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from the does-it-count-as-a-foreign-language dept.
Mark Guzdial at ACM (Association of Computing Machinery) writes:
I have three reasons for thinking that learning CS is different than learning other STEM disciplines.
- Our infrastructure for teaching CS is younger, smaller, and weaker;
- We don't realize how hard learning to program is;
- CS is so valuable that it changes the affective components of learning.
The author makes compelling arguments to support the claims, ending with:
We are increasingly finding that the emotional component of learning computing (e.g., motivation, feeling of belonging, self-efficacy) is among the most critical variables. When you put more and more students in a high-pressure, competitive setting, and some of whom feel "like" the teacher and some don't, you get emotional complexity that is unlike any other STEM discipline. Not mathematics, any of the sciences, or any of the engineering disciplines are facing growing numbers of majors and non-majors at the same time. That makes learning CS different and harder.
(Score: 2) by urza9814 on Friday January 12 2018, @01:26AM (6 children)
That's a terrible comparison. You're just talking rich fucks vs slightly less rich fucks. How about investors against *people who don't have any money to invest*? Some people are born with millions in the bank, and no matter how dumb they are they can hire someone to manage their money and be fine for life. Others are essentially born into debt. They could literally have a magical gift for predicting the stock market and it still wouldn't help them any because they wouldn't have a dime to invest in the first place.
The average American salary will barely keep you housed and fed. There's not much left to invest after basic expenses. But those basic expenses don't increase at the same rate as salary. The more you earn, the greater percentage of those earnings you can invest, and the greater return you'll achieve. Hell, if you're rich enough you can hire someone else so you don't even need to have any particular skill at investing; while if you're poor you've gotta be smart yourself to do well. But below a certain limit, you can't invest at all.
Average *household* income in the US is $75k/yr. Average cost of living -- excluding housing -- for a small family is $50k/yr. Rent for even a one bedroom apartment could be $20k-$30k, putting you in debt already just trying to meet basic expenses. Where's the money to invest? You've gotta be above average from the start to have any of that...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Household_income_in_the_United_States#Median_inflation-adjusted_(%22real%22)_household_income [wikipedia.org]
https://transferwise.com/us/blog/cost-of-living-in-the-usa [transferwise.com]
(Score: 1) by khallow on Friday January 12 2018, @07:39AM (5 children)
Why would I do that? What's the point of comparing people who invest against people who do not or who are in net debt? Recall that someone with not a penny to their name still has more wealth than the collective 30% least wealthy of the world do (including debt).
If you can't afford to live in the absolutely most expensive places in the US (you can find a few places in the US that are routinely more expensive than $30k a year in rent, but you really have to look), then move some place you can afford to live. If you're going to have a family, then learning how to reduce your cost of living is an important skill to have. Spending every penny of $75k on your small family's living expenses shows you haven't learned that skill yet. No point to getting worked up over the rich when they're not the problem.
(Score: 2) by urza9814 on Friday January 12 2018, @11:32PM (4 children)
Yes, why indeed would you want to discuss the original topic of conversation without continuing to shift the goalposts?
We weren't talking about if people can survive; we were talking about accumulation of wealth by those who haven't necessarily earned it. About the prospects of a genius born to poverty vs a fool born to wealth. My point being that if you're born poor, you don't have many opportunities to invest, and you aren't going to become a millionaire putting away $10k/year or whatever you can manage on that $75k salary. If you're born a millionaire, you have plenty of spare cash to invest and hire fund managers and such to make sure you stay wealthy. It's much, much easier to keep wealth than to earn it.
That is your own statement; my assertion is that it's easier for a wealthy fool to do it than an impoverished genius. Of course some counter-examples exist...the population is such that even with billion-to-one odds, it would have happened a few times. But studies show it isn't common.
There have been studies into wealth vs IQ. There's no real correlation. Being smart doesn't make you rich:
https://thesocietypages.org/socimages/2008/02/06/correlations-of-iq-with-income-and-wealth/ [thesocietypages.org]
But you know what wealth *does* correlate with? Having rich parents:
https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2015/07/rich-people-raise-kids-family-wealth/399809/ [theatlantic.com]
(Score: 1) by khallow on Saturday January 13 2018, @03:59AM (2 children)
It's foolish to compare those who are trying to accumulate wealth against those who are not. Is it more unfair that an expert golfer improves their game even more or a scientist learns more about their research field than the layman who doesn't even bother to learn anything about these things in the first place?
Let us keep in mind that there's a huge number of people out there who have pretty much renounced the accumulation of wealth even to the point of declaring those who are interested in becoming more wealthy to be sociopaths and such. So why does it matter to us that they aren't wealthy, when it doesn't matter to them? What is supposed to be unfair about this?
(Score: 2) by urza9814 on Monday January 15 2018, @11:07PM (1 child)
I never said anything about people who aren't trying to invest; I was talking about people who *can't afford* to invest. There's a difference, which I highly suspect you're ignoring intentionally because you don't actually have any response to that.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Tuesday January 16 2018, @10:28PM
While I agree that there are people who can't invest, I don't agree that they are sufficiently numerous to throw off wealth statistics.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Saturday January 13 2018, @04:00AM
Except of course, the impoverished genius experiences infinite increase in wealth, when they manage to save anything at all.