Don't need the average kid to be able to, you just need the average kid to have access to a peer who can do so for them. Which is quite reasonable.

One reason I don't seriously seek partnership is that I don't want to give up my time for intellectual and creative pursuits. The usual come back is 'if you find the right person...' but I can't move out of my state without losing healthcare and as a homosexual I've got a small dating pool. Partnering would require compromise on this, and I don't want to.

> Definitely already observe the being seen as children thing.

I'm hoping this gets better as I age. I have noticed people in their early to mid 30s, particularly those following 'the' life path, can get on a really high horse. But the longer people live, the more likely something is to happen to prove to them how fickle and random life is. (e.g. a child dying, a divorce, struggling with infertility, cancer, etc.)

If you're not interested, don't have them. I had one parent that enjoyed parenting and one that did not, and having a parent that doesn't want or like kids is so obvious to the kid. It definitely causes issues.

I have found that people don't know what to do with people who don't follow 'the life path', whatever path that is. Like here, I'm an oddball for not going all in on my career or caring that much. In general life, being an unmarried woman with no kids in my late 30s means people don't know where to 'put' you. A lot of parents in particular tend to think of childless people as children/adolescents, which is rather annoying.

For personal consideration/bias purposes before I go into my thoughts:

- Like Dr. Hicks, I'm a queer woman from an uneducated family who found success in academia. I had to leave before I could do a PhD because I got MS, but I am the only person in my immediate family with a graduate degree and I worked in academia for over a decade. I say this because, since she's relying a fair amount on standpoint epistemology, I'm in identity categories that according to her own approach say I can evaluate what she argues from that standpoint, and some of my disagreements come from her being overly narrow in interpreting her experience.

- Unlike Dr. Hicks, I'm an oddity in that I'm Technical (by her definition) by birthright (I'm a 3rd generation programmer and 3 out of 4 of my grandparents as well as several other elder figures in my family were all hackers/tinkerers/etc. - I started programming when I was 4-5 years old.) I'm not good or spectacularly talented since I've focused on other areas and talents of mine, but I have unambiguously done 'Technical' work and would be/am considered 'Technical' by most people. I've also observed 'Technical' culture for a long time and have what I would consider to be a fairly robust knowledge of the history and development of that culture. A fair number of my disagreements come from my own observations so I think clarifying my own position is important.

Where I agree with her is in her pointing out that there is unambiguously a 'Technical' culture that has an often antagonistic relationship with other cultures and that has a sense of self-superiority which often goes unchecked. I also agree that there are various aspects of Technical culture that result in some very, very offputting decisions when those decisions are enacted on a wider society. And that, because of the massive amount of societal power this culture has begun to wield in such a short time (on a historical scale), the faults and downsides of this culture are causing harm and suffering. I relate a great deal to her realization that the people who treat her nicely do not do the same for her friends/loved ones. I'm in the culture and so generally treated decently, but, like Dr. Hicks, I spend a lot of time around people who aren't/don't and the discrepancy in treatment really bothers me.

That said, she gets a lot of things wrong:

- She pretty much only studies the culture by observing the most materially successful inhabitants. It's like only studying how the royal family lived in England in 1600 and using that to extrapolate about English culture in general. Ironically given her talking about having to study the opposites of matters to fully understand them, she completely discards anyone Technical who is not working in Big Tech. The legions of IT workers and devs at lower companies, FOSS and general non Big Tech techies (like I don't think anybody would question Linus Torvald's 'Technical' status), freelancers, etc. Working at any company or organization usually requires at least somewhat licking the boot of whatever culture they profess - it's a self-selecting pool. Of course people she studies in Big Tech are going to act that way: It's a prerequisite to being there in the first place!

- She ascribes a lot to Technical people that she sees as unique, but I don't think are. Like when she talks about not wanting to be a U/X or tech 'People Person' because she can come up with a good, robust idea and can't make the engineering managers do it. Does she think that non Technical managers are any better at taking feedback and policies from people they consider outsiders? They aren't, in my experience. There's a decent amount of friction between academic librarians and other faculty members at a lot of institutions because the academic librarians don't always have a PhD, and good luck trying to convince the Sales and Marketing departments in a giant megacorp to do something that makes sense if it goes against their temperaments. Likewise, it's true that it's a mostly male group and this causes them to overlook some aspects of the female experience. I've found that groups and places that are overwhelmingly female do the same thing in the other direction. The results are different because of how our society is set up, but any group full of one type of person is going to be bad at considering matters outside of that group's experience because humans are pretty self-absorbed. I can also assure her that academia is very hostile and condescending to people outside its bubble on much the same level as high-status Technical people, and I see much of the same discrepancy of treatment there. High-status Technical people treat my working-class friends poorly, and so do academics. She just might not notice because she's in that club - most working-class people who 'make it' end up very attached to the culture of the people who lifted them out.

