alt Hacker NewsSecond ‘genetics’ comment — wow, we’re really far down the supremacy hole
The key era of tech was when the Jobs and Wozniak built things in their garage, and considered them a bicycle for the mind
You don’t need genetics to ride a bike and improve — but you do need that argument to justify the unjustifiable.
Dark days
Replies
Yeah - while it's not unreasonable to say there likely is a sizeable nature component to someone's propensity towards tech/math/etc, even if we assume for the sake of argument that this is only some tiny fraction of the population, we should still expand access to the resources as much as possible to catch those kids in the net. It's just better for everyone. Arguments about spending the money on food instead miss the point - if OLPC reaches even a few tech-disposed kids out of every thousand, those kids have a much better shot at being force multipliers for their own local communities and country 20 years from now.
Comparing bike riding and innate talent for math has to be one of the stupidest analogies I have heard in the last few months.
How many people can ride a bike? Everyone, all humans, except those with certain physical disabilities can do it.
How many people can code software competently or do science? Not many.
The fact that you cannot acknowledge your own childhood experience in school, that is, that you had smart and stupid schoolmates, is very telling that your comment is ideology based.
> You don’t need genetics to ride a bike
Depends on how you define genetics. Starfish cant ride it; There exist genetic conditions that would make it difficult or impossible to ride a bike (first google search: inherited retinal diseases).