The Weird Nerd comes with trade-offs
writingruxandrabio.com
writingruxandrabio.com
The exact stereotype differed by domain... the performer who is a diva, the self destructive author, the manic artist... each with a hint of nobility but also quite off-putting.
The author wanting to combine Weird Nerd with autistic is very incorrect IMHO... I've known a lot of weird nerds, am one myself, and there's lots of different flavors, most of them not autistic.
So much of talent is just really caring about something specific. Caring about it above other things. Specifically above external motivation and incentives. Do that and the weirdness grows naturally, neurodivergence isn't even necessary (though it might help)
Would neurodivergence have to be native (so, not grown "naturally") and at which point does weirdness fit on the spectrum ?
Recently I think people are more receptive to lower degrees of neurodivergence. I see it the same way people understand that you have a gradation between having difficulties climbing stairs and not being able to walk. We could probably have it more in the open that many are not full blown clinically diagnosed ASD patients, and I wouldn't see it as an issue to have "false positives" of diversity lumped into neurodivergence if it was destigmatized.
People feeling safe because they're not alone does not end stigma whatsoever either.
One of the things I try to emphasize with newly diagnosed young people is that they should not make their diagnosis an outward part of their personality.
There's a trend of putting your diagnoses in everything from your LinkedIn profile to your resume lately. I've been helping with resume review in a group and I've been stunned by how many times I've had to tell people that they need to remove their ADHD diagnosis from their resume.
I get how it might be fulfilling to have a label to explain away all your behaviors but it makes no sense to do so and I find it extremely self-limiting
I've worked with younger people in tech. I'm seeing a mix of effects, positive and negative, from increased diagnosis rates.
On the plus side, some people are using their diagnoses to find helpful support material, techniques, and advice.
On the negative side, some people get a diagnosis and then try to use it as an excuse for every personality trait they can fit under the umbrella of that diagnosis.
It's really difficult as a mentor to have to explain to someone that their diagnosis of anxiety or ADHD or autism doesn't give them a free pass in society for all of the things they struggle with.
I've had to explain to numerous people that having an ADHD diagnosis doesn't, for example, exempt them from the same performance review standards as their peers at work. This can be difficult to acceptance for someone who was given extra time on tests and possibly more leniency on assignments throughout high school and college due to their diagnosis. The educational institutions meant well, but the students took the wrong message from their accommodations and assumed it was always the world's responsibility to bend to their personal quirks rather than the other way around. Teaching people that their diagnosis is, to be blunt, not other people's problem is a difficult hurdle to clear for some. Many others get it right away, of course, but the internet rhetoric about neurodivergence leads a lot of people in the wrong direction.
I can’t speak for you, but that isn’t at all accurate as far as I know. I myself would not say these kinds of things to a coworker, and definitely not to a subordinate one or one that reports to me, as I don’t work in HR or legal department, and I’m not intimately familiar with actual existing accommodations for ADHD and other conditions under the FMLA and other disability discrimination laws and regulations in the US or other countries.
This is a legal minefield and accident waiting to happen. Tread lightly.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Family_and_Medical_Leave_Act_o...
> I’m not intimately familiar with actual existing accommodations for ADHD and other conditions under the FMLA and other disability discrimination laws and regulations in the US or other countries.
Why are you saying it's inaccurate if you don't understand the laws and regulations?
The FMLA that you cited and linked is for emergency medical leave, not for ADHD accommodations.
You're also making a mistake that I see a lot: Getting an ADHD diagnosis is not the same as having a disability. It is possible to qualify as having a disability due to an ADHD diagnosis, but it's a substantially more difficult standard to achieve and prove. The average ADHD patient will not and cannot qualify as being disabled due to ADHD.
This is exactly what I was talking about: There has been an explosion of over-confident opinions about how ADHD and other mental health conditions intersect the workplace that have no basis in reality. The amount of incorrect ADHD information circulating on places like Reddit and TikTok is leading people in the wrong direction in large numbers.
I didn’t say I wasn’t familiar with them, I said I wasn’t intimately familiar with them.
> The FMLA that you cited and linked is for emergency medical leave, not for ADHD accommodations.
It’s about more than that, but that’s neither here nor there.
Needing to take time off regularly, irregularly, as needed, or working less than full-time at an ostensibly full-time job due to a medical condition that may or may not be a disability are accommodations that would fall under FMLA, and it would be a factor in someone being unable to meet otherwise-reasonable standards or expectations. The FMLA applies even if your medical condition isn’t considered a disability, for that matter.
That’s specifically why I said that I’m not speaking for you, because I don’t know what you know or don’t know, nor do I know what jurisdiction you operate in, but I know enough to not advise others about how to speak about coworkers’ medical issues - I just don’t do it! I don’t speak about coworkers’ medical issues, because it’s none of my business, and it’s a poor use of my time, their time, and the company’s time. It’s also not in my job description to comment on my coworkers’ medical issues.
I’d be happy to discuss this further and read any resources you may have on this subject, though. I don’t claim to be an expert, and I am amenable to reason.
If anything, I'd suggest reading up on the details of FMLA.
FMLA is not, for example, a free pass to take time off as needed, or regularly.
The wording of FMLA is more about recovering from an illness. Someone who routinely becomes overwhelmed with work and needs extra time off is going to have a hard time arguing that it's actually FMLA protected leave.. FMLA will specifically exclude things like taking time off for routine medical care, because it's specifically not for those purposes.
I am going to have to disagree with you there: continuing care and mental health days are covered under the FMLA as I read it.
https://www.dol.gov/agencies/whd/fact-sheets/28o-mental-heal...
> LEAVE FOR MENTAL HEALTH CONDITIONS UNDER THE FMLA
> An eligible employee may take FMLA leave for their own serious health condition, or to care for a spouse, child, or parent because of a serious health condition. A serious health condition can include a mental health condition.
> Mental and physical health conditions are considered serious health conditions under the FMLA if they require 1) inpatient care or 2) continuing treatment by a health care provider.
> A serious mental health condition that requires inpatient care includes an overnight stay in a hospital or other medical care facility, such as, for example, a treatment center for addiction or eating disorders.
> A serious mental health condition that requires continuing treatment by a health care provider includes—
> Conditions that incapacitate an individual for more than three consecutive days and require ongoing medical treatment, either multiple appointments with a health care provider, including a psychiatrist, clinical psychologist, or clinical social worker, or a single appointment and follow-up care (e.g., prescription medication, outpatient rehabilitation counseling, or behavioral therapy); and
> Chronic conditions (e.g., anxiety, depression, or dissociative disorders) that cause occasional periods when an individual is incapacitated and require treatment by a health care provider at least twice a year.
> REASONS FOR LEAVE
> Leave for the Employee’s Mental Health Condition
> An eligible employee may take up to 12 workweeks of leave for their own serious health condition that makes the employee unable to perform their essential job duties.
> Example:
> Karen is occasionally unable to work due to severe anxiety. She sees a doctor monthly to manage her symptoms. Karen uses FMLA leave to take time off when she is unable to work unexpectedly due to her condition and when she has a regularly scheduled appointment to see her doctor during her work shift.
I never suggested discrimination based on mental health conditions is okay or encouraged. I'm just pointing out that you shouldn't put it on your resume and you can't expect it to exempt you from having to do your job. It's simple.
I don't understand your analogy to race because that doesn't make any sense and certainly isn't relevant to what I said.
As for your example of being deaf: The reality is that any disability that prevents someone from doing a job, in a way that that cannot be reasonably accommodated, means that an employer doesn't have to hire that person for the job. This makes people angry in the general sense, but the truth is that there are jobs that require certain abilities to perform. If someone was, for example, confined to a wheelchair then they would not be considered for a job loading trucks. That's "discrimination" in the general sense of the word, but it's certainly not bigotry.
I think you've either misunderstood what I was saying, or you're upset that the world isn't as idealistic as you want. The reality is that if a condition prevents someone from doing a job and it can't be reasonably accommodated, the employer isn't forced to keep paying that person and ignore their inability to do the job.
Having ADHD is a hurdle, but not something that prevents most people from doing jobs. It makes them more difficult, yes, but not impossible. If the condition is so bad that it becomes disabling (legal definition) then that's a different story, but again you're not required to employ people who have disabilities that prevent them from doing the job.
The deaf example is actually quite good. People who suffer from neurological disorders have a disability (in the legal sense) that sometimes can't be accommodated in a very similar way. But they aren't considered to be disabled in the same sense and people don't recognize it. They instead just think the people have bad social skills and should try harder (my last employer's DEI training said exactly this). If you had a deaf or wheelchair bound person and people just generally decided that those are excuses for doing things that everyone else can do then it'd be comparable (I mean things that they can do, but can't do as others expect because, say, they can't hear the instructions from their boss).
I'm really not that concerned with a perfect world and I agree with much of what you are saying. I'd best describe my feelings as annoyed and concerned for how much society has doubled down on all DEI biases being unacceptable except for those against people with neurological disorders (both sides of that annoy me, the doubling down and the ignoring).
And I apologize for suggesting, if indirectly, that you were bigoted. I meant that more as a rhetorical statement but don't think I couched it as well as I could have.
This is kind of a toxic perspective and could be why you have so many problems with your neurodiverse coworkers. If you believe they should never require accommodations and are always expected to conform to the rest of society, then you don't understand what that experience is like and how further debilitating it can actually be.
That's not what I said. The amount of toxic projection happening underneath these comments is wild.
Anyway, I did not say they shouldn't get accommodations. I said those accommodations do not exempt them from having to do the job.
The mistake being made is to confuse accommodations that help people do their job with "accommodations" that exempt the person from having to do the job.
Two different things! You can expect the first in the workplace. You cannot expect the second.
So how could we study what makes me turn off other people and have it make a difference in my life? It is unlikely that I would be able to change myself and there is almost zero chance that whatever it is about me that disgusts others will change their natural reaction.
In addition, I am not sure that this isn't how things are supposed to be. This may be part of social evolution that just makes the world tick.
I would prefer we stop classifying people and just let them be who/what they are without pointing fingers at them.
Highly unlikely, but you didn't rule it out completely. Plus there are others who also might be able to change.
We have small and graduated buckets for absolutely anything that impacts how we socially interact with someone. Which town they come from, nationality, ethnicity, educational background, religion down to specific cult group, football team, wealth level, parent's profession, family composition etc.
Any of these has potential for negative discrimination, but we also use them for improving the interaction and mitigate confronting issues. The small and graduated buckets do IMHO help avoiding the negative impacts in the first place.
What I'm not clear on is whether this translates to better real-world interactions. Certainly, it raises awareness of the conditions, but just watching a video does not necessarily lead to smooth conversation. Generally meetings with famous actors are pretty awkward and it is even less clear to me that someone who watches ADHD videos would necessarily enjoy meeting an ADHD person irl, particularly one that doesn't make engaging videos with millions of views.
But I just don’t see the point of diagnosing people with things unless it causes some kind of actual disability and dysfunction.
The ASD spectrum has become incredibly broad to the point where someone who likes just programming too much is being classified in the same group as someone who can hardly speak, let alone look after themselves.
This isn't true at all. The ASD grading has different levels based on the level of assistance needed. Unless that programming is significantly impacting your abilities in life, you would be told that you display some ASD like behaviors but that you don't actually have ASD.
I know a therapist that specializes in adult ASD and they believe that many people in technology fields do have undiagnosed mild ASD. The strong logical basis to the work and other characteristics of the job may play a role in attracting people whose minds work a certain way. It also seems the few people I know who have been diagnosed later in life tend to be in technical fields. The observations and the theory behind it seem to make sense. But not everyone has it, and there is criteria that need to be met to diagnosis it (disabilities).
The author tries to come up the "weird nerd" terminology, but it doesn't feel better to me. Extending the medical term to non problematic behaviours feels like a better tradeoff to me.
We already do that in spades: people can have myopism to varying degrees, and we don't avoid putting them somewhere on the scale until they need coke bottle glasses.
In that context, everyone is neurodivergence because, afterall it's a spectrum we're all on and nobody is going to be deadest average. At some point we have to define at what point these spectrums become clinical. The kind of language you see in the DSM for stuff like this is "does it affect daily living/relationships/health in a negative way".
Being neurodivergent isn't a disorder, not showering because you're obsessed with programming probably is.
People that are between the two, the vast majority of people, are not said to be either autistic or schizophrenic (you can't be both at the same time but can go from autistic to schizophrenic with a degenerative disease). Everyone is not "on the spectrum" for autism, again by definition no one that is schizophrenic is "on the spectrum" for autism at all so your comment is nonsensical.
How far on the spectrum towards schizophrenia have to be before they are clinically schizophrenic?
I don't disagree with the tendency to place things on spectrums but I find that people fail to adress that some people are so far on any spectrum that they become clinical.
I've never heard this before and a quick search can't find any evidence of it.
The "over-connected" suggestion did pull up studies like this[1], but that's one effect of one set of genes sometimes associated with autism, and, of course, it was in mice.
I'd definitely like to learn more, but at first impression, a spectrum with autism and schizophrenia at opposite ends seems way too simple a model for human brains.
[1] https://medicine.wustl.edu/news/in-autism-too-many-brain-con...
Thing is, I'm not a psychiatrist, the author probably isn't, most of us aren't. The question of whether it becomes clinical is IMHO irrelevant to most of us.
We won't be standing in front of someone pondering whether they can apply for disability, the better question will be how comfortable they are at keeping eye contact for instance.
We're redefining previously binary conditions as spectrums but the programs there to assist still available as a binary.
Whether you're legally blind or not, legally deaf or not is binary, but each person is on a spectrum and when interacting with someone we might want to adjust to their level where it matters. You don't talk the same way to an elderly with only half of their hearing left, even if legally they're not deaf. Or choose your color schemes with color blind people in mind, even if they won't be registered for governement assistance.
That's where I see the distinction between the administrative part of it, which needs binary criteria because of the management nightmare it would be to have gradual scales for everything, and the human/everyday life side of things, where caring about the different shades matters a lot IMHO.
Just one spectrum, 2 dimensions? Is that all we get? It's a linguistic short-cut, I get that, but I wonder how useful it is, how much nuance it conceals.
The spectrum can essentially be thought of has the degree of neural "over-connectedness".
Here's an image that shows what I mean: https://ih1.redbubble.net/image.4683716510.9542/raf,360x360,...
It also feels a bit tech-centric... probably tech is someplace autistic attributes are particularly helpful, but other subjects are probably most compatible with other kinds of neurodivergence.
