I can't help thinking that "fierce nerd" and Asperger syndrome go together. There will be some random Steve Jobs assholes as well but I think they are the exception.
Exactly my thoughts as well. Almost all fierce nerd traits PG describes are signs typically seen in Asperger/ASD/Gifted. I recognise myself in the article, as well as a number of my friends/colleagues who are all diagnosed with one or more of the above.
This feels weirdly like someone working out emotional issues by describing them in an emotionally distant "rational" way. Like what does this have to do with anything other then the thoughts in Paul Grahams head?
It's a classic refrain in a petty "revenge of the nerds" mindset. All the "haters" are wrong, unconditionally, and acting like an asshole is excused as being very special and brave.
It's a siege mentality designed to shore up one's sense of superiority, and ensure that one doesn't need to do very much soul-searching.
When you have to justify to yourself why you're a millionaire or a billionaire and "dumb luck, some modicum of skill, and being first" isn't a satisfying reason, you have to rationalize to yourself that you deserve it because you've got something that those ivory-tower eggheads and non-nerdy simpletons don't. And that thing is fierceness.
I've never seen a blog post more worthy of a good old fashioned fisking. I mean come on - "confidence is a self-fullfilling prophecy" - are we being serious here? It's only self-fulfilling because of survivorship bias. Maybe he's running with a crew of super successful founders and that's true, but from my point of view, I remember the dudes at my place of work that could very confidently talk my ear off about something that they half-understood (or very confidently describe an unworkable solution to a problem) and then got fired a month later because they weren't productive enough to meet even the super-low requirements of software development at a car insurance company. It's easy to spin narratives about confidence and restlessness and intelligence when you've surrounded yourself with the winners. Less visible are the people who go all-in on a fintech startup and end up broke a year later. Those people have all the same traits and end up in the same boat as all the other un-fierce nerds.
> Fierce nerds also tend to be somewhat overconfident, especially when young.
I wonder if that statement is overly specific. AFAIK, young people in general, or at least young men in general, have a reputation for being overconfident.
It's a fact that all humans are overconfident. That's why we have biases that make us confident in what we "know", and make us reject information to the contrary even if the information is factually accurate.
The overconfidence is not a trait endemic only to male "nerds".
Of course, it's still helpful to concede that humans should recognize and be aware of that weakness in themselves. Overconfidence is the reason so many spend the healthy end years of their lives so much less well off financially than they spent their healthy prime years. It behooves us all to be on guard against our overconfidence.
Maybe it's because I'm living in a latino country, but it certainly seems like men start with too much confidence since teenage years, and slowly brings it down so everyone stop calling them arrogant, then there is their appropriate level. While for females (again, at least here in this latino country) it's the opposite, they start off being super humble and careful, and while growing up gaining more and more confidence until finding the right level.
Of course, this is a broad generalization, but seems to fit where I'm living right now, but it's all anecdotal as it's based on my own perceived view of things of course.
Sounds right in line with my experiences and exposure to the "Machismo" portions of many Latino cultures. I always brought this up to my far leftist friends who tried to pretend that the cuban revolution was somehow good for the LGBT minority of Cuba. LOL you think that they abandoned machismo just because they got a hammer and sickle? They call queerness "capitalist decadence" there...
I think the "fierce need" / INTJ archetype the author is describing takes it a step above that of young men in general when it comes to overconfident / arrogance. And I agree with the author in that it's related to independent-mindedness. I can reflect on memories growing up where other young men were much more "in tune" to the group. They more intuitively understood the social cost of adopting an unpopular position. Or they just had the sensitivity to know that a position or statement wouldn't be well-received within the group. Or they just valued social harmony in general more than accurately representing what they believed to be true.
That's a bit different than when I think of young men in general being more confident than they ought to be. It has more to do with the goal: status within a group vs putting effort into finding what you believe is true and accurately representing that truth potentially at a social cost.
Does anyone else feel sort of weird when Paul Graham talks about nerds? It feels like he's trying to deal with something on his end, and we're just watching him rationalize to himself.
I feel like the Gen-X terminology of a nerd just isn't a thing anymore. Being an older millennial, I fully understand what sort of person Graham is talking about, however I don't think Zoomers or even younger Millennials would describe these people as "nerds".
Also, these days if you are a smart ambitious person looking to make an impact with technology you're not terribly edgy and you certainly aren't defying any major social norms. And that's a good thing.
So what would the modern generation call somebody like this:
In 9th grade insists "I don't see the point of these classes I'm going to be a programmer," takes AP comp sci as sophmore finds it insultingly easy [gets in trouble for going ahead of teacher], resents homework vocally and refuses to do it on principle but still gets great scores on tests, places in the school math competition but initially gets kicked out of the award ceremony for refusing for the "National Honor Society" performance, 12-grade gets official permission to work half-time coding and only take half classes.
That's what I was, and I don't think anybody else has ever given me a word for it. I knew pedantic nerds, and intense nerds, and condescending nerds, but few with real conviction.
This sounds exactly like one of my friends in high school. He was not considered a nerd though. However, he had decent social skills, had a girlfriend, etc. Incidentally, he went on to found several companies!
Curious question about terminology: The word 'nerd' no longer has obvious negative connotations. It also seem to no longer apply to many folks who would have been branded obvious nerds in 2003. And vice versa - many people laughingly named nerd today wouldn't qualify in 2003.
Could the terminology just be in flux, and therefore create confusion? With woke et al., we've got pleeeeeenty of examples of smart folks who miss the social norm du jour, attempt to say something true but rather say something unacceptable. And then they get ostracized or fired.
Maybe these folks are some examples of what used to be called nerds. Do we have a name for them?
I have found a few of his essays very good, indeed expressing things I haven't seen anywhere else. I think he has provided very good advice to young people at times.
The vast majority I would say that he is trying to retcon his huge success and the success of some businesses he has been associated with into a coherent worldview. I believe that in 'Hackers and Painters' he actually goes through some back-of-envelope calculations that show that the money he made when Yahoo bought Viaweb corresponded closely to the real value he had created, in some sense.
It is baffling to me why he isn't able to say "I got lucky - I worked hard and created something very valuable, but I was also in the right place at the right time." Clearly there were special factors at play selling an e-commerce platform to Yahoo in 1998. He's also done intelligent and pro-social things with both his money and his time since then it appears. I don't know what the shame is in saying "I won a lottery - but I have tried to do the right thing with my good fortune."
I think if you asked Jamie Zawinski, who I think was no less technically skilled, nor less purposeful about working on interesting and important things (nor, tbh, any worse at writing thoughtful essays), he would readily admit to having been extremely lucky. I don't know what the difference is between these two personalities. I think I'd rather be jwz in similar circumstances.
>Fierce nerds also tend to be somewhat overconfident, especially when young. It might seem like it would be a disadvantage to be mistaken about one's abilities, but empirically it isn't. Up to a point, confidence is a self-fullfilling prophecy.
As a child I was mathematically precocious and often (to myself) compared my modest accomplishments to stories of prodigies like Gauss or von Neumann. Looking back it seems patently ridiculous, but I might not have spent dozens of hours per week reading math textbooks and Wikipedia if I had had a more realistic self-perception. I can't say I regret it.
Nobody who knows me would call me "woke", except as part of some joke.
But as the father of a kid with Asperger Syndrome, and as someone with a likely diagnosis myself (according to neuropysch testing), I'm a little bothered by the broad brush with which P.G. is painting.
+1, and with all due respect to PG's technical background, reductive and stereotyping pieces like this kind of feel like he's looking at the people who thrust him into his lofty VC position with contempt.
I can sort of get over all that, I'm not going to sit here and take it personally because I know it's just broad strokes, but at the same time, if it is broad strokes, there is nothing to be gained here because nothing is factual and everything can be dismissed because it is too general.
If he focused on something more defined than a vague and derogatory term for smart people in general heay have had something worth reading.
Ps. Seriously, why is the grey subtext so hard to read? Stop with grey text. Please.
Umm... just so ya know, practically everything in "wokeness" is about somebody saying "Please don't paint me with the broad brush you're using."
I think most of what you identify as "wokeness" is other people who aren't directly affected trying to help out, since the affected people are usually a minority who won't be heard if it's just them. That can lead to its own forms of tone-deafness and "you're not helping" behavior, but that just leads to more cases of people who are sincerely and effectively helping being dismissed as "SJWs" out of hand. That's a cheap way of avoiding genuine problems with one tiny all-purpose acronym.
I just wanted to point that out because what you wrote can be read like "I didn't care about anything except when it happens to me". It might give you a moment's pause the next time you want to deride something as "woke".
> practically everything in "wokeness" is about saying.... Please don't paint me with the broad brush you're using.
Err.. really? I mean, that's the definition of individualism against which many "woke" people would object. Even you say, "since the affected people are usually a minority". This is just false, if we take minority to refer to the usual "protected subgroups".
The relevant sense of Woke here, seems to me, to be concerned not with people's individual needs -- but their needs qua some alleged group. Esp., as you offer, "minority" groups.
It's a sort of perverse individualism. It's just substituting a different type of broad brush. Rather than starting with a maximally individual analysis (and hence construe treatment in terms of procedural fairness), rather, start by a group analysis and place individuals within those groups (and hence talk about aggregate distributional outcomes).
The derision here is the conflict in having to raise an issue because you are autistic, without inviting the Woke-style "and autistic people are a minority who need protected". The latter substitutes the underlying lack of procedural concern for individual needs with exactly the same problem: again ignoring individual difference expect now substituting alleged "group needs".
Woke analysis of this kind prescribes, a typically condescending, set of redresses for alleged group grievances. Individualism prescribes nothing of this sort, rather, adjusting the rules so as to maximise each person's ability to get what they each, as individuals, need.
