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Comment by ilitirit | Hacker News Reader

> The biggest surprise was a geeky girl I had known was now beautiful

Is ugliness a prerequisite for admission into geekhood?

I think so. It wasn't always, but geekiness has gotten ridiculously commercialized. In the early 70s geekiness may have been more authentic, but now it's more about companies convincing homely looking girls and guys with BMIs below 20 or over 27 to buy Star Wars t-shirts and WoW subscriptions. Basically geekiness today is about buying products designed to make you feel smart, even if you're not.

That's a disturbing idea.

That's just marketing, I believe Bill Hicks has some good advice for people in that profession.

And Bill Hicks was wrong. Saying you hate people who make their living marketing is like saying you hate people who make their living using telephones.

Marketing is basically what separates humans from animals. It's the reason why we have language. Think about it, why do we have a word 'fire' that represents some underlying idea? It's to make that underlying idea possible to talk about with others; in other words the reason we have language is so we can market ideas.

Furthermore, all of the world's most intractable problems are basically marketing problems. For global warming, world hunger, malaria, water shortages, fisheries depletion, etc., we already have the solutions. It's just a matter of getting really talented marketers to create buy-in from others. Marketers are the heroes of the future, and without marketing we all die, just like the Easter Islanders or the Mayans.

"Marketing is basically what separates humans from animals."

Sorry ? I really don't quite follow that, would you care to elaborate ?

I don't know who downvoted you - you're absolutely right regarding the human ability to influence others. You didn't word it well, but the core of what you're saying is completely correct.

I've never been able to watch any Bill Hicks routine because that's the first one I saw, and it shocked me with how needlessly ugly it was. I can't find that stuff funny. Suggesting people kill themselves for their profession... That's fucked up.

I think that you should take a comedians word with a grain of salt.

What Bill Hicks was literally getting at was that to use your talent as a wordsmith to create wants where there are none and to pursue money without any consideration for ethics by trying to translate each and every human emotion into the dollar equivalent and a 'hook' by which to gain acess to peoples wallets is a very wrong thing.

Comedians will exaggerate grossly in order to make their point. See Carlin, Connolly and many others for more examples of such behaviour.

It's up to us to separate out the core facts from the poetic license.

The kind of marketing that the great-grandfather post of this comment referred to is exactly the wrong way to use marketing.

There is a book by some guy called 'how to win friends and influence people', it is a great example of how not to use skills with words, it is simple manipulations and there is a world of a difference between manipulation and reasonable discourse between consenting parties.

The latter is what sets us - amongst many other things - apart from the animals, not our ability to 'market' or to 'sell' where no need exists.

Marketeers now routinely employ psychologists in order to learn better which of our buttons they should push in order to get access to our innermost feelings so that we go and do what they want, consume their product.

For a nice example have a look at this:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hi63rXnuWbw

And tell me what you think of that.

A more appropriate book would be:

Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion = Robert B Cialdini

I agree with Mr Hicks, using your intelligence to find ways to psycologically manipulate people is pretty low.

Comedians will exaggerate grossly in order to make their point.

In other words, they improve their marketing. How ironic.

Marketing is fundamentally different from the normal exchange of ideas. Using language to explain to your fellow tribesmen where the herd you're tracking is located is not "marketing."

Markets are conversations. Conversations are marketing.

How is trying to sell your friends on where to hunt different from trying to sell them on a new pair of sneakers?

Because you need to eat. You don't need a new pair of sneakers.

One of the more annoying traits of marketing is that it gives new meanings to words that already have a perfectly good and accepted meaning.

Your example of the word 'sell' is one of those.

It takes the word and stretches it to a plausible but wrong new meaning. You're putting it somewhere between 'convince' and 'argue' whereas to sell means to exchange some item in return for some currency.

"One of the more annoying traits of marketing is that it gives new meanings to words that already have a perfectly good and accepted meaning. Sell means to exchange some item in return for some currency."

According to merriam-websters: "sell: to persuade or influence to a course of action or to the acceptance of something <sell children on reading>"

When I did the same thing with "marketing," it was clear to me you were abusing the term. You tried to redefine all human communication as marketing, which strips the word of its intended meaning.

If you don't want to go hungry, you won't try to "sell your friends" on where to hunt. You'll tell them what you know, you'll listen to what they know, and if their idea of where to hunt is better than yours, you say so, and then you go hunt there instead of where you originally thought you should hunt. You get just as much meat regardless of who initially suggested the hunt location. This is a situation that calls for honest debate, not marketing.

