Why would you chase people from Universities who have high salary expectations when you have the internet? It is beyond me. Developers storm remote positions, yet the industry is super slow with adoption.
I realize these aren't controlled experiments, but consider two sources:
1) Alistair Cockburn has a communication chart [0] suggesting that face-to-face at a whiteboard is the most effective form of communication. He's been showing the chart for at least a decade, to rooms full of engineers from all the big players and lots of little players. If he were wrong, he'd eventually run out of consulting clients, but that hasn't happened. I realize this is a weak argument.
2) YCombinator co-locates its funded teams. I'd wager they're familiar with the arguments for and against remote work, that they're technology savvy, that they're data-driven, and they're incentivized to get the most for their money. I realize that this second argument is the same as my first, but I think these arguments should make you think about why they put a premium on in-person collaboration.
I don't doubt that the parent wasn't being absolutely comprehensive in the scope of their answer, but surely you appreciate that direct communication in person is.. well, at the very least 'efficient'?
I can't believe you're actually wanting a source for this, lol
> but surely you appreciate that direct communication in person is.. well, at the very least 'efficient'?
No, I don't. I believe written communication is far more efficient. Cavemen talk. Writing is the greatest technology we've ever invented. Forget all your latest devops crazes, you can't do anything useful without writing.
> I believe written communication is far more efficient.
Categorically wrong. Two examples:
1) Years ago I was moving out of a shared house and looking for someone to move into my room. One person in particular would only communicate via email about coming to view the room. Consequently days elapsed before we'd got a final arrangement that could have been sorted out with a 10 minute phone call, despite having my number, and me having theirs. Then, when I took half a day off to wait in for this person to visit, they missed the appointment. When I checked my email it turned out they'd emailed me a few minutes before they were due to turn up to tell me they weren't going to make it. Again, despite having my phone number. Already irritated by their behaviour this obviously left me fuming.
2) Just the past few days I've been dealing with an "urgent" support incident where the two people involved have been exchanging emails for three days: a conversation that could be easily accelerated with a call.
In both these cases direct synchronous communication is the key: this might be face to face or on the phone, or a video call, but in no way is written communication more efficient.
I disagree. Yesterday I was trying to organise a visit to a luthier for a guitar repair. He told me to phone him, so I phoned, he didn't answer. I left a voicemail, and he phoned me back 15 minutes later, I missed him. On the third attempt, we spoke. I explained what I had written in the email, and he told me that I should call in with the guitar. Overall, it took ~20 minutes of back and forth to resolve an issue that could have been answered in the reply where he told me to phone him.
If you phone me, you are likely to call me at an inconvenient time and interrupt what I'm doing. If you send me an email, and I'm free, I'll respond immediately. If I'm in the middle of something, I'll respond when I'm finished what I'm doing.
Look, I work alone and find some situations best described by writing down long and comprehensive emails - but if you're going to accuse face-to-face contact as being 'caveman talk' I'm sorry but I'm going to wonder if your empathic or social intelligence is somehow dialled down.
My life experience tells me that there are vast tracts of productivity that are served very well by direct collaboration with other humans.
> accuse face-to-face contact as being 'caveman talk'
I said it's caveman technology, which is surely indisputable. In my experience it's thoroughly inefficient for discussing technical matters. That's probably why not much technology was developed before writing.
Is the insinuation not the same? It comes across as somewhat derisory, whether intended or not.
What amuses me about this exchange here is how even in 'collaborating' through writing, at least four individuals aren't able to meaningfully describe what they really intend. The internet, writ black and white, polarises and makes nuance absolute and all hope of sense is lost! :)
For what it's worth, I do appreciate where you're coming from - there's no forelorn dread I feel more than the suggestion of a completely superfluous face to face meeting... .
- ed
Also, I have to repeatedly remind friends and family, as well as business contacts, that the best and most assured way to get in contact with me is to send me an email. It has been for nearly 20 years now. Always!
Writing is great for one-way communication. If you actually mean to collaborate, if you don't know what you don't know and what to ask the other person, in-person communication is way more efficient.
And it turns out if you're solving nontrivial problems as a software team, you're talking is more of the collaborative kind than the one-way-information-distributing kind.
I'm not trying to argue or convince anybody, just answering the question from the HR perspective (I spend ~20% of my time hiring engineers in a large multinational company). Every large company has internal data overwhelmingly showing that you want to jam as many people in one place as possible. Of course there's physical limits (real estate, talent pools, cost of living), so you are constantly making a trade-off between paying a premium (more rent, higher salary) vs hiring remote workers who are cheaper but produce less on average. That's just how it works.
