I think the statement "people will put up with many things if you are excellent at math" is incredibly revealing
Also, no they won’t. Every physics department, every national lab, every tech company has that guy. You know who I mean. If your lab does not have that guy, odds are, you are that guy.
That's does kind of prove her point. That guy still has a job and likely would not have that job if he were just ok at math. She's not wrong, but hopefully society moves away from that culture and then that guy will have to either adjust or be left behind.
Does it?
He has a job - for now. That guy is famously hard to work with, and colleagues are always trying to shuffle him off to another department and managers get exasperated trying to mediate all the conflicts he’s involved with and when the RIFs hit, guess who’s on the chopping block?
Everyone in those places is good enough at math. But only one is a fucking asshole.
My perception might be tainted by personal experience. If you're good at math and easy to work with, you're golden, but between ok at math/easy to work with and great at math/terrible to work with, in my experience the former is let go before the latter. To a certain extent it makes sense, wether it's publish or perish in academia or maximizing profit in the corporate world, you end up prioritizing the "best" and brightest.
Are you in academia? This has not remotely been my experience in private industry.
Social skills pretty much trump all in engineering. If you write the most hyper efficient machine code, it will be a bitch to maintain and costs the team 10x as much going forward, but if you write code empathetically so that a normal human can pick it up, understand it, and fix it easily, then everyone will love you.
Same thing back when I was in physical engineering, you could have a brilliant idea for a design, but if you can't communicate why it's brilliant and why it's worth getting everyone else to change to accomodate it, then it will get shot down.
Glad to hear that hasn't been your experience. I've been in both now, but I've seen people I wouldn't spit at if on fire get funding or positions because of the work they produce. A guy known for making grad students cry has a line out the door because people want to be associated with him. He's got the funding and pull to make things happen because he's good at what he does, despite being an impossible prick. I think part of it is that there are very few people of the caliber that people will excuse that behavior from. Not every smart person with a bad attitude gets a pass, but in my experience, there's a threshold past which people will excuse a lot. I think there's a similar thing with money. Not every millionaire can get what they want, but at a certain point of wealth they just can. I totally understand if that's not a universal experience. I was just offering my perspective.
We have had very different experiences. Social trumps all in RIF discussions. Your boss's boss ('s boss's boss) is the one that made the decision and all he knows is that you organized the potluck last year and are always in-office. He doesn't even know the math guy's name.
Yea, that's completely valid. I imagine personal experience affects this a lot, but I'm glad to see people's experiences have been contrary to what I imagine this woman has likely encountered. Not that anything excuses letting your child's emotional and interpersonal development languish. She's a terrible influence, regardless of if she was correct.
Problem is, he ends up on a bunch of the things that are necessary but boring/unpleasant. So he ends up being the basement troll you can't fire or else the whole company will collapse
That guy at my university never developed the skills to work in a corporate environment. Last I heard he is unemployed most of the time
Having jever developed the ability to fail at things, he was also unable to continue academics. He made it through an undergrad on pure intellect. That didn't work so well for grad school
Also undergrad researchers were only making $15/hour, so not like staying in that role indefinitely is a great career
You know you're describing, like, 2/3 of lemmy rn?
I imagine that's a joke, but that's being overly gracious to lemmys collective intellect and insulting to lemmys collective interpersonal skills. Most people I interact with on Lemmy are nice, if not at least cordial, and I don't think being tech savvy equates to the kind of skill I'm attributing to that guy. Unfortunately, knowing what Linux is doesn't actually make you intelligent, despite what even I sometimes like to believe.
We aren't talking about being nice. We're talking about lacking social skills. And I would argue that "autistic nerd who has pegged their social worth to being good at something" is a good proxy for the average lemmy user. And linux user.
That guy would have been director of my department, and I've seen it at two different jobs. Problem is, they are that guy so the bosses keep them around but no one would ever dare promote them to a position of power. It would have been unbearable and everyone would bail quickly.
Yeah, up to a point. I interviewed a guy once who seemed super smart, but was a total asshole. He easily breezed through all the technical rounds, but ultimately we didn't hire him because none of us wanted to work with the jerk.
I'd rather have a colleague I have to sit down with and work on a problem for a few hours than one who is like the one you described. In the end it will still be net positive because we work as a team, we both know and understand the solution, if anyone of us was hit by a bus the product would still be maintained. Given we both know our shit and are at least good at what we are doing. There are very special cases where a prodigy, regardless of character, might be needed but most of the time, hire the people who are good, cooperative and have the social capability to bring up problems in a meaningful way.
Also just like, Turing. Sure that guy can get away with shit as long as it flows in the right direction, but when they don't need you anymore or your weird is outside what they'll put up with, suddenly you're on your own with your lack of social skills to defend yourself.
And then there's the Jack Parsons of it all. A brilliant, wild, and weird person may be able to thrive in a startup that depends on them, but once the institution becomes successful enough to not need them they can go from an asset to a liability instantly.
