Not to sound like a naysayer, but while the idea that education shouldn't cost money is laudable, it seems fairly untrue given the fact that education as a professional sector exists.
I think the site is a good idea, and it'd be great if it takes off. But I presume it'll briefly take off due to the novelty/pride value of being a mentor, and then see an exodus of mentors as they figure out on their second lesson that education is difficult, and that's why people usually get paid for it.
It's acting as a guide and less as a teacher, which is what students need. They need to figure most of it out for themselves and have a helping hand to get them over the humps.
It's essentially the concept of an apprenticeship as it works in the UK. The apprentice is paid a far below minimum wage salary, and is ostensibly trained by the company they apprentice with as part of their remuneration. The apprentice then works on commercial projects, again ostensibly with mentors.
Heck, throw in a ~$5/h wage and it's basically the UK apprenticeship model except with the guarantee of an actually qualified mentor. I agree that working for free is a bit of a steep ask, but I know I'd prefer to work for free with a properly qualified mentor than work at $5/h for someone totally unqualified (as my own apprenticeship turned out some years back).
EDIT: Yes, my last line is a false dichotomy. Ideally you'd be working for some sort of wage with a qualified mentor.
Facebook pays their interns over 5k/month. With how tight the market for CS graduates is, the idea of someone working for free for a company that makes a for-profit product is pretty crazy.
Unpaid (or, practically unpaid) internships are a sad reality of job markets where the supply far, far outpaces the demand - this is common in high prestige professions that do not require extensive qualifications - things like PR, fashion design, art galleries, magazine publishing, event organizing, etc.
Yes, but this is interns rather than apprentices. Interns are typically, as you've said, graduates. They're inexperienced, but they've had 3 years of theoretical training. Apprentices have had no training, much like the end user of askadev.
I agree it'd be fairly preposterous to hire a CS graduate for a very low or no wage salary. It just wouldn't be effective, what with the demand for CS at the moment.
The article states that some startups succeed because "they’ve found some viral loop, the crack cocaine of startup-land". My question is whether these things actually exist? The only kind of business I can think of where something like this really applies is media-styled companies aimed at young people. But this type of company doesn't really seem to be the kind of company the article is talking about. I can't think of any business-to-business companies (as 'upselling' implies) that have any kind of viral loop, so it seems to me that the article conflates high-growth media-companies with high-revenue business-companies, and then argues against a hypothetical business company working on user acquisition as if it were a media company.
Am I wrong here? Is there some sort of viral concept for business-to-business companies?
EDIT: Just to clarify what I mean by the fuzzily defined term 'media companies', I mean companies whose product is in one of the low/no fee media spaces, like social media or digital media.
Whatever kind of company you run, dig below the top-line growth numbers. Look into churn and revenue by cohort.
There are b2b companies with very high churn (Groupon's merchant acquisition is arguably an example) and those with very low churn (Stripe, GoCardless).
As an aside, there are some b2b companies with a pretty high viral coefficient. B2B invoicing platforms are a good example - a business might bring all of its suppliers/customers onto a platform. This is basically Tradeshift's strategy.
Thanks for that information, that's interesting. Either way, I thought it was an interesting article, and it was well written too. I also agree with the core point that growth without retention is meaningless. I suppose I just take issue with the term 'viral' here, although your point stands even with business-to-business: if you've had a sudden influx of customers, then you'll need to fight to keep them rather than just considering them an unchanging constant of your business forevermore.
If the reply is fallacious, then show that it's fallacious. If it is fallacious then it shouldn't be used as an argument irrespective of whom it's aimed it. If the reply doesn't contain some logical flaw, then it simply doesn't matter whether its opponent is black or white or anything else: neither truth nor logic are subject to whether people like them.
There is no way of 'redistributing power more equally': you will always answer to someone. In the case of any political system which pretends to 'redistribute' a given thing, then the person you answer to is the redistributor. Any philosophy which pretends it can halt ambition and greed is nothing more than a utopian philosophy, and any philosophy which relies upon a central authority to enforce fairness must first answer how it will halt that authority's ambition and greed.
> It's hardly a fair market when they're forced to compete with free though
Surely, as a member of an entrepreneurial-focussed community, you can trivially see why this argument isn't valid? The content holders are only competing with free if they're offering the same service as the free service.
The games industry has managed to cleverly counter 'competing with free' by making their paid services such as Steam value-added over simply providing the same content as the free content. The rights holders just have to find something that they can add that pirates cannot. As Steam gives community and ease of storage, and Spotify gives recommendations and playlists, so too must Hollywood find something that they can give.
Netflix already goes a long way to being the Spotify of the film and television industry, but it's hampered by only being allowed to show out of date content, and having its content culled fairly often. If the film and television industry were to introduce a Netflix+ with all the newest films and television shows, then I expect that they could attract a much larger number of people at a much larger price.
Of course, they could always just sit around whining that they "can't compete with free" and stick ever greater restrictions on the public until the public finally grow sick of them and force politicians to move decisively against the film and television industry.
In the music industry, there are plenty of digital download services that offer convenient and reliable distribution of DRM free audio files. Yet it's commonly accepted that their business is still severely impacted by copyright infringement, ie. competing with free.
Services like Spotify make far smaller revenues than music sales, so can hardly be considered a success for anyone other than Spotify.
I don't disagree that rights holders should make their services as user friendly as possible, but it's disingenuous to infer that will fix the underlying problem.
