obvthrowaway2
- HIPSTERS: If you really like something, but don't want others to crowd your interests, you will pretend to be nonchalant about it.
- AUTHENTICITY: A person's interests in a topic can be vetted as "authentic" if they are influenced by others whose average of personality vectors matches the person's.
- SOCIOPATHS: You can make in-roads with a group of interest by transforming your PV; see AUTHENTICITY.
- SKEW: You can influence others more by projecting a _very_ high value for a specific topic. If you love a particular form of music to an absurd degree, you're more likely to convert others.
I don't have any non-anecdotal evidence of any of these phenomena. Rather, these are some reasonable if not amusing deductions from the author's model.
Furthermore, articles that downplay the importance of practice, to me, seem like a bad idea. In my experience, people who claim a high level of general comprehension (but not technical) tend to lack the ability to implement any facet of their "tacit knowledge" at even a basic level.
I don't think anyone has ever said that and meant it. Except to the very naive, it's pretty obvious that a child growing up into a functional adult is a function of training volume and adaptation. On the other hand, training volume for "AI" tends to be huge and yet there are definite strata that these machines seem confined to.
I agree that that form of argumentation is meaningless though. AI is obviously improved over time, but as far as I know that's due to external modification and not just more training.
In sum, the social aspect really is the worst part of engineering in Silicon Valley, and I have half a mind to do something on my own so I no longer have to entertain mediocre engineers with terrible interests.
So, I would love to work for a place that was fully remote. It would be paradise to me.