Be nice to nerds | Hacker News Reader

Be nice to nerds

economist.com

93 pointsjaoued68 comments

After living in the US for nearly 2 decades I am still amazed at the fact that Americans belittle and make fun of people who are experts in certain fields and go as far as calling them names. When I was a kid in USSR I participated in a club called "Юный радиолюбитель" (similar to amateur radio hobbyist) where kids from 9 to 16 made electronic gadgets, radios, games and etc from publicly available schematics. I remember how fascinated everyone in my class was when I talked about the stuff I worked on. When I came to the US, still as a teenager, I was mocked as a geek or nerd. It is the oddest thing and still makes no sense to me.

Anecdotally, I feel that it's mostly because of stereotypes that nerds are socially awkward. In American culture, there's a lot of emphasis on being popular.

Yes, just looking at the replies here, it seems that everyone wants to shoehorn themselves and other into categories. I am a nerd in many ways, but I am also plenty of other things.

Culturally there are two main groups:

1. Popular or "cool" people. Anyone who is not "book smart".

2. Nerds, geeks, etc. People considered to be smart.

There are people who somehow manage to belong to both sides. But its very clear cut. Everything you do is defined by that. I don't know how it came about, but have noticed that it came to be during the early 20th century. If you look back at media from around after WW2 ended (late 40s and 50s) it starts to become used in movies and television. Popular people are into sports, cars, etc. Nerds are science types.

I experienced both sides in high school. In my experience, the popular side was more concerned in having a good time than anything. They wanted the attention. The nerds were generally better people all around. Nicer when you got to know them. I was a nerd who did sports and somehow ended up in between. But then decided to go full "nerd". The right choice because those friendships have lasted.

> Culturally there are two main groups:

Except, really, no.

> 1. Popular or "cool" people. Anyone who is not "book smart".

Except lots of people in this group are book smart, and even recognized as such by their peers in this group. It just isn't seen as dominating who they are.

> 2. Nerds, geeks, etc. People considered to be smart.

I would say that nerds, geeks, etc. as distinct from "popular" are defined more by perceived (from the "popular" perspective) overattachment to niche intellectual pursuits.

There is a very loose correlation with perceived smarts here, but its quite possible to be perceived as geeky/nerdy without being perceived as smart, and vice versa.

Also, you leave out (3) the very wide group of people who are neither particularly popular nor perceived as geeks/nerds.

>> Culturally there are two main groups: Except, really, no.

Except you've missed the word "main".

By any reasonable definition where either #1 or #2 is a "main" group, #3 is a main group.

Would you please expand this point:

Also, you leave out (3) the very wide group of people who are neither particularly popular nor perceived as geeks/nerds.

> There are people who somehow manage to belong to both sides. But its very clear cut. Everything you do is defined by that.

If you live in a sitcom maybe.

It all comes down to our culture of hero worship.

American heroes are defined by Hollywood. The #1 trait being - they get the girl. This Darwinistic prerogative of American Individualism has been the defining factor of our hero worship. If you don't fit the description, you are lesser.

Tech is introducing "the ability to change the world" as a competing concept to biological evolution. Thus, we are seeing nerdy entrepreneurs slowly added to the lexicon of hero worship.

American?

Ford Madox Ford quotes a saying from the north of England: When land is gone and money spent/Then learning is most excellent.

The Prince of Hanover who just caused a shakeup in the Gottingen faculty said "Professors, dancing girls, and whores: you can hire them for money anywhere." (Except, as it turned out, when the professors have names like Grimm and Humboldt, maybe you can't.)

No doubt one could multiply the examples. If America is at all a special case, it is probably because things traditionally changed faster here, and yesterday's learning might not apply to today's situation.

Although I'm very much Australian, my wife is Russian and her mother is a teacher. During a visit to my wife's small city, we attended some kind of summer show at her mother's school, which had students from elementary to high school levels.

