> Her father was a preacher, prison chaplain and at one stage a high school teacher. Ms Fowler never graduated from high school, instead working as a babysitter and ranch hand, and teaching herself in the local library. Lacking a formal education but determined to go to university, she submitted a list of books she had read as part of her college application
> After winning a place at Arizona State University to study philosophy, she then transferred to the University of Pennsylvania, earning a degree in physics. In her final year at Penn, she wrote a blog entitled “If Susan can learn physics, so can you”, explaining how she caught up despite having no secondary maths education. By the time she reached Uber at age 24, she was a physicist and computer scientist, and wrote her first book about software architecture while working at the company
>“When I was younger, I used to think that my unconventional upbringing was a weakness, but over the past few years I’ve learnt to see it as one of my greatest strengths,” she says. “I never had a single thing handed to me, I had to fight for everything I wanted, like my education. When I was harassed and discriminated against, I fought as hard as I could — because I hadn’t gone through all of that, I hadn’t worked so hard my entire life, just to have someone take it away from me.”
Just survival bias, for every fighter like her there are 99 others that fell through the cracks. Not everyone is born with such a strong will to succeed.
I fail to see why her being proud of her success both despite and because of her upbringing should be cause of criticism just because she fails to acknowledge her "class peers" who failed to make it where she did... it's sort of implicit (esp. since she didn't in any way denigrate them for "not working hard enough").
I think the point is that as a group we should care about bias even though some people are able to fight through it.
It’s like people who say “how could America be racist if Obamacare got elected” which I have been hearing a lot lately. You can have a system that’s massively unfair... the existence of a handful of people who succeed despite unfairness is not evidence of anything except that some people are extraordinary.
To not expect bias for someone only talking about her own experiences (and not comparing herself to others) sounds like you're trying to be criticize for criticisms's sake.
It's the onus of FT to contextualize Ms. Fowler's comments, if that's what you're getting at, but then again, it is FT not People magazine (take it for what it's worth).
Or perhaps the world is not so black and white. Perhaps her experiences taught her things women often seem to not know. Perhaps she had various forms of support that are not obvious here.
I homeschooled my sons. Lack of formal education prior to university is not evidence that one is not getting support. There are parents that actively quash the dreams of their kids and insist the kids pursue something the parent feels matters. They push their kids into pursuing a particular path. This is often seen by outsiders as a good thing, but it usually is not. It usually means the kid never got to decide for themselves what they wanted out of life and simply did as they were told.
Does UPenn accept average intelligence people like myself?
I think Susan is great, and she did amazing work, but she's also clearly top 1-5% brilliant. These stories give people like me false hope. As if I can pick myself up by my intellectual bootstraps and just study hard to be a physics/CS major and I'll just be able to make it into a top university.
In university I was a C physics student and maybe a B CS student. And that wasn't at a school known for academic performance. In fact, when I took calculus (with little secondary (high school education) education because I worked) even with free tutoring and doing hundreds of practice problems I only barely passed with Cs.
Going to a top university doesn't necessary correlate with having a successful career. You can definitely make a lot of money or find a lot of success even if your college academics were lacking.
I once saw a list of successful people who dropped out of either high school or college. It ranged from Peter Jennings to Steve Jobs to a number of billionaires. Very interesting.
As nice of a story it makes, those people are the exceptions. For the vast overwhelming majority of the population, secondary -> post-secondary -> graduate studies (last one optional) is the best path to "success". Those people who are able to succeed even after dropping out are the types of people who, even if they were enrolled in a small, no-name community college, would still be able to succeed, not because of their education but rather because of their personality and drive.
I wouldn't automatically put yourself into the average intelligence group. The fact that you are able to do Physics at a C means you are already way above average.
I always use to think that Intelligence was a binary black and white thing. Constantly struggling at school, understanding things in the moment but never able to recall and apply the knowledge effectively to get good grades. People would always think I was intelligent by the way I talked and thought, but looking at my grades or ability to manage daily/mundane tasks and you could see something very wrong.
I read book after book, learned about the brain, learning, memory and plethora of things in between. After developing negative feedback loops with everything, I generally accepted that I would be a failure at everything.
One day I came across a book that just explained what was fundamentally wrong. Long story short my brain couldn't focus and never did, it never developed structures necessary for success in anything let alone math, physics, computer science, music. I found a very very special treatment that can change the network in your brain responsible for focus and enhanced it.
Then all those years spending learning about improving abilities was all accessible, like someone flipped a switch and everything I read/experienced was there. Now I spend my days excelling at everything, there is not a single thing that I am not above average at and in some things far far above average. I live the Limitless movie(although its taken a year for it to be really evident) everyday of my life.