"Don't paint me with a broad brush" means let me speak for myself alone. This attitude is antithetical to analysis which begins with "minorities", which by construction, are not people who are each individually empowered to speak for themselves.
> It's a sort of perverse individualism. It's just substituting a different type of broad brush. Rather than starting with a maximally individual analysis (and hence construe treatment in terms of procedural fairness), rather, start by a group analysis and place individuals within those groups (and hence talk about aggregate distributional outcomes).
> Don't paint me with a broad brush" means let me speak for myself alone. This attitude is antithetical to analysis which begins with "minorities",
This is, I think "just be race blind". Wokeness, as you seem to be describing it is an ideology that recognizes that identities impact how a person is perceived. To fairly judge an individual, you have to take into account that, because of their race or gender, their work may have been misvalued or falsely attributed.
For better or worse, society discriminates, and recognition of that is a part of fairly judging people as individuals.
Well I think we have to take "woke" to mean the most plausible worst version of this ideology; or else we'd just name it charitably. Ie., the OP comment is nervous about being associated with the type of thinking i'm talking about.
It's entirely fair to say that whilst accommodating and judging people individually we need to account for that person's particular difficulty in first being judged in this manner -- because we, the judger, may be unable to properly understand their situation; and likewise they may not be able to argue their case, state their need, etc.
The problem enters when we take the goal of our project to actually be removing such "prejudices and obstacles" and, not rather, the empowerment of each individual. The former is an often optional detour to the latter.
Consider, for example, the most effective civil rights president in US history (LBJ) was a racist: did we need to solve his prejudice first? Would that have done anything positive?
Wokeism, if it means anything at all, I think has to be identified with this ends-means confusion. It's raising to the status of an end in itself the elimination of (minority) group hatred, (minority) group prejudice, etc.
This a deeply confused project; and routinely gets in the way of the actual end everyone cares about: each person, in their own particular situation, being able to live the way that best suits them.
If I read the message here correctly, the woke-dissenter is saying this: "My difficulties are particular to me, and all I want is to be able to solve them. I don't want to participate or "ally" with a society-wide war against the possibility I will be misunderstood or mistreated; rather I simply want the rules (,tools, practices) in place to empower me when I am."
Wokeism is the political incarnation of New Atheism, or likewise Evangelism: first we fight a total war against The Sins of The Mind themselves; and then, much much later, we help people in their particular situations.
> Consider, for example, the most effective civil rights president in US history (LBJ) was a racist: did we need to solve his prejudice first? Would that have done anything positive?
The current iteration of the civil rights movement is solving a different problem than that of 1968. Due to LBJ's actions, minorities are equal under the law. You can't just pass laws to make them more equal. They already are.
But if you look around, they clearly aren't, so the question becomes, well why not? If you subscribe to woke ideology, the answer is something like "pervasive cultural and systemic biases across various aspects of society". I'll draw a parallel to another evergreen topic, "cancel culture". The idea being that a large group of distributed people can ruin someone's life by changing how they interact with that person and making them a pariah.
Well many of these systemic biases are similar, if less sudden. People and systems trained to see or treat people as lesser. How do you solve that problem? I only see one solution: to get the distributed group of people to be aware of and ultimately counteract those biases, to undue the incidental cancellation of these people. And what is that but raising awareness of and reducing those ingrained prejudices.
All of the other approaches are things that routinely get called "reverse-racist" themselves, things like affirmative action and such which ignore the individual.
> "My difficulties are particular to me, and all I want is to be able to solve them. I don't want to participate or "ally" with a society-wide war against the possibility I will be misunderstood or mistreated; rather I simply want the rules (,tools, practices) in place to empower me when I am."
And the response to this is that while your difficulties are particular to you, it's likely that the best tools and practices to empower you when you are mistreated are allies who are willing to stand up for you agains the person mistreating you. As in the limit, if no one believes you are being mistreated except you, you will have no recourse.
There's no law that says that PG isn't allowed to say things that make GGP uncomfortable. In fact, there's laws that say that we can't prevent PG from doing that. All we can hope for is that said mistreatment is recognized by others, and that people pressure him to correct his behavior.
Wokeness is a recognition that this is a political (in the sense of like human-interaction, not election-related), not legal issue.
I think there's a means-ends thing going on here. Everything you say here is very plausible.
The problem with Wokeism (a term I don't like btw) is the means. We all broadly agree on the ends.
The individualist things this type of change can be bottom-up (individual -> group) and the wokeist wants it to be top-down (group -> individual).
In the former case the intuition is that we aren't going to be able to solve the group problem, so starting at the group level is a waste of time and a bit tyrannical. All we can do is empower individuals who, over time, will aggregate and approximately solve the group problem.
I agree however that it has to be both top-down and bottom-up. I think wokeism as ideology of over-reaction, is towards the extreme end of that top-down approach.
I agree with a lot of what the 'woke' are trying to achieve; police reform, less bias (call it institutional racism, etc..) in government institutions, address massive generational wealth gaps, etc... but the 'woke' are mostly reductive and reactionary and are the kings and queens of painting with a broad brush.
Thanks for raising that point. I'm only now realizing that the term "woke" means different things to different people. I'm grateful for your correction.
I’ve witnessed music scenes come and go. It wasn’t until recently I noticed the startup culture or visible ethos, at least online, morphed into something new. Perhaps like music we are seeing new trends evolve or we are in a transition phase where the new culture leaders are yet to emerge. But, PG is like alternative rock in in 2020 and beyond, out of style.
If you're going to be this sort of fierce nerd, make sure you come from money, because you're getting fired if you pursue these traits in the workplace.
Or maybe you keep quitting jobs, because you are the precocious one who can always see why things aren't working well long before anyone else. Yet nobody wants your feedback because it's too something. Too fierce, or scary because it's predictive, or they're just annoyed that you have no social skills.
And socially maybe the people at work can keep you in check without firing you, because you can't respond well in a socially-clever environment for example, no matter how amazing your insights.
FWIW, this isn't my experience at all. There's a difference between being an asshole and the contrarian bent+ relatively-minor rough edges Graham describes. The essay touches on this, by saying that it's become a lot easier to thrive as this sort of person than it used to be. In particular, you need to find your way to a field and role where results matter more than glad-handing and ego-stroking, and where the subjectivity and discretion of measuring those results is minimized. This used to be vanishingly rare, but in my perception (and experience), it no longer is.
In my case, my fatal flaw career-wise wasn't abrasiveness or asshole-ish behavior, but a strong aversion to promoting my work or any of the other non-goal tasks required to advance in an organization. I hate every minute I have to spend making it clear that I'm productive instead of just _being_ productive.
However, this is almost unavoidable in most organizations that aren't tiny. You either have to "manage your brand" and play politics, or you have to make sure that you're fitting a squishy, inherently-subjective rubric. At a bare minimum, you need to craft a presentation of your output at performance review time, and hope your interpretation of the rubric matches the decision-makers'.
My solution was to find a company with fairly objective and well-defined measures of output[1], where there's more than enough impact to go around. You can't avoid having people skills to get things done, but I don't mind using my people skills in service of getting shit done instead of internal organizational BS.
[1] This does not mean that we're tolerant of assholes. We've fired people for being pathological "brilliant jerks", though everyone I've come into close personal contact with is well above the jerk bar. What this does is separate "are you toxic in a way that hurts your coworkers or the company" from "what is your output", allowing people who are awkward and well-intentioned to thrive on one axis and grow on the other. This is in contrast to the usual case, where measuring output is polluted by interpersonal skills that are not related to output, and being awkward means your work isn't recognized either.
> It's hard to be independent-minded without being somewhat socially awkward, because conventional beliefs are so often mistaken, or at least arbitrary. No one who was both independent-minded and ambitious would want to waste the effort it takes to fit in
With descriptions of social clumsiness, being independent minded, and difficulty navigating two-way communication (when to start/stop) pg's depiction of "nerds" resonates because these traits are frequently associated with asd.
But what surprised me is that instead of washing away negative traits as part of the package, two options for the "fierce nerd" are presented:
Although questionable as a psychometric test, he is describing the Myers–Briggs INTJ [1] or INTP [2] personality type here. In terms of the Big-Five [3], I would suggest: Moderately-high Openness, High Conscientiousness, Average-to-Low Extraversion, Low Agreeableness, Average-to-low Neuroticism.
I have found the MBTI to be useful despite the empirical inaccuracy of the test itself. Even without taking the test, people can self-identify as one (or more) types. This then serves as a meaningful basis for discussion as well as raising awareness that people are deeply different in terms of their ways of thinking. It is quite an eye opener the first time you see someone self-identify as a personality type that is very different to your own.
None of the personality theories are 'proven' of course. We won't get that until we have a fuller understanding of the brain. But it is well accepted within psychology that personality is a thing. And personality types (Big 5, MBTI, etc) are useful models for now despite their shortcomings.
That's an interesting article but I just have a few questions about it. How would someone exactly prove that a certain theory in a field as subjective as psychology to be true? What kind of studies would prove the usefulness of something like MBTI? While I agree it does limit people to certain binaries that aren't necessarily always 100% accurate, I have found it to be fairly accurate myself and think it describes people to a decent degree of accuracy.
> Another solution may be to somehow turn off your fierceness, by devoting yourself to meditation or psychotherapy or something like that. Maybe that's the right answer for some people. I have no idea.
I do, and I think you should invest in these things (not "devote your life", PG shows his deep ignorance here of these things as though they are black and white). if you are in the overwhelming vast majority of "fierce nerds" that does not become a billionaire, or even if you do, you will invariably have a lot of problems in social situations and close relationships until some investment is made in tempering this extreme sort of personality.
> But it doesn't seem the optimal solution to me. If you're given a sharp knife, it seems to me better to use it than to blunt its edge to avoid cutting yourself.