There were some great dances performed by both girls and boys, of all ages. Some of the dances were rather "feminine" by the standards I was used to (I'd say ballroom maybe?) and I asked my wife and her mother whether the boys had issues with teasing or bullying. They actually seemed genuinely confused about why dancing would lead to teasing/bullying (their answer of course was no, there was no harassment).

In my rural Australian high school there were a few boys who danced (and numerous girls) and the prevailing attitude seemed to be that "masculine" dancing like break dancing was cool and totally okay while "feminine" dancing like ballet would have you treated like an outcast, teased and bullied.

I'm not sure whether the attitude I encountered in Russia is particular to my wife's region (North Caucasus) or all of Russia but it was quite interesting to see just how different things were.

Not only that, but as somebody who was actually a nerd before it was popular, I'm terrified of the "coolification" of geekiness. As an actual awkward social misfit, I'm pretty sure that if nerdiness actually becomes trendy, I'll be uninvited from the "club". It used to be that, at the very least, there was a place for me because I could read hexadecimal and recite the TCP header format. If computer programming becomes any "hipper", I won't even have a place here.

Here is another thing that still amazes me in the U.S - making fun of old people just because they are old (and not for any other reason). This isn't as common elsewhere as it is here, at least in my experience.

Just watch "mean girls".. It's celebrification.

Are these the ads by GE that the article is talking about?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3xGoBlI_fdg

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OvfU1NpCJQQ

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OpDIEJrog3s

That first commercial made me seriously crack up when I saw it for the first time. Great commercial.

Oh god, those are hilarious

Third one is dead-on.

Does anyone know where to find those IBM commercials from the dotcom boom that made fun of nerdy IT people? One had someone run in saying "Server's down! It doesn't scale!" and the other guy goes to his keyboard and says "Lock. The. Door." The other one had a web designer asking a puzzled businessman "You can have a spinning logo, or a burning logo."

Does anyone else think this is just nerd blackface, much like The Big Bang Theory? We're laughing at the nerd, not with him.

  > Techies in San Francisco don not only hoodies but
  > also T-shirts with “G∑∑K” emblazoned on the front.

Really, a geek would actually wear a t-shirt like that? It sounds a bit like someone who is a computer neophyte wearing (non-ironically) a t-shirt that says:

  CTRL+ALT+DEL
  I'm a computer expert

> > Techies in San Francisco don not only hoodies but > > also T-shirts with “G∑∑K” emblazoned on the front.

> Really, a geek would actually wear a t-shirt like that?

A techie might. A geek would have something more like "ΓΙΚ".

You are confusing geek with Greek.

No self-respecting geek would misuse a sigma where an epsilon belongs.

Phonetically, I'm think it should be an iota, not an epsilon, though either is far closer than sigma.

Now that we can nitpick: "a iota", not "an iota" :)

It's hard not to read gSSk there. I scratch my head.

I don't care if it is supposed to have been reclaimed. To me 'nerd' is a nasty, derogatory word that I don't use myself and I take offense when other people use.

Agreed, labels suck, though I have been called a bro-grammer and for some reason it doesn't bother me. Maybe because its the antithesis of nerd.

That's interesting. I feel like brogrammer would bug me a lot more than nerd. It could just be preferences though.

Well, back in the day, "nerd" meant "social misfit". Which a lot of us were (me included), because we were too busy trying to be smart to be worried about learning how to play the social game. (Paul Graham wrote an essay about this, "Why Nerds are Unpopular".) But in the real world, it turns out that social skills also matter, and I should have realized it earlier.

But these days, "nerd" means more "socially awkward but really smart", which is neutral to positive from our perspective.

"Brogrammer", on the other hand, to me at least means "male who thinks he's really smart (even if he isn't) and therefore that he can be an offensive jerk to others, especially females". It would bug me a lot if someone thought that was true of me.

