 I want to add to a previous video I've done, this is a while ago, and to be perfectly honest I didn't think at the time there would be anything more to add to it, but oh there is. See I'm obviously quite interested in programming. I've got some benchmarks of things, and some people that had vouched that I'm even really good at programming, but I don't consider myself a programmer. And in fact I don't think I would ever, but I'm very unlikely to wind up being a professional programmer at any point, and that should be surprising to most people. If you're good at something, why wouldn't you want to make a career out of it? It's a fair question to ask. Remember we work with other people, and it's important that your interactions with those other people would be positive interactions. Now it's sort of been creeping into some other videos, some interactions on Twitter or other places. I have a psych background, and if I didn't make that clear in a video that's actually what I went to school for, I went to school for psychology and I'm very interested in human behavior. I read a lot of psych research. More than anything else, believe it or not, while a lot of people are quick to say things like oh that person's behavior is toxic, it is more appropriate looking at it through social psychology to say that person's experiences are different in a way that causes them to communicate differently, that they are more suitable to a different group of people who have similar experiences, that they don't fit with that group. It's not that that person is toxic, it's that the interaction is toxic. I'm not saying there's no toxic part of it, but the interaction, the two conflicting groups, that is toxic. Not either party. My interactions with other cooks tends to largely be fantastic. My interactions with other medical professionals tends to largely be fantastic. In fact, I still, despite only popping in there occasionally for over four months, I'm still getting poaching attempts from one of the hospitals I was helping out downstate. I'm good and well respected in that area. But since I don't interact much with medical people on Twitter, my interactions seem quite toxic. Because they are. The interactions are toxic. That hostile nature doesn't happen outside of tech really for me. You can find some isolated groups. Definitely. They're very isolated groups. See even just in the general workplace I find, I get along well with most people. Not close relationships, it's the workplace. I don't think it's appropriate to even form friendships in the workplace. Form your friendships outside, you need time away from work. That's important. It's something I struggle with personally, but I don't unwind very well. I don't relax. I need to take more time outside of work. But the clear separation of work and home life is a good important thing. If you're making friends with people at work, sure it's an easy place to make friends, but where do you get that time away? Same reason why you don't date at work. I fucked that one up. Don't do that. My experiences are just too different. I don't know if that's... I assume to some extent it's a regional thing. Different regions, different cultures, subcultures, different personality types that develop because of that. It does seem like to some extent I have an easier time with East Coast programmers than I do West Coast programmers, but obviously the majority of the tech in the United States is West Coast Silicon Valley. There's another problem, specifically why I finally made this connection, what I'm adding to the video, and why I'm not really a programmer. Just a guy who programs subtle distinction, important distinction, though. You can not be a professional carpenter, but make birdhouses on your spare time as a hobby. I'm very, very evidence motivated. I fully recognize the point of tests as proof that your code works. I appreciate benchmarks as evidence on your code's performance. Gather that with multiple inputs as proof of your algorithm's performance curve. It's actually quite the well-observed thing that medical professionals tend to have a higher evaluation of evidence than many other fields, actually. That medicine and the core sciences both are very heavy as far as evidence goes. This drops down in other fields, not to say that other technical fields don't value evidence, but something I've noticed for quite a while, and I'm not the only person to have noticed this, is tech, specifically. It seems to not really care. In fact, there's almost an antagonism between tech in practice and computer science. And it's bizarre, and I don't understand it, and baffles me, but it's a clear difference in how the field operates from what I'm used to. In fact, even the culinary arts tends to have more respect for the sciences than tech does for its sciences. In culinary, there's food scientists who research specific ways to improve things, or even just how the food was made in the first place. What is it that gives Nougat its light, airy structure? We know that's protein now, and we can substitute around that. Some of those are fantastic, because I don't know if you've ever tried to make cake the old-fashioned way, and I'm talking old-fashioned way, with, say, beef gelatin. Your cake tastes like beef, and it's fucking nasty. It's, uh, uh, Jell-O doesn't have a meat flavor. Similarly, thickening for sauces, cheese sauce, I'm going to use the big example, roe, a mixture of butter and flour is often used to thicken many things. And for gravy, that's how I would recommend thickening it, still. That's probably the best way to thicken gravy, and I don't think we're going to come up with anything better than that for a good while, if at all. Because roe fits the flavors of that really well, fits the consistency of that really well. But cheese sauces, historically, and sometimes still, people will use roe to thicken cheese sauces. And