site banner
naraburns  nihil supernum  2yr ago (text post)   36252 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of October 3, 2022

This weekly roundup thread is intended for all culture war posts. 'Culture war' is vaguely defined, but it basically means controversial issues that fall along set tribal lines. Arguments over culture war issues generate a lot of heat and little light, and few deeply entrenched people ever change their minds. This thread is for voicing opinions and analyzing the state of the discussion while trying to optimize for light over heat.

Optimistically, we think that engaging with people you disagree with is worth your time, and so is being nice! Pessimistically, there are many dynamics that can lead discussions on Culture War topics to become unproductive. There's a human tendency to divide along tribal lines, praising your ingroup and vilifying your outgroup - and if you think you find it easy to criticize your ingroup, then it may be that your outgroup is not who you think it is. Extremists with opposing positions can feed off each other, highlighting each other's worst points to justify their own angry rhetoric, which becomes in turn a new example of bad behavior for the other side to highlight.

We would like to avoid these negative dynamics. Accordingly, we ask that you do not use this thread for waging the Culture War. Examples of waging the Culture War:

  • Shaming.

  • Attempting to 'build consensus' or enforce ideological conformity.

  • Making sweeping generalizations to vilify a group you dislike.

  • Recruiting for a cause.

  • Posting links that could be summarized as 'Boo outgroup!' Basically, if your content is 'Can you believe what Those People did this week?' then you should either refrain from posting, or do some very patient work to contextualize and/or steel-man the relevant viewpoint.

In general, you should argue to understand, not to win. This thread is not territory to be claimed by one group or another; indeed, the aim is to have many different viewpoints represented here. Thus, we also ask that you follow some guidelines:

  • Speak plainly. Avoid sarcasm and mockery. When disagreeing with someone, state your objections explicitly.

  • Be as precise and charitable as you can. Don't paraphrase unflatteringly.

  • Don't imply that someone said something they did not say, even if you think it follows from what they said.

  • Write like everyone is reading and you want them to be included in the discussion.

On an ad hoc basis, the mods will try to compile a list of the best posts/comments from the previous week, posted in Quality Contribution threads and archived at /r/TheThread. You may nominate a comment for this list by clicking on 'report' at the bottom of the post and typing 'Actually a quality contribution' as the report reason.

24
Top Bottom Old Controversial Comments
Jump in the discussion.

No email address required.

Please just tell me where you think white people are supposed to live

A friend of mine (white, very left-leaning) recently made an offhand remark that the large US city they live in is has "sooo many white people" upon discovering that said city is roughly 50% white. By the way they said it, it was clearly meant as a complaint. Knowing this person pretty well, this was about par for the course for them so I just ignored it, but I've heard similar things from other friends and it seems to be a general theme on the left in the US lately that there are too many white people everywhere, in a country comprised of 60-75% white people (depending on how you define it) as of the most recent census estimates [1]. I've heard this about cities, and I've heard it about rural areas in the form of "Yikes, I'd never live in {rural area}, too white". Importantly, I often hear the claim absent any other explanation of why that is intrinsically bad. Being somewhat progressive myself, I definitely recognize the impact on city demographics of slavery and redlining inflicted by white populations. I just don't see why the remedy is then to complain about the actual number of white people themselves, since in cities people in general are more progressive and therefore likely to vote for policies that work to alleviate long-lasting effects of racial injustice.

As someone who doesn't have a preference for an exact racial makeup in the place they live, but generally likes places that embrace multiculturalism like many large US cities do, I don't know what the reasoning behind such a complaint is, or what anyone who takes it seriously would like to see done about it. I'd like to hear from other progressive people what the steelman version of this is. For one thing, it is a basic fact of statistics that with a population of 60-75% white people, you shouldn't be surprised to find a city with roughly 50% white people. Second, do these people realize what scenario we'd end up in if they were to get what they seem to be advocating for (have all the white people move out of whatever area they're in)? Taken to the extreme, you get one area with all the white people and then 0 white people everywhere else, by definition what white nationalists advocate for, not to mention something I and everyone else who isn't a white nationalist finds detestable. This becomes even more confusing when the person complaining is white, by I'll chalk that up to just plain old stupidity.

More concretely, if a white progressive like my friend wants to act on their dissatisfaction and move to a place with far fewer white people, they are increasing the new place's white population and becoming part of the problem that made them relocate in the first place. What is the reasoning here? They get a pass on being white due to their progressive bona-fides? What are they even trying to signal? If we chalk it up to virtue signaling, why not just advocate for better/more just zoning and housing policy? I realize this post is heavy on me sharing anecdotes from my friend group, but I've heard it enough times now that I felt like I had to finally ask.

[1] https://www.census.gov/quickfacts/fact/table/US/PST045221

Maybe it’s just me but I think the right to exist should not be a trivial part of one’s political identity. Enoch Powell, an ultra-conservative politician famously said he’d fight for his country even if it were communist (politics come and go, people remain). If it’s become casual to bemoan your existence among your faction, maybe you should consider defecting?

Have you considered that there may simply not be a coherent theory of mind behind the complaint "too many white people"? It's a socially acceptable(to extreme progressives) way of phrasing several different complaints, which could be "place is boring and needs better food or nightlife", "place is full of red tribers and I don't like it", or "place is too expensive to afford".

I just had a conversation like this with a friend. She was convinced the city she's lived in for years was 90% white. Spoiler: It was less than half (non-Hispanic) white. I think she was used to being in Southern cities which are plurality black, but still; that is an impressive amount to be wrong by.

I think black populations punch above their weight in terms of making a city feel diverse, if that makes sense.

Diverse might as well mean 'has lots of black people' at this point; but, no one wants to say the quiet part loud.

That would mean that California isn't considered diverse, which doesn't seem to work.

It depends also how whiteness is defined, which can be anything but straightforward. You can probably double your white population just by relaxing a bit the criteria of who is white.

I used to hear it a lot, enough to consider it a symptom of profound memetic infection, and to distance myself from the people who say it.

I'm not a progressive but I suppose the steelman would be that in the progressive view, white people are intrinsically racist and possessed of certain unconscious biases and living in an area with a lot of white people would lead someone to encounter these instances of racism and bias more often, which isn't pleasant even if they aren't directed towards them. It may also lead white people in these areas to vote for less progressive policies and make the place less progressive as a whole. Even if true though, I suspect some other demographics may hold non-progressive sentiments at an even higher rate. I'd expect a city with a large urban black population or many devout Muslims to have more sexists and homophobes for example, although admittedly that's a guess.

Anyway, if you don't mind me asking have you ever asked your friend if they can see how this sort of rhetoric would turn people away from progressivism? It just baffles me how progressives will say things like this and then wonder why people become "anti-woke" or put it all down to them being racist and too attached to their privilege, not wanting to give it up.

I’ve heard this a lot as well. I think in some sense it makes sense if you aren’t white and want to be around a decent amount of other people who aren’t white. But it’s uncomfortable and an example of why I find progressivism problematic that saying things like this are normalized. I live in a very progressive area of a very progressive city and, as a white guy, it’s weird and uncomfortable to hear shit like this and I don’t know how to respond to it, but have gotten ripped for responding nonetheless.

Doesn’t entirely answer your question, but I think the answer is that many people on the far left are straight up more than a bit self loathing. I recently read a study that studies partisans based on different attributes and that was one finding, but I can’t find it. In this case my best guess is it was nothing more or less than a virtue signal in the purest sense.

I think the fair response here is to ask your friend something along the lines of 'exactly what percentage of white people would be ideal for this city?'. And if you're feeling trollish, ask if they would apply the same percentage to, say, Tokyo or Kinshasa. Would be interesting to hear what the response is - at best you'd get them to articulate their reasoning.

White people move in - Gentrification

White people move out - White Flight

White people stay where they are - Segregation/xenophobia

White people move somewhere else - Colonization

Few progressives will say it, but 'ol Willy Ockham's shaving implements point to a direct and explanatory answer.

What’s so weird to me is that everyone I know who complains the most about gentrification lives in heavily gentrified areas.

Why is that weird? I think it's natural that people would complain about a problem that they see around them every day - even if they are part of it. I don't think it's hypocritical to complain about the length of a queue that you're standing in, for example.

The only reason gentrified communities exist is that there is demand for them. In living in one of those communities you are generating demand for them, and thus providing further incentive for communities to be gentrified.

It's like claiming that killing animals for food is unethical but also eating meat regularly.

Complaining about the length of a queue does not imply that the people in the queue are ultimately responsible for the queue. They are only participants as fellow victims, even if literally speaking the queue wouldn't exist without them.

People complaining about gentrification don't think that white people are unintentional victims of gentrification forced to gentrify out of necessity.

I'm sure people who live in areas that are in the process of being gentrified (higher expenses, higher rents) might have a lot to say on the subject.

It would be silly to complain about it if you moved there recently though.

That's what I mean. For the record, I think gentrification is often used as a pejorative for a community being developed, and the issue is a lot more nuanced than it is regarded as being.

As an educated adult, I am required to refer to "projection", but the true underlying principle is "He who smelled it, dealt it".

because they feel as if some wealthy owner of a Midwestern chain of car dealerships (or a UES banker) taking his wife on a shopping trip will disrupt their romantic fantasy of a weekend in Paris?

This is the best reply in this comment thread. A lot of white people (and I'm sure some others) maintain a kind of colonial fantasy about their relations with Black (et al) people. They expect to show up and simply from showing up and being friendly to the Blacks (unlike those other, bad whites) they'll be welcomed as Mighty Whitey From TV Tropes, emphasis mine:

All this is a setup for the white man to adapt to the Native's ways, thereby making him superior both to the natives and the Europeans back home... One particular version has it so that the sympathetic Author Avatar whitey is not only now the Great White Hope for the non-white Noble Savages, but is very often defending them from other evil whites.

The musical Hairspray and the subreddit /r/hiphopheads would be my first cultural examples. Both filled with white characters who think they're special because they really appreciate Black people/culture, in a way other people don't. But that idea only even conceptually works if you're one of a few white American pioneers in your otherwise out of the way ethnic neighborhood/vacation spot. When it starts filling with other gentrifiers exactly like you, you have to realize you're not special. Like if Tom Cruise in The Last Samurai or Kevin Costner in Dances with Wolves got to the secret native army to find it filled with dozens of other white dudes doing the same thing. Would really ruin the specialness of the protagonist.

This is insightful, but only part of the larger issue. The upper-middle class has to distinguish itself from the lower-middle class, and spouting racism about what they believe the lower-middle class looks like is an easy way to do it. Of course, the lower-middle class is a lot less white than the upper, so they're essentially slagging the proles for what they themselves are doing.

There is no actionable goal in that statement, particularly not if it's coming from a white person. Your friend was uttering the signals they did in order to remain part of and have high standing in their chosen group. The only useful thing you can take away from this is to know that this belies an inherent resentment to a group you (and he) are also part of.

I've heard this too from my left-leaning friends (complaining that the suburbs and outskirts are disconcerting because they have too many white people and too little diversity) and thought it was... ridiculous. Yes, North America does indeed have a predominantly white population, and any large immigrant population is inevitably going to be in the cities. It's not as if the outskirts are going to be filled with immigrants pursuing the luxurious dream of working on a farm in Manitoba.

While I'm not in the least progressive, you asked for a steelman, so I'll try to provide one. The only possible way I can think of to steelman this and try to defend it as a legitimate complaint is that their surface-level aesthetic objection to predominantly-white areas seems to be based on a deeper underlying belief that areas that are insufficiently diverse are also going to be insufficiently accepting and welcoming, and thus won't align with their values system. Thus they don't like it.

Of course, even if I accept this premise it's not hard to see how this logic is only ever selectively applied against whites - these criticisms will absolutely never be levelled at neighbourhoods made up of black people or Hispanics (who as a group exhibit a more severe racial in-group bias than whites do), and for the most part they won't level this criticism at countries which are more monoethnic than the West either (e.g. China) as long as these countries' populations are primarily made up of PoC especially since going to Asia and complaining about how the demographics are just too yellow is something that would likely make them very uncomfortable.

It's quite clear that many leftists expect whites to take every step conceivable to make sure they are racially conscious and accepting (even if this would entail completely overhauling their countries' demographics in furtherance of this aim), and this onus will never get placed on other races. It's just hypocrisy to the extreme, in my opinion, and their standards for white people are so much more stringent than any other group of people out there it's almost farcical.

these criticisms will absolutely never be levelled at neighbourhoods made up of black people or Hispanics

To be fair, these people never actually live in majority-minority places. I almost never see these people in places like the Bronx that are absolutely dominated by minorities. They just know places like Brooklyn or whatever. I might be damning them through faint praise here. I don't know.

Also, to be fair to these minorities, I actually have lived in the Bronx as a white person, and minorities are generally pretty nice to me. It's other minorities that they are biased against.

Also, to be fair to these minorities, I actually have lived in the Bronx as a white person, and minorities are generally pretty nice to me. It's other minorities that they are biased against.

Well, to be correspondingly fair to white people, I'm an Asian immigrant to a Western country. My assessment is that white people are generally nice to me as well, both in the cities and the outskirts (and this holds regardless of the racial composition of the area). In my opinion, the entire idea of "too white = prejudiced" should be thrown out in the first place, but if we're applying these principles, we should be applying them fairly across the board.

"Yikes, too white" is in fact a dumb meme. By itself, there isn't really a way to steelman it, any more than you can meaningfully steelman "keep the government out of my social security" or whatever. Some memes are just really stupid for how catchy they are.

Memetically or genetically, pure fork-in-the-socket stupidity is not adaptive. Generally speaking, if you see people doing something dumb, it's either because you don't fully understand what they're doing, or because you don't fully understand how they came to be doing it. I think it's surprisingly rare for people to do things for no intelligible reason at all.

I think the proper approach here is to keep stepping up the meta-levels until you get to something solid. This meme works because Blue tribe people care about race in a general sense. Blue tribe people care about race in a general sense, because to a first approximation all Americans care about race in a general sense. Race is relevant to our politics in a way it simply wasn't in, say, 1990 - 2010, and appears to be growing more and more relevant over time. This happened for specific reasons, and the reasons bear discussion in a way the ground-level dumb meme doesn't. If you want some interesting exploration, I'd recommend starting from there and seeing where the history leads you.

Second, do these people realize what scenario we'd end up in if they were to get what they seem to be advocating for (have all the white people move out of whatever area they're in)?

I don't think any of them are thinking all the white people should go in one spot. To the extent that this is a problem, mass immigration will solve it, and while the meme may be dumb, it nonetheless serves basic interests for the tribe that is pushing mass immigration. The broader pattern explains the meme's fitness, its relevance, in a way taking the meme itself at face value does not. The reducto you propose isn't actually relevant.

What are they even trying to signal?

"Whiteness bad, diversity good". It's not complicated, and unlike the dumb meme, it can be steelmanned. Whether the steelman is persuasive is another question; certainly many seem to find it so.

deleted

It’s not actually possible for the social security trust fund to be saved. There’s no realistic way for the government to transfer that amount of money to be saved today and available tomorrow. The government controls the money supply. Their decisions effect the price of all financial assets and investing it in stocks would distort all market prices.

A small country could actually save the money by investing in larger economies without distorting prices. Switzerland does this. The US can’t.

In defense of the social security situation, what safe assets is the government supposed to buy? There is nothing safer than US government bonds, which are funded by future tax revenues. Buying foreign or corporate bonds could make sense at the margin, but it opens you up to a lot of risk.

For a large, closed economy like the USA whose inability to collect taxes would not just mean the downfall of its own economy, but the whole world order, I don't think anything else makes sense but relying on your taxation powers.

You could argue that the government should borrow less in general, but that is a separate issue from Social Security.

Yeah, I was going to make a similar point.

So, Social Security has a lot of money, right? What are they supposed to do, put it in a giant mattress and sit on it? No, if they can safely pick up even a few percentage points of return, they should . . . and, well, the safest place to put the money is US Government bonds.

Not just objectively (it is objectively the safest place, but besides that), but because the only way those bonds aren't getting paid back is if the US Government implodes. And if that happens, the entire social security system is dead anyway. So it's not picking up any added risk, just getting some absolutely free percentage points of yearly returns.

There are certainly criticisms one can make of this setup, but "the US social security system has a synergistic risk-free financial relationship with the rest of the US government" isn't one of them.

It doesn't really matter if they put it into US treasuries or cash those are just government liabilities the same as the liabilities the Social Security administration has to it's members. That is my point. The fact US treasuries pay a few percent interest over cash doesn't matter, because the Federal Government is paying money from it's right pocket to it's left.

The only thing that would matter to it's position would be if it offloaded risk or earned interest from some other entity than itself.

My gut reaction is to laugh at the notion the same way I laugh at the people who say mosquitoes have "a jewish character".

Whites are low status in America right now for a bunch of reasons that are mostly ideological and cultural but likely don't enter into your buddy's reasoning. He just correctly identifies this fact and bemoans that he has to live in a city full of low status people, which, by way of consequence, makes him low status as well.

In another time he would have complained about having to live "among niggers", for exactly the same reasons.

Why can't he be instead in a "vibrant" and "diverse" neighborhood, that is, one that exhalts the values of the elite and is therefore a sign that he's doing well and is close to the values of the ruling class (and therefore, to power and prestige). If he were a better man, he could afford all this symbolic luxury.

This racist disdain is particularly absurd, but it's really not that much different or less boneheaded than contempt for the "bunch of hicks" that also make the majority of one's countrymen. And again I think laughter is the right response to these eternal prejudices.

I'd like to hear from other progressive people what the steelman version of this is.

You're not going to get that here, the number of progressives is countable on one hand.

In any case, the words are largely empty. Talking about a place being too white is similar to doing some kind of land acknowledgment - a perfunctory thing that, after all this time, has no bearing on how they actually act. It's just another phrase you throw around without considering what it actually implies.

The traditional SSC response would be something about ingroup and outgroup and how when they say “white people” this is code for red tribe white people aka bad white people unlike themselves. I do not believe this. I believe there is a legitimate undercurrent of self hatred and suicidality to a lot of left-leaning beliefs. I believe the honest answer would be that white people should (ideally voluntarily) just die out.

They want to stay ‘on top’, live their comfortable lives with zero real changes, they just want to feel better about it.

Agree, and actually I wonder if some of the fervor behind the push for diversity and equity is to pull the ladder up behind them, to prevent meritocratic challengers from coming from behind and pushing them harder on the rat race. They're not gonna give up their jobs, but they're gonna give up the jobs of the equally talented people who would otherwise be hired after them.

