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Comment by wccrawford | Hacker News Reader

>Nerds, on the other hand, are incentivized to gain social status via math skills as a potential escape of their low status.

This is certainly not how I approached math, and it's the first I've heard anyone say it, even.

Instead, I'm good at math because I enjoyed it. It's simple and logical and my mind worked really well in that way. There was never anything standing in my way of learning math, so I always just picked up any new math easily. Later, because I was already so good at math (and so many people were bad at it) I sought out more math courses as a way for more easy A grades.

Never was it a conscious effort to set up my career or social status.

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Some individuals are perhaps purely intrinsicly motivated, but I think it's a very tiny minority. I also think there is a good chance that intrinsic motivation itself is a status enhancing adaptation, evolved by runaway selection. So ultimately, you are executing this adaptation whether you want or not, much like this fish carefully creating beautiful patterns in the sand, not knowing why he is doing it. It's all about sex.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B91tozyQs9M

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fisherian_runaway

If nerds were pursuing math to get status they would quit when they got absolutely no status.

Quitting is embarassing, certainly often locally a downward slope on the status landscape.

To put it quite frankly, your position is entirely wrong, and you are doubling down on an even weirder position. I also have never even heard of someone just pursuing math "to get acceptance as a nerd".

Being good at math gives you no status in life. People are proudly anti-intellectual when it comes to math, so the most you'll get if you're quite good at at math is "oh wow, that's cool. next topic". People who really like math, simply like math, despite it not winning them any social favors for the most part.

Mathematics is quite interesting and beautiful in its own way, so for you to say it's mostly "out of wanting to escape their low status" is both rude and uninformed.

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Also, it's true that quitting doesn't do you any favors, but people quit things all the time. Especially math. Or new years resolutions. It's definitely not a tenable argument as to why people would stick with math.

But they do get status. With their teachers. With their parents. And, probably the most important, with their peers, aka other nerds.

Damn I'd even expect most "cool kids" having more respect for someone better at math (all else being equal), even if their social context won't allow them to show this in any form.

Being good at math got me some "kudos" occasionally, but nothing like being good at almost anything else. Art (music, writing, singing) was way better to be good at. Even other nerdy things like spelling bees and programmer got way more acclaim than math.

Math, instead, got mostly derision from other kids and little to no respect from teachers or parents. No, "cool kids" never had even an ounce of respect for math nerds. If they secretly had any respect for them, they certainly never showed it.

And what's the point of trying to gain respect that nobody expresses? It's certainly not something that would be worth pursuing just to get that respect.

Long-term planning/deferred gratification. You were setting up a career as a source of status later in life.

>Long-term planning/deferred gratification. You were setting up a career as a source of status later in life.

It sounds like you're tying yourself up in knots to explain something that everybody already understands. Math is intrinsically fun, but only if you can cut through the ruinously bad educational system and the difficulty of getting started.

Such intrinsic interest to that extent was sexually selected for, so we're doing it only because of that. That's all I'm saying.

Intrinsic motivation makes sense to learn about the world to some extent, but there was not much to learn for hunter-gatherers to survive.

Obviously, you're only saying that to get laid, so who can trust you?

You could just as well argue we're all paper-clip maximizers, and simply interpret any evidence to the contrary as short-sighted. The only sense in which you can reduce everything humans do to sex is in the irrelevant and unfalsifiable sense.

> Obviously, you're only saying that to get laid, so who can trust you?

That's correct, but why would that reduce trust?

Because sex is a short-term goal, and the more heavily you optimize for it, the less you'll optimize for being accountable to the long term side-effects of dishonesty.

You risk getting bad reputation if you don't care about your offspring and social environment. People care about their reputation to be socially included (because that enables access to sex, among other reward signals of course, but sex is the strongest).

People could take vows of celibacy, and you'd probably just say they were really, deep down, only doing it to have more sex. And I'll certainly call you a liar, if only because you are so willing to brand everyone else with that label.

Our brains evolved to make decisions. Yes, they were constrained by a need to survive and reproduce. But those two goals are not the same thing. And the existence of those constraints does not actually preclude any other mode of operation.

You're being absurdly reductive when you conflate any motivation with a need to reproduce.

I think it's accurate. There is no doubt about it. I also don't see that there is anything is wrong with it. I think you have simply internalized modesty memes, but that ultimately makes you ignore fundamental motivations which in turn leads to dysregulation.

That's why we invented birth control. So we could be better at reproducing. When human decision making and the need to reproduce come head-to-head, reproduction is always the motivation, even if it results in less reproduction.

This is why your argument is nonsense. You're basically trying to define everything as sex. You're playing a silly word game so you can feel smug about this directionless and immature insight.

I'm not smug. I'm concerned about dysregulation due to ignorance of basic motivational drives.

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