That's one hypothesis. An alternative hypothesis would be to suggest that the more educated one becomes in philosophy the less that religion makes sense, and the clearer it becomes that there is no evidence for theism.
(Note, I'm not advocating for either of these hypotheses, but correlation is not causation.)
Your alternative proposition (hypothesis has a different meaning in philosophy than it does in the sciences) is rather confusing from a philosophical perspective. What is 'educated'? Education is a culturally relative idea that is very hard to closely define. Thus, for a religious person being 'educated' may mean something very different from a gypsy who grows up on the streets of Paris who is very 'educated' in the workings of life on the street. Does the 'educated' individual mean some one who can create amazing works of art? Or, does it indicate some one who has memorized and repeats certain culturally important texts and ideas?
There is certainly a cultural side to philosophy in Modern Western society that is largely anti-religious from the very beginning. I started out as your average fervent evangelical Christian, which I am no longer, but it was initially incredibly uncomfortable in a philosophy department to try to hold on to certain belief systems. However, it is not necessarily for the reasons that one would believe. It is a culturally phenomenon. In older generations, it was entirely unacceptable to be religious and be in philosophy. You were naturally routed towards theology by the university staff because the topics of conversation are entirely different; modern philosophy does not concern itself with the question of religion. Yet, the vast majority of older philosophy professors, when being honest, will acknowledge that despite their atheism there are still countless religious systems that have fascinating thinkers and concepts that are both rational and consistent.
It just so happens that in America, Christianity is the de facto symbol for religion and it is both irrational and inconsistent.
I seriously doubt that. Most "professional philosophers" these days are doing analytical philosophy, and it's been at least 500 years since a non-crazy person has been persuaded one way or the other about God by studying logic.
I suppose Georg Cantor might be an exception to this.
Gödel had an unpublished ontological "proof" [1] that's fairly simple to understand. It hinges on two things: 1.) accepting a logical system in which possibly necessary truths are necessary; 2.) accepting his argument that it's possible for god to exist.
Not knowing which faculties at which institutions this derives from (although, one could probably assume that they're not Theist institutions) that is a plausible explanation.
However, if you change the Population selection to the "No Affiliation" option the numbers are still pretty skewed in the atheist direction.
It's worth noting that philosophy's questions very often treat theistic worldviews with a significant amount of irreverence. A lot of these questions are relatively worthless when you can answer them with, "Whatever God decided on."
It appears that you have committed the fallacy of composition here. The claim that Jobs and Stallaman have some similar characteristics is not the same as saying that they are the same.
For example, you can objectively say that Hitler was an influential head of state (e.g. starting WW II) and FDR was an influential head of state. These are both true statements, while at the same time, these were two very different men.
But, if, for each class of worker, there is income equalization, you will find that large companies tend to have an equalizing affect rather than an unequalizing affect. In this example, it's not interesting that bosses get paid more than workers, it is interesting that all bosses tend to get paid the same amount.
I think the argument is that technology is great for the people who use technology.
If every programmer and engineer got paid $500,000/yr, that would be great...for ever programmer or engineer, it wouldn't matter much for others.
I do tech support for a web hosting company and I've definitely seen people with low incomes who don't and don't want to use technology, they are falling behind.
Believing that someone shouldn't receive direct help from the government isn't the same thing as believing that they shouldn't receive help. This is a false dilemma.
As, perhaps, a kind of silly example, a couple of weeks ago, my car wasn't working, I was immobile. I didn't and don't believe that the government should've helped me get my car working. But I did believe that I should be helped. I called a couple of my friends and now my car is working again.
If the rich didn't actually pay the percentage in taxes as given by their tax bracket, then their tax bracket isn't relevant because it isn't something that was actually followed in practice.
Also, capital gains tax is really. You'd have to make less than $8,500/yr to be in a lower income tax bracket. This hasn't always been the case. So, one easy, legal way to pay less in taxes is to get paid via capital gains.
It is good to take care not to create a false dilemma.
Of course the government is not the only actor that can, or should, address moral problems.
As I understand libertarianism, they are not at all against solving issues of poverty or hunger. But they do believe that the government is not necessarily the best solution to every problem. Of course that statement should be obvious, as government tends to be less efficient and more watered down than other organizations. So the question is in the details.
I'm not sure that usage indicates even rough numbers of hackers. Hacking OS code is a bit more daunting than hacking RoR code (at least in popular opinion), therefore I would think that more users of RoR are likely to hack on it.
That said, Linux is a huge project with tons of contributors.
RoR: Large number of contributors with relatively small patches, few full time contributors who are paid just to work on RoR.
Linux: Possibly smaller number of overall contributors but supplying more patches each, and more patches in total. More contributors who are paid to work on the kernel on a full or part time basis.
The numbers for the kernel are well known (and they are hard to beat for any open source projects):
https://lwn.net/Articles/395961/ (for every version ~1.1k devs and around 10k changesets)
Indeed. I don't recall the exact numbers, though I've heard both Linux and RoR numbers, I think that Linux has factors more developers committing to it than RoR.
Linux is, perhaps, the most rapidly changing piece of software in existence
I have never read, heard or observed that any race is, intrinsically, intellectually superior to another. Give this, your comment isn't interesting.
Now, I have read, heard and observed that Asians tend to have a different cultural emphasis on academics. Given this, it seems much more reasonable to suggest that the problem in the US is that the culture doesn't value learning.
Given this, it seems much more reasonable to suggest that the problem in the US is that the culture doesn't value learning.
Asians in the US don't seem to have this problem. As a result, they perform as well as Asians in Singapore, Japan and Shanghai. This strongly suggests that schools are not responsible for the difference. After all, if American schools sucked and school quality mattered significantly, shouldn't Asian Americans be dragged down as well?
You can debate whether it is cultural factors or intrinsic intellectual superiority. It's irrelevant for this conversation. The fact is the study seems to be measuring student quality but attributes the differences to school quality.
Making a general statement about American culture, which I did, doesn't, necessarily, say anything about the details of the culture. As you suggest, and as I've also generally observed, among the Asian Americans that I've met, they tend to retain a culture that's more interested in academics than what is generally found in the American culture.
I think you allude to a good point that I would like to restate.
In this study, and in others like it, the blame seems to be put on the educational institution. But, it's not hard to see places where success is gotten independent of the institution (like, for your example, Asian Americans). So, it seems wrong to put all your faith in and all the blame on the institution.
I've tutored 100s of people and I've done lots of independent learning and, based on my interactions, I think I can say that the schools could be changed however you want and they won't fix the problem in America. See, the students that I've tutored didn't mainly have a problem in understanding the material, as far as I could tell, they had a problem in not wanted to learn. And, if I can teach myself calculus, physics and programming, you don't need schools to learn things.
As far as I can tell, one large problem is that, in America, it's more prestigious to be a manager, lawyer or securities trader than it is to be an engineer or scientist. Engineering and science is associated with curiosity and learning (things good schools should have), the other disciplines are more associated with prestigious and financial comfort and generally are not as socially or economically valuable. There's an interested piece in the New York Times on this (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2598158).