PMC progressive whites advocate literally nothing that (they believe) would actually hurt themselves in the medium term (at least according to their own beliefs; complexities around the long term effects of eg. mass immigration and defunded police don’t feature in their political imagination).

You said it yourself. What kind of people stand by and cheer on their racial demographic replacement in their own countries? Can you cite other historical examples where demographic replacement wasn't the result of conquest, colonization, or atrocity? And that it was cheered on by the natives? The "too many white people" is just another expression of the same ideology that leads them to cheer on their own demographic replacement, and it's not just signaling. It's anti-white and has real-world implications.

You are influenced by this ideology such that you can't see very much wrong with this extremely unusual pattern of behavior or the real-world implications of its existence.

If instead of "too many white people", the fashionable statement was "too many brown people", you wouldn't say that they were signaling. Your downplaying of anti-white rhetoric and self-hatred is just another expression of this phenomenon.

Accepting real-world demographic displacement is the ultimate, real, terminal impact of that kind of psychology.

Amen. When someone tells you they hate you -- or themselves -- listen to them. When White progressives say something anti-White, they mean precisely that. Nihilistic self-loathing is the norm among them.

They’d donate more than 2% of their income to BLM - hell, they should do what the hardcore EA people do and give everything except their basic living requirements to BLM.

If that's your bar, no one believes anything.

They want to stay ‘on top’, live their comfortable lives with zero real changes, they just want to feel better about it.

Implies they feel bad , which was westerly's point.

The crux is that acknowledgement is very different from return; when the government of BC actually gives Vancouver island back to the Natives, then you can talk about white progressives actually hating themselves enough to give it all up.

They've demonstrated their commitment by pouring billions into underperforming minorities' programs in the last decades. There is no substantial difference between what they've been doing and handing a few indians vast amounts of land and money directly.

I believe there is a legitimate undercurrent of self hatred and suicidality to a lot of left-leaning beliefs.

Specifically when talking about antinatalism by way of climate change, though I swear that's more a way for people to cope with the fact that they choose temporary happiness over parenthood.

I believe the honest answer would be that white people should (ideally voluntarily) just die out.

Now among my natalist leftwing friends, I don't think 'die out' is really the right way to look at it. If all the white people have kids with nonwhite folks (as those friends have) is anyone or anything really dying out?

Specifically when talking about antinatalism by way of climate change, though I swear that's more a way for people to cope with the fact that they choose temporary happiness over parenthood.

I once had a single hippie mom say that to me outright. "I never wanted kids because of climate change but ah you know that's just an excuse."

Not necessarily representative (though I believe it is), but I was surprised to hear it spoken out loud.

If all the white people have kids with nonwhite folks (as those friends have) is anyone or anything really dying out?

I think this sentiment is only possible if you are convinced that there is no chance that your culture could die out or become unrecognisable.

Would anything be lost or die out if, in a collective fit of insanity, Japan decided to integrate - and intermarry fully - into the People’s Republic of China as a province? I imagine there would be a good amount of indigenous culture that would be discontinued. Of course, such forms of integration aren’t the only possible way cultures can irrevocably change or “die”, but I imagine it would be a pretty big shift with pretty monumental losses.

(Whether any particular instance of cultural “death”, like a language dying, is something to be regretted depends on your values, I suppose.)

If all the Uyghurs are having kids with Han, is it really genocide?

If it was by choice and not force, sure.

Wait, hold on. We've done a verbal sleight of hand here: you went from "is anyone really dying out?" to "is anyone being genocided?". I don't blame you, that's the phrase IGI mistakenly used, but let's rewind.

Consensual or not, if all the Uyghurs have kids with Han, are the Uyghurs dying out?

I don't think you can look at the situation without taking into account who's deciding to do what, but in either case, no, I don't think 'dying out' would be an appropriate way to describe the situation even if 'genocide' might well be.

I also think that there's an additional set of unstated assumptions: that the Han parent is going to pass on their culture while the Uyghur isn't, and I think that's something you can't just gloss over because that's emphatically not happening to mixed race US families.

Well that's one question I suppose. I'm sure there's a lot of different viewpoints as to whether unrestrained immigration counts as chosen or imposed for instance.

Plenty of people intent on destroying white as an identity and doing so against the wishes of at least some people though. Virulent advocates of that even.

I'm not one to care much for collective identities, since I remain despite my best efforts a rootless cosmopolitan, but it strikes me that every argument made to justify the oppression of whites magically becomes unacceptable when you swap them out for brown people or the Jews.

It just doesn't make sense that "the great replacement is okay actually", but "open borders for Israel" isn't. And that's just weird.

is anyone or anything really dying out?

There exist a rare plant called Catalina Mahogany that, because it hybridizes with its common relative the Mountain Mahogany, requires humans to preserve and continue its pure specimens.

I just can't rationalize the idea of people being wiped out when their line will continue for generations to come. I don't understand what's being 'lost' if my kids were mixed race instead of white. They're still mine and isn't that what's important?

Then I suppose you don't believe in significant biological differences between races?

I don't think vitamin D production differences are significant in the modern world with all year round availability of vitamin D containing foods plus most foods already come fortified with vitamin and supplements are cheap.

Significant differences would be in the different tolerance of environment, psychological aspects to thrive in society or make career and succeed. Maybe there are some differences in these things too but I don't think they are significant either because currently most social differences can be explained by culture and traditions rather than race or ethnicity.

It seems human intuition considers diversity for the sake of diversity to be an end.

Say I thought Hitler was bad for merely murdering so many people. That doesn't account for his attempted genocide which was to wipe a population away. The fact that his attempt at genocide involved killing is rather tangential. Charitably, his implementation of killing at such scale is the reason why he's the western example of evil.

We see this in non-political contexts with the designation of endangered species. Killing authorized game for food or sport is of course OK; but killing a member of an endangered species is not OK. Because these aren't human, and of course this isn't done at scale, this isn't anything like genocide, but why even bother saving species like this? Diversity is an end to us.

The U.N. considers it genocide to destroy a people group (even in part). So someone could implement genocide without actual killing, which would involve restricting births or whatever. You're fine to consider this nowhere near as bad as Hitler's mass-murder.

But, if (and maybe you don't) one considers Hitler's genocide made mass murder worse, then implementing genocide using non-murderous means is still genocide.

It's not that it's diversity, at least with endangered species, it's the finality of it. If you wipe out the last one (or nearly the last one), the entire species can be gone forever. If you kill an extra deer, there's lots more elsewhere. In some sense, deer are fungible (a sentence I didn't think I'd ever write).

It's less clear to me, but I'd also say Hitler was extra bad because he targeted innocent people for something they had no say in, AND he was trying to wipe out entire groups (that hadn't done anything to him). There's something hateful about that, and I think it's more about the finality and arbitrariness than a desire to maintain diversity.

I daresay a subset of western policy-makers don't count as "human intuition".

I heard someone claim once that sooner or later, given current trends, we're not going to have any more redheads. I like redheads, and think that would be a shame.

There's a lot of different varieties of human. If you blended them all suddenly and thoroughly, and everyone afterward were tallish, tanned semi-asians of a roughly-equivalent type, that would also be a shame.

I freely admit that this is an aesthetic preference with limited to no implications for actual policy, and probably genetic engineering will make these issues irrelevant in the relatively near future.

They wouldn't blend, because inheritance is Mendelian and discrete. Just look at the Uighurs and other Turks who still evidence the blonde hair and blue eyes of their Aryan ancestors, even red hair on occasion.

Though, recessive genes follow a power law in expression; so, they would be much less likely to be found in mixed populations. Northern Indians have 10% the blue eyes allele variant; so, they are only 1% likely to have blue eyes, and it is considered something rare among them.

Not everything is discrete. Height, skin color, facial features, body proportions are not. Isolated populations will continue getting unusual phenotypes due to recessive alleles taking root, but urban blended humans will all probably look like Tiger Woods or Charles Mingus or Kamala Harris.

In the long run? What's being lost is diversity. Whether that matters depends on your values, priorities, etc....and maybe how much you appreciate irony.

That depends on whether or not you are permitted to raise your children on your terms, with your own values, way of life, etc. In a strictly genetic sense, the Mongols may be one of the most successful people groups in history; in terms of their culture, society, and way of life, they are largely extinct. You can argue that was always going to happen over a sufficiently long enough time horizon, and that's correct. But it can happen on much shorter timelines, even within a single generation, and often does.

I'd like to hear from other progressive people what the steelman version of this is.

I don't consider myself a progressive, as that term is used today, but since you'll only get conflict-theory explanations from most folks here, I'll give it a shot at the mistake-theory explanation, and it's pretty simple: it is a combination of virtue-signaling and innumeracy.

Your friend probably doesn't actually want to move to a place with fewer white people. Such places probably exist within the city he lives in, and you could ask him why he doesn't move there, though you'd probably either be accused (with some justice) of being a jerk, or else you'd get a response that goes "something something gentrification." (Freddie deBoer has written about the catch-22 in which white people moving to whiter communities is white flight, which is bad, but white people moving to less white communities is gentrification, which is also bad.)

Among progressives nowadays, it's just considered an accepted fact that any place or organization that is "too white" will be hopelessly infested with institutional white supremacy. The only cure is more diversity. The problem with this is that "too white" basically means "majority white," and the problem with that is that, contrary to what a lot of people think, the United States is still majority white. Which means even places that are aggressively trying to attract more "diversity" are generally going to remain majority white and therefore will always be "too white."

Which means even places that are aggressively trying to attract more "diversity" are generally going to remain majority white and therefore will always be "too white."

Motte: It's bad that this all-white cast doesn't represent the real U.S. racial demographic

Bailey: It's bad that this all-white cast is > r% white, where r is less than the current U.S. white ratio. (i.e. it's bad that America is so white)

When people argue that some too-white institution is bad because it doesn't match local/national demographics, I suspect they are saying that because it is a convenient explanation that their audience will accept (It's not the True Rejection). I'm not sure this is done consciously or intentionally. I probably overuse this class of explanation. I really like it. It's probably not charitable.

It's concerning that your steelman suggests that people really, consciously think the bailey, because the proper and honest solution here really is a kind of Great Replacement, so that we really can realize <r% whites in all our local institutions, to avoid deeply-embedded white supremacy. Whites are a kind of invasive species, requiring population control for the good of wider society.

FWIW, I think the number of people who actually want to see the white population reduced, whose true motivations are literally what the conflict theorists say they are, is relatively small. Especially among white progressives, self-loathing or not. I genuinely think most of them just don't do the math and don't realize that it's literally impossible to, for example, have 50% of every community they care about be made up of POC.

Generally the term of art for such a thing was the "demographics are destiny" slogan, I thought?

I think a lot of them also literally just don't realize the vast majority of the American population is white. This is in part because so many of them spend their formative years in a handful of majority-minority cities. To them, 30% black/25% LGBT/30% white/40% Asian or Hispanic/10-20% Jewish sounds about right because that's literally what they spent their formative years around. Yes those numbers add up to more than 100% because some of those categories are not mutually exclusive.

"Math" and "doing the research" haven't exactly been shown as woke strengths in the recent past, so it's not like they're going to naturally correct themselves on their own.

I'll give it a shot at the mistake-theory explanation, and it's pretty simple: it is a combination of virtue-signaling and innumeracy.

Conflict explanation--it's malice for the outgroup. Mistake explanation--it's at best thoughtlessness; "a combination of virtue-signaling and innumeracy" isn't a position that I'd describe as...intellectually respectable?

This is where I'm confused--I thought that Scott's advocacy for viewing disagreements as mistakes was at least partially rooted in charity: let's assume the best of those we disagree with. But in this case, it sounds like the mistake version rounds to some version of "just dumb," and it's not obvious to me that this is a more charitable explanation than malice. Both are bad; is anti-intellectual thoughtlessness clearly better than hatred?

Does a steelman exist? Is there an answer that would reflect well on progressives? If yes, what is it? If no, what's the point in picking dumb vs. evil?

You make a fair point, and I think the real problem is not that no steelman exists, it's that I wasn't really being charitable even in my attempt to provide a mistake-theory explanation. (That's why I don't make a very good progressive.)

Okay, let me try again: the steelman requires that you more or less accept the Ibrim Kendi/Robin DiAngelo premise. Our country, our institutions, our societies, are suffering from deeply embedded white supremacy. Therefore, any place in which the white majority is glaringly obvious (to the point that non-white people are notable for being the outliers) is in need of diversifying (and should "do the work" to figure out why they have so few non-white people). Why are there so few POC here? Assuming you actually do the math and conclude that a ~13% black presence is what you should expect in an equitable racial distribution, a place where you find less than 2% black people has done something, intentionally or not, to make it unwelcoming or hostile to black people.

To go further, I'd have to go further in trying to steelman DEI and "anti-racism" as expressed by those two individuals, and, well, I don't accept their premises and I'm a liberal. But presuming you are dealing with someone who does accept their premises, the conclusion logically follows that any place that hasn't achieved some (statistically improbable) level of racial assimilation is full of institutionalized, unexamined white supremacy.

"foolish" is almost always more charitable than "malice".

It's the other way around; it's hubris of the highest order to think your enemies are idiots. I respect my enemies too much to lie and call them stupid.

  1. Even if you step up the meta levels, to "whiteness bad, diversity good" as you suggest above, what's the steelman? If it's going to be a proper steelman, it ought to stand up to some level of counterargument (that's the point of "steel"), but in my experience, even the "steelman" pulls the race card immediately and declares disagreement invalid without engagement.

  2. You said "almost always," well hedged. (I mean that sincerely.) But that admits the point that massive foolishness can be worse than small malice, and then we're just arguing degree.

Grey's Law, right? "Any sufficiently advanced incompetence is indistinguishable from malice."

What is your ideal programming education ?

Recently trying to teach my younger brother (CS freshman in Canadian university) programming and having that devolving into a yelling session (kicked the dog there) left me wondering about the state of programming education.

How is this CW?

  • Because in any discussion of any type of education system there is an undercurrent disagreement between the blank slatists and the "IQ believers (or whatever this group is called)".

  • How to teach something can also be split along CW lines. See common core, phonics vs whole language, etc.

  • On top of that there is the group representation angle. Certain groups of people are disproportionately represented in programming professions.

My thoughts/priors on the points above

  • I think IQ is very obviously correlated with programming ability, I think this is the default prior of anyone who believes in the predictive usefulness of IQ. However, I would go a step ahead and say that a very specific type of intelligence that probably correlates with IQ score, but is distinct is along certain dimensions could be a better predictor of programming ability. See Dehnadis work.

    My personal observation is that all good programmers I know show signs of high intelligence but not everyone who shows signs of high intelligence shows programming aptitude proportional to their intelligence. I am not entirely sure if its a "wordcel vs shape rotator" issue, the dichotomy isn't as obvious as is with Electrical Engineering for example.

  • I have come across two fairly distinct methods of teaching programming. I would classify them as 'trying to impart intuition' vs. 'trying to impart knowledge.'

    • The former consists of teaching via gamified methods where students are made to play elaborate games consisting of programming puzzles, modify existing code to draw out 2-d shapes and animations, etc. Once students develop some familiarity with changing words in a file to make the computer do something, they are introduced to data types, data structures, control flow, etc.

    • The latter is a more 'rigorous' approach where students are taught the fundamentals such as data types, structures, flow, interpreter vs compiler, etc first; Then they are made to write programs. These programs are sometimes gamified but not to the extent as the former.

    I consider the latter "imparting knowledge" method superior. It's more in line with all the hard sciences I have been taught and all the good programmers I am aware of claim to have been taught using this method. More on this later.

  • Obvious racial stratification. But I think putting that aside, the gender stratification is worth more discussion. Even the best discussions I could find on the topic simply boils down to "differences interest". I think that isn't the complete picture.

    I really don't want to do women dirty like this but, I have yet to come across a "good" female programmer. I really don't know what it is at the root of this. My superficial intuition is that a certain aspect of becoming a good programmer is just relentlessness. Sometimes you need to try out 100 different bug fixes and read through 50 stack overflow and obscure forum posts to fix a certain problem or get something working. Men in my experience are much much more willing to swim through the stack overflow and debugger sewers than women.

    But that isn't the entire picture, I just don't see women writing naturally good code, if that even is a term. And by that I mean the code a person rights with the knowledge of the fundamentals but no knowledge of coding best practices such as separation of concerns, lose coupling, etc. Men in my experience naturally tended to write "better" code without prior knowledge. A lot of the female students I taught used to roll their eyes when being explained good practices.

Intuition vs Knowledge

Programming is hard. Teaching it is also hard. Beginner tutorials tend to have an order of more magnitude views than advanced tutorials.

I am sure that the intuition based teaching methods were born out of frustration with the fact that students couldn't connect the pieces together despite being aware of all the pieces and how they work. But having seen it first hand, I just don't understand how it can teach someone programming at all.

My brother knows how to draw a submarine and make it sway up and down but doesn't know that void means nothing. He is being made to write out words without knowing what they mean and of course its all served in a bowl of global variable spaghetti. The professor chose dumbed down Java 2-d animation package called Processing to teach the class. The documentation is horrendous, its a shadow of what Java is. Why not just use Java? Or even python??

This is very much madness from my pov. Changing lines in code the way the students in my brothers class are being made to do is so far removed from the act of programming or even the primitives of programming that I am left wondering if the "vibes" people have gotten their noses in there as well.

I was taught much differently with an introduction to compilers, data types, conditionals, etc. All of it in C, and despite using python for 99% of my word, I am eternally grateful for having started with C.

It is so much of an over-correction from what I assume is the traditional way of teaching programming that I just can't wrap my mind around it, It might pass for school children but University? I mean I get it even MIT is teaching intro to CS in Python, but at least they are still teaching the actual language and not some bastardchild of it.

I think the fact of the matter might be that demand for CS degrees far exceeds requirement for CS practitioners. The universities are not being honest to their students and are making it all seem like a game in a with the hope that it will all work out for some reason.

Edit - To further clarify why I think the intuition based method is ineffective.

Intuition is hard to impart.

Here's the submarine example from my brothers class with some more detail. The question asks for "Make the submarine sway up and down in a wave and go from left to right".

To even a notice programmer it is immediately obvious that this means the x-coordinates need to be incremented every frame and the y coordinates are just sin(x). That intuition is abstracted behind a 2-d animation task. This is adding in excessive intellectual baggage, its not necessary to anyone who understands a loop.

