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The Weird Nerd comes with trade-offs

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Re: The Weird Nerd comes with trade-offs

#71

Post by gavinhoward »

As a Weird Nerd who can't get a job in the industry [1], this resonates.

On one hand, I understand that I can't get a job because of my own flaws. After all, who needs a solo-only C-only [2] programmer who can't build theory of mind and thus, can't read code written by others and who refuses to prioritize employer over user?

On the other hand, it is hard, and I secretly hope the industry can change so that people like me can have a place.

Edit: To clarify, I don't think I am a Genius, just a Weird Nerd in the sense that I do not like politicking. However, I am trying to learn from my empath wife how to do it because yes, it is a necessary evil right now.

[1]: https://gavinhoward.com/2024/06/my-programming-journey/

[2]: https://gavinhoward.com/2023/02/why-i-use-c-when-i-believe-i...

Re: The Weird Nerd comes with trade-offs

#72

Post by neilv »

Yossarrian22 wrote: post #5

The author is missing a crucial pressure that pushes against weird nerds, the people that have to work underneath them. I’ve had to answer to a Weird Nerd when I was starting out in my field, it was the worst fucking experience of my life, and I’ve spent the years since warning people away from that person, their career and their contributions to their field have stagnated due to all the people like me that they burn…

> I’ve had to answer to a Weird Nerd when I was starting out in my field, it was the worst fucking experience of my life,

I wouldn't want to tar all people who might be perceived as Weird Nerd, based on one data point (which AFAIK might not even be due to them being a Weird Nerd).

Almost all of the too-many people I've seen burn others under their influence, I wouldn't have called any of them Weird Nerd. And none of them appeared to be geniuses. Rather they tended to be at least somewhat successful as political operators, unlike how the article characterizes Weird Nerd. (Arrogant seemed to be the most common attribute, then greedy, dishonest, and unprintable bad word.)

Someone might decide to call some of those FTX cryptocurrency scammers Weird Nerds, but you could also just call them overprivileged brats with consequently warped worldviews.

Re: The Weird Nerd comes with trade-offs

#74

Post by dukeyukey »

FormerBandmate wrote: post #30
Michelangelo11 wrote: post #27

I do think it's a major issue that academia is increasingly bureaucratic and corporate, but I don't quite agree with the article. It's not that very smart, truth-motivated people have bad people skills (e.g., off the top of my head - von Neumann, Feynman, and Newton were all pretty good with people when they needed to be), it's that they are motivated largely by discovery and not by status and money. But academia tod…

Academia pays absolutely terribly for an elite job, it's all status. You could make more than 90% of tenured professors as a manager of Buc-ee's

"Earning" doesn't necessarily come with a truly elite status job, because you're not relying on a salary to live. Having to live off a salary is lower status.

Re: The Weird Nerd comes with trade-offs

#75

Post by Aurornis »

Yossarrian22 wrote: post #5

The author is missing a crucial pressure that pushes against weird nerds, the people that have to work underneath them. I’ve had to answer to a Weird Nerd when I was starting out in my field, it was the worst fucking experience of my life, and I’ve spent the years since warning people away from that person, their career and their contributions to their field have stagnated due to all the people like me that they burn…

The author sidesteps the problem entirely by picking the most idealistic Weird Nerd possible: A person who is indisputably talented, accomplished, perseverant, and even benevolently forgives those who wronged her in the past.

In the real world, the "Weird Nerd" rarely checks all of these boxes, let alone most of them. I bet a lot of people will read this and identify as the Weird Nerd despite checking none of the boxes. That's the nature of articles that leave out the nuance and instead give us the most idealized view of a noble scientist who was a victim of the system. It leaves an opening for everyone to feel like they were a victim of the system.

That's why this problem is far more complicated than articles like this would lead you to believe. Many of the "Weird Nerd" people out there aren't perfect scientists or engineers unfairly shunned by the system. Many of them have real flaws of varying degrees that would require a lot of guidance and mentoring even within a perfect system. And it's not easy! In fact, it can be very taxing on teams to work around the quirks of your average (non Noble Prize winning, like this article) Weird Nerd even if they can produce good output, which is why so many companies select for Boring Nerds instead.

Re: The Weird Nerd comes with trade-offs

#76

Post by giantg2 »

Not going to lie, I would like to see myself as one of these smart people who was held back by lack of social skills like selling oneself and capitalizing on political situations. I think that's probably unrealistic. However I do sympathize with much of what the article describes. It would be nice if politics and stuff wasn't so important.

Re: The Weird Nerd comes with trade-offs

#79

Post by ambicapter »

belinder wrote: post #68
kristjansson wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

At some point the question is “why?”. We can keep atomizing human variability into smaller, more graduated buckets of neurodivergence, but what’s the point, esp. for those that don’t really suffer negative impacts, and for which there isn’t really any remedy besides acceptance?

Just a guess here - but to make diagnosed people feel more included and part of a group, the more people get diagnosed even if it's 0.01%, the more safe the others feel because they're not alone, it stops being a stigma

How does sifting people into smaller and smaller buckets work to make people feel more part of a group? Seems more like people who have felt marginalized in the past want others to feel marginalized like they did, and work to place people into smaller and smaller categories to do so.
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