Snowflake Day

Courtesy of the Didact, he finds a millenial who writes:

Sure, some Millennials are guilty of being entitled. But turn on the news, and you’ll see some bigly examples of entitled, narcissistic Baby Boomers. Every generation is diverse. But at 75 million people, Millennials are the biggest, most diverse generation in the nation. We’re also the most educated. We know human-caused climate change is real. We know why the Civil War started. We know what Aleppo is.

But society has a lot of misunderstandings about Gen Y. We’re overflowing with ideas to shake up our workplaces and make them more creative, collaborative, meaningful, meritocratic, and fun. And since we’ve grown up in a fast-paced world, we’re impatient to have an impact. So people say we’re entitled upstarts who don’t want to put in our dues. We want to collect experiences, not possessions. So people accuse us of being unambitious. We want immediate feedback more than an annual bonus. So people complain we need constant praise. We like to use (and invent) technological short-cuts. So people call us lazy. We post selfies on social media because we value connections with others. So we’re labeled “self-obsessed.”

We’re sick of the stereotypes. We want to counteract the fake news and bust the myths about Millennials. We want to be recognized for who we really are.

Uh. OK. Isn't that special? The degree of sheer ignorance here is astonishing.

"you’ll see some bigly examples of entitled, narcissistic Baby Boomers" - yes, you will. A lot of examples. And that's why not only a fair chunk of millennials, but the rest of us post-boomer crowd generally dislike them as well. Two wrong's don't make a right - and the writer, for all they want to be taken seriously as a "real" grown-up, is already displaying his childishness.

"We’re also the most educated" - confusing time spent in school with an education. Look at the reviews of this 6th grade reader from 1914. That also leaves aside necessary skills no longer taught at schools.

"We know human-caused climate change is real" - science is a process, not simply a body of "facts". The latter are subject to change, either because we learn or develop better models for the physical world, or because people make up facts to suit their biases. We know for a fact the lead researchers into climate science aren't following a truth-finding process, but are instead interested in hiding the decline, not giving out the raw data because it may be used to dispute them, and developing computer models that get the desired result even if fed a flat line series.We also know the predictions made have not come to pass, and that the lead proponents of "it's all our fault" cannot tell us how much of an impact we have.  I strongly recommend reading "The Skeptical Environmentalist" if one gets a chance.

"We know why the Civil War started. We know what Aleppo is" - Yet most of them don't know what evil is shared by Lenin, Stalin, Hitler, and Pol Pot. Or why postmodernism is a worldview that leads to the death of the mind, of cultures, and people. Do they understand why the horrors of the French revolution were inevitable given the driving ideology? They know what they've been told on why the civil war started, but likely haven't dug into the diaries of the figures involved at all, or looked at sources that contradict those claims. And Aleppo? Who cares? It's a way to take cheap political digs at non-leftists (even if Johnson is an idiot). In a decade another city will be important, but the ongoing 1400-year war with Islam will still be going on. Do they know Vienna, Tours, Lepanto or why 1492 is significant beyond Columbus coming to the Americas and initiating an age of exploitation and ruin, or somesuch? Do they know Platea? Salamis? Thermopylae? Do they know the Anabasis? Do they truly understand the Magna Carta's significance in the rights of free Englishmen, in conceptually restraining the power of not only the king, but of government in general, as they scream for the government to assume more control over everyone else's lives?

"But society has a lot of misunderstandings about Gen Y. We’re overflowing with ideas to shake up our workplaces and make them more creative, collaborative, meaningful, meritocratic, and fun. And since we’ve grown up in a fast-paced world, we’re impatient to have an impact. So people say we’re entitled upstarts who don’t want to put in our dues." - One of the most disliked guys in a workplace is the new guy who comes in and starts wanting to change everything around without first understanding how things are actually working, and why. Respect has to be earned, and that takes time. Not all consequences of a change are immediately obvious, and understanding the second-order consequences of how things are working aren't either. Also, patience is a virtue, impatience... isn't. Change can be good. It can also be bad. So yeah - a guy who comes in without understanding what's going on and wants to change everything and gets upset that people don't get on board right away when he's not in charge and thus not responsible for the consequences of the change is an entitled upstart, and he's trying to handwave away the dues.

"We want to collect experiences, not possessions. So people accuse us of being unambitious." - if that was all, sure. But ambition isn't just about stuff. It's also about the willingness to take on responsibility, to guide and lead others. The author of this bit has a fundamental misunderstanding of ambition. Also, experiences are also ephermal. They are of no more value to one than what one can get out of the experience of using a possession. What about a legacy?

"We want immediate feedback more than an annual bonus. So people complain we need constant praise." - No, they complain you need constant praise because of how you deal with criticism.

"We like to use (and invent) technological short-cuts. So people call us lazy." - "Constructive laziness" is hardly a new concept.

"We post selfies on social media because we value connections with others. So we’re labeled “self-obsessed.” - Then connect with others. Show other people off at their best. Oh, wait, yet another picture of you doing something "awesome" or hanging out with your friends or that cool dish from some ethnic place? If one believes everything you post shows what you care about, then I have more respect for the food porn, especially if it's something you made, than of you being in the damn pics all the time.