I kind of a hoped it'll end up a joke saying "Don't use mongo". Last time I used it was 2.4 and it was the worst db experience ever. Back then It was more sane to craft a solution with PG and HSTORE. Now, I think RedShift does the job, why would anyone use mongo on production for anything today?
It's like if you ask "how do I drive my car downtown" and I answer, "Easy, just park at the station and take the train".
To answer your other question, their marketing goes a long way. I recently started at a new company, and the lead was proudly telling me how the project was developed using Mongo... So I start explaining how it's basically shit after using it professionally for a few years. His answer? But SQL doesn't scale well enough!
Except when it doesn't. We've had data corruption issues related to oplog, out of sync secondaries and excessive resource usage on the primary. As far as major problems. There were also a bunch of smaller problems but in fairness those were on the nodejs/mongoose side of things. Would not recommend.
My experience is similar- It makes me fascinated by things and creative in a way that I was when I was a child. It's like it turns off a part of my brain which years of experience has taught to filter out many ideas before they even reach my conscious mind. Mostly hare-brained ideas, but interesting ones nonetheless, and in entertaining them sometimes something brilliant comes out.
As a beginner in deep learning space, I am a bit baffled about the case "You need a lot of computational power". Good models learn fast, so if potential model looks promising on local machine, one can do training on gcloud for 100$ on high end machines.
Where am I wrong in this line of thinking?
definitely, and something well discussed in the erlang community over the years. The problem it solves aren't ones that most people realize are there until you've built things and encountered them.
When I went to Uni a common pairing was "physics and philosophy". That was my chosen degree subject when I was in high school. I wanted to do particle physics.
In the end I loved (pure) maths more than philosophy so graduated with Theoretical Physics and Mathematics. There were probably a quarter of the physics students doing the Philosophy of Science module (the only things I remember covering were Aethers, Xeno's Paradox, maybe also the Realism of QM Interpretations [it was a couple of decades ago]).
One could just as easily say that mathematicians are natural philosophers clouded by rigid symbols that have no inherent meaning on their own. For every zag, a zig.
Alright, I’ll bite. I challenge your assertion that math is without objective meaning.
First I want to make an observation. Do you know the history of how the study of complex algebra/calculus came about? If so, I assume you will agree that it was initially a completely abstract thought experiment with no connection to anything in the “real” world.
Given your assertion that math is without meaning, it would seem to me that mathematical ideas that originate purely out of human imagination would just be arbitrary semantics.
Then how can it be that complex analysis only several decades after it was formulated turned out to be not only useful, but necessary to formulate the theory of quantum mechanics in a way that agrees with physical observation?
I can name numerous other examples of the same phenomenon; namely that a purely abstract mathematical idea is long after its formulation shown to be profoundly reflected in physical reality.
To me it seems obvious that the way these phenomena occur implies that part of the process by which humans use their imagination and reasoning to come up with abstract mathematical ideas, is more akin to using their intuition to map out objective ‘structures’ of logic (that are also reflected in the underlying structure of physical reality) than to simply play with semantics, as it seems you are asserting.
Tl;dr
Post modernist philosophers are fools and they should be ashamed. Qed
I agree with you that there are many incredible and useful insights based on mathematics and the equals sign, but the main point of contention is that not every mathematical truth has a co-responding physical phenomenon. Nor can we adequately explain how an equals sign works, or why it works. Mathematics and [im]material reality are not one-to-one and assuming that mathematics supersedes the imagination or is a superset of human language and expression negates human experience and renders our lives as secondary to "almighty math." Mathematics is a tool, would you agree? Philosophy is also a tool. Mathematics without a human user is like a video game without a player. I am not asserting that mathematics has no "objective meaning" it _only_ has objective meaning (because for every "object" we must have a "subject" namely, the observing consciousness).
I'm always up for a discussion on this topic, because I find it very interesting and I think there is a major (dare I say it) metaphysical point here that is overlooked by mainstream intellectuals. However I've argued with enough post-modernists online over the years (which is usually like arguing with a wall) that I might have become a bit snarky- sorry about that, I appreciate the graceful tone in your response.
I agree that the symbolic language we call mathematics and reality are not one-to-one as you say. But the fact that we can use abstract reasoning around these symbols to uncover new ways of understanding of the physical world, especially in cases like the one I lined out in my example, implies to me that there must be some objective reality that is in some way captured by these symbols, in a way that plain philosophy cannot.
