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

On Sat, 1 Mar 2025, Rich wrote:

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....

This is the truth!

But I've also long felt that 'intelligence', just like most everything
else, tends to follow surprisingly closely a bell curve.  There's

This is also the truth! I have seen the exact same thing.

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.

True. I divide them roughly in 20% hopeless, 60% average and 20% great! Actually
in my current class I'd say it's closer to 30%, 50%, 20%. I try to make the
initial class of the program a bit more difficult, so that the 20%-30% realize
that it is not for them, and can save time and frustration, instead of hanging
on for 0.5-1 year before reaching that conclusion.
This makes the schools angry with me, because they get paid for every student
who graduates, so they always try to influence and push me to pass students who
have no business passing.
It is a balance of terror... if I am too soft, the schools reputation suffers
(and it already has) and if I am too hard, I have to look for a new job. =/ It
takes enormous diplomatic skill to walk that line. =/

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.

Interesting. You also have the plain lucky ones who just ride along. But they
still need some base level of competence, even if they just ride along.

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.

I usually make notes on the ones who stand out, and sell their CV:s to business
partners. The business partners know that I have vetted them, so they dare to
hire them, the students get access to better jobs, and I earn a dollar or two.
=)

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.

This is the truth! Hence my little side business. Recruitment companies charge
ridiculous amounts of money for nothing. I charge less than ridiculous amounts
of money for sending good, vetted CV:s. Sadly, the flow of students is too low,
to make any steady money on this, but from time to time, when I have a good
year, it is possible to help 3-4 to good jobs.

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.

Will make a note of that! No such community close to me. I knew one, but it
closed down, but I shall have to look for other ones.

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.

True. If we ever move to a highly automated post scarcity society, this riddle
needs to be solved. How can innate motivation be kindled in all humans and not
just in the ones who happen to be genetically lucky? If we can solve this, there
will not be a problem with a fully automated future, because there will be many
things to do and to learn and to excel at for the self motivated human.