Valuable time is being wasted on making 2-d shapes do things as opposed to knowing the tools that make them do things. I could solve the submarine problem instantly because I know what a loop is.

I think it's important for novice programmers to first get an intuitive sense for what we're doing here and then get a rigorous education in it. Skipping either step is likely to go badly.

Maybe this is because I'm self taught, but I don't think either of your two options are how I think about intro to coding.

The order I learned languages (so far) was perl -> python -> C -> common lisp -> JS -> Kotlin -> Scala -> Go (with a smattering of others in between when I needed them for specific things). I don't think explicit data structures/data types came into (as opposed to them being an implementation detail) that until I hit C, but by the time I did, they were quite intuitive.

Maybe this is just me being solution oriented, but the way I've always looked at it (and introduced people to programming when I teach them) was to start with a problem they were solving, start with a blank page (I've not found giving them starter code to produce good results), and walk them through each of the relevant tools, being careful not to tell them the combinations that they need. For synthetic problems, stealing music from the internet is usually a good place to start. People like music, and getting it is a quick way to go from the "I don't know what I'm doing" to the "I'm a god" adrenaline rush that hooks people on programming. They build up a toolbox of solutions to problems, and later combine them into bigger solutions for bigger problems.

But having the power and agency to solve my own problems (real problems, not synthetic assignments created by an academic) myself is what got me into this, and it's what keeps me doing it every day.

I will, however, agree that the (often quite useless) abstractions do get in the way more than they help, and leave people in a nebulous "I have no idea what's going on" state of mind. Maybe that's the benefit of going through C at some point? It strips away almost all of the magic. Maybe I'm being hard on abstractions here, but library specific abstractions (as opposed to the ones built into the language itself) tend to be poorly done and make my life harder rather than easier.

Solving your own problems is exactly the rush. And it can't be something that someone told you would be a good problem for practicing programming. It has to be something where you want to have the result and are eager to get closer and closer step by step.

For example I wrote bots to automatically fill out various HTML forms, or modded games, built websites for gaming clans, processed and synced subtitles for downloaded movies, scraped websites like the parliamentary election result website to slice and dice the data myself, to process Wikipedia dumps in various ways etc. Nobody told me to do any of these, but such things led me through lots of classic CS topics and I read up on how to do them with a goal in mind. That's so much better than the prof dropping some artificial problem on you.

Like if I have two subtitles in two languages and one is properly synced up, but the other isn't, but might also not correspond to the first subtitle perfectly one-to-one, then how do I find out a plausible correct alignment? This leads to various algorithms like edit distance, longest common subsequence etc.

But this presupposes that you have such computational or automation use cases in your life. For example today with Netflix existing, I might have never learned about video file formats, subtitle file formats, never had to correct audio or subtitle sync issues. If my parents had been rich and Steam existed, I wouldn't have had to learn how to play with the Windows registry, to mess with the Program Files, to understand how to use firewalls to set up LAN games etc. And all such endeavors open up new problems to solve, now you have to install an IDE, figure out environment variables, understamd that vague C++ compiler error, read up on what the words mean, all still with the goal that you want to get that thing working, but without any external pressure like deadlines, so if I want, I can take a side quest into deep diving into graph algorithms for a few days or whatever.

If you don't see such problems around you, if you don't care to customize stuff on your computer, you may look at project ideas but those always seem artificial because someone already did them and we know there is a solution. It's a schoolish problem. When you build something for yourself, you have to define the problem, the scope, then go further and further. Some riddle websites are also cool, like http://www.pythonchallenge.com/

I'm not saying that such self study is sufficient but it made my formal studies much easier because I could tie the concepts to first hand experiences.

To me programming is quite straight forward and easy to understand. Many things that are most difficult to understand in the field come from having to use/do things that gloss over a hundred little pieces of computing reality that make things "easier." To be honest, programming is really shallow. Programming is a textual interface for controlling computers. That's it. Everything else a computer does that might be useful belongs to a different domain. And while programming is shallow per se, all those different domains that you come in contact with via programming are very deep, and that's where most of the joy comes from for me when programming. I really hate "frameworks" and programming-language fetishism. That's all fashion. The essence of form over function.

So, to answer your question, the ideal programming education in my mind starts with real programs that do real things, but that are super simple. Literally start everyone with Hello World, then Hello Susan, then Hello , etc. Read real programs that do real things, learn how they work, etc.

So how is the best way to teach data structures, algorithmic complexity, single responsibility, patterns, (more things which are not programming) etc.?

The most ubiquitous data structures and algorithms are really simple to understand. Well over half of programming with ds is sticking a bunch of primitives into a struct, giving it a name, and keeping track of a list of them (or a list of refs to them). Things like "single responsibility" and "patterns" more generally are already getting into territory that I deem to be fashion. To the extent that those ideas are useful they're trivial, and they go much beyond the point of useful in their prescriptions.

Complexity is also pretty easy to teach by just making people perform different algorithms with pen and paper so they can feel the difference between them. From that intuition it's not difficult to understand how different algos can be a better/worse choice depending on the size of your dataset. But this can also be misleading, so I would include a section on how to test these things in the real world.

Do you have any recommendations for getting into it later in life?

I messed around with Java, html and linux in high school, then got funneled into a pure bio track for about a decade for my career. At one point I went back to learning some R and python without having the fundamentals (I guess the academic version of a script kiddie) purely for doing genome sequencing/scRNA-seq work. Now I'm trying to learn some fundamentals; I've been working through the Harvard Edx CS50 class, with hopes of trying the machine learning class next.

Any thoughts? Keep in mind I'm probably limited to 1-2 hours per day with maybe a bit more flex on the weekend.

Approach it like a craftsman.

I dive into things head first, willing to make mistakes. After I fumble through my first attempt with middling success, I'm left with usually some notion of where i could have done better. Sometimes I have a clear picture of how that is, other times I need to do some research first. Then i do it again with my new knowledge.

Repeat for 20 years.

Eventually you will organically run into the usual problems. The state of your program getting corrupted by refences to objects not being well managed. Using function calls that aren't thread safe in a multithreaded environment. Variables being initialized in the debug environment but not the release one. Your code descending into spaghetti hell because you used one kluge too many.

These are the normal problems neophyte code slingers encounter. Sometimes being forewarned by the elders helps. But in my experience most people need to learn these lessons the hard way. The best way is to code early and often on pet projects. Finishing them is optional, but gratifying.

Downthread, there's a recommendation for people to learn coding by creating mods for Slay the Spire. That's great advice IMO, and could be generalized to "learn to program by writing code that fulfills your goals" if you aren't into video games.

I've had interest in programming before but I've never really had a goal or anything to actually go with it. Tutorials are nice but trying to learn programming without a problem is like trying to learn to use a gun without any bullets.

I have touched before on the idea that a [programmer] must have something they value more than "[programming]": The Art must have a purpose other than itself, or it collapses into infinite recursion.

Something to Protect

Programming is notorious for tutorial hell. One of the reasons for this is that not enough care is taken to differentiate the act of programming vs its applications. An analogue I can think of is that math is a tool, its used in Physics, Chemistry, Engineering, etc. Similarly programming is a tool its used in Physics, Engineering, Web development, etc. However, a lot of tutorials for some weird reason try to sneak in some Physics, Engineering, Web development (not literally) teaching along with the programming. This makes a beginner come away with the impression that the task of learning to program is much more onerous than it actually is. A lot of people would be put off by math as well if Calculus courses had some physics, engineering and biology in it.

So firstly, be clear in what you want to learn. Do you want to learn only programming? Or programming for some kind application? You would only do yourself favors if the programming and the programming relating to the application is well delineated, at least while you are learning and not informed enough to not get overwhelmed.

My suggestion to you based on;

At one point I went back to learning some R and python without having the fundamentals (I guess the academic version of a script kiddie) purely for doing genome sequencing/scRNA-seq work.

  • First get familiar with the act of programming.

    • Choose one language and get good at it. Python is a no-brainer for beginners in general. And especially for the type of work you have to do. Just stick with python, no R for now, until you are not thinking in syntax anymore.

    • I suggest you watch this video and learn everything covered in this video. This video is far from comprehensive. It's far from perfect. But the point is to stick to something at all to begin with! This video will give you the ABC's of python. You can learn the how to write poems and novels later.

    • Once you are comfortable enough with the basic syntax of your first language that you don't have to check the correct syntax over and over again. Start doing some practice problems. There are hundreds of resources for this. LeetCode is an (in)famouse resource. However, be warned that even the "Easy" problems are difficult a beginner. These problems are meant to be tests of computer science application, so if you find them too hard, here are some easier ones. The objective here is to build for lack of better words "muscle memory".

    • Optional step. Once you are comfortable doing at least leetcode medium. You can read up a book on "Data structures and algorithms" or any such books on how to write better code. But I don't think these are necessary for non software engineers.

  • Familiarize yourself with the tools of your trade within your programming language of choice.

    • This means learning how to use specific libraries related to your field. You will have an easier time picking these up if you are already a good programmer. A reason non software engineers (especially scientists and researchers !!) write such terrible code is because they learn the requisite libraries needed for their work before becoming even half decent at programming.

  • Do a project(s) of your own. This is good for soo many reasons. And is an order not a prescription.

    • Self motivating.

    • You will be tested on applying what you know

    • Most in line with real world work

    • Will force you to learn new things yourself via forum posts and documentation scouring, which is an essential skill in programming, despite not being related to it in any way.

    • Rewarding.

You do the above long enough, some of it concurrently and you will reach a point where you can just program. You don't think in syntax anymore, all languages will be the same. For example I can start writing in a new language within 30minutes - 1 hours of looking at it, because I already know what arrays, conditions and loops are; The syntax is superficial to a programmer, But to achieve that, you need to first master ONE language. Your ultimate goal is to understand the meaning not the teachers (compilers) password.

CS50x is good all things considered. For your needs I might suggest CS50p. But ideally you can pretty much learn programming without courses at all.

Thanks for the reply! Sorry, I was away all weekend. I'll take a crack at it.

So firstly, be clear in what you want to learn. Do you want to learn only programming? Or programming for some kind application?

Unfortunately, I think my final goals will be determined more by how much time I can carve out of the rest of my life for it rather than starting with some endpoint in mind. I'm fairly confident I never want to actually be writing the nitty-gritty code that analyzes bio data, but rather am looking for synergy with what I already know. I think at the far end if I ever end up running a bio startup incorporating machine learning it might be fun to mess around with in the beginning stages, or at the very least, be able to converse intelligently with the engineers involved. Bootstrapping a bio startup in my basement is much harder; you can do some bacterial and yeast work (probably illegally in a few different ways) for something in the range of thousands of dollars, but doing anything with mammalian cells would probably be in the 100k range just for capital costs and be more or less impossible to hide.

Anyways, that's where I'm at. I'll give those resources a try and maybe recalibrate my goals over the next few months.

I'd add reading other people's code. I picked up a lot of coding by osmosis as a kid just fumbling around existing codebases, just trying to get a program to do something I wanted. I literally had no idea what is a for loop or what are function calls, I just dived in and tweaked it. Of course it works better the more background knowledge you have. But the main point is to se real code, instead of the idealized stuff that a lot of courses teach, eg "design patterns" just for the sake of design pattern, unrealistic standards of code cleanness, like the very opinionated Clean Code etc. The best open source products from respected companies don't code like that, but get shit done. I'm not advocating for spaghetti code, just to get a taste for real, working codebases as opposed to toy examples with unrealistic elegance. By reading code you can pick up good or bad habits alike, but that's not a reason to avoid it.

I would put this into the "things that you probably should do" bin. Issue being there are a thousand things like this to be done. Read forums. immerse yourself in the culture, read open source code, read new papers coming out, read documentation for fun, etc.

It leads back to your initial point, motivation. Those who are motivated will naturally do all of those things out of curiosity. But I am not sold on the idea that making someone uninterested do those things will make them good. Nonetheless, reading other peoples code does have high returns relative to "things you should probably do aswell".

Also we don't demand this from Engineers or any other profession (maybe barring doctors). Electrical engineers are not prescribed looking at other engineers schematics in their free time (even if it made them better Engineers). Programming is in this weird zone where its not standardized enough that only the most passionate of autists are the ones who make it through all the hoops.

making someone uninterested do those things will make them good

Someone who is uninterested will never become good anyway, so you might as well encourage them to do these things and find out if they are or not. I have worked 25 years in this industry and never met a developer I respected who was not in love with it.

Well, maybe those professions are being held back then. But electrical engineers are close enough to programmers in culture, I'd say. Or at least they are in my bubble. And as for other engineers, there's less of an open culture and things are proprietary. Realistic projects can only be done on the company scale in industry, there no equivalent of free software or Github for those professions.

Also,I don't think that other professions are really as straightforward and standardized as these conversations make it seem. Programming isn't sooo unique. Generic IT admin stuff or network engineering, infrastructure design etc also has a lot of the same difficulties. And someone who mucks around their home router and built some PCs as a kid will be better at such IT work. You'll be a better car mechanic if you're in some car modding community since growing up. You'll be better at roofing, construction planning, flooring, plumbing design etc if you dive into it obsessively. People just don't do it that much for whatever reason.

I am an engineering manager and the biggest change I've seen is the motivation. Me, and other older millennials and younger Xers who grew up tinkering with our PCs would never think of doing anything else for a living. We're in tech because we're into tech. The new generation is different: they're in tech because it pays well. There's such a huge demand for tech workers that zoomers' CVs mostly look like this:

  • burger flipper

  • call center operator

  • tech boot camp

  • tester/data engineer/front-end dev

As soon as I wrote that I realized that the older generations were different. They didn't have PCs growing up. My (very good) architect didn't even have a PC at home until his daughter needed one for school. He majored in chemistry, not CS. Another guy I know ended up working with computers because he was a handyman in a research institute the director of which decided to start a computer importing business. He forgot his keys on the day the shipment arrived, my guy picked the lock open, then picked it closed and was hired for being resourceful.

However, both these guys have a very important shared characteristic: they are very smart. Guy #1 wasn't a simple chemist major but won not-just-participation prizes in All-Union Chemistry Olympiads. Guy #2 is a just a natural-born engineer, trucks to transistors.

And this brings me to the question of scale.

  • You can't scale the way my older colleagues ended up in software engineering

  • You could try to scale the way I ended up in software engineering: give everyone a Linux PC with a bunch of compilers and interpreters and wait for the nerds to emerge, but I think that wouldn't work as well as it worked in the 90's: everything is just too user-friendly these days. I drive a car, but have no intention of becoming a car nerd

  • And finally, this leaves formal schooling as the only thing that can scale

And schools have to be schizophrenic in their curriculum. They have to teach math so people can calculate the tip and plan their spending, literature so people can read and understand references in summer blockbusters, history so they can pick a new name for their street, computers so they don't install malware and can search for stuff online. On the other hand, they have to create people who will become mathematicians, writers, historians and programmers. The only way they can do that is by forcing their students to try everything. Do they hate math? Do they love math? Do they not care either way, but are good at it?

While I think Processing is not the best tool for college-level education, I think Processing/Logo/drawing primitives in Basic/XNA/Love2D are a good introduction to programming at middle-to-high school level. The goal is to comb the student body for people who are not into programming, but are good at it nevertheless.

If I was trying to reach students at the elementary level, I'd probably build out things from the Usborne computer books from the 1980s. I remember endlessly rereading these books at the school library, and even looking back over Introduction to Computer Programming now, it is still an excellent introduction to what a computer does, how it executes a program statement-by-statement, etc. Many activities could be made into craft exercises, covering the essential ideas without having to deal with any particular programming environment.

As for university, I see far too many "introduction to programming" courses attempt to "teach programming" without giving students any idea of what the language even means. How are they supposed to solve problems with code if they don't understand what the computer does with that code? The language needs to be simple enough that this can be done in at most two lectures; scheme is simple enough that you can have a decent go at this.

Types should be introduced early, because "what sort of things go into this function, and what comes back out?" is a really important question to ask when designing a function, and it allows machines to (partially) check students' work, instead of an over-worked TA in a lab session. The programming environment probably has to be interactive and graphical, because those damn zoomers barely know what a file is these days, and we don't have time to teach them how to drive a shell.

My best guess is something like SICP, taught using DrRacket, and moving to Typed Racket ASAP. Replace the hardcore EE/CS examples with simpler problems to solve, since students aren't coming in with as much mathematical sophistication and we're going to be asked to teach a cohort that's not all headed into Engineering/CompSci, and probably borrow some pedagogy/scaffolding/recipes from HTDP. Bring in some of the cool CS stuff once students know how to actually program; you want to show at least some amazing CS ideas so that you hook the people who are susceptible to such things.

Disciplined ways of structuring programs make more sense once a student has made a few big messes, so discussions of coupling, modularity, and so on can come later. But they must not be left for too long.

I really don't want to do women dirty like this but, I have yet to come across a "good" female programmer. I really don't know what it is at the root of this.

It could just be there are so few in the first place. The proportion of coworkers I have of any gender that I consider particularly good programmers is quite low, and I've had over a period of ten years roughly... three female programming co-workers?

I don't recall them being remarkably good or bad. Like most of my coworkers I would class their code as "basically serviceable."

Have you known a lot of male coworkers that you viewed as being remarkably good coders?

I really don't want to do women dirty like this but, I have yet to come across a "good" female programmer

I know a few. One is one of the best system designers I know, the other is the kind of get-your-hands-dirty fix-anything learn-any-stack type that any company with legacy code needs.

My ideal programming education was, essentially, being taught the basics at a very young age, and then figuring out the rest on my own with the help of the immense documentation, examples, tools, and communities on the internet. If you want textbooks, download them. If you want to RTFM, it's also online. And there are a billion possible complex projects you can set yourself to. Write your own compiler, write your own hobby operating system, write a video game, write a simulator for a complex physical system... lots of stuff.

I consider the latter "imparting knowledge" method superior. It's more in line with all the hard sciences I have been taught and all the good programmers I am aware of claim to have been taught using this method. More on this later.

I'm not sure either is better tbh, or if it matters. To learn to code, one needs to learn how to solve problems, and that requires 'teaching intuition' by having people solve a bunch of problems, whether it's initially 'calculate the nth fibbonaci number' or later 'design and write a simple video game'. But you also need to learn a thousand different general programming bits, plus another five hundred bits specific to a language, and that's gonna look like 'teaching knowledge' no matter how it happens (in 'java', what are all the types, what's an anonymous inner class, generics, type erasure, reflection, boxing, a reference, a package, how does the build system work). And - good luck 'intuiting' that, you need to read the docs or a bunch of stackoverflow answers that, when put together, are basically the docs.

