Reviews and Comments

As much as I like reading about technical stuff, this book was unsatisfying.

Admittedly, this book is a bit out of date now. And everyone is very earnest, and clearly thinking hard in this book. But this is roughly how each essay felt:

Person talks about how data science is important in [CHOSEN TOPIC]. Then, how [OBVIOUS PROBLEM A] is surprisingly related to [OBVIOUS PROBLEM B] and so after some thought, is something that deserved more attention and [NEW STARTUP] is specializing in [MONETIZING THE EMERGENT SYNERGY BETWEEN PROBLEMS A AND B]. This is clearly the beginning of a bright new future for [CHOSEN TOPIC].

[LINK TO NEW STARTUP, BIO ABOUT NEW JOB, BTW TOTS HIRING, CALL US!!!]

Okay, Audrey Watter's piece is really good.

"Beyond infrastructure issues, as engineers, the web app programming we’ve been doing over the past 15 years has taught us to build applications in a highly synchronous transactional manner. Because each HTTP transaction generally only lasts a second or so at most, it’s easy to digest and process many discrete chunks of data. However, the bastard stepchild of every HTTP lib’s “get()” routine that returns the complete result, is the “read()” routine that only gives you a poorly bounded chunk. You would be shocked at the ratio of engineers who can’t build event-driven, asynchronous data processing applications, to those who can, yet this is a big part of this space. Lack of ecosystem knowledge around these kinds of programming primitives is a big problem. Many higher level abstractions exist for streaming HTTP apps, but they’re not industrial strength, and therefore you have to really know what’s going on to build your own."

Whelp, I feel like an asshole for quoting science studies now. Turns out (who knew) that POP NEUROSCIENCE REALLY SUCKS.

This is actually not an easy book to read. Every few paragraphs, I felt like bashing my head into the wall, either because the science was so horribly flawed, or because the early Victorian quotes are so well meant and concerned and so enlightened... and 100 years later, obviously meretricious bullshit. Even the author comments that she had a hard time writing the book because of having such rich and fertile source material.

I have discovered the joys of kindle.amazon.com, so some good highlights:

"One study even found that the more men there are taking a math test in the same room as a solo woman, the lower women’s performance becomes. And, surrounded by men, she herself may come to grudgingly believe that women are indeed naturally inferior in math—and women who endorse gender stereotypes about math seem to be especially vulnerable to stereotype threat."

"In addition to clogging up working memory, stereotype threat can also handicap the mind with a failure-prevention mindset. The mind turns from a focus on seeking success (being bold and creative) to a focus on avoiding failure, which involves being cautious, careful, and conservative (referred to as promotion focus and prevention focus, respectively). Also, the more difficult and nonroutine the work, the more vulnerable its performance will be to the sapping of working memory, and possibly the switch to a more cautious problem-solving strategy."

"In line with this, it’s been found that the presence—real or symbolic—of a woman who excels in math somehow serves to alleviate stereotype threat."

"in the absence of the luxury of a male breadwinner, the occupational decision making of lesbians looks very similar to that of heterosexual men."

"Allan and Barbara Pease, for example, purport to demonstrate in their book Why Men Don’t Listen and Women Can’t Read Maps the striking sex differences in the sheer volume of brain devoted to emotion processing. [...] “emotionally-charged images that were shown first to the right hemisphere via the left eye and ear and then to the left hemisphere via the right eye and ear.” Should readers have both the time and the resources to check out the [...] references, it was a postmortem study. Possibly Sandra Witelson really did present her samples of dead brain tissue with emotionally charged images — but if she did, it’s not mentioned in the published report." BURN.

"when I survey the popular literature, I suspect that this will not be where the people of the future will find their biggest laughs. Frankly, I think they will be too busy giggling in astonished outrage at the claims of early twenty-first-century commentators who, like their nineteenth-century predecessors, reinforced gender stereotypes with crude comparisons of male or female brains; or who, like Brizendine with her talk of “overloaded brain circuits,” attempted to locate social pressures in the brain."

"Non-Hispanic white girls born in North America are sorely underrepresented: there are about twenty times fewer of them on IMO teams than you’d expect based on their numbers in the population, and they virtually never attend the highly selective MOSP. But this isn’t the case for non-Hispanic white girls who were born in Europe, immigrants from countries like Romania, Russia, and the Ukraine, who manage on the whole to keep their end up when it comes to participating in these prestigious competitions and programs. The success of this group of women continues into their careers. These women are a hundred times more likely to make it into the math faculty of Harvard, MIT, Princeton, Stanford, or University of California–Berkeley than their native-born white counterparts. They do every bit as well as white males, relative to their numbers in the population."

"Stanford University’s psychologist Carol Dweck and her colleagues have discovered that what you believe about intellectual ability—whether you think it’s a fixed gift, or an earned quality that can be developed—makes a difference to your behavior, persistence, and performance."