I'm not sure what you mean by your final paragraph. Why would the public 'force politicians to move decisively against the film and television industry'? The film and television industry are the ones producing the content that the public want.
> All of that is analogous to existing regulation regarding cigarettes
But this is why e-cigarette campaigners say that politicians are just meddling out of personal distaste, rather than any scientific backing. The two core reasons why cigarettes cannot be smoked indoors are:
1) Doing so (potentially) causes deleterious effects to people who inhale the second-hand smoke. At the very least, it can be agreed that it's not preferable to breathe smoke.
2) It makes it likelier that the smoker will give up their dangerous addiction.
Neither case can be particularly easily applied to e-cigarettes, which emit harmless water vapour, and are to many smokers a means of giving up their dangerous smoking addiction.
I must say I agree with the e-cigarette campaigners that attempts to apply the same laws to e-cigarettes as cigarettes is just yet another example of politicians wanting to control something absent of any scientific proof that they need to do so.
While many may emit water vapour, I believe there's studies which show that there are non-negligible amounts of other substances in some e-cigarette vapours. I do not think there's enough scientific data to make a long-term decision; perhaps just regulating the manufacturers so that we know what's putting what into the air is enough?
My personal opinion is that no matter the safety, I cannot cope with the smell of e-cigarettes, having been around people who use them indoors, and would like to have at least some recourse for being forced to smell it all day in my workplace. If vapers manage to convince companies that it is their "right" to vape in the workplace, I will not be able to work. I would thus like some regulation around using e-cigarettes in places where I have little choice to be.
I don't think that either smell nor "non-water compounds" are reasons to regulate e-cigarettes tighter than we regulate perfumes, colognes, or spray deodorants.
Similar regulation for all four seems reasonable to me.
Those things don't tend to protrude more than a few inches, maximum, from a person's body, and there's an established culture whereby people will be reprimanded if they do.
Quite a few perfumes give me a migraine with even fairly limited exposure. By the time I notice the smell enough to run away, it's usually too late. If someone is wearing axe body spray I have to immediately leave the room.
This is the reason I stopped going to malls. The olfactory assault emanating from some of those stores is quite unpleasant and will give me migraines. Applies to the weekend bar scene, too, but I was never wont to hang around drunk people anyway.
I think it's reasonable to ask vapers around you to take it elsewhere if it bothers you. Similarly, if someone is wearing a very strong perfume that bothers you, take it up with them. As a vaper, I'll generally ask first before vaping in a closed area, but if I don't, I'm totally okay with someone asking me to take it elsewhere. If you run into large groups of people who don't, those people are just dicks. That doesn't mean we should start legislating away everything that's irritating to some group of people.
It seems to me that the argument for legislation seems to come from the idea that smoking is bad, smokers are bad people, so anything that looks like smoking is also bad.
Aye, it probably does come from that. I'll wait to see what becomes of "vaper culture" before making an opinion, but before then, I'm honestly not going to get involved either way on this process.
Okay, fair enough. Have you tried asking the vapers if they would mind not smoking them indoors? I know I've stopped doing so in confined conference rooms after a coworker commented that they didn't like the smell.
I appreciate it sucks that vaping is just one more thing which intrudes on your personal space and freedoms, but so do so many things at the office, from people chatting, to coughing, to cracking their knuckles or delighting you with the irritating buzz of their headphones. I'm not really sure that e-cigarettes warrant regulation any more than any of the other annoyances that are encountered throughout the day.
EDIT: Also, for anyone interested in learning more about the science of e-cigarette safety, Dr. Siegel of the Boston University School of Public Health pretty vociferously supports e-cigarettes and writes a blog on the science and politics of the matter:
> Have you tried asking the vapers if they would mind not smoking them indoors?
Yes. Unfortunately, some people do not seem to care about others, especially when they see what they're doing as "harmless". There seems to be a certain militancy among some vapers that doesn't exist around most other things.
Wow, arseholes. It's hard to recommend any course of action really, because I can't think of any coworkers I've ever had who'd refuse a reasonable request like that. I guess I'd offer to buy them some flavoured nicotine gum and ask them to try that for a while?
The apathy is not a cigarette/e-cig problem, sounds more like a personality trait. A little mindfulness would do our culture good(real practice, not the Time magazine version).
I posit the militancy is a possible result of persecution.
The base is usually vegetable glycerin [0] and/or propylene glycol [1], sometimes a low amount of distilled water or alcohol is added (I think up to 10%; usually with glycerin to lower it's viscosity) and finally food-grade flavours for taste. And of course nicotine in varying amounts from usually 0-36 mg/ml (36mg being rather rare in EU but I heard vapers in the US sometimes go that high)
Harmless is a very strong word. The Clearstream study [2] concluded that it "could be more unhealty to breath air in big cities compared to staying in the same room with someone who is vaping.", which is great but wouldn't make me use the word "harmless".
As a vaper for over 2y now after being a smoker for 8y, I obviously disagree with regulating vaping the same way smoking is, but imo we need some kind of regulation, sadly, as people are idiots.
There is everything from Chinese liquids of strongly varying degrees of quality (that was the problem with the 2009 FDA study) to people who think they can just blow huge clouds in restaurants.
My personal policy is not to vape at all where people are eating and anywhere else indoors, unless it's specifically vaper friendly, to stealth vape (a technique where you inhale deeply and breathe out slowly, avoiding visible vapour).
