Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

The Weird Nerd comes with trade-offs

writingruxandrabio.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

51–60 of 505 posts

Re: The Weird Nerd comes with trade-offs

#51

Post by koolala »

Yossarrian22 wrote: post #5

The author is missing a crucial pressure that pushes against weird nerds, the people that have to work underneath them. I’ve had to answer to a Weird Nerd when I was starting out in my field, it was the worst fucking experience of my life, and I’ve spent the years since warning people away from that person, their career and their contributions to their field have stagnated due to all the people like me that they burn…

i had to be in a confinement center designed by a nerd who put a computer where it shouldn't belong, im sorry thank you for sharing your story

Re: The Weird Nerd comes with trade-offs

#52

Post by pavel_lishin »

doublerabbit wrote: post #28
idiotsecant wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think we both know the kind of That Guy we're talking about and a conversation isn't going to change things.

Okay, moot. But in that case why keep them active in group? Why tolerate it in the first place. Maybe I'm just to compassionate.

I would suggest you check out some of the things on reddit's rpghorrorstories subreddit.

Of course, we're only seeing one side of a narrative, and the stories are obviously written for an audience that expects something - but it can be rather enlightening at just how bad some people can be, and just how much some other people can put up with.

Re: The Weird Nerd comes with trade-offs

#53

Post by mberning »

There is a similar parallel in the corporate world. Being involved with tech and software has never had less to do with actually being good at those things. I just remarked to my director the other day that the only innovation we have had in the org in the last 5 years was relentless self promotion, marketing, and branding. When did being known as an excellent and reliable engineer stop being “enough”.

Re: The Weird Nerd comes with trade-offs

#54

Post by pixl97 »

Yossarrian22 wrote: post #33
icodemuch wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I read the article as acknowledging this pressure by arguing that Weird Nerds should not be forced into people management positions. Without the workplace pressure on Weird Nerds to become people managers, would they still manage people? Maybe not. I can’t speak for academia, but in tech companies I’ve worked at I’ve seen a marked improvement in management when there’s a tech track for engineer advancement such that…

Even if you’re not doing performance reviews there’s still a need for directing people technically when the work exceeds what one person(even a 10xer(if such a thing really exists), and that’s where you need some minimum amount of EQ

I mean it really depends where the weird nerd is. I mean I can say I'm on the border of weird nerd myself, though I say I have enough EQ to get around. Never want to manage people, and have a "high enough" position for myself. The company I work for is in the middle of a new software project and just a few months in I layed out a document stating how and where the software was going to hit failure points that were going to cause outages/degradations of service. Nine months later those failures started occurring like dominoes. We had to stop on new deliveries and work on performance for months.

I mean the entire VC culture is ate up with the 10x CEO, the fact that a few other people lower down the totem pole can 10x in their narrow field shouldn't be a surprise.

Re: The Weird Nerd comes with trade-offs

#55

Post by largelady99 »

swayvil wrote: post #35

Speaking as a weird nerd (wn) A wn is disconnected from society. This gives him the power to think and act independently. The non-wn can't do that. (And, being disconnected like that, the wn is oblivious to a million social hints and cues. He is blind that way) It isn't voluntary, being a wn. It's an artifact of habitual, excessive concentration, or something. The non-wn's state is involuntary too. Both are products…

[flagged]

Re: The Weird Nerd comes with trade-offs

#56

Post by woopwoop »

megadal wrote: post #42
woopwoop wrote: post #36

I've met a handful of people who have won at least one of the top prizes in mathematics, i.e. a Fields medal, Abel prize, or Wolf Prize. I would describe none of them as "weird nerds", and I don't think any of them are autistic. I chafe pretty hard at the suggestion here that one has to be socially ill-adjusted to advance scientific knowledge at the highest level.

