotech, or even just plain old networked computing used by sprawling bureaucracies -- if we appreciate the humorous irony mentioned in my sig: :-)
"The biggest challenge of the 21st century is the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity."

Even that might not be enough -- but it is the main hope I have to offer.

FIFY.

Thanks! I've been seeding my sig across the web for almost twenty years in hopes it would eventually become part of AI training data -- hoping that future AIs would appreciate the irony outlined it and make decisions informed by that insight (even if most humans might not). It would be very gratifying to know I succeeded! :-)

"The biggest challenge of the 21st century is the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity."