Comment by bananaflag

15 hours ago

Could you elaborate?

I think back in the 90s when I was a teenager I thought it to be a good thing that there is a rise in status for a class of people characterized by clear thinking.

The older I get, the more I realize how many problems in society is because there are different "classes" of people. The more we can eschew that, the better it becomes for most people. While yes, I also see myself as having "clearer thinking" than many people , maybe because of the thousands of hours building and maintaining software, I'm not of the impression that my life deserves a higher status than others merely because of this. It's not "they think right and they think wrong", it's just "everyone thinks differently, but it's all valid thinking".

  • We all should be in the same 'class', but some people will be paid more for a job that takes intelligence or years of study.

    The older I get, I realize some people never change, will always have the same backwards or harmful thinking, and I avoid them instead of just accepting it.

    • > some people will be paid more for a job that takes intelligence or years of study.

      Sadly, it seems so, even if the effects of the jobs on daily life differ a great deal sometimes. The world would succumb faster if we had no garbage collectors, yet they get less pay than a programmer who the world could easily survive without? Makes no sense to me.

      17 replies →

  • > "everyone thinks differently, but it's all valid thinking"

    I don't agree that all thoughts are created equal.

  • I thought it more in the sense of: if a clearer-thinking group has higher status, then clear thinking would be encouraged among the population.

    (This did not happen that much, ofc.)

I would not characterize software people as particularly "clear-thinking".. there's a huge buzzing cloud of unexamined cognitive biases and thoughtless herd behavior that swirls around every software organization I've worked for.

  • I'd even go as far as to say that software people, as a group, are particularly bad at clear thinking. What software people tend to be great at is thinking within a space where the inputs are already clear. But where the inputs start messy, they typically struggle to find clarity more than most others.