All in all, a completely self-unaware portrayal showing that the author really is the child he insists, stomping his foot, that he is not.

The whole post is worth reading.

How To Act as if You're Actually Intelligent

...and not a caricature of what normally think a smart person is (sortof like Colbert used to play a caricature of what liberals thought conservative commentators believed, when parodying what they actually did would have been both more honest and funnier).

Eric Raymond was encouraged to view a clip of the Big Bang Theory, and wasn't impressed:

Bleagh. This is supposed to be a show about geniuses? It’s not. It’s a show about a dimwit’s idea of what bright people are like. The slowest person in my peer group could out-think and out-create any of these sad-sack imitations of “smart” on any day of the week. 

These actors are not bright, and don’t know how to fake it on screen.

Eric, being Eric, wouldn't let something like that slide without at least providing some guidance.

Here goes a list of bright-person behavior signals which, while not universal, are very common…

Bright people have very precise diction and tend to self-assimilate to educated speech norms even if their formal education is minimal. Enunciate as crisply as you can. If the character is designed to have a regional or lower-class accent, dial it down a little. [UPDATE: I may have overgeneralized a bit here. Strongly true of STEM geeks, but maybe not as reliably of other kinds of brights.]

Bright people concentrate. Their casual attention to a task or person is as intense as most peoples’ full attention. So fixate on those targets – not to the point of being glassy-eyed about it, but to the point where stillness and attention dominate your body language.

Bright people spend a larger fraction of their time in an ‘on’ state of mental alertness or conscious thought than non-brights do. This has consequences in visual saccades that are easy to see – with a little practice, you can grade people by intelligence in bank or movie-theater lines by watching eye movements. Look for relatively little time spent in a defocused, half-asleep state – or, conversely, lots of time when the eyes are tracking or making motions indicative of either imaginative activity or memory retrieval. Thus, when you play a bright person, always be looking at something.

 That sounds about right. I'm self-aware of the focus thing, though at first it had to be brought to my attention. I also know that when recalling I usually look at something fairly static or close my eyes so I can "scan" the information. When it came to things like power plant systems interactions it made visualizing the systems and their relationships in my head easier, almost like an overlay. After one qualification interview one of the board members joked that I must have had the answers tattooed under my eyelids because I'd close my eyes for a couple seconds and then, after reopening them, spout off the answer in almost perfect from-the-book verbiage.

Incidentally, this wasn't photographic memory. I had a knack for applying the correct language patterns to describe an abstract concept I understood. Computerese for computer issues, Navy Nuke-speak for technical plant issues, etc. - my memory for lists of things things like safety setpoints or common values for network ports is actually pretty crappy if not continuously reinforced or refreshed.

Why I Bother to Pay ANY Attention to the Verge

The verge. SJW central. I almost never - less than 1 in 100 times - read the articles that pop up in the feed because, for a so-called tech site, they are of course, SJW converged.  Usually, instead, the headlines, and the hysterical  (in at least two senses of the word) - first paragraph excerpt are more than enough to both assure me I'm not missing anything, and to give me a good indication of the "thought" trends in the liberal and SJW left of what we have insufficient representation of, etc.. Even the legitimate tech and science news article titles and excerpts give insight into how they feel.

Oh, and they promote a lot of shitty, pink, SF. Every bit as bad as io9.

It's an exercise in wading through the wanna-be clever, the cringingly gamma, and worse. Examples include "How to defeat Trump’s handshake: a fist bump", "Ryan Murphy says he plans to tackle the 2016 election on American Horror Story", and so forth. In a recent article titled "Edgelords aren’t the internet’s cultural leaders — snowflakes are" regarding the recent Pewdiepie contract cancellation, the usual SJW "arguments" were issued:

In a well-argued BuzzFeed essay, writer and Screener editor Jacob Clifton described PewDiePie’s actions as representative of a larger masculine identity crisis, and urged readers to engage with rather than demonize the people caught up in it. “The whiny self-importance and self-indulgence of white male rage,” writes Clifton, “is so repugnant that it’s nearly impossible to see through. But we won’t heal, and they won’t heal, if we don’t try.” There’s merit in all this. But after a point, it's tiresome to constantly hear the same revelation about how we need to understand white male rage — when it feels as though that’s all we talk about.

This recent one though, was glorious.

The 2016 election was a reality TV nightmare, so why would we want to watch it as fiction?

It was subtitled "I’m not okay, you’re not okay". The opener?

2016 was such a bad year that its terribleness became a meme unto itself. Mutating first on internet forums, the sentiment trickled into the real world through newspapers, magazines, mixtapes, merch — and from my personal experience at a fratty New Year’s Eve party I accidentally attended, a multi-thousand dollar light-up display reading “Fuck 2016.” So it’s not immediately clear why anyone thinks there’s a sizable audience clamoring to relive it.

Such wonderful butthurt. I'm not yet tired of winning.

I won't link to them, but just so you could see it in it's original "glory."