51–60 of 482 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
There's definitely some eccentric people in the field, but a vast majority people I've met working in tech were hardly the Poindexter type characterized in these articles
But do they think of themselves as such?
I met a lot of nerds in graduate school. In my experience the "fierce" nerds weren't smarter or successful than the "nonfierce" nerds. The fierce nerds were just more insecure and emotionally immature. They felt more threatened by being surrounded by other people who might smarter or more successful than them. It threatened their identity of being uniquely intelligent. They responded by lashing out. It may be that th…
Using James Watson as an example is an interesting choice. When I think of James Watson, I think of someone who a) stole his major work (the one thing for which he is famous) from a woman without giving credit, and b) has been almost-literally cancelled for being consistently racist, also by his colleague-science-nerds who consistently report that they don't like him. Not someone that I want to celebrate for being a…
> Most people think of nerds as quiet, diffident people. [...] In fact some nerds are quite fierce. That someone would think nerds are not competitive is, to me, the strangest thing about this article. Perhaps because I'm one, but whether it's Magic the gathering, Demoparties, rubics cube solving, chess, Counterstrike LANs, academia, or any of my tech jobs, every "nerdy" activity I've ever engaged with has always bee…
Collecting comic books? Memorizing all the Star Wars and Star Trek quotes, and reading side fan fictions about each of the characters?
It's weird to read an "essay" about "nerds" from a 56 year old. It's like he never got over the high school caste system of cliques.
It's weird to read an "essay" about "nerds" from a 56 year old. It's like he never got over the high school caste system of cliques.
It applies to a lot of what is happening in society today.
> Most people think of nerds as quiet, diffident people. [...] In fact some nerds are quite fierce. That someone would think nerds are not competitive is, to me, the strangest thing about this article. Perhaps because I'm one, but whether it's Magic the gathering, Demoparties, rubics cube solving, chess, Counterstrike LANs, academia, or any of my tech jobs, every "nerdy" activity I've ever engaged with has always bee…
This is something that has bothered me about a lot of people's views on competition, whether it's sports or business or whatever. Being competitive does not have anything to do with being an asshole.
I never got into trash-talking during games. It was always just easier for me to ignore it/use the other person's trash-talking as their own distraction against me running circles around them.
And then in software, Code of Conducts are not covering anything about how the project interacts with other projects. They're covering how contributors treat each other within the project. You're not in competition with your project mates. The sorts of harassing and belitting behavior that CoCs are supposed to address (whether they do or not is a different discussion) comes about from some sort of glory-hog mentality that is ultimately anti-productive. Insert roll-safe meme: "If I drive away most of the other contributors, my own efforts will be a much bigger proportion of the overall whole".
I've grown into that fierce nerd. Being in forced conscription in my 20s has made me wary of the 'wait to rush for nothing meaningful' culture. Then I joined companies and it feels like a ton of my time is wasted by processes, norms and ideologies. I did break out once to try and make a business but that hasn't worked out. So now I'm in employment just to earn/invest to have enough for a certain level of financial independence and I'm feeling that bitterness rise up again.
I'm very likely destined to burn out of industries/companies that aren't my own quickly, and this could cascade into bad looking resumes. It feels like a do or die situation sometimes.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Paul Graham himself muses in this post that the main contrast is between people who are "good at making deals" and those who are actually competent in some relevant domain. We can see this shift happening in politics as well.
A year ago he was musing how categorizing people into two groups was too basic. Xist versus Yist, and he showed us with some pretty basic math. Now two groups is all we need to understand the world?
So perhaps the way to understand it is PG believes people fit in these two groups, but those are not the only two groups you fit in, and they are by no means all-encompassing.
It's kind of like, you are either a member of team red, or team blue. You may be a blue type of person, another is a red, but that by no means defines the entirety of your being.
Let's try to have a little more good faith here, when trying to understand people's musings. The reality is, most of us here wouldn't have the courage to put our thoughts and opinions out there on the internet for the whole world to see, at least not to the extent PG does.