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What happened to nerds?

mrmarket.lol

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Re: What happened to nerds?

#431

Post by JuniperMesos »

hdhdhsjsbdh wrote: post #292
JuniperMesos wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> What's more, many nerds discovered that with enormous amounts of money, comes enormous amounts of power. You can now actually lobby for your sci-fi dream world, which is what some of the billionaire nerds are doing. > The money and power corrupted them. Actually accomplishing things in the world that constitute building a sci-fi dream world requires significant amounts of money and power, and any person or institut…

> I rode across town in a self-driving Tesla the other day while giving orders to its AI system about how and where to go. That was a pretty sci-fi dream world experience. That's worth quite a bit of corruption. This is why people hate nerds. Will not explain.

Plenty of people also hate whatever identity label you want to use for yourself.

Re: What happened to nerds?

#432

Post by _DeadFred_ »

altairprime wrote: post #424
vidarh wrote: post #340

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The challenge is to distinguish "think about hard problems for a long period of time, only speak up when you have something positive to contribute" from slacking. I am not arguing for bullshit metrics - I personally love working on things that may or may not pay off on a 10 year+ horizon and wish I could do more of that. But at the same time I've seen enough people coast to accept that most places that either isn't -…

A system that can’t tolerate occasional coasting is a system that can’t tolerate creative bursts. The trick is detecting “I secretly lost hope but my stream of income is very comfortable” when paying a costly salary; which would be mitigated somewhat by switching the tenure benefit of either pay enough to afford, or outright gift of, a single-family home ( looks pointedly at Stanford ) to a variation of residence hal…

Way back MBARI was looking for a role that in part included keeping the servers on their research ships going. That was my dream job. Only interview I completely failed because I wanted it so much and froze. Imagine eating Phils when it was still a hole in the wall, chilling in Moss Landing. Decades later I still daydream about that job.

Re: What happened to nerds?

#434

Post by juleiie »

traeame wrote: post #206
juleiie wrote: post #27

Nerds were bought out and turned into money and thus wife having chads. Now, the basement dwellers of today are actually tech illiterate and skillless with no charming qualities at all. Blame capitalism.

Seems illogical that you can quantify a subset of people that wouldn't even want to interact with the average joe on the clearweb. We're alive, intelligent and active on our IRC.

I know sites you have no idea about running on pure spite and strangeness. I am banned from almost all mainstream social media for wrongthink. What do you know about underground spaces?

Hell, just few weeks ago we ddosed one of new text only social media sites for having a bad font. There is a real microcosm down there. And war.

Don't go there. People would eat you alive for breakfast, doxx and possibly hack you as soon as you would start bragging about 'intelligence'.

Re: What happened to nerds?

#435

Post by mystraline »

iwontberude wrote: post #258
mystraline wrote: post #254

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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. Those career paths were always crooked. We see that going back to my great grandparents time with Black friday of 1929. They fucked around with unrestricted capitalism, and found out. Quite…

Unless you were black then you might think good god these yts gonna displace us again with a new new deal.

I know youre trying be inflammatory, but also accurate.

US culture has always had an out-group that could be sacrificed to the capitalist machine. And even Northern rhetoric woukd have people believe that slavery didnt exist there. Ive been in Boston at the slave docks. Banned in 1830's btw there. And slavery also benefitted the North even if banned.

And after the Civil war, black folks were still 3rd class. Took another 100 years to get the same legal rights. And even now, blacks are underpaid compared to the same jobs by whites.

Most of wealth extraction to black communities is mostly complete. Musk runs datacenters using methane generators in black communities, horrifically polluting them. And the republicans who run the cities/states dont care.

But the USA has effectively run out of people to sacrifice. Now, theyre coming for the middle-income whites. Thats the squeeze we're seeing. And thats not going to end well. Likely will be horrifically violent.

Re: What happened to nerds?

#436

Post by _DeadFred_ »

gnopgnip wrote: post #384
hattmall wrote: post #371

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We shouldn't really seek to punish "slacking off" though. Because when the opposite of valuable contribution isn't slacking off it becomes unintentional sabotage. It's a lot less noticeable in jobs that don't have immediate consequences for poor performance, but it really stands out in jobs where it immediately matters like construction. In a lot of cases everyone is getting paid the same but talent stands out and so…

If you don’t “punish” slacking off your institution falls behind even if there is no sabotage

If an IT department doesn't appear to be slacking off it is doing a poor job. It's much better to pay someone who prevents fires and sits around appearing to not be doing much, than a team constantly running around putting out fires that are costing a tone via lost productivity but look really busy.

