projektir

Sounds a lot like optimistic nihilism. Not my philosophy of choice but certainly not the worst one, either. :)

Wonder why math is such a problem. Growing up in the Ukrainian school system I was doing very well in math for 3 years and was doing double exams in the span of one.

Moved to the US, math was easier and it kinda fell off. Was back to Ukraine for some time, but it was never the same afterwards, and now I have the same math anxiety many other people do.

Yeah I agree but I've been using it for 5 months now and it's great and I can't say I care about the name that much anymore.

Yeah, I'm never too impressed by these. Once I have control over my depressive states, I can start looking at things like exercise or diet. But if I'm highly depressed, those things end up on the back burner and I'm much more interested in solutions to _that_.

Hmm, yeah. If I'm sufficiently depressed, things like diet become very negligible. Sense of belonging is much, much more important. I don't recall if anyone ever did a study for that in particular.

From what I've seen this attitude often actually creates and reinforces this harsh reality, though.

Most of our reality is composed of humans doing things, and if you dig deep enough into why humans are doing various bad things, you'll find a lot of confused, closed up people chasing odd status markers because they need it to survive against other parties chasing odd status markers. It's an error that endlessly feeds itself, and the only escape is to cancel it somewhere - do something else.

The point is kind of moot when the people you are supposedly protecting against are of your own kind.

It IS a meritocracy problem. If you are unable to measure who has the most merit, if you're not concerned with this problem, how can you possibly be having a meritocracy?

Connections and the ability to play politics seem to be much more important for getting to the top. Current systems, managers, etc., are just not setup to evaluate skill from what I've seen, you have to sell yourself, which means "ability to sell yourself" is how the system is stratified, and that's not merit.

So when you say "the best", often what you get is "best at selling self", which is not actually the best.

Want to chip in here, love Endless Space 2! It takes a bit to get used to but it's so fun to just play even if I'm not winning.

Only if your definition of "best developer" is extremely narrow, maybe, since a typical "best developer" would want someone around they could learn from, no? And why would this issue be more common among "best" developers over the, err, non-"best" developers.

*ample use of scare quotes because I found "different developers work well in different situations or best with certain people" to be more true than "there's this 'best' developer let's clone them".

Being on the other side of the process has only convinced me more of how broken it is. There are lots of baseline errors, biases, and insufficient attention given to the process that are quite obvious but a lot of people either fail to see them or refuse to see them because they don't want to admit that their hiring process is not better than rolling dice.

As a basic example, in a lot of places you get very little advance warning that you're going to interview someone.

Test problems or assignments are often not tested or even looked at by existing employees, so often you don't even know that your current team would do well on them.

Sometimes interviews happen without any intention at all to hire the candidate (wtf).

What if most people are not good at what society currently appears to value?

I don't think most people are against doing what they are good at (or even, what they like), it's just that discoverability is poor and in a lot of cases the most important thing ends up being a certain brand of social or political skill, and not the other secondary skill you might posses. For people to play to their strengths, we need a society that can detect and nurture those strengths, and I don't think we have that right now.

Yeah, if I only ever did things that I rejoice in doing I'd be getting nothing done. Not everyone is a super naturally passionate type.

This, to me, sounds personal.

There are wonderful games being made and I even found new titles to call my favorites as the years go by. I do not at all believe games are getting worse.

That being said, there are a lot more games now and there's less hard curation, and some genres have shifted (RTS and classic style MMORPGs are both dormant atm).

Generally I'm quite sensitive to that stuff but not really seeing that with this article (besides the phrase 'pool of women' maybe). Can you give some examples?