The Nerd as the Norm

From the first link, this part is so relatable :

"They'll stop going to the company picnic if it becomes an occasion for everyone to list all the computer problems they never bothered to mention before."

I don't really think his concept of a nerd works, since he lumps in lots of extraneous charateristics and values.

I think a more explanatory description would be, a nerd is somebody who is primarily interested in technical questions. That predisposes nerds to avoid ambiguity - but by no means excludes nerds like literature professors, who are absolutely obsessed with ambiguity.

It's generally a better idea to categorise people by priorities, as opposed to preferences - since preferences tend to be very variable.

> It would be nice to have nerdy interests and sensibilities be the norm for once; to get to feel as if society is organized with me in mind, and not feel a bit like an anthropologist observing an alien civilization.

For real though...

"Nobody is going to respect you for having feelings."

Funny, the inverse world.

I love the idea of a name for non-nerds, but don't know how to pronounce "wamb" - is the b silent as in lamb?

Why even try to show there is a "norm" as opposed to a multimodal distribution of traits?

These are probably different peaks in the spectrum. Unfortunately, this truth runs counter to people who want to control everyone... or at least predict.

The description of the anti-nerd would completely fall apart in Asian culture for instance.

Great article. Very clever the flipping of the traits.

really interesting piece.