Twitter pays engineer $10 million as Silicon Valley tussles for talent

Nonsense.

Athletic ability is totally different. While it still needs to be nurtured, not everyone has the talent to make the NFL.

But, you know what, we all played baseball and/or football as kids. We can play it -- just not at that level. It's for the very best.

And, if every child was taught math and science, or a foreign language, they could and would learn it, and some would excel. The same thing goes for computer programming.

 

You're right ... but what in the hell is the reason for your pointing that out? Google pays good money for engineers. Cool. But we knew that, right?

 

Sure, but folks here have said that computer programming and engineering aren't worth studying because the jobs are easily outsourced. Or we hear that only the best and brightest can succeed.

Sure, but unless we expose kids to these areas of study, we'll never know who might be the best and the brightest among them.

 

If you took our 20 greatest athletes and had them commit all their energies to soccer from childhood on, we'd have a hell of a fucking soccer team.

 

Frankly, YF, I haven't really heard it that way. What I've heard people saying is that putting your eggs in those baskets is way the hell riskier than it ever was. And I agree with them. What I don't agree with them about is that they seem to be saying it's somehow been rigged that way. It hasn't. Them's the breaks. We can't unscramble those eggs ... nor would we want to.

That's true. In virtually every area of human endeavor, only the best and brightest do succeed, if by succeed you mean do substantially better than everyone else. It's always been that way. And, by the way (this is for others), doing substantially better than everyone else is not what being middle class is. Being middle class is kinda plugging along.

This is simply wrong in the main. As a general matter, kids in the U.S. are exposed to these areas of study. There are tremendous rewards for our institutions to ferret out those who have these gifts -- and by gifts I mean the ability to be exceptional in a particular area. It's just not true that there's this vast, untapped reservoir of science and mathematics talent out there. Could we have tons more middle-of-the-roaders? Sure. But there are 8+ times as many Indians and Chinese as there are Americans on this planet. We can emphasize math and science all we want. But ceteris paribus*, we're not going to have as many truly exceptional math and science types as they do.

*And the reason that the U.S. isn't simply swamped with Indians and Chinese doing our math and science for us is that, frankly, ceteris ain't paribus. We're way the hell richer than them, which means we can afford to inculcate those skills to a much greater degree.

 

Based on my own experience, no, I have no reason to believe I would.

NOTE: This is not limited to math/science, either. There are multiple other things that I am not capable of doing. (I am quite good at math.)

 

How is athletic ability any different than academic ability?

And what you said goes against what you said earlier, that everyone can be an engineer. What you said now is what my point was. Not everyone has the same abilities or the same level of talent.

 

Baron's going get kicked out of all his liberal clubs now that he's admitted the Bell Curve is real.

 

If math engaged my interest in the least as a child, I believe I would have made an effort to be good at it.
But it did not, thus I did not.

 

And maybe that's the problem: That our test-driven education system fails to make math interesting, when in fact it can be quite interesting if presented properly.

 

"[T]he natural man inevitably rebels against mathematics, a mild form of torture that could only be learned by painful processes of drill." -- Woodrow Wilson

 

It's not ability. It's number of jobs and window of opportunity.

There are only about 200 professional jobs on the WTA Tour that will pay more than $65,000 in prize money. Once you subtract all the costs for travel, etc., anyone below No. 200 is scraping by on less than $50K. And the only way to achieve this is to begin when you are a child. And if you make it, the window closes rapidly around age 30.

Now, a friend of my wife just recently decided to train to be an ultrasound technician. She's in her mid-40s with absolutely no previous training or experience in this field. After only 18 months, she will enter a field abundant with jobs paying more than $60K per year.

What prevents anybody from doing that? I realize the exceptional money is truly for the exceptionally talented, but nobody has to condemn themselves to a minimum-wage life just because they are not exceptional.