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You are misinterpreting what the paper said and what I am saying in order to oil the axe you are grinding. First, one can dispute “programming ability is distr

You are misinterpreting what the paper said and what I am saying in order to oil the axe you are grinding. First, one can dispute “programming ability is distributed in two humps” without implying that “everyone can program.” Second, your proposition isn’t even a consistent proposition. If programming talent really is rare, then being egalitarian won’t have any effect on wages: Some people can, some cannot, and the free market will quickly sort out that you cannot build pyramids with thousands of unskilled programmers. If wages are stagnant, one possible explanation is that more people can program than you would care to admit. Which explains why you are ranting about spreading the myth that programming ability makes you a special, delicate flower. If you can socially engineer people into not becoming programmers, you believe there will be more money for you. What you fail to realize is that as an industry, “a rising tide lifts all boats.” The more talented people there are, the larger the pie we get to share. More programmers equals more software, equals more tools, equals more companies, equals more hardware, equals more demand for software, and so it goes until software has finished eating the world and it becomes a mature, stagnant industry. If you feel your wages are not rising as quickly as you like, perhaps you should look into other possible causes, such as a lack of skill in negotiation, or choosing to be an employee instead of an entrepreneur, or wage-fixing by companies with no-hire policies, or the practice of handing out paper stock options in lieu of cash for startup employees.

MustardTiger 11y ago
>First, one can dispute “programming ability is distributed in two humps” without implying that “everyone can program.” Yes, but people are disputing “programming ability is distributed in two humps” despite there being clear evidence of that being the case, and no evidence to contradict it. The distribution has not changed, or been retracted. Only the unsupported notion that the distribution is innate and unchangable.
- braythwayt 11y ago
  I am not responsible for explaining to you what "people" are saying, whether they are right or wrong. Please cite this "clear evidence" you speak of.
  - MustardTiger 11y ago
    I did not ask you to explain anything. I said your explanation is not representative of what is happening. And the clear evidence is the paper in question. Read the "retraction". They do not suggest the bimodal distribution is incorrect, but that they should not have suggested it was inherent and unchangable, when the evidence does not support that.
    - hyperpape 11y ago
      His test is not a very good predictor: most of those who appear to use a model in the pre-course test pass the end-of-course exam but so do many of those who do not. And it doesn’t predict the level of performance, as we discovered when we tried some deeper statistical analysis (Bornat et al., 2008). But the phenomenon is real and the prediction it makes is reproducible, as Dehnadi showed in a meta-analysis in his thesis (Dehnadi, 2009). That meta-analysis is summarised in (Dehnadi et al., 2009). But that’s not all. It’s not enough to summarise the scientific result, because I wrote and web-circulated “The camel has two humps” in 2006. That document was very misleading and, because web documents persist, it continues to mislead to this day. I need to make an explicit retraction of much of what it claimed. Dehnadi didn’t discover a programming aptitude test. He didn’t find a way of dividing programming sheep from non-programming goats. We hadn’t shown that nature trumps nurture. He had, however, found a predictive phenomenon, though he had no explanation of it. How do you read these paragraphs, or what part of the retraction supports the "two humps" claim and how do you understand that claim?
      - MustardTiger 11y ago
        I don't know how I could make it any clearer than what you quoted. What do you think "But the phenomenon is real and the prediction it makes is reproducible, as Dehnadi showed in a meta-analysis in his thesis" means? Or "We hadn’t shown that nature trumps nurture. He had, however, found a predictive phenomenon, though he had no explanation of it."?

MustardTiger 11y ago

>First, one can dispute “programming ability is distributed in two humps” without implying that “everyone can program.” Yes, but people are disputing “programming ability is distributed in two humps” despite there being clear evidence of that being the case, and no evidence to contradict it. The distribution has not changed, or been retracted. Only the unsupported notion that the distribution is innate and unchangable.

braythwayt 11y ago
I am not responsible for explaining to you what "people" are saying, whether they are right or wrong. Please cite this "clear evidence" you speak of.
- MustardTiger 11y ago
  I did not ask you to explain anything. I said your explanation is not representative of what is happening. And the clear evidence is the paper in question. Read the "retraction". They do not suggest the bimodal distribution is incorrect, but that they should not have suggested it was inherent and unchangable, when the evidence does not support that.
  - hyperpape 11y ago
    His test is not a very good predictor: most of those who appear to use a model in the pre-course test pass the end-of-course exam but so do many of those who do not. And it doesn’t predict the level of performance, as we discovered when we tried some deeper statistical analysis (Bornat et al., 2008). But the phenomenon is real and the prediction it makes is reproducible, as Dehnadi showed in a meta-analysis in his thesis (Dehnadi, 2009). That meta-analysis is summarised in (Dehnadi et al., 2009). But that’s not all. It’s not enough to summarise the scientific result, because I wrote and web-circulated “The camel has two humps” in 2006. That document was very misleading and, because web documents persist, it continues to mislead to this day. I need to make an explicit retraction of much of what it claimed. Dehnadi didn’t discover a programming aptitude test. He didn’t find a way of dividing programming sheep from non-programming goats. We hadn’t shown that nature trumps nurture. He had, however, found a predictive phenomenon, though he had no explanation of it. How do you read these paragraphs, or what part of the retraction supports the "two humps" claim and how do you understand that claim?
    - MustardTiger 11y ago
      I don't know how I could make it any clearer than what you quoted. What do you think "But the phenomenon is real and the prediction it makes is reproducible, as Dehnadi showed in a meta-analysis in his thesis" means? Or "We hadn’t shown that nature trumps nurture. He had, however, found a predictive phenomenon, though he had no explanation of it."?