Comment by dasil003 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by dasil003 | Hacker News Reader

I'm all for taking a good hard look at your assumptions and personal narrative to clean up biases, but this guy is generalizing way too much. Take this for instance:

> Americans have trouble seeing class, and the intersection between class and intellectualism—or geekishness, if you prefer—can be especially invisible.

"Geekishness" is an intersection of class and intellectualism? That's absolutely horseshit. There are no shortage of poor geeks and rich jocks. Being middle class definitely confers some advantages to pursuing those interests, but it has nothing to do with the innate quality of geekiness. Furthermore, geeky interests are not particularly intellectual per se, it's just we like to get involved in the details of them beyond what most people consider normal.

>>innate quality of geekiness

Very well put. The problem is most geek/nerd kids don't realize they are geeks/nerds until some point in their teenage.

In my case, I always wondered 'Why I was so different from others?'. It was only until a time in teenage that I realized this was actually a positive quality. Over time I saw geeks/nerds do far better than life than others, especially bullies.

Most bullies I know have only gone downwards in their lives, even the rich ones have only gone down with time.

> Most bullies I know have only gone downwards in their lives, even the rich ones have only gone down with time.

^ this. I was bullied by some kid, took me years later (and processing an experience at his house) to realize he was probably beat up by his mom.

Short straw went to him, imho.

Actually I parsed this differently. I parsed it as "the intersection between class and (intellectualism —or geekishness, if you prefer—) can be especially invisible".

I.e. "geekishness = intellectualism", which I think the case could be made for. He is right about Americans having trouble seeing class, since there is so much propaganda against seeing it (e.g. as soon as anyone anywhere mentions class, some republican is going to start screaming "class war").

I believe his "—or geekishness, if you prefer—" is referring only to "intellectualism", a way of broadening the scope rather than redefining "geek".

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