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Meaningless study is meaningless. There are so many complete breakdowns of basic logic here that it makes my head spin. >>> Prejudice against older programmer

Meaningless study is meaningless. There are so many complete breakdowns of basic logic here that it makes my head spin. >>> Prejudice against older programmers is wrong, but new research suggests it's also inaccurate. Setting aside the issue at hand for a second, I want to point out that holding some true belief is neither morally right nor morally wrong, it is just the state of being correct. I think most of us would agree being correct is always preferable to being incorrect. Yet here the author claims that believing something can be morally wrong even if it is a true belief? That's a little weird. >>> A dandy natural experiment to test the technical chops of the old against the young has been conducted—or discovered—by two computer scientists at North Carolina State University, in Raleigh. Professor Emerson Murphy-Hill and Ph.D. student Patrick Morrison went to Stack Overflow, a Web site where programmers answer questions and get rated by the audience. It turned out that ratings rose with contributors' age... No. Just no. I see no reason to accept the assumption that how high your score is on stack overflow relates in any meaningful way to how effective you are at computer programming. For example, if I took two programmers who were equal in every way, except that one spends the entire workday on stack overflow and the other works very hard all day, the one that has the lower stack overflow score is far more effective. I see no reason to accept the assumption that stack overflow is in any way representative of the programming community in any way. It is a self selected group of people that may or may not be employed as programmers. This isn't a study, it's a joke. The fact is, the quality of any individual programmer increases with age and experience. However, the average quality of all programmers of a given age decreases above some age. How are these two facts both true? People get promoted out of being programmers all the time, but very few people become programmers past a certain age. People become managers, consultants, executives, entrepreneurs.

derleth 13y ago
> Yet here the author claims that believing something can be morally wrong even if it is a true belief? This is entirely consonant with deontological ethics, as I understand it. http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/ethics-deontological/ http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/ethics-deontological/ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deontological_ethics http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deontological_ethics > the quality of any individual programmer increases with age and experience. Until senility and other age-related infirmities set in, especially ones that negatively impact the ability to concentrate, remember details, visualize problems, and express concepts in symbolic form.
- ido 13y ago
  Until senility and other age-related infirmities set in, especially ones that negatively impact the ability to concentrate, remember details, visualize problems, and express concepts in symbolic form. We're not talking about 80 year old programmers here, there's age discrimination against people in their 40s too.
mathattack 13y ago
I agree, it was painful reading the study. There are 100 other explanations for scores that disallow speculation that you can correlate it to age and expect a meaningful result. I really hope this wasn't published in a peer reviewed journal.
jleader 13y ago
>>> Yet here the author claims that believing something can be morally wrong even if it is a true belief? No, the author is claiming that belief in a statement can be morally wrong in the absence of definitive proof or disproof of that statement. In other words, morality can tell us how to treat a statement whose truth or falsehood we don't yet know. The author is saying "if we didn't know whether older programmers are better or worse than younger programmers, it would be morally wrong to discriminate against them; however, new research says that prejudice isn't just morally wrong, it's also mistaken." But you're right, the idea of using Stack Overflow scores as a proxy for programming skill seems a bit sloppy. On the other hand, do you have any evidence for "the average quality of all programmers of a given age decreases above some age"? I'm not convinced that promotion out of being a programmer is that strongly correlated with programming ability. But I may be biased, as an older programmer who's tried (with gradually decreasing success) to avoid all managerial responsibility.

derleth 13y ago

> Yet here the author claims that believing something can be morally wrong even if it is a true belief? This is entirely consonant with deontological ethics, as I understand it. http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/ethics-deontological/ http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/ethics-deontological/ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deontological_ethics http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deontological_ethics > the quality of any individual programmer increases with age and experience. Until senility and other age-related infirmities set in, especially ones that negatively impact the ability to concentrate, remember details, visualize problems, and express concepts in symbolic form.

ido 13y ago
Until senility and other age-related infirmities set in, especially ones that negatively impact the ability to concentrate, remember details, visualize problems, and express concepts in symbolic form. We're not talking about 80 year old programmers here, there's age discrimination against people in their 40s too.

mathattack 13y ago

I agree, it was painful reading the study. There are 100 other explanations for scores that disallow speculation that you can correlate it to age and expect a meaningful result. I really hope this wasn't published in a peer reviewed journal.

jleader 13y ago

>>> Yet here the author claims that believing something can be morally wrong even if it is a true belief? No, the author is claiming that belief in a statement can be morally wrong in the absence of definitive proof or disproof of that statement. In other words, morality can tell us how to treat a statement whose truth or falsehood we don't yet know. The author is saying "if we didn't know whether older programmers are better or worse than younger programmers, it would be morally wrong to discriminate against them; however, new research says that prejudice isn't just morally wrong, it's also mistaken." But you're right, the idea of using Stack Overflow scores as a proxy for programming skill seems a bit sloppy. On the other hand, do you have any evidence for "the average quality of all programmers of a given age decreases above some age"? I'm not convinced that promotion out of being a programmer is that strongly correlated with programming ability. But I may be biased, as an older programmer who's tried (with gradually decreasing success) to avoid all managerial responsibility.