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The Weird Nerd comes with trade-offs

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Re: The Weird Nerd comes with trade-offs

#421

Post by harimau777 »

CalRobert wrote: post #343
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…

This bizarre romanticization of autism is frustrating for those who are or have loved ones who are nonverbal, stim all day, etc.. I almost wonder if nerfing autism to the point where it's a fun thing to talk about having on tiktok is a way to demonize effective interventions so insurance companies won't have to pay for them.

I think that there's a big difference between high functioning and low functioning autism. It's not surprising that people with high functioning autism want it romanticized in order to help protect themselves against discrimination or being thrown away for not being useful.

Re: The Weird Nerd comes with trade-offs

#422

Post by ModernMech »

detourdog wrote: post #231
rustyboy wrote: post #225

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Out of curiosity, given it is a spectrum, what's at the other end of "really" autisitc (if that's even the right word) or does that just go from 0 being "normal" to 1 being that "really"?

I think another comment said the opposite was schizophrenia.

I have no idea what that comment is talking about, the "opposite" of autism is not schizophrenia -- there's no "opposite" of autism and if there were it wouldn't be schizophrenia, I don't see how that possibly follows.

Re: The Weird Nerd comes with trade-offs

#423

Post by [deleted] »

auno wrote: post #391
rustyboy wrote: post #225

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Out of curiosity, given it is a spectrum, what's at the other end of "really" autisitc (if that's even the right word) or does that just go from 0 being "normal" to 1 being that "really"?

It sounds like what you are thinking of is a spectrum more in the sense of a range, where one end is "least" and the other "most". There was an interesting article[0] making the rounds a few years ago arguing that it's more like the color spectrum. While there is an underlying linear value to the color spectrum in the wavelength, you don't really talk about red being "more" of a color than blue just because it has lo…

[deleted]

Re: The Weird Nerd comes with trade-offs

#424

Post by YurgenJurgensen »

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

This fails the placebo test. People feel more included and part of groups even if the groups are assigned at random.

Re: The Weird Nerd comes with trade-offs

#425

Post by hoseja »

CalRobert wrote: post #343
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…

This bizarre romanticization of autism is frustrating for those who are or have loved ones who are nonverbal, stim all day, etc.. I almost wonder if nerfing autism to the point where it's a fun thing to talk about having on tiktok is a way to demonize effective interventions so insurance companies won't have to pay for them.

Well then let us undo the work of Hans Asperger.

Re: The Weird Nerd comes with trade-offs

#426

Post by jerf »

"And I believe the conversation here starts with accepting a simple truth, which is that Weird Nerds will have certain traits that might be less than ideal, that these traits come “in a package” with other, very good traits"

I think the point here can be strengthened by removing the issue of "weird traits" entirely. The simple reality is, if you are hiring someone to be very, very smart in their field, at a world-class, there is literally no one who can just parachute in and replace them, level, you need to minimize the amount of other things they have to do in order to operate at that level.

Why hire a world-class irreplaceable expert to do anything if you're going to require them to spend 90% of their time doing things other than being a world-class irreplaceable expert? Even if the expert is the nicest person in the history of humanity, it's still a complete waste if you can't support them and they have to do all this other stuff just to be allowed to function as a world-class expert.

In local parlance, this is no different than hiring a senior engineer and then 100% filling their schedule with meetings. Or expecting to hire a unicorn that is an expert in seven distinct languages and is also a manager and a high-level sales person. If I put that job listing out HR would laugh and send it back to me. Essentially making "world class scientist AND good manager AND expert sales/politician" the baseline for functionality in the sciences is just a recipe for futility.

There doesn't even have to be a correlation with "weird traits"; even a population-average distribution of the ability to me a manager + politician + sales + something else is a very, very tall ask. Add back in that there are certainly good reasons that outlier personality traits are fairly likely to go with outlier skills and it just makes it worse, but it would be plenty bad enough without that.

Re: The Weird Nerd comes with trade-offs

#427

Post by giantg2 »

Gigachad wrote: post #409
giantg2 wrote: post #257

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, you can't diagnose most people. Yes, the diagnosis generally requires there to be disabilities related to it. Otherwise it doesn't meet the criteria.

That's the current medical way, but the author and this thread like to put up the idea that basically all if not all programmers and "weird nerds" are autistic but it's just massively under diagnosed. To which I disagree, if there are essentially no disorders in your life, you shouldn't be diagnosed. The ASD spectrum has become incredibly broad to the point where someone who likes just programming too much is being c…

"The ASD spectrum has become incredibly broad to the point where someone who likes just programming too much is being classified in the same group as someone who can hardly speak, let alone look after themselves."

