| I raised two girls who found the "alpha geek" phenomenon totally repugnant. One is heading back into a CS degree in her thirties; the other went bio and is an entrepreneur. I have to wonder if the chasing away is not to their benefit. Perhaps the ugly is not just a ... social artifact but more of a reflection of the nature of the course of study. Two things spring to mind: - the curious economics of program-correctness.
( people quickly abandon all hope and despair - the
"fixes" are all very tedious ) This one's weird - I hope I do not try your patience with it... - the observation that is made by Adam Curtis in "All Cared For" that what we now call the "environmental movement" could be an artifact of computing. The mindset that there is a knowable and optimum equilibrium for complex systems is something I find increasingly puzzling. It just seems to be a bootstrap; I can't really come up with an ...epistemology of it that isn't circular. People 100 years ago just didn't care; they do now; there was propaganda; it's a thing now that used to not be. Now suppose that there are other, irrational "optima" that people in our field become obsessed with. Finally, I believe that prior to the 1990s, people used things like punch cards and other madness to filter participants. After 1990, the unemployment rate of GenX led to the abuse of computing to find those kids something to do. That, I think, led to the "alpha geek" phenomenon as it is now - we had "alpha geeks" before but they seemed nicer, somehow. Or something. I'm increasingly attributing thready employment to Fed policy, as per Dean Baker, and Scott Sumner. That's not a main stream view... I would submit that the tech industry is definitely moving backwards. Whether this is all part of it is a hard question. |
There's a split in environmentalism between the "deep green" who want nature to be left alone and tend to have a spiritualist approach, versus the "bright green" technocratic management of ecosystems. But the deep greens definitely came first, starting with opposition to nuclear testing, the dumping of nuclear waste at sea, whaling, pollution of rivers and acid rain, and the effects of pesticides (Silent Spring was published in 1962)