Has anyone actually read the studies linked by the author to back up his drivel? I'll save you some time: the 2007 study isn't valid even by the low levels of scientific burden required for psychological studies (it's entirely based on self-reporting), and the 1982 study support the opposite conclusion to the author's. In fact, the 1982 study [0] finds that men and women simply have different kinds of friendships, where men are likely to only engage in emotional sharing with their closest friends, and women are more likely to engage in emotional sharing with all their friends.
This brings me on to challenging the true point of the article: slating the traditional male gender role. It's no accident that the author turns to the authority of feminists for perspectives on men -- despite that being so laughly outside the remit of feminism -- because the entire point, unstated but present, throughout the article is that women have 'got it right' and men should be more like women. In lieu of any studies which actually support his point (note that only the first two studies in the article actually even discuss his point about male friendships, the rest are an irrelevance), he instead uses anecdote as evidence for a point neither study can support, and then goes on to blame the entire mess on the traditional male gender role. I won't defend the male gender role, because I have no stock in doing so, but I would at least ask that if something's going to be blamed for mens' terrible friendships then we at least provide some proof that men do indeed have terrible friendships.
Lastly, the article, like so many in the media, is yet another argument that encourages you to accept its faulty form by providing you with a false dichotomy: the argument begs the question that either type of friend (the emotional numerous friends of women, or the close few friends of men) is a superior type of friend, links some 'evidence' which doesn't support its point, and then encourages you to ask yourself whether men or women 'have it right' before even bothering to prove if there's anything to actually get right in this situation.
I will say one thing though: if this is the kind of stuff Men's Journal prints, then either its readership is mostly women, or men sure do love self-flagellation.
> men and women simply have different kinds of friendships
I think you nailed it there. This matches what I've been picking up from books by Deborah Tannen, an author recommended to me by a guy at work.
Tannen describes men and women as having two massively different styles of communication. Communication is not at all addressed in the attached article, yet, when I perceive the dialogue in the article, it matches Tannen's model to a T. In a nutshell: men communicate in the domain of independence while women communicate about intimacy. If you remember _nothing_ else about what I write here, remember those two words: intimacy vs. independence.
So for example, when the wife in the article repeatedly asks for "dish," that's a blatant signal of intimacy. She wants to be in on secrets. She wants intimacy with her husband and is sending out "sonar" to see how intimate her husband is with his friends. Even her use of the idiosyncratic term "dish" and expecting her husband to pick up on it can be perceived as calls for intimacy.
Meanwhile, when the author describes "activity" or "convenience" friends, (with an undeserving negative air), he's failing to perceive that these types of friendship allow the men to preserve their independence. It also explains why the men felt intruded upon when the women scheduled an activity for them. The author perceives it in the parent-child spectrum, which is okay, but not insightful imo. Tannen's model of men's independence I find superior. It also explains the author's ignoring phone calls from his friend - it's a meta-communication about preserving his own independence.
Just to get meta about publishing in the 2010s, the article is a smorgasbord of irritainment, pseudo-psychology and self-doubt. Certainly not the kind of thing most men would find useful, valuable or insightful. Although that certainly doesn't it make the author "gay" as someone below suggested! However, this article is neither empowering through interdependence nor through independence, just a slab of rage press with a bit of correlation without causation statistics. (Can't you just hear an editor saying "Great, now finish up with some stats to back it up.")
So let's read Tannen's books to help our relationships and communication along, then get back to talking about Linux and signal processing and shit.
Sure. She has numerous books now, but the first one that started her off on this path was _That's Not What I Meant!_, which was about differences in communications styles in general. One chapter of it was about the diff. b/t men and women and that got the most attention and requests for more info, so she wrote _You Just Don't Understand: Women and Men in Conversation_. (There's a lesson for startups about listening to your audience there, too.)
The main one to recommend is the latter, but the first one is great, too. I haven't read her other ones. And TBH I haven't finished either one after several months, b/c the material in the first few chapters just got me so far along I was surprised and it shifted my perspective quite a bit. Especially for a literally-minded person like myself, it was like learning to see not only a new color, but a new, parallel spectrum.
> because the entire point, unstated but present, throughout the article is that women have 'got it right' and men should be more like women .... true point of the article: slating the traditional male gender role.
That was not my reading at all and on re-reading I still can't see it.
Then Liz would let out a big theatrical groan that said, in essence, What kind of friendship is that?
I thought it was a great friendship, if I thought about it at all.
To me, this suggests that there is a model for male friendships that works perfectly well. I perceived the problem to be that not all men are good at implementing or maintaining this model, especially over distance.
The author acknowledges that the female model isn't necessarily the single optimal model:
At the same time, a wave of feminist sociologists and psychologists began describing female friendship, with all its confessional talk, as the optimal model. Many feminist thinkers now see those views as overly simplistic.
> ...before even bothering to prove if there's anything to actually get right in this situation
But there is something to get right! Not feeling lonely.
> Has anyone actually read the studies linked by the author to back up his drivel?
No. I skimmed over that bit and didn't feel it was actually necessary for the point of the article. The author spoke to me on a personal level, through a narrative that I can relate to. They didn't need to prove anything to me: speaking to my lived experience was more than enough to make me think.
