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What happened to nerds?

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Re: What happened to nerds?

#401

Post by jimbokun »

nathan_compton wrote: post #293
azalemeth wrote: post #178

Earlier 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…

> 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 and managed into obscurity. I'm in academy and I'm mostly quiet and seek to contribute honestly and I've been managed into obscurity but I'm also quite happy, pay the bills, and more or less enjoy the work. If you want glory you have to deal with bulls…

There's a lot of wisdom here.

Re: What happened to nerds?

#402

Post by lutusp »

This is easy to answer -- the nerds are out there, but they don't push themselves into the spotlight. The reason Sam Altman gets more press than Linus Torvalds is because Altman is a media spectacle and Torvalds is a technologist. In terms of importance, Torvalds outranks Altman. In terms of flash, the reverse.

Consider this: present-day historians say Alexsandr Solzhenitsyn was a writer in the time of Leonid Brezhnev. 100 years from now they'll say Brezhnev was a politician in the time of Solzhenitsyn.

Re: What happened to nerds?

#403

Post by romaniv »

The premise of the article is faulty. "Nerds" became "cool" as technology became more important, so sociopaths in leadership positions stated to pretend to be nerds. It's as simple as that.

I think a far more important question is why we no longer have more reasonable public figures. Who are the modern equivalents of Isaac Asimov or Richard Feynman?

Re: What happened to nerds?

#404

Post by jimbokun »

afavour wrote: post #312
nathan_compton wrote: post #293

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 and managed into obscurity. I'm in academy and I'm mostly quiet and seek to contribute honestly and I've been managed into obscurity but I'm also quite happy, pay the bills, and more or less enjoy the work. If you want glory you have to deal with bulls…

It's the money side that applies pressure there. It's great that you're able to make enough money but a lot of people who aspire to the quiet academic life are stuck in the lower tiers making a pittance.

This is because there are far more people wanting a quiet academic life than there are jobs providing a quiet academic life with a livable wage.

And this is likely to become even more out of balance as college enrollment declines and there are smaller and smaller cohorts of freshmen as fertility continues to decline.

Re: What happened to nerds?

#405

Post by aranelsurion »

afavour wrote: post #323

The fate of many nerdy interests: you want it to become popular and widespread. Then it does, and you realise you've lost control of it and it becomes commoditised. So went comic books, goes tech.

Damn, I remember playing games in 90s instead of watching TV like my classmates, and daydreaming one day I’d be able to talk about games instead of what was on the TV yesterday.

Now everyone plays, watches or at least knows games, but most games are lowest common denominator focus group tested commodity crap. Huge budgets and production value, almost zero innovation. Even indies are 80% slop to make a quick buck.

If you have a hobby no one cares about, hold it dear and close to your chest, and be happy that no one cares about it.

Re: What happened to nerds?

#406

Post by leononame »

zozbot234 wrote: post #290
leononame wrote: post #273

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As for the why, I don't have an answer, but I thought I addressed it with this: > 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. There will always be peopl…

> The intentions of your garden-variety nerd talking about atheism are pretty clear, and it's not to make some greater theological point. I agree about the underlying intentions, but I was talking about the typical, literal arguments for garden-variety 'rational' atheism. The point that these arguments tend to map quite cleanly to negative theology would usually be considered a pretty strong one as a matter of philos…

Yeah, but only if you take the arguments fully out of context and only if you view a subset of the arguments.

First, the argument of your garden-variety nerd atheist don't always map so cleanly to negative theology. I've seen plenty of arguments in the realm of "The bible contradicts itself, so you're stupid if you believe in it. Checkmate", etc. You get the idea. Just some of the arguments map well to negative theology.

Secondly, the context is missing. In my original comment, I was talking about how being very literal is seen as poor social adaptation because subtext, inaccuracies etc are part of social communication. Pretending to not understand that, or not understanding that, does not make one a logical being, it just makes you look like a dork.

Your argument is applying a very literal take of the hypothetical garden variety atheist we've brewed up. This is the same as taking the bible very literal and then calling people stupid when they believe in it. It's not arguing the main point, but picking out something that's easy to criticize and building your argument around it. My point is that taking something very literal is exactly a sign of poor social adaptation when there is a relatively big agreement on not taking it literally by society.

Now, your garden-variety nerd's arguments hold up very well against people who actually do take the bible literally, but I'm getting to a point where I want to get off the religion debate, because that's not really what I wanted to point out originally.

Circling back to my original: Logic and reasoning is not against social norms. Being a dork who pretends to not understand or actually doesn't understand social norms just to make a point is. Being hurtful just to feel superior is against social norms. Pretending you're interested in "truth" and that's why you are not conforming to social norms is also a pretty stupid take, imo. Yeah, social norms aren't always great, and they certainly don't work for everyone and a lot of people are left out being the "weird" ones, it sucks. But the reason these people are the "weird" ones is not because they're on a noble crusade for truth and logic.

I'm pointing this out even though you're not the original commenter I was responding to because we kind of got derailed into the details of this thing that was more meant as an example than really the main argument.

Re: What happened to nerds?

#407

Post by jimbokun »

biofox wrote: post #142
goodpoint wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> guys who are average in talent but excel in demonstrating value and social management of the value/status aka techbros

I got into programming and computers due to their intellectual depth, and the exciting opportunities they opened to explore everything from electronics to obscure areas of mathematics... through to theory of mind and the dream of making silicon think. The combination of endless trend-chasing, software churn, and techbro culture made me hate everything about software, so I jumped ship to biology.

> ... through to theory of mind and the dream of making silicon think.

I think part of your naiveté was thinking this goal was likely to turn out as a net benefit for humanity. Maybe it eventually will. But the current scenario was always the most likely scenario for machines rivaling or surpassing humans in intelligence.

Re: What happened to nerds?

#408

Post by jimbokun »

zelphirkalt wrote: post #165
biofox wrote: post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I got into programming and computers due to their intellectual depth, and the exciting opportunities they opened to explore everything from electronics to obscure areas of mathematics... through to theory of mind and the dream of making silicon think. The combination of endless trend-chasing, software churn, and techbro culture made me hate everything about software, so I jumped ship to biology.

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.

The problem was very few nerds realized this was the most likely outcome as they devoted themselves to improving machine intelligence.

Re: What happened to nerds?

#409

Post by jimbokun »

zozbot234 wrote: post #172
zelphirkalt wrote: post #165

Earlier 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.

How so?

The models get better and better at understanding the intent of a prompt and doing more useful work with less intervention.

Re: What happened to nerds?

#410

Post by jimbokun »

marmarama wrote: post #190
zozbot234 wrote: post #172

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 wro…

Yes.

As AI improves every white collar job becomes a management job. With the previous conception of an Individual Contributor role disappearing.

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