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The Weird Nerd comes with trade-offs

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Re: The Weird Nerd comes with trade-offs

#111

Post by sctb »

sneed_chucker wrote: post #67
walt_grata wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I duno on some of that. Until I was about 39 I was a "weird nerd" and then my wife (Dr of special education) finally convinced me to talk to a Dr and get get tested for autism. Turns out I'm ASD 1, would have been Asperger's in the past. Autism has a very wide range of ways it shows itself.

Well, to me your comment also speaks to the increasing degree to which we medicalize personality traits. I'm sure your diagnosis is legitimate, but also I'm inferring from your comment that you are married and gainfully employed; so it sounds like you're able to build and maintain relationships, as well hold conversations with strangers or non-close acquaintances when necessary. In years past would any professional h…

Being married and gainfully employed and able to build and maintain relationships as well as hold conversations with strangers when necessary can come at an exceptionally high cost for neurodivergent people in the form of masking (like a kind of mental tech debt). Instead of overt social difficulty, this might present itself as anxiety, depression, and suicidality—those conditions are worthy of medicalization IMO.

Re: The Weird Nerd comes with trade-offs

#112

Post by faeriechangling »

65 wrote: post #69
lainga wrote: post #8

> 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"

Yeah, this is a dumb insinuation. The author is conflating people who are motivated internally by making great contributions to society with autism. Many of the best artists and scientists aren't autistic, and perhaps are quite the opposite: deeply emotional and socially aware. I'd argue you need a deep understanding of social value to even want to make a great contribution to society. Also, it's not like people with…

>I'd argue you need a deep understanding of social value to even want to make a great contribution to society.

Autistics only nessecarily misunderstand social value in a superficial way. They are frequently compensating for a sort of "social blindness" with unusual strengths like pattern recognition to get insights into social situations in a more detached way through a different lens.

People also can be on a team with somebody who has a deep understanding of social value who doesn't have it themselves. Jobs/Woz comes to mind.

Re: The Weird Nerd comes with trade-offs

#114

Post by throwaway42668 »

mattgreenrocks wrote: post #108

It feels like more and more areas of life are regressing to the mean in terms of how status is distributed. The mean being some sort of centralized cabal-like structure (perhaps autonomously/accidentally centralized, like an algo) doling out status. By design, it is highly uneven, quasi-random (there are things that make you eligible but there are no guarantees), and their authority to do so unquestioned. Take social…

> And people _love_ this sort of structure because it means that something other than actual competence can be the deciding factor.

It's different competence. Not incompetence. It's being competent at identifying marks to exploit, attention-seeking, etc.

I don't particularly care for it myself and feel pretty strongly that it's narrowing the gap between humans and apes, rather than widening it, but it's still some kind of skill.

Re: The Weird Nerd comes with trade-offs

#115

Post by anal_reactor »

ToucanLoucan wrote: post #16
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…

The author bemoans that any org that is not sufficiently pro-weird-nerd becomes anti-weird-nerd, and in conjunction with this comment which laments the experience of working under one alongside my own experiences of similar, I think it's worth remarking that many Weird Nerds not only do not foster social skills of any sort, but in fact view this as a badge of honor, as "proof" of their weirdness, and just, I'm over t…

> but seriously. You need to be able to hold a conversation. You need to be able to talk productively with your fellow people, including difficult conversations. You need to open to negative feedback, to be able to take criticism or contrary viewpoints without turning into a puddle of some combination of depression/rage/self-hatred, or people are just not going to get on with you.

You implying that non-nerds have any of these traits lol no they don't it's just that they exhibit more of group-thinking and less individualism, so they provoke less situations that might potentially cause conflict.

My experience with nerds is "ok each has their own opinion this is going to be difficult but let's try cooperating" whereas non-nerds act exclusively "my way or the highway" because they have never previously encountered the idea that their view of the world might be wrong "because I'm the majority".

Re: The Weird Nerd comes with trade-offs

#116

Post by Aurornis »

belinder wrote: post #68
kristjansson wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Just a guess here - but to make diagnosed people feel more included and part of a group, the more people get diagnosed even if it's 0.01%, the more safe the others feel because they're not alone, it stops being a stigma

> but to make diagnosed people feel more included and part of a group, the more people get diagnosed even if it's 0.01%, the more safe the others feel because they're not alone,

I've worked with younger people in tech. I'm seeing a mix of effects, positive and negative, from increased diagnosis rates.

On the plus side, some people are using their diagnoses to find helpful support material, techniques, and advice.

On the negative side, some people get a diagnosis and then try to use it as an excuse for every personality trait they can fit under the umbrella of that diagnosis.

It's really difficult as a mentor to have to explain to someone that their diagnosis of anxiety or ADHD or autism doesn't give them a free pass in society for all of the things they struggle with.