My brain has changed so fundamentally, I can't even say I am the same human being anymore. Now I spend my days trying to become a "genius" I always dreamed about and starting to understand that intelligence isn't one thing in particular its many things:
1. Focus
2. Sensory Awareness
3. Reaction time
4. Analytical Ability
5. Working and Long-term Memory
6. Creativity
7. Emotional Intelligence
8. Executive Function/Task Management
There are probably more, but those are the ones I focus my attention on. You have to find ways to improve those things, it might take a year or it might take the rest of your life. I make it my life mission to identify geniuses in any domain and learn from them. Most of my learning has come from a Kung Fu and Dance master and he excels in all these areas.
Just remember that your abilities are heavily dependent on your intellectual/emotional development. If your parents have serious limitations in those areas you will probably have them to because in your core development years you were mirroring their neurons, but that doesn't mean it can't change. The hardest part is identifying the limitations.
The brain is infinitely complex, everything you have perceived/experienced is probably there, its just a matter of how you access it. You have a universe in your brain use it. I have really only scratched the surface, because even knowing all these things is not enough. You actually have to do physically/mentally stimulating activities to develop these abilities. Even then it is luck, but not impossible.
I am not trying to inflate my ego(because that's a weakness), I am not a genius or anything special in my mind. But it is a just the reality I worked tirelessly to create and I like to share that experience.
This is really interesting. What is that very very special treatment that can change the network in the brain responsible for focus? Any links or further details about it will be really appreciated.
It's called Neurofeedback training. I was fortunate enough to find the person who pioneered this breakthrough treatment and she was only 30min away. There are a lot of scams so please do your research and make sure the person running the clinic has academic weight. I was fortunate to find the right person. It essentially boils down to connecting your sensory system with your motor cortex and it put you into a state that high performing athletes and Buddhist monks get into. I will also mention the way I did the treatment probably gave me above average results. So if you are doing it, you should message me so I can give you the techniques I figured out in the process.
This is very interesting. I have a similar outlook on abilities as you, but only partial/lesser results so far (it's still difficult to find consistent time to develop specific skills). Actually in some ways, your story seems similar to mine. I didn't start to steadily improve until after I had good results with meditation and learning to keep my circadian rhythm in check.
Email me; I'd love to compare notes and also pick your brain.
Rarely are people truly inherently smarter than everyone else. All of our brains work differently; some of us respond to learning environments, others don't. Take things like IQ tests as a grain of salt; it's just another tool of hierarchy. Find the environment/learning style that works best for you.
I think its overly charitable to call someone computer scientist because they write code. Feels very silly and fake, something done to boost up the credentials. sorry.
>call someone computer scientist because they write code
You're the only one doing this. The article omits any justification for the terms, sure. And it could be a baseless claim. But I don't really see any reason to assume that's the case.
what a strange list of people to join. I mean, I realize you have to contextualize these name in the time they were selected but, Trump, Spitzer, GWB, Rupert Murdoch, Kissinger.
After the Time person of the year thing there was a bit of an online spat about who did and didn't get featured on the cover and who was most deserving of the credit. To me it seems a bit unseemly and unnecessary. I don't think any of these people themselves are jostling for the position of most heroic person of 2017.
> I don't think any of these people themselves are jostling for the position of most heroic person of 2017
I'm curious about the phenomenon. We had mass acceptance of horrifying behaviour. Switches flipped and what was dirty but tolerable became unacceptable. If we wish to replicate this process in other domains, it would be helpful to understand what happened.
This seems so odd to me. In the circles I am most familiar with, such behavior has always been seen as reprehensible. I suppose there have always been rumors that such behavior was commonly accepted in Hollywood, and as it turns out, silicon valley doesn't seem too different. Well, I think Washington DC deserves to be on that list, too. I wonder how common it is for more "powerful" people in other circles to get away with this kind of malarky?
As a non-SV insider, I was struck by something Vi Hart posted on Twitter recently[1]:
"When we were looking for funding or a home for our VR group, we were warned in private conversations against SO MANY funders and leaders within companies, by their equally powerful white dude colleagues. Often several separate warnings against the same dude. I KNOW YOU KNOW."
Sounds to me like the upper echelons know and don't care.
Most places that it's shown up are workplaces with powerful, almost untouchable figures (a TV star or a 'rockstar programmer' or a CEO or an elected representative, or, of course, a priest, going back a bit further), and defective or non-existent HR. I suspect it's less common in more normally-functioning workplaces, simply because people would feel safer in complaining to HR, and special accommodations for the predator would be less likely to be made.
Also, of course, it was not exactly advertised that this was going on.
more importantly if we wish to avoid replication in other domains it would be helpful if more people understood what happened. Our thoughts and culture are easily changed by those who know how to flip the right switches as you put it. This can work for or against any particular interest.
