The Weird Nerd comes with trade-offs

I’m not sure I follow the first sentence. What does this have to do with Women in STEM?

(I’m not being political. I just don’t follow the connection)

There's definitely been a move to demand individuals be good at everything... old stereotypes of the nerd brought a lot of negatives, but they were also apologetic, acknowledging the trade off, that paying attention deeply to one thing does lead to being worse at other things.

The exact stereotype differed by domain... the performer who is a diva, the self destructive author, the manic artist... each with a hint of nobility but also quite off-putting.

The author wanting to combine Weird Nerd with autistic is very incorrect IMHO... I've known a lot of weird nerds, am one myself, and there's lots of different flavors, most of them not autistic.

So much of talent is just really caring about something specific. Caring about it above other things. Specifically above external motivation and incentives. Do that and the weirdness grows naturally, neurodivergence isn't even necessary (though it might help)

Everyone get your bucket ready, I'm going to throw an anecdote into it.

I play D&D. This exposes me to a wide variety of people, but unsurprisingly, a lot of them are probably what the author would consider Weird Nerds.

Most of them are perfectly pleasant people, and I look forward to spending time in their company, both in the context of playing D&D, and just as a way to socialize. Heck, at my last session, a player proposed doing a regular board game night, and I am very excited to do this with those people.

But. Occasionally, you meet someone who is just fucking unpleasant to be around. Maybe they're on the spectrum (as the author really wants to lump all Weird Nerds on the far end of), maybe they're just poorly socialized, maybe they're just assholes. And unless they're just awful people [more on this later], you learn to put up with their idiosyncracies - because in the end, they're pretty good at playing D&D, and it's fun to slay a dragon or solve the mystery of the mermaid pond, or finally get revenge on your vampire stepfather from hell or whatever. But those people? They're not coming to board game night, and they're not fucking coming to any of my BBQs. They're ok in the context of playing D&D for three hours, but I'm not willing to spend more time with them.

I think that's another reason why some Weird Nerds who are unpleasant to be around have found a safe haven on the internet, as the author puts it: because while they're still unpleasant, you can read their unpleasant words and then walk away for awhile. They're not standing in front of you, demanding your time face to face. If someone is the world's expert on a thing you're collaborating on online, it doesn't matter if you groan every time you have to talk to them, because your time with them is largely limited, and you can walk away at literally any point during the interaction and regain the will to live and spend more time with them.

I'm not sure what my point is. Maybe that it's kind of ok to not want to be around people who are unpleasant to be around, and that despite that, it's also ok for them to still meaningfully participate in the things that matter to them.

[About the awful people in D&D: it's a game, and it's made to be fun. Not every table is made for every player, and vice versa. If you're in a game, and someone is truly ruining the game for the other players by being a generally unpleasant person, I am begging you to just fucking stop playing with them. Life is short, don't surround yourself with assholes. I promise you can find more players. And if you're the one being asked to leave a D&D table because other people find your unpleasant, reflect on your actions. Maybe you're just at a table that's a bad fit for you. Or maybe you're an asshole.]

(If I currently play D&D with you, rest assured that I am not talking about you; all the examples are from past games.)

> I still stand by my association of Weird Nerds with autism, but for some reason people really do not like to call Weird Nerds autistic.

I'm sorry, what, even if they're preponderant you can't just call all of them that any more than you can collectively call all basketball players "Marfan Syndrome havers"

I've witnessed more than a little of this. I worked in a university, in a library (though not as a librarian), and realized that everyone at a certain level or above in administration Came From Money. While "has a house in another country" is not subtle, "father was on an Everest expedition" is. Once I began noticing this soft ceiling I could not help but see it everywhere in the university. Meritoriousness was not on the menu and it took me entirely too long to "get" that I was locked out of promotion and that it was just a way to keep me dancing like a little dog standing up for a treat.

The "bundle of tradeoffs," which is a more humane and human way of thinking, is at odds with the "cog in the machine" approach which began with interchangeable machined parts and progressed on to the human element. Being replaceable then becomes a prized characteristic. Indeed, one of the administrative staff suggested that anyone who seemed like they were too valuable to replace ought to be let go on those grounds alone. It's a recipe for a kind of predictable mediocrity.

Business loves predictable mediocrity, and we see it in various forms of intellectual property. Why sell a copy of Office for unlimited use when you can charge monthly and predict out your next few quarters? Own a movie? No, rent. And as academic institutions continue their transformation into administratively bloated credential assembly lines, we will see more business-y strategies worm their way in.