HN user
fair take, but my view these days is the following.
there is way too much information-garbage floating around.
hence I try to stick to time-tested classics particularly when it comes to certain topics. now, your time-tested classic may be different from mine and certainly, i want to see if there are things I missed, and hence I mentioned Bohm's work, as something the author of this PhD missed.
End of the day, there are many belief systems that we human hold onto, but we need a method to settle opinion.
And science happens to be a certain kind of a method for settling opinion.
CS Peirce wrote about it so beautifully in his 1877 essay: "On the fixation of belief". go read it. here is a link saving you a google search. https://www.peirce.org/writings/p107.html
guilty as charged !
But Bohm's "On Creativity", to me presents a much deeper "philosophical" take on a) what is creativity and b) how to foster it. And I dont see it referenced in this text at all.
Again, since this is about persuation, it is what the reader wants to believe.
These kind of studies are dubious. The PhD report could have been generated by an LLM in about a day, and no one would know any better.
It works like this:
Take any hypothesis. And have a lot of verbiage around it with dubious experiments to "statistically" validate it. and write a giant report which would eventually turn into a book.
Steve Pinker and his likes excel in this kind of stuff. Psychology/Sociology and sometimes economics are filled with these sorts of studies.
It is more persuation than science.
And one could could argue that science itself is a certain kind of persuation.
InstaFail. Nobody wants this. We are already saturated with bull-shit through social media.
Now, there is yet another devices that manufactures BS before it hits our eyes.
Steer clear.
the wet-dream of management is to get rid of high-paid knowledge workers. Now, chatGPT is the answer to their prayers, or, so they think.
ex-ibm here.
Some context from an earlier thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41558554#41561970
Basically, management rot sets in with MBAs in charge who have no clue how software products get built. They see coders as overhead. Big Mistake. Short-term, it leads to some improved profits. Long term, it leads to cultural rot. and the org is doomed. Happening to amazon and aws as we speak.
very nice app. just the front-end browser component alone is super-slick. but expecting users to bring their data to your platform is a barrier to adoption.
why is this news ? they do it twice a year.
they have way too many employees, and it will take them a decade of such cuts to "rightsize"
the two types are nice !
the author likens your first type to building "mental" roads, which form new pathways of cognition, and takes time, and has emotional resistance, and requires conscious effort and practice to carve out. also to relate the roads to other roads correctly, so the mental map of roads is consistent, and can be traversed.
the problem is that most students do not grasp ideas fully and develop facility with it. when this happens, the foundations are shaky, and facility is lost. then, they label themselves as incapable which leads to a vicious cycle where, the belief of being stupid leads to more stupidity.
the second type is where the roads (ideas) are there, but a route from source to destination is not clear, and the aha moment is when you see the full path in the mental eye.
you touch on a raw nerve that could be the subject of a long post.
in summary, the attitude of management in many large companies is that code is just work that needs to get done, and any engineer who can type on a keyboard can do it equally well (cue in ai-coder). so, the smarts is embedded in defining requirements and managing execution of said-code which resides in management.
The problem with this is many-fold. 1) it encourages a culture of top-down decision making including technical decisions and the person making designs is not the one doing the work 2) as tech evolves, the org is unable to catch up since the decision makers are the elite few.
in short, a manufacturing line mentality where the supervisor holds the cards and workers are tools.
this memo is one for the ages. filled with management speak.
Being ex-IBM, i can relate.
Basically, the management class despises SDE worker class, and thinks of them as overhead. Recent statements by the aws head about chatGPT replacing SDEs is along the same lines.
SDEs are tools that just do what mgmt tells them. mgmt holds the decision-making and all the cards.
periodically there is a whipping (pipping) in the form of a layoff to keep the troops in fear.