Julian Assange and Mark Zuckerberg were two nerds on either side of the privacy spectrum in the twenty-teens. One was framed and tortured, the other was given an empire. The message was received. We now only have the Zuckerberg type.
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What happened to nerds?
181–190 of 541 posts
Re: What happened to nerds?
#182Money happened. Wherever there's big money to be made, will also attract ambitious people hungry for money and power - it's that simple. Now that FAANG jobs aren't looking all that attractive, many such people have set their sights on AI research/dev and quant finance jobs. The latter one has exploded in popularity / virality the past years. Previously a niche profession within finance which, frankly, most had no clu…
Multiple rounds of gamergate happened. All nerds without 7 figure income were kicked out as loosers (insoles). Now being nerd means larping as bilionare.
Re: What happened to nerds?
#183Earlier quoted context omitted.
I don't agree with Paul Graham on everything but he nailed this argument: https://www.paulgraham.com/identity.html > If people can't think clearly about anything that has become part of their identity, then all other things being equal, the best plan is to let as few things into your identity as possible. Of course one can't not have any identity whatsoever, afterall ethics is a type of identity and no one should in…
That was a great read! Thanks for linking it! Paul certainly has a way with words that I simply don't, and he expresses the same idea I had, only much more clearly. I wonder if being "engaged by identity" can be automatically detected somehow? Would be a cool experiment to build a automatic moderator that just hides identity based responses. Also makes me wonder if there's a reliable way to detect it in yourself? If…
I am surprised you haven't read it before, because when I read your comment I immediately remembered that essay haha.
For conscious bias a good test is if being exposed to new facts prevent you from changing your opinion on something.
For example, imagine I was a very big believer of full-blown libertarianism and I was exposed to very concrete evidence that say, for example, government run healthcare is both more efficient and cheaper than private healthcare[1]. Would I still be full-blown libertarian and try to put holes on the data or would I embrace that libertarianism doesn't bring good outcomes in healthcare[2]?
Unconscious bias is much harder though, in fact libertarians tend to be very much fueled by ideology than facts. One could say that unconscious bias is fundamentally the same thing as ideology.
Another example, like I mentioned before I am very much a pro human rights ideologist. So I am inherently against some things like eugenics, even though one could provide data to me saying that eugenics would lead to "better" outcomes in society I would still be against it on principle.
[1]: Personally I sympathize with most libertarian views, but I don't consider myself a libertarian. I don't think a full private healthcare system is good for example. And this is the core issue the essay brings out, being a libertarian is assuming an identity and it closes you off to new ideas.
[2]: it is very hard to have absolute evidence to anything, but one must be willing to look over their own pre-existing world view when analyzing information available. A certain level of suspicion of information is warranted, but if you can't get past that, your world view is essentially ideology.
Re: What happened to nerds?
#184This happens in any industry where value/status are at a premium. Finance, Law, VC guys were good too in the beginning but when the value/status change happens it attracts certain kind of guys who are average in talent but excel in demonstrating value and social management of the value/status. Another change which has happened recently is that the economics of engagement farming have become common place wisdom as alr…
Academia is the most relevant, toxic example that I can think of. Be horrible to others on a short term contract (grad students, postdocs) and break them whilst extracting maximum value -- get more papers, more grants written -- more money -- success. Be nice, think about hard problems for a long period of time, only speak up when you have something positive to contribute -- be labelled an underperforming academic an…
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Re: What happened to nerds?
#185What happened to Nerds was HN started calling Musk an Engineer...and rockets he was developing...
The original sin is earlier, when people with a dream and a million dollars were dubbed Hackers. And then articles like these calls these Stanford and Harvard guys nerds. Have they ever seen a true computer nerd, you know, the type of people that can actually write code and are not just paying other people to?
Re: What happened to nerds?
#186Earlier quoted context omitted.
None of those categories were ever “nice”, wtf.