So to answer your question, I agree that math is a tool, but I think in some sense it also more than a tool. I believe it can also be seen as a map into a platonic reality, and that there is some element of our mind that is able to observe this realm which allows us to draw the map (using mathematical symbolic language) and come to an agreement about how it should be drawn. And that elements of this platonic realm are for some mysterious reason also reflected in the structure of our physical reality.
Splendid, I really appreciate your taking the time to formulate a response -- it's very interesting to consider a metaphysical or Platonic realm where maths, although it may not exist in isolation, ends up arriving at the same points and valleys and landscapes and landforms time and time again. That is actually quite peculiar, the regularity with which mathematics works. I spent some time at the end of my university studies [the first go-round] trying to understand how we as humans came to discover multiplication and division. There are many possible operations we can do on numbers but only some yield a useful symmetry whereas others result in a jumbled chaos.
A close friend of mine refers to humans as "symbol makers" and I hold firmly that everything in the flow of life is meaningful, but it's really astounding that we can filter out useful patterns from our surroundings. Your point alludes to me in a similar way the beauty of a leaf or a tree: it's been speculated and suggested that over many millennia our sensory systems (namely sight) have tuned in and honed in on being able to find tasty ripe fruits and berries (why they may appear red and bright or purple and bright when in full ripeness and before ruin .. to pilfer an Alt-J lyric).
In that way, perhaps maths is some sort of tree or leaf or forest that is naturally existent, not actually separate from the earth or the forest or the consciousness of man, but still somehow a useful set of patterns our [mind] intellect-sense has been able to pick out and find the tasty and juicy bits of.
One very fascinating part of the whole narrative of mathematics is Progress. For example, Kepler and his assistant's calculated observations of the planets, mathematicians dedicating their lives to figuring out n-many decimal places of logarithms and creating reference books, and also equations and derivations. Although maths may somehow "exist" naturally because a set of equations or a set of inferences or physical phenomena may have a mathematical representation, they still need to be discovered (and often re-discovered) to stick around and be of any use to us. To me it still echoes of the personal mission of understanding and critical thinking -- one must come to the solution on their own and verify it in their personal experience to truly feel it and know it to be truthful.
Would you categorize maths as more of an invention or as a discovery? Pure discovery would imply that maths exists on its own like a tree does (or "might" if we consider that a perceiving consciousness must also be part of the 'tree'). Whereas, an invention is something deliberately put together to solve a functional need in the life of man.
Nietzsche solved philosophy; everything since has been quibbling over semantics, there is no original thought anymore. Whereas physics’ Nietzsche was Newton, and there have been continuous advances since his time.
Maybe in the sense the Von Braun solved rocketry. I agree that everything that has come since have been refinements to Nietzsche's developments (dare I say models) but those refinements have brought about the real-world application of philosophy more than Nietzsche ever did.
See Mao, or Popper, or even though I can't stand the guy Chomsky.
Nietzsche and Wittgenstein worked to show many (most) of then current philosophical problems weren't. Bias and language were such a big part of problems that when substracting them, they were rendered hollow. So the subject, as it was until XIX century, could very well be called a problem and yes, it was solved.
Sure, if you totally reframe the entirety of what it means "to solve philosophy" to mean what you said, then gaius's comment makes sense.
I'm not sure I agree that solving a lot of the then/now "problems" with philosophy is the same as solving the entire field of philosophy. Especially since it requires mobile goalposts.
Also, it's a hilarious and an absurd claim "x Solved Philosophy" because that's like saying "Tony Hawk solved the skateboard." Perhaps Tony Hawk is great at skateboarding, but you can never personally know what it's like until you try yourself. Philosophy is not something that can be solved by someone outside of yourself, not even Nietzsche can wipe away your ignorance, only you can do that for yourself.
No. I suppose when you say "nothing" you're talking about philosophical propositions, which can be mapped to computer programs. In which case we can note that (1) the vast majority of programs have never been generated before by any process and (2) the vast majority of possible programs cannot be reduced to simpler programs that might have been expressed earlier.
Who said anything about computers? The whole universe is in a constant state of Recycling. Remember that old adage "energy/matter cannot be created nor destroyed?"
I recall someone (Eliezer Yudkowsky?) writing an essay with the thesis that a couple of millennia of epistemology did not foresee the epistemic issues raised by quantum mechanics.