The problem is that the only point of the article, besides telling a story, is to raise the question of whether the author is unsatisfied with (or sometimes merely insecure about) his friendships because men are bad at friendship compared to women. It doesn't make it better to present both sides and say "but who knows," it just makes it a worse article. Without any real facts or insight to talk about, attributing something you don't like about yourself to your gender is just psychological projection and spreads negative feelings towards men.
Imagine if a Dad wrote an article, "Do men suck at parenting?" that assessed men on what was essentially their ability to "mother." Or imagine if a male teacher wrote, "Do men suck at teaching?" or a female programmer wrote, "Do women suck at programming?" None of them motivated by a new study or based on anything but a personal anecdote. We'd all rightfully rise to the defense of men and women in general.
There are whole field of scientific study based almost entirely on self-reports. As such, there has been much research done on its veracity, which has shown that it is largely valid and reliable when reporting on simple things (like friendship behavior) so long as it's anonymous, does not require introspection(1), and there is no fear of reprisal(2).
The 2007 study meets all those requirements, so I see no scientific reason to question its results.
Also, I can't think of any practical methodology for studying friendship behaviorally - but would love to be proven wrong.
1. Baumeister, R. F., Vohs, K. D., & Funder, D. C. (2007). Psychology as the science of self-reports and finger movements: Whatever happened to actual behavior?. Perspectives on Psychological Science, 2(4), 396-403. Baumeister, R. F., Vohs, K. D., & Funder, D. C. (2007). http://users.business.uconn.edu/jgoodman/mgmt%206201%20assig...
2. Brener ND, Billy JOG, Grady WR. Assessment of factors affecting the validity of self-reported health-risk behavior among adolescents: evidence from the scientific literature. Journal of Adolescent Health 2003;33:436-457. Summary at http://www.minnetonka.k12.mn.us/TonkaCares/RwR/Documents/Val...
Oh, very well. Thank you for proving that the scientific community disagrees with me, and proving evidence for your point. I can't say I actually agree with those criteria; especially since one is wholly impossible: there is never a possibility that there's 'no fear of reprisal' when the reprisal can take the form of conflicting with one's self-identity. To be honest, to accept a self-report I'd have to see the following:
1) A study which shows that the questions themselves do not introduce bias. An actual study, where multiple groups of participants were asked the same questions in different forms so as to prove the language of the question cannot influence the result. Of course, this would cause every questionnaire and interview study to fail, because the language does indeed affect the results and is thus a confounding variable (which cannot be controlled without pretending that some language "just doesn't affect people", and yet still functions as language).
2) A proof that the demographic of the sample was controlled for all controllable factors other than those measured. For instance, in this study it wouldn't be good enough to test for the correlation between gender and friendship satisfaction by just getting a bunch of men and women: they'd all have to be the same class, race, wealth etc.
3) The study cannot draw conclusions, nor interpret its results as causative. This is really quite self-explanatory: correlation does not imply causation. Yet, especially in sociology and psychology, this logical maxim seems to get forgotten amongst the excitement of having produced a study.
I'm sure there's more objections, but you've already put up with me arrogantly berating the scientific community for 3 points now. If I were allowed to edit my post to state that the scientific community disagrees with me regarding the validity of the 2007 study, I would.
As for an experimental methodology for studying friendship, I can't say that I can think of any studies which would do so and get past an ethics committee (bloody ethicists), but making the study longitudinal over childhood through to young adulthood would help, as it would show what age-bound variables affect the output. It might just be that young adult men are, for instance, too busy developing a career to have friends, or too busy drinking beer to have friends, or whatever; either way, making it longitudinal would allow some of the uncontrollable confounding variables (such a life experiences) to become more apparent.
1) Questions that introduce bias are known as leading questions, and researchers have devised multiple methods of avoiding that - including, as Dan noted, asking the same question more than once with different wording, and using only neutral language. Also, keeping questions simple, clear, specific and brief - with no implicit assumptions or loaded phrases.
2) Good research controls as many variables as possible. The more uncontrolled the variables are the less valid the data is - but this applies to all studies, not just self-reports.
3) Correlation ≠ causation is rarely forgotten in the actual research - the discussion sections of research in reputable journals are overly modest at best, noting the limitations and weaknesses of the study and typically making few claims for generalizability. Mass media reports, however, tend to take more than a few liberties.
I agree any valid study of friendship has to be longitudinal - the issue becomes one of measurement. You do not trust self-reports, yet how else could it be measured? Hire a researcher to follow people around? Ask them to carry an audio recorder with them every day for a few years?
The only practical alternative I can think of is to ask their close friends or relatives. However, this may be unnecessary because research has already compared self and other reports on a sensitive issue (life satisfaction) and found a high correlation (1).
And finally - although unscientific, the high upcount of this article suggests that it hit a nerve and that many here are unsatisfied with the quality of their friendships. It is my own experience, and that of my brother and my father, and most of the other men I know - more than enough to suggest something is not quite right - that it warrants a thoughtful discussion and not be dismissed out of hand.
> And finally - although unscientific, the high upcount of this article suggests that it hit a nerve and that many here are unsatisfied with the quality of their friendships.
See, you used the term 'suggests' rather than 'proves' because you know that claiming a stronger relationship between upvotes and motive would be affirming the consequent. But this is precisely the sort of weasel-wording which I've seen in observational studies, and it seems deliberately crafted to trick an uncanny reader ill-versed in logic into misinterpreting 'suggests' as 'proves'. Of course, we both know that we cannot infer anything from a consequent other than one of the possible antecedents must have occurred, and we both know that the antecedents in this case -- motive for clicking upvote -- is huge, and thus nothing meaningful can be inferred about the consequent. I'm happy to have a discussion about almost anything, but if someone comes to the party with nonsense evidence pretending the discussion has already been studied and decided, I'm going to call them on it.