I'm sure your diagnosis is legitimate, but also I'm inferring from your comment that you are married and gainfully employed; so it sounds like you're able to build and maintain relationships, as well hold conversations with strangers or non-close acquaintances when necessary.
In years past would any professional have bothered to test someone like you for a disorder?
But practically, the disorder definition above basically would lump the above poster in with somebody who was struggling to hold down a part time job or any social relationships as having the same level of disability. All therapies, treatments, accomidations, etc will end up calibrated for the more profoundly disabled person while being offered to the above poster. Generally, peoples first impression of the person will understandably be based on that of the average person with autism spectrum disorder if they're told they're autistic which will cause them to be pretty profoundly misunderstood.
That's just my take on this.
Or are the people who fail to hold down a job really just morally bad and of low character?
Was it better for people to just be "weird" or "creepy" or "freaks" instead of somewhere on the autism-spectrum?
The judgement of the behavior predated the diagnostic labels.
How has autism diagnosis stopped any of this from happening? People are absolutely unapologetic about calling autistic men creepy in particular.
It hasn't stopped it completely but now you've got a LOT more resources available to use to do something about it. And there are many more who will say something like "hey, you should look into this stuff" instead of just simply shunning and shaming than there were 40 years ago. Especially when spotted in early childhood.
There are no magic bullets. The solution to not being called creepy is, in the end, not acting creepy, same as it ever was. But the diagnostic/psych world can help people find a path to get there. Many of us have been following it for a while now. Do I wish my parents and teachers had known what we know today? Abso-fucking-lutely. Could've started to learn to manage a lot earlier.
Recall the context here of the comparison to those "lacking the talents of these gainfully employed autistics". No shortage of bad names to call them either. Many fewer structured and well-studied support systems.
I see them get despondent that they have a disorder which means they can definitionally are socially impaired and always will be.
As for the parents and teachers causing kids to not be creepy, that mostly consists of them saying stuff like "mastrubrate in your room" and "don't tell strangers you want to have sex with them". There's not actually a competent make autistic people not creepy treatment that's in any way mainstream or widespread (Although if one existed I'd be all ears). If I had to suggest anything, it would be intensive immersion in social situations with neurologically typical people, which doesn't really take a diagnosis.
Like I just keep hearing these theories about how we need to diagnose people with autism to get them resources and treatment but I don't know what these things are. Honestly I see men getting into stuff like looksmaxxing stuff because they're convinced of stuff like their perceived "creepiness" being a result of them being ugly (evidence would support that ugly people are seen as more creepy), and at least something like plastic surgery offers them an evidence-based method to reduce perceived creepiness - which is something the medical system DOES NOT COMPETENTLY OFFER despite the medical system also telling them that they have social deficits. I think the neurosis's being caused by labelling and reification are already doing damage.
I think the thing that bothers me most about autism spectrum disorder is it's seen as a sort of life sentence which involves impairments which by definition are lifetime and you can never overcome, and if you fit these boxes, even if you have no significant problems, you're some successful married computer programmer, you are just fucked for life! Yet when I look at the actual research, I see children going from being clinically diagnosable with a disorder to sub-clinical all the time in followup studies. Yet all we really care about is getting MORE people diagnosed with autism spectrum disorder, as in, it should be our goal to have MORE people labelled as being impaired instead of LESS people because we did such a good job resolving their impairments and making them independent that they no longer had any significant difficulties or need for support or a "disorder" label anymore. Being disordered has become a fucking identity where the more people who have the identity the more we are saving people.
But, if you’re asking about the typical autistic inability to communicate with others, then yeah, 0-1 works as well as any. Just don’t take it as literal or as the only possible set of traits.
… the question is, do you have the right embeddings? ;)
(/s, mostly)
[0] https://neuroclastic.com/its-a-spectrum-doesnt-mean-what-you...
(These are non-rhetorical questions, I'm really not sure about the answers to them myself)
They certainly do. And I don't think we can make meaningful comparisons between individuals in terms of their problems, how they struggle or suffer, etc. For me personally, I don't assume to have it any worse than anyone else, and I always assume that others have deep challenges that I won't ever know about.
> Is anyone truly normal or neurotypical?
Again, these concepts become strained when applied to individuals. It's like the family who has 1.5 children: they don't exist. These are ever-changing labels that we make use of within an extremely nebulous social process. I try to apply them only in well-defined contexts and then throw up my hands in the general case.
> Why do some people's problems get the validation of the medical system and others don't?
I have no idea; in my mind this question is trying to peer closely into the nebula.
Very roughly, because some people can't function without intervention (for loose definitions of "function"). And some treatment (therapy, drugs, whatever) can help them function.
Autism 1/Aspergers is sometimes kind of borderline - some people can function with it, but it can exact a heavy tool on them as a sibling comment noted. Depress and suicide are relatively more common. Why go through life miserable if it's not necessary?
People without autism or other diagnosable issues are generally more resilient. a bad week, one-off negative occurrence, etc won't send them into a tailspin. That's a very real concern with some neurodivergent individuals.
And you do have to remember, it's all a spectrum. And as observers, we don't know what a person is feeling/thinking internally and not expressing.
This whole thought that autistic people who appear to have no problems are all secretly on the verge of not just burnout, but AUTISTIC burnout and will tailspin into the nether at any moment is a recent idea I have yet to see any actual evidence of other than self-report. The entire idea smacks of non-falsifiability to me.
If I told you I had to consciously monitor my tone of voice, and mannerisms, and level of eye contact to pass for normal, and had to silently drill these things in my mind before starting or joining a conversation, that I basically had to be like a method actor and get into character before speaking, what would you propose as a way to falsify or verify my claim?
You're right: it's non-falsifiable. And you'd be right to raise an eyebrow about the idea that keeping it up would lead to clinical depression. Doesn't mean it isn't true.
Theres people who go in and DONT get diagnosed with ASD, but get found out to be having other issues, ranging from endocrine to trauma.
The evidence for treatment is the improvement in quality of life for people who do manage to get help.
The control would be people whose challenges make their lives, and the lives of those around them, harder.
And having raised a “high functioning” autistic son, I definitely saw when interventions helped. And I also saw the struggles my son had that his coworkers would have just written off as “quirky”. Sadly, he stopped treatment, was overcome by those struggles, and took his own life, so at least for this sample of one, yes, the interventions help. Right up until they don’t any more.
Because there are effective forms of treatment available, but are gated by diagnosis because of $reasons. Validation of the medical system enables one to access those treatments, perhaps most important of which is being able to tell yourself, as well as others, that you're having an actual problem and are not "just lazy" or need to "just get yourself together", etc.
Yes. I get that your questions appear to be sincere and genuine, but, yes. Relative to the actual, demonstrable, neurological differences in connectivity and so forth in the “neurodivergent” brain, the overwhelming majority of people are “normal”. Relative to the actual lived experience of “neurodivergents”, the overwhelming majority of people are “normal”.
These kinds of questions are asked by people who simply don’t understand the enormity of the difference.
Much like people who don’t have aphantasia speaking to people who do. And so forth.
Aphantasia is one that I find extremely hard to wrap my head around. The notion that somebody who’s otherwise normal can’t visualize things is really interesting. I have a friend who has it. The only outward symptom is his dislike of fiction and most TV/movies (and you’d only notice that if you knew him fairly well).
I think I _used_ to be able to visualize things. I remember feeling frustrated when I was younger and did a more art because I could never imagine the same thing twice when I wanted to draw it. Every time I tried to think about about it, it would have a different pose or texture or orientation. But even then I think I just had a different "level" of aphantasia. I could never figure out how to use color. I kept to pens and lead pencils for art and couldn't get into painting. Even now, staring at a wall and thinking about repainting it, I cannot visualize it with any other color, much less two or three colors for trim and accents.
One of the advantages, perhaps, is that I don't need to close my eyes to imagine things. There's no point, there's nothing there. I may let my focus drift so I don't get distracted by shiny or moving things. But I can stare at a wall, or go for a hike or a run and just let my mind go wild.
That said, I do enjoy fiction, though I never really get "into" anything in particular. In light of this discovery, perhaps it is because I'm not really able to "visualize" scenes to recreate memorable moments, I can only really enjoy it in the moment and maybe recall a few quotes and descriptions, which are harder to get excited about.
ADHD is simultaneously overdiagnosed and underdiagnosed; the case of your brothers' school could be the former, or correction of the latter (or both).
> mostly the kids who would in the past have been described as lazy, which I find hard to believe to be based on actual neurological differences
ADHD manifests as laziness to observers making snap judgements, so this actually tracks - turns out, some of the specific symptoms that, in the past, would make someone branded as lazy, are actually a disorder.
The problem with calling people lazy is that it's a moral judgement, which sometimes may be helpful as a form of corrective social pressure, but absolutely does not help when "laziness" is a result of a disorder like ADHD; it only makes them suffer that much more.
I'm going to give a pretty out-there answer for this: because they piss us off.
A problem is medicalized when the people who have that problem can no longer be ignored, either because the effects are so severe that their demands for treatment become loud on a societal level, or because the effects naturally bother other people.
We started treating HIV/AIDS only after years of the affected communities refusing to shut up about it.
We medicalize mental health issues because the people with them cause problems for the people without them. It is notable that many mental health conditions have names describing the experience of being around them rather than the experience of having them. Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder feels like neither, but people around someone with ADHD get annoyed that they don't pay attention and move around a lot.
For another example, we still diagnose some children with "Oppositional Defiant Disorder".
Also, saying "this deserves medicalisation" and throwing a label on people doesn't mean you're actually helping. Lets say somebody was masking - how would medicine help them?
I agree about medicine not really being the solution, though. If an environment requires masking all meds can do is suppress symptoms, at best.
Not strong evidence but what exactly is the evidence that autistics are going around masking far more than the average bear? Low social motivation is an old theory for the cause of autistic social behaviours which is a theory which would indicate less masking. I’ve heard all this mask mask mask talk over the last few years, but I haven’t seen any persuasive science.
I should also be clear - I’m not saying autistic men don’t mask, or don’t struggle with masking, I’m saying I can find no convincing evidence that autistic men as a group mask an unusual amount. The diagnostic criteria does not indicate masking as a symptom, just as a potential risk that may confuse diagnosis especially in women by making actual social deficits which actually get you diagnosed harder to detect but not impossible.
For instance, a woman who doesn't react in certain ways to someone's cute baby is some kind of child-hating alien monster.
The man who doesn't react in those ways is assumed to be wanting to do that, but actually masking in the other direction so as not to appear effeminate.
When I'm meeting with representatives of a client, and one of them makes a suggestion that I know won't work, and I refrain from instantly and publicly shooting down their idea and instead I make a show of considering it, then ask them a probing question or two that let them realise the problem with the idea themselves - am I masking? Or am I merely being professional?
When I see something worthy of a compliment and I rehearse it in my mind to make sure it isn't objectifying or creepy, and that it's personalised to them and shows I paid attention to and understood the thing I'm complimenting - am I masking? Or just being charming?
When I'm socialising with people who are talking about their struggles to lose weight, and I in many years going to the gym have struggled to gain weight or visible muscle, but I keep my mouth shut rather than trying to build rapport about our shared inability to reach our target weight because I've tried it and I know it doesn't work - am I masking? Or just showing a normal level of social skills and empathy?
My face is usually flat, and my tone is usually monotone. Most people modulate their face and their tone naturally and don't have to think about it. When I socialize, I have to think about my face and my tone constantly. Yes everyone is doing this at some level, but for autistic people it takes as much effort as the thing the socializing is meant to accomplish, so that part cannot be enjoyed or suffers as a result of the intentional masking.
Another example is I have echolalia, which means sometimes I have an involuntary urge to repeat things that I heard earlier. I also have various tics where I move my body in wild ways that tend to make people uncomfortable or look at me in strange ways if I do them in public. When I'm socializing, I suppress (mask) all of these urges. I'm sure that most people suppress urges to move their body and make noises in public, but not in a way that autistic people suppress these urges -- again it comes down to it being a conscious effort that causes discomfort. I would compare it to having to sneeze for an entire meeting; all you are going to think about is having to sneeze, and the disruption you will cause if you sneeze and everyone will look at you. But it's not a simple sneeze, it's an action that everyone will talk about and gossip about later, something that will ostracize you.
Another thing I do when masking is more like mirroring. I'm constantly monitoring the situation to figure out how to respond, since I can't use the content of people's words I have to use contextual cues to figure out the appropriate way to respond. For instance I can know a joke is being told by the way someone is telling it, but I might not be able to tell you why it's funny based on the content. Still, I can laugh at the joke but I'm not laughing because I found it humorous, I'm laughing because I discerned the appropriate social place to laugh. And yes people laugh at jokes they don't understand all the time, but for me this extends to everything. I don't know when people are being mean to me, or flirting with me, or scamming me in real time. It takes days, sometimes years of reflection for me to figure out the actual social context of a situation I've been in.
I'm sure all this is true for many people, as I can't imagine socializing is easy for anyone. I do see people who can effortlessly talk with anyone and everyone, and I wonder how they do it, and if they face the same kinds of struggles as me when they go home and decompress. Do they stay awake all night replaying every social interaction from the night before? Do they have to spend days recharging before they can go socialize again? I don't know. But for me it's true to a degree where it makes me never want to go outside again. And that's what makes it a disorder instead of just a quirk or something everyone does.
But it's diagnosed based on behavioral observations, it's not like people get diagnosed with ASD based on brain scans like you would for MS or parkinsons.
Show me the actual proof of this. For something so at the core of modern clinical practice, the utility of diagnosis itself is taken for granted rather than actually proven.
> the utility of diagnosis itself is taken for granted rather than actually proven.
Given the topic of autism, I'm not sure if you are trying to be sarcastic or not.
Here's a question for you. When is the last time mental health outcomes improved in a way which could not simply be the result of reporting differences?
I would say the last time was around the year 2000, when suicide and drug addiction were at all time lows. Every single chance since then, on aggregate, has been useless and the entire field of mental health has completely failed to produce any evidence it has advance an inch this millennium which is absolutely fucking scandalous. I don't know how much oncology improved in the same period of time. Also if you include reported mental health data, people report WORSE mental health now than they did in the past.
Given that, I see pretty much zero reason why the status quo today does a lick to improve people mental health better than the status quo back then. I am just dead stupidly sceptical of diagnosis (at least beyond 2000/DSM-IV levels) as being a source of mental health because not only is it not proven people don't even attempt to prove this.
