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

281–290 of 505 posts

Re: The Weird Nerd comes with trade-offs

#281

Post by Aerbil313 »

Here's a different take.

> Everything comes at a cost: spend more time worrying about politics, there will be less time for science. What’s more, the kind of people who really care about science or truth to the extent that Karikó did, are not the same people that get motivated by playing politics or being incredibly pleasant.

Obvious answer: We should incentivize and structure our institutions to be more receptive to Weird Nerds in order to enable further progress of science.

My take: Scientific work is by its nature unnatural for human beings. Human beings played politics for millenia and are structured to do so, mentally, physically, biologically. Structuring our society to be more receptive to the people which we are wired to not be receptive is swimming against the current.

The same argument can be applied to a lot of modern phenomena.

Re: The Weird Nerd comes with trade-offs

#282

Post by [deleted] »

ergonaught wrote: post #258
sneed_chucker wrote: post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree with what you're saying, but also - everyone has problems. Is anyone truly normal or neurotypical? Why do some people's problems get the validation of the medical system and others don't? (These are non-rhetorical questions, I'm really not sure about the answers to them myself)

> Is anyone truly normal or neurotypical Yes. I get that your questions appear to be sincere and genuine, but, yes. Relative to the actual, demonstrable, neurological differences in connectivity and so forth in the “neurodivergent” brain, the overwhelming majority of people are “normal”. Relative to the actual lived experience of “neurodivergents”, the overwhelming majority of people are “normal”. These kinds of ques…

[deleted]

Re: The Weird Nerd comes with trade-offs

#283

Post by Aerbil313 »

anewhnaccount3 wrote: post #123

Shades of Graeber in this essay: >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...

I don't know. Does internet communities count?

Re: The Weird Nerd comes with trade-offs

#284

Post by majormajor »

faeriechangling wrote: post #220
detourdog wrote: post #173

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The disorder is how they affect their social surroundings. Everyone is on the spectrum and the disordered are having social problems.

Yeah but we don't call people disordered for lacking the talents of these gainfully employed autistics, so it seems sort of arbitrary to me.

But would it be worse for the world if we could actually understand and identify things - and find treatments for - executive function failures like extreme laziness or trouble with timekeeping?

Or are the people who fail to hold down a job really just morally bad and of low character?

Was it better for people to just be "weird" or "creepy" or "freaks" instead of somewhere on the autism-spectrum?

The judgement of the behavior predated the diagnostic labels.

Re: The Weird Nerd comes with trade-offs

#285

Post by makeitdouble »

Gigachad wrote: post #198
giantg2 wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

ASD has different levels of diagnosis. I've been told by a therapist specializing in ASD that there are a lot of diagnosed and undiagnosed ASD workers in tech. It's very possible the only reason they are "full blown clinically diagnosed" is because they haven't been tested.

At this point we could diagnose basically everyone on the planet with some flavour of neurodivergence. I’m sure there’s one that makes people good at sales, one that makes people ruthless CEOs, one that makes people programmers, etc. But I just don’t see the point of diagnosing people with things unless it causes some kind of actual disability and dysfunction.

The issue IMO is we don't have a non medical but accurate word for "some flavour of neurodivergence".

The author tries to come up the "weird nerd" terminology, but it doesn't feel better to me. Extending the medical term to non problematic behaviours feels like a better tradeoff to me.

We already do that in spades: people can have myopism to varying degrees, and we don't avoid putting them somewhere on the scale until they need coke bottle glasses.

Re: The Weird Nerd comes with trade-offs

#286

Post by kristjansson »

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

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2024/05/13/why-were-turni...

Re: The Weird Nerd comes with trade-offs

#287

Post by bsder »

cbozeman wrote: post #171
bradleyjg wrote: post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

However, in my experience the vast majority of brilliant nerds way overextend themselves, and are much too confident outside their domain. They're also much more likely to be jerks and will tumble from conflict to conflict until they get their way by attrition or status. Conflicts are strangely more personal because so much ego is tied up into it. They're more likely to assume they're right in every (non-tech/science…

"You're out of your depth." That's what you do. A lot of very smart people think because they're very smart they have some kind of exceptional insight into the inner workings of all things. They don't. And they need to be reminded of that. Intelligence allows someone to gain that insight faster than those in the middle of the bell curve of IQ, but it doesn't magically confer it . It still takes time, reading, researc…

> "You're out of your depth."

Except most of the time ... they are not. Most non-junior WNs learn to have significant respect for those doing the work. The Weird Nerd judges based upon objectively observed behavior rather than social cues or group opinions.

Mostly, the Weird Nerd gets in trouble because they simply aren't fooled. And that pisses of corporatocrats like you worse than anything else.

The WN can see that you are rewarding the politician rather than the person who actually did the work. The WN will actually calculate the full cap table and see the distortion that flags the insider backscratching. The WN can envision exactly how the sales incentives will be exploited. etc.

Effectively, the WN is a canary that detects bad managers immediately unlike normal people. And that's something that bad managers simply cannot abide.

Re: The Weird Nerd comes with trade-offs

#288

Post by makeitdouble »

parineum wrote: post #109
makeitdouble wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

You didn't use this word specifically but this whole conversation has the underlying prior of the "everything is a spectrum" mindset. In that context, everyone is neurodivergence because, afterall it's a spectrum we're all on and nobody is going to be deadest average. At some point we have to define at what point these spectrums become clinical. The kind of language you see in the DSM for stuff like this is "does it…

> At some point we have to define at what point these spectrums become clinical

Thing is, I'm not a psychiatrist, the author probably isn't, most of us aren't. The question of whether it becomes clinical is IMHO irrelevant to most of us.

We won't be standing in front of someone pondering whether they can apply for disability, the better question will be how comfortable they are at keeping eye contact for instance.

Re: The Weird Nerd comes with trade-offs

#289

Post by faeriechangling »

sctb wrote: post #111
sneed_chucker wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Good thing I see no to negative evidence that autistic men actually mask. Autistic women I see more evidence for.

Also, saying "this deserves medicalisation" and throwing a label on people doesn't mean you're actually helping. Lets say somebody was masking - how would medicine help them?

Re: The Weird Nerd comes with trade-offs

#290

Post by faeriechangling »

alistairSH wrote: post #214
sneed_chucker wrote: post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree with what you're saying, but also - everyone has problems. Is anyone truly normal or neurotypical? Why do some people's problems get the validation of the medical system and others don't? (These are non-rhetorical questions, I'm really not sure about the answers to them myself)

Why do some people's problems get the validation of the medical system and others don't? Very roughly, because some people can't function without intervention (for loose definitions of "function"). And some treatment (therapy, drugs, whatever) can help them function. Autism 1/Aspergers is sometimes kind of borderline - some people can function with it, but it can exact a heavy tool on them as a sibling comment noted.…

I asked this elsewhere but will ask this here - does calling people autistic and medicalising actually prevent misery, depression, and suicide?

This whole thought that autistic people who appear to have no problems are all secretly on the verge of not just burnout, but AUTISTIC burnout and will tailspin into the nether at any moment is a recent idea I have yet to see any actual evidence of other than self-report. The entire idea smacks of non-falsifiability to me.

Post reply on HN