I think it is a combination of finally enough people starting to actively speak out against that behavior, the power these groups finally gained and amassed pieces of knowledge that those practices are really harmful. We just gained critical mass to flip the switch. To replicate it faster we should probably speed up human learning and development in some way.
I don't know which people were on the cover but I saw Fowler and many more on the "cover" [referring to the Time "Person of the Year" video on their website]. No one reads the magazine anymore, right? The real prestige is being featured in the video IMO.
I don't think it's possible to know. There are so many cultural factors that led to where we are today that it's all but impossible to draw a straight line. No doubt Susan Fowler had an effect on that culture. So did the first female Presidential nominee losing to an incredibly unqualified man (before anyone starts, no, I'm not saying that sexism is the only reason she lost), as did the fact that Trump himself had numerous accusations against him that were all but dismissed in popular consciousness...
I don't mean to diminish Fowler at all. But the moment we have arrived at is a huge collection of interconnected events, not a straight line from A, through B, to C.
I wonder if Clinton didn't have certain associations - Bill, Weiner, Weinstein (the Clintons were warned about him and met with him after the election to make a show about the campaign, only to later feign shock and distance themselves), would those accusations against Trump have had more power?
I know that's not your main point, it's just important to point out culpable people like the Clintons were instead of seeing them (or the campaign) as victims.
In late September, emails show, he was discussing a documentary television show he was working on with Hillary Clinton. He had long raised campaign cash for her, and her feminist credentials helped burnish his image — even though Tina Brown, the magazine editor, and Lena Dunham, the writer and actress, each say they had cautioned Mrs. Clinton’s aides about his treatment of women. Now, Mr. Weinstein exchanged questions about distribution rights for the show. “I am hopeful we can get a good price for this,” Robert Barnett, Mrs. Clinton’s lawyer, replied.
Two days later, Jeff Bezos, founder and chief executive of Amazon, interrupted a vacation in Hawaii to field advice from Mr. Weinstein, according to the emails. The Wall Street Journal was reporting on turmoil at Amazon Studios, one of Mr. Weinstein’s business partners. He recommended an aggressive response that involved hiring some of his own team, including a libel lawyer who “makes sure everyone sticks to the right narrative,” Mr. Weinstein wrote. He added, “I’m happy to coordinate with whoever you’d like, as a friend of the court.” Mr. Bezos declined to comment.
My instinct is no - I don't think the allegations against Trump fell away because Hillary was compromised over them, I think they failed because, well, not enough voters cared. Which is part of what inspired the Women's March and so on.
That said, it's a fascinating thought exercise to wonder where President Clinton would be today, if the same sexual assault revelations happened. As the first female President married to someone accused of various sexual improprieties I suspect it would be a very difficult needle to thread.
Do not know about impact but Ronan Farrow's Weinstein story was published in October and put together over the course of a ten month investigation [0]. Susan Fowler's blog was posted in February. I'd imagine Farrow probably started on his story before the investigations started; especially since Weinstein was a well-known story. If Farrow's article was posted before Fowler's, I want to say that there would still be the same reaction. A lot of people had no idea about Fowler and Uber but people definitely know about Weinstein.
I remember there was an episode on the podcast The Daily where Michael Barbaro interviewed a reporter who worked on the Harvey Weinstein story. I think they said that The New York Times had tried to pursue this story in the past, but they really wanted to make another push for it this year to expose the unreported stories of sexual harassment.
Personally, I don't think Weinstein, and the after effects on other public figures, would have blown up to this level without Susan. Actually, going even further back, people like Ellen Pao and their stories have been consequential as well. I would say stories like Pao's cleared the way for Fowler.
Not to be dramatic, but I think this example is very timely and appropriate for showing the impact of an uncensored internet. We can only guess whether impact like this will still be possible without net neutrality.
Not speaking dismissively of Susan's contribution, but I think so. Her story snowballed into a lot of shady shit going on at Uber, and Kalanick wasn't ousted as a direct result of her allegations. Weinstein himself kicked off a pattern of high-profile ousters based directly on the allegations. I think they're slightly different scenarios, and contributed culturally in their own way, and why she was one piece of a broader picture in Time instead of person of the year by her lonesome.
(I realize the irony in my typing this, that I appear to be saying Weinstein was responsible for something a number of people would argue a woman started, but hey. That's not what I'm saying, and you get my point and what I'm trying to say.)
Put another way, Susan didn't go after a high-profile leader directly. She went after systemic issues in a company. Weinstein, on the other hand, showed a lot of people that high-profile leaders are vulnerable to public attention, and that became a slightly different species of snowball. Both are cultural contributions.
