I would venture a guess to say that what makes FP or declarative style programming/thinking feel weird is not any great context like the nature of the human brain but rather the lesser one that usually people try to learn it after already having had learned imperative style stuff.
The functionally written recipe from https://probablydance.com/2016/02/27/functional-programming-... may be less helpful if I need to know exactly what steps to take to bake a cake, but it will actually be much more helpful if I want to know what a baked cake is. It isn't quite a fair example because it leverages how humans already know what a baked cake is, what a preheated oven is, etc and the clunkiness of the FP-style recipe is likely more due to that than anything fundamental to FP.
Let's try a different example that better maps to real world application logic. The task is to build a scootybooty.
Imperatively, a scootybooty program is:
- Acquire four wheels and two axels.
- Chop down a tree.
- Plane wood from tree into curved flat shape.
- Attach axels to convex side of planed wood shape.
- Attach wheels to axel.
Declaratively it is:
- A scootybooty is a planed plank of wood with two trucks.
- A planed plank of wood is a flat board.
- A truck is an axel with two wheels.
Now imagine your boss asks you wtf this scootybooty thing is and what it can do. Which program more quickly allows you to answer these questions? My favorite thing about the FP/declarative paradigm is that the mental model first-classes the abstract thing you are implementing above how you implement it. Imperative style encourages you to think about the steps it takes to do something moreso than the thing itself which IMO can lead to cart-before-horse type mistakes in planning. Declarative programming: "the forest is made of many trees", imperative programming: "tree, tree, tree, tree, tree, tree..."
Well... what really is empathy? To me it stands to reason that it is the ability to recreate the mind of another using inference based on their behavior and communication, and thus be able to experience a similar emotional state or set of mental circumstances.
It would also stand to reason that this ability would be directly related to how similar the data contained within empathizing brains is.
If you conceive of empathy as “responding to behavior in a way that is considerate of the other party’s ability to understand and receive benefit from it” in the sense that designers and product folks use it then it becomes clear that AI trained on data more similar to what a human would’ve drawn most meaning from would naturally be more empathetic.
Inferring the mental state of another entity would more fall under 'theory of mind' rather than empathy, which is not only inferring their emotional state but also feeling it yourself.
I guess you could define 'empathic behaviour' as per your last paragraph, as a synonym for 'considerate', but unless it's driven by empathy it's really just mimicry of empathic behaviour.
Being brown in a white place is a different experience than being brown in a brown place. There is a lot of friction when different enough groups coexist. If you've ever found yourself in maybe a job or something where you thought differently enough from the people around you to feel like they were more interested in just maintaining their bubble of how they understand the world than discovering the best way to be, it's that same mechanism in action. Just it's blown up to much larger proportions since it's not just you differing with people who share your race, culture, ideas about how society should function, etc.
The nature of progress is movement relative to the position currently being held. I bet you're right that a lot of people are just thoughtlessly bandwagoning, but I bet the blanket dismissal of progressive attitudes also misses a lot of people who are thoughtfully deciding where to go from here.
My point though was not about the progressive attitudes, as much as about the ridiculous excess ("guys" being offensive, etc). In a decade or so these would be viewed the same way most people viewed hippies after the 70s...
Because for some, race/gender is a primary factor in how they experience being a developer. I believe that is the fundamental point the article is making -- that the reasons why React is what it is today are not necessarily objective and totally sound but rather significantly influenced by what ideas and interests were already in the population at the cost of other ideas that may require more of a leap from the mainstream to fully understand but may also be better overall.
It would not be appropriate to post with the title “black men in tech had a twitter meltdown” but it is at least this okay with white dudes for the same reason why it's fine to make fun of The Mountain if he can't hit a squat in the gym but it's not fine to make fun of your buddy who's trying to make a change in his life. Of course how much better The Mountain is than your buddy at lifting heavy stuff is probably a larger discrepancy than the gap between white men and and minority women's abilities to affect the course of the developer landscape but that's the mechanism.
Just like this whole drama, this attitude (I don’t like my gender and race being the focus of things, therefore I’m going to do it to you) seems counter-productive to the cause of inclusion and diversity.
While I agree with you that it's problematic, a minority woman stereotyping a white man is not quite the same as in reverse if you see relative social positioning as a first class factor. The reasoning for why it's different is something like the reasoning for why it's generally fine for employees to get together and casually bond over being annoyed by their bosses but the same thing going the other way would be obviously inappropriate. A lot of people experience being of minority race, gender, and culture as constructs that basically equate to having been born holding the short end of an implicit employee-boss relationship. As such, it's something that's naturally at the forefront of their minds.
> Order 5: Self-Transforming Mind. In this order of consciousness, which is infrequently reached and never reached before the age of forty (Kegan, 1994), individuals see beyond themselves, others, and systems of which they are a part to form an understanding of how all people and systems interconnect (Kegan, 2000). They recognize their "commonalities and interdependence with others" (Kegan, 1982, p. 239).
This idea is awesome, and is common sense in eastern philosophy. First generation Americans, or anyone who finds themselves the venn between multiple diagrams of culture, can also arrive to this pretty quick. Everyone's ideas are limited to the experiences that produced them, but it's embarrassing for western science on the whole for it to shirk the east when it comes to the realm of inner experience.
In the context of the rest of the article it seems that the author composed that forgetting that their personal vantage point isn't the default. They seem to be saying that he tends to give CPR to figureheads of dying cultures not for the benefit of the author's social segment but for the benefit of the cult of Rogan.
I personally agree, but also find it hard to blame the guy too much. Anyone who has honestly engaged with trying to fundamentally change who they are knows that it's hard as shit. Can you blame the man for still being the brotastic brody bro that he was a few years ago? It turns out that yes, yes you can. I personally don't, but it is a terribly valid point to say that some comfortably privileged person's curiosity (or desire to satisfy their privileged preconceptions, depending on who you ask) should be outweighed by school shootings or the validation of the experiences of women and other minorities.
It really seems like there is such a disparate and massive quantity of fact and opinion out there nowadays that it's hard as hell even getting it all to fit together, much less managing to connect whatever views you cobble together with those that others wind up with. Cohesifying society in the midst of all of this feels like trying to put together a themed potluck by giving everyone literally a billion ingredients and hoping that their selections just each happen to be all taco themed or whatever. What a fucking mess.
Totally agreed. As I look back at my reddit usage over the years is that reddit provides a structured view into shifting social sentiment. Any sufficiently massive, long-lived, and topically comprehensive discussion community will give you the same thing, but I have yet to find one that gives as much of an overall view into what everyone else is thinking than does reddit, mostly for the simple fact that you are shown all the content by default.
I know that it inadvertently helped me learn a lot about what factors can make people feel the way they do and behave the way they do. As I follow juicy comment threads and such, I also see this happening for others. That is indeed cool as fuck.
