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What happened to nerds?

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Re: What happened to nerds?

#511

Post by abstractcontrol »

p-e-w wrote: post #311
almost_usual wrote: post #299

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Some people are naturally talented at things. It’s no different than an average athlete who works extremely hard and an elite athlete who puts in half the work but still outperforms the average.

What? Elite athletes put in unimaginably more work than average athletes.

Yes, this is what I mean. It's not that talent doesn't exist, but it's never the case that people on the top of their domain work less hard than others. In fact, it's the opposite. People don't have talent, the talent has them.

Re: What happened to nerds?

#512

Post by sapphicsnail »

JumpCrisscross wrote: post #504
nerdsniper wrote: post #287

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? Finance was good people when? When Swiss banks captured all the war spoils of WW2? When they ran Penny Auctions during the Great Depression? When they financed slave ships? When the Medici financed endless war across Europe? I’m not saying people are all awful, but I don’t think there’s any “b…

> Law was good people when? I'm a fan of Cicero.

Cicero was so obnoxiously pompous and vain. Maybe go further back to Solon?

Re: What happened to nerds?

#513

Post by watwut »

harrall wrote: post #499
fizzyfizz wrote: post #339

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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! A…

I always interpreted terms geek and nerd as: geek is someone knowledgeable extremely into a some tech or scifi or some such".

Nerd is geek plus low social skills. He may be just awkward and once you get used to it he is actually nice. Or, he may be as asshole. But always weird.

Re: What happened to nerds?

#514

Post by atom_arranger »

m_fayer wrote: post #108
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…

Nerd-dom has also somehow merged with the world of fantasy and fandom. These are subcultures obsessed with hero journeys, morality tales, escapism, and cartoonish black-and-white ethical systems. I don't expect such people to handle fame and wealth well at all.

I'm not claiming everyone uses the terms this way but for your consideration:

Geeks - Obsessed over fictional world(s). Nerds - Obsessed over the real world (or a specific part of it).

Comics Geek Math Nerd

There's a decent amount of overlap though.

Re: What happened to nerds?

#515

Post by TrackerFF »

boelboel wrote: post #168
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 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.

A lot of high-performing nerds are by nature competitive, and really dial the "I'm always correct until proven wrong, and even then I might correct" personality trait up to 11.

Some guys, like Gates, seemed to have extremely opinionated views on what Microsoft products should have been like. That should be a given, as he was the co-founder and CEO, but when you see older footage of him, he has (had?) this "This doesn't make sense to me, so it is shit" way of seeing things. He also seemed to have a typical brutally honest way of reviewing stuff, which can make one come off as very abrasive.

Can't remember where I read it, but there was this psychology paper that studied elite performers, those that were considered to be at the very top of their game (sports, business, art, culinary, etc.) - and toxic/abrasive leadership is just more accepted, because the top performers strive for perfection, no mater the cost. Their subordinates and co-workers just consider it "tough love", instead of abusive behavior.

Re: What happened to nerds?

#516

Post by SenHeng »

watwut wrote: post #513
harrall wrote: post #499

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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! A…

I always interpreted terms geek and nerd as: geek is someone knowledgeable extremely into a some tech or scifi or some such". Nerd is geek plus low social skills. He may be just awkward and once you get used to it he is actually nice. Or, he may be as asshole. But always weird.

You may be right. Ut that’s just pointless bike-shedding.

harrall is right that to the general populace, nerds/geeks are interchangeable terms for people who prefer to study/play with computers rather than socialise with the rest of us.

That doesn’t necessarily mean they have a better moral compass and will always do the right thing. Those are images that nerds put onto themselves.

Re: What happened to nerds?

#517

Post by AnthonyMouse »

Spooky23 wrote: post #159
AnthonyMouse wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> far less moderation and tone policing This feels like maybe even the majority of the problem. In general corporate social media favors memetic content and disfavors "inconvenient" content. Inconvenient meaning things that cause non-trivial numbers of users to mash the thumbs down or "report content" button. The premise of that is supposed to be that people are reporting spam and trolling etc. The problem naturally…

That’s a ZIRP problem. You didn’t have massive sprawl communities until the investment was there to build systems to keep Nazis and trolls away. Slashdot really highlighted this for me - if you followed the site and the core forum of founders, dealing with moderation was horrible. The writing of CmdrTaco over the years really made it sound like it just made him miserable.

If suffering more trolls is the price of not sterilizing the things that make humanity interesting then we've made the wrong trade off.

Re: What happened to nerds?

#518

Post by srean »

altairprime wrote: post #423
srean wrote: post #400

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do dupe's get necessarily de-ranked ? If it has active participation in the form of new comments, it makes sense to merge the comments and not penalize the post.

If you email the mods and ask them to do so, they’ll either agree or let you know why they didn’t. I don’t have a solid enough grasp on how their logic works to predict the outcome here.

> Dupe's

It gets tiring to watch over autocorrects

Re: What happened to nerds?

#519

Post by watwut »

SenHeng wrote: post #516
watwut wrote: post #513

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I always interpreted terms geek and nerd as: geek is someone knowledgeable extremely into a some tech or scifi or some such". Nerd is geek plus low social skills. He may be just awkward and once you get used to it he is actually nice. Or, he may be as asshole. But always weird.

You may be right. Ut that’s just pointless bike-shedding. harrall is right that to the general populace, nerds/geeks are interchangeable terms for people who prefer to study/play with computers rather than socialise with the rest of us. That doesn’t necessarily mean they have a better moral compass and will always do the right thing. Those are images that nerds put onto themselves.

I agree with more compass.

But I genuinely find it weird that Musk and CEOs in general are called geeks or nerds. Their whole thing is that they made a choice to spend less time doing actual tech work and a lot more time doing business, managing, dealing, etc. Whole their success is predicated on their ability to make people do what they want. They are not spending time tinkering with computers, they are spending time schmoozing for investment contacts. That is literal opposite of a nerd or a geek.

In the "revenge of the nerds" drama, they would be ultrasocial jocks bullies with cool computer game at home.

Re: What happened to nerds?

#520

Post by Millennium »

Most nerds became collateral damage from society's attempts to contain something much darker: something we mostly forgot even existed, and only fought through outdated traditions. We meant well when we tore out those countermeasures, and we did end that collateral damage. But we no longer remembered what we were keeping at bay, and so we also set the darkness free. The monsters at the top are only part of the problem, and might not even be the biggest: they have plenty of counterparts at the bottom who are in some ways even worse.

Now we have to figure out a new way forward. We need a way to put what needs chaining up back in its chains without harming the innocent weirdos. I don't have an answer. There might not be one. But it is the challenge.

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