I wouldn't dismiss the butterfly effect so quickly. She was certainly early in this wave, and the cumulative inertia has to be part of why things ended up as they are.
I don't. I think the allegations against Weinstein were severe enough that they could have stood alone, and didn't vastly benefit from the cultural change that Susan started with Uber. The point being made was that Weinstein might not have happened had Susan and Uber not happened, and I'm not sure I agree with that. Which is NOT to say I discount anything that did, which I'm guessing from voting I did not express clearly enough.
The allegations against Weinstein are mostly years old though. Is it just coincidence they were raised in this current climate? Fowler's revelations contributed to an environment that made it easier to speak up.
Edit: The reason I find Fowler somewhat unique is that her background, credentials, writing skills, etc, made her hard to dismiss. It was very believable, perhaps to some that might have tended to challenge similar stories.
So it seemed to open a door for women that had similar stories, but not the same level of gravitas. It also primed the media to pay attention to this area.
Yes and no. People spoke up before Fowler; why are we hinging the culture on her? Something I think a lot of people are overlooking is that she was heard on a larger scale than anybody before her, but lionizing her as a result is actually disrespectful to the plethora of examples who came before her and were just unlucky (I guess?). I can think of a number of prominent examples within tech that didn't get any of the attention outside of tech, but I will not rehash them here.
That, to me, indicates that something else shifted culturally to allow the Uber thing to help contribute to that environment. What is that? Was it the scale of Uber? Was it something about Fowler? Was it that the same power dynamics that suppressed revelations about Weinstein were starting to degrade within insular tech? I'm personally curious about it, and I don't think Fowler's blog post was solely responsible and folks should start making conclusions about cultural shifts, is my only point.
Edit to your edit: Careful; you're lightly claiming that accusers before Fowler were unbelievable and easily dismissed.
Sure, but would they ever have been published prominently? Historically, there's been a bit of a code of silence about this sort of thing. It's quite plausible that the Uber story loosened things up a bit.
I think it might be stoking the fire now, but there wasn't really all that much of a response when allegations were made about Trump, either by voters or the media. It's really hard to see that as the jumping-off point. As a result of the current climate, indeed, Trump's allegations are being re-examined by the media.
They also ruled the world last year, and will rule the world next year. "Person of the Year" awards tend to highlight people that have had a particularly atypical effect in one particular year. They'd be pretty boring if they didn't.
Another way to look at it: while Bezos has done plenty with Amazon in 2017, it's a continuation of what he was doing in 2016. And I suspect 2018 will continue this year. It's not that his achievements aren't notable, it's that they didn't dramatically change the course of this year's events, or inspire a dramatic change of direction. By comparison, 2017's awakening to sexual assault/discrimination claims is an absolutely huge deviation from existing patterns.
You are getting clobbered, I will join you in this one.
There is no rhyme or reason for the basis for selecting a Person of the year. None what so ever. They are primarily focused in a specific part of the world. Forget Asia, Africa and other so called Third World.
Selecting a person of the year is not more substantive than sitting in a drum circle and passing the beer and talking stick. Especially since the newspaper business is now shadow of itself.
Honestly, I really do not know who the person of the year should be. The world does not revolve around a person, 10 years from now when one would have to think about 2017, Susan Folwer's Uber takedown will be very unlikely thing many would remember.
If you just make a tiny grammatical change it will eliminate all that unease. Change it to "A Person of the Year", rather than "The Person of the Year". :)
My guess is that when people look back on this era, Macron will by far be the most influential of that list. But it's hard to explain why now, and Fowler is very much the start of this year's zeitgeist.
> The other people have a extraordinary larger impact on global economics and politics.
That would only make sense if the primary criterion for selection were raw power. I don't know FT's criteria or the MO behind their Person of the Year designation. My hunch, however, is that it might be more nuanced, and they might be interested in people who stand up against established power, especially given the current sociopolitical climate.
I'm not sure that they were that interesting, really. Macron was arguably inevitable unless you assumed that for some reason France would abandon its tendency to reject the far-right candidate when it came to a one-on-one vote. While there was a lot of talk that it might do this, there wasn't that much evidence. Xi continues to exist; there'd definitely have been a year where it'd make sense for him to get it, but it wasn't this year. Bezos ditto. Musk ditto. MbS is the only one that I'd argue of these as being truly significant _in this particular year_.
It's because of today's victim-hood culture. Achievements do not matter anymore. Merit is a lost concept. You get your achievements handed to you now by falling into protected groups and putting in the bare minimum effort. She wrote a blog post documenting her year at Uber, it's great she did that, but it not Financial Times worthy. Honestly, even on a social level, why not Terry Crews? He's the only man that spoke out. You'd think he'd win a victim point for being black. But then he loses a point for being a man. This whole victim-hood culture is ridiculous. Long gone are the days of the real heroes such as Martin Luther King jr.