PG encouraging people to be emotionally unhealthy so that they can add to his pool of talent for him to profit from. The fierce nerd, great term btw, is ambitious and brilliant. they can do all of these things at the same time. It might just cut down the full on "become a billionaire" mindset, but that's a good thing, since it's unethical to be a billionaire.
Yeah this part was especially disappointing given pg's influence, and I think this is one of his weaker essays because the advice is not well thought out. If you have a chip on your shoulder, are insufferable, can't shut off aggressiveness, etc, the best thing you can do is learn when and how to channel it. That's the missing piece.
I know a lot of people that fit this mold, and for this type of personality there's nothing that will meaningfully dull the edge [1]. But, if they learn how to control it, they can avoid cutting their friends and themselves, and live a much happier life.
The last thing this world needs is more emotionally stunted leaders alone in their suffering.
[1] This point in particular seemed like pg engaging in pure speculation, not something based on specific examples
> Most people think of nerds as quiet, diffident people. [...] In fact some nerds are quite fierce.
That someone would think nerds are not competitive is, to me, the strangest thing about this article.
Perhaps because I'm one, but whether it's Magic the gathering, Demoparties, rubics cube solving, chess, Counterstrike LANs, academia, or any of my tech jobs, every "nerdy" activity I've ever engaged with has always been overly competitive.
The fact that so many open source projects have had to adopt "code of conducts" is IMO a direct reflection of the fierce competition that has always been inherent to software development. Whether it's code quality, clever hacks, optimization... everything about what we do has a competitive element.
Come to think of it, I can't actually think of any nerdy activity that isn't, in practice, extremely competitive.
> The fact that so many open source projects have had to adopt "code of conducts" is IMO a direct reflection of the fierce competition that has always been inherent to software development.
This is something that has bothered me about a lot of people's views on competition, whether it's sports or business or whatever. Being competitive does not have anything to do with being an asshole.
I never got into trash-talking during games. It was always just easier for me to ignore it/use the other person's trash-talking as their own distraction against me running circles around them.
And then in software, Code of Conducts are not covering anything about how the project interacts with other projects. They're covering how contributors treat each other within the project. You're not in competition with your project mates. The sorts of harassing and belitting behavior that CoCs are supposed to address (whether they do or not is a different discussion) comes about from some sort of glory-hog mentality that is ultimately anti-productive. Insert roll-safe meme: "If I drive away most of the other contributors, my own efforts will be a much bigger proportion of the overall whole".
I think its mostly due to the diffusion of what a "nerd" is. Being a "nerd" or a "geek" used to be a insult, now its trendy for some reason, and seems to mostly be a term for modern consumerist culture (buy lots of stuff in some sort of genre and be a nerd)
It is probably because competition is so commonly attributed to physical athletics. Physical strength or stamina exhibited on the playing field is competition.
Spelling bee competitors are seen positively, but also almost as a joke compared to quarterbacks. Mathlete? A joke in popular culture.
There is some evidence that this is changing, but there is also a lot of bad art. The Social Network, and Steve Jobs the film portray fierce nerds that basically no one wants to know.
The actual people?
Zuck and Dorsey just got through extracting maximum advertising value from the heart of US democracy.
Bezos hasn't done fierce nerds any favors with his squeezing of the lowest paid people in his organization.
Bill Gates' reputation is headed downhill right now faster than ever before.
Tim Cook has real potential. But the jury is still out. We do not know the calculus involved in compromising privacy values in China.
It is going to take a lot more well-known, rich, fierce nerds that also manage to round out their personality before we see mainstream positive portrayal and following of competitiveness in intellectual exercises.
> Perhaps because I'm one, but whether it's Magic the gathering, Demoparties, rubics cube solving, chess, Counterstrike LANs, academia, or any of my tech jobs, every "nerdy" activity I've ever engaged with has always been overly competitive.
I think that is little bit you choosing very competitive things to engage in. People who were obsessed with start trek for example did not build competitive societies. And I worked in multiple teams that did not felt overly competitive to me at all.
Through, I would not see Counterstrike nerdy at all. This sort of games is more of the most stereotypical guy pastime that exists.
I met a lot of nerds in graduate school. In my experience the "fierce" nerds weren't smarter or successful than the "nonfierce" nerds. The fierce nerds were just more insecure and emotionally immature. They felt more threatened by being surrounded by other people who might smarter or more successful than them. It threatened their identity of being uniquely intelligent. They responded by lashing out.
It may be that this source of insecurity is a driving force. But years later, when I see who is more successful I think it is the nonfierce nerds. The fierce nerds exhausted themselves with petty disagreements and arbitrary hills to die on. The nonfierce nerds were able to focus on the hills worth climbing and recruit others to work with them.
As someone who feels like this description of "fierce nerd" applies to themselves, I'd agree. I'm clever, but not particularly so. And I'm not particularly successful either. And my abrasiveness has lost me many friendships and relationships over the years too.
Perhaps it's a flattener of the bellcurve of success. If you only look at the right hand side you will see lots of fierce nerds. But you aren't seeing the many, many more who are just ordinary, annoying assholes.
Maybe it’s me, but I think “fierce” has thrown a lot of people off. I would classify what you are describing as what PG terms “the bitter nerds”, not necessarily “fierce”.
As Graham says, the difference between fierce and bitter is success. And given that, in a very competitive environment, the difference between success and failure is largely luck...
I heavily disagree. Any fierce nerd ive known all know they are VERY good at what they do (in terms of some intellectual persuit) and know how to assert themselves
Indeed, although I think it's a huge mistake to represent these failures as permanent, and bitterness as an immutable, defining characteristic of fierce, unsuccessful nerds. Not only have some of the greatest intellectuals overcome decades of repeated failure and mistakes, but we often only see one small part of their personality: the extremes that draw the most attention. This is even more true in the social media era where people are reduced to bite-sized summaries. Haters and successes. An incredibly reductive, childlike view of the business word, itself a tiny corner of humanity that gets all the attention because people love money.
I enjoy reading Paul Graham's musings on nerds / nerdiness, but I can't help but have difficulty relating.
Maybe it's a generational thing (born in '92), but Graham often seems to paint a picture of nerds similar to what you might see in movies and TV shows depicting the 80s, like the kids in Stranger Things.
Even this article, while I can certainly conjure which of my friends growing up were the "fierce nerd", it still feels a little disconnected from my reality.
For example, Graham begins by explaining that the concept of a fierce nerd is one unknown to the general public. But I'm not sure I agree. In the era I grew up, there was not so much social distinction between who is a nerd, but there was a lot of social distinction for those who were argumentative, or "fierce". In my experience, everyone knew who the "fierce nerds" were (although not by that name), because they were known for their awkwardness and combativeness - not for their nerdiness. Indeed, my own nerdy friend circle in high school spanned a wide range of popularities and I would say "fierceness" (or rather, lack thereof) was probably the best indicator of popularity.
I see these themes spanning Graham's other musings on nerds, typically trying to characterize a class of kids who are hated for their interests and passions, but that's just never been my experience. I think it's a generational thing.
There's definitely some eccentric people in the field, but a vast majority people I've met working in tech were hardly the Poindexter type characterized in these articles
Paul Graham himself muses in this post that the main contrast is between people who are "good at making deals" and those who are actually competent in some relevant domain. We can see this shift happening in politics as well.
The two group categorization is a rhetorical device commonly used everywhere, throughout the world, to help drive a point, worldview, or allegory home. In it's correct form, it is never intended to be a dichotomy (as this would make it fallacious).
So perhaps the way to understand it is PG believes people fit in these two groups, but those are not the only two groups you fit in, and they are by no means all-encompassing.
It's kind of like, you are either a member of team red, or team blue. You may be a blue type of person, another is a red, but that by no means defines the entirety of your being.
Let's try to have a little more good faith here, when trying to understand people's musings. The reality is, most of us here wouldn't have the courage to put our thoughts and opinions out there on the internet for the whole world to see, at least not to the extent PG does.
Well, we could certainly speak to the difference between those whose emotional needs are served by sharing their advice with the world, and those for whom they aren't.
I’d take PG more seriously if he actually had to work to maintain his flock. Folks who struck it rich in the lottery talk about how suddenly everyone wanted to be their friend.
I’ve been rummaging around the human experience for 41 years, applying technology to problems at public uni and big corp, building houses, growing food, hunting, earned degrees in electrical engineering and math.
To me that’s all there is, to go do directly.
All this feels like is someone who is riding off that lottery ticket.
That is, I’m not seeing an information advantage. Just a political capital advantage.
I thought we did away with allegiance to unelected political agents?
The reason that 4 quadrant divisions of the world seem like they always work is because any two vectors chosen at random in a high dimensional space are nearly orthogonal with high probability.
If one were suitably cynical (and independent-minded, another of his bugaboos) one might suggest that it's always been "the kind Paul appeals to" and "the bad people".
The article is an attempt of classifying people into neat groups with certain characteristics, without acknowledging their true inner personality as a result of the cultural background and the particular individual qualities. "Nerd" is one such classification, "fierce" is a sub-classification. Semantic word-play with little empirical or anecdotal evidence.
I think after the dotcom craze, it stopped being "edgy" or "different" to be passionate/ambitious about technology. If anything, it's the most straightforward thing to pursue ideas or business interests with these days, especially if you have a "fierce" personality.
To be fair, there's a lot more to the "nerd" archetype than just technology. But, from my experience, it was not particularly edgy or differentiating to be passionate about video games, board games, card games, literature, obscure TV, fanfics, internet culture, etc.
Yeah... if anything that seems normal these days? Many young adults are passionate about at least one of those things, whereas for Gen-X (Paul's generational cohort) those were far more underground interests.
Is the word "geek" no longer used for what you are describing? Although there a lot of overlap, I thought nerd referred to strong interests in academic subjects and geek referred to niche cultural subjects.
