However, results in evolutionary game theory show that a society of self-seeking, self-regarding agents will generally face conditions that ultimately lead to its collapse.
Gary Cooper's goofy speech in The Fountainhead ( see http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zc7oZ9yWqO4 ) typifies Rand's attitudes. Among other preposterous propositions, Cooper is made to utter the nonsense that great inventions are uniformly the work of sole inventors, selfishly and reflexively seeking their own interests. This is ahistorical; see Against Intellectual Monopoly by Michele Boldrin and David K. Levine ( http://www.dklevine.com/general/intellectual/againstnew.htm ) for the history of inventions such as the steam engine, radio, telephone, and so on. In each case, ideas were in the air, and there were a number of people who came up with similar inventions more or less at the same time.
Cooper argues the basic notions of intellectual monopoly, which are that intellectual property is essentially indistinguishable from tangible property, and that all copies of ideas "belong" to their creator. These arguments come straight from the RIAA legal playbook. I'm surprised that any culture of hackers would want to subscribe to notions more commonly associated with corporate monopolists.
A) You socialize(d) with people who read things that aren't sold in the grocery store.
B) You not only know how to read, but most likely voluntarily read a 700+ page book in your spare time in order to learn/see what it was about/etc...
C) If you can speak about what was in the book, and what you thought about it, you can follow the plot of a 700+ page book, you can understand the points the author was making, perhaps you can intuit the not-very-subtle philosophical and societal messages she was delivering, and you can discuss how you agree or disagree with those messages.
It's no IQ test, but frankly it's probably a much better question than "Do you have a degree?".
At least I'd rather work with people who have read a book like that, and have an opinion on it's content and the author's points (even if they hated the book/points/etc...), than the average CS degree graduate.
Sure asking about Ayn Rand isn't really an intelligence test, but it's not a bad start. Smart people can learn about data structures and algorithms. Slow people who've managed to get a CS degree from some random college may have learned enough to pass, but there's no demonstration of smarts there.
I'm hiring based on people being smart, self-motivated, willing to learn, willing to think, and people I can hold a conversation with. Teaching someone like that how data structures work is a lot easier than teaching a degree holder how to be someone I want to work with and someone I can trust to be on the ball as new technologies come out.
So, out of curiosity, do these "results in evolutionary game theory" have a source?
No, because it's not only a personal opinion, but a statement that Rand's philosophy of rational self interest is logically invalid ('rational' does not imply 'self interest'; the basis on the reflexivity of identity could fairly be called desperate) and scientifically incorrect. Rand's philosophy is incompatible with findings of reciprocal altruism in evolutionary biology and experimental game theory.
"So, out of curiosity, do these "results in evolutionary game theory" have a source?"
Here's one: "Game Theory Evolving" by Herbert Gintis; see Chapter 11. http://www.amazon.com/Game-Theory-Evolving-Herbert-Gintis/dp...
edit: no online sources? I don't normally pay $35+ because a hostile, anonymous internet commenter said something would refute someone I respect but didn't want to explain the ideas himself.
As for $35, it pains me to mention libraries...it was a source, with a link so that you could see something about the book.
I can't say I know of a single public intellectual or professional philosopher who takes Rand seriously. I do know of a well-regarded mathematical logician who does, but this is an aberration.
Alan Greenspan (http://www.nytimes.com/2007/09/15/business/15atlas.html).
Clarence Thomas (http://www.law.com/jsp/article.jsp?id=1090180289132).
your ignorance of public intellectuals and professional philosophers is not an argument against Rand. lol.
I understand if your 15 how exciting Rand can be. But to see adults take it seriously is sad.
If good programmers read Rand or write blogs at a higher rate than bad programmers, then it works, even if it's frequently wrong about individual people.
My feeling is it has gotten much worse as people have sought degrees solely for the purpose of using them to get jobs in the field, precisely as you suggest would happen to blogs and reading cliff's notes.
However, may I point out that blogging is very different from reading the cliff's notes of a book? A hiring manager can read your blog. If they simply check that you have a blog, well, whoop-de-doo. I have a blog, so that clearly proves nothing.
However, if the hiring manager reads your blog, they can deduce a great deal about what you pretend to think and how you communicate it. So it is a small example of your work, much as posting source code is a small example of your work.
You still haven't told us who Ayn Rand is.
The ability to write blogs is irrelevant here too as what we most likely care about is the ability to program. Hence, the programming test.
Now take the group of programmers who have written less than 30 blog posts about programming. Y% of them are good hires, and 100-Y% are bad hires.
Is X > Y, or X == Y, or X < Y?
That is the issue.
And that is the way degrees are used (when used rationally). The claim with degrees is that X is more than Y, not that most good programmers have degrees or anything else. That may be so. Then someone defended using degrees by saying there is a lack of alternative tests that are sufficiently cheap. That's not true. There are lots of cheap tests, and I have suggested 2 for which I believe X>Y is likely, and which, if studied, might turn out to have a higher X than the degree test.
My point was is that even though it filters out many of the worst programmers it would also filter out all of the really great programmers. I'd rather have my search take longer and cost more to have those great programmers on my team than end up with just good programmers.
Note however that criteria (2) is important. If you use the filter "Is named Linus Torvalds", you would certainly increase the probability that any given applicant is good. Then again, your applicant pool will drop to either 0.
Or, "how many blog posts do you have about programming?" Again this is easy to verify.