Side comment, but I started working for Uber recently. Someone on my FB friendslist unfriended me because of that. Irony was that she works at Palantir. Pot meets kettle
Susan Fowler is a great person but this reeks of a clickbait agenda.
She is important but Xi, Bezos,and Musk are radically changing the face of the world in a much much greater capacity.
EDIT:
Musk has the hyperloop, tesla, spacex. These are what I consider revolutionary technologies that could change the face of our global civilization.
Bezos is eating the world with amazon, whole foods, and washington post. Amazon is leading so many new industries drone deliveries, cloud, and so many are cities are competing for hq2. What isn't amazon doing lately ?
Xi is changing the face of silicon valley by making SV more like china which has huge global implications.
I think Fowler is great, but she isn't on the same level.
Fowler's post created ripples, at least in tech. It was a brilliant exposition of how not to run a company. Bullying happens in every company, what makes a company special is how you deal with it.
Uber dealt with bullying by pampering its odious alpha-shits and creating a structure around them that legitimised and encouraged it, in the guise of "culture".
Musk, Bezos xi et al, are uber rich engineers. Most moderatly intelligent people with >60 billion can change the world. Getting there in the first place is the hard part.
writing honestly about an abuse of power, knowing that it will most likley end your career and result in more persecution, takes a fuck tonne more courage than ordering a bunch of top people in thier fields to build a rocket/shopping empire.
in terms of impact, a nobody unseated Kalanick, something the US legal system never managed to do, despite his companies many legal transgressions.
For what it's worth, I remember there were several high profile VCs accused of harassment, with several of them resigning or being pushed out. Scoble was also accused.
>writing honestly about an abuse of power, knowing that it will most likley end your career and result in more persecution, takes a fuck tonne more courage than ordering a bunch of top people in thier fields to build a rocket/shopping empire.
If you grow up with little to lose it's hard to un-learn that.
African Americans have a particularly eloquent way of describing that behavior but it isn't appropriate to repeat here.
You don't notice most of the time when someone rage-quits their job for moral/ethics reasons because usually it doesn't lead so something like this.
Perhaps it is to be expected in Hacker News, but focus exclusively on the technological and totally ignore the cultural at your peril.
If you accept the premise that Susan Fowler has opened (or helped open) a door for women across the world to be more successful and freer of sexual harrassment, you could absolutely make the case that will have as big of an impact as whatever Bezos is doing with Amazon - women are quite a large portion of the population after all!
To put this another way: even if you are fixated on industry and finance, all of those companies have employees. The issues raised by Susan Fowler are very important to these employees. That makes this issue very important to industry and finance.
Ya know, your comment might leave something to discuss had you left out the “clickbait” part. Instead it leaves me impulsively want to downvote. But, hey, happens to the best of us, so let’s move on. I suppose it depends on one’s gender to some degree. Musk is the epitome of “boys and their toys”, because nothing he’s done has had any impact on my life yet (well, except the oodles of dosh made off TSLA). Bezos? Eh, modern day Sam Walton that impacts the lives of more than a few, but in the end a retailer. But if you’re female, I could see how one might view the Fowler situation as “good, maybe I’ll have to put up with creepy men just a little less than I did last year.”
OP's comment is exactly right, and I've noticed a trend in the Financial Times over the past several years to jump increasingly on social activism bandwagons. The way they've lionized Ellen Pao, for example, a figure who has turned exploitation of these bandwagons into a personal brand, has been incredibly frustrating to watch.
What Susan did and the other women and men who have come forward this year will have a massive impact on the business world and the types of people who read FT need to know about it. It will affect HR policies, compensation, career paths, job assignments, and the manager/employee relationship in general. Having your business outed as an "Uber" will destroy billions in shareholder value and may end up with you, the C-suite guy, getting canned, even if you're a "nice guy". You can be damned sure that all these C-level guys are reviewing policies and having internal discussions about this and making sure that they're not going to be next.
New rockets and computer products come every year and have been since 1969. Wholesale cultural shifts in business are more rare, more impactful, and more complex.
I would say that there is a social activist moral panic that we are in the midst of, some of which has been spurred by social media mobs and deliberate narrative reinforcement. Fowler is just one example of it, along with Pao.
Another example would be the horrible way Denise Young Smith was fired from Apple, and James Damore from Google.
This pick signals more of the wagons circling, fanning the flames by the Financial Times.
Everytime sexual harassment by comes up from women, they are demonised in HN. And this is the reason these issues are coming up. What's wrong with Ellen Pao taking about it? You very skilfully changed it into her "personal brand". Past presidents make it their brand to give speeches and earn millions just for that.