True, I've been conflating the two in all of my posts. As far as how they were used when I was growing up, the distinction tended to be moot because they were most commonly used ironically or jokingly.
there's a lot more to the "nerd" archetype than just technology.
I'd probably go as far as saying that technology (or at least practical technical skills) has become far less relevant as a 'nerd' marker.
Many of the self identifying 'nerds' I meet might be avid technophiles, but it's not like most of them know how to code better than anybody else (or at all in many cases).
Same, born in 92 and his characterization of being nerdy and young seems super antiquated. “Nerdy” interests don’t make you a social pariah, they transcend groupings all together; the star quarterback plays dnd, the head cheerleader builds robots in her basement, the stigma on having unique or “nerdy” hobbies and interests is mostly gone. When I think of what PG is describing, it’s characterized by poor social skills and bad hygiene.
I can tell you as someone that graduated college in 92 that being nerdy as a kid in the 70s/80s it was very different from that, at least in my area of the world (Midwest USA).
If you want a not very distorted glimpse of what it was like watch the movie, "Revenge of the Nerds".
In that movie, nerds publicly sexually harass and worst their enemies girlfriend. Yes, girlfriend mocks him at one moment, but the response is ridiculous. Are you sure you want to claim that is how things actually were?
Edit: in the movie nerds sell secretly taken naked pictures of said girlfriend to earn money. The movie is old and ridiculous, but when you start to claim this is how things were, I want to know wtf was going on in your school.
stuff like that happened at my high school, and not that long ago. do you not believe that kind of thing happens/happened, or do you just not believe that "nerds" can be the perpetrators?
these kinds of events can fly under the radar if you aren't involved. I only know of the situation I'm thinking of because the girl found out and complained to the school, which ended up expelling the others involved.
I do not think the movie is "a not very distorted glimpse of what it was like".
More importantly, if movie is accurate, then nerds are no better then evil jocks. They are just two groups of bullies and assholes locked in a fight where everybody who avoids them is doing something smart.
In your school, did the girl that got her nudes public got together with the dude that took them and sold them? You can peel levels of that movie how much you want, you won't get meaningfull image of reality.
I'm just five years older than you and strongly relate to these descriptions of being a nerd, having academic interests not shared by young peers and consequently caring very little for social games. Even in adulthood, unless I carefully choose who I hang out with. And I'm from Europe, not the US, so it's not a thing local to the US either.
If it's truly a generational change, that would be a very interesting development. Especially if it happened in just the five years between when we were teenagers - I had no impression that people a few years younger than me had a wildly different experience than me. But I could certainly be mistaken.
Do you find no familiarity at all in these descriptions? Meaning some of the following - Being more interested in reading than gossiping, liking technical projects more than team sports, being uninterested in popularity contests and social status games to such a degree that you barely care about losing them, prioritizing learning over number of superficial acquaintances, having ideas and thoughts that you assume to be true but for which you experience lashback for stating out loud. Potentially experiencing some loneliness or hostility over this, not necessarily making that part of your identity, eventually seeking a small number of like-minded folks...
Has the world really changed this much? From my perspective, it seems likely that you're just not the target demographic for this essay.
I knew many people who fit that description, but with even a little social intelligence it seemed to me their experiences in highschool were pretty great; they weren’t nerds, they were just smart and studious and many were very well liked. Our homecoming king was on the academic decathalon team. Im not saying that smart, introverted folks with underdeveloped social skills don’t exist, just that they don’t exist opposite to bros and jocks and cool kids (and weren’t mercilessly bullied for being themselves).
On the other end, nerd-culture had permeated all levels of the social strata, and my very popular friends who partied every weekend were also semi-pro halo players and avid anime fans and didn’t hide either of those facts.
It’s only six years, but it could have been wide exposure to the internet? Also very possible I’m seeing the past through rose colored glasses.
There is a pretty wide variance from school to school, town to town, and state to state/country to country. Maybe you were in a particularly well-adjusted school, and other schools and communities are still more judgmental of non-blessed interests? Or maybe the nerds remain, but they had different interests from the new main-stream. I'd hardly call Halo a nerd thing, for example.
Maybe it was a well adjusted school, or maybe it was a school in which achievement culture and college application stacking and reverse engineering had fully run their course. After all, 'well rounded' on paper people get into elite colleges, and people from elite colleges have a better shot at becoming rich. Nothing less nerdy than wanting to be rich.
How old is PG? Born in 1964, so age 56, according to Wiki. I'm from the same era. Being young and nerdy in the '60s and '70s was pretty isolating.
Computers weren't available until the early '80s, and weren't affordable for another decade, so few kids had easy access to them, and networks didn't arise until about 1990. So if you were born before '80-'85, you had a tough time rallying around tech toys with other nerds/geeks to share your enlightened world view.
Stewing nerds in their own juices through adolescence tends to foment fierceness, which is just another word for not understanding or tolerating non-nerds very well. With today's omnipresent social connectivity, isolation should be less a problem in 2021, since tech content and cool devices are everywhere today.
What I would have given to play around with RPi or robots in my teens...
You're a bit young then. I'm a decade older, and see very clear similarities in my age cohort to what he's describing, particularly when I was in my early 20s and teens. Which is interesting, because a good theory of behavior is not limited that tightly in time.
Where are you (or GP) from?
Im also ‘92. I grew up in California, but in a rural part of the state. Nerdy interests absolutely had a stigma. My high school didn’t even have a CS class, no academic decathlon team, and certainly no robotics club. It was the “best” school in my district, too.
In challenging or AP classes you had essentially two groups, the jocks, who were trying to follow a college track, for which sports were essentially requisite in our district, and the nerds who just liked learning stuff. The jocks(male and female) did their homework as a group, complained loudly about difficult tests/assignments and consistently used their relative influence to affect their grades. The nerds brought in their own lessons, asked questions that lead the class off topic, consistently read the textbook and stayed late to ask questions rather than negotiate.
Anyway, thought I’d throw this anecdote out there for variety.
I was in a semi-rural suburb of San Antonio, Texas. We had a CS class, our academic decathalon team team placed 6th in state (I was a C but placed 3rd in individual), and I took a lot of AP science and math so I spent a lot of time with the top people in our class. It was… a great time. Non-AP classes were hit or miss, but AP physics C, calculus B/C, and art history were some of my all time favorite school experiences. I feel very lucky to have had the time I did.
If there are star QBs that play DND (somehow I doubt there actually are that many) this is just proof that DND has gone mainstream and is therefore being commercialized as nerdy while actually not nerdy any more. This is known in some parlances as 'nerd-chic'.
> Maybe it's a generational thing (born in '92), but Graham often seems to paint a picture of nerds similar to what you might see in movies and TV shows depicting the 80s, like the kids in Stranger Things.
Graham's characterizations of nerds reminds me of the "They don't know" meme[1] guy.
>As the world progresses, the number of things you can win at by getting the right answer increases.
Either that or in history there are certain junction points in which a number of hard problems arise and if you are good at solving hard problems at that point you are going to do well for yourself. After which there is a period of consolidation until the next rise of hard problems. Probably Mr. Graham wouldn't like to consider that idea though.
I don't see the point in inventing some arbitrary social category, when it's only backed by what seems like little more than speculative drivel.
> Another solution may be to somehow turn off your fierceness, by devoting yourself to meditation...
Huh? Lots of highly successful and effective people (who he would probably call fierce) cite meditation as a crucial tool for increasing their focus and mental discipline. This is just a bizarre take.
> The bad news is that if it's not exercised, your fierceness will turn to bitterness, and you will become an intellectual playground bully: the grumpy sysadmin, the forum troll, the hater, the shooter down of new ideas.
Can’t stress this enough. Some reach for what others have. Others reach for what they need but get trolled into thinking they have nothing and start reaching for what others have.
This is the equation for misery. And the opposite is the equation for success. But I admit this is just one dimension and datum on the look of life.
This was not too bad considering PGs latest writings, which have been various degrees of underwhelming and tone deaf. This is like, at least, a rally call or something. But I'm just a bitter forum troll so...
Expertise with people, technology, and finances could be view as three legs of a startup. Each has their own form of fierceness. As a casual observer, it seems to me that the ideal founder formula is a fierce networker/marketer, a fierce nerd, and a fierce businessperson.
The first rush of comments are all negative, mostly of the ad hominem sort, accusing PG of publicly psychoanalyzing himself. And yet, I really liked the essay because it reads like a lifeline to those who doubt themselves, perhaps profoundly. To PG the same qualities that alienate a "fierce nerd" in so many contexts are precisely the same qualities that could lead to success (even dominance) in other contexts.
The useful follow on to this essay, I would think, is to give a list, as long as possible, of places where "fierce nerds" are wanted, demanded, needed - both well-known institutions and startups.
Another useful follow up would be to give better advice about achieving harmony. Everyone deserves peace; to put it another way, progress that requires a human to sacrifice love isn't worth making.
>The useful follow on to this essay, I would think, is to give a list, as long as possible, of places where "fierce nerds" are wanted, demanded, needed - both well-known institutions and startups.
This article promises "how to deal", but all it delivers is a list of difficult stereotypes, prefaced by reasons you are not allowed to disagree with the stereotypes, and never discusses how to deal with them.
> And yet, I really liked the essay because it reads like a lifeline to those who doubt themselves, perhaps profoundly
Do they? I mean one of the define characteristics is an overconfidence in themselves.
I think PG is trying to justify some kind of assholish behaviour in his past by reframing it as a virtue.
Really, I think the “fierceness” is incidental. Do immensely successful people need to be somewhat competitive? Sure. Do they have to interrupt everyone, lack social awareness, etc? Probably not.
