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Comment by valdiorn | Hacker News Reader

Am I the only one who's slightly offended by being portrayed like a rogue tribe of bushmen that researchers "go and live with" to study?

Hackers, aka. software developers, are just people with a specific job.

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We also have a culture, and anthropologists don't only study distant tribes. I'm in Turkey and have a few anthropologist friends here studying everything from the statistics department to television stations to poor Turks displaced by gentrification. An ethnography on a single evangelical church has been published. If it's a group of people, an anthropologist is either studying or considering studying it.

mmm. This recalls me the situation when a young monkey is taken into lab to the elder one and asks what is the monkey job. The elder one puffs: "Its anthropological research!". "What is it?" - asks the young one. "You see, I push this button and measure how fast these large white monkeys will give me a banana".

Ah there it is, my daily dose of "programmer snarkily trivializes a complex field". I was wondering what took so long.

Now you know how the bushmen feel.

Offended? What, the great modern human is immune to being studied like all those primitive inferior bushmen?

Sorry to put words in your mouth; that's just what I heard in my head when I read that post.

Its the "rogue" part that offends me. As an american living in america I grew up this way, I'm marginally offended that hanging out with me would be considered analogous to traveling to the other side of the planet to the extreme opposite of american lifestyle.

Or a person with reasonably normal empathy (my wife?) seems to be able to figure me out without a PHD and years of study.

Also, like clockwork, right after the "othering" comes the "hate" and I'm not looking forward to that part. (Ah he's different than us... what next? Oh make fun of and bully of course, thats what the majority always does after they define an other!)

You're projecting your insecurities on someone else's attempt to understand.

He is insecure about that for a very good reason, though, considering how media only started positively displaying people with hacker mentality after the last bubble hit (everyone else was getting fired while programmers were still being hired) and the Social Network (again, because of lots of money being talked about).

You are aware that there are lots of anthropology studies on americans living in the United States right? It's just a field of study.

Indeed. I think some people underestimate how much variation there is in culture and lifestyles in this country.

Hackers are far more interesting than bushmen as a specie. Such a belief in their superiority... I find bushmen lovable.

It all depends on environment. Bushmen may find you edible.

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