Rape and sexual harassments are most under-reported crimes. Everyone who faced these issues should talk about it. And HN being mostly men's place, it's obvious they don't like it.
Xi has been around for ages, as has Bezos. It's not really their year. Musk has done very little to impact anyone's life; maybe some of his stuff might in the future (though I would argue probably not), but at most it's unrealised potential. Save it until there's an impact. The change in culture around sexual assault and harassment in the US and more broadly the west in general is already having a large impact, and going forward its impact may be dramatic.
You could certainly argue to what extent Fowler was involved in that, but if you take the position that she was key, and there's certainly an argument to do so, then it makes sense.
Much of the FT's output is about the business of business, and they've covered Uber and the fallout from Fowler's revelations extensively. It's not a stretch.
(A very cynical person might mention the FT's recent trouble with gender pay gap, but I'd say Fowler's impact remains clear.)
Leading a shift in the workplace dynamics for 50% of the population could arguably have a much bigger impact than decreasing the cost of rocket launches
> After winning a place at Arizona State University to study philosophy, she then transferred to the University of Pennsylvania, earning a degree in physics. In her final year at Penn, she wrote a blog entitled “If Susan can learn physics, so can you”, explaining how she caught up despite having no secondary maths education. By the time she reached Uber at age 24, she was a physicist and computer scientist, and wrote her first book about software architecture while working at the company
Damn. Very impressive.
It’s like people who say “how could America be racist if Obamacare got elected” which I have been hearing a lot lately. You can have a system that’s massively unfair... the existence of a handful of people who succeed despite unfairness is not evidence of anything except that some people are extraordinary.
It's the onus of FT to contextualize Ms. Fowler's comments, if that's what you're getting at, but then again, it is FT not People magazine (take it for what it's worth).
I homeschooled my sons. Lack of formal education prior to university is not evidence that one is not getting support. There are parents that actively quash the dreams of their kids and insist the kids pursue something the parent feels matters. They push their kids into pursuing a particular path. This is often seen by outsiders as a good thing, but it usually is not. It usually means the kid never got to decide for themselves what they wanted out of life and simply did as they were told.
I think Susan is great, and she did amazing work, but she's also clearly top 1-5% brilliant. These stories give people like me false hope. As if I can pick myself up by my intellectual bootstraps and just study hard to be a physics/CS major and I'll just be able to make it into a top university.
In university I was a C physics student and maybe a B CS student. And that wasn't at a school known for academic performance. In fact, when I took calculus (with little secondary (high school education) education because I worked) even with free tutoring and doing hundreds of practice problems I only barely passed with Cs.
I always use to think that Intelligence was a binary black and white thing. Constantly struggling at school, understanding things in the moment but never able to recall and apply the knowledge effectively to get good grades. People would always think I was intelligent by the way I talked and thought, but looking at my grades or ability to manage daily/mundane tasks and you could see something very wrong.
I read book after book, learned about the brain, learning, memory and plethora of things in between. After developing negative feedback loops with everything, I generally accepted that I would be a failure at everything.
One day I came across a book that just explained what was fundamentally wrong. Long story short my brain couldn't focus and never did, it never developed structures necessary for success in anything let alone math, physics, computer science, music. I found a very very special treatment that can change the network in your brain responsible for focus and enhanced it.
Then all those years spending learning about improving abilities was all accessible, like someone flipped a switch and everything I read/experienced was there. Now I spend my days excelling at everything, there is not a single thing that I am not above average at and in some things far far above average. I live the Limitless movie(although its taken a year for it to be really evident) everyday of my life.
My brain has changed so fundamentally, I can't even say I am the same human being anymore. Now I spend my days trying to become a "genius" I always dreamed about and starting to understand that intelligence isn't one thing in particular its many things:
1. Focus 2. Sensory Awareness 3. Reaction time 4. Analytical Ability 5. Working and Long-term Memory 6. Creativity 7. Emotional Intelligence 8. Executive Function/Task Management
There are probably more, but those are the ones I focus my attention on. You have to find ways to improve those things, it might take a year or it might take the rest of your life. I make it my life mission to identify geniuses in any domain and learn from them. Most of my learning has come from a Kung Fu and Dance master and he excels in all these areas.
Just remember that your abilities are heavily dependent on your intellectual/emotional development. If your parents have serious limitations in those areas you will probably have them to because in your core development years you were mirroring their neurons, but that doesn't mean it can't change. The hardest part is identifying the limitations.
The brain is infinitely complex, everything you have perceived/experienced is probably there, its just a matter of how you access it. You have a universe in your brain use it. I have really only scratched the surface, because even knowing all these things is not enough. You actually have to do physically/mentally stimulating activities to develop these abilities. Even then it is luck, but not impossible.
