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As far as I know, which is admittedly not much, unstructured play as a mean of nurturing a child's independence, self-reliance, and creativity in a central tenet of Montessori.

Where to begin? First, let's start with the most specific. Patrick claims to have written almost 3,000,000 words, which is almost 3 times the entire Harry Potter series. I'm not passing judgement on him. It's great that Patrick can write so prolifically, but such an undertaking can only be described as Herculean. Success in writing for the public typically follows a power distribution. Using words written as a proxy for popularity, it can likely be assumed that impact will be exponentially lower for someone who writes less.

Next, let's get a little more general by talking about opportunity cost. Assuming Patrick's writing really is responsible for 7% of Stripe's engineering team (which is a huge assumption), what would happen if Patrick had never written anything? Maybe the company would flounder and die, or, more likely, engineers would still be attracted to a high growth startup and Stripe would largely be in the same position.

Finally, I'd like to make a statement about writing in general. The goal of writing is to convey an idea. What constitutes an acceptable conveyance of an idea is context-dependent, but generally you want to convey an idea for a reason, e.g. you may want to convey the design of a system you're building. In these cases, creating the idea to convey (e.g. designing the system) is so much more important than the actual conveyance of the idea (e.g. explaining the system), unless you're so bad at explaining that people are hopelessly lost after reading your writing. Most people know when they understand something and know when they need clarification. Humans are consensus builders by default, which makes ok writing and great writing equally good in many contexts. The person who started this discussion may have been offended at the insinuation that they can't program, but I largely agree with such an assumption. Writing is a tool ultimately used in our profession to aid in the building of things. To focus only on writing means you're not focusing on building.

I don't think many people want to send their kids to a crap shoot.

Large systems, like a school system, need rules and procedures that help guarantee a relatively consistent outcome. The unstructured, exploratory nature of Montessori doesn't lend itself well to a a large-scale, systematic approach.

More interesting is that reaching the 99.99th percentile is very difficult, and yet completely unremarkable. I love David Foster Wallace’s essay on this subject: “ Tennis Player Michael Joyce's Professional Artistry as a Paradigm of Certain Stuff about Choice, Freedom, Discipline, Joy, Grotesquerie, and Human Completeness.” He follows a top 200 and is impressed by how absolutely amazing he is at tennis, but ultimately knows the player will know neither fame nor fortune.

They literally linked to a study, said "this is the best study", then said "this study didn't show benefits in [any] these areas", without mentioning the benefits the study did show. Belarus is/was not a country at risk of contaminated water, even after the collapse of the USSR.

The author made it seem like breastfeeding had no impact, but rather they just cherry-picked the conditions to look for from the study, making no mention of things that were impacted.

I don't think you can generally claim that testers aren't to blame for bugs, nor that should they be credited for bug-free software.

Obviously dedicated testers can't fix bugs themselves, so cannot be to solely to blame for bugs. Similarly, it's possible to write bug-free software without a dedicated tester, so testers can't receive full credit for bug-free software.

However, a testers job is not to play a game haphazardly. Rather, the job of a tester is to develop a methodical way testing software that is under rapid development. This can mean creating test plans, understanding the most important user flows, understanding common failure scenarios, and even light automation. Games are hugely complex pieces of software. This large breadth means that the test workload is too big for the engineering team. Also, the systems underpinning a game are usually very tightly coupled, meaning that changes in one system can break things in a completely unrelated system. Having good testers is an integral part of delivering a bug-free experience in this type environment.