>This happens all the time with unorthodox ideas, you can be right but if the mainstream doesn't shift in your favor before too long, you get ignored, discredited, or worse. I'd argue this is a bigger problem now,
If I'm understanding you correctly, he doesn't miss this. He addresses it directly and comes to the opposite conclusion.
> The good news is that your fierceness will be a great help in solving difficult problems. And not just the kind of scientific and technical problems that nerds have traditionally solved. As the world progresses, the number of things you can win at by getting the right answer increases. Recently getting rich became one of them: 7 of the 8 richest people in America are now fierce nerds....In the past century we've seen a continuous transfer of power from dealmakers to technicians — from the charismatic to the competent — and I don't see anything on the horizon that will end it.
Im sure all of us see ourselves in this essay, in part because it's ego catnip. But this part resonated very strongly with me. I was in my early 20s when I realized how crucial it was for me to work somewhere where my work was measured as objectively as possible, which has finally led me to hone in on small/mid-sized co applied research[1] as the path that fits me.
It's definitely my perception that the world supports this more now than it ever used to. You can't ignore people skills entirely, but the path to success through technical work instead of management has never been better (eg the IC ladder at my co easily goes up to $1M/yr).
> Popular but wrong ideas, once they have "network effects" are much stickier than they once were. All this is tougher on the contrarian, or "fierce nerd".
I'm not convinced that this is __worse_ than it once was. There's too much heterodoxy, too much pluralism, too low barriers to entry, and too much opportunity for the quiet dissenter to build their niche and wait out the irrationality longer than they could ever have dreamed in the world of 50 or even 20 years ago.
[1] driven by well-defined problems instead of product people's beliefs about the market, or the politics and bureaucracy of academia. It's actually been very useful ground for me to practice my political skills, since the impact of rubbing people the wrong way while figuring it out is heavily mitigated by the clear and measurable impact of my work.