Erik McClure

Our ancestors weren’t stupid. They were trying to find some kind of logical progression of cause-and-effect, but they lived in epistemic hell. This is why cargo-cult programming exists. This is why urban legends persist. This is why parents simply want their children to do as they say. This is why we have youtubers chastising NASA for not reading their own Apollo 11 postmortem. This is why corporate procedures emphasize checking boxes instead of critically examining the problem. When your cause-and-effect chain is a hundred steps long and caused by something 5 years ago, economic pressure incentivizes simply trying to avoid blame instead of trying to find the actual systemic problem. The farther up the chain of management a problem is, the longer it takes for the effects to be felt, and the worse we get at finding the root cause. Software engineering has the same issue, where incompetence may only cause performance issues years later, after the original coder has left, and the system has scaled up beyond a critical breaking point. This is why we still don’t know how to hire programmers.

When introducing myself, I am always clear that, most of the time, I am either busy, or trying to be busy. Everything to me is work, everything that makes me proud of myself is work, everything in my future will, hopefully, be more work. The entire concept of retiring to me is madness. I never want to stop working.

This is often mistaken as an unhealthy obsession with work, which is not entirely true. I am not torturing myself every day for 10 hours just so I can prove myself, I’m doing exactly what I want to do.

They’re teaching it wrong.

And I don’t just mean teaching the concepts incorrectly (although they do plenty of that), I mean their teaching priorities are completely backwards. Set Theory is really fun. Basic Set Theory can be taught to someone without them needing to know how to add or subtract. We teach kids Venn Diagrams but never teach them all the fun operators that go with them? Why not? You say they won’t understand? Bullshit. If we can teach third graders binary, we can teach them set theory.

We take forever to get around to teaching algebra to kids, because its considered difficult. If something is a difficult conceptual leap, then you don’t want to delay it, you want to introduce the concepts as early as possible.