That's full psychopathic behaviour
And unfortunately also not incorrect. At least in the US, pretty much all of the most wealthy and successful people are psychopaths. :(
It is incorrect. No one is so good at math that they can design and build a full useful system on their own. That means they have to work with other people as part of a team. That means that their lack of social skills will doom or limit them.
It is also a mistake to equate psychopaths with having no social skills. They don't have empathy, but they often have excellent social skills.
Yeah, it's also survivorship bias. All the successful psychopaths would make you think that a) you need to be a psychopath to succeed, and b) all psychopaths will succeed. It's wrong on both counts, but we can conclude that c) being a psychopath does not preclude success. It might even be easier to succeed, since capitalism abhors a principle, but I don't have the statistics to support that.
Thee day result of "STEM is all that matters" is a bunch of miserable, emotionally damaged kids who can do quadratic equations but can't understand consent
Such bad parenting. Basing his self-worth around being good at math is just setting him up for failure
When you're told you're really smart, or good at math, you avoid ever failing - you're the smart kid, it shold come easy to you. If you're struggling, it's the fault of the subject or problem, not you - because you're the smart kid
Alternatively, you feel like a complete failure when you inevitably hit a wall.
I feel real lucky my parents divorced early, and my mom immediately put me into a ton of therapy and counseling. The shit at the school was kinda counterproductive, maybe at best taught me to hide it better. But the professionals were probably responsible for me coming somewhat normalish.
Or when you get past where you can coast (calc 2 for me) you realize you don't really know how to learn and study. It didn't ruin my self image but I did change majors.
Please please please be satire
Nope. Shes works at a VC in silicon valley and is close friends with JD vance.
Please please please be satire
Well, it's not
When I saw the words "Andreessen Horowitz" I about wanted to puke. Those people are truly evil. They helped Trump get elected.
And will help JD Vance get the job too, maybe even elected
The day before, at the Pre-K:
Teacher sipping tequila: "Sooo, what should I give this little privledged shitbucket? 'Excels at math' or 'Reads above grade level'? I think I already did 6 or 7 'Excels at math' in a row and this kid is just...a regular-ass little kid that eats glue and stares at the ceiling."
Asst Principal shooting tequila: "Math! That little shitbucket is Valley money. They don't care about reading."
I 100% thought that was satire until I saw who wrote it
So she’s going to raise a brilliant mind that ends up having zero empathy or emotional intelligence? That’s going to be a miserable life for everyone involved.
“I got fired for no reason! I was a top performer!”
It’s because you’re an asshole that got along with no one at work. My dad was also a top performer but had empathy and compassion. He left a high-paying field because of miserable assholes with no emotional intelligence.
I worked somewhere that had a principal engineer that stuck around for years at a job. Everyone I talked to disliked them. Every single person. They were abrasive, argumentative, and not receptive to anyone’s ideas. There were even examples where they took credit for the work of others. The only reason they were kept around was because they had the ear of the CTO. When they finally left, everyone was publicly happy about their departure and we got to start undoing their shitty decisions.
Often times it’s simply who you know, not what you know.
Honestly, this sounds about right from someone who works at Andreesen Horowitz. She is friends with JD Vance.
In my experience they have been an out of touch tech investment firm for at least twenty years now. I’m pretty sure their entire culture is to be a delusional competitive rich kid echo chamber.
People will put up with anything if you hold a gun to their heads (the USA method!) or if you pay their expenses, mostly, but people will avoid you if not if you're just a difficult and annoying human being. I feel bad for the kid. 😕
3 of the most elitists producing schools: yale, harvard and stanford, it make sense. if you had a professor from one of these schools you will know how snobby and arrogant they are when teaching the class.
So, another brand new account with no comment history posting about how Katherine Boyle is shitty.
Granted, she is but can lemmy.world not do something about these hit an run accounts?
I'm actually the same person.
Have you considered a fully monogamous Boyle hate account. That can be your thing. "I think Mickey 17 is a great movie; also, Katherine Boyle likes to eat dog poop."
I think Mickey 17 is a great movie…
They’re only on their second incarnation. They’ve got at least 15 more to go.
And that, boys and girls, is the story of how narcissistic sociopaths are born.
Be good at math, and no one will care. It's definitley math, and not having all that money from your parents that make people not care. That's why his math needs to be "good", not "great" because skills aren't something people with money actually need to survive.
That's just everyone else.
In this case, their "be good at math" is actually good advice, in that it will likely be the only skill and therefore excuse their kid has to remain employed in their 6 figure salaried position where they do nothing but participate in meetings all day.
Great parents.
When opportunities to utilize those math "skills" arise in the future, who do you think the teachers will recommend? Probably not the asshole kid who doesn't follow directions and never learned how to deal with 'no', failure, or group dynamics.
She is not wrong. There has been many a biopic about ~~ex NAZI~~ maths nerds that nuked Japan.
She's not wrong, but it's not something to aspire to. Same as "You can be a pedophile if you're a corrupt fascist dictator"
People tweeting stuff. We allow tweets from anyone.
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