Each US state has its own licensing laws and you may have issues with the particular laws in your state, but it's certainly wrong to say there's no mandatory driver's ed in the US. California, for example, requires 30 hours of classroom education and 6 hours of behind-the-wheel instruction from a state-licensed professional driving school.

I have a CA license and my US driving school track record consists of a total of 5 hours of "classroom education" (video watching) and passing a driving test despite running a stop sign in a residential area (my German license didn't count, had to start from nil)

Jeff used a rhetorical device called hyperbole. He does not literally kill a child multiple times each day.

Also, as long as we're being literal about everything, it would be impossible to kill a child (or anything else..) multiple times.

The 'multiple times' annotates occurrence of desire, not the subject of desire. He doesn't "want to kill him many times", but many times a day he "wants to kill him".

Paul is right. Writing is definitely the best way to convey and spread ideas. If you're a good enough writer, you can spark a reformation just by printing up a few copies of your 95 theses and passing them around. I think writing unfortunately took a back seat to speaking for the last 100 years thanks to radio and television, where a small number of charismatic speakers have been able to dominate the public discourse.

But that is changing again thanks to the internet. Take SOPA for example. SOPA was defeated not by an influential speaker making an impassioned anti-SOPA speech, but by blog posts and forum posts and reddit/hacker news posts on the internet. We're getting closer every day to the world of the novel Ender's Game, where Ender's brother and sister were able to influence international politics solely through their anonymous internet writings (something which I used to think was farfetched and ridiculous).

Yeah. A Picture may be worth 1000 words, but 1000 words isn't enough to tell a full story.

I don't know, Knock manages pretty well with seventeen.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Knock_%28short_story%29

The ideas in this article are eerily reminiscent of what people were saying in the late '90s/early '00s, particularly with respect to companies like Enron. Malcolm Gladwell wrote an article making the opposite point to this one. http://www.gladwell.com/2002/2002_07_22_a_talent.htm

I suspect after the bubble pops we'll be reading 'the talent myth'-type articles in Forbes.

The article you linked is so much better that the one we discuss, there's no comparison.

Asimov wrote a short story ("The Dead Past" I think it was) that extrapolated this idea into the near-future, where scientific advancement would be so expensive and require such narrow specialization that it could only be done by governments.

So today I learned two things from the front page on Hacker News: 1) College students aren't really learning anything in college. 2) Fresh, young college grads should be paid more.

Makes sense.

Come on. I think the context is pretty clear. If a group of novelists are discussing how writing is inherently hard, would you let them know you don't understand how they can say writing is hard? After all, you learned how to write when you were five or six by picking up "See Spot Run" and then stringing together some nouns and verbs of your own...

If something is "inherently hard", not just "hard", it seems that it should be hard for everyone, which is clearly not the case with programming for some geniuses out there. There are people who don't blink an eye at mastering any data structure or algorithm, don't sweat when it comes to actually coding, and they're human just like you. Plus what if programming became really simple for some AI to do? You ask it "Make me a triple-A style video game I might enjoy" and it does so after a short while. I believe Eliezer is pointing out that programming being inherently hard is a mind-projection fallacy.