When the DSM-V was released, the director of the NIMH started the RDOC for research which was nominally supposed to do studies based less on categories like "autism" and more on underlying biological phenomenon, trashed the idea of symptom based diagnosis pointing out it has largely been depreciated elsewhere in medicine, and suggested we might have to get rid of the words schizophrenia and depression because they were confusing things. I think about such things occasionally and wonder if the entire diagnostic nosology we have is basically a fatally flawed system.
So my essential objection is, why medicalise people's identities if there's no evidence it's improving people's outcomes?
20 years in a time of massive social changes? Would it really happen all so quickly? There are million things that could be making things worse. Heck, it could be case that without these treatments it'd be even worse. I don't know if that's true or not, but I'm saying consider the wider environment in which this is all happening.
It's impossible to really be sure either way. Maybe it's all garbage, maybe not. but make sure you're at least trying to look at the whole picture.
Just because things seemingly turned out OK doesn’t mean the treatment was appropriate. In the same way, just because someone manages to “get by” doesn’t mean they don’t need to be diagnosed. It’s just making their life needlessly more difficult whereas they could yave more resources that reduce the burden they have to live with every day.
Just knowing you have a diagnosis, regardless of whether or not you are treated, can be incredibly empowering and helpful. It isn’t a mystery why other people could sit down and study for three hours when I was in college and I couldn’t. I was diagnosed with ADHD, I knew where my blockers were and what they looked like (and continue to!) It gives me a lot more control and ability to manage myself day to day vs. assuming something is wrong with me. The latter feeling can be incredibly demoralizing and even lead to self-destructive tendencies such as a self-medicating with alcohol and drugs. After all: Why bother trying if you’re convinced you’re truly broken? It’s not something that has a name but that other people share this problem with you and manage is, again, incredibly empowering.
It’s like a book where the main character who thought he was a doctor in the asylum finds out he was actually a patient the whole time. A mental health diagnosis forces you to go back and relive every moment with a different perspective.
Many people go through a prolonged period of skill loss/regression. I lost the ability to code for over a year. Took a long time to get to a mental place where that was possible again.
I used to code and commit to Github almost every day. My commit log is almost all green since 2018 when I started using Github, but if you look at the last year or so you can see where I just stopped and it goes dark.
Thankfully within the last 4 weeks or so I'm back to my normal self, so it was temporary, but I don't know what I would have done if my job had depended on my ability to code.
Did you know, up until the 1970s, homosexuality was considered a mental disorder [1] by the psychiatric profession?
Can you understand why many homosexuals felt that they were just being themselves, and that them being themselves didn't warrant inclusion in a diagnostic and statistical manual of mental disorders?
With that thought in your mind, can you see how a happy and successful person who wasn't struggling in any way might feel similarly?
LGBT people had been persecuted from so many angles for a long time, the tools used against them are incredibly varied. Just because mental health diagnoses were (and still are) used as a cudgel against them doesn’t mean the entire exercise of diagnosing should be called into question any more than somebody using a knife to stab somebody should call into question all of us keeping cutlery in our home.
Many autistic advocates are, in fact, advocating for improving society such that autism is no longer a major barrier to success. Until we have that, autistic people often require medical care.
It is perhaps important to also note the recent pushback against autism's equivalence of conversion therapy (ABA).
The traits you are describing here and autism don’t exclude each other. Many autists live well. Some Fortune 500 founders and/or CEOs are autistic. I’m tempted to conclude you are projecting a stereotype, but I might be reading too much into your post.
Can I ask candidly, what did you gain from knowing this? Presumably this didn't have much effect on you, since you seem to be fairly successful - finding a partner and getting married and presumably also having a decent job.
Seems kind of like a vanity validation for your wife rather than a benefit to you.
Yeah, the benefits are a mixed bag and subjective but that's why we should normalize self-dx rather than insisting people have to get a medical opinion to be "validated".
[1] https://www.abc.net.au/news/2023-11-26/national-fitness-to-d...
Frankly, the law doesn't make sense given that ASD is not a "medical condition" in the sense of being temporary or avoidable and the act of passing driver's ed and attaining a driver's license demonstrates your driving ability. If you were undiagnosed prior to attaining a driver's license, it clearly did not impact your ability. If you were diagnosed and attained a driver's license without disclosing your "condition" it clearly did not impact you either. It feels more like ASD is being used as a proxy for some other condition (learning disability?) that is not usually diagnosed directly.
IMO anyone fined for non-disclosure should try to take the case to whatever the Australian equivalent of the Supreme Court is. Surely some NGO must be willing to foot the bill.
For instance, I spend a lot of time scripting conversations and I've found if I don't do this it will have a meaningful negative impact on my ability to communicate with people. Almost like if I don't practice setting up the path between a concept and the words, then when I need to talk to other people that connection doesn't exist and I just can't put things to words.
But I draw my ingroup/outgroup boundary broadly enough to include all non-sociopathic humans and several other species; I have zero motivation towards spectator sport; music only holds my interest for a few plays and then bores me; I can "visualise" my sense of balance strongly enough to completely override my actual sense of which way is down; my body self-image is almost entirely under conscious control (as in: I can't be body-dysmorphic because I don't have a consistent morph to dis).
I've thought of being tested by a doctor but always think "What's the point? How is it going to help knowing?" so I'm curious as someone also well into adulthood if you've had any impact from knowing.
I'm also married and am able to keep a job and function relatively well even though I'm not the most sociable person.
> I recently argued that many Weird Nerds (I called them autistics, but people really hated that)
These are the same thing. The author recognizes that. Everyone recognizes that.
If so, I have to disagree vehemently. That is not my experience at all and feels extremely homo economicus and - to be honest - depressing. I want to care about things I like and that bring me joy, even if no-one pays me for that or validates my choice.
Most extroverts aren't ruthless machivellian self interested people like you are worrying I am claiming, but they are focused primarily on fitting in and being accepted by others- and do choose their activities and behaviors mostly based on that. Their interests are genuine, but the biggest factor in them is usually who it connects them with, and how it makes them appear to others. What do your hobbies, car, clothing, etc. say about you and how will that affect how others see and treat you?
Introverts are, as the name implies, more inwardly focused- and although they enjoy social connection and acceptance also, it can be exhausting and therefore less motivating, and generally takes a back seat to more inwardly generated concerns. It is often wrongly confused with being socially awkward or shy, which isn't the same at all.
The idea originally comes from Carl Jung, and his point in coming up with it was for people that personally identify themselves as fitting into a particular bucket, to realize this, and be able to consciously explore the part of yourself that doesn't fit into it, that you might have ignored or rejected in the past.
For example, if you see yourself as an introverted person, and dislike extroverted qualities in others, it can be useful, for personal growth, to explore and accept your own extroverted qualities as well. I would argue that is nearly the opposite of "simply fitting people into buckets" - it is a tool that gives a perspective to do the opposite of that. To understand the complexity and diversity of yourself, and of others.
I am perfectly fine describing myself with the actual details of my experiences. Its much richer and nuanced that way rather than simply saying Im not some way because Im an introvert. What Ive seen is the complete opposite of ehst you are saying. People label themselves as something and believe anything thst doesnt fit the label is not them, out of reach, a monumental step for them to do. Talking to a cashier all of a sudden isnt just muttering some words, its a foundational shift from being introverted to extroverted.
I think all of modern psychology/psychaitry suffers in this way: Making up categorizations with the belief that making things easier to conceptualize and making it easier to associate things is scientific and valuable insight. I think its the opposite. Youre losing precious detail and artificially killing complexity and getting simplified, untrue beliefs.
I dont need these labels to explore "my more extroverted qualities". Having never labeled myself this way, I had no issues being the complete "opposite"
The "buckets" themselves (archetypes) are simply explaining different aspects of human experience and personalities, but absolutely nobody fits into them neatly, and they are limitless- you could probably come up with hundreds of them if you wanted to. Which you think are important and worth talking about is really a matter of opinion or personal values and goals.
These ideas are widely misunderstood and misused in both popular culture and the social sciences, but that isn't the fault of the concepts themselves. For example, the categories in the popular Myers–Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI) are from Carl Jung's archetypes, but people use them exactly like you said- to essentially justify their own behaviors, when the point is to explore the parts of yourself that are the opposite of that. This idea often horrifies people that are fans of MBTI and use it like you are implying.
I'm sure you would agree that people already have different personalities, and see themselves a certain way, and often dislike traits in themselves and others that are somewhat opposite traits to those. For example a person might see themselves as an analytical logical person, and look down on people who seem to be guided mostly by emotions. It can be hugely valuable for a person like this to start to understand and accept the emotional part of themselves and others, but that likely won't change the fact that they are still a person that prioritizes "thinking" over "feeling."
People often mistakenly call this Carl Jung stuff "pseudoscience" because they are misunderstanding it as trying to be science. It is not- it is a tool or technology for personal growth, and is not attempting to be a literal explanation for how the human brain works or anything like that. It would be more accurate to relate it to religious or spiritual practices like meditation.
The fact is that introverted people are quite rare compared to extroverted people, and extroverted people do tend to see it as a bad thing and want to do things like "help teach introverts to be less extroverted" but may be horrified by the idea of the opposite- learning about and accepting their own introverted aspects.
Do you mean to say that neurodivergence is more common among extroverted people? If so, do you have sources for that? I have not yet heard of any relation between extra- (or intraversion) and neurodiversity.
I feel like people are usually just using the word to mean autistic, but there are many types of neurodivergence.
Caring about something beyond a typical amount for intrinsic reasons is a neurodivergent marker?
Is this really the HN I grew up with?
I'm not sure why people are so upset about this suggestion... I'm not sure if they just disagree, or if they don't like being labeled neurodivergent.
Different types of neurodivergence are highly correlated- a quick google search suggests introversion, left handedness, autism, dyslexia, and ADHD are all highly correlated. Left handedness is also a type of neurodivergence that goes a lot deeper than which hand you write with.
Being interested in something for its own sake beyond an "average" interest is extremely typical.
Our brains are wired to incentivize this interest via the delivery of pleasurable feelings, determination, and motivation. These experiences shape our personality and inform future higher-than-average interests. This is a good feedback cycle, and not something to be lumped together with other facets of personality.
Implying otherwise suggests that people are weird for liking things that they like.
From my observations, most extroverted and otherwise neurotypical people don't have obsessive interests they pursue deeply entirely on their own. When they have hobbies they enjoy a lot it is often the social community around the hobby as much as anything else that is motivating them to stick with the hobby.
It would not surprise me if ASD is overrepresented in scientists and engineers.
However, people also imitate their tribe, and seeing "weird nerds" with mental illness may get other nerds to emulate that behavior without actually being mentally ill.
I imagine that every asshole genius will have plenty of sharp edges in their behavior that they could round off very easily, making it a near-free win for their relationships (and overall success in life). Beyond that, however, it feels likely to me that making them focus - intellectually, emotionally, or both - on being more socially acceptable, eats directly into the focus they have for the things they're genius at, and disproportionally so.
But when it's some famous "difficult" person like Jobs or Gates, or in fiction like Doctor House, the version of them that we see is idealized.
Actually this is the exact counterpoint of TFA: using the inexistent genius as an excuse for the trade-off. Imitating the genius is more difficult than just being a jerk.
This is a really nice statement. Definitely agree with it. I've often seen so many fast-starters in many fields who just taper away, because the subject just isn't interesting to them, and it was the peeps who stayed in the field that ended up becoming really good at it. Definitely holds up the old "Average intelligence and persistence has accomplished much more than genius" quote
"Average intelligence and persistence has accomplished much more than genius"
For hard problems, high IQ is necessary but still insufficient. You are not going to solve a hard math problem with average IQ no matter how much persistence you throw at it.
I'm inclined to disagree, but there's an important piece here that I've found when solving problems that were at least hard for me: sometimes I can get hung up on making a particular approach work when it's not going to and what I need to do is back up and find a different angle of attack.
For example if you're solving a hard math problem with little math knowledge and average IQ, if you're really passionate and persistent about it, then you'd realize you first need to learn more math to build your understanding of the domain. IQ/persistence in this case is not really about the problem itself, but more about the problem-solving process itself.
I suspect most of us here are... At least in some degree.
I almost wonder if nerfing autism to the point where it's a fun thing to talk about having on tiktok is a way to demonize effective interventions so insurance companies won't have to pay for them.
It's a mix of romanticization and a change in acceptance and understanding of the two, and they do often go hand in hand as we've seen.
But things like the tiktoks mentioning "My Ausistic brain" or "My ADHD brain" are a bit over the top and are making it feel like it's being treated as a 'cool thing' to have.
For me personally I knew I had some sort of autism or ADHD decades ago. It was only when I started having massive issues focusing on work a couple of years back, combined with stimming and an increase in sensory issues that I decided it was time to investigate and sure enough, diagnosed with both. Out of the ~20 developers at my workplace a good 2/3 of them are either diagnosed with one or the other, or exhibit strong signals that would indicate they've likely got at very least ADHD.
There are two competing pressures in psychopathology that are essentially incompatible with each other. On the one hand, healthcare administration and especially the nightmare that is the privatized and insurance-driven US healthcare system puts pressure on justifying needs. Since insurance really tries its absolute best to never help you if it can get away with it, people with extreme divergences are incentivized to insist that only the most extreme manifestation of something is real, everyone else is faking it, and that makes them bad. If something starts to be "not a disorder" in the public perception, insurance companies will use this to try to weasel out of providing necessary support.