So you need both, but good / motivated students of one will do the other by themselves.

Also, the problem with the brother's course / the processing.js thing isn't necessarily that it's too intuition-drive, but that it's too dumbed down. One could imagine a python course that was very 'teaching intuition', almost like a socratic method with code, but still used that to lead people through all the difficult parts of beginner programming, as opposed to just showing them how to move a cute little character around a 2d grid. (but then people would start failing again!)

I really don't want to do women dirty like this but, I have yet to come across a "good" female programmer. I really don't know what it is at the root of this. My superficial intuition is that a certain aspect of becoming a good programmer is just relentlessness. Sometimes you need to try out 100 different bug fixes and read through 50 stack overflow and obscure forum posts to fix a certain problem or get something working. Men in my experience are much much more willing to swim through the stack overflow and debugger sewers than women.

I think Dr. Lawrence Summers shed some light on that matter in 2005 but it didn't go over well. I think 70+ years ago women may have been more represented in programming because either programming was easier compared to today or they were not actually doing programming as it's understood today. Probably a mix of both. Coding today has many more parts...more complexity in terms of interconnectedness, hence steeper learning curve. A Node.js trading platform or app is way more complicated, more moving parts, than anything produced in the 60s.

My personal observation is that all good programmers I know show signs of high intelligence but not everyone who shows signs of high intelligence shows programming aptitude proportional to their intelligence. I am not entirely sure if its a "wordcel vs shape rotator" issue, the dichotomy isn't as obvious as is with Electrical Engineering for example.

IQ is one of those things that's necessary but insufficient.

Programming is hard. Teaching it is also hard. Beginner tutorials tend to have an order of more magnitude views than advanced tutorials.

Most people are not learning how to actually program but learning how to follow instructions for a tutorial, which are related skills, but making the leap from tutorials to deeper or fundamental understanding is harder. If as soon as you deviate a little too much from the tutorial you get lost again, means you never understood it well to begin with.

I'll just say I've known a number of excellent women programmers. My personal opinion is that the main issue is just different interests (and often other options). Research seems to support that (roughly, women are interested in people, men are interested in things), it's one of the most repeated findings with biggest effect sizes in psychology.

As to teaching CS, I can't really remember what worked well for me. My sense is to focus on solving problems, and building out the world of tools, knowledge, and techniques that allow you to solve larger and more complex problems. I think it's important to have something concrete to attach abstract things to when learning. But that's just a first thought.

I’ll second the “excellent women programmers” thing; though I am not in tech, I am dating a woman who is as far as I can tell “good” at programming (graduated from Carnegie Mellon roughly in the middle of the CS cohort), and she tells me that there was at least one woman in her cohort who was brilliant enough that her professors described her entering industry as “a great loss to academia”.

That said, she also describes that women were an overwhelming minority, that the entry class was 50/50 M/F but very quickly all the women left, and she’s…well, not happy, but willing, to bang her head against a programming problem for ages without apparently making any progress. (She is quite neurotic, though, and had to really work through that during her undergrad.)

Programming is hard to fake. In most school subjects it's enough to know the "teacher's password", so memorization (of facts or algorithmic processes to solve one of a few types of problems that are likely to be in the test) is a decent strategy for getting good grades.

In programming, you have to problem-solve, face uncertainties, without an option to bullshit your way out of it (the code either compiles or not, it either crashes or not, and the computer doesn't care about your emotional state or your deadline or whatever).

I think the necessary relentlessness and intrinsic motivation required is comparable to playing musical instruments or sports. And incidentally, it's mostly boys who spend insane amounts of time on practicing the guitar or football or yoyo or skateboarding or even video games etc. without any external pressure from parents and teachers.

If you don't give a shit about playing the guitar, and have no aptitude for it, a private tutor will similarly have a very hard job to try and teach you to play.

It's impossible to teach things like this, it's only possible to learn them. By that I mean that the action has to come from the learner. The teacher can't actively put anything in the learner's brain. You can lead a horse to water and so on.

Intelligence surely is a factor here but it's not the only one. I know intelligent people who are not obsessive tinkerers and less intelligent ones who constantly muck around with some stuff, building various kludge and messing with their car, building stuff around the house, repairing this or that in a custom way etc. This itch to make things is a big component in who will actually learn to program and who won't.

@ last paragraph, 'intelligence' is just whatever causes intelligence, and if that trait makes people - in practice, in the complexities of society and technical work - smarter, then it is 'part of' intelligence too, because it really does lead to that person being smarter in the specific area

I'm saying that there's a separate personality trait that's something like the drive to make stuff despite failures, to not give up in the face of difficulty. And this is not always a Hollywood hero upward trajectory. One side of it is someone trying over and over with sub-par results or taking way longer than others with less stubbornness but more intelligence would. I know people who are relentless and put lots of energy into something fruitless and they aren't very skilled for it. They may build dangerous contraptions out of wood and metal but with lousy construction, inefficiently etc. They may obsess over reading history and politics and come out of it believing various pants-on-head tinfoil conspiracy theories, or may spend way too much time on building hopeless perpetuum mobile constructions etc.

Willingness to work hard (intrinsically driven industriousness, relentlessness, stubbornness) can be decoupled from intelligence. On the flip side, many intelligent people are lazy and coast along, wasting their potential.

There's a subtlety here, though. Why is it a separate personality trait, and not a 'component' of intelligence? Because if you are an 'intelligent person' 'wasting your potential', and that waste-of-potential is set up in such a way that it can't easily be externally fixed because you need to have that "drive" to figure out a bunch of different things to be smart, then that's just another cause of having lower intelligence.

Intelligence is usually understood as an ability, the cognitive processing power, your ability to deal in abstractions and meta levels, notice patterns, keep more stuff in your working memory, etc. It's distinct from experience, lexical knowledge, amount of acquired skills etc.

If you don't want to use the word intelligence like this, then let's name my concept intelligence_2, and understand my statement as "intelligence_2 is a distinct trait from willingness to work hard from an intrinsic drive."

Intelligence is usually understood as an ability, the cognitive processing power, your ability to deal in abstractions and meta levels, notice patterns, keep more stuff in your working memory, etc.

I mean, I could say something similar about some of these. Working memory isn't part of intelligence, it's just a separate trait. You can be incredibly intelligent, but just not have the working memory to keep a big list of facts or intermediate steps (although is this actually how working memory really works? idk.), and thus waste your potential in practice. But in practice it's a key component (not to say anything about what memory is or how it's constructed, which, idk, and the same is true of that "drive", they could all be high-level features of some more complicated underlying mechanism that doesn't have those as levers). Which is kind of my argument - intelligence is complicated and messy, it's related to many mechanisms in the brain, and there's not really a particular reason to say that the 'drive' isn't intelligence but working memory is - and we don't really know how intelligence works, so decomposing it in ways that seem convenient isn't necessarily the best approach.

If an intelligent person is externally motivated to do stuff, by teachers, parents, expectation, poverty etc. they can perform well.

So basically, drive can be substituted by something else, but the cognitive power of your brain can't be replaced through external influence.

To tie it back to the original point: just because you get good grades in high school, and get good test scores, doesn't mean you'll be a good at practical programming. You can even do a full CS degree program and still not be good at programming compared to your peers who pour a lot of hours into it from this itch to create stuff.

That's true, but I'm trying to say that a person with that 'drive' will, all else equal, understand things more deeply, figure out more stuff, and therefore be "more intelligent" in every observable sense we say "intelligence", and that's part of why they're better at programming. So saying it's separate from intelligence isn't quite right imo

More comments

I think the necessary relentlessness and intrinsic motivation required is comparable to playing musical instruments or sports. And incidentally, it's mostly boys who spend insane amounts of time on practicing the guitar or football or yoyo or skateboarding or even video games etc. without any external pressure from parents and teachers.

People brought up the "interest in things vs interest in people" gender difference. But I always prefer how much more neurotic women are. It's incredibly difficult to keep smashing your soft brain meats against a problem, fruitlessly at first, for hours, if not days, if you are biased towards experiencing profound and prolonged negative emotions in response to failure.

Women generally avoid the chance of failure more than men, likely due to their increased neuroticism. So they won't master skillsets that require you to fail repeatedly.

I think the necessary relentlessness and intrinsic motivation required is comparable to playing musical instruments or sports. And incidentally, it's mostly boys who spend insane amounts of time on practicing the guitar or football or yoyo or skateboarding or even video games etc. without any external pressure from parents and teachers.

Yup. Good coders are people who have been coding for years on their own time, almost as a hobby or recreation. It's not like something in which you just clock in and clock out.

This is where the discussion turns to "why do we expect programmers to be obsessive and do their profession also as a hobby when nobody expects that from accountants or civil engineers or surgeons or lawyers?" And some accusations that programming is toxic and elitist and exclusionary, biased towards basement dweller neckbeard incel nerd techbros who have nothing better in their lives than messing with a computer.

As this often comes up in discussions, I have tried to think it through and here's my current opinion. Those other jobs are perhaps less fun on the whole (fewer people enjoy them as a hobby). Those other jobs are also not available for practice for kids. At the same time I would expect that good professionals would tend to keep up with developments in their field even just out of interest. And the professional skills of engineers or mechanics of any sort probably correlate to how much they tinkered with things as kids. Whether this correlation is due to direct causation or the common-cause type is another question.

The complaints typically come from two places. One is DEI, the other is from older devs with families and outdated skills. Maybe a third one: accusing tech companies of implicitly requiring unpaid labor for skill development and exploiting the naive twenty something guys and depressing wages because "its supposed to be fun, here's some pizza and a ping pong table, now go make me some profits."

People who have excellent careers do have their career as a lifestyle. You don't become a star lawyer by doing your 9 to 5 and going home. You don't become a star surgeon by working regular hours. If you want to do accounting for a municipal office, you don't have to worry about accounting in your spare time. If you want to manage the finances of a hedge fund, your world is centred around your career.

If you want to have a fairly regular job as a coder you don't have to center your life around it. If you want to be skilled enough to be the tech lead of a graphics engine or writing the coolest new thing in fin tech you are going to have to work very hard to develop a high proficiency. Programming is very much a skill based profession and those who really want to master it will be better at it. You don't become a star musician, tennis player, chess player, coder or surgeon unless really make it your life's mission.

With that said many lawyers write wills for middle class people and many surgeons are removing tonsils while working regular hours.

Okay, but is there anything interesting or unusual in this aspect regarding programming? Why does this always come up when debating software dev?

My guess is that there is an abundance of otherwise low-status kids who, by virtue of spending too much time "in the basement" can punch above their weight. And that these avenues are not properly gatekept by usual prestige and status gatekeepers. Or is there some other reason?

A surgeon can't do surgery at home, but they are probably thinking about it, reading about it or spending more time at work.

First, a note on motivations: It's possible that autist techbros make the field the way it is. But people who usually advocate this position seem like they should also like your skill-development theory, because they are probably a fan of blaming Management for exploiting workers. The reason for the discourse is IMO because the autist nerds are low-status and so should be blamed and shunned even moreso than Management.

Second, an additional theory that likewise doesn't blame nerds: software is in its infancy, and the training and techniques are not well-studied enough. Once we learn more about it, it will become legible and really become a job that an everydayman can do, like plumbing.

Third, which came to mind after writing the second: all of software is automation. Any problems that become well-studied enough to be solved well, become automated away and hidden under layers of abstraction, which is how we got to the present day. With the newfound time, programmers are expected to solve the next ladder-rung of problems. Unlike car repair or plumbing which have physical movements that robots can't do easily, and so always need a person to put in some elbow grease.

I just had an idea. What if this is analogous to slut shaming? What if the point is that the "autists" give away something (programming labor) for too cheap because they enjoy it, thereby depressing the price on it? Young women slut shame their peers who are too eager to have sex with every guy for fun, because this no longer allows the more modest women to place demands on guys and sooner or later the default expectation becomes that every woman must quickly put out.

It's just an overload of the term "expect". It's not that we "expect", in the sense of having a social demand, that good programmers will be obsessive and do their profession as a hobby, it's that we "expect", in the sense of anticipated experience, that programmers won't be good unless it also happens to be the case that they're obsessive and do their profession as a hobby.

Of course, that instantly turns it into a signalling mechanism and Goodhart's it to death. But in spaces where there's less pressure on quality, the pattern is still observable.

However, I would go a step ahead and say that a very specific type of intelligence that probably correlates with IQ score, but is distinct is along certain dimensions could be a better predictor of programming ability. See Dehnadis work.

Caveat: at least some parts of the Dehnadi writeup in "Camel Has Two Humps" were retracted, although mostly summary-side rather than . This doesn't necessarily mean that they're wrong in the broad strokes -- but it does undermine the specific test he used.

I consider the latter "imparting knowledge" method superior. It's more in line with all the hard sciences I have been taught and all the good programmers I am aware of claim to have been taught using this method. More on this later.

I think there are benefits and costs to each approach, but I've largely emphasized the "impart intuition" approach to start, and then blending in knowledge focuses as time goes on. The failure modes of "imparting knowledge" are less obvious, especially in a classroom where most problems can be reduced into knowledge questions (tests) or can have their intuition components avoided or solved by one or two members of a full classroom (long-term projects). But the larger understanding about problems as things that need to and can be resolved internally instead of by repetition is especially important in computer programming.

More seriously, knowledge-focused studies are not merely less interesting to most new students, but they're also specialized to specific environments. They're important! There are a lot of problems that can arise if you see compsci as solely solving problems, not just in the bad practices sense but actively developing wildly non-performant or unsafe code unknowingly. But there's a lot of people come out of colleges with incredibly in-depth knowledge of Linked Lists, but not a) to avoid using them outside of a job interview, and b) how to learn how to handle the garbage collector for their current language of choice.

I really don't want to do women dirty like this but, I have yet to come across a "good" female programmer. I really don't know what it is at the root of this. My superficial intuition is that a certain aspect of becoming a good programmer is just relentlessness.

I know a good few (including cis), albeit generally more at the enthusiast level rather than as a career. I think it's less common, but that's plausibly social, plausibly preferring people-focused relentlessness, plausibly downstream of having the background, or plausibly just not having the sort of near-autistic 'not letting this go' aspect.

But the larger understanding about problems as things that need to and can be resolved internally instead of by repetition is especially important in computer programming.

I agree with this. Most of being good at coding rests on your ability to detect hidden abstractions in the business logic you're writing-- subtle regularities in the domain that can be used to write easier-to-understand and easier-to-modify code.

There's this saying: "Show me your flowcharts and conceal your tables, and I shall be continued to be mystified. Show me your tables, and I won’t usually need your flowcharts; they’ll be obvious." I think that's saying something basically similar, and I think it's true.

But trying to teach how to do that seems basically similar to trying to teach someone generic problem solving, which professional educators have been banging their heads against forever.

Yes, finding these hidden abstractions feels like "reverse engineering" to me, which in software could be broadly defined as: "determining business rules from code."

What got me started on programming was fractals. To this day, I greet every new language I learn with a Mandelbrot renderer. But I believe there needs to be a hook. For me, it was pretty pictures. That got me into graphics, OpenGL, raytracing, and I learnt programming almost as a side effect. For other people it will be other things. But there needs to be a thing that you want to make the computer do. That empowering cycle, of "I speak the magic incantation and then the machine does my bidding," is what drives motivation, and motivation is the primary factor of learning programming.

This is a subject near and dear to me. Because I positively loath working with most new programmers. I loath this entire generation of "programmers" that never had to manage memory. That just stitches libraries together to accomplish 99% of their tasks. And if it isn't garbage collected, and it isn't a library, they flail around uselessly.

That's "programming" in the same way purchasing a bird house kit from a hobby shop is "wood working". Yes, you are technically using a tool that is also used in that activity. But 95% of the work was done for you. And they are barely even cognizant of that fact.

But I'm a fucking crazy person. I got annoyed that 86Box didn't work with my HOTAS once, so I downloaded the source and fixed it myself. A certain especially difficult level of Populous pissed me off to such a degree, I download the version of DOSBOX with the debugger built in and began dissecting the bytecode that effects the AI speed. Successfully I might add. Patched a version of the game just for me that was a smidge easier for my aged reaction times. When the Oculus Quest came out, I was annoyed that a lot of Gear VR games would run on it, but the controls weren't mapped to the right buttons. Since most of those games just run Unity, and use the built in Oculus plugins, I discovered I could replace the .net bytecode in the dlls to remap the controls. So I took about a half dozen Gear VR games I liked, unpacked the APK files, edited the DLLs, repacked and signed the APK files, and then loaded them onto my Oculus Quest.

Lately I decided I wanted to learn x86 assembly, targeting the 8088 platform, BIOS/DOS function calls, EGA graphics and Adlib music. Wrote a sprite editor, currently working on an adlib tracker. All in assembly. It's so much fun, I love it.

So yeah, I'm a fucking lunatic.

I came up through a Computer Engineering program. There was programming in all 4 years of it, largely in C++, but also Java and Python (which I hated). But other required courses were the material properties of transistors, which I largely forgot. Then how to create adders and other simple electronics out of discrete components (NAND gates, XOR gates, etc). Then some assembly on this project board I actually still have, but can't recall at all what it ran.

I still remember, after I graduated, I was talking with a buddy of mine who did a Computer Science degree at a different school. At some point he asked me "So how did we get to where we are now, with operating systems and compilers and stuff?" I was blown away that after 4 years, and a Computer Science degree, he didn't know that.

Increasingly, the teaching of programming is "vibes based" as you put it. Fundamentally incompetent people are being handed degrees. The only reason they appear to be able to perform a task that vaguely resembles programming is that people smarter than they or their entire lineage will ever be set the table for them.

This is a subject near and dear to me. Because I positively loath working with most new programmers. I loath this entire generation of "programmers" that never had to manage memory. That just stitches libraries together to accomplish 99% of their tasks. And if it isn't garbage collected, and it isn't a library, they flail around uselessly.

If programming is as simple as piecing together libraries, shouldn't this have a depressing effect on salaries? Yet coders are making more than ever despite the abundance of libraries. Instead of having to be super-efficient, programs are now way more complicated, such as backend and frontend. One challenge has been replaced by another.

If programming is as simple as piecing together libraries, shouldn't this have a depressing effect on salaries?