Is there a clear definition of self-doubt that doesn’t overlap with underconfidence? Because if the terms we’re using are so broad that a person can both be described as overconfident and underconfident, then as I say elsewhere this just looks like cold reading.
It's the difference between feeling and acting. A person can feel a lack of confidence and feel doubt and still act confident or overconfident.
Lots of people, like artists, visionaries, and weirdos who make strides to live a unique life have to act confidently to get to that life yet many also have a lot of self doubt. They just do the brave thing to move ahead with their vision even though it could likely end in failure. For many it does, whether they are remembered posthumously or not.
People are really complex systems, they don’t just have one emotion, even at one time. I know several people who seem to swing between overconfidence and self doubt, sometimes very suddenly. Maybe some will eventually settle in the middle. But if someone has something in their psyche that just keeps pushing them back into an overconfident mindset, then it’s hard to see how they wouldn’t also experience regular injections of humiliation leading to growing self doubts over time.
I’m not saying you can’t be both under- and overconfident. I’m saying that if you’re using terms so broad and vague, you could probably describe anyone that way.
Wow this describes me to a T. My parents were constantly praising me and making me feel like a genius. Yet in the real world I'd estimate I'm around 120 IQ. So definitely not genius level.
It's almost like a positive form of gaslighting which unfortunately still has negative consequences like you've pointed out.
If we really want to go in this direction and criticize other people calling famous tech businessmen assholes, at least give credit where it's due - Jobs deserves this much more than Gates. Gates documented unethical behavior was mostly against other companies, not so much individuals, with a few notable exceptions.
I doubt Jobs--who died nearly ten years ago--was as likely a trigger for this essay as Gates, who is currently in the daily news due to his alleged bad behavior.
On the other hand, Gates' recently reported "bad behavior" seems to be largely stuff like infidelity and inappropriate sexual relationships which is not what the essay touches on at all. Jobs' assholery is exactly business & engineering related in the way that PG is talking about.
> I think PG is trying to justify some kind of assholish behaviour in his past by reframing it as a virtue.
I couldn't help but read part of it as a response to/rationalization of the recent pushback he (and other "fierce nerds") have been receiving lately...the former underdogs are now the establishment.
The bad news is that if it's not exercised, your fierceness will turn to bitterness, and you will become an intellectual playground bully: the grumpy sysadmin, the forum troll, the hater, the shooter down of new ideas.
I think "shooter down of new ideas" is getting unfairly lumped in with those other actually-bad traits. If there's one thing a lot of "idea guys" and optimistic entrepreneurs tend to lack and need, it's a skeptical partner who keeps them grounded in reality. Someone who is experienced, seen it all, constructively critical. Someone who will say "Wait a minute, this was tried in the '80s, and it won't work. Maybe try this instead." If you lump "people who push-back" in with haters and trolls, you're going to end up surrounded by yes-men.
The tech landscape is littered with failed projects that could have been stopped early if the idea person had a sounding board that keep him/her realistic.
Absolutely agree. The best and most creative environments I have worked in have been full of people who you could turn to and say "What if we did X?", and they would immediately come up with reasons that X would fail or be impossible. If your idea hadn't been absolutely annihilated after 5 or 10 minutes of this, it was probably pretty decent.
Yes, it is true that new ideas need criticism. However, if one is almost always critical of new ideas, especially ones that push beyond your wheelhouse, then that is a problem because you'll never innovate. PG lumps it with haters and trolls because that's what being a negative person entails. The point is the extremity. There is nothing wrong with being a hater, proportionately, as you can only love something if you hate its opposite.
I went to school at MIT with tons of people who had world-class intelligence, productivity and even accomplishments, but imposter syndrome was still rampant.
Even if someone happens to be exceptional at everything you choose to do and thus have confidence, they can only do so many things. And that means that for every thing they are exceptional at, there are a thousand things where they are unimaginably outclassed by others. MIT was awful for that.
For me personally, the more I learn about my areas of expertise, the more I realize how clueless I am about so many other areas. But if the knowledge of your general cluelessness makes you timid outside of your domain of expertise, it limits how much you can accomplish.
Also, I didn’t really read ‘fierceness’ to mean ‘assholeness’. I’ve been around some people who had ideas that they desperately wanted to see out into the world. They were fiercely passionate and they did have a tendency to interrupt, but they definitely weren’t assholes.
Somewhere in a secluded underground luxury bunker, Sergey Mikhaylovich Brin, Larry Edward Page and Bill Henry Gates are fiercely nodding their heads in agreement. ;p ;) xx
Pretty sure a lot of people’s brains broke given Trump, environment, and coronavirus.
The veil was lifted. A whole lot of the late Boomer, and Gen X are halfway to the end, realizing it wasn’t magic, and seeing sentiment for their efforts turn on them.
I’ve seen a number of folks, 40-60, meltdown over the last 2-3 years. Most of my 20-30 something acquaintances have weathered it well.
The older class though, has really been hit by reality not being as easily bent to their will given the virus, and sentiment turning against their generation acting as helicopter parents to society.
To be fair, this man's job was to identify the type of person who is likely to succeed at startups, and by most accounts he was very successful at it.
Understanding personality traits and how they relate to the people you're looking for has felt critically important as I work on my startup. It has come up over and over again in hiring (including MANY more inbound, exploratory conversations than I would have expected) and in client management (identifying the best point of contact on their side, but also keeping clients on track and responsive during an onboard).
I've noticed as I myself get older that a lot of things that older people used to say, which seemed particularly out of touch then, are actually starting to make some amount of sense to me. I even find myself repeating some of those things. However, I try to be careful to temper that with my memories of hearing them from older folks when I was young. I think part of the disconnect is/was that older people actually do forget what it was like to be young or how they thought/felt when they were young. I'd suspect that's what's going on in OP's mind - he's mostly forgotten the trials and tribulations of youth (maybe even defensively blocked out some of the traumatic memories) and to him it doesn't even make sense for an older person to remember how important social interactions are to teenagers.
> It's weird to read an "essay" about "nerds" from a 56 year old. It's like he never got over the high school caste system of cliques.
“Nerds” being a meaningful category isn’t an idea limited to high-school caste/cliques, especially in tech; one of the reasons software flipped from being predominantly female to predominantly male is the popularization of the idea (IIRC, in the late 1960s or early 1970s) that stereotypical nerds (socially maladapted, querulous, technophilic males) were the optimal workers in the field.
The idea, which best as I know was only grounded in thin popular management quasi-science, has become increasingly less popular in the last few decades.
It is weird, though, that Graham’s affected contrarianism requires him to pretend that fierceness as opposed to diffidence is contrary to the popular stereotype, nerds lacking the skills to manage/moderate conflict manifesting in both conflict avoidance where they are uncomfortable and fierce, intractable, often petty conflict within their comfort zone has always been central to the stereotype.
My 70 year old grand-father, whose getting increasingly worse bouts of dementia, still remembers all the names and deeds of the various school bullies who tormented him in High School like it was yesterday. School seems like it was a very traumatic time for many, many people. Bullys do enormous amounts of damage to people and I am very happy to see the slow death of the "high school caste system" from the new generation. A lot of genuine social justice will come from increasing culture shaming and rejection of people who act like bullys.
I agree with you initially, but I tried to read it from the lens of someone who is reflecting on his past experiences and applying them to a certain archetype of people he meets throughout life working in tech.
With computer science being one of the most popular degrees being held by Gen Z, the "nerd" casting will slowly fade as computer work becomes more and more the norm vs. traditional trades and fields that require higher education.
Average Joe caught wind you could make Lawyer and Doctor money with a Bachelor's or less, makes sense to me.
[Here's my best summary of what a "fierce nerd" is, according to this essay]
Most non-nerds think of nerds as:
* quiet
* diffident
In fact some nerds are quite fierce. "Fierce nerds" are:
* small group [subset of nerds overall?]
* more competitive than highly competitive non-nerds
* competition is more personal for them; they're not
emotionally mature enough to distance themselves
personally from competition
* work in areas that are less random in the kinds of
competition they engage in [no points for
persuasion or style, I suppose]
* somewhat overconfident, especially when young
* intelligent, at least moderately so
* independent-mindeded, see fitting it as wasted effort
* annoyed by rules
* impatient, not sure why
Using James Watson as an example is an interesting choice.
When I think of James Watson, I think of someone who a) stole his major work (the one thing for which he is famous) from a woman without giving credit, and b) has been almost-literally cancelled for being consistently racist, also by his colleague-science-nerds who consistently report that they don't like him.
Not someone that I want to celebrate for being a 'fierce nerd'.
I didn't see it as defending sexism. It was more pointing out the hypocrisy of Apple for firing Martinez while selling and promoting 'Beats by Dre'. In both cases the creative works were well-known before the hire/acquisition.
Which is a poor critique considering Martinez would be working directly with other Apple employees while Dre is barely involved with Apple as far as I know. The issue isn't the creative work alone, the issue is the impact on fellow employees and the working environment.
Pointing out that hypocrisy is a strategy some took with criticizing Apple, but it's not the direction PG chose. [1]
He said nothing about Dre, focusing entirely on saying "He's a good guy, actually", which is the epitome of the strategy taken by men historically to defend other shitty men.
That's not "defending sexism" per se, but it is excusing sexism because of the content of someone's character. "Sure he said sexist things but he is not sexist". It does not pass even the most baseline level of scrutiny.
I think it's also worth saying here that the comparison to Dre is super irrelevant:
1) Musicians may write lyrics in the first person, but the general default for all musical content is it's "fictional", and not representive of their personal views on the matter. It's artistic license with ideas - occasionally problematic. That is not the case with "autobiographies", which is what Antonio's book was purported to be.
2) Dre has taken complete ownership of all of his past indiscretions and apologized for them [2]. Antonio double down.