Basically every point on a given spectrum exists in some living person though. I'm close to someone who probably couldn't get diagnosed with autism as he can speak fluently and mostly take care of himself, as well as socialize among some circles of people, but certain kinds of social pressure just completely break his brain, and on top of that he has pretty extreme and disabling reactions to certain kinds of overstimulation, including reverting to hitting his head on walls, a behavior he had to pretty meticulously train himself not to do. I would definitely describe him as autistic. I think he's a less extreme case than people who are nonverbal. People like him might not need or want or benefit from medical intervention or navigating the other insane bureaucratic nightmare of disability benefits, but also might not be able to function in society. Specifically, I think he'd have been screwed if not for finding circles where people are aware of these traits, structure their social norms to not function as a minefield for people who are like that, and treat him with compassion. This comes from recognition that autistic people exist and may not be completely categorically obvious, and people like him have to push back against gatekeeping "real" disorder because doing that means people bicker about that and accuse you of stealing valor and then conclude it's too much effort to try to understand the nuances and who's allowed to call themselves what, and in this situation, most people will just throw up their hands on understanding and do what comes naturally to them: Exclude and ridicule people they find weird
I think we could solve both of these problems if we provided more paths to success for people without strong social skills, didn't exert so many conformity pressures on people in every context, didn't put amoral paperclip maximizing bean counters in charge of crucial services like healthcare, and didn't have the neoliberal dogma that most people who say they need help are faking it and thus we need to torture people with hoops to jump through if they want any hope of getting it
Mental disorders are real. They're also made up. We choose what differences are salient and how to cluster them. We set a threshold of difference that's adequately disabling because the rules say we need one. We try to see what we have in common with people different from us, and try to describe them and empathize with them. When it's apparent someone is "sort of weird in the vague direction of spaciness" it makes sense to both assume this might be what we call ADHD but milder, and even if you don't think that's literally neurologically true or whatever, we often describe things in directions or by analogy.
I think it's impossible to get this right. I still want to make private insurance illegal. I still think we should do less harm to people for not learning to politic well. I still think that the internet made everyone so obsessed with words that they have holy wars about the true meaning of several of them. Rather than get drawn into them, I think we should solve the problems that make them feel like important battles, because words are at the end of the day mostly just attempts to communicate. Besides, we're many of us programmers here. We all know most names are fungible
I fully sympathize with people who worry about this delegitimizing their condition, but I am at the same time endlessly grateful that it allowed my wife some peace and closure in better understanding herself.
Its a disservice to both worlds and I am not sure why was it done.
People with asperger syndrome need guidance to navigate the world, while traditionally autistic people need to be taken care of, why lump both together with a single term
One of the reasons is that autism was recognized to belong to a spectrum. It is not a boolean (you have aspergers or you have not, you have autism or not). It is, to keep with the metaphor, a bunch of stats expressed in floats. To what degree are you unable to filter external stimuli? How can you handle social situations? What about social cues? And so on.
The binary classification came with lots of issues.
Another issue was that Hans Asperger was funded by the Nazi regime, and protected intelligent children, while allowing other children to be "euthanized". So there was pressure to remove the actual name too.
If you still need a binary classification, I believe "high functioning" and "low functioning" are still in use.
But I believe that if you make criminal umbrella term for anyone who jaywalks to hitler and everything in-between then its quite useless term.
Because using it doesn't tell you much and you have to make multiple qualifiers.
You can have a spectrum of autism with rough labels that give you an idea of state of the person.
Like in the example, umbrella term criminal has all sub category as theft, murderer, teenager :)
The "my ADHD brain" stuff isn't my thing, though I am pretty sure I have an ADHD thing that's so mild it doesn't quite qualify for the second D, but I have a heavily ADHD spouse, and she likes them. I think it makes her feel less crazy/dumb for doing the admittedly sometimes amusingly boneheaded things she does, like bashing her arms and legs into things or making tea and forgetting it a moment later. But also she has grappled with how that content flattens ADHD into, her words, "quirky ditz syndrome" and much rarely goes into the darker aspects she struggles with, like being completely unable to accomplish a basic task for hours on end and getting increasingly frustrated with herself, or her "zombie hours" when she gets absolutely stuck in her phone (I eventually helped her setup parental controls on iOS to boot her off after awhile, but even that being couched in things called "parental controls" is humiliating for her).
Didn't investigate and get treatment until it imploded my career...
The people that think it's trendy are young, they often live at home with parents so I think it's a case of their ADHD / austism not yet having serious repercussion's.
So they’re ’normal’ in that environment.
I've spent a lot of time trying to avoid things that challenge my attention span, mediating and journally, and trying really hard to use organizational tools/apps. With some pretty decent success.
I really struggle with knowing when disorder is just code for anti-human (or anti-your personality) work.
https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2017/feb/23/outcr...
(after the outcry, the decision was reversed)
But yes, it is a serious condition and feeling awkward is not in the same basket.
The only reason to appropriate the term "autism" and associate with that condition is to medicalize one's psychology and obtain funding and services that previously were reserved to "low functioning" autistics (before that term was even necessary).
(edited to clarify)
At 7 years old, she has mental capacity of 2 year old.
With the right help, she can be somehow functioning, but surely won't get into STEM. Being "weird nerd" is pretty orthogonal to being actually autistic.
Look at every thread about the subject on these boards: it's filled with people claiming to be "on the spectrum" (aren't we all?).
>nerfing autism...is a way to demonize effective interventions so insurance companies won't have to pay for them
What a bizarre conspiracy. Are treatments even expensive?
It’s much easier to pretend it’s all a scam and not do anything, or penalize/force people to ‘act normal’. At least for insurance companies, teachers, employers, and often parents.
Which is why a lot of folks with ‘actual’ ADHD/Autism have a lot of PTSD from their childhoods. (And no, not a joke.) Severe, triggering, legit PTSD. Objective, causes the same physiological symptoms as those in war zones type PTSD. Except for it being around ‘weird’ things like school, childcare, interactions with their parents, teachers, peers, instead of when their buddy got blown up by an IED.
To make things even more complicated, persistent and repeated traumatic events that a person is powerless to prevent (usually in childhood, but not required) tends to cause Complex PTSD - which has a lot of overlap with ADHD and Autistic symptoms. Like 80-90% depending on which set of definitions one uses.
A really good way (in my experience) to get Complex PTSD is to be around someone like a parent/caregiver/partner with Antisocial Personality Disorder/NPD/BPD and suffer repeated adverse events because of it that they can’t escape. Something that if it’s a Mother doing it, Society will actively prevent someone from escaping.
Fun times, eh?
As to how to stop or get out of this? Who knows. A big underlying problem (and why society defers to the Mother in most cases here) is that there is no chance there will ever be enough resources to actually figure out the underlying truth for most of these situations.
That is because the real problem cases fundamentally work via manipulation and hiding abuses, so good luck. It would require an objective, unbiased expert (if such a thing is even possible) to follow the kid around 24/7 to see what is actually occurring. For months, or even years. And frankly, in my experience a large portion of scientists, engineers, medical doctors, nurses, police, special forces, and firefighters have backgrounds like this. So maybe this kind of thing is actually essential for society to function.
And regardless, solving this may be like solving the obesity crisis by getting everyone to run on treadmills and get fit or the like. That just ain’t happening.
Even assuming that someone is a high-functioning autistic person - now what? As far as I know, there is no course of treatment that can cure it.
Is it just about wanting a label for one of many reasons (to find a tribe, evade responsibility, get accommodations of one form or another, etc)
Don't know anything about the topic and am kind of curious.
That makes one of us - no consensus required.
Monotrope? AuDHD? Brenner's Lacanian "Way of Being"?
Forensic accounting of which spectrum owns which symptoms is the new ultra-sport - winner take all. The thought that we wind up with yet another control vs. uncontrollable dichotomy of Stoicism worries me, at least in the West.
Walk around an Amazon warehouse unannounced for an afternoon observing its transformation of surveillance capitalism into a set of funhouse mirrors where the observer cannot discern between observer and observed - an infinitely extensible Heisenbug. It's as if you took a page from the 1980's PC design playbook and decided that delightful beige was the architecture of the future - a kind of inorganic revenge of the techno-typicals.
Some people these days who are anything but call themselves autistic, ADHD, etc because they don't have a defensible banner anymore under which they can be passionate or ambitious without some reason behind the reason for it.
The only way out is empathy - true empathy, a willingness to accept sometimes (often) people do things for the sheer joy of doing them.
Hard disagree, which I think is your point. I see this as an offshoot of anti-intellectualism: distaste for / absence of passion and ambition is cultural, not biological, and culture becomes self-sustaining.
> The only way out is empathy - true empathy, a willingness to accept sometimes (often) people do things for the sheer joy of doing them.
Strong agree, and it's wild to me that this has indeed become a radical idea.
First it's absolutely true that orgs that purport to support weird nerds will revert back to rewarding politicians. I've seen it happen, and typically has to do with who is doling out money.
However, in my experience the vast majority of brilliant nerds way overextend themselves, and are much too confident outside their domain. They're also much more likely to be jerks and will tumble from conflict to conflict until they get their way by attrition or status. Conflicts are strangely more personal because so much ego is tied up into it. They're more likely to assume they're right in every (non-tech/science related) situation.
My advice to weird nerds (assuming emotional intelligence isn't an innate skill) is: Find a way to turn your brainpower onto this challenge as equally important as your core interest. Treat interacting with your institution like a long term engineering project or investigation. Think long term and be strategic, create and track longer term plans, try to learn what people respond to, what works and what doesn't. Always try to be kind and maintain some humility, but assuming you aren't sure what that really means, then ask for lots of feedback. Or you can just find someone you trust and delegate all of this to them, like a technical founder hiring a CEO.
(Edit: relatedly, if you work for or with weird nerds in a support role, my advice is to take full advantage! They might have a useful point, so set your own ego aside, don't take it personally (they are weird), and try to listen charitably. Their work is what you're here to support, after all.)
it's a skill like any other, so if you put in dedication and practice, you can get better at it, just like practicing leetcode. whether or not an individual wants to do so is on them.
edit: I wish I had more skill at building coalitions and/or pushing an organization in a direction without saying "we need to do X".
Your next paragraph gives advice to the weird nerds, but this is practically a genre. What I haven’t seen much of is advice to an organization about how to deal with what you’re pointing out here.
You have an employee that’s brilliant in technical area X but also has very strong and very wrong opinions about how the company ought to structure its cap table, pay its cleaning staff, and market to potential customers. He gets into constant arguments about these things. What do you do?
That's what you do.
A lot of very smart people think because they're very smart they have some kind of exceptional insight into the inner workings of all things. They don't. And they need to be reminded of that. Intelligence allows someone to gain that insight faster than those in the middle of the bell curve of IQ, but it doesn't magically confer it. It still takes time, reading, research, and seeing it in practice.
Or put another way - what I call the "Iceberg Analogy" - every discipline in life is like an iceberg. The average person sees about 10% of what's actually happening, and is able to comprehend that without too much effort, but the other 90% that's below the surface takes a lot to fully make sense of.
When you talk to people, you have no idea how much time they've spent before that conversation gaining insight. Maybe their simple phrase is a culmination of several years of research and insight, whereas for you, you just thought about this topic yesterday.
Seems like normies need to be reminded of that way more frequently than nerds.
To me, your proposal sounds more like a band-aid, instead of treating the core ailment: someone who won't recognize their own fallibility.
Perhaps it can't be "treated", and we just have to make do with such "band aids". But wouldn't it be more productive if we could just get to the root of it?
If you're not actually out of your depth, you won't be insulted by it.
I don't get insulted when someone says I'm stupid. Because that is not true, and I know it isn't true. It isn't the things we know to be untrue that insults us - it's the things that we know to be true, that we can't accept - or even worse - can't see about ourselves that insult us.
Isn't this the point of the previous comment? That the WN thinks they're not out of their depth and can't see that about themselves. So it is an insult from that perspective.
Except most of the time ... they are not. Most non-junior WNs learn to have significant respect for those doing the work. The Weird Nerd judges based upon objectively observed behavior rather than social cues or group opinions.
Mostly, the Weird Nerd gets in trouble because they simply aren't fooled. And that pisses of corporatocrats like you worse than anything else.
The WN can see that you are rewarding the politician rather than the person who actually did the work. The WN will actually calculate the full cap table and see the distortion that flags the insider backscratching. The WN can envision exactly how the sales incentives will be exploited. etc.
Effectively, the WN is a canary that detects bad managers immediately unlike normal people. And that's something that bad managers simply cannot abide.
Not knowing your customers isn't unique to engineers.
Hell, you could argue the process started much earlier: before voice assistants came DTMF phone menus with automated recordings; before that came outsourcing customer support to cheapest labor available - which is like hooking up ChatGPT to the phone line, except with protein robots paid peanuts and worked to the bone instead.
How do you know?
Studies already suggest that 9 out of 10 people prefer text communication with businesses. Of the remaining 10%, we have to establish that they:
1. Prefer the phone over other alternatives. Some may want face-to-face communication, for example.
2. Want to phone a utility in the first place. Preferring phone communication over other means does not imply that they want to communicate.
3. That the person of which you speak knows of them. Someone who really does want to phone a utility, but is not known by said person, would not meet the qualifications defined.
Unless you actually compiled a list of those he knows and surveyed them in a good faith standing, you can't know. The statistics are not in your favour, though. It is quite unlikely that he does know someone who wants to make a phone call to said utility. Perhaps your weird nerdiness has clouded seeing that?
Congratulations, you've shown you don't know how the world actually works. This is called "Weird Nerd" but it really means, "Someone who can't operate within society and thus is forced to suffer because they'll do the hard work of building or designing something, but won't do the hard work of understanding human beings."
First, go learn how the world actually works. Not the way you clearly - and incorrectly - believe it to work - the way it actually works. Then once you figure out how to operate within the system, you might actually get something worthwhile done.
> The Weird Nerd judges based upon objectively observed behavior rather than social cues or group opinions.
This is why they so consistently fail.
> Mostly, the Weird Nerd gets in trouble because they simply aren't fooled.
They get in trouble because they have an incorrect mental model of the world and are instead stuck in how they think the world "ought" to work, instead of how it "actually" works.
The pragmatist in me is sympathetic to your viewpoint here. But the article in question is making the point that when Weird Nerds have to "figure out how to operate within the system", they actually lose their ability to get something worthwhile done. That still might be the optimal path for them to take as individuals, given the incentives they face, but maybe as a society, we'd be better off trying to design the system so that it could better tolerate the "downsides" of the Weird Nerd so they can maximize their ability to get something worthwhile done.
Obviously this is a balancing act (as the article points out), but the author is making the point that some environments (like academia) have swung too far in the direction of conformity, which seems to me to usually be presented using the exact language you're using here.
Definitely worth it for a Nobel Prize level intellect but I’m not sure how far below that the line is.
Call him to your office and warn him his behaviour is unacceptable as it is interrupting the business. If he still persists, fire him for insubordination and/or disrupting the workplace.
The difference between a master and a nerd is whether the talent is socially desired, and the difference between being employed and unemployed is whether you can be productive to society regardless of your personal leanings.
The same thing you do with any highly anti-social employee, fire them. It doesn’t matter how sophisticated their technical skills are, if they are incapable of transforming that into value for the company, then their value to the organisation is at best nothing, and more likely negative.
