NumberSix

Saving your sanity from Doomsday News

Is the seemingly never ending torrent of Doomsday News worrying you, distracting you, keeping you up at night or even worse?

The first figure, the bar chart based on the BLS Consumer Expenditure Survey shows almost the same expenditures in Atlanta, Georgia and Los Angeles, California, with somewhat higher overall expenditures in Atlanta and somewhat lower housing expenditures relative to transportation in Atlanta.

However, Zillow gives a median home value of about $220,000 in Atlanta: https://www.zillow.com/atlanta-ga/home-values/

Median list price per square foot is $219

Median home list price is $310,000

Zillow gives a median home value of about $663,000 in Los Angeles: https://www.zillow.com/los-angeles-ca/home-values/

Median list price per square foot is $478/sq foot in Los Angeles

Median list price of homes is $750,000

That is a radical difference in housing prices that does not seem to show up in the figure in the article. Presumably salaries and budgets are proportionately lower in Atlanta than Los Angeles.

Is this really an accurate and adequate explanation? I know people who have moved from Atlanta where they could afford a house and had to downsize to a smaller apartment in the San Francisco Bay Area which is somewhat more expensive than Los Angeles, but in the same ballpark.

Is Los Angeles really more affordable than Atlanta?

[ADDED]

The US Census reports:

Fulton County, GA (Atlanta area)

Median Household Income (2012-16): $58,851

Per capita income for past 12 months (2012-16): $39,101

https://www.census.gov/quickfacts/fact/table/fultoncountygeo...

Los Angeles County, CA

Median Household Income (2012-16): $57,952

Per capita income for past 12 months (2012-16): $29,301

https://www.census.gov/quickfacts/fact/table/losangelescount...

Note that Fulton County, GA (Atlanta) has a higher median household income than Los Angeles County, and much lower median home prices according to Zillow.

It is unclear what the consumer expenditure report is computing. It may be the percentage of total expenditures NOT INCLUDING SAVINGS AND TAXES, rather than gross income:

https://www.bls.gov/opub/hom/cex/calculation.htm

Hence people in Atlanta may be saving more but spending a similar percentage of TOTAL EXPENDITURES to people in Los Angeles.

Asteroid is discovered in deep space heading for Earth. Astronomers watch the asteroid approach Earth. Asteroid hits New York City. Millions die. Astronomers and media report:

"Asteroid from deep space kills millions. Asteroid causes death of millions."

No experiment is possible. Causation is clear.

The article is misleading if not false. Neural nets were hot in academic AI research 30 years ago (1988). The original Perceptron had fallen out of favor in part because of arguments that it could not implement a exclusive or (XOR) in Minsky and Papert's book Perceptrons

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perceptrons_(book)

Neural nets fell out of favor in the 1970's but came back and became hot in the early 1980's with work by John Hopfield and others that addressed the objections.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Hopfield

Practical and commercial successes were limited in the 1980's and 1990's which led to a reasonable decline in interest in the method. There were some commercial successes such as HNC Software which used neural nets for credit scoring and was acquired by Fair Isaac Corporation (FICO).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Hecht-Nielsen

I turned down a job offer from HNC in late 1992 and neural nets were still clearly hot at that time.

Some people continued to use neural nets with some limited success in the late 1990's and 2000s. I saw some successes using neural nets to locate faces in images, for example. Mostly they failed.

AI research is very faddish with periods of extreme optimism about a technique followed by disillusionment. One may wonder how much of the current Machine Learning/Deep Learning hype will prove exaggerated.

Also, traditional Hidden Markov Model (HMM) speech recognition is not rule based at all. It uses a maximum likelihood based extremely complex statistical model of speech.

It doesn't read like a joke. It reads like a mistake or perhaps he is assuming his audience won't be aware of who the Jacobites were and will find it funny.