Interestingly, Rosalind Franklin herself may have been something of a "fierce nerd":
> From the outset, Franklin and Wilkins simply did not get on. Wilkins was quiet and hated arguments; Franklin was forceful and thrived on intellectual debate. Her friend Norma Sutherland recalled: “Her manner was brusque and at times confrontational – she aroused quite a lot of hostility among the people she talked to, and she seemed quite insensitive to this.”
The idea that Watson "stole" his major work from Franklin is absurd. Franklin was on a completely different track and thought Watson & Crick's approach was a dead end.
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[ 3.0 ms ] story [ 326 ms ] threadIt's a siege mentality designed to shore up one's sense of superiority, and ensure that one doesn't need to do very much soul-searching.
I've never seen a blog post more worthy of a good old fashioned fisking. I mean come on - "confidence is a self-fullfilling prophecy" - are we being serious here? It's only self-fulfilling because of survivorship bias. Maybe he's running with a crew of super successful founders and that's true, but from my point of view, I remember the dudes at my place of work that could very confidently talk my ear off about something that they half-understood (or very confidently describe an unworkable solution to a problem) and then got fired a month later because they weren't productive enough to meet even the super-low requirements of software development at a car insurance company. It's easy to spin narratives about confidence and restlessness and intelligence when you've surrounded yourself with the winners. Less visible are the people who go all-in on a fintech startup and end up broke a year later. Those people have all the same traits and end up in the same boat as all the other un-fierce nerds.
I wonder if that statement is overly specific. AFAIK, young people in general, or at least young men in general, have a reputation for being overconfident.
The overconfidence is not a trait endemic only to male "nerds".
Of course, it's still helpful to concede that humans should recognize and be aware of that weakness in themselves. Overconfidence is the reason so many spend the healthy end years of their lives so much less well off financially than they spent their healthy prime years. It behooves us all to be on guard against our overconfidence.
Of course, this is a broad generalization, but seems to fit where I'm living right now, but it's all anecdotal as it's based on my own perceived view of things of course.
That's a bit different than when I think of young men in general being more confident than they ought to be. It has more to do with the goal: status within a group vs putting effort into finding what you believe is true and accurately representing that truth potentially at a social cost.
Also, these days if you are a smart ambitious person looking to make an impact with technology you're not terribly edgy and you certainly aren't defying any major social norms. And that's a good thing.
In 9th grade insists "I don't see the point of these classes I'm going to be a programmer," takes AP comp sci as sophmore finds it insultingly easy [gets in trouble for going ahead of teacher], resents homework vocally and refuses to do it on principle but still gets great scores on tests, places in the school math competition but initially gets kicked out of the award ceremony for refusing for the "National Honor Society" performance, 12-grade gets official permission to work half-time coding and only take half classes.
That's what I was, and I don't think anybody else has ever given me a word for it. I knew pedantic nerds, and intense nerds, and condescending nerds, but few with real conviction.
Could the terminology just be in flux, and therefore create confusion? With woke et al., we've got pleeeeeenty of examples of smart folks who miss the social norm du jour, attempt to say something true but rather say something unacceptable. And then they get ostracized or fired.
Maybe these folks are some examples of what used to be called nerds. Do we have a name for them?
That's the case for all PG essays, isn't it?
The vast majority I would say that he is trying to retcon his huge success and the success of some businesses he has been associated with into a coherent worldview. I believe that in 'Hackers and Painters' he actually goes through some back-of-envelope calculations that show that the money he made when Yahoo bought Viaweb corresponded closely to the real value he had created, in some sense.
It is baffling to me why he isn't able to say "I got lucky - I worked hard and created something very valuable, but I was also in the right place at the right time." Clearly there were special factors at play selling an e-commerce platform to Yahoo in 1998. He's also done intelligent and pro-social things with both his money and his time since then it appears. I don't know what the shame is in saying "I won a lottery - but I have tried to do the right thing with my good fortune."
I think if you asked Jamie Zawinski, who I think was no less technically skilled, nor less purposeful about working on interesting and important things (nor, tbh, any worse at writing thoughtful essays), he would readily admit to having been extremely lucky. I don't know what the difference is between these two personalities. I think I'd rather be jwz in similar circumstances.
As a child I was mathematically precocious and often (to myself) compared my modest accomplishments to stories of prodigies like Gauss or von Neumann. Looking back it seems patently ridiculous, but I might not have spent dozens of hours per week reading math textbooks and Wikipedia if I had had a more realistic self-perception. I can't say I regret it.
But as the father of a kid with Asperger Syndrome, and as someone with a likely diagnosis myself (according to neuropysch testing), I'm a little bothered by the broad brush with which P.G. is painting.
If he focused on something more defined than a vague and derogatory term for smart people in general heay have had something worth reading.
Ps. Seriously, why is the grey subtext so hard to read? Stop with grey text. Please.
I think most of what you identify as "wokeness" is other people who aren't directly affected trying to help out, since the affected people are usually a minority who won't be heard if it's just them. That can lead to its own forms of tone-deafness and "you're not helping" behavior, but that just leads to more cases of people who are sincerely and effectively helping being dismissed as "SJWs" out of hand. That's a cheap way of avoiding genuine problems with one tiny all-purpose acronym.
I just wanted to point that out because what you wrote can be read like "I didn't care about anything except when it happens to me". It might give you a moment's pause the next time you want to deride something as "woke".
Err.. really? I mean, that's the definition of individualism against which many "woke" people would object. Even you say, "since the affected people are usually a minority". This is just false, if we take minority to refer to the usual "protected subgroups".
The relevant sense of Woke here, seems to me, to be concerned not with people's individual needs -- but their needs qua some alleged group. Esp., as you offer, "minority" groups.
It's a sort of perverse individualism. It's just substituting a different type of broad brush. Rather than starting with a maximally individual analysis (and hence construe treatment in terms of procedural fairness), rather, start by a group analysis and place individuals within those groups (and hence talk about aggregate distributional outcomes).
The derision here is the conflict in having to raise an issue because you are autistic, without inviting the Woke-style "and autistic people are a minority who need protected". The latter substitutes the underlying lack of procedural concern for individual needs with exactly the same problem: again ignoring individual difference expect now substituting alleged "group needs".
Woke analysis of this kind prescribes, a typically condescending, set of redresses for alleged group grievances. Individualism prescribes nothing of this sort, rather, adjusting the rules so as to maximise each person's ability to get what they each, as individuals, need.
"Don't paint me with a broad brush" means let me speak for myself alone. This attitude is antithetical to analysis which begins with "minorities", which by construction, are not people who are each individually empowered to speak for themselves.
> Don't paint me with a broad brush" means let me speak for myself alone. This attitude is antithetical to analysis which begins with "minorities",
This is, I think "just be race blind". Wokeness, as you seem to be describing it is an ideology that recognizes that identities impact how a person is perceived. To fairly judge an individual, you have to take into account that, because of their race or gender, their work may have been misvalued or falsely attributed.
For better or worse, society discriminates, and recognition of that is a part of fairly judging people as individuals.
It's entirely fair to say that whilst accommodating and judging people individually we need to account for that person's particular difficulty in first being judged in this manner -- because we, the judger, may be unable to properly understand their situation; and likewise they may not be able to argue their case, state their need, etc.
The problem enters when we take the goal of our project to actually be removing such "prejudices and obstacles" and, not rather, the empowerment of each individual. The former is an often optional detour to the latter.
Consider, for example, the most effective civil rights president in US history (LBJ) was a racist: did we need to solve his prejudice first? Would that have done anything positive?
Wokeism, if it means anything at all, I think has to be identified with this ends-means confusion. It's raising to the status of an end in itself the elimination of (minority) group hatred, (minority) group prejudice, etc.
This a deeply confused project; and routinely gets in the way of the actual end everyone cares about: each person, in their own particular situation, being able to live the way that best suits them.
If I read the message here correctly, the woke-dissenter is saying this: "My difficulties are particular to me, and all I want is to be able to solve them. I don't want to participate or "ally" with a society-wide war against the possibility I will be misunderstood or mistreated; rather I simply want the rules (,tools, practices) in place to empower me when I am."
Wokeism is the political incarnation of New Atheism, or likewise Evangelism: first we fight a total war against The Sins of The Mind themselves; and then, much much later, we help people in their particular situations.
The current iteration of the civil rights movement is solving a different problem than that of 1968. Due to LBJ's actions, minorities are equal under the law. You can't just pass laws to make them more equal. They already are.
But if you look around, they clearly aren't, so the question becomes, well why not? If you subscribe to woke ideology, the answer is something like "pervasive cultural and systemic biases across various aspects of society". I'll draw a parallel to another evergreen topic, "cancel culture". The idea being that a large group of distributed people can ruin someone's life by changing how they interact with that person and making them a pariah.
Well many of these systemic biases are similar, if less sudden. People and systems trained to see or treat people as lesser. How do you solve that problem? I only see one solution: to get the distributed group of people to be aware of and ultimately counteract those biases, to undue the incidental cancellation of these people. And what is that but raising awareness of and reducing those ingrained prejudices.
All of the other approaches are things that routinely get called "reverse-racist" themselves, things like affirmative action and such which ignore the individual.
> "My difficulties are particular to me, and all I want is to be able to solve them. I don't want to participate or "ally" with a society-wide war against the possibility I will be misunderstood or mistreated; rather I simply want the rules (,tools, practices) in place to empower me when I am."
And the response to this is that while your difficulties are particular to you, it's likely that the best tools and practices to empower you when you are mistreated are allies who are willing to stand up for you agains the person mistreating you. As in the limit, if no one believes you are being mistreated except you, you will have no recourse.
There's no law that says that PG isn't allowed to say things that make GGP uncomfortable. In fact, there's laws that say that we can't prevent PG from doing that. All we can hope for is that said mistreatment is recognized by others, and that people pressure him to correct his behavior.
