Re: Schneier, Data and Goliath: no hope for privacy

D <nospam@example.net> wrote:

 
 
On Wed, 26 Feb 2025, Salvador Mirzo wrote:
 

This was a painful read. =( I thought I saw this due to the fact that
I teach at the vocational school level and not university level. Are
yo useriously telling me that this b.s. goes one (and comes out of)
the university level?

>
I'm afraid it is.

 
=(
 

If so...  we'll soon enter a period of decline, if even
universities turn out CS student so ill equipped to develop new
brilliant services in todays world.  =(

>
Perhaps the crowd that's brilliant is a minority that hasn't changed
much compared the previous times.  (Perhaps it has.) Just because a
lot of people are joining university and coming out of them pretty
clueless, it doesn't mean that we've reduced that small group that
carries the rest of the world on their shoulders.  Perhaps this
group is still the same percent compared to the last centuries. 
(Just guessing hypotheses here.)

 
That would be a comforting thought!  Maybe the nr of brilliant people
stays at the same percentage!
 
In my experience, the brilliant guys hardly need a teacher.  All I do
is to feed them problems when they get bored.  Then they go away,
work at it 24/7 until they solve it, and come back for more.  When I
teach, and have to keep it at a level that is appropriate for the
average level, they get bored and space out.

I've seen this too.  Actually, we all have.  The "brainiac" in the
front row of the calculus or physics class that's the one asking
questions that sometimes befuddle the instructor for a moment....

But I've also long felt that 'intelligence', just like most everything
else, tends to follow surprisingly closely a bell curve.  There's
always a small percentage of "ultra high" on one end, a large middle of
"good to great, but not at the same level of the 'ultra high'" and a
following tail who just can't, ever, get it.  It just is the way it is.

And the ones who strike it rich if you go digging you find out that
they were the "survivor bias" ones (i.e., the lucky one that survived)
or that they had "generational backing" (family wealth) that could be
leveraged to "buy" the right people to increase their odds of becoming
the "survivor bias" one.

I've also seen what you describe at $job.  I spent somewhere on 15-20
years helping train new hires, and it didn't take very long until I got
quite good at "picking out" the new ones who were going to succeed from
the ones who were likely to wash out just by interacting with them for
a surprisingly short period of time.

So I give them the lecture slides and material to read at their
leisure and keep feeding them problems.  Occasionally they get stuck,
but very rarely, and then I zoom in.
 
Those students give me immense joy!

Yes, these are the students you want, sadly, they usually are never
more than about 3-4% of the class.  They are also the ones you want HR
to filter through to you from new applicants, but sadly, HR is piss
poor at doing that filtering.

But I think you're totally right in that we've entered a period where we
have a lot of people who are completely wasting their degrees, specially
in an area such as computer science.  I could be wrong, but it seems
that computer science is housing a lot of nonsense.  I'm sure there are
declines in mathematics and physics too (likely more so on physics than
in mathematics, I'd guess), but I believe computer science might be the
worst.  When I look at the student body in computer science, the vast
majority seems totally uninterested in computer science---they're
interested in /playing/ video-games, not producing them.

 
When I wwas young, it was considered a virtue to expand your mind, to learn new
things, to develop yourself. My home was full of books, we watched
documentaries, went to museums. When the computer arrived, I was fascinated with
linux, BSDs, programming.
 
I hope that this culture is still alive.

It is.  Go look into the "maker community" or "maker space".  It has
shifted somewhat from our days back then but much of it is still there.

It would be so incredibly depressing if the majority of the young
today were to waste away their lives watching podcasts and playing
computer games.  It feels they would just waste their lives that way
instead of exploring it and challenging their limits, and breaking
through their limits.

Sadly, remember my 'bell curve' above.  Half of them will fall on the
"below median" point, and those will often be the ones who *do* waste
away their life on consuming that which others create.

And a lot of it is motivation.  They, for whatever reason, seem to be
unmotivated by most any argument to do other than consume for
consumptions sake.