I also feel like you've also dodged every point I've raised (or perhaps I didn't explain my objections very well). With regards to #1, the issue wasn't that I think researchers are deliberately crafting leading questions, but that in order for the study to be valid they'd have to show that their questions either do not lead thus aren't confounding (which I've argued is impossible), or that they lead predictably thus can be countered in the analysis (which I also argued is impossible).
With #2 you're correct that this is an issue for all studies, but it's a particularly large issue for studies of things which are irreducibly complex, like people. Since we can't (easily) take specific facets of a person and study those in silo from the rest of a person, controlling confounding variables becomes a bigger issue. Even in other observational sciences we can usually demonstrate the core parts of our assumptions in a controlled experimental manner. For instance, in the study of global warming, we can demonstrate in a controlled, experimental way that the combustion of fossil fuels releases CO2. With studies of human behaviour this is rarely possible.
With #3 you're correct that the media is far guiltier of this than the scientists, but I'd argue that scientists need to be more vocal about this issue. I appreciate this treads a fine line between asking for more scientific social responsibility, and holding scientists responsible for the behaviour of society, but I feel this is a valid concern due to the way that politicians like to fund studies such as these to validate their personal opinion. The reason I believe this important isn't that I think scientists are trying to dupe us, far from it, but because it worries me that as burden the of proof for a posteriori logic falls from the strongly codified and philosophically justified rules of empiricism and falsifiability, so scientists move from being discoverers of truth to yet another controllable authority figure.
Also, thank you again for citing evidence for your point. I apologise that I have not done so, but I seriously doubt any scientists actually agree with me here. Having read your linked study, I would say it both stands to reason and doesn't really seem to prove the point it claims to prove. If you set out to prove that self-reporting isn't invalidated by confounding variables, and you do so by invoking self-reporting which contains almost exactly the same confounding variables, then you can't really claim to have proved anything. Relatives and friends of a sample in such a study would be just as likely to change their answers, consciously or subconsciously, to avoid internal conflict, and because they're tied to the sample in such a way that would produce a similar personality and similar self-identity reprisals if the subject's life choice were cast in doubt, it's also not a large leap of logic that their changed answers would usually change along the same lines as the sample.
Again, I can't really think of a better way of studying complex issues like human behaviour, but since we started at the point of 'science agrees self-reporting is fine' and are now at 'we agree it is the best we can get', I feel we're moving in the right direction. I do agree that well-controlled self-report studies are probably the best we can get in this field, it just seems to me that the best we can get isn't as valid as the best we can get in experimental sciences, and should be noted as such.
About 1) - don't most forms ask questions more than on e using different wording? This helps eliminate people just filling the form out randomly, but couldn't it also help keep language neutral?
Yes, this is correct. Most self-reporting relies on having the same question asked in different ways and places to catch people whose inconsistent answers suggest they should be removed from the sample.
However, my objection is that I don't believe language can be easily classified in terms of the response it'll elicit. Obviously, one can (usually) correctly guess the response that'll be received if one were to run up to a stranger and yell "You're a [swearword of choice here]", yet the fact that I've had to preface this with the modifier 'usually' betrays my point; some people will get aggressive if you swear at them, some will laugh, some will respond in kind, and so on. My concern is that if we can't even predict the effect of language in its most obvious state, we probably can't predict its effect in subtler states.
This unpredictability of language leaves us in a tricky position when it comes to asking questions on a self-reporting study. In order to solve that one objection, we'd have to come up with a method of using language which manages to communicate its point, without causing that point to make people feel emotion. This is further complicated by the fact that people are complex beasts with internal and external factors playing in to how they behave, such that a question formed neutrally for one person would probably not be so neutral with others. This also makes avoiding 'fear of reprisal' for one's response to a question impossible, as we can only remove external reprisal. It would not be possible for us to, for instance, removal the internal upheaval of a conflicted homosexual admitting to a survey that they were gay.
I am not sure I understand what you are claiming here?
Are you saying that self-reports (a.k.a. anecdotal evidence) has happened so often on this subject that it in itself has created a big enough dataset to label it a proper study?
Without it we wouldn't have had this great debate about male friendships. Sure, the original article may very well be crap, but the resulting debate is not.
I'd sooner say that men and women _currently_ have different kinds of relationships, for the most part. For men who have been conditioned toward independence but who have greater emotional needs than that model allows, the independence model can feel repressive. Likewise, I've known a number of women who lean more toward independence than intimacy. (This switching of relationship models seems to happen more than a little among the trans-men and trans-women that I know.) It isn't clear to me that the relationship categories are linked to anything other than cultural/societal conditioning.
Listening to feminists talk about relationships is actually helpful, in that by acknowledging the basic equality of women, we as men can allow ourselves to form the kind of relationships that we each want individually, rather than the kind that is trained into us from childhood. Escaping from societal pigeonholes can be good for men as well as women.
I don't think he attacked the traditional male gender role. In fact, I think the article supports your general opinion. it starts by entertaining the idea of the male friendship deficiency, and even giving some anecdotal evidence.