Wokeness is a recognition that this is a political (in the sense of like human-interaction, not election-related), not legal issue.
The problem with Wokeism (a term I don't like btw) is the means. We all broadly agree on the ends.
The individualist things this type of change can be bottom-up (individual -> group) and the wokeist wants it to be top-down (group -> individual).
In the former case the intuition is that we aren't going to be able to solve the group problem, so starting at the group level is a waste of time and a bit tyrannical. All we can do is empower individuals who, over time, will aggregate and approximately solve the group problem.
I agree however that it has to be both top-down and bottom-up. I think wokeism as ideology of over-reaction, is towards the extreme end of that top-down approach.
He's talking about "nerds"; a cultural identity.
You are talking about asperger's, a medical condition.
PG doesn't draw any lines between them.
What is your objection, specifically?
It's not immediately obvious to me how this relates to the article. Can you elaborate? Is "fierce nerd" a reference to Aspergers?
And socially maybe the people at work can keep you in check without firing you, because you can't respond well in a socially-clever environment for example, no matter how amazing your insights.
In my case, my fatal flaw career-wise wasn't abrasiveness or asshole-ish behavior, but a strong aversion to promoting my work or any of the other non-goal tasks required to advance in an organization. I hate every minute I have to spend making it clear that I'm productive instead of just _being_ productive.
However, this is almost unavoidable in most organizations that aren't tiny. You either have to "manage your brand" and play politics, or you have to make sure that you're fitting a squishy, inherently-subjective rubric. At a bare minimum, you need to craft a presentation of your output at performance review time, and hope your interpretation of the rubric matches the decision-makers'.
My solution was to find a company with fairly objective and well-defined measures of output[1], where there's more than enough impact to go around. You can't avoid having people skills to get things done, but I don't mind using my people skills in service of getting shit done instead of internal organizational BS.
[1] This does not mean that we're tolerant of assholes. We've fired people for being pathological "brilliant jerks", though everyone I've come into close personal contact with is well above the jerk bar. What this does is separate "are you toxic in a way that hurts your coworkers or the company" from "what is your output", allowing people who are awkward and well-intentioned to thrive on one axis and grow on the other. This is in contrast to the usual case, where measuring output is polluted by interpersonal skills that are not related to output, and being awkward means your work isn't recognized either.
Also, many of those 'skills' are nothing more than shared cultural backgrounds and/or biases.
> It's hard to be independent-minded without being somewhat socially awkward, because conventional beliefs are so often mistaken, or at least arbitrary. No one who was both independent-minded and ambitious would want to waste the effort it takes to fit in
But what surprised me is that instead of washing away negative traits as part of the package, two options for the "fierce nerd" are presented:
1. use power for good
2. be cynical and embrace bitterness
It's a lot easier to do #2 than #1.
[1]: https://www.16personalities.com/intj-personality
[2]: https://www.16personalities.com/intp-personality
[3]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_Five_personality_traits
That's an understatement. It's meritless pseudoscience.
I have found the MBTI to be useful despite the empirical inaccuracy of the test itself. Even without taking the test, people can self-identify as one (or more) types. This then serves as a meaningful basis for discussion as well as raising awareness that people are deeply different in terms of their ways of thinking. It is quite an eye opener the first time you see someone self-identify as a personality type that is very different to your own.
None of the personality theories are 'proven' of course. We won't get that until we have a fuller understanding of the brain. But it is well accepted within psychology that personality is a thing. And personality types (Big 5, MBTI, etc) are useful models for now despite their shortcomings.
This is a fairly good post with some additional thoughts on the MBTI debate: https://dynomight.net/in-defense-of-myers-briggs.html
It actually has international data to support its model.
I do, and I think you should invest in these things (not "devote your life", PG shows his deep ignorance here of these things as though they are black and white). if you are in the overwhelming vast majority of "fierce nerds" that does not become a billionaire, or even if you do, you will invariably have a lot of problems in social situations and close relationships until some investment is made in tempering this extreme sort of personality.
> But it doesn't seem the optimal solution to me. If you're given a sharp knife, it seems to me better to use it than to blunt its edge to avoid cutting yourself.
PG encouraging people to be emotionally unhealthy so that they can add to his pool of talent for him to profit from. The fierce nerd, great term btw, is ambitious and brilliant. they can do all of these things at the same time. It might just cut down the full on "become a billionaire" mindset, but that's a good thing, since it's unethical to be a billionaire.
I know a lot of people that fit this mold, and for this type of personality there's nothing that will meaningfully dull the edge [1]. But, if they learn how to control it, they can avoid cutting their friends and themselves, and live a much happier life.
The last thing this world needs is more emotionally stunted leaders alone in their suffering.
[1] This point in particular seemed like pg engaging in pure speculation, not something based on specific examples
That someone would think nerds are not competitive is, to me, the strangest thing about this article. Perhaps because I'm one, but whether it's Magic the gathering, Demoparties, rubics cube solving, chess, Counterstrike LANs, academia, or any of my tech jobs, every "nerdy" activity I've ever engaged with has always been overly competitive.
The fact that so many open source projects have had to adopt "code of conducts" is IMO a direct reflection of the fierce competition that has always been inherent to software development. Whether it's code quality, clever hacks, optimization... everything about what we do has a competitive element.
Come to think of it, I can't actually think of any nerdy activity that isn't, in practice, extremely competitive.
This is something that has bothered me about a lot of people's views on competition, whether it's sports or business or whatever. Being competitive does not have anything to do with being an asshole.
I never got into trash-talking during games. It was always just easier for me to ignore it/use the other person's trash-talking as their own distraction against me running circles around them.
And then in software, Code of Conducts are not covering anything about how the project interacts with other projects. They're covering how contributors treat each other within the project. You're not in competition with your project mates. The sorts of harassing and belitting behavior that CoCs are supposed to address (whether they do or not is a different discussion) comes about from some sort of glory-hog mentality that is ultimately anti-productive. Insert roll-safe meme: "If I drive away most of the other contributors, my own efforts will be a much bigger proportion of the overall whole".
Culture follows power. Once a bunch of tech nerds became billionaires in the 1990s, every aspect of that subculture gained prestige.
Spelling bee competitors are seen positively, but also almost as a joke compared to quarterbacks. Mathlete? A joke in popular culture.
There is some evidence that this is changing, but there is also a lot of bad art. The Social Network, and Steve Jobs the film portray fierce nerds that basically no one wants to know.
The actual people?
Zuck and Dorsey just got through extracting maximum advertising value from the heart of US democracy.
Bezos hasn't done fierce nerds any favors with his squeezing of the lowest paid people in his organization.
Bill Gates' reputation is headed downhill right now faster than ever before.
Tim Cook has real potential. But the jury is still out. We do not know the calculus involved in compromising privacy values in China.
It is going to take a lot more well-known, rich, fierce nerds that also manage to round out their personality before we see mainstream positive portrayal and following of competitiveness in intellectual exercises.
I have heard far worse things about non amazon warehouse workers in the UK Sports Direct for example.
I think that is little bit you choosing very competitive things to engage in. People who were obsessed with start trek for example did not build competitive societies. And I worked in multiple teams that did not felt overly competitive to me at all.
Through, I would not see Counterstrike nerdy at all. This sort of games is more of the most stereotypical guy pastime that exists.
It may be that this source of insecurity is a driving force. But years later, when I see who is more successful I think it is the nonfierce nerds. The fierce nerds exhausted themselves with petty disagreements and arbitrary hills to die on. The nonfierce nerds were able to focus on the hills worth climbing and recruit others to work with them.
Perhaps it's a flattener of the bellcurve of success. If you only look at the right hand side you will see lots of fierce nerds. But you aren't seeing the many, many more who are just ordinary, annoying assholes.
In a more broad sense, you can be smart but easily work on the wrong thing or put your energy into the wrong area.
Maybe it's a generational thing (born in '92), but Graham often seems to paint a picture of nerds similar to what you might see in movies and TV shows depicting the 80s, like the kids in Stranger Things.
Even this article, while I can certainly conjure which of my friends growing up were the "fierce nerd", it still feels a little disconnected from my reality.
For example, Graham begins by explaining that the concept of a fierce nerd is one unknown to the general public. But I'm not sure I agree. In the era I grew up, there was not so much social distinction between who is a nerd, but there was a lot of social distinction for those who were argumentative, or "fierce". In my experience, everyone knew who the "fierce nerds" were (although not by that name), because they were known for their awkwardness and combativeness - not for their nerdiness. Indeed, my own nerdy friend circle in high school spanned a wide range of popularities and I would say "fierceness" (or rather, lack thereof) was probably the best indicator of popularity.
I see these themes spanning Graham's other musings on nerds, typically trying to characterize a class of kids who are hated for their interests and passions, but that's just never been my experience. I think it's a generational thing.
Xist versus Yist, and he showed us with some pretty basic math.
Now two groups is all we need to understand the world?
So perhaps the way to understand it is PG believes people fit in these two groups, but those are not the only two groups you fit in, and they are by no means all-encompassing.
It's kind of like, you are either a member of team red, or team blue. You may be a blue type of person, another is a red, but that by no means defines the entirety of your being.
Let's try to have a little more good faith here, when trying to understand people's musings. The reality is, most of us here wouldn't have the courage to put our thoughts and opinions out there on the internet for the whole world to see, at least not to the extent PG does.
I’ve been rummaging around the human experience for 41 years, applying technology to problems at public uni and big corp, building houses, growing food, hunting, earned degrees in electrical engineering and math.
To me that’s all there is, to go do directly.
All this feels like is someone who is riding off that lottery ticket.
That is, I’m not seeing an information advantage. Just a political capital advantage.
I thought we did away with allegiance to unelected political agents?
The reason that 4 quadrant divisions of the world seem like they always work is because any two vectors chosen at random in a high dimensional space are nearly orthogonal with high probability.