Companies/institutions are social systems, and the phrase “politics” is mostly just used to refer to “social skills”. If too many of the participants are corrupt or incompetent then the social network of the organisation can become especially toxic. But that’s a different problem to the fact that if you want to contribute value in such a system, you need to have social skills.
Can you get value out of somebody who has terrible social skills? Maybe sometimes, but it takes a lot of babysitting. Even then, you’ll never be able to properly trust that you’ll be able to rely on them to do anything ever. So it’s almost never worth the cost.
There’s also essentially no limit to the amount of damage they can do in companies. Even if you put aside the potential impact on company culture, I’ve seen many engineers needlessly waste huge amounts of company resources pursuing solutions that they considered to be technically brilliant (and which may have been), but were completely misaligned with the company’s objectives. I’ve personally witnessed one (especially brilliant) Rust engineer drive a company completely out of business with this approach.
Not every organization is going to have any opportunity to snag one but if you are running MIT, Google, or Lawrence Livermore you probably need to consider how to handle that edge case.
I think it's an interesting question, how organizations should deal with this. I think my previous employer actually dealt with it quite well - for the issues I cared about I _was_ given the opportunity to express my opinions and also share them with the people who were in the positions for making decisions around these issues. I was generally listened to patiently and also got (sometimes unsatisfying) explanations for why the actual course of action was different. I was _not_ given the authority to make these decisions or push these issues (the ones outside my area of expertise) through. I ended up leaving the organization in quite a bit of frustration, which I think was probably unavoidable, but I learned a ton from this episode, and we're otherwise still on good terms (I help out with little things now and then).
Brilliant nerds that solve problems for the organization on their own usually don't get rewarded as much as politicians despite the skills perhaps being more rare at the organization than politics.
For example, you could deep dive into a bug that's been hanging around, finally find the really technical solution to it, but most of the money holders won't be able to appraise that value from the technical details alone.
In general, simply giving away things to companies will usually get you taken advantage of (usually not maliciously).
Doing a tour to explain why it's a problem first, then providing the solution, is the much better alternative.
It really is true that it's a thankless job if everything is working well and you're being proactive by fixing problems before they become a problem.
There are exceptions where the money holders can deal with the technical details and don't need to be sold on the problem first, but it's rare and usually those are prestigious jobs in close proximity to lots money.
Status is immensely important. people who have status or convey it can get away with being wrong or espousing falsehoods and will not be called on on it. If anyone is guilty of speaking outside of his or her expertise and spreading bullshit, it is likely not going to be the nerd.
If this behavior is rewarded, then you haven't eliminated politics - you've reinforced politics but eliminated social cohesion and decorum as elements thereof.
Take social media: it is more about who they've said you are rather than _what_ you say. The key message of the medium is less the content of the message itself (though it figures in!) and more the combination of your online persona's followers + likes along with the message itself. I'd argue social media is a real shift in the Internet itself where we began to take online reputation very, very seriously, to the point that we decided we'd believe that likes were more than just Internet Points.
And people _love_ this sort of structure because it means that something other than actual competence can be the deciding factor. They have a shot at being in the cabal and among the deciders. And it's a lot easier to evaluate people: simply see what other people say about them.
Not saying that non-technical factors don't matter. They matter a lot and are often very easy wins to pick up. But it's clear people like systems that aren't centered around competence as much as they may claim otherwise. And areas where that isn't the case seem to eventually be converted to more conventional hierarchies.
It's different competence. Not incompetence. It's being competent at identifying marks to exploit, attention-seeking, etc.
I don't particularly care for it myself and feel pretty strongly that it's narrowing the gap between humans and apes, rather than widening it, but it's still some kind of skill.
Now we have self-identifying "computer hackers" and "security researchers" and "red team operators" who probably have never heard the words "shellcode" or "ASLR" in their life, and whose technical chops cap out at wrapping payloads from hardcoded URLs in a 100-line golang script and call it an advanced exploit. We used to call them "script kiddies." "Compiler developers" who couldn't tell you the difference between a regular expression and a context-free grammar, and simply wrap babel in a javascript snippet, calling their glorified terminal alias a real compiler.
Go look at the posers on r/programminghumor, or, god forbid, fucking Instagram influencers releasing content and memes about programming instead of having any technical competence with computing itself. While being a computer nerd used to be looked down upon with derision, it's now trendy and hip to be a "software engineer," much in the same way geek culture was appropriated and colonized by outsiders to the field. People think that 16 weeks spent studying JavaScript at a bootcamp puts them on even footing with shut-ins who spent tens of thousands of hours in front of a bash terminal and customizing their vim setups. It's the absolute depths of Dunning-Krugerism. These aren't geeks; they don't act or talk the same as people who have been embedded in this culture for years and lifetimes, even if they parade around superficial status markers to try to pose as one. It's as if an Anglophone went to a country where the predominant language was one other than English and started appropriating a few dozen words from the native tongue to pose as a local - "you're not from here, are you?"
Perhaps this stance on computer geek culture is "elitist" or not "inclusive" enough, but be aware that maximum inclusivity tends to result in the same regression to the mean that you describe. It's much easier to spin a narrative about how 31337 at programming you are when you can write any bullshit you want on social media and pose and identify as something you are not, while those who are actually out there writing software instead of posting about it, pushing commits instead of simply updating their GitHub READMEs, have scant little to show to the blithering masses of people who confuse Internet Points, narratives, and hearsay for actual competence. It's a continuation of the postmodern trend to socially construct status, narrative, and indeed, even truth, by manufacturing simulacra and digital content to stand in for and completely replace any underlying reality.
No matter if one is "weird nerd" or not
And frankly, nobody's irreplaceable. If you're #1 in the world, but casually drop racist and sexist slurs, odds are that the #2 expert in the world isn't that much worse than you, nor #3..#10.
Re: racism and sexism, I suspect that's not just wns and may have more to do with upbringing than personality. Most wns tend to be free-thinkers, and barring some oddballs, they tend to self-select out of that way of thinking.
Yes - but a lot of Weird Nerds aren't willing to be cordial. I said in another comment that I think that one of the reasons they find their home online is because online, others can walk away from their comments when they need a break from them; something that's much harder to do at work, when you're face to face with them in a meeting, or at the watercooler, or in the bathroom where they followed you to continue their argument.
> Re: racism and sexism, I suspect that's not just wns and may have more to do with upbringing than personality. Most wns tend to be free-thinkers, and barring some oddballs, they tend to self-select out of that way of thinking.
I wildly disagree that racism and sexism - especially if you were brought up in it - is something most people, especially weird nerds who have a very high opinion of their intelligence - "think your way out of".
> I wildly disagree that racism and sexism - especially if you were brought up in it - is something most people, especially weird nerds who have a very high opinion of their intelligence - "think your way out of".
I don't think we're disagreeing. Certainly the way we're molded in our formative years is hard to break out of. That wns tend to be freethinkers is also true, after all their differences in thinking are what set them apart from regular members of society. I'm positing that freethinkers have a much better chance of breaking the mold than regular people.
I'm not sure of your tone in this conversation though. Are you perhaps uncomfortable with individuals who think differently from you? That is often the root of intolerance my friend.
Well, no it isn't. That was the point of the top comment in the chain: the commenter worked for Weird Nerd, found them insufferable, told everyone they were insufferable and that working for them sucked, and as a result the Weird Nerd's career has tanked because no one new will work with them. There really aren't many cases where you can Go It Alone without any support from anybody, even if you're brilliant.
> that working for them sucked, and as a result the Weird Nerd's career has tanked because no one new will work with them.
We don't know for a fact that that's what killed their career. That's just the op's impression having worked with the person. The real truth is often muddy. And of course we've all met people who are extremely insufferable to their subordinates and peers but manage upwards very well and go on to very fruitful careers.
The industry has really changed though. It is much easier to hire social well adapted people who can code at all than to hire a bunch of people with social problems who can code really good. The former is scalable at least, the latter breaks down as no one can get along.
There's plenty of counterexamples in the software space, to the point where most great software was originally written by a single person - C, Unix, Linux, Git, TeX, Python, Ruby, Perl, SQLite, QEMU...
Most of these now have huge teams maintaining them of course, but the initial research and engineering that was needed to come up with the golden egg is usually a one man show. C designed by committee is COBOL.
Individual efforts are completely different. A programmer like Notch can produce Minecraft on his own and then just get help to push it into a maintained product. This happens all the time, but you can’t produce that easily (and definitely not consistently) at the big corp level.
If you have no financial constraints? In what world do you spend massive amounts of money to mitigate people being "weird"?
I’d argue that it’s not due to communication costs. The more you attempt to parallelise a problem the harder communication gets.
edit: to be fair, it is extremely necessary to have both voices at the table challenging one another
I love weird nerds, I love the sort of people who obsess about things, who work on them as obsessively as I do, I love info dumps, I love people who are passionate even about bizarre, niche shit I don't care about (actually, I love them even more for it!) but seriously. You need to be able to hold a conversation. You need to be able to talk productively with your fellow people, including difficult conversations. You need to open to negative feedback, to be able to take criticism or contrary viewpoints without turning into a puddle of some combination of depression/rage/self-hatred, or people are just not going to get on with you.
And I fully accept that autism runs through this pack of people like a freight train, and that's fair, I am always down to provide accommodations, I will talk to people how they need to be talked to, I will bend the norms of social interaction so it's more palatable, all of that, zero issues whatsoever. But even with that in consideration, relationships of all kinds are a give and take, and if all you do is take, people will notice, and people will avoid you.
You implying that non-nerds have any of these traits lol no they don't it's just that they exhibit more of group-thinking and less individualism, so they provoke less situations that might potentially cause conflict.
My experience with nerds is "ok each has their own opinion this is going to be difficult but let's try cooperating" whereas non-nerds act exclusively "my way or the highway" because they have never previously encountered the idea that their view of the world might be wrong "because I'm the majority".
The thesis of the initial discussion is that it is unfair to hold "weird nerds" to certain standards.
The person you are responding to is claiming that actually some of these standards are important.
Your response to that of claiming that the standards are important is to say that actually normal people don't pass those standards either.
This doesn't refute the argument that the standards are important, but would actually agree with them that actually yes it is totally fine to hold people to important standards, weird nerd or not. (And in fact, you think the weird nerds are even better are following the standards! So what is the issue of holding them to those standards then?)
Imagine you have an all-Arab company and you hire a Jew. Of course there's going to be a lot of drama, even it that particular employee has fantastic social skills, and would thrive in an environment full of people from their own culture.
My point is, in order to achieve the same result "collaborate with others and not cause drama" nerds need much higher social skills than non-nerds, simply because they're a minority.
It might reasonable to hold people to important standards, while these standards might be inherently unfair. It depends on whether you value effects or effort.
And that's before we get into nerds being a minority which is just... no. Nerd shit is so mainstream at this point and co-opting minority status to talk about you really being into geology or something is... a lot.
There's a lot going on here and I'm not interested in unpacking it, have a lovely day.
Your reply can be summarized as "workplace is magically immune to natural friction that occurs when people from vastly different social groups interact because I strongly believe in HR's wishful thinking and besides, talking about two social groups that are commonly known to hate each other to the point that they don't want to recognize each other's statehood is just non-compliant and goes against our community standards"
I can’t speak for academia, but in tech companies I’ve worked at I’ve seen a marked improvement in management when there’s a tech track for engineer advancement such that they never need to become managers, if they don’t want.
I mean the entire VC culture is ate up with the 10x CEO, the fact that a few other people lower down the totem pole can 10x in their narrow field shouldn't be a surprise.
Problem is that many places design their ladder such that non-managers are expected to do manager-like work past a certain level. This is to much dismay of those people who are not trained in management skills, and most of the skills they have acquired thus far are no longer being put to good use. These Weird Nerds may very well understand that being at the next level means making impact that exceeds what one person can do alone, nonetheless they will become increasingly unhappy at those roles. Maybe they will leave, maybe they will avoid getting promoted to higher levels in the first place.
It's not surprising that lots of people opt out or wash out of this system because the expectations don't match the formal preparation for it.
Let's forget the Weird Nerds for a minute and look at the following situation: a person W is technically savvy enough to have accomplished a big chunk of project X. Say, 90%. And then there is a 10% left which takes as much work. So management hires people from a consultancy to pick up the 10%. Except that these guys don't write much code. They are adept at finding their way into technical management at light speed and want to push what should be their work back to W, while doing the bare minimum otherwise. Now W has more work than before, because he has been pushed into politics. At the very least, he will need to communicate to his colleagues that they need to pick up the slack for real. With some luck, W will find a nice way to do that, but that's the kind of problem he is ill-equipped to handle.
There is something in this article which is overlooked in these comments: people like Katalin Karikó are often under a lot of pressure to perform. They can have crippling debts, or be supporting an elderly parent or relative. Or fear something as life-wrecking as a deportation. They don't get the luxury of being "average", because there are more desirable "average" candidates than them: people who speaks with the right accent or in the right cultural code.
Outside laboratory science, the expectation to bring in funding is not as strong. You don't need much money to do research, and grants are not as readily available. As far as the administration is concerned, if you do your teaching duty without too many issues, you can use the rest of your time as you see fit. Academic politics revolve more around personal relationships with the tenured people at your department.
I wouldn't want to tar all people who might be perceived as Weird Nerd, based on one data point (which AFAIK might not even be due to them being a Weird Nerd).
Almost all of the too-many people I've seen burn others under their influence, I wouldn't have called any of them Weird Nerd. And none of them appeared to be geniuses. Rather they tended to be at least somewhat successful as political operators, unlike how the article characterizes Weird Nerd. (Arrogant seemed to be the most common attribute, then greedy, dishonest, and unprintable bad word.)
Someone might decide to call some of those FTX cryptocurrency scammers Weird Nerds, but you could also just call them overprivileged brats with consequently warped worldviews.
In the real world, the "Weird Nerd" rarely checks all of these boxes, let alone most of them. I bet a lot of people will read this and identify as the Weird Nerd despite checking none of the boxes. That's the nature of articles that leave out the nuance and instead give us the most idealized view of a noble scientist who was a victim of the system. It leaves an opening for everyone to feel like they were a victim of the system.
That's why this problem is far more complicated than articles like this would lead you to believe. Many of the "Weird Nerd" people out there aren't perfect scientists or engineers unfairly shunned by the system. Many of them have real flaws of varying degrees that would require a lot of guidance and mentoring even within a perfect system. And it's not easy! In fact, it can be very taxing on teams to work around the quirks of your average (non Noble Prize winning, like this article) Weird Nerd even if they can produce good output, which is why so many companies select for Boring Nerds instead.
