Assuming you already have all the possible evidence already leads to falsehoods. Science is about not embracing falsehoods, if it is anything.
What you promote is what cemented "Clovis first" for decades beyond its sell-by date, and opposition to the K-T bolide model and plate tectonics. Pretending to know interferes with coming to know.
I watched Predator when I was very young, on VHS, without having watched any trailers, and I still remember how amazed I felt. What was this monster? How was Arnie going to win, the creature was unbeatable and was everywhere!
A couple of other movies -- again, no trailers -- which made me feel this way were "Aliens" (they are everywhere!) and "Die Hard" (how is this cop going to beat all these bad guys?).
I don't really feel that way anymore with scifi or action movies, and of course much of it has to do with growing up. But I wonder if teenagers feel that way about the current crop of scifi/action movies, do they feel the thrill, do they feel "the good guys can't possibly win", or is this forever lost in modern cinema, what with all the rushed pacing, spoilers and trailers?
Superhero films kindof kill the tension. Superheros always win, and the suspension of disbelief is heavily established for the superpowers. The tension of a possible failure by the heroes is lost.
Helps if one isn't too familiar with the source material. With my Marvel experience prior to MCU limited to a bunch of animated shows I watched as a kid, I left the cinema furious after watching Captain America: Civil War - I was pissed at them showcasing and then destroying S.H.I.E.L.D., the one thing I actually found most interesting in the whole setting. It was a moment of genuine, deep surprise, as I had no idea how they planned to recover from losing - what I believed to be - a critical piece of the setting.
Couple more MCU movies and now I know better how this genre works :).
this is a 'haha Americans so dumb' myth that's been blown up - it's the result of a NY Times article that outline a private restaurant chain focus group result.
So tldr; some people in a private focus group questioned the value of a 1/3 pound burger over the same priced 1/4 pound burger. It's not indicative of any system numerical illiteracy.
I will add there were no actual data released - it's solely based on an anecdote from a A&W restaurant executive.
I was exposed to this myth in my youth as various European nations described their misadventures in the US of A or encounters with Americans and as a result came to US with wrong expectations. Now that I live here, things a little more clear to me. It is a nation of more than 350 million people ( depending on how and who you count ). Even a small percentage of certifiable idiots will be very well represented in terms of absolute numbers.
I would not say Americans in general are dumb though. I would say that:
1) they are under-educated ( and then we can also get about the quality of education for those that were educated )
2) they are very heavily propagandized
Even more than that, the accounts we get claim that some of the people in the focus group said the 1/3 pound burger was smaller than the quarter pounder. Even if those claims are accurate, it's possible they were looking at the diameter, since the 1/3 pounder has two smaller patties stacked on top of each other, while the quarter pounder is one large patty.
Most places that report on this say that the third pounder was cheaper and that Americans preferred the taste, but they didn't buy it because of the name and their poor math skills. But its name was changed to "Papa Burger," and it still didn't become the quarter pounder killer it's portrayed as.
Sprints when used correctly are invaluable to a development team. Source: My own experience as a junior dev and a lead dev on teams working in this methodology.
Note it's not useful in all (most?) scenarios or in all stages of a product's development.
When you are in support mode for a product that's stable, standing up something from scratch, working on a POC or experimenting with frameworks or libraries - it's not useful, use kanban or something else.
But when you are working on a/b tests or adding features to an existing product it's extremely useful.
When done correctly:
You get a two-way promise between leadership and a dev team. The dev team commits to getting stuff done within that <sprint-length> time - therefore they must carefully decompose work where that makes sense. Leadership commits to LEAVING THE DEV TEAM ALONE for that <sprint-length> time - no priority changes, no "Product Manager Chad had a dream if we implement X we get 1000% more revenue!", none of that nonsense. This means for bigger efforts, you get <sprint-length> chunks of working code "done" at time. This in practice means the devs drive how much they can get done in a certain amount of time - if a PM wants an earlier date out the door, that's <x> fewer sprints of decomposed work that gets done.
The tricky thing here is the use of the term "correctly" above. Sprint-based methodology isn't a tool for management to dictate or predict performance and it's not a tool to micromanage tasking. If leadership DOES have this distorted view of it, then it is useless overhead to no benefit for anybody.
It's also not useful at all if only the dev teams practice it - everybody has to respect the commitments required to do sprint correctly - if they don't, use kanban or something else.
Yeah, good point. If productivity equates to value creation then hackers are more productive. If productivity equates to what software management can measure, then developers are more productive.
I’m making a pithy statement about the difference hackers and developers
I gotta say that your distinction between 'hackers' and 'developers' is pretty ill-informed - just out of curiosity, have you primarily worked in start-ups?
You are only safe when you don't have bosses and all responsibility and power rests on yourself.