The author incorrectly speculates that the title of the magazine -- Jacobite -- is a play on Jacobin:

Jacobite – which is apparently still a real magazine and not a one-off gag making fun of Jacobin – summarizes their article Under-Theorizing Government as “You’ll never hear the terms ‘principal-agent problem,’ ‘rent-seeking,’ or ‘aligning incentives’ from socialists. That’s because they expect ideology to solve all practical considerations of governance.”

Jacobite has nothing to do with Jacobin. Jacobitism (/ˈdʒækəbaɪˌtɪzm/ JAK-ə-by-tiz-əm;[1][2] Scottish Gaelic: Seumasachas [ˈʃeːməs̪əxəs̪], Irish: Seacaibíteachas, Séamusachas) was a political movement in Great Britain and Ireland that aimed to restore the Roman Catholic Stuart King James II of England and Ireland (as James VII in Scotland) and his heirs to the thrones of England, Scotland, France and Ireland. The movement took its name from Jacobus, the Renaissance Latin form of Iacomus, which in turn comes from the original Latin form of James, "Iacobus." Adherents rebelled against the British government on several occasions between 1688 and 1746.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jacobitism

The Jacobins on the other hand were a French political movement/party:

The Society of the Friends of the Constitution (French: Société des amis de la Constitution), after 1792 renamed Society of the Jacobins, Friends of Freedom and Equality (Société des Jacobins, amis de la liberté et de l'égalité), commonly known as the Jacobin Club (Club des Jacobins) or simply the Jacobins (English: /ˈdʒæ.kə.bɪnz/; French: [ʒa.kɔ.bɛ̃]), was the most influential political club during the French Revolution. Initially founded in 1789 by anti-Royalist deputies from Brittany, the Club grew into a nationwide republican movement, with a membership estimated at a half million or more.[1] The Jacobin Club was heterogeneous and included both prominent parliamentary factions of the early 1790s, the Mountain and the Girondins.

In 1792–93, the Girondins were more prominent in leading France, the period when war was declared on Austria and Prussia, the monarchy was overthrown and the Republic created.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jacobin

Also see this recent article:

https://work.qz.com/1125919/we-finally-have-proof-that-visio...

This is the direct link to the research mentioned in the article:

http://www.people.hbs.edu/rsadun/AreFounderCEOsGoodManagers....

This is a recent list of founders ousted by investors:

https://www.cnbc.com/2017/06/22/ousted-founders-ubers-travis...

Briefly:

Steve Jobs, Apple Travis Kalanick, Uber Jack Dorsey, Twitter Parker Conrad, Zenefits Andrew Mason, GroupOn Jerry Yang, Yahoo

This is just a small number of particularly high-profile cases.

In principle, but...

Venture capitalists for example are notorious for investing in startups and replacing the founder and/or CEO with "more experienced management" as the company grows.

A well known prominent example is the ouster of Steve Jobs at Apple in the 1980s by John Sculley whom Jobs had supposedly hired -- with the support of the lead investors such as "Mike" Markkula and Arthur Rock.

Steve Jobs is not an unusual case. The founders of Cisco Sandy Lerner and Len Bosack were ousted by Don Valentine/Sequoia:

http://www.businessinsider.com/how-ciscos-founders-were-oust...

There are many other examples.

I would not take excuses like this for rejecting a candidate, especially a highly qualified/skilled candidate, at face value. Despite the pervasive rhetoric about wanting the "best" or hiring only the "best," both individual interviewers and companies as a whole are often afraid of hiring candidates who know more or are more skilled than themselves. The unstated fears include that the candidate will, if hired, outshine colleagues, his or her boss, or even, in some cases, the founder or CEO of the company -- especially in the case of startups where venture capitalists or other investors could be impressed by the new hire.

Since it is usually not acceptable to reject an applicant for this reason, some pretext will be generated. One way is to focus in on some area where the candidate is weak or different such as using a different software tool. Another way is to use trick questions or problems.

