Unfortunately most people are still stuck in the mindset that everyone who isn't broken inside wants children. I've never wanted children at any point in my life, but I'm wrong apparently.
I don't get this impression at all. My wife are in our early 30s and in a minority among our friends (educated coastal folks to be fair) in having kids. I'd say in my circle it's not socially acceptable to express that people should have kids. If anything, the opposite bias exists. I know a lot of people who want kids but try not to express that opinion because it's not "cool."
Parents still push for grandkids, but that's different. Being a parent literally changes your brain chemically. My dad never said anything about grandkids, but after my daughter was born it was literally two years before he could have a conversation about something other than her. And he's one of those "interesting people" (traveled the world working on healthcare programs in the developing world) that has interesting things to talk about.
There's a bit of the tragedy of the commons at work here. Raising kids is expensive, difficult, often thankless work. And yet if no one did it, you wouldn't have any of the nice things that are more-available to people who don't have kids. Furthermore, given that political attitudes appear to be strongly heritable, it seems like the political attitudes that correlate with the class of people who deliberately don't have kids will also wane.
You're not necessarily wrong. It's a matter of whether one has a well-developed dream or talent that isn't child-related. The reason this matters is because we need long-term sources of meaning and responsibility in our lives. Starting a family is ipso facto the traditional thing to do and our traditions know more about us than we do. Changing course is possible but one ought to have good reasons in mind first.
Evolution is just a methodology, not living entity with desires and goals. If your genes allow you at the age of 20, to look so stunning that you have 10 children before you sadly die from the effort expended to look so swimmingly handsome, then your genes will soon proliferate to every corner of the globe. We'll call that successful 'evolution', even though most people today would be horrified that you only lived 20 years.
I like this view on it. I can't disagree. I was just saying that there is some merit to being called "evolutionarily broken" for not wanting children. Whether you think that's good or bad or meaningless is another issue
If we were completely asocial, independent creatures, then perhaps. But humans - and therefore their genes - have always lived and died in groups, and even a primitive tribe may stand to benefit from having a small amount of individuals unburdened by child-rearing. From the point of view of the gene, what's important is only that some part of the family tree propagates; the number of dead-end branches doesn't matter. Therefore an increase in reproductive drive could easily be deleterious to a particular gene's long-term survival.
Disclaimer: I have no knowledge of the role of child-free individuals in our era of evolutionary adaptedness. I'm just pointing out that evolutionary dynamics are a lot more nuanced than "more children = good", especially in social animals.
Well, natural phenomena (like having mates and children) don't always go according to the plan.[1] That's why nature populates the earth with enough people to ensure most of them will follow the rules of evolution/biology/whatever.
But I'm guessing that even those people who don't want children are following the rules of natural selection. "Only the fittest will survive" is then translated to something like "only the genes of those who want to pass on their genomic data will survive".
Debatable in a world that is (also debatable) overcrowded and lacking resources.
But in general sure; maybe OP has been to a lot of birthdays (as have I) where people stare at you like you just told you are a serial killer. While in reality you just don't want kids. That goes away when you go over 40 though. Then some people even start to envy you for your freedom. Generally better not care what other people think. It's a tiring and pointless thing.
Huh? If your vim add-on in Chrome is better than in Firefox, you're using the wrong add-on.
Try Vimperator in Firefox.
Meanwhile, `d` can't even close the New Tab page in any Chrome vim add-on. It's a bit pathetic. Vimium is the crappy Chrome plugin that was ported to Firefox.
True but regardless of which one is technically correct, both pretty much share the same negative connotations now. I used to always hear people talking about how the swastika is really a sign of peace, but regardless of what it originally meant, it doesn't mean that anymore.
It doesn't have anything to do with Nazis to at least a billion people in India. I'd even bet that the majority of people around the world associate swastikas with non-Nazi stuff.
No, I'm going to agree that that is 100% within the field of academic computer science. I literally covered all the relevant notation in my freshman year.
What I'm wondering is whether or not there was some other factor going on, because I'm trained as a computer scientist and found nothing particularly objectionable about the formula, other than the f[] application notation. (And as a polyglot programmer, I've long since made my peace with that sort of notation mutation.) And I am by no means well-practiced in that sort of thing; I've been out of school for 14 years now, and only dabble on the side in this sort of thing now. The "forall y there exists an x such that" pattern in the middle is an extremely common recurring pattern, and what surrounds it on either side is also extremely simple.