- She seems to think that Technical culture status is conveyed on high by some central authority, when in my experience, squabbles over who is in the culture or not are fairly common and not all of us agree. I, for example, would absolutely consider some devs at Big Tech to not be 'Technical' based on various measures. When people are offering her 'access to the tent', they're saying they see her as one of them. There's not a group chat where we update who's in and out. Likewise, you can absolutely convey 'Technicality' on to someone, but you don't do it by just saying 'this person is a techie'. You do it by introducing them to the culture, teaching/mentoring them, and helping them with projects/work. Then you let them speak for themselves and their own work. Having someone speak for you is actually kind of an anti-signal in some ways, because a strong indicator of Technical culture is being able to speak for yourself, your work, and your thought process.

- I think she lacks an understanding of Technical history. A lot of the hostility in Technical spaces came about because the first generation to 'make it big'/be socially accepted and impactful had very hostile interactions with mainstream culture before that point. She notes that she's treated with hostility because she doesn't meet Technical expectations or qualifications, but that's the same experience a stereotypical Technical person has outside of Technical spaces. I move in 'people oriented'/mainstream non Technical spaces well because I'm a bubbly, somewhat charismatic white woman who can read social cues well. I'm attractive/feminine enough to not be considered 'weird' or 'creepy', and I know how to tailor my appearance/speech/etc. to different groups. It's better than it used to be, but a lot of that top down antagonistic culture from Technical people is reactive, and the superiority is partially a defense mechanism/coping. This is also one reason Technical people tend to take critiques from outsiders poorly, especially when that critique is 'you need to be more like us! :)' This is also related to the changing demographics and dynamics of the Internet/Web and a lot of Technical people feeling like they lost a bubble and safe place.

IDK, good on anyone who reads my word vomit, I just wanted to get my thoughts out. They're not particularly well formed or organized, though.

A tactical observation more than anything else.

I think, ironically, the best way to fight this would be to lean on identity politics: There are probably certain races that ping as older or younger. In addition, trans people who were on puberty blockers are in a situation where they might be 'of age' but not necessarily look like an automated system expects them to, and there might be discrepancies between their face as scanned and the face/information that's show on their ID. Discord has a large trans userbase. Nobody cares about privacy, but people make at least some show of caring about transphobia and racism.

> So many questions.

Do they keep a database of facial scans even though they say they don't? If not, what's to stop one older looking friend (or an older sibling/cousin/parent/etc.) from being the 'face' of everyone in a group of minors? Do they have a reliable way to ensure that a face being scanned isn't AI generated (or filtered) itself? What prevents someone from sending in their parent's/sibling's/a stolen ID?

Seems like security theater more than anything else.

Mostly because a lot of my personal interests/ability to self-develop was related to Internet access. (My parents made VERY QUESTIONABLE financial choices and opted to pay for Internet access instead of food or clothing so I might have been freezing and my clothes all had holes in them but I could go online to talk to other smart kids.)

Also because I remember me + my parents being sat down when I was in elementary school and having my options talked about. In middle school once I was proven to have programming and math aptitude during the dot com boom, educational experts came to us and discussed specific gifted learning options (including things like private schools, skipping grades, or even pulling me out of school altogether for private instruction). None of this was initiated by my parents - it was brought to us. This was in the 90s.

If I'm honest, I never ran into an intellectual wall. I did choose a comparatively 'easier' path, but that was more because I had a wide breadth of interests and choosing something easier meant I'd have more time to indulge my various interests. I was still getting interviews for tenure track positions out of grad school and when I did try to work post-graduate school, my first position was at an Ivy where I was the only one on staff who didn't come from an Ivy League school. (I was too lazy/too absorbed in my own things to do what was required to go to one.)

I ended up disabled in my last semester of graduate school - the 'wall' in my case is my body being unable to accommodate the social/networking demands of an academic or high powered private research career rather than my running into a topic I felt was beyond me. Particularly combined with being on my own in a HCOL area as that lifestyle required: Doing all your life management on your own with no safety net along with running at that high of an intellectual level is near impossible when you have a severe disability. (I have MS.)

I've been 'stuck' intellectually once in my life, and it was the result of a medication we tried for symptom management, and I found the feeling horrifying, if I'm honest. It was the first time I'd run into a problem where I had to sit there and think and still couldn't come up with a way to proceed, versus running into a problem and just being too damn lazy to bother. (Being able to see what I would do to solve the problem is very different from being motiviated to do so.) Apparently, most people feel that way fairly often? It made me way more sympathetic to people who didn't like school or who don't like learning.

I'm a thoroughly useless adult, so it was a waste of money on their part, but it does happen. Or at least it used to.

The healthcare point is because it means that a lot of elderly Americans have medical conditions that are unattended to, injuries that never healed properly, etc. It's common, particularly in the working class, to have your body be functionally wrecked by the time you're 55 (particularly for men). If we want the elderly to be active, we need the infrastructure to allow that rather than declaring that any health condition that won't kill you in the next two weeks is fine for the poor to deal with, actually. Heart conditions are really common, diabetes, COPD, poorly healed injuries for those who at one time worked blue collar professions, etc. Someone who lost their foot to diabetes isn't going to be cycling and sure, if they'd been more active 30 years ago that might not have happened, but it's the reality now.

