121–130 of 505 posts
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"Earning" doesn't necessarily come with a truly elite status job, because you're not relying on a salary to live. Having to live off a salary is lower status.
I don't understand what you're saying here.
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Caring about something deeply above external motivations, especially external validation is by itself neurodivergent. At the very least, you have to be highly introverted, which is rare.
I'm understanding your statement to mean that caring about something because of itself, without external motivation (like validation or money), is neurodivergent. So neurotypical would be to only care about something if you profit from you caring about it? Is that reading correct? If so, I have to disagree vehemently. That is not my experience at all and feels extremely homo economicus and - to be honest - depressing…
Most extroverts aren't ruthless machivellian self interested people like you are worrying I am claiming, but they are focused primarily on fitting in and being accepted by others- and do choose their activities and behaviors mostly based on that. Their interests are genuine, but the biggest factor in them is usually who it connects them with, and how it makes them appear to others. What do your hobbies, car, clothing, etc. say about you and how will that affect how others see and treat you?
Introverts are, as the name implies, more inwardly focused- and although they enjoy social connection and acceptance also, it can be exhausting and therefore less motivating, and generally takes a back seat to more inwardly generated concerns. It is often wrongly confused with being socially awkward or shy, which isn't the same at all.
>There was a time when academia was society’s refuge for the eccentric, brilliant, and impractical. No longer. It is now the domain of professional self-marketers. As for the eccentric, brilliant, and impractical: it would seem society now has no place for them at all.
https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/7004628-there-was-a-time-wh...
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Many weird nerds are on the spectrum and require very good people managers above them to mitigate their quirks, and should never go into people management themselves. The industry has really changed though. It is much easier to hire social well adapted people who can code at all than to hire a bunch of people with social problems who can code really good. The former is scalable at least, the latter breaks down as no…
Any non-trivial engineering or research is a team effort. It's good to have a mix of perspectives and temperaments in a team to keep poeple creative and honest. But the team ultimately has to cohere in order to deliver. That's really the core job of a manager: to create an environment where people can work together meaningfully and direct it to productive ends.
There's plenty of counterexamples in the software space, to the point where most great software was originally written by a single person - C, Unix, Linux, Git, TeX, Python, Ruby, Perl, SQLite, QEMU...
Most of these now have huge teams maintaining them of course, but the initial research and engineering that was needed to come up with the golden egg is usually a one man show. C designed by committee is COBOL.
This is ridiculous! The best researchers won't be much better at 45 than 25, so it's just wasting 20 years getting "experience" and moving up the ladder. But by nature of getting that experience, they're going to give up on actual innovation.
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…
Just one spectrum, 2 dimensions? Is that all we get? It's a linguistic short-cut, I get that, but I wonder how useful it is, how much nuance it conceals.
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Many weird nerds are on the spectrum and require very good people managers above them to mitigate their quirks, and should never go into people management themselves. The industry has really changed though. It is much easier to hire social well adapted people who can code at all than to hire a bunch of people with social problems who can code really good. The former is scalable at least, the latter breaks down as no…
Any non-trivial engineering or research is a team effort. It's good to have a mix of perspectives and temperaments in a team to keep poeple creative and honest. But the team ultimately has to cohere in order to deliver. That's really the core job of a manager: to create an environment where people can work together meaningfully and direct it to productive ends.
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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…
I get how it might be fulfilling to have a label to explain away all your behaviors but it makes no sense to do so and I find it extremely self-limiting
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…
Is it the autistic/not-autistic spectrum? Because if so, we're all on it.