[Kisil]

>If you want to tell your children they can be anything they want, you can't end up with a perfectly egalitarian society as a result.

Perhaps an easier solution than the author's don't-let-anyone-excel would be to de-stigmatize lower-talent positions. Tell your children they can be whatever they want, and then let them follow whatever they're good at. Even if it's plumbing or retail. Fundamentally, I don't think meritocracy is incompatible with mass happiness. (More technically, I believe there exists some value system in which pursuit of excellence is encouraged without associating a sense of shame to "lower" professions.)

> when someone proposes grand social engineering plans: What does it mean for a given person?

We have to be very careful here to view imbalances as potential indicators of underlying problems, and find and treat those problems rather than the symptoms. To use your example, we have to determine whether systematic pressures are keeping women from choosing CS, and correct those pressures, rather than adding new pressures to choose CS. This point gets made frequently around here, but the mistake is made often enough that it bears repeating: adding different counter-pressures that fix the statistics may mask the problem, but often also exacerbate the underlying issues.

[billybob]

Yes. Let me make it personal. Why have I not invented cold fusion, written an operating system, or cured cancer? Answer: because I'm not smart enough.

OK, I don't want to be too defeatist - I should try my best to do what I can. But I realize I have limits, and that I am more able than some and less able than others.

Does that make me unhappy? No. And if it did, I think the fault would be mine. Like everyone else, I try to look on the bright side of things. Nobody is perfectly happy, and studies show that beyond the point where you have enough not to worry all the time, more money doesn't make you happier.

We don't need to stop telling people 'you should try to excel.' But it would be good to add 'in whatever makes you happy.' If you love cars, be a great mechanic, not a sullen one who wishes he was an executive. And if you want to be a scientist but don't have what it takes, well, learning to be happy in something else is part of life. We all have to deal with that sort of thing.

[paulgerhardt]

http://www.ted.com/talks/mike_rowe_celebrates_dirty_jobs.htm...

Stick with it...(especially in the middle and towards the end)

I'm still very much trying to digest the contents of this article rather than regurgitating the usual flippant answers.

Not everyone can get a job in at their local Google datacenter, even if they train for 2 years. (There was an amazing NPR story recently to this effect.) And while I have moved multiple times, and across two hemispheres to get to Silicon Valley (and yet still can't call myself local to anywhere) I feel some obligation to satiate something I which appears as burgeoning task vacuum in rural America.

That is, there is a tremendous amount of idle "Turking" power going to waste in the heartlands - lifetimes of mechanical acuity being thrown away on television rather than say another Wikipedia/Github for rapid-prototyped goods .

[protomyth]

Mr Rowe was pretty much right on. There is a certain class-ism that seems go along with manual labor. I have heard people call plumbers and carpenters "unskilled labor". That is so much crud, it is unbelievable.

[jerf]

I agree completely. If my kid grows up to be a garbageman, it will not bother me, if that's what he wants to do. (I pick that as a stereotypical low status job.)

I mean, as much as I love my programming job, if you don't want your job to be your life, something like a garbageman has some advantages. The job doesn't come home with you, it's outdoors, physical, you can make a living. None of this particularly appeals to me (other than the "make a living" part which I'm fine with :) ), but it takes all kinds. (Given that my kid is under two years old, the only consideration I'd have is the relatively high risk of automation, but that's not something we can easily predict now.)

And I do agree with your counterargument on the topic of "women in computer science", for what it's worth. I think it's actually both issues in play, which makes it more complicated.

[jimbokun]

"If my kid grows up to be a garbageman, it will not bother me, if that's what he wants to do."

What if it means that he can't afford health insurance, save for retirement, or make a down payment on a house?

[jerf]

"That which can't continue, won't." Like I said, my kid is not even two years old, and predicting the world he'll be entering the labor market in is effectively impossible right now, because there's a crapload of trends that simply Can. Not. Continue. And therefore won't, the only question being in what manner they will not continue.

For instance, I'm not sweating trying to put aside vast quantities of money for college education. Why am I doing this horrible thing? Well, tuition has been going up by about twice the rate of inflation for a long time now (http://www.finaid.org/savings/tuition-inflation.phtml ), and projecting that out, it's another 70% increase in real tuition prices over what I already consider the completely unsustainable tuition rates of today. I don't know what will happen, but today's traditional "four-year college you live at" is not going to be the only choice, or possible even the dominant choice, by then.

Similarly, health care insurance simply can not continue increasing at the rate it is currently increasing at for another 20 years. It's physically impossible. Who knows what will happen instead?

Housing prices are also very difficult to predict once it really settles in that housing is not a good investment.

It's a choice he'll make with eyes wide open if I can help it, but it's his choice, not mine, and frankly neither of us sitting here in 2010 have more than a passing clue what sort of world he'd be making that choice in. Care to bet that by 2028 the US won't have some kind of universal health care, for instance?

[coolnewtoy]

a garbageman, especially if he works for the city, will have a better chance at all that than an artist of most varieties with an ivy league PhD

[protomyth]

is a carpenter lower talent then a programmer?

where does a lawyer fit in the talent pool?

is it wrong to define the whole of a person by the job they have?