There's also a lot more demand for software engineers now. Everything runs on apps, web sites, productivity software, etc. Everything that used to be mechanical and complicated now has an embedded computer. Availability of libraries is just one variable that has changed gradually over the course of decades.

Much love and respect to what you're doing and your opinion - I've followed along plenty on your friday threads.

But the problem with this attitude is having everyone write in assembly or C means we'd never get anything done. Re-Inventing the wheel is fun (sometimes), but it's not efficient. Stitching together libraries correctly is still difficult enough that very few people can be competent software architects.

I'd agree that people need to understand they're standing on the shoulders of giants, and I have seen a marked decrease in that knowledge/attitude among younger programmers. But if I had to build some of the things I've worked on without anyone else's great code, I'd be miserable.

But the problem with this attitude is having everyone write in assembly or C means we'd never get anything done. Re-Inventing the wheel is fun (sometimes), but it's not efficient. Stitching together libraries correctly is still difficult enough that very few people can be competent software architects.

My rant isn't so much "Everyone needs to write everything in assembly/C" as "Everyone, at some time, needs to have written something in assembly/C".

I sure as shit am not re-inventing the wheel constantly in my day job. I'm stitching together libraries for efficiency's sake, same as everyone else. But having at one point made my own wheel, even if not a particularly good one, I understand you aren't supposed to use a wheel flat on it's side. Or try to put a flat edge on it. Which keeps me from doing pants-on-head retarded things with other people's wheels.

But like... there are lots of people who are value-positive programmers in today's environment who would never be willing or even able to do anything worth doing in assembly. I bet you're much better than they are -- you're a grandmaster while they're merely competent -- but surely you agree they're still worthwhile to employ, even if only so they can do the dumb grungy projects on which your talents would be wasted. It feels like you are picturing the counterfactual universe as one in which everyone who was currently employed as a software engineer had your talents and depth of expertise -- but I think the more likely alternative is one in which almost no one can live up to your standards, so almost no one writes software, almost nothing gets built, and our society doesn't get to have nice things.

I'm sorry you have to work with them, though. The depth of conviction that makes great programmers great also means it is torture for them to be forced to collaborate with relatively shitty programmers.

torture for them to be forced to collaborate with relatively shitty programmers

This is mostly because we want them to notice our brilliant optimizations and beautiful abstractions in PR review, and decorate our PR with :thumbsup: and :+100: and :sunglasses: emojis. But it all just goes past them and they Approve without comment.

I completely agree. My university was a little "behind" the times and I was raised with the C method, even my AP class in high school was C++. I always knew that it would be of benefit to me and now after being in the industry, the nodejs generation is trash and I hate working with them.

Okay but garbage collection is better than reference counting for performance though, and reference counting is better than manual for sanity, certainly so when you're writing trees.

garbage collection is better than reference counting for performance though

These aren't the only two options available. Especially with the advanced research that has gone into static analysis these days.

And still, if you want any kind of performance you still have to worry about locality and all the other fun issues that only come up if you understand what is actually happening behind the scenes.

Being able to understand well how to do manual memory management requires more intelligence than just slapping stuff together, and understanding how it works is also very important for using automatic memory management well (if you write a nice, GCed, dynamic language naively or use a ton of lambdas or temporary objects, it may perform very poorly, whereas making it work well with the JIT makes your code look more like C)

I'm not dismissing garbage collection whole sale. I'm dismissing programmers who have known nothing else.

Here is an example. Once upon a time i had to shove about 10 thousand objects into NASA Worldwind and see how it ran. It ran like dog shit. Because whatever fresh graduate they had coding it reallocated memory for each objects screen transformation every frame. So it triggered the gc literally multiple times a frame with a few thousand objects to render. That is a level of idiocy only possible if you learned to program in an environment where you were barely cognizant memory was a resource with costs associated with it.

I'm not dismissing garbage collection whole sale. I'm dismissing programmers who have known nothing else.

Eh, this basically feels like a box out of the famous XKCD comic.

Because whatever fresh graduate they had coding it reallocated memory for each objects screen transformation every frame

This really is a problem though, if you write 'clean functional immutable nodejs' where every single function creates a new immutable object, it'll perform terribly. I've done it a few times on fun hobby projects, and it really did perform badly.

And learning manual memory management and writing some C definitely is worth doing in learning, and many fields of programming still require writing it. (That said, in most contexts doing it manually, or even worrying that much about memory management, is awful and just slows you down.)

If you don't understand the difference between dick measuring over your choice of text editor, and fundamentally not understanding how a computer works, then yes, it's superficially similar.

My disgust reaction to argumentum ad XKCD aside, it does make me wonder. Did programmers of old complain when things moved from byte code on punch cards to disks and actual languages, with compilers and all? I certainly had a few professors who seemed to have such a chip on their shoulder.

It wasn't byte code on punch cards to disks and actual languages. Compilers were rather early in the game, and macro-assemblers too. FORTRAN goes back to 1957, COBOL 1959, the well-known FORTRAN IV in 1962. FORTRAN was famously designed for punched cards, which is why the strict column rules in FORTRAN 77 and earlier. Aside from grouching about "you're not a real programmer until you've had to sort the box of punched cards you dropped on the ground", I don't think there was serious complaining about the move away from them. Complaints about assembler v. high level languages survived for much longer.

Yeah, it's probably fair that your point deserved more care and elaboration than argumentum ad XKCD can provide. Which: sorry about that! I was overly flip.

So!

Fundamentally software is a rickety tower of abstractions built on abstractions built on abstractions. At the lowest level you've got logic gates, and if you put enough of those (and some other stuff) together in the right configurations you can make stuff like arithmetic logic units; and if you put enough stuff of basically that abstraction layer together, you have yourself a CPU, and that and some other bits gets you a computer; and then you have the BIOS, the OS on top of that, and the language runtime of the stuff you're working on on top of that, and your program running on top of that. Obviously you already know this.

And the reason this basically kinda works is that a long time ago programmers figured out that the way to productivity is to have hardened interfaces at which you program; the point of these interfaces is to avoid having to concern yourself with most of the vast underground of abstractions that form a computer. Which means that most programmers don't really concern themselves with those details, and honestly it's not clear to me they should in the typical case.

That's because making maintainable software is about ensuring that you are, at all times, programming in the level of abstraction appropriate to your problem domain, neither going higher (resulting in perf issues, typically) or lower (resulting in bugs and long implementation times as you re-invent the wheel over and over). For every guy who tanks the performance of an app by not respecting the garbage collector, there's another that decides to implement his own JSON parser "for efficiency" and hooks it up to the [redacted] API, resulting in several extremely-difficult-to-debug issues in production that I personally burned several hours in fixing, all to shave milliseconds off an hourly batch process' running time. Not that I'm bitter.

So I guess that sort of statement-- "you're only a good programmer if you've used a language with manual memory management"-- feels like unjustified programmer-machismo, where someone chooses one of those abstraction layers between bare physics and the language runtime more-or-less arbitrarily and says "ah, but only if you deeply understand this specific abstraction layer can you truly be a good programmer."

Admittedly I work in distributed systems, where 99% of things that actually matter for performance occur over the network.

I'll second memory management, or more broadly understanding pointers, as being an important boundary.

There is nothing fundamentally lost moving from machine code to assembly - one's just shorthand for the other. Transforming C mechanically into assembly by hand is not hard, just pointless and tedious. But languages "above" memory really truly do lose sight of something. There is nothing in the Haskell Man's conceptual toolbox he can use to get a handle on the memory of the system he runs on.

I'll grant it's not often important, but there is a real line between "languages which require memory awareness" and languages that do not, and it's not arbitrary. A real aspect of system execution and performance is totally lost.

Abstractions leak. All of them. Even down to the physical layer. A great programmer needs to know enough about the layers below to recognize when they're being bit by a leaky abstraction. If you don't understand enough about the layers below to be able to recognize an operating system call that doesn't work, or a CPU that mis-executes an instruction, or a memory management system that causes your code to grind to a halt while you pay the cost of deallocation, you're going to be unable to solve a problem. Thing is, physical layer issues are very rare (and simple bit flips are much more common than something as esoteric as rowhammer). Operation system bugs are at least reasonably rare with mature operating systems. Issues due to allocators, on the other hand, happen ALL THE TIME if you have a lot of data. So they're rather more important.

I would honestly put both our complaints in the bucket of "Programmer is ignorant about the level of abstraction they are working at." But people don't know what they don't know. And the only way out is for them to have worked at multiple levels of abstraction to know the bounds of the one they are currently operating in.

I know some really old programmers (old enough to remember punch cards) and while I wouldn't say they are unhappy with the spectacular leaps in ease and power of computing, there is definitely an element of "I had to walk uphill ten miles in the snow both ways" in their attitudes.

A couple things stand out to me from your post. I consider myself a very good programmer, and after managing around 100 other ones I've gotten some experience as to what makes good ones. Note that my market is east coast enterprise software for whatever that's worth.

First, I find it surprising you've never met a great female coder. I think you need to work with more people. They're rare, absolutely, but if you're not in a place that hires women because they're women then the bell curve of their quality is the same as men from my experience.

I was trained in the "intuition" method. While I've met phenoms that were self-taught or bootcampers my guess is around 2% of them are good enough for me to want to hire, vs around 10% that have gotten a degree (and those degree programs were, when they got them, using an early focus on data structures etc.).

That being said, I did find so much theory for so long to be incredibly frustrating. It's not a stretch to say that I learned more about coding in the monthlong training put on by my first company than I did in a whole year of school. I think the theory matters, but the current CS and SWE accreditation requirements need some major adjustments, IMO. I would have killed for a databases class and requiring the use of source control.

I agree with you that trying to dumb down coding instruction seems like a win but isn't. You may keep freshmen around long enough to sink into the program where they can't get out without burning money, but they'll be shittier programmers. Your brother's professor using Processing seems almost unbelievably stupid for so many reasons. Java and C# are already high level enough for a newbie to take a crack at them, much less something like Python. Why on earth would you waste a semester not developing exposure to a valuable language?

I am actually, however, grateful that my C/C++ class was second year. The place I was taught had a brutal class that was supposedly just 1 hour but was easily the hardest single programming class I took. Because of it I was able to wipe the floor with other students at a different school when I transferred, but I honestly don't know if I would have fallen in love with programming if my only runtime error messages were just segmentation fault.

Agreed that C and C++ bloooooow as starter languages. You want something with reasonable error messages and stack traces. And good IDE support-- I think statically typed is actually lower-frustration than dynamically-typed while learning because the compiler tells you if you've fucked up in a particularly obvious way before even running the program.

EDIT: Also if I never again have to write a conversion function between (pick any two) char *, wchar_t *, _bstr_t, CComBSTR, CStringA, CStringW, basic_string, and System::String it'll be too soon.

EDIT: Also if I never again have to write a conversion function between (pick any two) char *, wchar_t *, _bstr_t, CComBSTR, CStringA, CStringW, basic_string, and System::String it'll be too soon.

Oh god. Oh god no. All those repressed memories are coming back. What have you done?! I don't have enough whiskey in the house to make this go away!

my only runtime error messages were just segmentation fault.

gdb --args !!

You can even set the SIGSEGV handler to automatically attach gdb to the running program.

GDB is

  1. not easy to learn

  2. even less easy to learn if you are a part of the modern GUI/webapp/the-fuck-is-a-shell generation (so, the problem statement at hand)

  3. doesn't even scale to larger projects, so you can hardly say you'll use it in a real job

Compare it with, let's say, the chrome debug console. Or the vscode debugger for python. They're far more intuitive than x/10g info all-regs, b 0x1234, ni×100, etc.

Sure, but just bt and q already gets you 50% of the benefit.

You can just run a nodejs program with --inspect and the chrome debugger will automatically find it and connect (green icon, top left corner), and then you can debug it just like you would a website! It's much nicer than gdb.

I took the theory-and-math-heavy track at school because I figured it would be interesting. It's true that I learned more during an internship than in any of those courses. In programming in particular, degrees definitely are signaling and gatekeeping.

Still, I think programming is in its infancy. Whenever discussions about "is it really engineering or not" come up and the inevitable comparison to bridges and EE happens, people point out that software is bad and buggy, and lots of people don't follow "best practices."

It could be that in a hundred years or so, they will look back and laugh at how primitive we were. Maybe training catches up and programmers become everydaymen like plumbers instead of passionate autists.

Still, I think programming is in its infancy. Whenever discussions about "is it really engineering or not" come up and the inevitable comparison to bridges and EE happens, people point out that software is bad and buggy, and lots of people don't follow "best practices."

I've had that conversation and I'm not sure we'll ever be able to get to that level of "best practices" because the need for software so heavily outstrips the supply. If we needed 100 bridges tomorrow or the world was going to end I'd assume there'd be some that aren't able to handle heavy trucks. See chinese physical engineering corner cutting.

Plus, getting a great gay sex app together is less important than a bridge. Software isn't as consistently life-critical as designing roads is (and when it is, the standards are really high).

Finally, there's the fact that we're dealing with building things that at some level don't have simple and constant physical constraints to box us into "standards". Nobody can build a bridge that corkscrews up to the moon on their own, but you can do things with software you can't do with any other type of engineering.

A few thoughts:

I learned programming I think by something closer to the first intuitive method, and it's still how I generally encourage people to learn. I would describe it as, first write a program that does something you find interesting or useful, no matter how minor. Pay little attention to design, cleanliness, optimization etc, just bang it out and get it working. Once you have something that basically works, then work on refactoring and adjustment to make it better, possibly with the advice and supervision of somebody more senior. Expand that initial project to be bigger and do more things, or start a new project that's more ambitious, and repeat. Keep at it for a while and eventually you'll learn all of the important parts and gain experience.

I see this as useful in that it maximizes natural interest. I find it rare and difficult to build interest in reading walls of text about elaborate rule systems regarding things you've never done. Both building things you find interesting or useful and getting hands-on experience in how to make it better are much easier to maintain interest in and stick with.

I do think that there's a certain type of intelligence or way of thinking necessary to be a good programmer. It's probably kind of correlated with proper IQ, though not quite the same thing. Like many other related things, I have no idea to what extent it's genetic versus developmental, but clearly many adults just aren't capable of it.

Regarding gender, I'm not really sure why, but it seems women self-select out of development at a very high rate, most specifically American women. Of all of the developers at my company, I think under 10% are women. Women are a lot more common in testing, product reps, project managers, line management, pretty much everything but development. There's zero women in our architecture groups. I'm not honestly sure if women are actually less likely to want to advance into the higher ranks of technical skill, or if it's actually about the same for the total number of women doing development work. I've never personally worked with a woman I thought was a super awesome developer, though some other people I would trust to make such calls have made such claims of some of the other women I work with, and I'd also say not that many of the men were super awesome either.

I haven't seen any reason to adjust my priors on that beyond the 90s-era standard - anyone who has the skills and the interest is welcome to do the job, but I reject the notion that there's any significant overall bias or prejudice keeping deserving people out of the profession, or that we need to put our fingers on the scales in some way to get "better numbers" on the participation of any particular group.

I consider myself a competent (not great, certainly not "rock star") programmer. I was formally taught. I definitely have strong areas and weak areas. I am good at coding and recognizing when someone else has written crappy code, and figuring out higher-level solutions. I am not great at grinding out leetcode problems (I can do it, but not brilliantly or easily), and algorithm classes were my bane.

(I am trying to teach myself about quantum computing right now, just out of personal interest, and man, I am not enjoying having to brush up on my linear algebra.)

Coding to me is more art than science, but I learned the science and understand the need for that foundational background. Thus, I agree with most of your observations. Most people can learn to build some things by following tutorials and memorizing patterns, and that's probably good enough for putting together apps like legos, but real programming requires knowing something about the bits and the hardware, at some level, and knowing a lot about data structures and algorithms.

I think that, as you say, persistence is the key to being a good programmer. Anecdotally, I have also observed few really good women programmers, but I suspect this is more because the kind of persistence/obsessiveness involved in figuring out solutions to hard problems with no more reward than that sudden "Aha, I finally got this fucking thing to work!" is rare in women. Whether that rarity is the product of biological or social conditioning is kind of irrelevant, frankly - women just don't usually have it.

That said, I also see in newer hires a lack of that sort of persistence both among the men and the women. Probably somewhat "Old man griping about the young'uns" here, but I've seen an increasing tendency of kids with fresh CS degrees to not really know how to independently track down the solution to a problem, including scouring stackoverflow and APIs et al. They sort of throw their hands up and ask very broad questions in channels like "Hey, this thing isn't working, can anyone tell me why?" Or "How do I do ?" ("Thing" being a fairly complicated multi-step process that requires experience mostly consisting of trying to do it and figuring out how to get past each obstacle one by one.) And they do this at every step. I have to gently point them at where to go to look for the solution to the next step, when I want to say "This is called being a programmer - read the documentation, use Google, and figure it out!"

My general impression is that the quality of CS grads has definitely gone down. Admittedly, I am not seeing a lot of grads from the top schools, so maybe things are better there and all those kids go to FAANG companies.

That said, I also see in newer hires a lack of that sort of persistence both among the men and the women. Probably somewhat "Old man griping about the young'uns" here, but I've seen an increasing tendency of kids with fresh CS degrees to not really know how to independently track down the solution to a problem, including scouring stackoverflow and APIs et al. They sort of throw their hands up and ask very broad questions in channels like "Hey, this thing isn't working, can anyone tell me why?" Or "How do I do ?" ("Thing" being a fairly complicated multi-step process that requires experience mostly consisting of trying to do it and figuring out how to get past each obstacle one by one.) And they do this at every step. I have to gently point them at where to go to look for the solution to the next step, when I want to say "This is called being a programmer - read the documentation, use Google, and figure it out!"

I am amazed at how many programmers never read the documentation. I've had many coworkers, not just younger, give up if they don't already know the solution to the problem. It should be bog standard to peruse the API calls, and fiddle in test programs with anything you don't understand. But most don't.

They don't want to discover a solution, they want someone to figure it out for them, and tell them exactly what to do.

A level up from that would be reading the source code of the libraries yourself (assuming it's available). A level up from that would be studying the byte code as an absolutely last resort.

Because sometimes you do find bugs in libraries. Or annoying deficiencies. Once I was using an open source websocket library, but had to use a bearer token for authentication. The websocket library came years before the requirement for bearer tokens, and it did not support it at all. The guy who maintained it had weird ideological reasons to never include it. But fuck it, it's open source. So away I went hacking it in. No big deal. But it's remarkable how few programmers are truly willing to go wading through someone else's code.