This is an article on how this was allegedly done in academia in the Soviet Union:

https://arxiv.org/pdf/1110.1556.pdf

Trump is not the first President to use Twitter. Barack Obama had at least three twitter accounts:

http://time.com/3882715/president-obama-now-has-his-own-twit...

Obama in fact tweeted about various controversial topics, producing outrage among generally conservative Republicans:

https://www.usnews.com/news/articles/2015/09/16/president-ob...

President Trump's use of Twitter, a new communications technology, to communicate with the general public and world is no different than Franklin Delano Roosevelt (FDR)'s use of the then new technology radio -- weekly addresses to the nation and press conferences -- to communicate with the nation and as it happens bypass the almost uniformly hostile newspapers of the 1930s.

Trump is no more using Twitter to communicate policy directives to US government agencies than FDR was using radio. He still has to formulate and sign executive orders and go through the legally proscribed channels as the successful legal challenges to the original Muslim ban show.

Rather than try to censor the President of the United States his critics should rationally and clearly critique his actual policies and actions.

This is the link to the Discover blog post text:

http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/fire-in-the-mind/2013/04/2...

The issue with Watson's original account is here in the Johnson's text:

After negotiations between both labs, papers by Wilkins and by Franklin and Gosling appeared in the same issue of Nature along with the one by Watson and Crick. (They can all be found on a website at Nature, and an annotated version of the Watson-Crick paper is at the Exploratorium’s site.) Toward the end of their paper, they flatly state that “We were not aware of the details of the results presented [by the King’s scientists] when we devised our structure, which rests mainly though not entirely on published experimental data and stereochemical arguments.” Yet they go on to write in an acknowledgment, three paragraphs later: “We have also been stimulated by a knowledge of the general nature of the unpublished experimental results and ideas of Dr. M. H. F. Wilkins, Dr. R. E. Franklin and their co-workers at King’s College, London.”

The sentences seem to contradict each other, and in any case Watson made a point, in his book The Double Helix, to describe the pivotal moment when he saw Photo 51.

So the controversy continues. Was it ethical for Wilkins to show Watson his colleague’s work without asking her first? Should she have been invited to be a coauthor on the historic paper? Watson hardly helped his case with his belittling comments about Franklin in The Double Helix.

The bigger issue from the original Hacker News post is Watson and also Feynman's portrayal of their work as highly independent of their colleagues: "disregarding" others.

This is complicated issue. Specifically, The Double Helix, cited in the original HN post, does mention Rosalind Franklin but in a rather demeaning way that slights her contributions -- which came to be highly criticized in subsequent years.

This is the relevant section from the Wikipedia article, which like most Wikipedia articles on contentious topics should be taken with a grain of salt and not substituted for original sources:

Recognition of her contribution to the model of DNA Upon the completion of their model, Crick and Watson had invited Wilkins to be a co-author of their paper describing the structure.[186] Wilkins turned down this offer, as he had taken no part in building the model.[187] He later expressed regret that greater discussion of co-authorship had not taken place as this might have helped to clarify the contribution the work at King's had made to the discovery.[188] There is no doubt that Franklin's experimental data were used by Crick and Watson to build their model of DNA in 1953. Some, including Maddox, have explained this citation omission by suggesting that it may be a question of circumstance, because it would have been very difficult to cite the unpublished work from the MRC report they had seen.[78]

Indeed, a clear timely acknowledgment would have been awkward, given the unorthodox manner in which data were transferred from King's to Cambridge. However, methods were available. Watson and Crick could have cited the MRC report as a personal communication or else cited the Acta articles in press, or most easily, the third Nature paper that they knew was in press. One of the most important accomplishments of Maddox's widely acclaimed biography is that Maddox made a well-received case for inadequate acknowledgement. "Such acknowledgement as they gave her was very muted and always coupled with the name of Wilkins".[189]

