| Thanks for writing that, Dan. It's important to clarify what we're arguing about. Underneath "others are stupid" lies "my intelligence goes unrecognized" Oh, but that's why it's good to check where this is coming from: It is precisely because I know what brilliant minds we have in this industry that I am disappointed. I am blown away by how much smarter others in this industry are than I am -- and that is one of the reasons it stings. Imagine you have a nephew who you know to be a prodigy and, sure enough, he ends up getting his PhD at MIT, and you're so proud of him. Then he tells you his dissertation is called 'Yo' and is 200 pages about sending 'Yo' to your friends, and how he expects will make him rich, rich, rich! The disappointment stems from the expectation that he can do better. underneath "others are undeservedly rich" lies "I deserve better"; and so on. That's a very strange motivation to project on this situation that we're funding foolish endeavours and not funding truly interesting research.
[By the way, projecting jealousy is one of the last tools of defence in the box and one of the lowest. It's easy to use, hard to refute and is rarely germane. Please be careful.] My comments were made because our industry is a ship driven by greed to foolish ends. We are abundant in potential but are squandering it like spoiled grandchildren. Joe Armstrong opened last year's StrangeLoop with "We can do better." I'm sure you've heard Alan Kay's talks since, what, 1997? He's... jealous? I don't think so. He, like many of us, would just like to see progress. But we've made little-to-no progress in the last 35 years. So when we also see what projects are funded, it's not hard to frustrated. Can you imagine a time when chemistry is exploding and yet it's hard to get funding to do medical research but there is funding, plenty of it, if you want to create better fireworks? Go to a top conference on the most innovative projects and there's not an investor to be found, but stand near someone who just made Angry Birds and you might get a concussion from the stampede. A much lighter way of hearing what I'm trying to say is this: try to find a TV show called "That Mitchell and Webb Look", Episode 4.1, wherein a chemist who thinks he finds a cure for a disease is told by the owner, M. Ganier, that this is his laboratoire and he demands new ways to make hair silky! I think you'll find it's hysterical and at the same time -- this is how many of us feel. You're right that you hear emotion, but it's frustration, because it's not that we can't, it's that we don't. |
In any case, this is definitely not the ressentiment I was talking about; this is an opposite kind of discussion, one that is thoughtful, not cynically predictable, and opens the conversation further rather than closes it. All of which is just fine for HN.
It's also an example of what I meant by "if people would speak openly and personally about such feelings", and that takes some courage and I admire you for it.