And in what way is Katalin Karikó responsible for your mistreatment? I doubt you would have said something similar about a black or gay former manager, attributing your mistreatment to their race or sexual orientation. But for some reason it’s perfectly acceptable to attribute it to a Weird Nerd personality.
>There was a time when academia was society’s refuge for the eccentric, brilliant, and impractical. No longer. It is now the domain of professional self-marketers. As for the eccentric, brilliant, and impractical: it would seem society now has no place for them at all.
https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/7004628-there-was-a-time-wh...
I would venture a guess that the vast majority of "Weird Nerds" are not Katalin Karikós, and instead are simply difficult jerks who are not nearly as smart as they think they are. Hubris mixed with obstinance is a recipe for misanthropy.
Also, the notion that the internet is a place where your outputs are judged solely on their merits, so that you don't have the "ability to sell yourself and your work", is absolutely hysterical.
Linus's approach is very good at setting this precedent, while staying really quite friendly, and it's what attracts a lot of people to the endeavor.
How about: IQ and EQ are mostly fixed in any given individual. You can use one to simulate the other - e.g. using EQ to get help or bullshit your way through a problem your IQ is insufficient for, or using IQ to intentionally behave in a way that would be totally natural if you had higher EQ. So it's not that they're negatively correlated per se, just that if you're being pressured past your limit in one, the other will effectively drop.
The "bundle of tradeoffs," which is a more humane and human way of thinking, is at odds with the "cog in the machine" approach which began with interchangeable machined parts and progressed on to the human element. Being replaceable then becomes a prized characteristic. Indeed, one of the administrative staff suggested that anyone who seemed like they were too valuable to replace ought to be let go on those grounds alone. It's a recipe for a kind of predictable mediocrity.
Business loves predictable mediocrity, and we see it in various forms of intellectual property. Why sell a copy of Office for unlimited use when you can charge monthly and predict out your next few quarters? Own a movie? No, rent. And as academic institutions continue their transformation into administratively bloated credential assembly lines, we will see more business-y strategies worm their way in.
There's a lot of that. And in academia in general.
Many/most are decent people. But even those often haven't been exposed to the ordinary life experience of the majority people from their country. And that often seems to affect how they think about themselves and the world.
Also, there's often implicit self-promotion and self-interest behavior. Which they might think is normal, since it's in their upbringing, and in the circles they now travel in. But it's not necessarily normal to the masses of their countries (which I'd expect to tend towards more cooperative and egalitarian in some ways).
Science ultimately is a collective effort. The collaboration doesn't need to happen in real time, in the same physical place. Ideas can be spread out across time and geographies and finally one person puts them together and given our bias for hero worship, we call that one person a genius and go on a wild goose chase of how can we create more geniuses instead of asking how can we foster a environment for ideas, an environment which sometimes needs to last for decades in order to bear fruit.
Pointing out that it pays terribly is completely on point.
A different way to become a low paying professor is to research and earn 7digits+ from patents
I'm sorry, what, even if they're preponderant you can't just call all of them that any more than you can collectively call all basketball players "Marfan Syndrome havers"
I say this as a weird nerd who is definitely on the spectrum, like I suspect many HN readers are.
> but for some reason people really do not like to call marathon winners "Kenyans".
Why might other marathon runners not like being lumped in with that country, given its incredible winningness at long-distance racing?
And even then, its a _spectrum_ meaning every person has a their own unique mix of, lets just call them quirks.
Meaning they (and you) are more than a single word like "autism". In fact in Sweden we've moved away from the "autistic diagnosis" because it's too simplistic. It's dangerous to be too caught up in "being autistic" that we hinder ourselves and others when we can do more.
Signed, a dad with autistic tendencies and a 4-year old child with may quirks that already give us quite a lot of challenges.
But the thing is, it's a spectrum.. Personally I do find it a little ridiculous because the biggest parts of autism have absolutely nothing to do with my work/interests but with social life, sensory issues, etc. And it's definitely more a struggle than a superpower (at least to me).
The author is conflating people who are motivated internally by making great contributions to society with autism. Many of the best artists and scientists aren't autistic, and perhaps are quite the opposite: deeply emotional and socially aware. I'd argue you need a deep understanding of social value to even want to make a great contribution to society.
Also, it's not like people with autism are automatically geniuses. Anecdotally I've found autism to not really contribute to original and innovative thinking, more with excessive fixation on a subject. There is a difference.
Autistics only nessecarily misunderstand social value in a superficial way. They are frequently compensating for a sort of "social blindness" with unusual strengths like pattern recognition to get insights into social situations in a more detached way through a different lens.
People also can be on a team with somebody who has a deep understanding of social value who doesn't have it themselves. Jobs/Woz comes to mind.
I don't like to call anybody autistic because it invites paternalism or even outright discrimination. I even object to using much milder labels such as "introvert."
The best thing for a Weird Nerd to do is to find a trustworthy 'patron' who can appreciate that it benefits them to handle the messy human stuff and let the Weird Nerd do the nerd work. The problem is that Weird Nerds are often terrible at figuring out who is trustworthy and a good fit for a symbiotic relationship like this.
I think the point here can be strengthened by removing the issue of "weird traits" entirely. The simple reality is, if you are hiring someone to be very, very smart in their field, at a world-class, there is literally no one who can just parachute in and replace them, level, you need to minimize the amount of other things they have to do in order to operate at that level.
Why hire a world-class irreplaceable expert to do anything if you're going to require them to spend 90% of their time doing things other than being a world-class irreplaceable expert? Even if the expert is the nicest person in the history of humanity, it's still a complete waste if you can't support them and they have to do all this other stuff just to be allowed to function as a world-class expert.
In local parlance, this is no different than hiring a senior engineer and then 100% filling their schedule with meetings. Or expecting to hire a unicorn that is an expert in seven distinct languages and is also a manager and a high-level sales person. If I put that job listing out HR would laugh and send it back to me. Essentially making "world class scientist AND good manager AND expert sales/politician" the baseline for functionality in the sciences is just a recipe for futility.
There doesn't even have to be a correlation with "weird traits"; even a population-average distribution of the ability to me a manager + politician + sales + something else is a very, very tall ask. Add back in that there are certainly good reasons that outlier personality traits are fairly likely to go with outlier skills and it just makes it worse, but it would be plenty bad enough without that.
On one hand, I understand that I can't get a job because of my own flaws. After all, who needs a solo-only C-only [2] programmer who can't build theory of mind and thus, can't read code written by others and who refuses to prioritize employer over user?
On the other hand, it is hard, and I secretly hope the industry can change so that people like me can have a place.
Edit: To clarify, I don't think I am a Genius, just a Weird Nerd in the sense that I do not like politicking. However, I am trying to learn from my empath wife how to do it because yes, it is a necessary evil right now.
[1]: https://gavinhoward.com/2024/06/my-programming-journey/
[2]: https://gavinhoward.com/2023/02/why-i-use-c-when-i-believe-i...
I have also tried to start my own business, but that is not going well.
In some ways, things are better than ever for folks like you. Starting and running a one-person business making software is feasible now but would've been much harder in decades past.
> Second, I work alone on code that is entirely in my head. ... Rust is great for teams ...
Unfortunately, industry has problems that are big enough that they're not easily solved with one person. So tools that work to bring about a team's success will be valuable. As will individuals who work well in teams.
Yes, you are absolutely right.
Unfortunately, I have been trying that and failing. I don't blame anyone for that either.
> Unfortunately, industry has problems that are big enough that they're not easily solved with one person. So tools that work to bring about a team's success will be valuable. As will individuals who work well in teams.
You are absolutely correct. And yes, that is why people shouldn't hire me.
Nevertheless, I think there are some problems that one person can solve.
I want to make the next-gen version control system. I think that may be small enough for one person. Other infrastructure software can be like that too.
> I want to make the next-gen version control system
While you certainly could invent one yourself, you could consider contributing to popular ones like git/mercurial. It'd help teach you both the positive and the negative aspects of their design choices. Also you could consider learning from newer approaches like Jujutsu [1] or Pijul [2] on your way to designing the next-gen system. Good luck!
Blog post marketing, mostly. I am about to start a podcast for marketing as well.
I would do conferences, but people have advised against that.
Its quite possible you have thought of this, but I cant be sure. If you have thought or acted on it, how long were you able to sustain it?
Being able to switch your obsession is something we are able to do, but it does require time and thinking.
I actually can't switch my obsessions. Not intentionally. I have tried.
It has taken me 7 years of marriage to go from uncanny valley social skills to appearing normal at first glance. Social engineering skills would probably take me another 100 years.
And on that point (and this is purely my belief, not objective truth), unlike most people, I want clients to choose my software because it actually is the best for them, not because I manipulated, er, socially engineered, them into thinking so. If people make uninformed decisions in my favor, then on some level, I am slightly scamming them. I don't want that.
I respect your position. I am going to push against a few errors made on my part.
Social engineering was used incorrectly by me. I should have said marketing and sales. You cannot switch to something you find uninteresting, much less something you feel is in opposition to your values.
> Weird Nerds (I called them autistics, but people really hated that)
And I totally get why they're trying to come up with a word that markets better, and yes many people react negatively to "autist" or calling someone "on the spectrum".
At the same time, man prominent people are making public their diagnostics and assert being on the autism spectrum, and I wonder if it becomes a disservice to them to not use the term when appropriate, precisely because of how it's perceived now.
I think it's a good thing to come up with some other term to refer to these extrinsically motivated nerds that don't really care for typical social constructs but bring immense value to a bunch of types of work. That way whether they identify or are diagnosed as autistic isn't necessarily the important piece, more the result of their person.
Also, "on the spectrum" is used today much like "depression" was used in the '90s. It's a catch all excuse used at the expense of people actually suffering the disorder. Much like sometimes you are just sad, I would wager many people who claim to be "on the spectrum" are just assholes.
> something they choose to do
Point taken, but then switching that for "weird" doesn't feel like helping, it's still a pejorative and not really focused description.
> people actually suffering the disorder
An issue I'd take with that is the effect to which it's penalizing depends a lot on the environment and what the person is trying to do. Would two people with the same condition, but one suffering and the other not, need to be identified in two different ways ?
Is it the autistic/not-autistic spectrum? Because if so, we're all on it.
I have good reasons to consider myself neurodivergent (and others do consider me such). There are definite divergences that have caused me problems. I have what people consider "superpowers" and what people consider "difficulties".
Not certain I am autistic. Might have been considered mild or (the then-termed) "high functioning" as a kid in the 80s.
But on the other hand, I don't think it's necessarily wrong to put me in the same broad category as autistic people, because I have the same issues in the context of the article -- with being conventionally "ambitionless", having relatively little grasp of (or instinct for) power games etc., and needing the kind of support that others often do.
That category needs a name. (In the UK we'd traditionally go for "boffin", which is broadly a term of affection, but it's a little harder to spot a boffin these days because of casual clothing at the office)
Not selecting against weird nerds doesn't mean selecting against "socially well-adjusted Nerds".
In fact, the article says that a person can in fact be exceptional at politic and science, despite their tenets being antithetical in many cases.
> There is a strong anti-correlation between these interests (that of course does not mean there is no one who is good at both.)
The article is about how politicking is a requirement of success in academia. Schmoozing isn't social grace. It's closer to social engineering.
Social grace is having the grace to socialize without embarrassing yourself, you don't have to schmooze to do that. And yet it is often a requirement of politics.
Which is a requirement of success in academia.
Schmoozing is antithetical to science because science is the pursuit of the truth of the nature of things backed by tangible evidence. Science isn't supposed to show bias or favoritism.
Kind of hard to reject that notion. Though you could probably argue that schmoozing isn't necessary for politics. Most people would disagree though.
This is very similar to the idea of the tortured artist or that to be a great comedian you have to be depressed.
The happy and well adjusted comedian or socially adept mathematician doesn’t make for an interesting story — it just doesn’t fit the popular narrative and so it gets ignored.
In every discipline there are total weirdos and normal people at every step of the way, from terribly inept to amazingly world-class.
Unfortunately my only solution to this is to learn from my dad’s experience and lean into instead of away from the areas Katalin disdains. Success seems to require leaning into these areas of social reciprocity. Especially in startups. Yes you must make a product that people want, but to become big it requires distribution, which requires schlepping by performing these social reciprocity hacks.
A wn is disconnected from society. This gives him the power to think and act independently. The non-wn can't do that.
(And, being disconnected like that, the wn is oblivious to a million social hints and cues. He is blind that way)
It isn't voluntary, being a wn. It's an artifact of habitual, excessive concentration, or something.
The non-wn's state is involuntary too.
Both are products of nature/society/habit/etc. Both trapped in their respective shape.
I suppose some of us are not trapped like that. There might even be a way to escape it. To make that habit-shape into something conscious and voluntary.
This had the effect of embracing those people who hadn't necessarily figured out how to be independent adults. As long as they were lucky enough to be identified and brilliant enough to be hired, they could flourish at the Labs.
I'd love to know if other settings have made similar accommodations, and to what effect.
A major risk in academia is picking a dead-end niche. We hear about the people who picked an unlikely winner. This one picked mRNA vaccines. The inventor of MRI scanning had similar problems. He was almost fired. Those two succeeded, eventually. But the people who work on E-beam lithography or vaccines against addiction didn't do so well. Both of those would have been huge if they worked well. You can't tell in advance. If you could, the problem didn't need research.
A more useful way to look at this is that doing it and selling it are different skills. This is why companies have separate R&D, production, and marketing departments. If you face a hard problem in one of those areas, you can't devote enough time to the others. This is to some extent a time management and division of labor problem.
Academia is not team-oriented in that sense. At least below the principal investigator level. Once reaching that level, university PR departments are happy to hype any modest advance into a major breakthrough. Below that level, it's a cold world. Academia seems to have built itself a dysfunctional world - a huge bureaucracy, not much of a career path for real researchers, and a shrinking pool of full professorships. So anybody who is any good goes to a startup now.
Henry Kissinger, who was not lacking in people skills, once commented that "academic policy is so vicious because the stakes are so low".
I think it is naive to take such a stance. This is the thinking that leads to layers of management, institutional bloat, non experts with MBAs calling shots and ultimately loss of the opportunity to fund genius as it becomes all the blurier who really has the vision and capability and who is just good with filling out grant applications.
