Five Geek Social Fallacies (2003) | Hacker News Reader

Five Geek Social Fallacies (2003)

plausiblydeniable.com

38 pointsedent13 comments

GSF #6: The patterns I see among my geek friends are patterns peculiar to geeks

This is a very interesting list of social assumptions that many people hold or have held but often don't hold up, and it's good to think about them.

But they're not universal among "geeks" nor rare among people who are not geeks, so the narrow framing and the armchair psychoanalyzing within that framing distract from the real insights.

Agreed! About 20 years ago, my sister held DND (D&D?) games in her basement, and I saw the weirdest lot of misanthropes in my young life. They made Comic Book guy look like Don Draper. Later she tells me that at least two of them wound up having an affair (within the circle). It struck me very un-geek of them to get down like that - opened my eyes. So yes Geeks experience the universal human condition :-)

Yes. For example, I've seen #5 in non-"geek" circles and I haven't seen it in "geek" circles.

I would say this would have been nice to know ~20 years ago, but umm, it came out ~20 years ago. Ah well.

Perhaps I had to learn my lessons the hard way regardless

Huh, seems I'm prone to #4. I don't force people together that don't want to be together, but I do find it close-minded in most cases that they think those things. I keep those thoughts to myself and simply ask them their feelings about that other person, and I always find that I can't relate and then keep it at that.

I find it hard to accept it's social fallacy. I can see the others though, so I'll take it seriously and work to a point where I can at least understand the perspective. The why this is a fallacy isn't really explained. I do get that if it is perceived as a fallacy that certain requests are in appropriate

Here is my perspective: Ultimately, we are creatures with complicated social lives. Friendship is not transitive and there are a variety of reasons why two people won't get along, and the fact that you are friends with both of those people only has a mild impact on the chances that they will get along.

That's fair enough. Thanks for helping my thinking here a bit! :)

Five Geek Social Fallacies (2003) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30120733 - Jan 2022 (4 comments)

These are interesting observations for social interactions, and I think they’re generally useful.

One thing I’ve personally noticed is that traumatized people have cognitive distortions which go beyond simply social awkwardness. There are physiological changes which may help explain such behavior https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6428430/

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3181836/

I like that the way it is expressed uses a lot of mathematical concepts, notably in the theory of sets/groups. This seems to be required so the audience understands it.

There is an assumption here that geeks respond better to scientific-formatted articles.

Why does the author say they are fallacies and treat them as true? He never describes what makes them fallacious.

was this on k5?

do you mean k5 the "geek social media site run by rusty, so popular that nobody bothers to run ads, porn, or gambling on its abandoned domain"?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com