- Kissinger. He was Nixon's National Security Advisor, intimately involved in prosecuting the Vietnam War, a war which he fully supported on the grounds of containing the influence of communism. By awarding the peace prize to him, the prize committee shows that they don't think it's crazy for millions of Vietnamese people to die in order to protect the interests of global capital. No credibility.

- Obama. His prize was awarded nine months into his first term. This was based on essentially nothing. The prize committee treated it as little more than a Time Magazine Person of the Year style popularity contest. No credibility.

So there's no need to keep score on correct vs incorrect calls based on unreliable prognostication about future outcomes. These are concrete examples of times when, even just considering the information they had at the time, they made an absolute mockery of the prestige of the Nobel prize.

> QAnon (/ˌkjuː.əˈnɒn/) is a far-right conspiracy movement centered on false claims made by an anonymous individual or individuals, known by the name "Q", that a cabal of Satanic, cannibalistic pedophiles operate a global child sex trafficking ring

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/QAnon

It plays into classic themes of degeneracy and a need to return to traditionalism, and is designed to shock and whip up passions among the family-values crowd.

But it's the comment about the Taliban that really showed your hand. The meme on the right is a grudging admiration for the Taliban because of their highly conservative social ideology; i.e. commitment to traditional gender roles, forbidding abortion, persecuting trans people, etc.

Though I agree... there's probably no coordinated conspiracy of abusers covering for other abusers, just a pervasive culture of secrecy and willingness at all levels to do anything to protect the clergy. And seriously, who thought it would be a good idea to sexually stunt young people with religious indoctrination, get them to swear to a vow of chastity, and then go their whole lives without sex or porn, and think it'll just be fine to trust them absolutely in situations of incredibly significant power imbalance? Like organizational reform aside, this doesn't seem fixable for the church. It's too fundamental to their whole model. They'll keep going because they have so much momentum, but more victims are going to keep getting hurt.

Excuse me, what? I certainly would, and I don't know how you could possibly think that nobody else would.

Even when you're just working alone, having seen something before and knowing the theory/literature means you can build on it instead of wasting time thinking about how to reinvent the wheel. Like you can imagine someone who knows nothing about ACID or transaction isolation being frustrated by apparent concurrency bugs in their database and hand-rolling some abomination of a locking mechanism to manually serialize database transactions. They're going to waste a ton of time on that, and it'll be fragile and have terrible performance. Or if you're working on some task tracking application and wondering about how you can untangle dependency relationships for users, you should have a basic suite of graph algorithms in your head so that you can use them effortlessly and focus on the actual problem instead of being mired down in retreading basics that every CS graduate already knows.

Also it doesn't seem like an issue of communication in the case of the homebrew guy; he was just stumped.

Also the article you linked doesn't argue that you shouldn't know how to write a linked list, it argues that you should implement ADT operations in functions instead of trying to wing it with ad-hoc logic all over the place. Blizzard's developers were definitely smart enough implement a doubly-linked list one time, they were just fallible humans who got tripped up consistently implementing the same logic in a hundred different places.

But that is not this. In the case of inverting a binary tree, what you call logic-puzzle minutiae is just taking a fundamental building block in computer science (binary trees) and asking the person to demonstrate even the faintest ability when it comes to writing an incredibly basic algorithm. Max Howell not only can't do it, but he doesn't even see why he should need to know how to do it!

That kind of proud ignorance is what grinds my gears. I'm sure someone can gather requirements and deliver value to customers and fix bugs and string together code and everything without knowing how to work with trees, but I don't really care. If they've somehow gotten that far without even a glimmer of curiosity about the fundamentals of computer science then something is disturbingly wrong, and I would worry about what other mammoth blind spots they inexplicably have.

Yeah, imagine what kind of nerd would be interested in the field and genuinely want to learn all they can, ha ha.

They've only recently been forced to admit that climate change even exists, but it's still like pulling teeth because they insist that any solutions have to be technology driven from the private sector, with no mandates whatsoever from government.

Check out https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Chamber_of_Comme... and try to keep from retching.

That might seem like a fine distinction, but the importance going forward is stark given a quote from TFA:

> The third judge, Lord Justice Birss, took a different view. While he agreed that "machines are not persons" ...

It's a very common worldview among the tech set.

Edit: Uh, downvotes, really? I think it's totally reasonable to assume this as a given since it's, like, pretty obviously true. If anything the parent needs to provide their own extraordinary evidence for why consciousness would be non-computable. I'm just trying to provide some context for them to read up more on some stuff that apparently everyone but them (who has given it any thought) already knows about.