I yelped and stepped back. A manager rushed over to me, slammed the lid shut, and told me to not tell anyone.

I quit a couple weeks later.

I have made many mistakes in my career in terms of systems that were either overly complicated or inefficient or both, and it has almost always ended up boiling down to either trusting the SQL that an ORM produces, or putting too much of the business logic in hand crafted stored procedures. I have done both, regretted both, and nowadays advocate for sticking to simple, predictable, and dumb stored procedures so that you can both have the benefit of knowing/controlling exactly what will execute in the database and having things like validation occur code side whenever possible.

In the real world, that simplification of stored procedures isn't always possible. But if it's your starting assumption, then you can fight for it until you are certain that there isn't a practical alternative to pushing the logic into the stored procedure. And if a compromise of these principles needs to happen, I would push complexity into a stored procedure before trusting the SQL produced by an ORM every time.

But where I fall on that spectrum may just be due to the severity and types of problems I have seen happen with each approach, do YMMV. And I wouldn't go so far as to call myself an expert, so also YMMV on that front. I am just a guy who has made a lot of mistakes. But if it'll help others, this is my takeaway.

I do worry about the stability-of-nations risk, but I think if we could plan as a global community for such contingencies we could come up with plans for securing or perhaps even permanent shutdown of nuclear facilities in the event of the collapse of a nation.

Ultimately, I think we are at the point where we need to take more drastic action, and nuclear can certainly fit into that for avoiding the worst outcomes of climate change.

I also hope that we come to a point as a society where we are willing to make and enforce laws that will help us prevent a similar event as the ones that brought us climate change. We were systematically and intentionally lied to, over and over, by oil and related industries. Technology that would aid us was scrapped for the sake of short term profits. Scientific analysis was hidden. Lobbying allowed the practices to continue. Lies were allowed to be propagated to the public to the extent that, even today, many people doubt climate change is even happening despite overwhelming evidence. These need to be crimes, as they have real victims: and unlike many person-to-person crimes, these corporate crimes can affect our entire society.

We must begin to treat our profession with the care due to it - recognizing the negative impact it can have on human lives, justice, and freedom when it is used with harmful or careless intent.

The ACM Code of Ethics is the closest thing we have to our own Hippocratic Oath, and I encourage all engineers to read and take the serious obligations we are charged with to heart.

I do agree with his statement that we need to talk more about the complex reasons for that behavior on top of behavioral conditioning, and that people caught in those cycles can and should leverage the means that we have at our disposal to undo that conditioning when it is harmful to them (with professional help as needed). But I think it is absolutely valid to talk about how behavioral conditioning is intentionally leveraged in the design of many products we use, in casinos, etc. And that it is not something that people can or do consciously notice.

Before people can help themselves, they need to even realize there is a problem in the first place, and that is one of the dangerous things about behavioral conditioning. Conditioning is the very mechanism by which we learn new behaviors that become integrated into our life: and as such, it is very easy for a person to fall prey to operant conditioning and for it to just feel like "life as normal," even when the patterns in your life have actually changed dramatically.

In particular, I think it's important for us to be aware of behavioral conditioning as an intentional design choice of the products we use and the entertainment we engage in. The more we are consciously aware of it, the more we can develop the sort of meta-cognition that allows us to notice when we fall into patterns of conditioning that are harming us more than helping us. (note that you can also be conditioned to engage in behaviors that are helpful too! So being aware of what you are conditioning yourself for is as important as whether/when you are being conditioned)

When we turn debates into something that is "won" rather than something that is seeking a refinement of what we know as truth, we encourage people to use deceptive tactics: to appeal to straw men if they can get away with it, to distract from the issue if they can get away with it, to do whatever they can do to win. That's how you end up with blowhards like Ben Shapiro: people who are more interested in winning a debate by any means necessary and reinforcing their existing belief systems then discovering truth. You get a thrill out of "victory," but it is less than hollow when it's won by appealing to fallacious arguments: it actively works against our ability as a society to understand the concept of truth. And it is so easily abused by people with malicious intent.

For me, the most damaging effect was the separation of debate and decision making. In real life, if I advocate for a position—be it where we eat dinner or where my child goes to school—and I'm convincing, things actually happen. We have to go to that restaurant and my kid has to attend that school. Debates happen to inform a decision all parties are trying to make together.

As a kid, the opposite was true. Debate was about proving my intelligence in exchange for praise from my teachers, parents, and peers. It was an athletic competition in which our positions were our jerseys, in that we took them off after and went home.

I was reflexively argumentative for a decent period of time as a young adult before I realized the damage it caused to my relationships and how unproductive and dishonest it was.

In a discussion, several parties with different perspectives work together to make progress toward truth, whatever that means in the given context. If one or more parties has their opinion changed, that's seen as productive.

In a debate, several parties plenty a points-based game (perhaps even literally), and if someone is seen to be changing their mind, they lose.

A huge pity.

Focusing on the mechanics and methods has left you blind to the outcome, as demonstrated:

> You have to argue successfully on both sides to win a competition

Who, in the real world, would use a skill like this? Lawyers who defend corporations who poison populations? Murderers? Sleazy politicians?

It might just be that you have demonstrated the very thing being discussed: Talking past the issue at hand. The OP isn't about the mechanics of debate. It's about talking past the issue.

One try to sell you something, the other had an idea for a language he started to work on over the holidays.