I am not trying to inflate my ego(because that's a weakness), I am not a genius or anything special in my mind. But it is a just the reality I worked tirelessly to create and I like to share that experience.
Edited For Brevity
http://www.addcentre.com/
Email me; I'd love to compare notes and also pick your brain.
Don't you need a degree in computer science to be called computer scientist.
Not sure if i'd call every software programmer a 'computer scientist'.
Merely mentioning this bad apparently. downvotes.
A computer scientist is one who practises and/or studies computer science, which she does. No, that doesn't require a CS degree, though it helps.
Elected First female Chancellor of Germany vs wrote a book about microservices.
Yes hurting for credentials in this context. Most people have no idea who she is, her only claim to fame is writing that blogpost.
You're the only one doing this. The article omits any justification for the terms, sure. And it could be a baseless claim. But I don't really see any reason to assume that's the case.
https://ig.ft.com/sites/person-of-the-year/
Good see another woman on the list.
> Donald Trump
Well, that certainly takes a lot of the prestige out of her winning...
I'm curious about the phenomenon. We had mass acceptance of horrifying behaviour. Switches flipped and what was dirty but tolerable became unacceptable. If we wish to replicate this process in other domains, it would be helpful to understand what happened.
"When we were looking for funding or a home for our VR group, we were warned in private conversations against SO MANY funders and leaders within companies, by their equally powerful white dude colleagues. Often several separate warnings against the same dude. I KNOW YOU KNOW."
Sounds to me like the upper echelons know and don't care.
[1]: https://twitter.com/vihartvihart/status/938212942356537345
Also, of course, it was not exactly advertised that this was going on.
I don't mean to diminish Fowler at all. But the moment we have arrived at is a huge collection of interconnected events, not a straight line from A, through B, to C.
I know that's not your main point, it's just important to point out culpable people like the Clintons were instead of seeing them (or the campaign) as victims.
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2017/12/05/us/harvey-wei...
In late September, emails show, he was discussing a documentary television show he was working on with Hillary Clinton. He had long raised campaign cash for her, and her feminist credentials helped burnish his image — even though Tina Brown, the magazine editor, and Lena Dunham, the writer and actress, each say they had cautioned Mrs. Clinton’s aides about his treatment of women. Now, Mr. Weinstein exchanged questions about distribution rights for the show. “I am hopeful we can get a good price for this,” Robert Barnett, Mrs. Clinton’s lawyer, replied.
Two days later, Jeff Bezos, founder and chief executive of Amazon, interrupted a vacation in Hawaii to field advice from Mr. Weinstein, according to the emails. The Wall Street Journal was reporting on turmoil at Amazon Studios, one of Mr. Weinstein’s business partners. He recommended an aggressive response that involved hiring some of his own team, including a libel lawyer who “makes sure everyone sticks to the right narrative,” Mr. Weinstein wrote. He added, “I’m happy to coordinate with whoever you’d like, as a friend of the court.” Mr. Bezos declined to comment.
That said, it's a fascinating thought exercise to wonder where President Clinton would be today, if the same sexual assault revelations happened. As the first female President married to someone accused of various sexual improprieties I suspect it would be a very difficult needle to thread.
[0] https://www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/from-aggressive-ove...
Not to be dramatic, but I think this example is very timely and appropriate for showing the impact of an uncensored internet. We can only guess whether impact like this will still be possible without net neutrality.
(I realize the irony in my typing this, that I appear to be saying Weinstein was responsible for something a number of people would argue a woman started, but hey. That's not what I'm saying, and you get my point and what I'm trying to say.)
Put another way, Susan didn't go after a high-profile leader directly. She went after systemic issues in a company. Weinstein, on the other hand, showed a lot of people that high-profile leaders are vulnerable to public attention, and that became a slightly different species of snowball. Both are cultural contributions.
Edit: The reason I find Fowler somewhat unique is that her background, credentials, writing skills, etc, made her hard to dismiss. It was very believable, perhaps to some that might have tended to challenge similar stories.
So it seemed to open a door for women that had similar stories, but not the same level of gravitas. It also primed the media to pay attention to this area.
That, to me, indicates that something else shifted culturally to allow the Uber thing to help contribute to that environment. What is that? Was it the scale of Uber? Was it something about Fowler? Was it that the same power dynamics that suppressed revelations about Weinstein were starting to degrade within insular tech? I'm personally curious about it, and I don't think Fowler's blog post was solely responsible and folks should start making conclusions about cultural shifts, is my only point.
Edit to your edit: Careful; you're lightly claiming that accusers before Fowler were unbelievable and easily dismissed.