Did you do it in a few seconds while reading from a slide and listening to a lecturer talk about math? I did the same thing as you and it took me more than 10 seconds to parse through the notation. If someone put this up on a slide during a talk and asked if I 'understood it', the answer would be no. Doesn't mean I'm incapable of understanding it, just that it uses muscles I don't flex very often.
Well, as I was trying to allude to, yeah, I did understand it pretty quickly because it uses a lot of common patterns.
Possibly I'm an extreme outlier, because when I say that I try to keep up with the field a bit, I really do. I really do watch YouTube videos of presentations full of math significantly more complicated than that every so often.
But still, I would also stand by my wondering if there was something else going on here, because it still seems to be grad students in school at the time really should have followed that. When I was in grad school I am quite confident I knew several other students who would have understood that just fine, and I went to "just" Michigan State, not MIT or Berkeley.
'Outside their field' was poor wording on my part. I meant more that it's not the sort of thing that most CS engineers see day to day. People forget things they don't use often.
I think it's important to realize that these are two different things. One is a formal research science, the other deals with practical problem-solving and implementations.
Your typical software engineer likely has a CS degree, but CS researchers and software engineers are two separate populations. Sometimes the same person will do both, but usually not at the same time in their life or for the same organization.
edit: for example, you don't even need a computer to learn computer science fundamentals. A notebook or deck of playing cards will do fine.
As I write this, thearn4's post is fading into the grey, but it's true. That's why I qualified my post with trained as a computer scientist. I have a Master's degree in the field, and I try to keep up with it to some extent, but what I am now is an engineer. Degree or no, I can not currently say "I am a Computer Scientist" with a straight face.
He wasn't talking to software engineers who may have been out of school for a while had time to forget this stuff though; looks like he was talking to a mix of graduate and undergraduate students and some faculty, and I would think stuff like this would be covered during freshman/junior year for sure?
TBH I personally don't always raise hands to such questions though.
This is such a notation issue. If I were to show an implementation of permutations from 1..N in eg Brainfuck (to choose an extreme example), there's no way the mathematicians would get it. Why don't mathematicians learn math??
This issue comes up frequently when I try to read CS papers which explain their concepts using math notation. It's much, much easier to reverse-engineer the concept from a working example written in some notation I can actually read, such as... any programming language, even a programming language I've never formally learned. The math notation is literally Greek to me (if you'll pardon the pun) and does more to obscure than communicate meaning.
Not sure it's just notation but a mater of understanding.
In computer programming "exists" it's a matter of checking all the possibilities and find one, therefore is restricted to finite sets (and realistically speaking quite small the ones).
On the other hand in mathematics there is no such restriction. Existence is just an assumption, if there is at least one, then we go further with the assumption, no meter we talk about finite sets, infinite countable sets or infinite uncountable.
I'm working as a computer programmer for quite a long time and I also find this very annoying seeing people around thinking only finite when they have to solve real problems.
Didn't read the article, is that supposed to show the properties of a function that is both "1:1" and "onto"? Ie, the set of all inputs is the same as as the set of possible outputs, so for any x in the set, f(x) will return a result that is also in the set?
Didn't major or minor in mathematics but I took a few papers. Time to the read the article and collect my prize or look ignorant under my real name on the web.
EDIT: I was wrong! Though in my defense I had been given the context from TFA I think I would have got it.
But isn't CS one of the formal sciences (together with mathematics, statistics, etc.)? Familiarity with mathematical notation should be pretty foundational for active researchers in the field I would think.
It just doesn't come up very much. The computers abstract it enough that you rarely need to actually look at notation like that. Unless you're doing some real close to the metal work, which the people who kept their hands raised probably were.
You're mixing up programming with computer science. The former is a task that does not necessarily need any math (e.g. web development), the latter is literally math (e.g. category algebra).
It doesn't come up because it is too abstract. About the only languages I can think of that will accept existential statements are theorem provers. My favourite is Isabelle/HOL.
In fact, the notation used by the lecturer is sloppy. Numbers 1..N is not a rigorous domain definition. (Unknown if real or natural.)
That will only give you the appearance of fitness, not the effect of it. You'll still be huffing and puffing as you climb the flights of stairs to the office the day the elevator breaks, though being lighter through liposuction will help reduce the difficulty of the task.
What's the going rate on an intelligence implant these days? Having cosmetic surgery to overcome a lack of exercise is like moving your fuel gauge to "Full" so you ever have to buy gas.
You're paying Heroku to not have to think about deployment or scale, which is also why their marketplace is successful - who wants to think about managing a database, when two clicks and a few environment variables later you can have one. Heroku is great for devs who don't want to think about ops and can afford to throw money at the problem (it gets really expensive really fast).