Twenty five years after the fact, the first clear recitation of Franklin's contribution appeared as it permeated Watson's account, The Double Helix, although it was buried under descriptions of Watson's (often quite negative) regard towards Franklin during the period of their work on DNA. This attitude is epitomized in the confrontation between Watson and Franklin over a preprint of Pauling's mistaken DNA manuscript.[190] Watson's words impelled Sayre to write her rebuttal, in which the entire chapter nine, "Winner Take All" has the structure of a legal brief dissecting and analyzing the topic of acknowledgement.[191]

Sayre's early analysis was often ignored because of perceived feminist overtones in her book. Watson and Crick did not cite the X-ray diffraction work of Wilkins and Franklin in their original paper, though they admit having "been stimulated by a knowledge of the general nature of the unpublished experimental results and ideas of Dr. M. H. F. Wilkins, Dr. R. E. Franklin and their co-workers at King's College, London".[81] In fact, Watson and Crick cited no experimental data at all in support of their model. Franklin and Gosling's publication of the DNA X-ray image, in the same issue of Nature, served as the principal evidence:

Thus our general ideas are not inconsistent with the model proposed by Watson and Crick in the preceding communication.[192]

People vary. I find it quite difficult to work effectively in an open office. Coffee shops are often better but not that great. I find either total silence or soft instrumental music is usually best for me. Some people seem to enjoy open offices although I suspect their work is different and does not require the same level of deep concentration.

The obvious solution is to allow people to select the office environment that works best for them: office, cubicle, open area etc. instead of imposing a one size fits all "solution" from above.

Watson's original account of the discovery of the double helix has been heavily criticized for downplaying the role of Rosalind Franklin's x-ray crystallography measurements of the structure of DNA in the discovery.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rosalind_Franklin

Disregard or failure to give credit to others where credit is due?

There is no obvious connection between the methodologies peddled by "Uncle Bob" or the author of the piece and security breaches. They are not claiming to be computer security experts. How exactly are unit tests or code reviews or similar rituals supposed to have prevented the numerous breaches by Julian Assange and his WikiLeaks associates, especially when most of the information appears to have come from insiders with authorization to access the data? (for example). In the Bradley/Chelsea Manning case the government has consistently implied that Manning had authorization to access the vast State department archive of diplomatic cables, as implausible at that seems. I don't see how unit tests or code reviews would have prevented John Podesta from clicking on an obvious phishing link. :-)

Both "Uncle Bob" and the author are selling extremely complicated, cumbersome, expensive ways to develop software -- great for them as consultants if they can pull it off, not necessarily great for their customers. Giant near monopolies such as Microsoft or Google can afford these methods, may even benefit from this sort of super-bureaucratic "gold plating" of software and certainly do benefit from convincing small potential non-monopoly competitors to adopt these slow, expensive, bureaucratic methods that smaller firms cannot afford (they run out of money trying to create perfect software instead of software that works and gets the job done).

That is not necessarily true. Under some circumstances it can be true. For example, if a community builds more luxury apartments entirely in addition to existing apartments, then yes some well paid people will probably move out of the existing apartments into the new luxury ones, making apartments available to the lower paid.

However, if inexpensive apartments are either bulldozed or remodeled to become luxury apartments, eliminating inexpensive options for the lower paid. That has been happening in Mountain View and probably in San Francisco which the Guardian article directly discusses.

In Mountain View, home to Google, there are over 2000 luxury apartments and condos under construction. The situation is similar in several other Silicon Valley cities. This is a huge increase in apartment construction since 2010.

It is a similar pattern to San Francisco and other big cities mentioned in the Guardian article. The new construction is aimed toward generally young, generally single, tech workers at Google, Apple, Facebook and other employers within easy commuting distance of Mountain View. Many existing apartments have remodeled and boosted rents, effectively evicting many people with lower paying jobs. There is minimal construction of apartments for lower paid folks.

