Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

What happened to nerds?

mrmarket.lol

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

491–500 of 541 posts

Re: What happened to nerds?

#491

Post by conwy »

boelboel wrote: post #276
conwy wrote: post #251

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Admittedly this is anecdotal, but I've visited many doctors over the years, as a patient, and pretty much all of them treated me well, practiced their jobs professionally and gave me good advice and treatments. I never had a doctor give me advice that turned out to be wrong or ill intentioned. Again ... maybe it's just my experience. None of these were super life threatening conditions. However I did go under the ope…

Being non-virtuous doesn't all of a sudden turn them into some kind of evil monster. It's just a job for most of them, one that pays well. Being professional and giving treatment like they should (basically following orders) is the easiest way to avoid problems for doctors. This all changes when they get more difficult patients. As someone who's been told bogus by doctors, even lightly pushing back many will complete…

But it's good that being virtuous is the "easy path" for them. That's how I want it to be. Why would I want to make it difficult or put impediments in the way of my doctors doing their job well?

My point is that, when the institution supports and encourages virtuous behaviour, the actors within the institution are more likely to practice virtue.

I think this is also largely the point of Plato's Republic.

Re: What happened to nerds?

#492

Post by hollerith »

crote wrote: post #58
negergreger wrote: post #6

Nerds 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…

Ah yes, the internet where we had polite conversations on the merits of Vim vs Emacs, and women wanting to participate were warmly welcomed with a friendly "tits or gtfo"... Shitposting, trolling, and harassment has been around since the very beginning of the public internet. If you didn't see it, it has to have been because you were (unconsciously or not) looking away. The "ideologues and political commissars" didn'…

I didn't see any shitposting on the internet in the 1990s or the decade after that, nor anything remotely like "tits or gtfo" before I saw it on 4chan (which started in 2003).

I did see a lot of trolling and a little harassment (not of women or other disadvantaged groups).

Re: What happened to nerds?

#493

Post by conwy »

moron4hire wrote: post #298
conwy wrote: post #251

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Admittedly this is anecdotal, but I've visited many doctors over the years, as a patient, and pretty much all of them treated me well, practiced their jobs professionally and gave me good advice and treatments. I never had a doctor give me advice that turned out to be wrong or ill intentioned. Again ... maybe it's just my experience. None of these were super life threatening conditions. However I did go under the ope…

> I've visited many doctors over the years, as a patient, and pretty much all of them treated me well, practiced their jobs professionally and gave me good advice and treatments. I never had a doctor give me advice that turned out to be wrong or ill intentioned. You are extremely lucky, then. As a man, I've been gaslit by my doctors about my depression. My PC in my early 20s told me I was just lazy and needed to get…

Well I've had more mixed experiences with other kinds of professions. Real estate agents have fibbed to me about the condition of the property, recruitment agents have misrepresented the role, financial advisors have given me sub-optimal advice. There didn't seem to be much in the structure to prevent this. Doctors, nurses and surgeons on the other hand were very careful and thorough, and that included telling me things I didn't want to hear. This makes sense. Medicine is much more serious - people's long-term health and lives are at risk.

I don't deny there's privilege involved in my case. Again, this seems an institutional problem. The medical field as a whole needs more inclusive frameworks to deal with women's health, racial justice, LGBTIQ, ageism and much more. These are issues need to be addressed at an institution and even whole-of-society level. You can't expect each individual to independently solve for them all. At the very least, they need education.

Re: What happened to nerds?

#494

Post by keeda »

jnwatson wrote: post #122
keiferski wrote: post #78

I don’t know why you’d think “being interested in nerdy stuff like computers” would somehow translate into virtuous behavior. They seem like entirely different things to me, in the sense that I wouldn’t expect a writer, or a baker, or a chef to have typical ethical behaviors as a group. “What happened” was just that some people got rich and powerful and their real personalities showed through. This is not a new thing…

Bill Gates is a great counterexample to the article's premise. Always clearly a nerd, yet led a company that no one loved and many people hated for its strategy of embrace, extend, extinguish. Post-CEO, he had completely refurbished his image via philanthropy, only to throw it away with the Epstein stuff.

All the replies questioning Gate's nerd cred and philanthropy are incorrect.

1) There is ample evidence of him being a huge nerd. You can find dozens of references about how sharp he was technically at Microsoft. Here's one of the better known blogs: https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2006/06/16/my-first-billg-rev...

He even published a paper on a Math problem in undergrad before dropping out to start MSFT: https://www.npr.org/2008/07/04/92236781/before-microsoft-gat...

2) I would challenge all the commenters claiming his philanthropic work is "falsified" or "just PR" or "mostly self-serving" to prove it, keeping in mind there are ample public records all over the place.

You can dislike a person, especially Gates who was famously a huge jerk, but really... let's stick to facts please.

Re: What happened to nerds?

#495

Post by a_bonobo »

_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.

