A few subtleties i think was missed in tech founders' accents post by Paul Graham and antirez. http://anandjeyahar.com/2013/09/04/accents-and-its-effect-in-the-techfounderstartup-world/ . I am rather emotionally close/involved to the subject, so would be happy to know the gaps and biases in my reasoning any of you point out.
Regards, Anand
I can't even get past the introduction:
You are the reason Paul Graham made that comment.
Delusions of Gender -- I watched a video of the author speaking about her book, and it was interesting, but the same information could be told much quicker than in one hour. So here are some points I remembered:
Selection bias: if you make a study and you don't find a difference between male and female brain, you don't write a bestseller. Also, comparing the male and female results is the first obvious idea of any researcher, so given p = 0.05, one research in twenty would publish something about the differences between men and women, even if there was none. So if you want some meaningful results, you need to do the meta-analysis of the published studies -- and they often look just like they would if the difference wouldn't really exist: larger samples have smaller differences, and almost half of them shows the difference in the opposite direction.
Some differences are exaggerated and misinterpreted. For example, there is a picture of a brain showing that in these little areas women had more signal than men (or vice versa) when solving a maze. First, many popular authors will interpret it as "women only used these parts, and men only used those parts", while in reality it m...
I'd expect writing the Culture is tricky to pull off. Banks has a pretty distinctive voice and reasonably solid worldbuilding that's is a lot less likely to make people go "ehh, I could write better" than JK Rowling's stuff for example. Also the part where it subverts most of the whole drama from conflict thing by being people with their shit together wielding superior technology makes finding a plot that works a bit harder.
You may be right, at that. Banks is an intimidatingly skilled writer. Although surely you would expect less-impressive "me too"s? Fanfic writers are usually fans of some stripe ... um, aren't they? I guess I don't really know much about fanfiction author demographics, at that.
Also the part where it subverts most of the whole drama from conflict thing by being people with their shit together wielding superior technology makes finding a plot that works a bit harder.
Well, the novels mostly focus on "outsiders" looking inward at the Culture, such as those from other civs and Special Circumstances, right? They have plenty of conflict.
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