Google has the political clout in Mountain View to get more apartments for its tech employees despite the NIMBYs. Rental costs are a major negative for Google since the high cost means California tech salaries are actually among the lowest in USA adjusting for local cost of living. The disparity with the Plano Texas region (so-called Telecom Corridor) is astonishing.

People with lower incomes who are disproportionately Hispanic in California don't have a powerful force like Google to stand up for them.

There was a rent control measure (Measure V) passed in Mountain View about one year ago and remarkably actually enforced despite legal challenges.

https://mvtenantscoalition.org

Ah! A Labor Shortage!

But even as they forecast a brighter future for the working class, these economists also worry that the new age of tight labor markets and rising wages will create a different sort of challenge. As Alan B. Krueger, a Princeton University economist who was the chief economic adviser to President Barack Obama, put it, “We are heading for a labor shortage.”

Emphasis on labor shortage added.

Now where have I heard that before? Oh, yes:

2003 (depths of a recession)

http://aoaconsulting.com/yahoo_site_admin/assets/docs/Will_T...

http://knowledge.wharton.upenn.edu/article/what-labor-shorta...

2004

https://www.fastcompany.com/50595/labor-shortage-myth

2005

https://www.shrm.org/hr-today/news/hr-magazine/Pages/0305cov...

2010 (depths of Great Recession)

https://www.cbsnews.com/news/skilled-labor-shortage-frustrat...

https://www.tlnt.com/a-coming-labor-shortage-the-evidence-ju...

2012

https://secure.marketwatch.com/story/the-looming-us-labor-sh...

2013

http://businessroundtable.org/media/blog/the-u.s.-skills-gap...

https://www.us-immigration.com/us-immigration-news/us-immigr...

http://www.nasdaq.com/article/weekly-review-the-upcoming-lab...

http://money.cnn.com/2013/06/13/news/economy/trucker-shortag...

2015

https://tickertape.tdameritrade.com/investing/2015/06/skille...

https://www.tradesmeninternational.com/news-events/the-const...

Where did all those construction workers laid off at the end of the housing bubble go?

It seems that for employers and their hirelings, there is always a labor shortage or a looming labor shortage.

The article ends with:

It’s a system that polishes privilege, its byproduct a contempt for earned authority. Many of the people who started with this attitude had it ratified and encouraged by perhaps the most prestigious university in the world — and now they’re running the whole show.

Emphasis on now added.

Who in their right mind thinks people who attend Harvard and a handful of other elite universities and prep schools haven't been running the whole show since before the American Revolution?

See for example:

https://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2008/11/obama-joins-l...

IMHO the more likely explanation for these results is that the human visual system has built in mathematical, logical capabilities actually far beyond advanced college math. These are used to identify and track objects at a very early age. It is much easier to access these abilities using pictures and icons.

Text is an additional layer of abstraction probably involving language and communication systems outside the human visual system. The text is a label or abstraction for the visually represented concepts which must be encountered and learned first.

There is a consistent pattern in learning mathematics and other technical areas that most students learn better and faster with pictures and concrete examples. Abstraction comes later.

Google and many other tech companies and the investors that ultimately control them fear losing control of their business, in this case an extremely lucrative near-monopoly, to their employees, especially the technical employees. Thus they prefer young, relatively ignorant, naive, hard-working, compliant, inevitably more error-prone employees to more experienced employees, despite the apparent cost. It is a matter of political and economic control.

Thus they have an unwritten rule to minimize the use of employees with more than ten years of hands-on technical experience. They will employ more experienced employees if they absolutely must, but otherwise they avoid it. Hence, there are some but very few technical employees with more than ten years of experience. The numbers trail off with increasing experience and age. There are also exceptions for more experienced employees from usually wealthy families affiliated with the investors.

It is an irrational and hidden class system. It is costly. It is not fair. It almost certainly makes it very difficult to make technical advances and breakthroughs that require more experience, the wisdom of age, etc.

