Whenever I am watching cop shows or the like and someone says, “Does the perp have any priors?” or something similar, all I can think of is, “Oh, he/she was a Bayesian. Cool.”

I’ve always been deeply suspicious of the “10,000 hours/practice” idea of mastery, because in my experience even if I practice for 10 times as long in something in which I have no talent or ability, like operational math, I will still perform far worse than the naturally-talented who practice much less.

This seems to show that this intuition of mine is correct.

Some people have intrinsic gifts. Some people have intrinsic deficits. I know this is hard for liberals to accept – used to be hard for me to accept, even – but it seems to be the case.

When I realized that no matter how hard I studied, no matter what I did, that I’d never be very good at math, it was actually sort of freeing. It liberated me to concentrate on those things I was and am actually good at without wasting all sorts of time in areas that are essentially useless to me.

As an aside, people who are good at math think, Oh, anyone can learn it! Just takes studying. But this doesn’t appear to be the case. Certain brains are probably predisposed to be good at it, and others not so much.

Luckily or unluckily, I am strangely dichotomous. Math and writing/reading usually are fairly correlated, but not so with me; on standardized tests, I usually score in the bottom 10% or below on mathematical ability and in the top 1/10th of 1 percent (depending on how fine-grained the test is) in reading comprehension, analogy analysis and similar skills.

In other words, if you measure my IQ using more math-based assessments, I generally score in the 50-70 range (which is firmly in the mentally retarded category), and if you use a more verbal-based testing regimen, I break the test, scoring off the charts.

Yeah, but of course there is no such thing as natural talent. That wouldn’t be egalitarian.

When your article starts off with an obvious sophism such as this, why should I even bother to read the rest?

With the disappearance of the desktop computer and the downfall of the desk phone….

The desktop computer is not disappearing. Not going anywhere. In 10 years, there will be nearly as many and used almost as commonly as they are now, at least in the business world.

Selfishly speaking, what I really like about the average person abandoning a real computer is that they will be at a huge disadvantage in the business world to me.

Any monkey can learn to use a tablet in five minutes. But they don’t really help you with productivity except in edge cases (looking at a Powerpoint before a meeting, for example). But being competent and well-versed with a general purpose computer – well, the fewer people who are capable of that, the better for me.

By 2025 or so, I suspect we will go back to the state of users in about 1998 or so – approximately 2-3% competent with any real productivity tool, and the rest incapable of touch typing or being able to use a real work machine.

I remember even as recently as five or six years ago, I’d eagerly await software updates, glad of the new features and increased capabilities.

But gradually I’ve learned to dread software updates as these days all they do is to remove features, reduce capabilities and generally make my life worse.

Now a posteriori – that is, from so many observed instances in the wild – I generally try to do anything I can to minimize the amount of upgrades that occur since nothing good will come of it.

But why is modern software so user hostile?

There probably isn’t one reason only. There never is an human affairs. But as I’ve noted before, software can’t help but respond to and reproduce general trends in society. And society right now is much about removing control and self-determination from individuals – with NSA spying, decreased funding for social programs, increased credentialism, etc.

Mozilla’s now-cachetic Firefox is the example I use most, but there are many others.

If a software update happens to a regular user/consumer product these days, I can almost guarantee that it will get worse. (Interestingly, software for enterprise-class products which I also use extensively is still improving.)

I used to be firmly opposed to this, but perhaps there should be some sort of licensing that occurs – similar to a driver’s license test – before one can use a computer, tablet or smart phone.

Would this help? I don’t know. Probably not. But I don’t have any better ideas until someone creates a gene-inserting virus that raises IQ by 30 points.