Heh. Hopefully I'm given the benefit of the doubt on that. She bordered on unassailable, which is difficult to do when recounting anything.
Edit: Ugh, really? You're reading something that isn't there.
Travis' mother died. He thought he could mourn and be CEO at the same time, but he decided he couldn't handle both
https://www.ft.com/content/7ab21e44-de85-11e7-8f9f-de1c2175f...
The other people have a extraordinary larger impact on global economics and politics.
Another way to look at it: while Bezos has done plenty with Amazon in 2017, it's a continuation of what he was doing in 2016. And I suspect 2018 will continue this year. It's not that his achievements aren't notable, it's that they didn't dramatically change the course of this year's events, or inspire a dramatic change of direction. By comparison, 2017's awakening to sexual assault/discrimination claims is an absolutely huge deviation from existing patterns.
There is no rhyme or reason for the basis for selecting a Person of the year. None what so ever. They are primarily focused in a specific part of the world. Forget Asia, Africa and other so called Third World.
Selecting a person of the year is not more substantive than sitting in a drum circle and passing the beer and talking stick. Especially since the newspaper business is now shadow of itself.
Honestly, I really do not know who the person of the year should be. The world does not revolve around a person, 10 years from now when one would have to think about 2017, Susan Folwer's Uber takedown will be very unlikely thing many would remember.
That would only make sense if the primary criterion for selection were raw power. I don't know FT's criteria or the MO behind their Person of the Year designation. My hunch, however, is that it might be more nuanced, and they might be interested in people who stand up against established power, especially given the current sociopolitical climate.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
She is important but Xi, Bezos,and Musk are radically changing the face of the world in a much much greater capacity.
EDIT:
Musk has the hyperloop, tesla, spacex. These are what I consider revolutionary technologies that could change the face of our global civilization.
Bezos is eating the world with amazon, whole foods, and washington post. Amazon is leading so many new industries drone deliveries, cloud, and so many are cities are competing for hq2. What isn't amazon doing lately ?
Xi is changing the face of silicon valley by making SV more like china which has huge global implications.
I think Fowler is great, but she isn't on the same level.
Fowler's post created ripples, at least in tech. It was a brilliant exposition of how not to run a company. Bullying happens in every company, what makes a company special is how you deal with it.
Uber dealt with bullying by pampering its odious alpha-shits and creating a structure around them that legitimised and encouraged it, in the guise of "culture".
Musk, Bezos xi et al, are uber rich engineers. Most moderatly intelligent people with >60 billion can change the world. Getting there in the first place is the hard part.
writing honestly about an abuse of power, knowing that it will most likley end your career and result in more persecution, takes a fuck tonne more courage than ordering a bunch of top people in thier fields to build a rocket/shopping empire.
in terms of impact, a nobody unseated Kalanick, something the US legal system never managed to do, despite his companies many legal transgressions.
Has it, though? I see giant names in Hollywood go down. Senators in DC. I'm not seeing tech figures, though.
I saw Uber do the very definition of a classic ass-covering report.
Is silicon valley really cleaning house?
So yeah, I think tech is changing for the better.
If you grow up with little to lose it's hard to un-learn that.
African Americans have a particularly eloquent way of describing that behavior but it isn't appropriate to repeat here.
You don't notice most of the time when someone rage-quits their job for moral/ethics reasons because usually it doesn't lead so something like this.
If you accept the premise that Susan Fowler has opened (or helped open) a door for women across the world to be more successful and freer of sexual harrassment, you could absolutely make the case that will have as big of an impact as whatever Bezos is doing with Amazon - women are quite a large portion of the population after all!
New rockets and computer products come every year and have been since 1969. Wholesale cultural shifts in business are more rare, more impactful, and more complex.
Another example would be the horrible way Denise Young Smith was fired from Apple, and James Damore from Google.
This pick signals more of the wagons circling, fanning the flames by the Financial Times.
do you really think that shining the light on the fucked-up situation in tech world is something people do for fun and profit?
Rape and sexual harassments are most under-reported crimes. Everyone who faced these issues should talk about it. And HN being mostly men's place, it's obvious they don't like it.
Xi has been around for ages, as has Bezos. It's not really their year. Musk has done very little to impact anyone's life; maybe some of his stuff might in the future (though I would argue probably not), but at most it's unrealised potential. Save it until there's an impact. The change in culture around sexual assault and harassment in the US and more broadly the west in general is already having a large impact, and going forward its impact may be dramatic.
You could certainly argue to what extent Fowler was involved in that, but if you take the position that she was key, and there's certainly an argument to do so, then it makes sense.
(A very cynical person might mention the FT's recent trouble with gender pay gap, but I'd say Fowler's impact remains clear.)
Downvotes should be reserved for offtopic comments not disagreement.