Honestly, given the quality of the documentation provided by most libraries etc these days, it's often easier to jump straight into the source. At best, the behaviour is undocumented. More likely the documentation is from six months ago when it worked entirely differently. The devs probably notified everyone about the change in behaviour via Discord or something.

EDIT: I think being given solutions to problems tends to be more valuable when you've tried your best to solve the problem yourself already. Then the answer is like a flash of light. If you just read about a problem and a solution, it's just a series of facts to store away for later.

The latter is a more 'rigorous' approach where students are taught the fundamentals such as data types, structures, flow, interpreter vs compiler, etc first; Then they are made to write programs. These programs are sometimes gamified but not to the extent as the former[...] I consider the latter "imparting knowledge" method superior. It's more in line with all the hard sciences I have been taught and all the good programmers I am aware of claim to have been taught using this method.

I realized as an adult that I do not retain knowledge if I am given that knowledge before I have any way to apply it. I suspect I'm not alone in this; but regardless, I strongly prefer the teaching methodology where you are made acquainted with tools by being given problems which necessitate using those tools. By "tools", here, I refer to algorithms and data structures, among other things. (I think this is why, even though I loved my Algorithms and Data Structures courses, I hated Operating Systems and whatever one it was that taught us assembly language. I retained very little of those and do not count them among the good or useful courses I took.)

I'm aware that this "knowledge-first-to-use-it-later" approach is similar to how the hard sciences are taught; I hated it there as well.

My actual start in programming came from hacking around in the Civilization 4 Python codebase, where I built mods for Fall From Heaven 2 and by necessity had to learn programming syntax-- I was only formally educated in programming later. Contrary to what your argument above would predict I was by far the strongest coder in my graduating class, and went on to get a job in FAANG (where I was, in my judgement, roughly at the top 20% of programmer strength in the company.)

So I don't know the total of what my "ideal programmer education" consists of, but I'm pretty sure a big chunk of it would involve writing a self-designed mod for the game Slay The Spire.

Okay okay, hear me out, this has a number of advantages:

  1. Slay the Spire is entirely programming-first. There is no "editor" interface, as a Unity game would have.

  2. Slay the Spire modding has, as its first step, decompiling the codebase. This gets your student exposure to "the act of having to understand somebody else's extremely nontrivial code".

  3. The codebase is also written using fairly reasonable best practices, particularly for a gaming studio-- it uses polymorphism to deal with all the myriad cards and their effects, which allows you to see very intuitively how polymorphism is used in the wild and why it's valuable. (I know that in my own programming education all of our programs were trivial enough that interfaces and abstract classes seemed weird and pointless, and none of my instructors could give what felt like adequate explanations for their use.)

  4. You can get something pretty cool out the other side-- a game mod! Having something cool and nontrivial that you're in the process of building is worth any number of credit points in inspiring motivation to actually learn programming.

  5. It's Java, which is a very standard programming language which features automated memory management.

So I think if I were designing a programming practicum it would feature game-modding as a big part of it, with perhaps some Code Combat or similar coding game in the first couple of weeks to familiarize students with the basic syntax and philosophy around programming in some reasonably entertaining format. And, of course, some problem sets later that showcase situations where students are given no choice but to use the standard data structures and algorithms.

What were you doing with FFH? I might have some of your work installed.

I'm a very poor programmer, the only thing I did was edit some Leader files to stack good traits on an Amurite leader in Ashes of Erebus so I could try to make an archmage Master of all the elements and achieve omnipotence.

I did the More Leaders Modmod!

The coding was extremely low-quality and the Python was probably buggy as hell. But it was mine.

EDIT: Wait, I think Ashes of Erebus did end up incorporating some of my work! How's that project going, by the by?

I think Ashes is basically finished. They added a race of Hamstalfar, hamsters lording over elves. That broke my immersion somewhat.

Was your More Leaders anything to do with the Minor/Emerging leaders in Ashes of Erebus?

I added a bunch of minor leaders, but I didn't do any of the mechanics behind Minor Leaders in general.

I... did not much like the Hamstalfar.

I also have the experience that I am incapable of remembering things that are not applicable.

The way I was taught Python was a cycle of:

  • Learn a new idea (conditionals, for loops, Big-O notation, lists/sets/dictionaries/strings, recursion, objects, etc.)

  • Solve a few problems that require that idea in isolation

  • Solve a few problems that require that idea in addition to everything else I know

  • repeat for the entire semester

  • Solve one problem using many (but not all) of the ideas, with minimal direction

Once you have a big enough toolbox, you have to start solving the problems instead of guessing the teacher's password.

Based on my anecdotal experience of people wanting to learn programming from me, the only reason a person can't code is because they aren't motivated. I know lots of people who like the idea of coding, or like the salary of it, but they don't like coding. Most good programmers I know like it. There are things I like the idea of, or like the rewards of, but I don't like the activity of it (social games/PUA), so I stay bad at them.

I think that's way more important than the choice between games or formal whatever theory.

I was self-taught from a young age. It never really felt like “learning”, it was just “fun”, because I was so fascinated by it all. Constantly trying out new languages, thinking of new little projects to do (everything from webdev to bare metal stuff like bootloaders), I even took programming books with me when we went on family vacations. None of it was very structured, but I did end up exposing myself to a very broad variety of areas.

In general it’s very hard to teach someone a complex skill when they have neither intrinsic talent nor intrinsic motivation. I have no suggestions about what to do in that case, except for asking him which topics he finds the most interesting and encouraging him to work on those things.

Edit to expand a little more: I think all learning is essentially self-learning. In the course of my life, I have never encountered any significant evidence to the contrary. Talk about using a “gamified” approach or a “rigorous” approach is ultimately neither here nor there, because YOU can’t actually “teach” him anything with either method. He has to do the legwork himself. He may gravitate to a more rigorous approach, or a more vibes-based approach, it doesn’t really matter. In my view, the role of a teacher is mainly to be a sounding board for questions, but crucially the teacher should be an intelligent sounding board. They should not only provide answers, but they should also examine the hidden underlying assumptions behind the student’s questions, and they should correct misconceptions and guide the student in the right direction when they seem to be going down a bad path.

Teach them python. Give them all domain names, and digital ocean droplets.

Let them troll each other. Fin.

I broadly agree except for the part about women (I actually have known a lot of women who were great software developers, although I agree that women seem proportionaly less likely to get good at it) and had a similar background: I started in CS where I remained for two years (taking all of the CS classes before stopping after data structures in C) before changing my focus to a physical science. I now work in a job where I am essentially a data scientist for a group of (much smarter) physicists all of whom can program with the kind of intuitive knowledge that you described. All of these people (whom have been perfectly willing to self teach themselves other things in math and physics) are hugely constrained by the fact that they don’t know really know how data structures work. If they ever bother to learn Ill be out of a job.

I have asked some of my colleagues how they learned to program. The older ones are all completely self taught (and are usually a little better since this means that they had to learn C or Fortran) while the people my age usually got some sort of CS for physical scientists (which is usually a 1 semester long class in python where they learned to use numpy and matplotlib). I really don’t understand why more of them haven’t self taught and have concluded that it must be a matter of motivation or maybe even professional chauvinism.

Lots of scientists fundamentally don’t believe that things which happen on a computers are or could be that interesting. This is just insane to me given that computers are finally getting powerful enough that they can run some of their experiments with simulations (or at least use simulations to better plan them). Given the importance of these skills I really believe that universities should require physical scientists to spend a year taking real computer science, or whatever else it takes to make more of the profession aware that these skills are becoming as important as competence in mathematics for doing original research these days.

This is just insane to me given that computers are finally getting powerful enough that they can run some of their experiments with simulations (or at least use simulations to better plan them)

This has been true for a while though. Computing in general, whether it be by simulation or code for a tool or just for analyzing large amounts of data, have taken over or created many subfields in the hard sciences.

I agree and I should have clarified that I specifically meant High Performance Computing which is where knowledge of things like parallel programming is essential.

I have come across two fairly distinct methods of teaching programming. I would classify them as 'trying to impart intuition' vs. 'trying to impart knowledge.'

The former consists of teaching via gamified methods where students are made to play elaborate games consisting of programming puzzles, modify existing code to draw out 2-d shapes and animations, etc. Once students develop some familiarity with changing words in a file to make the computer do something, they are introduced to data types, data structures, control flow, etc.

The latter is a more 'rigorous' approach where students are taught the fundamentals such as data types, structures, flow, interpreter vs compiler, etc first; Then they are made to write programs. These programs are sometimes gamified but not to the extent as the former.

I consider the latter "imparting knowledge" method superior. It's more in line with all the hard sciences I have been taught and all the good programmers I am aware of claim to have been taught using this method. More on this later.

I want to push back on your last point.

I went to a university that was top 20 on this list and was one of the strongest programmers of my year and am currently working at a FAANG. My introduction to programming was in high school and was mostly self-taught -- I took two programming courses in high school but they were primarily HTML-oriented. Before college, I was never explicitly taught about if-statements or for-loops (though I had been using them for ~3 years) and didn't know asymptotic notation, heaps, hash tables, etc.

Then I got to college and voraciously consumed all the "formal" CS education. So to me, my education was primarily the former method and "I turned out fine". (Though I certainly would have appreciated getting a formal CS education a year or two earlier, and certainly rigorous education is necessary at some point).

The main caveat is that "move this frog around the screen to eat bugs" is kind of a pathetic attempt to gameify education and I would have hated it. Working on my own projects and actually achieving them made programming basically seem magical, and (imo) that's what made me super excited to learn the formal stuff when I got to college.

Yeah, I have kinda the same story.

First programming I did was on a graphic calculator, learning only from the manual of the calculator. Had no clue what loops where, or what a condition is, much less what a data structure is and why would I need that. I just wanted to have a program to so some calculations for me on a test, hacked away in BASIC.

Then when I finally got the proper programming courses everything fell into place, and I'm fully convinced that prior experience was essential. I was actually engaged learning about the more complex topics of programing.

Personally I always thought Texas and other border states were just playing national politics with the border crisis. Creating a crisis as an issue to run for re-election on.

https://www.axios.com/2022/10/07/new-york-adams-emergency-migrant-buses

NYC has received 17k migrants since April. That seems tiny compared to what Texas has dealt with.

Adams said the city is receiving on average 5-6 buses a day. I will assume 40 people per bus or about 240 a day. That’s about 75k a year and he says it will cost the city a billion a year.

Now 75k a year of migrants is probably NYC fair share of migrants for how many are coming. NYC population around 9 million or 1/35 of the US.

He says it’s not an issue they asked for, but they did declare themselves a sanctuary city.

Maybe Adams is actually a Republican. Because his complaining is exactly what Republicans would want from busing them for political reasons. Conversely maybe Texas GOP complaining about migrants was not just politics but a real issue they were having trouble dealing with. I assumed it was politics.

I think this also shows some weaknesses with the blue city state capacity. The basic agreement before was we have some globally competitive people we can tax a lot to fund our local poor plus civil servants. Blue cities aren’t that good at building more housing and infrastructure anymore. It’s about $20k a year for them per migrant. Texas and the south can just give them a mortgage for $20k to buy a used a trailer and use their land which can house multiple people though jobs might be a problem theirs only so many meat processing plant and ranch hands you need.

Honestly NYC should just ship them to Chicago and write a $20k a head check. There’s plenty of abandoned property on the southside that needs people (though has violence issues but better than where they came from).

If Adams was going to be a good Democrat he should just pay the tab and tell Abbot he will take his proportional share.’

I posted this as a reply to someone else further down the chain, but I'm going to repost it as a top-level response:

Where illegal immigrants end up:

https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2019/03/11/us-metro-areas-unauthorized-immigrants/ (this is measuring by metro area, rather than state, and some of the cities spill across state borders - New York being the most prominent)

https://www.dhs.gov/sites/default/files/publications/immigration-statistics/Pop_Estimate/UnauthImmigrant/unauthorized_immigrant_population_estimates_2015_-_2018.pdf

Per DHS numbers, out of the top 10 states, we have

Blue States (CA, IL, NY, NJ, WA): 4.33M

Red States (TX, FL, GA, NC): 3.33M

Purple States (AZ): .33M

CA and TX account for about half of their respective categories.

An older (2016) study from PEW gives us the tally below for all statse: https://www.pewresearch.org/hispanic/interactives/u-s-unauthorized-immigrants-by-state/

Red States: 4.22M

Blue States: 5.76M

Purple States: .62M

An interesting side note to consider - if your ultimate goal is to get rid of immigrants these stunts may be counterproductive.

“It’s safe to say what’s going on is a pull factor, which is somewhat ironic given the criticism from some of these same governors involved in this about various pull factors that they claim already exist,” Magnus told The Times. He said social media plays a part in the problem because it is enticing “when migrants hear that there are buses that will take them to locations where they are told they will receive benefits and job.” Magnus noted that human smugglers use the same information to lure migrants.

Another fun side note:

We've seen the threshold for Texans to start complaining about immigrant culture, and it's something like 30K/yr. (See p.23) And that state isn't even hiring buses!

Well the intent isn't to deter migrants directly, I'm sure the intent is to get the Federal Government to act on border security, which would hopefully THEN deter the migrants.

Or at least, make blue states share the costs.

Blue states already share the cost, and annoying municipal officials is not going to persuade Democratic legislators to spend vastly more on border security (which Abbott and Desantis already know).

It will certainly make their case for the need for more border security vastly stronger when even the Democrats are declaring it a crisis, albeit indirectly. So when they take office the political road to action is already well-paved.

How else can they draw attention to the issue given that National Media (Fox excluded) alternates between ignoring it entirely and bemoaning the "extreme" tactics employed by border patrol and the plight of detained migrants themselves?

How would YOU suggest they raise awareness?

Hey, do you know if they're still keeping kids "in cages" at the border? Remember when that was a national outrage? Anyone? Bueller?

I'm assuming that faceh is not only talking about economic cost but societal too. And well as to your second point: "The beatings buses will continue until morale border policy improves"

As has been noted repeatedly, immigrants mostly live in blue states. The "societal costs" are already shared. That's not the issue. The issue is that nativists don't want any significant immigration at all.

"The beatings buses will continue until morale border policy improves"

The overwhelmingly pro-immigration voters living in areas with already high immigrant populations are not going to change their mind because a few more show up. It just doesn't affect their lives that much. You're more likely to see the Feds cut a big check to affected blue states than you are to see a major opinion shift. This policy is grandstanding by Abbott and Desantis to further build their lib-owning credentials.

immigrants mostly live in blue states.

That's a bit of a misleading phrasing. "Immigrants" as a class are different than the types of persons who have no other option but to "sneak" in.

The ones crossing the border are almost certainly a much, much larger burden and net drain on resources than those that follow "proper channels."

Hence, even that one Democrat mayor in Texas is shipping migrants out.

I challenge you to show that blue states, especially Northern ones, have as many undocumented immigrants as Southern border states.

"Immigrants" as a class are different than the types of persons who have no other option but to "sneak" in.

All immigrants, legal and illegal, tend to wind up in blue states. Red states tend to be lacking in economic opportunity and the comparative lack of major cities or pre-existing communities makes them relatively unattractive.

The ones crossing the border are almost certainly a much, much larger burden and net drain on resources than those that follow "proper channels."

What's your model?

I challenge you to show that blue states, especially Northern ones, have as many undocumented immigrants as Southern border states.

"Southern border states" includes includes California. If you mean "traditionally southern states" (or just red states on the border), that's literally just Texas.

As for where illegal immigrants end up:

https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2019/03/11/us-metro-areas-unauthorized-immigrants/ (this is measuring by metro area, rather than state, and some of the cities spill across state borders - New York being the most prominent)

https://www.dhs.gov/sites/default/files/publications/immigration-statistics/Pop_Estimate/UnauthImmigrant/unauthorized_immigrant_population_estimates_2015_-_2018.pdf

Per DHS numbers, out of the top 10 states, we have

Blue States (CA, IL, NY, NJ, WA): 4.33M

Red States (TX, FL, GA, NC): 3.33M

Purple States (AZ): .33M

CA and TX account for about half of their respective categories.

An older (2016) study from PEW gives us the tally below for all statse: https://www.pewresearch.org/hispanic/interactives/u-s-unauthorized-immigrants-by-state/

Red States: 4.22M

Blue States: 5.76M

Purple States: .62M

If you want to compare Texas to the northeast, that's 1.6M vs 2.3M (states counted: CT, DC, MD, MA, NJ, NY, PA, RI, VA)

These are good numbers to use, but I suspect that as soon as I scale them for the population of the respective states it will make things a little clearer as to how each state has been faring in shouldering their share of the influx.

Here's a 2016 study from Pew that estimates the total number of 'unauthorized' immigrants and their percentage of population on a state by state basis:

https://www.pewresearch.org/hispanic/interactives/u-s-unauthorized-immigrants-by-state/

See also @netstack's post below which indicates Texas and Florida have far more immigrants in absolute numbers than anywhere but California, and that as a percentage of the population its heavily skewed towards border states.

To get REALLY specific: based on these numbers, in order for Martha's Vineyard to have a similar share of immigrants in their borders, which I've arbitrarily set at 3% to approximate the ratio of the whole U.S., the community of 15,000 people would need to have 450 illegal immigrants living there.

They declared a crisis over Fifty. So they really aren't prepared to shoulder their fair share at this rate.

Do you disagree?

More comments

This report shows the top 10 states by illegal population in Table 3.

The only Southern border states are

  • AZ (360K, 5.1%).

  • FL (660K, 3.1%), if you count it as a border

  • TX (1940K, 6.6%)

Note that Arizona went blue. Against that we have

  • IL (450K, 3.5%)

  • NJ (460K, 5.2%)

  • NY (560K, 2.9%)

for unambiguously Northern blue states, and

  • WA (290K, 3.9%)

  • GA (380K, 2.7%)

  • CA (2610K!, 6.6%)

in the other-blue category. Percentages are proportions of total state populations per this 2018 estimate. The other state from the list is NC, which is neither blue nor border nor northern.

In conclusion, TX and CA dominate the conversation both in absolute numbers and in percentage. Of the northern states, NJ is closest in percentage, and NY in total population. FL has a higher total than any of them, but a lower percentage than IL or NJ.

On one hand, you could add up all the blue northern states, plus WA, and still not clear the number from TX. On the other, they are all dwarfed by CA. Take out those two big outliers, and I don't think AZ or FL really outpaces the north.

It's possible that this is skewed in some way, especially since it's pre-COVID, but it does agree with Texas' own numbers (p.27).