I've had to explain to numerous people that having an ADHD diagnosis doesn't, for example, exempt them from the same performance review standards as their peers at work. This can be difficult to acceptance for someone who was given extra time on tests and possibly more leniency on assignments throughout high school and college due to their diagnosis. The educational institutions meant well, but the students took the wrong message from their accommodations and assumed it was always the world's responsibility to bend to their personal quirks rather than the other way around. Teaching people that their diagnosis is, to be blunt, not other people's problem is a difficult hurdle to clear for some. Many others get it right away, of course, but the internet rhetoric about neurodivergence leads a lot of people in the wrong direction.

Re: The Weird Nerd comes with trade-offs

#117

Post by Aurornis »

faeriechangling wrote: post #97
belinder wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just a guess here - but to make diagnosed people feel more included and part of a group, the more people get diagnosed even if it's 0.01%, the more safe the others feel because they're not alone, it stops being a stigma

This is not my experience at all. Being diagnosed directly led to immense stigma over and over. You are literally giving people the language they need to stereotype you and put you into a bucket by getting diagnosed and telling people your diagnosis. Stigma is literally an iatrogenic consequence of diagnosis itself, never mind diagnosis stopping stigma! I hear "Autistic" thrown around as an insult maybe 10x more than…

> by getting diagnosed and telling people your diagnosis

One of the things I try to emphasize with newly diagnosed young people is that they should not make their diagnosis an outward part of their personality.

There's a trend of putting your diagnoses in everything from your LinkedIn profile to your resume lately. I've been helping with resume review in a group and I've been stunned by how many times I've had to tell people that they need to remove their ADHD diagnosis from their resume.

Re: The Weird Nerd comes with trade-offs

#118

Post by mattgreenrocks »

throwaway42668 wrote: post #114
mattgreenrocks wrote: post #108

It feels like more and more areas of life are regressing to the mean in terms of how status is distributed. The mean being some sort of centralized cabal-like structure (perhaps autonomously/accidentally centralized, like an algo) doling out status. By design, it is highly uneven, quasi-random (there are things that make you eligible but there are no guarantees), and their authority to do so unquestioned. Take social…

> And people _love_ this sort of structure because it means that something other than actual competence can be the deciding factor. It's different competence. Not incompetence. It's being competent at identifying marks to exploit, attention-seeking, etc. I don't particularly care for it myself and feel pretty strongly that it's narrowing the gap between humans and apes, rather than widening it, but it's still some ki…

Good catch. It gets at technical competence, but it isn't constrained to that. It's more of "good at what the org ostensibly is about," vs "good at ensuring the org lives on."

Re: The Weird Nerd comes with trade-offs

#119

Post by Animats »

It's the author of the article that seems weird, not the researcher.

A major risk in academia is picking a dead-end niche. We hear about the people who picked an unlikely winner. This one picked mRNA vaccines. The inventor of MRI scanning had similar problems. He was almost fired. Those two succeeded, eventually. But the people who work on E-beam lithography or vaccines against addiction didn't do so well. Both of those would have been huge if they worked well. You can't tell in advance. If you could, the problem didn't need research.

A more useful way to look at this is that doing it and selling it are different skills. This is why companies have separate R&D, production, and marketing departments. If you face a hard problem in one of those areas, you can't devote enough time to the others. This is to some extent a time management and division of labor problem.

Academia is not team-oriented in that sense. At least below the principal investigator level. Once reaching that level, university PR departments are happy to hype any modest advance into a major breakthrough. Below that level, it's a cold world. Academia seems to have built itself a dysfunctional world - a huge bureaucracy, not much of a career path for real researchers, and a shrinking pool of full professorships. So anybody who is any good goes to a startup now.

Henry Kissinger, who was not lacking in people skills, once commented that "academic policy is so vicious because the stakes are so low".

Re: The Weird Nerd comes with trade-offs

#120

Post by pavel_lishin »

glitchc wrote: post #91
pavel_lishin wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

You conflate two things that are actually quite different. You don't need to be friends with the Weird Nerd, but you do absolutely have to respect their expertise in the subject matter, especially when it exceeds yours. It's in your employer's interest to do so. Not doing so means you're being less than professional and might secretly be jealous of this person for having attained a higher level of technical achieveme…

Respect for your knowledge, yes - but if you're the world's top expert in Subject X, while simultaneously world-renowned for being an unpleasant asshole, don't expect people to interact with you more than the absolute bare minimum required to do the job.

And frankly, nobody's irreplaceable. If you're #1 in the world, but casually drop racist and sexist slurs, odds are that the #2 expert in the world isn't that much worse than you, nor #3..#10.

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