I support public transit and biking infrastructure and totally agree it's great for disabled people as well - one thing I found interesting when I lived in a city with decent transit + universal healthcare is how many more physically disabled/elderly people I saw out and about going about their business.

I just find that the idea that we can just get rid of cars/that everybody who uses them just doesn't know any better overlooks a substantial amount of the population and their needs, and you need to address the needs first if you actually want to move away from the car. It has big 'everybody is a single, able bodied 25 year old man without dependents who lives in CA or the PNW' energy to assume those of us in cars are just not educated enough to know better. Like now even when I travel I don't like taking public transit because I'm immunocompromised and being jammed in with that many people is a health hazard. I'm not stupid. Neither is the exhausted mom with 2-3 kids and one hour to get across town to buy food for the week.

While yes, a lot of the elderly continue to cycle in countries where the infrastructure exists (e.g. the Netherlands), those places also have universal healthcare. You can't just throw your average 60 year old American office worker on a bike.

Or for people with small children who need to be able to transport them. Or their groceries for a family of more than 2, particularly since American cities and towns aren't usually accommodating of the 'stop every day/every other day for food' method of food shopping that's more common in some European countries. A bike isn't really a great option for someone with a 20 month old and a 4/5 year old.

If you're very high up in a giant organization and the business fails, you have the network to land somewhere else - the COO of a 10,000+ employee company is not going to end up penniless working at Walmart. In an organization of that size, responsibility is so diffuse you just blame it on other people/departments/etc. and parachute away.

If you're a worker bee in an organization of that size, whether the business succeeds or fails doesn't have much correlation with your job security or performance.

I'd agree in a vacuum that in a capitalist society that would be a major difference, but post 2008, business leaders are well aware that the appetite for letting large businesses fail is not there. We'd lose too many jobs/the economic hit would be too large, and we'd rather prop up bad businesses to keep people employed than help low-level employees after their leaders run their businesses into the ground.

> the money is bad and it requires a different set of skills.

Which is one thing that makes me think of recent graduates. Recently retired people/people in tech who've FIREd also might be viable. People who either can't get a high paying tech job or who had them and are past that stage in life - politics is better than service sector work (for the recent grads) and the retired wouldn't depend on the money.

Skillswise, there are more people going into CS who don't have a passion or intuition for technology - we pushed a lot of people into CS and STEM in general over the last decade or so who wouldn't have pursued it in the 90s-2010s. I bet there are lots of C students who could do a better job at understanding tech than our current leaders and a better job at communicating with non-technical people/schmoozing than most of the talented techies.

> at least advising these people

I think they need to hold office. Advising isn't going to cut it - the incentives for our current politicians to listen to this group aren't there. The only incentive lever we have any hope at pulling (outside of radical system change) is threatening their seats.

The rest of the world isn't going to twiddle their thumbs while we decide to placate everyone's egos. (I'd say 'letting Elon run amok in our government' falls in this category as well - it's clearly an ego thing for him as a donor stakeholder).

Maybe some of the recent grads who find themselves in a losing tech job market can pivot.

I've worked in large academic institutions and currently work in a giant private corporate behemoth and see a lot of the same issues. I think what it comes down to is a couple of things:

* For a lot of people, status means not having to learn or update/change anything about yourself or your way of working. We (where I work) franchise, and I see so many business owners who can't be bothered to learn email, how to log in to a computer system, etc. They shouldn't have to, they think. They're too important! In academia, this is professors in their 70s who don't want to change their teaching style or administrators who think it's the 1980s. In government, I'd expect this to be the bureaucrats who've been in their positions for 20-30+ years. Because these people have status (be that capital or tenure), the culture of the organizations leans towards pleasing them, and people who ask them to learn are stonewalled or exited.

* Related to this, people care most about what's in front of them. The veterans dying/students who have issues/clients who aren't served well are more abstract than John who doesn't want to learn and will make your life hell if you try to make him.

* In terms of resistance from the less entrenched, I think it's worth noting that for the most part, changes in the modern American workforce (especially rapid ones) very, very rarely favor the worker. Sudden changes usually mean more work for less pay, layoffs, etc. For example, my own company just switched the bonus system in what is clearly an attempt to pay people less in bonuses. The only counter-example I can think of recently is the rise of WFH, but that's already being rolled back. Changes = good for management/owners, bad for workers. This means people are going to be resistant to all change because they've learned it means bad things for them. In small enough organizations, this can be somewhat mitigated by the leaders having a personal relationship with their worker bees, but in big orgs that doesn't happen.

I also think there's a fundamental tension between the type of person you need to be in order to implement and understand systematic changes and the type of person that makes a good factory/retail/service worker. There's a lot of people at the top of society who want obedient, uncurious workers and then are shocked when there are negatives to a population filled with those kind of people. We (as a society) have completely failed in educating our population for the digital age because a lot of people make money off the general populace's ignorance, but that does mean that the general populace can't administer in a digital society.