The fact that California is on the border and has such huge population of illegal immigrants tends to support the narrative that there's a border 'crisis.'

More comments

Texas isn't just playing politics, and a lot of that politics is more complex than "look at what Joe did to the border".

  • The largest single busing program is run by the city of El Paso, itself a democrat stronghold(albeit not always particularly progressive) and generally aligned against Governor Abbott. That this fact is only brought up by republicans trying to defend their own busing program is probably more political a decision than having busing programs to begin with.

  • A lot of these migrants are sheltering in the Rio Grande valley, which is realigning from "blue enough that these rural counties can't fill a room with local republicans" to "red-ish". A lot of this realignment is more or less the same people, too- existing elected officials are choosing to switch party registration, and in local terms this is aligning strongly with Greg Abbott. Busing migrants to blue cities elsewhere in the country is a way to reward newfound friends and punish long-term enemies, given that masses of unemployed and ethnically distinct(the valley is majority Hispanic, but it's mostly a specific kind of Hispanic- the descendants of white Mexicans living in Texas before independence from Mexico or at least before annexation by the US. The migrants are usually mestizo or indio centracos or Venezuelans.) poor people are generally not something anyone wants in their backyards.

-200,000 people a month is legitimately a lot and is getting used as cover for cartels trying to smuggle in drugs and slaves. This latter aspect is in heavy use in pro-border security narratives. There's also a major humanitarian aspect of having hundreds of thousands of unemployed poor people sitting around in a rural semidesert, and this fact is in heavy use in pro-busing narratives.

-Finally, busing is popular in Texas, although not overwhelmingly so, and this is probably a factor in Abbott's decision to continue the program. Texas is red but not red enough that he can afford to take a series of unpopular decisions with no consequences and Abbott would rather make it up elsewhere than compromise on abortion.

Does anyone have predictions on how this country will look when half of its citizens have a standard deviation lower IQ on average?

Let me rephrase this. Is there any way this won’t be a catastrophe which, in 500 years, people will look back on as a lesson in how nations fail? There’s no possible way that tens of millions of lower IQ people added to a nation is good for the nation, right?

This is why I hate empathy. I’ve got no problem letting them in to work and go back. Just don’t give them citizenship.

How many people would be interested in a $50 a day childcare, cleaning, cooking, etc when they have young kids and are working professionals. Put them in your garage or spare bedroom. They could save a ton of money to eventually go back to their home country.

But empathy gets in the way. Because if they are here in this country then they need housing, health care, education, and citizenship.

The US depends much more on those with 3-4 or higher standard deviation higher IQ than it does having a mass of 100IQ people. The latter already just believe what smarter people come up with and work in jobs, entertain themselves, in ways said smarter people come up with. Whereas the latter ... physics, philosophy, finance, law, math, engineering, etc.

So if you're worried about tens of millions of lower IQ people added to the nation, why not worry about the hundreds of millions of similarly lower IQ people already here? There are still 15% of the population below a standard deviation anyway.

Would it, though? Let's say the new people are, on average, 94 IQ. Are the existing 100IQ voters really competently evaluating political philosophies and candidates, or are they mostly just led by politicians and media on either side? If 150M 95Iq people were airdropped into the US right now, or the next generation was significantly dumber ... it would suck, but society wouldn't collapse. You just can't have a 95IQ person write a compiler, no matter how much affirmative action wants it.

Or - a bunch of 94IQ people wouldn't destroy society, because the existing 94IQ people and existing 100IQ people don't. And both are, relative to having much more intelligent and smart and passionate etc people, worse for 'the nation' or 'the people' or anything.

It's the same issue as the race/IQ debate. You have people who are 130Iq on this site arguing that the US going from 100IQ to 95IQ is a CATASTROPHE. But what about the gap between 100 and 130? And for racism - ok, blacks are some number of points less. But - ">130IQ people" are 30 points higher than the average american. Isn't that a much more important bit?

It's harder for the smart people to support welfare payments for X + 150 million than it is for just X.

Yeah, but the solution is for the 130IQ people to have more children, or do eugenics, in either case. The difference between 100 and 95 is swamped by 100 - 130.

People with an IQ of 90 are plenty smart enough to realize that they can get what they want by voting for the party that will take from the middle class and give to the poor

this is not that stark. A lot of poorer people still vote R, esp if white. Also ... don't the democrats want higher taxes on the rich, and the republicans want lower taxes on the rich? I don't have a preference on the issue, but have never understood the 'take from the middle class' argument.

I guess it depends on what you mean by 'collapse'. I don't think the US will stop existing, but I think life will get drastically and permanently worse for me and my family.

Can you name a specific way that'll happen?

Also ... don't the democrats want higher taxes on the rich, and the republicans want lower taxes on the rich? I don't have a preference on the issue, but have never understood the 'take from the middle class' argument.

The rich is an exponentially different category. If you take the upper 10%, the first 9.9% are PMC and business owners with very transparent income streams. When the government raises taxes on the rich, it targets these people first and foremost. Orthoxerox the FAANG programmer and orthoxerox the owner of a copy center chain both have to do something for a living, which makes them middle class.

Taxing the "idle rich" is much harder. They have enough money to pay other people to take care of their money. These well-paid and highly qualified people spend their days thinking about minimizing the tax burden of their customers, coming up with complex and tailor-made solutions. To counteract them, you would have to fill the IRS with equally well-paid and highly qualified people, and this just doesn't scale.

You hire one such guy for $500K, he spends a year targeting Mr Moneybags, spends another $500K on court fees and gets ten million back in taxes. That's a great rate of return, isn't it? Hire a hundred of them, and they will collect a billion tax dollars every year!

There's 130 million households in the US. The top 10.0% (or 13 000 000) can be forced to pay $10K more in taxes. Bam, 130 billion tax dollars earned.

You have people who are 130Iq on this site arguing that the US going from 100IQ to 95IQ is a CATASTROPHE. But what about the gap between 100 and 130?

To be fair, if there were a country with an average IQ of 130, for them it would be a catastrophe to be reduced to an average of 100. It's possible that, for a fixed percentage of 130 IQ people a country might have (assuming it's a low percentage), having a population average of 100 is still going to get you a significantly better standard of living than a population average of 95, even if the gap between 100 and 130 is much larger.

I'm not arguing that intelligence doesn't matter, it does, I'm explicitly arguing that the difference that matters is the 130/160 vs 100, as opposed to native 100 vs migrant 95. It just sounds like a reductio ad absurdum

Realistically, the US will fund future spending programs, no matter how large, through debt and not taxation. This has all sorts of negative externalities but none of them are what you're describing.

You want to see the worst case future of the US under a scenario of demographic semi-replacement(because no one expects the natives to pack up and move to australia like SA whites)? Argentina, not South Africa. Inflation is the killer, not tax burden or hostility driven outmigration(Hispanics think getting to live next to white people is the awesomest thing ever). And that's still bad, but talented and demographically majority Argentines aren't exactly excluded from in country opportunities the way SA whites or high caste Indians are. If anything, a scenario like that strongly encourages native talent to go to work in country in high-reward jobs because it strengthens the economy and raises tax revenues without having to raise rates(which the US is unlikely to do).

What makes you think these migrants are a full standard deviation lower IQ? Particularly if you mean genetic potential IQ?

Also, the US hasn't even been a nation for 500 years. Indeed, few nations last that long. Making predictions about 500 years from now seems extremely overconfident.

We have studies on the IQ of native Americans, mestizos, indigenous Mexicans, and so on. By all accounts they are lower than the median iq in America. IQ isn’t everything, but successful countries all have high IQs and when countries become inundated with low iq citizens (South Africa) it makes pretty much everything worse off.

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/15688574/

https://www.mdpi.com/2624-8611/1/1/9/pdf

Your first study is of childhood IQ, which is known to be not nearly as heritable as adult IQ. It also cannot adjust for confounding factors such as malnutrition (which is generally not an issue in the First World, but Mexico is not that). Your second is Lynn, who I do not have great confidence in -- but also fails to show a full standard deviation.

Mexico is a fairly developed country which is poor and a failed state, but there’s not masses of people starving on the streets there.

These migrants come from Central America and Venezuela, and in border states are considered less assimilable than Mexicans and Caribbean Latinos. It’s not totally unreasonable to point to recent food shortages in Venezuela as depressing average IQ, but I believe Venezuelan and Honduran IQ’s were also quite a bit lower when they were ruled by US-backed dictatorships that consistently produced enough food for everyone.

Of course Hispanics also seem to interbreed with whites and be indistinguishable therefrom in a couple of generations, so YMMV.

Here's an article from reason about exactly this, with a ton more studies and numbers (still reading). There's also the hispanic-white-iq-gap tag on human varieties.org , and - looking at the list of studies from the puerto rico article - the massive variation in result from study to study strongly suggests one can't take a random number from a random study at face value, but actually understand where they come from! (Gwern's now-deleted list of GWAS results on wikipedia felt similar, many entries with more than one study had very different results.) There are many well done studies that do have reliable, reproducible results, but that doesn't mean every or even most in some field are.

Cheap labor might be a net benefit if welfare expectations weren't so high and if crime were more effectively dealt with, but yeah, as it is it seems to be a bad deal.

Edit: And the sociocultural problems, obviously. And the identity politics.

they did declare themselves a sanctuary city

That is the problem, isn't it? "We declare that if you come into this country undocumented, we won't turn you away and we'll give you a place to stay in safety". And then bus loads come in from elsewhere and it's "We didn't mean it like that".

Well then, how did you mean it? I could declare my home a sanctuary for Azerbaijani refugees, safe in the knowledge that nobody from Azerbaijan is going to turn up on my doorstep. But if they do, I can't wriggle out of it by "Oh, I meant only if you came straight to my door, not that you came in to the country fifty miles away".

Now 75k a year of migrants is probably NYC fair share of migrants for how many are coming.

One comparison I think is interesting is that the number of illegal border crossings each month in 2022 (~200k) is roughly the size of the Russian force that originally invaded Ukraine in February. Obviously those crossing into the US aren't an armed force bent on regime change, but I think it gives an interesting perspective to the scale of the problem that someone (wrongly, as it turns out) thought that was a large enough force to invade a country with more people than California.

Honestly, I think the Democrats have a branding problem in that they've been positioning themselves as Anti-Republican on this (among other issues) without universally wanting unfettered immigration either. But when word gets around that "Uncle Joe will let us in" and people start turning up, they can't exactly admit that some degree of restriction is valid and desirable, so they do things like quietly continue building Trump's wall.

I also think we need to reconsider the idea that the shibboleth "asylum" when said to border agents should grant months-to-years of legal residency until claims can be reviewed with no real teeth for failure-to-appear. It sounds nice in principle, but seems prone to abuse.

One comparison I think is interesting is that the number of illegal border crossings each month in 2022 (~200k) is roughly the size of the Russian force that originally invaded Ukraine in February.

I assume most of those are deported quickly. Do you know what proportion of the migrants manage to remain in the US long-term?

I was looking into that as well. I'm seeing about 180-220K "encounters" a month, of which 70-110K are immediately booted under Title 42. Unfortunately, the remainder are just flagged as Title 8 "apprehensions and inadmissibles." I believe this includes release-with-monitoring along with immediate deportation, detainment, or denial of asylum.

And of course, these numbers completely exclude any crossings that avoid the CBP outright.

The previous rule- and Abbott and Doucy’s original demand- was that migrants have to wait for their claims to be processed in Mexico.

I also think we need to reconsider the idea that the shibboleth "asylum" when said to border agents should grant months-to-years of legal residency until claims can be reviewed with no real teeth for failure-to-appear. It sounds nice in principle, but seems prone to abuse.

I listened to an interview a while back where, basically, the pro-immigration person said that this happens all the time, but is actually more common with chinese immigrants. Their copy-paste story is that they're a christian being persecuted for asylum.

Now, this was during Trump's presidency and on NPR, so the chance of the interviewee outright lying to make Trump look bad is high. Or perhaps that was on a per-capita basis, so hispanic asylum abusers were still more significant in a different way.

But yes, I'd agree. There are literal armies of lawyers camped at the border to coach and help make sure immigrants keep their stories straight. Even if you tighten up the rules, that's a difficult thing to fight against.

The first thing we do, let's kill all the lawyers.

Yes, but if the reality is that most of the immigrants from certain countries are going to go live, disproportionately, in certain US states, then those states are bearing a larger part of the burden. Stunts like declaring sanctuary in Martha's Vineyard and NYC are then shown to be stunts just as much as Texas busing immigrants to NYC and Martha's Vineyard.

So if you're not willing to deal with the illegals, then stop declaring yourself a sanctuary, and pay your share towards the burden on the states that do deal with them.

And seeing a larger portion of the benefits as well, to be fair.

A big portion of the non-software industry in California is propped up by dudes coming up from places like oaxaca with experience and skill in trade who would be making 80k+ with a social security number and a Midwest accent working for way less building shit, and dudes coming from closer to the border willing to break their backs picking fruit for too little money for the juice to be worth the squeeze.

Source: I live there and worked in trades part/full time from 18yrs till the pandemic let me go to school for that sweet sweet STEM degree and the following fake job where I get to make six figures to sit on my ass and pretend to work instead of hauling wires through a 140 degree 2.5' crawl space.

That Oaxaxa point is apropos, actually. There is a community of dudes that came up from the peninsula a looooooong time ago near me, which drew more dudes from there, and finally peeled of a lot of guys with options. We get some real talented electricians , plumbers, carpenters, and arborists who could go anywhere to come to this shitty southern Californian area you've never heard of because the great-great-grand uncle came here 130 years ago to build retaining walls for avocado groves.

you really feel like your STEM job is fake and you don't produce value? but the $ is too good to go back to threading wire through hot crawl spaces?

Hell yeah.

Any job where I can take a break, cook myself a meal and wash it down with expensive whiskey then go back to my desk if fake as fuck.

For real though, I am referring to the difference in suffering and imposition from one to the other. In my previous job, I was exhausted, I was at risk of hurting myself or being killed because some chucklefuck flipped a breaker somewhere, and I did actual important work that mattered. If everyone in my position stopped working suddenly, society instantly collapses.

Now, I am at no risk, I can do whatever I want whenever I want, I make more money, and if everyone in my position stopped working suddenly society is damaged, but it doesn't sliiiiiiiiiide on back to the 1800's.

Any salaried CNR job feels fake when you realize you have the option of phoning it in if you don't feel productive today and this doesn't affect your pay. I could be reading The Motte for eight hours, uh-huhing my way through conference calls and still earn almost $300. I don't claim I could do this for several weeks in a row, but someone with an easily quantifiable output doesn't even have the luxury of a single lazy day. If you shingle roofs for a living, either you shingle them and get paid, or you don't shingle them and don't get paid.

Of course, those places are in fact dealing with illegal immigrants, because illegal immigrants tend to disproportionately settle in blue areas. The idea that NYC is saying "we don't want illegal immigrants" is obviously incorrect, given that the state allows them to get drivers licenses and the city provides them with free health care,

There's no problem shipping illegals to New York City, then. Glad we agree.

No, there certainly is no problem, as long as that is where they want to go.

And, btw, as I understand it, the people being sent are not illegal immigrants; they entered, requested asylum, passed a "credible fear" interview by an asylum officer, and hence were released pending formal adjudication of their asylum claim at a deportation hearing before an immigration judge. All of which is perfectly legal. Anyone who does not pass the credible fear interview can appeal, but are held in detention until that happens. See discussion of procedure here.

Yeah I don't believe gaming dubious asylum claims is a legitimate means of entering the country, gonna stick with illegals. Hope they keep getting shipped to sanctuaries!

As I mentioned, if they don't pass the credible fear interview, they don't get in. And I am guessing that asylum officers, who actually know the law, are better able than you or I to determine whether the claims are dubious or not. And, I too, hope they keep getting shipped to sanctuaries; it is better for them, and in the long run the sanctuaries will be better off economically.

I'm glad we agree! I'm more than happy with the transportation.

Albanians, who would get EU citizenship somewhere in Central Europe

Lol what.

I don't think so. None of these countries give citizenship out lightly. Not the former WP countries, not Germany - I still remember the anguished editorials from 1990s about how Turks who came to Germany in 1970s for work still didn't have citizenship.

Well, according to this, Turks were getting dual citizenship by a loophole where they renounced the Turkish one, got German, then got Turkish again. which the Turkish government was helpful with.

https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fsoc.2020.536940/full

In '99 that reform stopped the loophole they were using, although it doesn't seem to have changed things much re: naturalisation rates.

Germany made naturalization much easier over the course of the 90s. See section entitled "The German Citizenship Law Reform of 2000" here

Yeah, legal requirement for residency went down to 8 from 15 years. None of that seems to make it particularly attractive as a place to 'get' EU citizenship.

Lol what.

This is low-effort and antagonistic. You're welcome to ask for clarification on a claim that confuses you, but this is not the way to do it.

Texas has grown 20% in the past decade, with non-Hispanic whites becoming a minority in the state. In 2005 the illegal immigrant population was estimated to be 1.4-1.6 million. In 2006 it was estimated to be 1.74 million. What's driving Texas' population boom?

Meanwhile New York's population has been flat, with a recent decline. California grew about 6% and started declining. At this rate Texas will be the largest state in a decade or so. I'm guessing that unlike provinces in Canada (or at least a particular province), states can't throw a hissy-fit about losing representatives in the House and end up getting to keep them? lol

Texas is 100% playing politics with the border. Well, maybe 90%; we've got to leave some room for Florida, which is apparently so overwhelmed that they have to use Texan migrants for their publicity stunts.

First, what's the cost of living in rural Texas or California? How about NYC? We already have a method for evaluating how much someone is willing to live in a particular location. It's curious that Republican lawmakers have chosen this particular cause to intervene in the market. There is a symmetrical argument for job markets; the demand for cheap agricultural labor in NYC does not compare to that in a commensurate area of west Texas or SoCal. Martha's Vineyard was a particularly extreme case--dumping migrants somewhere with no jobs and a high opportunity cost suggests that efficiency is a low priority indeed.

Second,

75k/yr is probably NYC's fair share (as 1/35 the US population)

How many illegal migrants do you think we get in a year? Because that rate suggests 75K * 35 = 2.6M/yr. Actually, I'm seeing a NYC population more like 1/39th of the US, which would suggest a total intake of 2.9M/yr. Given that the total illegal population has been stable or declining since 2007, at something like 10-12M, I find this rather unlikely. Source 1, source 2.