But then, it turns around. He could enjoy his friendships without sharing "deep feelings", just centering around activities. That's what the ending means, when the wife asks him for entertaining gossips, and he can't tell anyone.
Or, to play devil's advocate, that you aren't putting in the level of work in your day job that you could be putting in. If I were an employer looking at a candidate and I saw they had huge amounts of open source contributions, the first thing I'd ask is "how did you have time for this and your day job?".
It also tells you something else about a candidate: that their previous job probably wasn't particularly hard or that they didn't have much in the way of responsibilities. If you're the lead developer on a several hundred thousand line codebase, it seems less likely that you have time to build an open source resume than if you were a junior developer.
Honestly, I think open source is a bit of a mixed signal. If the code shown in the repositories is great, then that's fantastic, but if it's merely average then I think it makes you look worse than just not having it there at all. This is really my biggest objection with open source: if you want to use it as some sort of resume, then you have to contribute huge amounts of time to it in order to make it representative of your skill. Then it's no longer an open source project you do for fun, but just a second day job. Additionally, when it gets good enough for an employer to see, what interviewer is going to have time to read through it? This problem is magnified especially when developers start treating open source as a form of resume, and interviewers have to wade through shockingly poor repositories from every candidate to determine the candidate's quality.
I doubt the issue is Facebook 'creeping [him] out', so much as it is that it's uncertain what exactly Facebook is going to want out of the deal. Facebook isn't primarily a games company, and it's even less a 3D/desktop games company. There doesn't appear to be any obvious motivation for Facebook to use this tech for its intended purpose, so the question becomes what exactly they do want Oculus Rift for.
I assume Notch is worried about those implications. Will Facebook start demanding that every Oculus Rift game have tight Facebook integration? Will Facebook do something strange, like have Facebook wall updates appear in the game world irrespective of whether it fits into the game? If I were a game developer, this'd creep me out too.
>>I doubt the issue is Facebook 'creeping [him] out'
I think that's very much the issue.
Seriously, "virtual reality" and "Facebook" are two things I don't want to think about in the same context. The former is an extremely promising piece of technology that can change the way people work, talk and play. The latter is a gigantic online advertising engine. Put them together and there's only one direction virtual reality can go: a new way to advertise to Facebook users (once they "bring virtual reality to everyone" of course. /eyeroll ).
Perhaps Facebook are thinking "What's the one thing that could truly set us apart from all other social media sites, and place a prohibitively high barrier to entry on this otherwise very easy to enter field?", and perhaps the conclusion they've reached is to take social media to the next level, and have it simulate life in virtual reality.
Perhaps Facebook are going to aim to have a FacebookVR some time in the future, where you can meet up with other avatars 'in person' in their virtual reality community?
... Or perhaps this is just a sleazy cash in where they think they can recapture the video-game-enamoured youth market by shoving Facebook into every Oculus Rift game.
This is a play by Facebook to create a unique App Store to compete with Apple, Google, and Microsoft using a unique piece of consumer electronics.
Facebook can't find a cheap smartphone manufacturer with a homegrown OS to buy, so they go with the next best thing that's also got a screen. I think the VR aspect is accidental/a nice to have.
The hard lesson over the coming decade or 2 is going to be that UI design for virtual reality tolerates much less intrusion then a desktop PC.
If you're remotely computer literate and organize your desktop the way you like, it hurts when you lose that and it already feels like an invasion when a program does something you don't want it to.
I suspect transposed to virtual reality, people are going to be even less tolerant of trying to force things on them because the experience is much more intimate.
> "... people are going to be even less tolerant of trying to force things on them because the experience is much more intimate."
Perhaps not if that's how you 'grew up with it' (so to speak). If you're clever enough and insert yourself into the system early enough then you get to shape all the 'norms' that will eventually emerge.
Except that's not what's happening. Virtual reality isn't an abstract interface to a complex piece of hardware - it's intended to mimic your everyday experience of reality.
A lot of UI paradigms will simply disintegrate against that issue. You'll be able to transpose existing ideas into virtual reality by projecting them onto things which are those abstract interfaces (virtual displays etc.), but you're not going to be able to expect to control how the user moves or interacts.
Most likely will be firmware-level integration. Social media companies, and Facebook most of all, are about engagement, which means making it easy to use Facebook from every platform possible. Having your head inside an immersive virtual reality just put people too far from Facebook I'm guessing, so the new FB Oculus will have a stream from your newsfeed that the firmware kindly muxes into your display at all times. :)
Google does this same thing with Android and other pervasive Google platforms and services. Why is Google making a phone? So that you use Google services a lot more than you otherwise would, which gives them the opportunity not only to drive up their search and traffic numbers, but collect a lot of data that is useful in targeting advertisements.
I agree that it's hard to think of any product tie-in with FB's extant line that wouldn't be disgusting. The only safe way to think of it is as a portfolio piece -- Facebook just wants to be associated with the next revolutionary name in computer input technology. It's hard to believe that it is so innocuous, though, and Zuck seems to put that idea to bed in his announcement.
I think so too. This 3d world environment would completely get rid of computers as we know it, and tablets too, if you could just put on the helmet and go to the internet/facebook, see all your friends, etc...
I am sure the advertizers would love to create 3d models of their products in this environment. Maybe watch some Ford trucks rumble up the mountain while you watch?
I think anyone that was even mildly creeped out by Secondlife or Playstation Home will be about 10x more creeped out by VR versions (not even adding in the Facebook angle).