Its unfortunately that is your interpretation of the word because your definition is inflammatory

By "word", I presume you mean "brogrammer".

Do you have a less inflammatory definition? (I would claim that my definition is true to the current connotation of the word, even if not the current denotation.)

I've never seen/heard a non-derogatory use of "brogrammer" -- maybe gkilmain will enlighten us with some use I'm not aware of (has it already been reclaimed by brogrammers making in-group use of the term?), but the connotations are overwhelmingly negative: http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=brogrammer

Yes. Remove everything after the word smart and add "(like most people in the programming profession)"

That doesn't capture what I think of when someone says "brogrammer". At the very least, I think it also denotes a strong sense of machismo, with a connotation of disrespect for others and boorishness. It's not a positive term, generally speaking.

I would define brogrammer as a programmer who acts like a (stereotypical) frat-boy.

You know, living to party, acting up in boorish ways.

I'm am perfectly happy to be called nerd/geek but call me a bro-grammer and you will definitely piss me off. (and I'll hate myself a little for inspiring someone to call me a bro-grammer)

I would hate being called a bro-grammer, because for me it implies that other geeks aren't taking you seriously.

Very interesting to hear that. The opposite is true for me and I never would have thought people are still offended by that word. Very good to know that a word that's fun and light hearted to me might still offend others.

It's very common for a word to be OK for in-groups to use and not OK for out-groups to use. When someone in the in-group uses it, it's acceptable because they identify with it and it's a term of endearment. When the out-group uses it it's a label and a slur.

I'm not going to list any of these because I'm not in most of the in-groups (other than nerd) but if you think about it I'm sure you'll be able to come up with some examples.

Nerfherder

“Be nice to nerds. Chances are you may end up working for them”

Uhhh, no, chances are you're gonna be working for some MBA or other, alongside the other nerds.

Depends on the industry. In IT, I most of my bosses had a definitely nerdy background, except maybe one (who was still pretty nerd-friendy).

Most bosses are basically political nerds. Their area of expertise is politics.

> “Be nice to nerds. Chances are you may end up working for them,” wrote Charles Sykes, author of the book “50 Rules Kids Won’t Learn in School”, first published in 2007.

I'm not sure why this guy is getting credit for a saying that was a common teacher's refrain when I was still in middle school in the early 90's.

Regardless, nerd (still hate the word, but I'll use it here for the sake of brevity) triumphalism isn't going to help it happen. It feeds a superiority complex and an underdog mentality at the same time...the product of which can be quite cringy at times [0].

Nerds are becoming increasingly important as technology and science become more prevalent in our daily lives, but at the end of the day nerds still can't do it all by themselves. Even companies that are led by nerds still have people who aren't nerds that work for them and keep them alive: PR people, HR managers, financial analysts and accountants, etc. I would argue that the 99th percentile of financial and organizational managers are 1000x more valuable than the 99th percentile 10x engineer. Even the nerdiest of nerd-led ycombinator unicorns would consider themselves extremely lucky to be bought out by Bain Capital or Goldman Saks private equity, or to have 20% of their IPO value swindled from them by an investment bank. These organizations don't give a shit about how the world works, just about how well it makes them money.

Middle managers that shit on nerds are never successful, but nerds that shit on middle managers aren't successful either. If you can't see your position as symbiotic, you are doomed to failure.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10238132

Honestly, the amount of energy that a person can waste on something other than being mutually supportive is staggering. It's generally much better to consider people in more human terms, than "Nerd" or "Manager" in any case.

So the argument is "be nice to nerds because they make and shape new things"? What happened to be kind to people because they are people?

I agreed with everything in the article and thats why I think it's a poor article.

Hall mark of a good read is being doubtful of the posited headline premise but afterwards being utterly convinced of a new thought or stance.

You could have written this 20 years ago and it would feel just as accurate. I mean the premise is that nerds are trendsetters. The article contains lots of a fun anecdotes but nothing convincing or more importantly new. Exactly what does this article say thats new?

