> I don't think that nerds have an inbound tact filter. I don't think this is a good explanation of going on.Are you a nerd? I ask because it's extremely risky to speculate about how the minds of people of a type that you're not, work. That's precisely the problem we nerds have trying to understand non-nerds: their minds work differently and we don't understand how, at least not instinctively; we have to laboriously build up such understanding by hand, and we get reminded constantly of how limited our understanding is even after we've spent years building it up.
> If you spent twenty years being called a "smart kid" and then went to a job where all the smart kids end up, then you may have a rock-solid self-image. That gives you a certain amount of immunity to tactless comments. It also gives you the confidence to make tactless comments.
If you qualify all three of these sentences with "around other nerds", then they are true. But, at least in my own personal experience, they're not true without the qualifier.
Food for thought: remember the studies that showed that kids who were told they were smart did less well on subsequent tests than kids who were told they had made a great effort? That's because "smart", at least the way we instinctively parse that word, is something not under our control. When someone tells me I'm "smart", I don't feel more confident, because "smart" is something I don't control; I can't command myself to be smart, the way I can command myself to make a concerted effort. So being told all the time that you're a smart kid doesn't actually improve your self-image.
What does improve your self-image if you're a nerd is being told that some problem solution you came up with is right--provided it comes from someone whose opinion you expect to be right, such as another nerd or a teacher. Having that happen often as you're growing up does give you a lot of confidence when you're trying to solve the next problem. But that only works in an environment where correct solutions are the measure of value, i.e., around other nerds.
> I think what happened is just that nerds care about speaking directly.
That's true, but it's really just a side effect of the fact that nerds care about actually solving problems. Which implies that the best way to get a nerd to learn how to be tactful is to point out that doing so can help them to solve a problem: namely, how to cooperate effectively with non-nerds to get something useful accomplished.
The inbound tact filter, in fact, is just the same sort of thing, but applied to interacting with other nerds. Nerds know that other nerds don't apply tact in the outbound direction, because they're too concerned with communicating accurate information to muddy it up with tact filters. But we nerds also know from experience that nobody, including us, likes to be told they're wrong, or that something they've worked hard on isn't done yet and needs more work. So we apply the inbound tact filter as a hack around our own emotions as much as anything else--to get us past the initial emotional reaction and on to actually solving the problem. At least, that's my experience.