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Comment by FredPret | Hacker News Reader

Don't let the idiots get you down - the world is, and has been, becoming friendlier to little niches of people over time. The smart weirdos have been kicking butt for a long time now (at least the ones that can get to a friendly enclave) and this is set to grow exponentially.

And if you're still pessimistic, consider this. A person I otherwise rabidly disagree with once said "political power grows out of the barrel of a gun". Well, military power is also now accruing to those with the best ideas (see all the drones and cyber-war lately).

The world is slowly turning into nerd paradise!

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there is relatively little correlation between conformism and intelligence

a world dominated by military power is not a nerd paradise

consider the plight of the iranian nuclear scientists

Despite the tragedy in Ukraine, most people in most countries are living through an era of unprecedented peace and prosperity.

Since 1950, the global population has more than tripled, while militaries have shrunk. Since 1960, military spending as a share of global GDP has gone down from over 6% to less than 3%.

The world isn't perfect, but it has become a lot less warlike and more hospitable for nerds in recent decades.

>Since 1950, the global population has more than tripled

I don't see this as a grand thing tbh. Sure there's more nerds but I feel like they trive most when not having to deal with scarcities.

I don't think he was saying that's a good thing on its own, population relative to military spending was the point...

01960 was in some sense the height of the cold war, and also only 15 years after the end of world war ii (in europe and japan, anyway; in china and some other places war continued longer)

the cold war ended in 01991, and since then the us has been pretty much free to invade and conquer and colonize wherever it wanted without any real opposition

it's been 77 years since the end of world war ii, so this is probably an atypically peaceful moment in history

probably a few years into world war iii military spending will be a much larger fraction of gdp

The world always has and always will be dominated by military power, but that power is increasingly wielded by engineers.

2000 years ago, you needed a couple of engineers in charge of sword production and an army of Jocko Willinck types to wield the swords.

Now, you have an army of engineers producing drones, some other nerds remotely piloting the drones, and a couple of J.W.'s to do specialized strikes.

I don't see this trend reaching a stopping point anytime soon.

AI and it's automation of knowledge work will destroy the nerd paradise.

The only hard jobs left are things involving physical labor, like plumbing (ironically extremely hard to automate).

Nerds are capital F "ucked"

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