This isn't true at all. The ASD grading has different levels based on the level of assistance needed. Unless that programming is significantly impacting your abilities in life, you would be told that you display some ASD like behaviors but that you don't actually have ASD.

I know a therapist that specializes in adult ASD and they believe that many people in technology fields do have undiagnosed mild ASD. The strong logical basis to the work and other characteristics of the job may play a role in attracting people whose minds work a certain way. It also seems the few people I know who have been diagnosed later in life tend to be in technical fields. The observations and the theory behind it seem to make sense. But not everyone has it, and there is criteria that need to be met to diagnosis it (disabilities).

Re: The Weird Nerd comes with trade-offs

#428

Post by AmericanChopper »

bradleyjg wrote: post #405
AmericanChopper wrote: post #392

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> You have an employee that’s brilliant in technical area X but also has very strong and very wrong opinions about how the company ought to structure its cap table, pay its cleaning staff, and market to potential customers. He gets into constant arguments about these things. What do you do? The same thing you do with any highly anti-social employee, fire them. It doesn’t matter how sophisticated their technical skill…

Congrats, the university you run just lost out on a Nobel Prize. The donors are going to love that.

I’m sure this is the threat that the brilliant asshole types would want you to believe. But there’s no limit to the amount of talent that one single toxically anti-social team member can deter from joining an institution, or that they can chase out of one for that matter. Especially if they’re a senior team member.

There’s also essentially no limit to the amount of damage they can do in companies. Even if you put aside the potential impact on company culture, I’ve seen many engineers needlessly waste huge amounts of company resources pursuing solutions that they considered to be technically brilliant (and which may have been), but were completely misaligned with the company’s objectives. I’ve personally witnessed one (especially brilliant) Rust engineer drive a company completely out of business with this approach.

Re: The Weird Nerd comes with trade-offs

#429

Post by ToucanLoucan »

anal_reactor wrote: post #414
stale2002 wrote: post #161

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> You implying that non-nerds have any of these traits The thesis of the initial discussion is that it is unfair to hold "weird nerds" to certain standards. The person you are responding to is claiming that actually some of these standards are important. Your response to that of claiming that the standards are important is to say that actually normal people don't pass those standards either. This doesn't refute the a…

When people say "I want you to have good social skills" they think "I want you to collaborate with others and not cause drama". These two might seem similar but they aren't. It's okay to expect people to live up to expectations, but at the same time you might admit that these expectations are unfair and put certain people in disadvantage because of their innate traits. Imagine you have an all-Arab company and you hir…

I would absolutely, 100% expect professional behavior from a bunch of arabs and a Jew who found themselves working together, and it's frankly illuminating that that was your go-to as a scenario that would inevitably cause workplace friction, especially following a line about "innate traits."

And that's before we get into nerds being a minority which is just... no. Nerd shit is so mainstream at this point and co-opting minority status to talk about you really being into geology or something is... a lot.

There's a lot going on here and I'm not interested in unpacking it, have a lovely day.

Re: The Weird Nerd comes with trade-offs

#430

Post by ToucanLoucan »

esskay wrote: post #380
CalRobert wrote: post #343

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This bizarre romanticization of autism is frustrating for those who are or have loved ones who are nonverbal, stim all day, etc.. I almost wonder if nerfing autism to the point where it's a fun thing to talk about having on tiktok is a way to demonize effective interventions so insurance companies won't have to pay for them.

It's been a similar pattern with ADHD, it feels like its almost been turned into a trend. Although that being said we've had a number of people at our place been diagnosed with ADHD, Autism and in some cases both, all developers, all within the last 3-5 years, and you know what, they're absolutely correct diagnosis. It's a mix of romanticization and a change in acceptance and understanding of the two, and they do oft…

It just seems to be the way of things. There's an inherent value in being yourself without feeling the need to hide, and via the process of de-stigmatization, more people are comfortable coming out and expressing that they are what they are, and because of the de-stigmatization effort, those people are uplifted. And in turn, other people who want to feel special and want more social capital will either imitate it or try to get diagnosed themselves.

The "my ADHD brain" stuff isn't my thing, though I am pretty sure I have an ADHD thing that's so mild it doesn't quite qualify for the second D, but I have a heavily ADHD spouse, and she likes them. I think it makes her feel less crazy/dumb for doing the admittedly sometimes amusingly boneheaded things she does, like bashing her arms and legs into things or making tea and forgetting it a moment later. But also she has grappled with how that content flattens ADHD into, her words, "quirky ditz syndrome" and much rarely goes into the darker aspects she struggles with, like being completely unable to accomplish a basic task for hours on end and getting increasingly frustrated with herself, or her "zombie hours" when she gets absolutely stuck in her phone (I eventually helped her setup parental controls on iOS to boot her off after awhile, but even that being couched in things called "parental controls" is humiliating for her).

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