Contrast this with marketing. If you're marketing Nike, you don't get just as much meat regardless of whether people buy Reeboks, Nikes, or Birkenstocks. Your incentive structure is totally different. If you're really good at winning in the incentive structure of a marketing director, Nike's sales will go up, regardless of whether they're better or worse for the customers.

It's probably futile trying to argue with you since you started the conversation by, essentially, saying that you don't believe in honest debate. Marketing is the opposite of honest debate.

> Marketing is basically what separates humans from animals.

Are you a marketer?

> all of the world's most intractable problems are basically marketing problems

http://stuffwhitepeoplelike.com/2008/01/23/18-awareness/

I agree, those are basically marketing problems — they are created by marketing. The problem is that marketing, which is where you try to persuade someone of something because it will benefit you personally, regardless of its truth, is fundamentally corrosive to the kind of disinterested investigation of the truth that we need in order to collectively solve these problems.

You could as easily say that these are violence problems: it's just a matter of getting really talented soldiers to kill the people who are opposing the solutions. The trouble is that there's no correlation between the correctness of a person's point of view on how to solve world hunger and their skill at violence, so generally speaking, increasing the level of violence doesn't improve the level of competence in social, economic, and agricultural policy. (I guess it might solve the water shortage problem in a different way, though, sort of like you can lower the rate of heart disease by administering carcinogens.)

Similarly, there's no positive correlation between the correctness of one's opinion and one's skill at marketing. I think you can make the argument that there's a negative correlation: people whose opinions are tentative and based on evidence are not nearly as confident as a good marketer needs to be.

Now I would like to see the statistics of sizes of Star Wars T-Shirts sold. In fact statistics broken down for all geek themes, please (are Linux users fatter than OS X users? and so on...).

Agreed, when I was growing up there was a clear and obvious distinction between geek and non-geek. I'd learnt computers with DOS, I remember getting a bonded modem (two 56k) was the best thing in the world and made the internet lightning fast. I remember having a science kit with glassware, a burner, fuel and even a pack of matches to light the thing, I saw one recently that didn't have a single piece of glass in it.

Geek is now the kid who can get 100% on a song on Rock Band and fail a literacy test. It's no longer the kids getting A's who play board games and video games with all their free time.

Isn't the definition for geek basically a nerd without the high intelligence.

http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=geek

That definition more accurately fits the typical usage of the term 'dork'. The word 'geek' is usually used to indicate someone with a great deal of specialized knowledge (such as a computer geek, or a math geek, but also sometimes less technical topics, like a literature geek or a band geek), and typically a lack of social prowess. A 'nerd', on the other hand, is more typically one who displays heightened scholastic ability in all (or at least most) areas, but a significant lack of social skill.

I'm not trying to say that any other use of these (or any other) words is, in any sense, wrong. But these are their current, common, usage.

EDIT (since the urban dictionary link wasn't there when I wrote the above): Remember that different people use words differently. An urban dictionary definition is just what the people who use and vote on urban dictionary definitions (in particular, the urban dictionary definition in question) agree that a word means. This is why lexicography isn't trivial; there is significant sample bias in, for example, the set of people who care enough about how urban dictionary defines 'geek' in order to change it.

dork also means whale penis

The More You Know™

That's an urban legend.

Wikipedia disagrees:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dork

Interestingly enough it considers the penis definition more important than the nerd definition

Yes, but nothing about whales.

This is a linguistic tar pit from which there is no escape. Run away while you still can!

Right on.

Addendum: this marketing is facilitated by the fact that the culture is coming to appreciate that geekiness can equal power.

The difference I think is that geekiness is now socially acceptable, even popular. See the glut of TV shows featuring geeks in endearing, funny roles instead of their normal "loser" position.

Even in my social circles, we now have a bunch of wannabe geeks. People who buy iPhones, read reddit, use "FAIL" a lot, but never played D&D, wrote code, nor done anything genuinely geeky, ever.

It's usually a consequence of not caring much about one's appearance due to your lack of social skills ans poor self image.

Beauty comes in part from your attitude, too.

It was for me. In high school and most of college, I refused to make myself pretty. It was a symbolic rejection of that whole social strategy, and I did think it was a dichotomy. I was going to be smart, and that was all.

It wasn't until I had been a professional for a few years that I changed my mind. I noticed that the women who I really respected as programmers were also all stunningly beautiful. I read up on it a bit and realized that it's just another skill, and not a particularly difficult one. Overnight I blossomed and became pretty.

But it didn't happen until I was twenty-six. And it's one thing to look beautiful for yourself and your husband; I'm not sure I'd have put in the time to compete with sixteen-year-olds.

I imagine he means that she was geeky, in the sense that she wasn't popular (and not in the sense that we all consider ourselves geeks). Girls who are beautiful in high school don't usually have this problem.

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