it's, see, the extra butter, this guy ought to relate this, the extra butter tends to cause this film to develop in your mouth. It feels weird. If you've ever had mac and cheese, especially, but sometimes cheddar soups, and that you get this lingering feeling in your mouth, that's from there being too much butter. Similarly, the flour component in that almost gives it a chalky-like taste. It's clearly identifiable as flour, not like mineral powder, but if you've had roe-thicken cheese sauce, you know exactly what I'm talking about. It's not pleasant. What food scientists have worked out, and what is the established norm in the field, is sodium citrate. Now, not everybody is directly aware that they're using this. In fact, a common thing I do, just because it's more convenient than having a big thing of sodium citrate available and keeping it dehydrated all the time, because Lord knows in a busy kitchen you're going to leave the thing open at some point, and some moisture is going to get in there and clump the whole fricking thing up, is American cheese slices. Just a few of them to provide that sodium citrate. You don't need very much, and then overwhelmingly the cheese that you actually want to use. It's like we're doing something like a ham, apple, cheddar, soup, throw in, God, even for a gallon, eight slices of American cheese is usually enough to get you going, and then the two wedges of, say, like a nice smoked gouda, and the whole thing just blends delightfully. Not in tech, though. Like I'd said, tech has an observable antagonism towards computer scientists, and is vocally proud about that, and I don't understand it at all. It's very disagreeable to me. See, when I go about problem solving, one of the things I look for is not just my own solutions and can I work something out, but what's the literature on this? As somebody worked out an effective solution, how effective was their solution? Sometimes I feel like I have a better approach, and I will implement my approach and test it as well and see how they stack up. More often than not, what you find is that they're each suitable for different situations, and that's totally understandable. But tech seems almost proud to be anti-science, and that's just weird. See, my interaction largely devolved into, do you have proof of that claim, and then the person mocking me over it. But the final thing said as a sub-tweet, because of course you're not going to say it directly to the person, was about how medical people are always so evidence-based and it's problematic. Now, I don't know about you, but if I was experiencing medical issues and you needed to go into the ER and needed treatment for it, something to potentially save my life, I don't want to make sure that the treatment that the doctor gives is actually something that would fix the problem that I'm having, that they have correctly identified and tested, the thing that I'm experiencing, and that the treatment protocol that they are using has been shown effective for treating the problem that they had identified and tested. If you've got a viral infection and you're given antibiotics, it's not going to work. And we know that's not going to work. Tech seems largely fine on giving antibiotics to treat viral infections because of conventions and cargo cults, and not because of evidence. But there's another factor. Remember I said experiences affect how we communicate, affect what we prioritize, affect our whole personality, really. I'd mentioned in a previous video that I had experienced a lot of trauma that I was rather recently diagnosed with and we're still narrowing down exactly what it would be. We're not too concerned about a specific name. It's more understanding what's going on with me specifically. But some form of complex trauma, specifically the result of just an overwhelming majority of gaslighting. Now it becomes very unsurprising that somebody who's been experiencing a lot of gaslighting, a lot of people causing them to doubt their own lived experiences, is going to strongly favor proof and evidence. See I've had situations even very recently, today in fact, where a situation had to be resolved because somebody was making an accusation about something that they did and me not following through, trying to get me in trouble and I shouldn't say trying to get me in trouble, it was probably just them trying to keep themselves out of trouble, but making an accusation about them having done something and they never did it. I never had information that I was supposed to have and that was provable because the entire conversation happened through email. So I could prove that. You never tell me that I didn't have that information. I didn't know that that was something I was supposed to do. So it's not just field conventions and what I'm used to and even ways of trying to explain why evidence is a good thing to have. Even if, you know, techness is not a life-threatening thing. There's evidence, there's cases where, you know, evidence in better cooking, that's not a life-threatening thing, yields better products. There's also very personal reasons for me favoring always having evidence. See, I don't think I could ever be a professional programmer working in a company with numerous other programmers, just because of how differently we view that. I take evidence very seriously and it's not the norm in the field to take evidence very seriously. In fact, evidence even gets mocked. The people who gather evidence get antagonized. There are fields that greatly appreciate my dedication to evidence and it makes sense for me to work in those fields. I'm appreciated in those fields. But it does not make sense for me to be employed in tech. So the funny thing is, too, the programming I'm doing is largely fixing things that had they had that dedication to evidence, I wouldn't need to fix in the first place. But hey, I'm the one who's wrong, right?