Just a comment, whether a 0.1 percent false positive rate is "small" is a subjective value judgement. Would you drive across a bridge that had a 1 in 1000 (0.1 percent) chance of collapsing and killing you as you drove across it? No, probably not.

In addition, the 0.1 percent false positive rate is based on a small sample of around 1000 cases. The Federal fingerprint databases such as the ones used in the Brandon Mayfield case have millions of people in them and may eventually have all US citizens (over 300 million people) in them. How does this "small" rate extrapolate when a fingerprint is compared to every fingerprint in the US or the world?

I do not agree with the definition of "production quality software" in this post, which exclusively focuses on purported readability and extensibility by others.

No. No. No.

The difference is that production quality software needs to be usable by other people -- often many other people -- instead of just the author or a small group of researchers. In many cases it must work close to 24 hours/7 days per week under highly variable conditions.

This means it generally must have fewer and less severe bugs than a proof-of-concept or research prototype. This often requires extensive testing by end users or QA folks standing in for end users.

There are many examples of shipping commercial products and widely used open source programs that clearly meet this criterion but are certainly not easy to read, maintain or extend code.

Modularity in particular often fails to produce either readable or extensible code, rather producing numerous layers of confusing modules and/or objects -- "lasagna code" instead of "spaghetti code." It also can fail to produce "production quality software" as I define it above.

Regarding fingerprints, in the wake of the Brandon Mayfield case which raised serious questions about the accuracy of fingerprint identification by the FBI, the National Academy of Sciences was asked to perform a scientific assessment. Initial results were published in:

Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS)

Bradford T. Ulery, 7733–7738, doi: 10.1073/pnas.1018707108

Accuracy and reliability of forensic latent fingerprint decisions

Bradford T. Ulerya, R. Austin Hicklina, JoAnn Buscagliab,1, and Maria Antonia Robertsc

Edited by Stephen E. Fienberg, Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, PA, and approved March 31, 2011 (received for review December 16, 2010)

ABSTRACT

The interpretation of forensic fingerprint evidence relies on the expertise of latent print examiners. The National Research Council of the National Academies and the legal and forensic sciences communities have called for research to measure the accuracy and reliability of latent print examiners’ decisions, a challenging and complex problem in need of systematic analysis. Our research is focused on the development of empirical approaches to studying this problem. Here, we report on the first large-scale study of the accuracy and reliability of latent print examiners’ decisions, in which 169 latent print examiners each compared approximately 100 pairs of latent and exemplar fingerprints from a pool of 744 pairs. The fingerprints were selected to include a range of attributes and quality encountered in forensic casework, and to be comparable to searches of an automated fingerprint identification system containing more than 58 million subjects. This study evaluated examiners on key decision points in the fingerprint examination process; procedures used operationally include additional safeguards designed to minimize errors. Five examiners made false positive errors for an overall false positive rate of 0.1%. Eighty-five percent of examiners made at least one false negative error for an overall false negative rate of 7.5%. Independent examination of the same comparisons by different participants (analogous to blind verification) was found to detect all false positive errors and the majority of false negative errors in this study. Examiners frequently differed on whether fingerprints were suitable for reaching a conclusion.

http://www.pnas.org/content/108/19/7733.full

Authors

Bradford T. Ulery

aNoblis, 3150 Fairview Park Drive, Falls Church, VA 22042;

R. Austin Hicklin aNoblis, 3150 Fairview Park Drive, Falls Church, VA 22042;

JoAnn Buscaglia bCounterterrorism and Forensic Science Research Unit, Federal Bureau of Investigation Laboratory Division, 2501 Investigation Parkway, Quantico, VA 22135; and

Maria Antonia Roberts cLatent Print Support Unit, Federal Bureau of Investigation Laboratory Division, 2501 Investigation Parkway, Quantico, VA 22135

One might wonder why such an assessment was not done a long time ago.