Since Jobs/Gates/Zuckerberg emerged people have looked to nerds to be good candidates for captains of industry.

> This year tuition fees at these boot-camps will reach around $200m in America alone.

Jeez, I'm in the wrong business...

> as awkward to watch as an engineer trying to do stand-up comedy for the first time

See above. I thank you :-D

Uh, hasn't this been the case for quite some time now? What is this article saying that wasn't being said about computer whiz-kids in the 90s?

Nerds have been poised to rule the world for about as long as Linux has been ready to break out onto the desktop.

It's strongly advised to be nice to people in general, but I agree that "Chances are you may end up working for them" :-)

> presents the “brogrammer” startup culture in all its grit and glory

Not one of the main characters could be described as a Brogrammer.

> Each month at least 70m people play “League of Legends”, a complex multiplayer online game; that is more than play baseball, softball or tennis worldwide.

... soccer?

> The “sharing economy”, exemplified by Lyft and Airbnb, also was originally a nerd thing: they prefer renting to buying stuff.

or we prefer cheap/better. Uber and Lyft are cheaper than a taxi and better. AirBnB means I can rent an apartment instead of a sketchy motel. If anything Zipcar would be a better example, pay to rent a car short term so you don't need to buy one. The whole point seems odd though.

> Brands like Mountain Dew and Doritos have sponsored video-game competitions

and are mocked for it... Drink verification can.

as a nerd I don't really like being lumped in with Dew chugging CoD players or anything to do with LoL. kinda /s

> that feels as awkward to watch as an engineer trying to do stand-up comedy for the first time

because engineers aren't funny right.

> As the success of Pokémon Go, an augmented-reality game, shows (see article), there can be big profits in the avant-garde areas where nerds like to experiment

The article doesn't point to the correct page but to a story about Theranos, strange.

http://www.economist.com/news/business/21702208-theranoss-fo...

Chances are it was written by a bad bot

>At the time [2011], the naysayers thought coding was a weird, fringe activity for computer-science geeks.

Is this at all true?

I was already pretty old five years ago and I can confirm that this was not at all true at that time.

I checked the date on this article assuming it was written in 1998. Nope, July 16, 2016. O-kay. Thought we had moved on, but I guess the Economist hasn't.

> Andreessen Horowitz has invested in various gadgets and products that early adopters have embraced, including a nutrient-rich drinkable meal for engineers too busy to take a break from coding, called Soylent.

What? Does nobody else think that is... messed up?

Soylent? I mean, it isn't really for "engineers too busy to take a break from coding". That's just the way the journalist chose to phrase it (and I found it hilarious as a soylent consumer).

Its basically the same idea as the other "liquid meal replacements" out there. Cheaper than a real meal and nutrient rich with little to no preparation.

I have it for lunch often just because I don't want to bother with making/buying lunch.

I assume he means the name... it's basically a reference to Soylent Green and cannibalism. "Soylent" is a portmanteau of "soy" and "lentil", but "Soylent" specifically is most commonly associated with the movie about a similar meal replacement where the secret ingredient was other humans.

Because of that, I literally thought the "Soylent" thing was a joke, I didn't think someone would ACTUALLY try to sell a meal replacement called "Soylent"... it's just... a bit macabre.

To be fair, the name seems to be based on the book Make Room! Make Room!, not the movie (extremely loosely based on the book) Soylent Green. Soylent in the book (also, the forms of soylent other than soylent green in the movie) was not made from people.

On the other hand, the movie probably has more cultural currency than the novel, so its still probably fairly poor branding.

Of course, if you're having Soylent for lunch, you're still buying lunch. You're just not having to go out to buy lunch.

Yeah, it is also cheaper than I can buy lunch by going out or getting delivery.

Well, it's not like it's Soylent Green.

Indeed, I think the use of such a derogatory description in an article called "be nice" is messed up.

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