I don't have estimates for how many illegal immigrants are already in NYC, but Table 3 from source 2 estimates 520-630K in New York state. the city has 8.38M of the state's 19.5M people. Using the low end, since cost of living and agricultural labor likely pull migrants away from NYC, a rough estimate suggests 220K illegal immigrants already in NYC. That's somewhere between 1/44 and 1/36 of the total illegal population.

If the total illegal population is mostly stable, and NYC already has, to a first approximation, its "fair share" of that population...what's the justification for shipping them more migrants?

NYC already has, to a first approximation, its "fair share" of that population

I'd argue that the fair share is zero, because the population shouldn't exist, because it's illegal. Those constituencies undermining the rule of law in a way that increases the population should shoulder 100% of the burden, because they are responsible for all of it. I'd say that states and cities that declare themselves sanctuary locations should receive all of the illegal immigrant population.

They aren't being "shipped." They're not auto parts.

If the total illegal population is mostly stable, and NYC already has, to a first approximation, its "fair share" of that population...what's the justification for shipping them more migrants?

Why wouldn't being a sanctuary city increase what counts as their fair share? If they have policies intended to be more friendly to illegal immigrants than average, shouldn't they also have to take more illegal immigrants than average?

If the total illegal population is mostly stable, and NYC already has, to a first approximation, its "fair share" of that population...what's the justification for shipping them more migrants?

The justification is that they support the migrants and the people shipping them away don't. There's no problem with that arrangement; if you are pro-migrant, congratulations, you should welcome the chance to live up to your principles and help the unfortunate.

what's the justification for shipping them more migrants?

Rubbing their noses in NIMBY hypocrisy is quite sufficient.

Imagine an alternate world where Democrats found some clever way to publish the names of the daughters of rich politicians who had abortions. Imagine the Republicans freaking out and sputtering bullshit protests when they are obviously just upset that their constituents are finding out how many of their mistresses are getting abortions. Do you think you would be sympathetic to their plight? Can you muster up a comparable defense of Hershel Walker's abortion scandal?

Uh, yeah, I'd actually be upset about that doxxing.

That's not a very good comparison, though. The original argument was that sanctuary cities didn't have their "fair share" of illegal migrants. It'd be like Democrats finding newly pregnant Republicans, counseling them to get abortions, bussing them to abortion clinics, and then crowing about how high the Republican abortion rate is. I think you'd call that political theater and feel a sense of distaste.

The original argument was that sanctuary cities didn't have their "fair share" of illegal migrants.

Was it? I think the argument I've heard is more "You want them? You take them." And they clearly treat getting relatively small numbers as a catastrophe that they have little capacity to handle, so I find the "already getting their 'fair share'" stats to be deeply suspicious.

I was referring to slider's

Now 75k a year of migrants is probably NYC fair share of migrants for how many are coming. NYC population around 9 million or 1/35 of the US.

...

If Adams was going to be a good Democrat he should just pay the tab and tell Abbot he will take his proportional share.’

If they're already doing that, his argument gets a lot weaker.

Now, I agree that it's not a knock-down defense. It's still possible that NYC is shirking, that voters would demand a border wall if they weren't insulated from the immigrants. But it's not obvious. There are 5-600K illegal immigrants in New York state--4-6% of the illegal population. The state has about 6% of the total US population. As others pointed out, their laws are illegal-friendly, the enforcement is limited, NYC is a "sanctuary." It's not like residents are actually pushing illegals out. I'd assume that market forces and climate should make NYC less appealing than rural Texas and California, and yet it's picked up quite a few anyway.

So New York probably isn't far off from its proportional share, it's not being obviously exclusive, and it clearly has handled previous migrants well enough that residents aren't upset. Republicans want to claim that NYC is being hypocritical for complaining about a stress that only appeared once Abbott got involved.

Republicans want to claim that NYC is being hypocritical for complaining about a stress that only appeared once Abbott got involved.

But that's the point. Why is it a stress? Your whole argument hinges on NY being able to easily absorb the amounts they're receiving. If that's not the case (and it clearly isn't), then there's something different about the cohort of folks illegally crossing the southern border and making an asylum claim compared to the general block of people who are not legal residents of the US.

Put it this way: Is NY getting an amount of the people who crossed last month that is proportional to how much they represent support of the border crisis / open border situation? That 4-6% of the population might be a serious under-proportion if NY Senators and Congresscritters represent 15-20% of the defacto national support for the present shitshow. Similarly, if NY illegal immigrants are mostly people who overstayed visas, or long-time illegal residents who have been in the US for 10 years and have significantly acclimated, that might be trivially easier to deal with than a comparable number of Venezuelan refugees who just finished a 4,000 mile death trek.

Shrug. I don't think it's any worse a parallel than trying to deflect to someone's abortion scandal.

Given that the total illegal population has been stable or declining since 2007, at something like 10-12M, I find this rather unlikely. Source 1, source 2

These methodology behind these numbers is bad and a better methodology based on inflows, outflows, and demographic data suggests the illegal population is twice as large.

We have more direct data on new arrivals anyway. Ignoring people who aren't caught, border patrol has stopped about 1.8M illegal entrants this year so far. It seems Biden is now expelling about 40%. 1.8M*0.4/35 = 20.5K annual flow, not too far off.

22M? Big if true. Would that apply to the CBP estimates of NYC's current population, too?

I don't think your math checks out on the annual flow, though. It would be 1.8M * (1-0.4), assuming that everyone not in that 40% is just released into the country, and I'd divide by 39 instead of 35. Where'd you get the 40% number? Closest I could find was ~1M of the 2.2M encounters getting expelled under Title 42, but some of the remainder is also detained or turned back at the border. And of course neither number counts those who dodge the CBP entirely.

Yeah it should have been 60% and I forgot to include the source for the encounter and release numbers.:

Biden’s DHS is honoring that order increasingly only in the breach. Just 40 percent of the aliens who were stopped by Border Patrol at the Southwest border in July were expelled under Title 42, down from 47.7 percent in June and 62.3 percent in all of FY 2021. By contrast, Trump expelled more than 87 percent of migrants subject to Title 42.

The report in source 2 of gp actually addresses this...

Research by the Office of Immigration Statistics replicates the Fazel-Zarandi et al. methodology and assesses the possibility that the size of the unauthorized population was in the range of 16.2–29.5 million on January 1, 2017 as Fazel-Zarandi et al. conclude, rather than 11.4 million as the DHS residual model estimates. One key finding is that the difference between FazelZarandi et al.’s results and DHS’s residual model is entirely driven by high estimated growth in Fazel-Zarandi et al.’s model during the 1990s—yet key data required for inflow-outflow modeling are not available for those years. These data limitations, along with a number of questionable modeling assumptions, give DHS no confidence in Fazel-Zarandi et al.’s findings about population growth in 1990-2000. A forthcoming DHS whitepaper includes a preliminary inflowoutflow analysis that is similar to the Fazel-Zarandi et al. method but updates certain assumptions and makes fuller use of DHS data for 2000 – 2018; the paper finds support for the DHS estimate of about 11.4 million people as of Jan. 1, 2018 (Rosenblum, Baker, and Meeks, forthcoming).

...what's the justification for shipping them more migrants?

To make it clear for them that you don't want to deal with shit policies they're supporting ?

Most illegal immigrants already live in a couple of metro areas, generally in blue states or blue cities in red states. The issue is not really about the distribution of the notional burden of illegal immigration; it is a fundamental dispute whether or not illegal immigration/asylum seeking is even a big deal.

So why are they complaining about receiving a few tens of thousands more?

Then perhaps proponents should be honest about it rather than using a pretense of correcting unfairness.

It's okay for Republicans to say "we don't want these immigrants, so we are making them your problem." Democrats are entitled to object to this (manufactured) burden. If that's the case, Republicans shouldn't get to act as if their maneuver highlights hypocrisy.

Democrats are entitled to object to this (manufactured) burden.

Manufactured by?

Republicans shouldn't get to act as if their maneuver highlights hypocrisy.

Why not?

I think I made it pretty clear, above, that New York isn't obviously shirking. If they're already supporting their "fair share," then objecting to additional busses is not hypocritical.

You're welcome to disagree. Please try to make an actual argument instead, though.

The responsibility they're shirking is law and order. The people through their elected representatives choose to not address border security. Their fair share of the problem should be proportional to their lack of of cooperation on stemming the invasion.

If I have a roommate and I bring a new dog in despite my dog-hater roommate’s protests, then complain about how my roommate has been starting to shaft dog food costs on me, is that hypocrisy or not? Would my roommate getting me to walk the dog more than 50% of the time be a manufactured burden?

What exactly is a fair share of responsibility on something between two parties when one party clearly didn’t want that something and had that something imposed on them?

I don’t even have a dog (ha ha) in this fight, I live in another country and don’t really have strong opinions on immigration one way or the other, and immigration where I live generally seems to be positive. But it doesn’t seem like the problem is either manufactured, or that it doesn’t highlight some sort of hypocrisy. Let me rephrase: It doesn't seem like the problem is entirely artificial and Republicans just decided to fuck with New York just to dunk on them, and it isn’t obvious that there isn’t some sort of hypocrisy in asking for other states to process massive amounts of prospective immigrants on short notice (as “illegals” and asylum seekers do) while when the same thing happens in their own borders they shit themselves, irrespective of whether they are taking in a “fair share” of immigrants.

Blue cities in red states are still a problem for the red states. Herding them into these locations is a step in the right direction, though.

First I’m picking up elsewhere that the illegals in NYC are largely people who did not leave when their visa expired. So people who had jobs and functional lives. I don’t know enough to verify the truth of this. But therefore a different type of illegal than the completely homeless no job type showing up in Texas.

This article gives some numbers. 2 million illegal encounters so far at southern border this year. No clue how many are getting in but at that rate then 75k would be fair (though to date NYC only gotten 14k….75k was just my estimated run rate off Adams saying 4-6 buses a day)

https://news.yahoo.com/number-illegal-migrants-entered-us-155908676.html

I agree Florida doesn’t have the same issue. More similar to NYC that the illegals are a few by boat from Cuba, Visa expired illegals, or those with enough funds family to come to Florida.

I don’t know the true number of refugees but I’m fairly certain there are not 2 million agricultural jobs available in Texas. And NYC has a lot of restaurants in need of labor etc.

This is worth consideration, and if you want to calculate a fair share based on visa-expiration vs. border-hoppers, I'd be interested in reading it.

It is also possible that this year real is bucking the trend, and I am wrong to generalize from the last 15 years of stable population. If there are 2 million more illegal immigrants in the US next year, then shipping 51K to NYC would be proportional.

But we have been told about border crises year after year. Caravans, surges, whatever. And yet the population has been stable. Those 2M encounters are before any decisions--the article says 920K were already deported under Title 42. This chart suggests that >1M have been expelled, and that the remaining group includes detainees and deportations, too. It's not clear how many of those are released into the US until a hearing, or how many migrants are dodging the CBP entirely.

I don't think that it's obvious NYC is shirking its fair share, so I find it pretty defensible for them to complain.

Overstays are definitely the largest group of illegal immigrants in the US, but the vast majority are tourists and business visitors, not workers (it is very difficult for an unskilled person to get a work visa). So, not people with jobs. See overstay reports here

Re the 2 million encounters, the vast majority were immediately expelled or detained. It looks like 25-30 pct have been released.

Overstays are definitely the largest group of illegal immigrants in the US, but the vast majority are tourists and business visitors, not workers (it is very difficult for an unskilled person to get a work visa). So, not people with jobs.

But... how do you imagine they survive if they don't have jobs? Do you imagine they are all wealthy retirees, that they are economic parasites on the welfare state, or does the legal category not reflect the underlying reality?

The OP said:

So [visa overstayers are] people who had jobs and functional lives. I don’t know enough to verify the truth of this. But therefore a different type of illegal than the completely homeless no job type showing up in Texas.

My point is that a person who becomes an illegal immigrant by overstaying his tourist visa is also jobless when he becomes an illegal immigrant. He also is effectively homeless, in the same sense that an illegal entrant is. eg: From the perspective of the job market, or whether they are parasites on the welfare state, it does not matter whether an illegal immigrant entered illegally or overstayed a tourist visa. The distinction is not nearly as stark as the OP assumes.

The difference is that visa overstayers generally do not start out destitute and homeless. They arrive on airplanes with papers in hand, and they either have finances arranged such that they can live here in reasonable comfort without a job, or they choose to overstay once they have procured a job. They are apples and oranges to migrants who cross the border on foot and then claim asylum.

  1. And many, if not most, border crossers have relatives and friends in the US and can also live in reasonable comfort. It is not as if visa overstayers are particularly well off; if they were, they would not be seeking to illegally immigrate.

  2. I don't know what you mean by "papers in hand"; the only "papers" they have are tourist or similar visas, and some don't even have that

  3. The only job they could have procured is an illegal job. Had they procured a legal job, they would have applied for a work visa and hence would not be staying illegally.

Just to clarify, these are not people who are overstaying their tourist visas because they want a chance to see the Grand Canyon. These are illegal immigrants, just like border crossers, who plan to stay permanently and simply used a different means of entering the country.

Anyhow, as I said, the point is not that the groups are absolutely identical, but rather, as I said, the OP is greatly overstating the difference between them.

These are illegal immigrants, just like border crossers

The whole point is that, while they are both illegal immigrants, visa overstayers are not just like border crossers.

One group arrives on airplanes with passports and legal entry visas. The other undertakes a dangerous journey on foot or smuggled in a truck. It doesn't take a brain the size of a galaxy to recognize that there are going to be enormous socioeconomic differences between these two groups. OP didn't "overstate" anything, you're just splitting hairs to try to dismiss a fact that is inconvenient for your worldview (i.e. a deep blue sanctuary state like New York freaking out over the grim reality of what it means for thousands of the second type of illegal immigrant to arrive on one's doorstep).

More comments

Can you help me understand how you arrived at the conclusion that visa overstays are the largest group of illegal immigrants in the US? I looked at the overstay reports and I see a somewhat consistent estimate of about 700k per year. 25% of 2M is 500k, but it only represents actual encounters, so I'd expect this number to be the sum of the encounters released and the non-encounters. If even 10% more illegal immigrants are crossing without an encounter, it seems to me that the rate of growth of non-visa overstay illegal immigrants is larger, especially as of the last few years. Is the argument that the total visa overstay population is still larger than the total illegal southern border crossing population? I didn't see estimates for either of those numbers in the overstay reports.

I did not mean to imply that the link was the source of that statement, and because I was agreeing with the post's statement in that regard, I did not look for a citation. But see here

It helps. But dishwasher, cook, etc you don’t need English. I’ve eaten in restaurants in America where the waitress could only speak Spanish. I point at menu, she brings foods, I pay bill.

Even less of an issue at a McDonald’s self check out. They only need to learn how to say order numbers in English.

I'm starting to wonder if this wasn't the reason fast food places didn't shift to meals/combos.

But most restaurant workers are not waiters.

I don't know how much of a burden migrants are to border states, but you can't just assume that the burden is commensurate to the burden in NY, because migrants don't necessarily settle in border states. They go to existing communities, which are mostly not the states in question

As for Adams, his complaint all along has not been "don't send migrants" (I mean, come on, it is NYC; the city estimates that immigrants make up 37.2% of the NYC population and 44.2% of the labor force). but rather "coordinate with us before sending people." The city could probably use those types of workers; (unlike on the South Side of Chicago); the NY Times recently had an article about all the restaurants that have reduced hours compared to before the pandemic, because they can't find workers to fill all the shifts. There are certainly fewer places open 24 hours.

The state of emergency relates to the fact that NYC guarantees a spot in a shelter for all homeless persons, including the newly arrived migrants, and "The mayor’s declaration allows the city to open emergency relief centers more quickly by exempting them from the normal land-use and community-review process that often slows the opening of shelters.". Obviously, 17,000 people since August is nothing relative to the city's population, but is a lot relative to the current capacity of the shelter system, which is about 61,000.

Finally, $1 billion per year amounts to only $50 for every resident of NY State, so hardly much a burden.

but rather "coordinate with us before sending people."

Yeah man, that's all Texas wants too, but somehow it's racist when they say it.

Actually agree with a lot of your critiques which is why I made a tangent on housing. And the minimum wage in NYC is an issue. Texas housing and wages not as much of an issue. If NYC had SRO and no minimum wage then you could just put them to work at cheap rent.

My counter to you though is his speech is made to be meme in his tone. From a national politics perspective it sounds like they can’t handle them. When I agree in a labor shortage world they should be useful.

I’ve always been a Friedmanite and gave up feelings. But clearly there’s a 2-sided market here where there are migrants you can use for cheap labor who are also better off being used for cheap labor than their other options. But in the progressive labor standards world on housing and labor markets that’s not ok. And in that world it feels better to not do the trade and keep the problem away from you.


What is this place?

This website is a place for people who want to move past shady thinking and test their ideas in a court of people who don't all share the same biases. Our goal is to optimize for light, not heat; this is a group effort, and all commentators are asked to do their part.

The weekly Culture War threads host the most controversial topics and are the most visible aspect of The Motte. However, many other topics are appropriate here. We encourage people to post anything related to science, politics, or philosophy; if in doubt, post!

Check out The Vault for an archive of old quality posts. You are encouraged to crosspost these elsewhere.


Why are you called The Motte?

A motte is a stone keep on a raised earthwork common in early medieval fortifications. More pertinently, it's an element in a rhetorical move called a "Motte-and-Bailey", originally identified by philosopher Nicholas Shackel. It describes the tendency in discourse for people to move from a controversial but high value claim to a defensible but less exciting one upon any resistance to the former. He likens this to the medieval fortification, where a desirable land (the bailey) is abandoned when in danger for the more easily defended motte. In Shackel's words, "The Motte represents the defensible but undesired propositions to which one retreats when hard pressed."

On The Motte, always attempt to remain inside your defensible territory, even if you are not being pressed.


New post guidelines

If you're posting something that isn't related to the culture war, we encourage you to post a thread for it. A submission statement is highly appreciated, but isn't necessary for text posts or links to largely-text posts such as blogs or news articles; if we're unsure of the value of your post, we might remove it until you add a submission statement. A submission statement is required for non-text sources (videos, podcasts, images).

Culture war posts go in the culture war thread; all links must either include a submission statement or significant commentary. Bare links without those will be removed.

If in doubt, please post it!


Rules


Recommended Posts And Communities

Recommended Realtime Chats