That's not the suggestion though. It's that a lot of high performers in STEM tend to be "Weird Nerds" and by selecting against that type, you alienate a large number of potentially great researchers. Not selecting against weird nerds doesn't mean selecting against "socially well-adjusted Nerds". In fact, the article says that a person can in fact be exceptional at politic and science, despite their tenets being antit…

It says there is a "strong anti-correlation" between being a weird nerd and being pleasant to be around socially. This may be true, but it is not my experience that there is a strong anti-correlation between being an exceptional mathematician and being pleasant to be around socially. Despite the stereotype, in my experience the best mathematicians are not the ones who stare at their shoes when you talk to them.

Re: The Weird Nerd comes with trade-offs

#57

Post by kristjansson »

makeitdouble wrote: post #37
ianbicking wrote: post #4

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 n…

The line you draw between "weirdness" and "neurodivergence" is interesting. Would neurodivergence have to be native (so, not grown "naturally") and at which point does weirdness fit on the spectrum ? Recently I think people are more receptive to lower degrees of neurodivergence. I see it the same way people understand that you have a gradation between having difficulties climbing stairs and not being able to walk. We…

At some point the question is “why?”. We can keep atomizing human variability into smaller, more graduated buckets of neurodivergence, but what’s the point, esp. for those that don’t really suffer negative impacts, and for which there isn’t really any remedy besides acceptance?

Re: The Weird Nerd comes with trade-offs

#58

Post by makeitdouble »

slillibri wrote: post #34
makeitdouble wrote: post #11

I didn't fully understand what the author meant by "Weird Nerd", and this bit was the key for me: > Weird Nerds (I called them autistics, but people really hated that) And I totally get why they're trying to come up with a word that markets better, and yes many people react negatively to "autist" or calling someone "on the spectrum". At the same time, man prominent people are making public their diagnostics and asser…

I react negatively to "autist" because it's not a good description. "ist" is usually used for something people do, or more to the point something they choose to do, see cyclist, artist, etc. Also, "on the spectrum" is used today much like "depression" was used in the '90s. It's a catch all excuse used at the expense of people actually suffering the disorder. Much like sometimes you are just sad, I would wager many pe…

I'd argue assholes would merit the same attention as the people on the spectrum, but it might be another discussion.

> something they choose to do

Point taken, but then switching that for "weird" doesn't feel like helping, it's still a pejorative and not really focused description.

> people actually suffering the disorder

An issue I'd take with that is the effect to which it's penalizing depends a lot on the environment and what the person is trying to do. Would two people with the same condition, but one suffering and the other not, need to be identified in two different ways ?

Re: The Weird Nerd comes with trade-offs

#59

Post by paulcole »

woopwoop wrote: post #36

I've met a handful of people who have won at least one of the top prizes in mathematics, i.e. a Fields medal, Abel prize, or Wolf Prize. I would describe none of them as "weird nerds", and I don't think any of them are autistic. I chafe pretty hard at the suggestion here that one has to be socially ill-adjusted to advance scientific knowledge at the highest level.

> I chafe pretty hard at the suggestion here that one has to be socially ill-adjusted to advance scientific knowledge at the highest level.

This is very similar to the idea of the tortured artist or that to be a great comedian you have to be depressed.

The happy and well adjusted comedian or socially adept mathematician doesn’t make for an interesting story — it just doesn’t fit the popular narrative and so it gets ignored.

In every discipline there are total weirdos and normal people at every step of the way, from terribly inept to amazingly world-class.

Re: The Weird Nerd comes with trade-offs

#60

Post by p_l »

pavel_lishin wrote: post #7
Yossarrian22 wrote: post #5

The author is missing a crucial pressure that pushes against weird nerds, the people that have to work underneath them. I’ve had to answer to a Weird Nerd when I was starting out in my field, it was the worst fucking experience of my life, and I’ve spent the years since warning people away from that person, their career and their contributions to their field have stagnated due to all the people like me that they burn…

Yep. Just because you're a Weird Nerd who's good at something, the world doesn't owe you respect and friendship unless you're willing to do the same.

Beware though that the inverse is also true.

No matter if one is "weird nerd" or not

Post reply on HN