One aspect of it, that has always been a part of the package, is that folks Just. Don't. Like. Me.
Most, if questioned about their dislike, may come up with a couple of things, like "He's abrupt," or "He's arrogant," but these are also exactly the traits present in many folks that they do like. They are just trying to justify this "feeling" that they have about me.
As anyone in my shoes can tell you, we're "bully magnets." Most of us were recipients of multiple atomic wedgies, in school. My grade school days were a living hell. Again, there's no real "reason" for the hate. There's just something about us that pisses them off. I suspect that the "resting bitch face," prevalent amongst us may have something to do with it. It often looks as if we're being hostile, when we're not. I spent many years, training my "resting" face to be one that's basically "harmless dork," as opposed to "angry bastard." Doesn't win me a lot of respect, but, at least, I'm not being attacked out of the starting gate, anymore.
I've gotten used to it. It doesn't even really bother me too much, these days, and it happens a lot less. Feeling sorry for myself is a waste of time. I used to get all butthurt about it, but that was just stupid of me. Others have far worse crosses to bear. In the aggregate, it's been a good thing. I'm fairly decent at my software development.
The folks that matter, stick around. I do have a fairly large circle of close friends and associates that don't let my "oddness" get in the way, and enough folks have respected me, that I was able to make a decent living.
But many of us don't have those "soft" skills, that can be important, when working in a team, or trying to establish relationships with other people.
It sounds like those are totally fixable personality defects, yet here you are acting persecuted and making excuses. What if you didn't blame other people and instead took responsibility for your own off-putting behavior?
I've worked with too many men who think they're too special to follow social etiquette, when they are actually just garden-variety jerks who use their nerd identity as a get out of jail free card.
It's far too easy to conclude that you aren't heeding your own advice. Was this some next level attempt to show what being a bully magnet looks like?
I don't understand.
Not really sure what the solution is. Maybe a huge increase in the number of national labs, as a vent for those who hit the first roll but fail the second.
We also need a vent for people who are good at teaching but not super focused on research. Drastically increase the community college system, IMO, and start paying the instructors enough to have nice middle-class lifestyles. Stop making people-people and weird nerds compete for rare grants and let them both do the things they are better at.
It doesn't take very long to find corporate examples of this alternative, and why it's not great either.
One thing is to always be looking for one's own blindspots and examining how your or other people's behavior might be misinterpreted, and defusing any potential awkwardness with honesty and humor. For example, forgetfulness or anxiety rather than intentional snubbing. And err on the side of humor mixed with some self-deprecation and self-awareness because it demonstrates you're cool, reciprocate, are domesticated, and strive to not embarrass others intentionally.
A while back, the department dean was a mildly-weird nerd but developed politician-/salesman-like cheerfulness and political skills taking some of the burden off PIs and supporting them in whatever ways were needed to bring in the big grants, licensing deals, and industry collaboration. Having 2 expert, dedicated, highly-productive grant writers were also invaluable. The grad students were absolutely going places and startups were on the minds of about 80% of folks. It was a good spot to branch out from or build a research CV but there weren't profits to be had directly there.
In the React case, I'm not sure it would have become the framework it is today unless Dan Abramhov pushed it outside of the company. That took an insane amount of effort and skill to do that, especially at the time when Angular was quickly establishing itself.
Rust required an entire company to organize behind it and Mozilla spent a fortune getting it on its feet. Otherwise, I am not sure it would have been more than an experiment on someone's laptop, long forgotten.
I'm not sure what the solution for that is, or how else you push through all of the noise. Every great discovery and advancement in history is driven by the folks who can sell their hard work or at least have someone else willing to do it for them.
(I’m not being political. I just don’t follow the connection)
Even the proposed rule
> Any system that is not explicitly pro-Weird Nerd will turn anti-Weird Nerd pretty quickly
just feels like a misunderstanding of the paradox of tolerance[0] ("in order to maintain a tolerant society, the society must retain the right to be intolerant of intolerance").
So we need to question what the author means with "Weird Nerd", because if a weird nerd just isn't expressing intolerance, I can't fathom how anyone could have an issue with it ...and become "anti-Weird Nerd".
It's not a dig at the movement or their values, i do think its a minority who do this, but its a vocal minority who might be capturing the movement (i don't think this is the case, but this is a danger. look at what HAES as become).
> Everything comes at a cost: spend more time worrying about politics, there will be less time for science. What’s more, the kind of people who really care about science or truth to the extent that Karikó did, are not the same people that get motivated by playing politics or being incredibly pleasant.
Obvious answer: We should incentivize and structure our institutions to be more receptive to Weird Nerds in order to enable further progress of science.
My take: Scientific work is by its nature unnatural for human beings. Human beings played politics for millenia and are structured to do so, mentally, physically, biologically. Structuring our society to be more receptive to the people which we are wired to not be receptive is swimming against the current.
The same argument can be applied to a lot of modern phenomena.
https://x.com/esrtweet/status/1795088812944584781
He contends that autism is brain damage that limits your max IQ and that all the smartest people are neurotypical -- the genius brain is almost necessarily a normie brain, but better.
I think that what's closer to the truth is that extremely high intelligence is itself a form of neurodivergence, which is likely to be comorbid with other forms of neurodivergence. Eric himself I believe to be neurodivergent (in some non-autistic way) with 95% confidence: one of the tells is his choice of desktop environment: a minimalist tiling window manager (likely i3) with Emacs full screen on one of his displays -- anything else he deems too distracting and a drag on his brain. This sounds very ADHD and in any case is an almost archetypal Weird Nerd setup. Neurotypicals love their Windows and Mac style UIs, and every NT software engineer I've met has no problem managing -- and mousing through -- multiple windows: Visual Studio Code for coding, Postman for making HTTP calls, DBVisualizer for database interactions, etc.
NTs also love what people like Eric (and I as well sometimes) dismiss as "monkey socio-sexual games"; and if you are smart as well, you tend to get really, really good at these. Having been around extremely intelligent people who otherwise seem neurotypical (in particular, having married one and thus gained two more as in-laws), they tend to get less into hard science fields like math and physics, and more into fields where they can wield their impressive social skills for maximum benefit such as law, psychology, or entertainment. (Great actors, like Orson Welles or Sir Patrick Stewart, fit this profile to a T, though there are some great actors -- like Dan Aykroyd -- with autism!) My in-laws were legal professionals for the entertainment industry; after that long and successful career they retired, went to seminary, and joined the clergy of the Episcopal church!
Eric's observation that all the best scientists are neurotypical-ish may be a result of what's described in TFA: in today's world, being a prominent scientist selects very hard against Weird Nerd traits because at that level, beyond a baseline level raw skill in the discipline doesn't correlate well with success; schmoozing and marketing do. The same has been true of professional software engineering for at least a decade and a half or so.
I definitely think so. If Eric had gone to tea with faculty at the Institute of Advanced Study back when Einstein and Gödel were top dogs he may well have had the opposite impression.
And they hide this behind a smokescreen by focusing on all the superficial forms of diversity (gender, skin color, orientation etc).
There never was such a time, since at least the time of Newton and Euler Academics are a popularity and status contest. You got to be eccentric only after you climbed to the top of your field.
The part about "organized manager" is surprising. If we're going to stereotypes, I would've guessed that a manager who was autistic would likely have being organized as one of their strengths.
Regarding "socially adept [...] manager", I've worked with two software engineering project managers who were autistic. They were both very different (one amiable, and had much better than average understanding of human behavior and emotions; the other came off as making an effort to tolerate people). Both were not only well-respected, but liked, and were effective at difficult work&people-herding jobs.
Even with the manager who came off as not really liking anyone by default, and even on a very difficult project, almost everyone on large teams respected the project manager (excepting one person, who couldn't stand something about the project manager, or the nature of the project). And I didn't hear the grumbling like I'd normally hear about a manager who was unfair, incompetent, or dishonest.
I play D&D. This exposes me to a wide variety of people, but unsurprisingly, a lot of them are probably what the author would consider Weird Nerds.
Most of them are perfectly pleasant people, and I look forward to spending time in their company, both in the context of playing D&D, and just as a way to socialize. Heck, at my last session, a player proposed doing a regular board game night, and I am very excited to do this with those people.
But. Occasionally, you meet someone who is just fucking unpleasant to be around. Maybe they're on the spectrum (as the author really wants to lump all Weird Nerds on the far end of), maybe they're just poorly socialized, maybe they're just assholes. And unless they're just awful people [more on this later], you learn to put up with their idiosyncracies - because in the end, they're pretty good at playing D&D, and it's fun to slay a dragon or solve the mystery of the mermaid pond, or finally get revenge on your vampire stepfather from hell or whatever. But those people? They're not coming to board game night, and they're not fucking coming to any of my BBQs. They're ok in the context of playing D&D for three hours, but I'm not willing to spend more time with them.
I think that's another reason why some Weird Nerds who are unpleasant to be around have found a safe haven on the internet, as the author puts it: because while they're still unpleasant, you can read their unpleasant words and then walk away for awhile. They're not standing in front of you, demanding your time face to face. If someone is the world's expert on a thing you're collaborating on online, it doesn't matter if you groan every time you have to talk to them, because your time with them is largely limited, and you can walk away at literally any point during the interaction and regain the will to live and spend more time with them.
I'm not sure what my point is. Maybe that it's kind of ok to not want to be around people who are unpleasant to be around, and that despite that, it's also ok for them to still meaningfully participate in the things that matter to them.
[About the awful people in D&D: it's a game, and it's made to be fun. Not every table is made for every player, and vice versa. If you're in a game, and someone is truly ruining the game for the other players by being a generally unpleasant person, I am begging you to just fucking stop playing with them. Life is short, don't surround yourself with assholes. I promise you can find more players. And if you're the one being asked to leave a D&D table because other people find your unpleasant, reflect on your actions. Maybe you're just at a table that's a bad fit for you. Or maybe you're an asshole.]
(If I currently play D&D with you, rest assured that I am not talking about you; all the examples are from past games.)
Not to defend but how is someone to recognise a fault of their own if they're not called upon? Unless its truly terrible and they know they are doing it on purpose.
The issue we live in nowadays we are all scared how to tell each other how we feel towards and that we now safe harbour them by throwing them a label and approving that to a degree.
I'm direct and blunt, if someone is doing something in a group I call them out of it; I expect folk to do the same for me.
I may be offended but you should be offended, there's no harm in that.
Granted it's a double edged sword. You tell them; they preach to their safe haven and breathe the toxic fumes of their peers. Or they actually recognise it.
But I'm a DM, not their therapist or their dad - I'm not obligated to hand-hold someone through a radical restructuring of their personality.
And, it might not surprise you to find out, some people react very badly to being criticized. And I'm not particularly interested in having an argument over my subjective opinion of a person. I just don't want to be around them anymore.
"No that's not alright, cut the crap otherwise your out of here"
Why play with them and not just cut them out completely? By keeping them in group your only enforcing their unpleasantness.
The people who actually ruin the game and make it not fun to play, we do cut them out.
But other people, well - I guess the threshold for playing a cooperative game with someone is different than the threshold for inviting them to a party at my house. Plus, at D&D, they spend a lot of their time inside a character who may be more interesting and pleasant than the person rolling the dice.
Therein lies the crux of the issue. Everyone agrees that this person needs help, but also agrees that they shouldn't feel obligated to provide it.
And so they continue on, blissfully unaware of the chafing they cause. Life goes on, and their contribution remains minimal.
> Therein lies the crux of the issue. Everyone agrees that this person needs help, but also agrees that they shouldn't feel obligated to provide it.
This sentence will definitely seem targeted at you. However both the following are true:
1) You are not their keeper 2) Therein lies the crux of the issue
I would say your anecdote did its task brilliantly, it described a situation fairly, which presented reasonable expectations humans can have today.
The pros/cons of this current accommodation were then discovered.
Maybe I'm just to compassionate.
Of course, we're only seeing one side of a narrative, and the stories are obviously written for an audience that expects something - but it can be rather enlightening at just how bad some people can be, and just how much some other people can put up with.
As I said, I trial them out if they can't obey the first warning than out they go.
Not your emotions, not your circus.
It might be true that allowing minute variances between normie nonverbal feedback gatherer people to be a factor to their successes has its own problems, but encouraging everyone to drop that BS and just be offensive and blunt to make things simple is at least not a widely supported solution.
So be nice... it sometimes gets complicated to be just a nice and happy person, but you actually don't have to be a fearless warrior at all times.
However, whenever he'd have his "cool" friends over for parties I wouldn't get an invite, in fact never met any of his other acquaintances. He explained to me once that he likes to keep his different social lives separate, and I was apparently the only one in his "tech" social circle.
That made me feel like shit, and reinforced my self-view as failing to be a normal human.
This is a theme that's continued with multiple "friends" throughout my life, to the point where I eventually just gave up trying, gave up giving of myself to others to simply be siloed or discarded once they got what they wanted from me. I got tired of the lack of reciprocation in giving me a chance to be a part of their actual life even though they were apparently getting enough from me that they were willing to keep me around when it suited their needs.
I hope some day you gain some compassion and can see that people who are different than you are still people, and that treating them as lesser except when you can get something from them (like an interesting dnd game) is a huge part of the problem in these types of people retreating even more from the social and emotional norms.
At this point, why in the hell do you think I would even _want_ to be willful part of the society you inhabit, that treats other humans as you do?
But please don't equate me with someone who treated you badly, based on five paragraphs I banged out this afternoon.
Just because I don't want to invite a casual acquaintance who regularly says things I find vile to my house, doesn't make me an incompassionate villain.
Academics are as much courtiers these days as they are researchers.
I think the real problem isn't so much the skillsets of the researcher involved as much as is what is implied about the environments and the vagaries thereof.
The argument this piece is referring to and the way it is responding to it seem to deflect attention from the real problems, or rather, recasts it in the wrong way. My focusing on whether or not Karikó is "too weird" or whether it's time to abandon "weirdness", it deflects attention from all the problems that people are dealing with in academics. For every person who is "weird", there are many others who are not and still get screwed, or still others who are not but also not particularly bright and still "milk" the system or are in the right place at the right time.
This whole debate strike me a bit like climate change debates, specifically the criticism that berating people for not recycling or using plastic straws or whatever is just blaming the victim, or is hiding the real offenders behind the curtain. In the same way it strikes me as kind of besides the point whether Karikó is weird or not, or how weird is too weird, or whatever. The bottom like is academics is no longer really about science in many fields, and not even really about how socially skilled you are, it's about politics and random dynamics of fate.