Many billionaires are starting up ocean expedition places, surely they'll want IT. Off the top of my head I can think of OceanX (Ray Dalio), Inkfish (Gabe Newell), RevOcean (Kjell Inge Rokke out of Norway). They're all building or already have massive ships with sophisticated IT and research equipment.

Re: What happened to nerds?

#496

Post by oliculipolicula »

plaidthunder wrote: post #458
PaulHoule wrote: post #164

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That’s a system though that seems to be at the breaking point.

Yes. It might be a general property of all human organizational structures, to degrade over time in terms of intent drift and erosion of public goodwill. It offers some predictive power if so, like OBAFGKM + luminosity is enough to determine where a star is on its lifecycle. Maybe there's a similar domain that maps some human coordination structure onto a deterministic trajectory from birth to death. If that were the…

Hey it's the one that Turchin managed to have not named... psychohistory. Fair enough, that's not absolutely about a one-way life-cycle (From not overly much to sometimes less than zero, or its counterpart There and back again).

For VC, go back to the Medicis? Obsession with Roman over Athenian (ie, not even Macedonian or ahem Florentinian, whom, as you know, were blessed-- by themselves-- with nonTrumpian^W (-"anti"-)papist perturbations) can only push them closer to all of extant theory. They don't get to have Germanics explain their early policy failures, eg

Update: for the record, I hold the opinion that libertarianism and liberalism (social, political but not to forget the far less trendy "fiscal") should be right next to each other in parameter space. One may be allowed to define a metric that puts a firewall, or, if you are less amused, an event-horizon _around_ them. I'd suggest "make things people want"

Re: What happened to nerds?

#497

Post by 8note »

simonh wrote: post #152
andyferris wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think nerd -> believes in science. Science -> requires honesty, curiousity, humility, persistence (i.e. admit you are wrong, accept you losses). Generally I'm not sure you'd be considered a nerd if you weren't too honest for your own good. Not that this covers all types of virtuous behavior - there do exist nasty scientists. (And there is some level of fraud/dishonesty in academia, too).

Musk is a fascinating example. Incredibly hard working, visionary, detail oriented. Without him we'd probably not have had reusable rockets for another generation or more. With Tesla he also accelerated electric car adoption. He was also brutally honest about their chances of success, when pitching SpaceX to the other initial investors he gave it a 10% chance of success. He was little more confident about Tesla, sayi…

we probably would. the key to both those things was government money and support

Re: What happened to nerds?

#498

Post by sublinear »

Yapping7880 wrote: post #478

I feel like, as an industry or social group, we're going through a midlife crisis. There were so many people in tech who I looked up to as a young engineer, and now it feels especially bleak for young people in tech to find role models. But that could just be me being ~40 and despising what so many of these people became at ~60+. Cleve Moler, the creator of MATLAB, died a few weeks ago. I've had the opportunity to me…

At the other side of the "midlife crisis" is the self-acceptance and maturity to become that role model.

I'm not saying that to glorify anything. The sentiments in your comment could have been written at any point in human history. Part of that maturity is to lose the ego too. You're not a hero for doing what feels natural, and that is to share what you have been fortunate enough to gather so far.

Re: What happened to nerds?

#499

Post by harrall »

fizzyfizz wrote: post #339
keiferski wrote: post #78

I don’t know why you’d think “being interested in nerdy stuff like computers” would somehow translate into virtuous behavior. They seem like entirely different things to me, in the sense that I wouldn’t expect a writer, or a baker, or a chef to have typical ethical behaviors as a group. “What happened” was just that some people got rich and powerful and their real personalities showed through. This is not a new thing…

The OP is mostly talking about image, not reality. What image do tech founders choose to project. OPs timeline is somewhat off. They posit a golden era for the 1980s-2007 but that’s not right. Tech CEOs have often been hard-charging salespeople and businessmen. Look at early Wired magazines and there was much celebration of random rich guys in suits, as much as the nerdy tech creators. This was the “suit/hacker” dich…

I don’t know about everyone else but “nerds” have never had a positive image to the general population.

Nerds as honest or incorruptible? In popular media, from Revenge of the Nerds to The Simpsons to Big Bang Theory, the defining feature of “nerds” is that they have poor social skills and less regard for their fellow humans.

Now people like Jeff Bezos or Elon Musk look like the nerds that now have money and power! Ah ha! “It doesn’t matter what others think of me now! This is revenge for looking down on me before!”

Re: What happened to nerds?

#500

Post by musicale »

pc86 wrote: post #318
nradov wrote: post #283

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And academia will become even more toxic as opportunities shrink along with declining student enrollment. A lot of the third-tier colleges will close entirely.

This seems good, honestly. A degree from a third-tier college doesn't do anyone any good except the administrators at that college.

The competition for faculty jobs at any college is typically fierce, which means you can find excellent faculty almost anywhere.
Post reply on HN