This is a report on the Brandon Mayfield case:

https://oig.justice.gov/special/s0601/exec.pdf

Bottom line is fingerprints are much more accurate than chicken entrails but hardly infallible as used to be widely believed.

I disagree with a number of points in the article, but a particularly questionable claim, which is common in recent years, is that version control is new/modern:

Version control. Twenty years ago, it made sense to write your code on your desktop and send the new code (as patches) by email. But this only makes sense when the pace of collaboration is slow. Today, this would be insane. Anything less than Git is backward. Note that even Microsoft builds Windows using Git today.

Version control has been in widespread use for over forty (40) years. SCCS (Source Code Control System) was released in 1972 -- forty-five, yes forty-five (45) years ago. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Source_Code_Control_System

The widely (and still) used Revision Control System (RCS) was released in 1982 -- 35 years ago. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Revision_Control_System

Concurrent Versions System (CVS) was released in 1990 as a networked extension to RCS -- twenty-seven (27) years ago. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Concurrent_Versions_System

The Subversion version control system was released in 2000, seventeen (17) years ago and was in widespread use years before Git. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apache_Subversion

There are, of course, many other version control systems dating back decades in many cases: Perforce, Mercurial, Visual SourceSafe, and others.

Version control has been in widespread use at many companies and organizations at least since the 1980s and has been in widespread use in many open source projects specifically for decades. Many open source or free software projects used CVS or SVN or other version control systems before Git or still do.

There is nothing new or modern about version control. It has been standard practice in software development for over thirty years.

What is striking to me is that the table of AP tests taken (2016) in the article clearly states:

Calculus AB 302,532 Calculus BC 118,707

for a total of 421,239 students taking this demanding technical subject and exam in 2016 (one year). Undoubtedly, in this day and age of cheap readily available computers with more power than a 1980's Cray supercomputer, most of these students both have computers and have undoubtedly done lots of programming whether they have taken AP Computer Science or not.

As for Microsoft, they have announced numerous layoffs of tens of thousands of highly skilled engineers in the last few years, for example:

http://www.zdnet.com/article/microsoft-layoffs-of-18000-empl...

Many in Finland which consistently ranks TOP in international ratings of education, math, and science.

This is Feynman from the introduction to his Feynman Lectures on Physics:

The question, of course, is how well this experiment has succeeded. My own point of view — which, however, does not seem to be shared by most of the people who worked with the students — is pessimistic. I don’t think I did very well by the students. When I look at the way the majority of the students handled the problems on the examinations, I think the system is a failure. Of course, my friends point out to me that there were one or two dozen students who — very surprisingly — understood almost everything in all of the lectures, and who were quite active in working with the material and worrying about the many points in an excited and interested way. These people have now, I believe, a first rate background in physics — and they are, after all, the ones I was trying to get at. But then, “The power of instruction is seldom of much efficacy except in those happy dispositions where it is almost superfluous. ” (Gibbon)

Richard P. Feynman, 1963

http://feynmanlectures.caltech.edu/I_91.html

Note that by his own account, most of his students did not do well. James Gleick's biography of Feynman, Genius, has a longer discussion of the disappointing results of his lectures to undergraduates at Caltech, many of whom reportedly stopped attending the lectures as they were not getting anything useful out of them.

That Feynman in fact had difficulty explaining freshman physics to the highly qualified students at Caltech surely does not indicate he did not understand freshman physics.

Some topics are simply very complex. It is not clear that they can always be conveyed in simple terms. In some cases, a "big picture" explanation may be possible but the details remain complicated. In some cases, a hand-waving analogy to some everyday phenomenon may create the illusion of understanding but be misleading or wrong.

To give a specific modern example, a state of the art video codec such as H.264 is extremely complex, built of many complicated components and sub-algorithms. While it may be possible to explain the big picture in relatively simple terms, the detailed implementation and operation is not simple. The inability of someone who creates or implements a video codec to explain it in simple terms to a layman is not an indication that they do not understand it.