VR "Presence" cuts both ways.
Yes it massively amplifies virtual experiences but disruption, incongruities and annoyances are amplified to the same or perhaps a greater degree...
I think it will be more mainstream and captivating and thus effective than SecondLife. For one thing, you will be invited to join existing friends rather than jump in and deal with randoms.
I don't think that's actually a contradiction as you imply.
The better people get at ignoring ads, the more effort you have to put into getting people to see them if your business is built around them. You can get into a bad feedback cycle where people try ever-harder to ignore your ads as you try ever-harder to make them un-ignorable.
Um, that is also what Facebook did. Maybe not for work but definitely for communication and play.
And if you read the announcement you would know where FB wants to go with VR. Since neither WhatsApp nor Instagram require you to log in with your FB account, I doubt the first thing you'd see after putting on the Rift would be a FB login page.
how/why? Facebook is how I connect with my friends and make plans to hang out with them in person later. Without it I wouldn't talk to a lot of people, online or offline.
In exactly the same way that heroin substitutes for many healthier goal-seeking behaviors in the junkie, Facebook seems to give many of my former friends a social fix, such that they seek other forms of interaction much less now. That includes telephone calls, nights out at the pub / dinner / billiards, and especially one-on-one conversations.
Which is what, exactly? I always thought the "killer app" of true VR would be socialization and collaboration: a "virtual world" in the sense of Second Life, OpenCobalt, or Neal Stephenson's metaverse.
Facebook itself is the "casual" version of a socialization system. Facebook's biggest uncaptured market right now is people who prefer to socialize in a more "hardcore" fashion: in virtual worlds (e.g. MMO game-worlds) rather than on websites.
Facebook could probably capture some of this market by putting out the world's first massively-multiuser VR world. It wouldn't necessarily have to be a game, per se, although games could be built on top of it. Just a place, like Facebook itself is a place.
World-of-Warcraft-like MMO games allow for "character customization", but on a moment-to-moment basis, character models are mostly static. You can read an explicit display of emotion if they choose to "emote" one, but there are no continuous subtle cues about how a person is continuing to feel about something.
Now, one of the interesting things about VR is that, provided your perspective is attached to an avatar, the only sensible place to put the "camera" is staring right out of the eyes of that avatar. This means that, whenever you're among other players in a shared VR environment, you're going to be constantly staring at up-close views of other people's avatars' faces, who are in turn staring back at you. So, if your VR equipment could read your facial cues, and replicate them on your avatar's face...
Basically: what are the advantages, over using Skype, of having meetings in a physical office? A VR office should be able to replicate those advantages.
Except you're face is going to be covered with virtual reality junk, and all it does is display something a normal monitor or TV can. Reading your facial expressions requires nothing more than a webcam. And the whole thing I think is just a gimmick that doesn't add much value (both VR and facial expressions.) Additionally video game characters look really creepy when they try to do facial expressions.
1. The face-reading parts would be inside and part of the virtual-reality junk. (And, helpfully, would also enhance eye-tracking.)
2. Modern graphics technology has all it needs to generate realistic expressions on characters. Modern video-game characters instead look creepy because they're replaying a small pre-made library of expressions that don't usually fit the situation very well. If the character's face just mimicked the tension in the muscles of your own face moment-to-moment, this problem would disappear.
3. The argument that facial expressions (or body-language in general) doesn't add value is refuted explicitly by the fact that people prefer meeting in person, to meeting over video-chat, to speaking over the phone, to having a text conversation. The only thing each rung of that ladder adds to the previous is body-language-based interaction.
But these are all beside the greater point: the feeling of being in the same room with someone is necessary for the emotional regulation of your relationship with them. Skype doesn't give you that. VR, eventually, can.
And none of that requires virtual reality to do. You could have a video game with the characters matching your facial expressions. It would be just as pointless, but it could be done.
It doesn't explicitly require VR... but it does require having both "central vision" and "peripheral vision." Basically, to have the level of detail required to be able to read people's expressions off their avatars in a non-VR setup, you have to have their faces filling a large-enough degree of your vision that, in most setups, they're fullscreen on your monitor (you know, like Skype.)
To be able to interact with the world while talking to someone (because that's the reason you're in a virtual world rather than on Skype), you need to be able to see things going on around the person while focusing on them. So, you either need a grid of nine monitors, or this thing[1].
And you still can't have a natural conversation with more than one person (or especially express any status-regulation emotions involving looking at one person in preference to another) because tilting your head means you can't see the "central vision" part of your screen-wall any more.
If only there was some way for tilting or moving your head to just show you more of the virtual people and world around you, in a naturally-mapped way, you know?
"Facebook isn't primarily a games company, and it's even less a 3D/desktop games company"
So what? What were you guys thinking back when Google was purely an Internet/search engine company, and tried to foray into other ventures (Android, self-driving cars, etc)?
Companies expand their markets, create new products. It is natural. Why does the Oculus acquisition seem to perplex the HN crowd?
I don't think the general consensus is perplexed at all.
By the way, could you send me one of these driver-less cars you speak of? Maybe some other vaporware?
I've seen driverless cars driving, without human input, on city streets and highways in the Bay Area for over a year. You can't possibly call it vaporware just because it's not being sold immediately -- with the risks involved, they'll probably need 10-20 years of validation before they hit the market. We need more companies thinking that far out, not fewer.
