The Overflow

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Public service announcement: If you have high talent, programming is extremely easy to learn. The way I became a programmer was by finding an old ZX81 computer with 4K of RAM and no tape drive, meaning that anytime you wanted to use a program you had to type it in from scratch, and pretty soon I was typing in my own programs. This was at the age of 5 or 6. This mysterious Talent doesn’t always correlate to intelligence, but if you did well at algebra and you’re currently making less than $120,000/year, consider installing Python 3, looking at some random Python programs online, and then seeing if you can write programs yourself. College majors are a highly inefficient market, with Computer Science enrollments steadily dropping, and competent programmers are in extreme demand right now – in the Bay Area, companies are paying $10-$20,000 for successful referrals. It doesn’t require a four-year education to start getting paid to do this – if you’ve got enough Talent to learn to program just by reading code, then regardless of what other career you’ve built or costs you’ve sunk, you should definitely try your hand as a modern-day wizard. This concludes the public service announcement.

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The authors test the hypothesis that low-effort thought promotes political conservatism. In Study 1, alcohol intoxication was measured among bar patrons; as blood alcohol level increased, so did political conservatism (controlling for sex, education, and political identification). In Study 2, participants under cognitive load reported more conservative attitudes than their no-load counterparts. In Study 3, time pressure increased participants’ endorsement of conservative terms. In Study 4, participants considering political terms in a cursory manner endorsed conservative terms more than those asked to cogitate; an indicator of effortful thought (recognition memory) partially mediated the relationship between processing effort and conservatism. Together these data suggest that political conservatism may be a process consequence of low-effort thought; when effortful, deliberate thought is disengaged, endorsement of conservative ideology increases.

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I still think there’s a deeply problematic solipsism in most of this reporting. Apple makes lots of stuff that lots of Americans own and therefore it’s possible to make people feel a kind of psychic chain of guilt when they hear about bad conditions in the factories building the components. But this is a bit like the South By Southwest human hotspots problem, what Apple stands accused of is complicity in the misery of Chinese workers but its real crime often seems to be exposing our delicate western sensibilities to the misery.

You don’t read articles about working conditions in factories making socks destined for export to Kazakhstan, and you don’t read articles about working conditions on the rice farms that people eagerly leave to go toil in the sock factory. That rice and those socks are invisible to us and so too are the workers. What we need to see and hear about are bad conditions wherever they may be, not just the ones that provide the appealing news hook. When you read something bad about a Foxconn factory and then see that thousands of people line up for the chance of a job at one of them, that really ought to make you wonder. What were those guys doing the day before they decided to stand in line? How did that look? If you want to understand the depths of poverty that exist in the world, you can’t just look under the streetlamp.