I imagine scientific inspiration/insight comes in flashes. The ability to be honest in the job/what is going on/realistic is going to get much better results long term with better mental health, and trust making better internal dynamics.

Re: What happened to nerds?

#437

Post by ph4rsikal »

lojban wrote: post #212
ph4rsikal wrote: post #208

Increasingly men have been disenfranchised over the last decade so the only way forward is to take on such titles to at least appear successful. It looks like normal behaviour to me.

Could you elaborate? In what ways have men been disenfranchised?

For tenure-track positions—the pipeline for future faculty—white men have gone from 49 percent in 2014 to 27 percent in 2024 (in the humanities, they’ve gone from 39 percent to 21 percent).

https://www.compactmag.com/article/the-lost-generation/

Re: What happened to nerds?

#438

Post by parineum »

maxbond wrote: post #322
the__alchemist wrote: post #307

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am suspicious of this fruit-altitude analogy due to its long history of use, and 100% failure rate.

That sounds like excellent grounds for suspicious but I don't know what you mean. We were talking about Peter Higgs for example. I don't think Peter Higgs could have self funded CERN. I don't think a thousand Peter Higgs could have. Nation state level resources are the table stakes for fundamental research into particle physics, because everything beneath that barrier has already been explored - I don't think that's…

> I don't think Peter Higgs could have self funded CERN. I don't think a thousand Peter Higgs could have

Higgs didn't use the LHC to write the paper which won him the Nobel prize.

Additionally, I think it's worth considering that the availability of the money that built the LHC alleviates the drive to find different solutions.

As they say, "necessity is the mother of invention." I frequently think of the great pyramids and people being baffled on how they would build something of that scale without modern equipment. It's hard to get your mind to come up with novel ideas when it already knows that you'd use cranes, trucks, etc. to do it today.

Re: What happened to nerds?

#439

Post by altairprime »

_DeadFred_ wrote: post #432
altairprime wrote: post #424

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A system that can’t tolerate occasional coasting is a system that can’t tolerate creative bursts. The trick is detecting “I secretly lost hope but my stream of income is very comfortable” when paying a costly salary; which would be mitigated somewhat by switching the tenure benefit of either pay enough to afford, or outright gift of, a single-family home ( looks pointedly at Stanford ) to a variation of residence hal…

Way back MBARI was looking for a role that in part included keeping the servers on their research ships going. That was my dream job. Only interview I completely failed because I wanted it so much and froze. Imagine eating Phils when it was still a hole in the wall, chilling in Moss Landing. Decades later I still daydream about that job.

Their open house is next month; if you stopped by in the morning and asked to learn more about their vessel IT and told your story, odds are they’ll have someone with that role ashore from last month’s expedition that could chat with you for an afternoon. They exist because of dedication and are likely to respect it in kind. At worst you’d get to visit MBARI with seasoning, at best live another life-sheaf vicariously through someone else’s experiences :D

Re: What happened to nerds?

#440

Post by vidarh »

hattmall wrote: post #371
vidarh wrote: post #340

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The challenge is to distinguish "think about hard problems for a long period of time, only speak up when you have something positive to contribute" from slacking. I am not arguing for bullshit metrics - I personally love working on things that may or may not pay off on a 10 year+ horizon and wish I could do more of that. But at the same time I've seen enough people coast to accept that most places that either isn't -…

We shouldn't really seek to punish "slacking off" though. Because when the opposite of valuable contribution isn't slacking off it becomes unintentional sabotage. It's a lot less noticeable in jobs that don't have immediate consequences for poor performance, but it really stands out in jobs where it immediately matters like construction. In a lot of cases everyone is getting paid the same but talent stands out and so…

I agree we shouldn't, but until we're at a post scarcity point, we kinda have to at least keep it somewhat in check.

But if you're standing around because there isn't anything positive you can contribute at a given moment, that isn't "slacking off" to me. That isn't the problem.

The problem is if you create situations that effectively encouraged people to seek them out because slacking off won't get noticed.

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