In a similar capacity, the B&MGF/IV have a laser that blasts mosquitoes out of the air. However despite it actually existing, it would be perfectly reasonable to refer to it as vapor ware at this point. You'd even be excused for asserting that it was just a PR stunt and funding sink.
Your comment is irrelevant. My point is that Google is "trying to foray into other ventures" (my exact words). I never claimed self-driving cars are available to consumers right now.
You seem to be completely failing to understand o0-0o's objection.
Your example of another Google "venture" is, at this point, vaporware. Now we are told that Facebook is moving into a new "venture"? Why are we to believe that this will be any less vaporware? The only thing that matters to us, the potential consumer, is if they can ship. Everything else is irrelevant.
When Google enters a brand new market, they seem aware and empathetic that the public might be confused as to why Google has made a step in that direction.
An example is Android "expanding" to the wearables market: http://developer.android.com/wear/index.html They relate the new market to what they can relate with. It's "for your existing Android apps" and adding more functionality "to your users".
What is Facebook's grand vision? Why should gaming companies not retreat from this announcement?
Well instead of mobile games they may leverage the large console and desktop gamers out there and add FB accounts to those circles. Besides it may be a new revenue.
One kind of social events is gaming with friends. It's nice to compete with friends and show to your network what you and your friends are up to.
Undoubtedly at some point virtual reality is going to become the next "smartphone". Rift is a giant headset but in a decade or two it will get so small that we can enjoy virtual reality at home like we enjoy using a smartphone.
This feels more and more like getting your virtual character in SIMs to play virtual reality game.
> It's nice to compete with friends and show to your network what you and your friends are up to.
I've never understood this mindset in gaming. Maybe I'm just showing myself as an introverted curmudgeon, but I only game when I'm not programming, and I just game to try to unwind. Being forced to do something 'social' when I just want to relax is just annoying to me personally.
I'm not saying I hate other people (I do), or that I don't want to ever be social (I don't), but social situations -- while often fun -- do require more mental energy than just shooting bad guys, or scoring goals, or whatever else the game has you doing.
Maybe I'm very unrepresentative of the gaming market at large, but I don't understand why numerous gaming companies (Sony and Microsoft have both headed down this path) want to cram social aspects into games. I'm not sure what they think the business case for that decision is. I assume they think it'll make games something more essential to day-to-day life than they currently are, by connecting games to the people you love, but that just makes me want to play games less.
You have a valid point there, but you certainly can play by yourself and hopefully there is a way to opt-out or silent game update after integration.
make games something more essential to day-to-day life than they currently are, by connecting games to the people you love
Certainly. For example, friend quizzes on Facebook.
I don't know what game makes sense to people. I try to be open-minded and play as many type genres as possible, whether it is FPS, MMRPG or puzzles. Disclaimer: I love minecraft.
The only problem with my social network is that most people in my FB circle don't play games. Even if they do they don't play the games I play... That's always an unsolvable problem. Another problem is I don't want to download a 10GB game. We'd have to wait for super-awesome-cloud-gaming-infrastructure to deliver that to us. We are still early in that direction.
If you look at the size of Twitch.tv and lots of game-related subreddits, it's obvious that "social gaming" is a very big market with a lot of potential money to be made.
Why is what you want the only thing that is worth doing? What about the people who do care that their mom topped their previous score in [they care]Ville?
Let's see, one involves spamming people who don't care, the other only involves people who do.. [shit]Ville spam games aren't social gaming, they are anti-social gaming.
Not to mention, what is the context of this discussion? Rift. What does Rift have to do with [shit]Ville spam games? Fuck all.
Long term relationship because gaming can only happen at slow social speeds rather than fast individual speeds. That means more milking subscription money out.
Playing thru the Halflife story / drama with your friends sounds superficially interesting. Then you realize you can only go as fast as your slowest friends. Then you realize they want $15/month for six months while it plays out for everyone. Um, no thanks.
> There doesn't appear to be any obvious motivation for Facebook to use this tech for its intended purpose
Facebook gets their hands in the less-casual game industry and also gains control over a platform for virtual experiences, I can see many reasons why Facebook would support continuing to build the Oculus for its originally intended purpose.
Frankly, I'd have preferred Microsoft. At least they seem to have some ability to build platforms.
Facebook acquiring Oculus doesn't just creep me out, it also means the platform will fail. They don't have the experience, and developers won't be lenient with their failures.
Carmack does not seem like the type to be "cashing in" unless he felt that the engineering work were no longer compelling and interesting. It sounds like he still feels it's interesting work, so I don't think he's being driven by money.
>Facebook gets their hands in the less-casual game industry
Yeah, but I think this is what people like Notch fear, because it's not going to be of any use to just have their logo emblazoned on the device: they're going to want something more from it.
Given the way that they and Zynga worked together to drive casual gaming into the dirt, I'd actually rather Microsoft bought the device than them, because at least Microsoft have a major games wing which would benefit solely from using this device for its intended purpose (albeit by locking the device to Windows and Xbox exclusively).
They're probably thinking post-Facebook. They aren't dumb, they know what they have now won't last and when it dies out they can cash in their user data and go into the virtual reality business.
I think the site is a good idea, and it'd be great if it takes off. But I presume it'll briefly take off due to the novelty/pride value of being a mentor, and then see an exodus of mentors as they figure out on their second lesson that education is difficult, and that's why people usually get paid for it.