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What happened to nerds?

mrmarket.lol

341–350 of 541 posts

Re: What happened to nerds?

#341
This is going to be buried, but I'll say it anyway.

I've been thinking about this a fair amount over the past 5-10 years, and I think a lot of the issues that we have can be traced to our demography and specifically 'the zeal of the convert' along with existing cultural dysfunction that would have been addressed if we'd grown more slowly as a group.

There's a lot of discussion about tech as an industry, but much less about tech as a culture, encompassing people's lives outside of their work/career.

Most people who are into tech in their 40s-60s came into it via a strong interest as an adolescent or young adult, and a fair number of them felt misunderstood and/or were abused/taunted/bullied/etc by mainstream culture. Then they discover this part of the world where people think like them and things make sense. They make friends who see things in systems! They can argue with facts! They agree what is important to argue about! They agree that consistency in thinking principles matters! Etc. This means a lot of people in tech, particularly the ones who hold the most power (even outside of founders) are decently likely to have either a disdain of or fear of non-tech cultures due to bad experiences, feel that tech culture needs to be defended from outside influences who don't understand and would crush it, and are well... zealots about it.

The problem is zealots are really bad at accepting and pinpointing issues within a culture. They want to defend it beyond all reason because to them, that culture/group is their safe place. If someone is bad in the culture, it can't be a sign of something wrong with the culture (because the culture is a safe place). Instead, that person 'isn't a true X'. Or that person is just a bad apple. The other influence is that converts absolutely don't want to lose their place. In the case of tech culture, because we've intertwined the culture with a career, that means people being afraid of losing their career/network/etc.

This is a different than being born into something. The perspectives are different. People born into tech culture/grey tribe/however you want to label it get to see more of how the culture expresses itself in different relationships (including its problems). They see disagreements between nerd adults that aren't mediated with corporate or monetary power/status structures, they have a choice about how much of the culture they participate in or not (like how someone born Catholic who goes to Mass once a year at Xmas is still considered Catholic regardless). There's more wiggle room, and more a sense of how those virtues play out over an entire lifetime instead of being limited to how they're expressed in a workplace between the ages of 20 and 45. Depending on the particular situation, it's also possible to have someone in tech culture who doesn't hold any personal grudges against the other cultures they share space with.

Right now, since we're dominated by converts between the ages of 20 and 50 and we've grown so quickly, we haven't had the time to create the cultural guardrails that would allow us to do things like 'agree on what constitutes an abuse of power' or 'agree on what we should teach our kids about morals', etc.

And because of the lopsided age pyramid, we have next to no elders, which doesn't help either.

This is shifting slightly as the first generation of explosive growth is starting to reproduce, and soon they'll start aging out of the workplace and we'll start to see more contemplative behavior. It's already somewhat starting: there's hints of people reaching that stage in their lives.

(NB: Yes, I'm aware that the tech industry pre-dates the 80s, but demographically those numbers are minuscule in comparison to the people who joined during and after the dot com boom. My grandmother used punchcards and knew C and was born in 1934, but there just aren't enough people with that experience for them to exert a cultural pull. Almost all of the elders we do have are regarded individually: we know (or know of) those people, but that's different from 'I'm struggling with this moral question, I'm going to go ask John because he's both wise and will understand what I'm talking about enough to give decent advice'.)

Re: What happened to nerds?

#343
post #318
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.

I feel great about my degree from my third tier college. I learned a lot I didn't expect to, got into a top tier grad school afterwards, and came away with no debt. Maybe me and the millions of other third tier college students are too dumb to know what's good for us, though.

Re: What happened to nerds?

#344

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 was always a POS, reading about his behaviour earlier on doesn't make him seem in any way virtuous. The whole 'charity' persona he put on afterwards is just PR.

Gates was (is) definitely a huge nerd. Much more than most of the people here.

He was also the poster boy for tech nerd assholes, until the scale of tech assholery shifted wildly for the worse, and he switched to legacy building mode.

Re: What happened to nerds?

#345

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…

Over 99% of students who attempt your "mostly quiet" strategy are managed entirely out of academia long before tenure.

You won the lottery, which is great for you, but it's not a strategy to promote to others as life advice.

Re: What happened to nerds?

#346

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> There's plenty of wealthy folks who aren't especially evil or greedy in any real way, but you wouldn't know that because they don't tend to show off or spend their wealth to begin with I'm well aware, I'm personally early-retired person with financial independence, and of course I have friends too :) With that said, many of them are greedy, some in big ways others in smaller ways, even if they're generally good peo…

My first- and second- hand experience with rare counterexamples is that if you meet a Hollywood star in person they will make a good impression; as if they make a bad impression it will make an impression and you will tell your friends. Lately I’ve been doing a sort of street performance which makes it very likely people will remember me and that again motivates me to be nice. On the other hand I hear Elon Musk comes…

Actors, trained to get to their cognitively resonant freq at a snap. Graham Norton show is complex enough to show off their basic charisma. No need for "reverse-psycho" multidim post-AI inoffensive-charm-offense that has Thiel's approval. Prediction: not going to see Karp appear, guy is too "complicated" (normies: creepy) for an "ivy league" game. with respect to sama. Needs an academic-sociopath drinking game show together with Sarah Payne, Thiel himself, Catherine,David Deutsch etc. it's probably going to be some kind of faux-snobbish LATAM liquor. Fernet con Coca?

Musk is basically a nerd who's ever surprised at what he can get away with, other times over his head in technical matters, and still other times suffering the South African typr of elite arrested development.

Trump recognised that he was facing a equal or better operator. Musk would feel insecure in the same situation. That's nerd. Maybe Trump has a similar training as actors (by actors?), just not to the frequencies normies expect :)

Re: What happened to nerds?

#347

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Law was good people when? During the era of the 3/5ths compromise? Dredd Scott? Plessy? Lochner v NY? Buck v Bell? Korematsu? All of those are only things because there were lawyers willing and eager to sue the government over the evils at issue, so your point is much weaker than you think.

That’s actually exactly my point. That all these fields have had good and bad people the entire time and that the ratios probably don’t change all that much. It sounds like you’d agree with me.

Well, yeah, I suppose I don't disagree with your overall point lol, sorry if comment sounded overly combative

Law and finance were sources of and avenues to money and power from the outset. Took some time for tech to emerge as such.

Re: What happened to nerds?

#348

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

The points your making make sense. I am thinking of it like this: Say there is an elegant argument. It checks out at first. Then you do the unit analysis, and find out the units don't match! But you still don't find the flaw in the original argument; maybe because it's suble in some way. That's where I am: Very smart people have been writing things in the vein of your post here for millenia, and it always seems convi…

Yeah, I agree. It works as an argument for why science can't rely on wealthy benefactors, not for understanding what is possible with a given budget at a given point in time. And biology and chemistry are good counterexamples where capabilities are getting smaller and cheaper.

I would point out that that's on the back of a huge amount of research funded by grants and performed in national labs, but it doesn't impact your argument.

Re: What happened to nerds?

#349

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…

[flagged]

It has crossed my mind that being a scientist is for people who are already financial independent. Same as being an artist. For the rest of us, we need focus on careers where we can make a living. Of course, we can still do science and art as hobbies, but it is rather risky pretending to make a living from it.

Re: What happened to nerds?

#350
post #318
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.

I have been to a "third tier" college, but do you learn nothing there?
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