My impression of academics is that it blew way past "social skill" long ago and is now in a very different realm altogether. I've seen too much fraud and manipulation to blame anyone who has good ideas for "not being socially skilled enough."
I didn't read the original tweets but the idea that Karikó should be shamed for complaining because "that's just the way it is" seems like condoning the problems and then blaming her for calling them out. The next step is complaining about people calling out fraud because "that's just what everyone does".
What was your director’s response?
Do you think there’s any chance you’re biased and blind to other innovations because you really dislike self-promotion, marketing, and branding?
I am definitely biased, but whether I am blinded to real innovation or progress is something I think about all the time.
I think I would not be opposed to the self-promotion, marketing, and branding were it in support of some significant achievement or accomplishment. Unfortunately we have a culture that seems to think showering and getting dressed in the morning is a noteworthy event.
To use a more concrete example, I ran a project to upgrade a significant piece of software in our environment that had been neglected for some time. The project went well and I moved on to more interesting work. I had multiple people tell me that we should promote it, give talks about how it was done, pound our chest about how hard of a project it was, etc. I refused. In my mind it was a normal upgrade of a system we were responsible for and frankly was disgraceful that it was in such a bad state of deferred maintenance. There was no way I would be comfortable “taking credit” for doing what should have been done years ago.
Fast forward a few years and another team responsible for doing a similar project is giving multiple presentations all around the org and all the way up to the 2nd in command of the company. I’m like wow, maybe we should have taken the opportunity when we had it to pretend like we are superheroes for doing the bare minimum of our job and not having a vendor drop our support contract.
You think you’ll change from this experience or just keep doing stuff the way you like to do it?
Not a great comparison because work is a deal in exchange for money and tooth brushing isn’t a deal you make with anyone.
With employment, the outcome you want is likely continued employment and/or some sort of increase in power/pay/responsibilities/etc.
Can’t really tell which it is on behalf of someone else, but in the programming case, the company agreed to pay for work. Unless people were being fired left and right whose job it was to do the thing that was left undone then the company was satisfied with their output. You can tell because they kept paying them.
With teeth brushing the outcome you likely want is healthy teeth and gums and fresh breath. Brushing once a year the night before the dentist won’t likely get you to that outcome (but if it does then it is good enough).
I'm something of a weird nerd myself, and though I haven't tried it, I'm sure ChatGPT could spit out some of the most complicated code I've written and make it look easy.
This is ridiculous! The best researchers won't be much better at 45 than 25, so it's just wasting 20 years getting "experience" and moving up the ladder. But by nature of getting that experience, they're going to give up on actual innovation.
To get great research done you have to be great manager who can prioritise time and resources, balance a budget, forge connections with other researchers, get the most out of the people working for you and know where and how to get even more funding to keep the research going after the initial round of research dries up. Those 20 years might not make you a better 'scientist', but hopefully they will make you better at all the other 'soft' skills that are required for successful scientific research. At 25 you should be focusing on the science and doing research and not have to bother with all that 'crap'.
The iphone is made by Apple after all, and we can get into discussions about how much credit Apple even deserves for the iphone or whether Steve Jobs deserves credit for whatever portion of that we give.
But in academics we still act as if it's just "Joan Smith" doing their research and hiring people to get things done, and acting as if they're brilliant for doing so, when in fact many other people probably have the exact same ideas, or happened to be in the right place in the right time, or know the right people in the grant agency, or whatever; or their grad students or postdocs are the ones with the ideas, etc. etc.
I keep thinking about a colleague of mine who, whenever someone like a grad student would have an original idea, but required his grant money or whatever to pay for it, he would take credit on papers saying "ideas are a dime a dozen; it's the work involved getting it to happen that matters." But if there was a paper that was the result of a relatively unoriginal idea that required a lot of RA, grad student, and postdoc labor, it was always "it's the idea that counts, and not whoever follows through with it."
I feel like that's the atmosphere in academics now.
At 25, you are likely pursuing somebody else's ideas, because you have not proven yourself yet. At 35, you should be pursuing your own ideas, but it often gets delayed to 45, because taxpayers are stingy with their money.
I ask because I hear/read very similar things to what she wrote from people in all kinds of fields (not just STEM or academia).
Number of times the words "weird", "nerd" or "autistic" appear in Kariko's memoir: 0
Number of times the word "internet" appears in the book: 3
#1 referrring to her mother ("there was nothing she couldn't find on the internet") who would call Kariko daily to keep her informed of current events because Kariko was too busy working the lab (not publishing silly ideas to a substack blog about "Weird Nerds")
#2 referring to a book about stress by an endocrinologist that she read as a teenager ... she describes how the author in 1925 noticed that many diseases have the same symptoms and comments that "anyone looking up symptoms on the internet today" would also notice this
#3 referring to a period "in the 1990s, before the dawn of the internet bubble"
Thus, Kariko appears to have achieved success without being autistic and without heavy use of the internet. In fact, she achieved success despite an "internet bubble".
Let's hope the blogger finishes her PhD despite the distractions of the internet. It is likely that the only "Weird Nerds" she has identified are an internet audience who likely worship university dropouts and who are most certainly not doing real work on real biological problems in a wet lab. Instead, they are staring at screens and playing video games.
Trying to put computer addicts that idolise university dropouts whose idea of biotech is life extension in the same category as Nobel Prize-winning biochemists who have solved real problems is pure fantasy, like computer games. But coming from web bloggers, it's not surprising.
It's also not surprising that Kariko refers to an "internet bubble". That bubble arguably needlessly diverted investment away from biotech during Kariko's career. The example she cites is gene therapy which in the 1990s was "the next big thing", only to be later overshadowed when the internet bubble arrived.
Dante hated flattery so much, he immersed flatterers in excrement in the 8th circle of hell, below murderers. A fitting image given how full of crap such people are in this life.
In a riff on John Adams, no scientific enterprise will function in the absence of a moral people. You cannot have good scientists without first having virtuous men and women. You are wasting your time, and in fact, probably laying the groundwork for harm.
I think you hit the head of the nail there.
I thought academia was created by the nobility to be a place for weird nerds since the weird nerds were useful.
being agreeable when you disagree, even when you are 100% certain you are correct
It's essentially the bureaucrats taking over. Putting metrics on things that can't be measured well and treating those as if they're the answer. Saying "good enough" or "something is better than nothing" when they don't apply. Because it's easier to deal with that than the chaos and uncertainty of innovation.
I think this is also something silicon valley lost. We definitely stopped dreaming. Stopped building the future we wanted and instead just started doing work. There's been a lot of stagnation. It's not just about making things smaller
Societal niceties are difficult to navigate as I just can't predict the effects of what people do as a consequence of what I say and personal opinion may not be grounded in fact.
For example the job interview, technically I have no issues at all, but initially I did not know the "right" way to behave in them, and I would come across arrogant (statement of fact comparing oneself's achievements to others invariably tend to do this). I expected to be hired based on technical merit and that I am generally amenable.
I wasn't hired until I started manipulating the interview, faux humble, quiet, hiding smaller achievements, exactly the kind of thing you're taught in school is the opposite of what to do.
I'd also investigate the interviewers to find out their interests and hobbies for leverage e.g. they like paint balling, ok, I don't do that but I can use some of their common phrases in parlance "by accident" and without giving away my background research on the interviewer.
I shouldn't have to do this, and I despise it (mainly from resentment of the process) but the results speak for themselves. In 4 interviews since I started it I've landed all 4 jobs.
Side note: I'm wondering what will happen with this comment will people downvote because it's showing I'm manipulative in interviews, or up vote due to agreement / feeling the same way. Obviously I want the latter as I like points, but society (perhaps not community) tends to go the other way when you speak uncomfortable truths.
What this misses is the fact that a massive element of the “support for women in STEM” discourse was the blatant demonization of the Weird Nerd in favor of the Failed Corporatist.
"Nerd" has been the subject of a long and largely successful attempt at reclamation, to the point where people younger than a certain age don't generally consider it to be derogatory and comfortably identify with it. It's been so successful that the author feels the need to prepend the word "weird" to clarify that we're not talking about just anyone who likes video games.
By the time I was helping with a local youth group in 2017 (14 year olds) the very extroverted ringleader of the group was a proud "nerd", by which he meant that he and his friends loved to play video games like Fortnite and had an aversion to sports.
Take a look at the highest voted entries in Urban Dictionary [0]. Obviously this isn't a scientific measurement, but it shows a strong subculture of self-identified nerds who embrace the label to some degree.
Edit: here's another source [1] that you may find more credible, from 2012:
> And the appropriation of the word "nerd" was a "battle that got won", says [Neil] Gaiman. "It's like many terms that were originally intended to offend, the team that was offended took it as its own as a badge of honour.
> "It's part of a cycle, that terms of abuse are turned around - in this case it has been socially turned around."
> I'm a genius and I'd like you to change your behavior to accommodate my needs.
In education they call this "twice exceptional".
Wow. Sure as hell feels that way.
See, I actually feel like this is happening across the Internet, too, in a different way.
Firstly, I'd consider myself some sort of "Weird Nerd" but certainly not a genius or even especially intelligent; I would be willing to indulge in the idea that my contingent and I have some unusual qualities that, while not remarkable, are still somewhat unique and indeed basically a package deal with our "other" traits.
Secondly, while "weird nerds" are prominent on the Internet of today, they're definitely struggling to keep control over their own spaces. Anyone remember forums, and have routine thoughts about how different it is from social media? I think that forums were controlled by weird nerds, and social media is clearly not, it's controlled by people who play the political games better and more often. Weird nerds are forced to try to adhere to the rules of this system, they get increasingly tired of it, burn out and start behaving erratically. I think a lot of people are deeply in denial that this is happening, and some of them may have never even known a world where it wasn't happening, so they find other reasons why.
Being driven by truth and put off by bullshit is something that I think is very core to a lot of people who are currently struggling to find anywhere to fit in. No matter how much time passes, it will never feel "right". It feels like people can only ever be their true and honest selves in small quantities, in closed groups, being careful with who to trust.
Note that this person seems to be somewhat convinced that the Internet is the best place for weird nerds, but also note that the critique they are talking about happened on X, one of the largest and most influential social websites on the Internet. I think this should speak volumes to how much weird nerds are not in control of the "rules" and narratives of the Internet right now. I'm not sure what the authors thoughts are on this (and I'm sure it's detailed in other posts if I wanted to know) but I think this is a huge battleground. It's a bit hard to see it because it's obfuscated by the broader "culture war" of the Internet, which makes it appear as if the "fight" is between two hyper-partisan groups that have completely opposite views. I think that's neither the cause nor the reality of why the Internet is full of so much strife; I think those hyper-partisan spats formed around more interesting and nuanced conflicts and overshadowed them. I hope that some day there will be a moment of clarity where everything starts to make sense...
I lost my job in a layoff over 6 months ago and really struggled to find something in the state that tech has been in since zirp and section 174 went away.
If there's any positive I see from all of this is that there are a lot of weird nerds out there feeling unmoored, unmotivated, and are looking for somewhere to fit in and do the greatest work of their career. I think that someone(s) with resources who creates such a nerd commune will create something truly special, something that transcends the "normal", giving these misfits something that they fully own, drive, but still share with the same world that looks down on them as "divergent". I have never met a more passionate or selfless group of people.
I think Steve Jobs was an example of this type of nerd whisperer. He knew what drove the people that actually create things in this world, and he gave them a powerful outlet to show their value. I think he deeply felt and meant what they were selling at the time: "the people who are crazy enough to think they can change the world, are the ones who do".
"Normal person," 2002: "you use the Internet? How weird and anti-social!"
Same person, 2012: addicted to Internet in public, oblivious to people around them
Interesting how the social acceptability changed so drastically in ten years time. It's almost as if it is completely arbitrary and based on political (e.g. relative) observations. And not a hint of incongruity is felt between the former and latter opinions.
Weird nerds are suited for environments with high growth that need experts and will transfer resources to get the most out of them.
This is in general true - groups will spend resources on an advantage, when the need for it is painfully obvious.
> Paul Graham talks about an underrated quality one needs for extreme success, namely the willingness to be low status. And Karikó had plenty of that: she lived her convictions, in this case the conviction in the importance of mRNA through rejections, humiliations (her office was vacated without her having received prior notice) and hardship. I would go even further and say: she had intellectual courage
Spoken of as courage and low status, being on the pursuit. But societally what I think is most under-stated is the dissonance.
Bruce Sterling's Reboot 2011 put forward two modern archetypes. The first isn't super relevant here, but Favella Chic, being low resources but amazingly cool, bending & reusing whatever you can scrape together to be cool as hell & on top of your shit. The other is High Tech Gothic, where you are wired to the 9's, a master of your domain, amazingly capable & competent, but desperately alone & on your own; a It's Lonely At The Top / The Crown Wears Heavily sentiment.
This idea of apartness, the stark difference of values and beliefs and actions between the individual and the world they see about them: I am so glad to have had some referents for this notion, it's been so helpful. And personally, mulling it over, I keep thinking, it's not really the Weird Nerd's issue. It's not really their problem per se; another view is that the world is failing to hook people, failing to expose them to the raw awe and majesty of possibility and science, failing to inspire exploration & discovery & maker-ship that such an amazing universe of possibilities and circumstance has created around us.
As the Butthole Surfers song Weird Revolution says, The so-called weirdos in this country stand as completely freaked out by the normal man as the normal man is completely freaked out by the weird masses reaction to him. It's worth assessing not just the weirdos as the weird ones! And it's worth telling them, letting them know, this dissonance between your world and the so called normality isn't necessarily your fault, isn't necessarily something wrong with you. I don't think we duly sympathize or grok the alienation the weirdos suffer with.
The Butthole Surfers' observation was -- only recently -- given scientific support in autism research, where it's called the "double-empathy problem". Previously, the prevailing theory was that autistics suffer from "lack of empathy" or "mind-blindness"; the double-empathy theory posits that it's rather a case of mutual incomprehensibility between autistic and allistic minds. Dogs and cats get into conflict because they have difficulty reading each other's body language, but if you are a dog person (as most people are) you have a tendency to always blame the cat.
In retrospect, it is pretty hard for a weird nerd to gain traction with any ideas other than obviously profitable products. Strategic thinking needs to be done by the MBA's /s