Yeah, for law I imagine these "nice" beginnings were 2000 years ago at best. If they even existed at all. But all these jobs where talking to other humans is paramount will be dominated by extroverted quacks by default. Same goes for the capital raising college dropout pseudo-tech-bros. They were never nice, they just weren't so engaged in public discourse before, when billion dollar net worths still meant you actual…
You don’t have to go back that far. Read To Kill a Mockingbird for an example of a really nice lawyer.
Re: What happened to nerds?
#187Nerds used to have a internet to discuss tech in, you were allowed to make an argument based on logic and reasoning. Then the ideologues and political commissars showed up, giving zero shit about tech or logical reasoning, this pulled the discourse down to the lowest common denominator and the rest is history. Why should I take the moral high ground and listen to an argument I dislike if I'm not offered the same cour…
Isn't it the reddit model that absorbed them? Nerds were often seen as poorly social since "logic and reasoning" would go against socially accepted norms. This where the fedora tipping meme comes from: "everybody understands that religion is not literal, but we have to all accept the lie for social cohesion". But "nerds" would be the ones willing to take the ridicule and ostracism because truth would be more importan…
> Nerds were often seen as poorly social since "logic and reasoning" would go against socially accepted norms. This where the fedora tipping meme comes from: "everybody understands that religion is not literal, but we have to all accept the lie for social cohesion". But "nerds" would be the ones willing to take the ridicule and ostracism because truth would be more important than conformity.
I don't think nerds are/were seen as poorly social because logic and reasoning go against social norms. I'll bite on the religion focus. If everyone understands religion is not literal, being smirk about taking it literally is not logical or reasoning or making anyone look smarter. It just makes you look like a dork. Subtext and not being meant to read literally are a core part of social interaction.
I see the same in school, when some overly literal students argue about the interpretation of a book they are assigned to read. "the author can't possible mean that" or "show me where it says that on the page" is a common lazy criticism with little value. Some people are just like that, and (warning: personal observation) nerds tend to be a bit more like that. But the arguments I hear from that corner against religion are seldom great, they are just some minor gotchas.
I don't want to get into the whole religion debate, and I'll admit that there are also groups of Christians that take the bible very literally, as I'm sure there are for other religions as well. From what I can see, these don't make up the canon of religion, and I kind of believe they're mostly concentrated in North America, but that might be my skewed perspective.
It's quite sad that social mechanics in our society don't work well for some people, but that doesn't mean they don't exist and it doesn't make everyone except nerds "illogical".
Re: What happened to nerds?
#188Earlier quoted context omitted.
Academia is the most relevant, toxic example that I can think of. Be horrible to others on a short term contract (grad students, postdocs) and break them whilst extracting maximum value -- get more papers, more grants written -- more money -- success. Be nice, think about hard problems for a long period of time, only speak up when you have something positive to contribute -- be labelled an underperforming academic an…
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The stakes are never higher when the stakes are so low.
Re: What happened to nerds?
#189TLDR, "Yoink" =3
Patrick Boyle seems to cover the SPCX trajectory fairly well...
Re: What happened to nerds?
#190Earlier quoted context omitted.
Well, and now with the push towards AI slop and letting agents do work for you, it is even less about creativity and talent. You can't even chase trends in libraries while still being clever about it any longer, you gotta chase more and more braindead ways of getting code generated based on tons and tons of mediocre code found online, gobbled up by big tech without the original creator s' consent.
I think that plenty of 'nerds' would very much disagree about that. Steering agents effectively is something that can take massive amounts of creativity and talent and be quite helpful wrt. the final result. There's no real analogue of this in traditional programming.
Sure there's an analogue.
It's being the tech lead of a team of junior to mid level developers. You design roughly what the solution should look like, split it into reasonable sized tasks so they don't go off the deep end, advise them on some of the details, then assign them the tasks and let them get on with it, keeping an eye on what they're doing, reviewing their output, and course correcting them when they go wrong.
Just like with a team of humans, you have to use your judgement as to how much supervision they need individually and how large a task you can give them without them going off the rails.