I'd probably go as far as saying that technology (or at least practical technical skills) has become far less relevant as a 'nerd' marker.
Many of the self identifying 'nerds' I meet might be avid technophiles, but it's not like most of them know how to code better than anybody else (or at all in many cases).
If you want a not very distorted glimpse of what it was like watch the movie, "Revenge of the Nerds".
Edit: in the movie nerds sell secretly taken naked pictures of said girlfriend to earn money. The movie is old and ridiculous, but when you start to claim this is how things were, I want to know wtf was going on in your school.
these kinds of events can fly under the radar if you aren't involved. I only know of the situation I'm thinking of because the girl found out and complained to the school, which ended up expelling the others involved.
More importantly, if movie is accurate, then nerds are no better then evil jocks. They are just two groups of bullies and assholes locked in a fight where everybody who avoids them is doing something smart.
In your school, did the girl that got her nudes public got together with the dude that took them and sold them? You can peel levels of that movie how much you want, you won't get meaningfull image of reality.
If it's truly a generational change, that would be a very interesting development. Especially if it happened in just the five years between when we were teenagers - I had no impression that people a few years younger than me had a wildly different experience than me. But I could certainly be mistaken.
Do you find no familiarity at all in these descriptions? Meaning some of the following - Being more interested in reading than gossiping, liking technical projects more than team sports, being uninterested in popularity contests and social status games to such a degree that you barely care about losing them, prioritizing learning over number of superficial acquaintances, having ideas and thoughts that you assume to be true but for which you experience lashback for stating out loud. Potentially experiencing some loneliness or hostility over this, not necessarily making that part of your identity, eventually seeking a small number of like-minded folks...
Has the world really changed this much? From my perspective, it seems likely that you're just not the target demographic for this essay.
On the other end, nerd-culture had permeated all levels of the social strata, and my very popular friends who partied every weekend were also semi-pro halo players and avid anime fans and didn’t hide either of those facts.
It’s only six years, but it could have been wide exposure to the internet? Also very possible I’m seeing the past through rose colored glasses.
Computers weren't available until the early '80s, and weren't affordable for another decade, so few kids had easy access to them, and networks didn't arise until about 1990. So if you were born before '80-'85, you had a tough time rallying around tech toys with other nerds/geeks to share your enlightened world view.
Stewing nerds in their own juices through adolescence tends to foment fierceness, which is just another word for not understanding or tolerating non-nerds very well. With today's omnipresent social connectivity, isolation should be less a problem in 2021, since tech content and cool devices are everywhere today.
What I would have given to play around with RPi or robots in my teens...
In challenging or AP classes you had essentially two groups, the jocks, who were trying to follow a college track, for which sports were essentially requisite in our district, and the nerds who just liked learning stuff. The jocks(male and female) did their homework as a group, complained loudly about difficult tests/assignments and consistently used their relative influence to affect their grades. The nerds brought in their own lessons, asked questions that lead the class off topic, consistently read the textbook and stayed late to ask questions rather than negotiate.
Anyway, thought I’d throw this anecdote out there for variety.
Graham's characterizations of nerds reminds me of the "They don't know" meme[1] guy.
[1] https://www.buzzfeed.com/kristatorres/they-dont-know-twitter
Either that or in history there are certain junction points in which a number of hard problems arise and if you are good at solving hard problems at that point you are going to do well for yourself. After which there is a period of consolidation until the next rise of hard problems. Probably Mr. Graham wouldn't like to consider that idea though.
> Another solution may be to somehow turn off your fierceness, by devoting yourself to meditation...
Huh? Lots of highly successful and effective people (who he would probably call fierce) cite meditation as a crucial tool for increasing their focus and mental discipline. This is just a bizarre take.
Can’t stress this enough. Some reach for what others have. Others reach for what they need but get trolled into thinking they have nothing and start reaching for what others have.
This is the equation for misery. And the opposite is the equation for success. But I admit this is just one dimension and datum on the look of life.
The useful follow on to this essay, I would think, is to give a list, as long as possible, of places where "fierce nerds" are wanted, demanded, needed - both well-known institutions and startups.
Another useful follow up would be to give better advice about achieving harmony. Everyone deserves peace; to put it another way, progress that requires a human to sacrifice love isn't worth making.
"How to Deal with Difficult People on Software Projects" is a pretty good read in this vain https://neilonsoftware.com/difficult-people-on-software-proj...
Do they? I mean one of the define characteristics is an overconfidence in themselves.
I think PG is trying to justify some kind of assholish behaviour in his past by reframing it as a virtue.
Really, I think the “fierceness” is incidental. Do immensely successful people need to be somewhat competitive? Sure. Do they have to interrupt everyone, lack social awareness, etc? Probably not.
Lots of people, like artists, visionaries, and weirdos who make strides to live a unique life have to act confidently to get to that life yet many also have a lot of self doubt. They just do the brave thing to move ahead with their vision even though it could likely end in failure. For many it does, whether they are remembered posthumously or not.
This is essentially the pathology of a narcissist.
It's almost like a positive form of gaslighting which unfortunately still has negative consequences like you've pointed out.
I wonder how much Bill Gates triggered this write up.
https://twitter.com/paulg/status/1392756490138791937
It appears he sees himself as the shop steward for the Silicon Valley Asshole Union.
I couldn't help but read part of it as a response to/rationalization of the recent pushback he (and other "fierce nerds") have been receiving lately...the former underdogs are now the establishment.
The bad news is that if it's not exercised, your fierceness will turn to bitterness, and you will become an intellectual playground bully: the grumpy sysadmin, the forum troll, the hater, the shooter down of new ideas.
The tech landscape is littered with failed projects that could have been stopped early if the idea person had a sounding board that keep him/her realistic.
Even if someone happens to be exceptional at everything you choose to do and thus have confidence, they can only do so many things. And that means that for every thing they are exceptional at, there are a thousand things where they are unimaginably outclassed by others. MIT was awful for that.
For me personally, the more I learn about my areas of expertise, the more I realize how clueless I am about so many other areas. But if the knowledge of your general cluelessness makes you timid outside of your domain of expertise, it limits how much you can accomplish.
Also, I didn’t really read ‘fierceness’ to mean ‘assholeness’. I’ve been around some people who had ideas that they desperately wanted to see out into the world. They were fiercely passionate and they did have a tendency to interrupt, but they definitely weren’t assholes.
Happens on every PG post.
The veil was lifted. A whole lot of the late Boomer, and Gen X are halfway to the end, realizing it wasn’t magic, and seeing sentiment for their efforts turn on them.
I’ve seen a number of folks, 40-60, meltdown over the last 2-3 years. Most of my 20-30 something acquaintances have weathered it well.
The older class though, has really been hit by reality not being as easily bent to their will given the virus, and sentiment turning against their generation acting as helicopter parents to society.
It applies to a lot of what is happening in society today.
Understanding personality traits and how they relate to the people you're looking for has felt critically important as I work on my startup. It has come up over and over again in hiring (including MANY more inbound, exploratory conversations than I would have expected) and in client management (identifying the best point of contact on their side, but also keeping clients on track and responsive during an onboard).
Is right now. It's orders of magnitude more popular than it has ever been.
“Nerds” being a meaningful category isn’t an idea limited to high-school caste/cliques, especially in tech; one of the reasons software flipped from being predominantly female to predominantly male is the popularization of the idea (IIRC, in the late 1960s or early 1970s) that stereotypical nerds (socially maladapted, querulous, technophilic males) were the optimal workers in the field.
The idea, which best as I know was only grounded in thin popular management quasi-science, has become increasingly less popular in the last few decades.
It is weird, though, that Graham’s affected contrarianism requires him to pretend that fierceness as opposed to diffidence is contrary to the popular stereotype, nerds lacking the skills to manage/moderate conflict manifesting in both conflict avoidance where they are uncomfortable and fierce, intractable, often petty conflict within their comfort zone has always been central to the stereotype.
Fortunately for my generation, we didn't scrimmage or skate with helmets so we don't remember who wronged us. IDK how later generations manage.
With computer science being one of the most popular degrees being held by Gen Z, the "nerd" casting will slowly fade as computer work becomes more and more the norm vs. traditional trades and fields that require higher education.
Average Joe caught wind you could make Lawyer and Doctor money with a Bachelor's or less, makes sense to me.
Most non-nerds think of nerds as:
In fact some nerds are quite fierce. "Fierce nerds" are: [I'll let you draw your own conclusions.]When I think of James Watson, I think of someone who a) stole his major work (the one thing for which he is famous) from a woman without giving credit, and b) has been almost-literally cancelled for being consistently racist, also by his colleague-science-nerds who consistently report that they don't like him.
Not someone that I want to celebrate for being a 'fierce nerd'.
He said nothing about Dre, focusing entirely on saying "He's a good guy, actually", which is the epitome of the strategy taken by men historically to defend other shitty men.
That's not "defending sexism" per se, but it is excusing sexism because of the content of someone's character. "Sure he said sexist things but he is not sexist". It does not pass even the most baseline level of scrutiny.
I think it's also worth saying here that the comparison to Dre is super irrelevant:
1) Musicians may write lyrics in the first person, but the general default for all musical content is it's "fictional", and not representive of their personal views on the matter. It's artistic license with ideas - occasionally problematic. That is not the case with "autobiographies", which is what Antonio's book was purported to be.
2) Dre has taken complete ownership of all of his past indiscretions and apologized for them [2]. Antonio double down.
[1] https://twitter.com/paulg/status/1392756490138791937
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dr._Dre#Violence_against_women
> From the outset, Franklin and Wilkins simply did not get on. Wilkins was quiet and hated arguments; Franklin was forceful and thrived on intellectual debate. Her friend Norma Sutherland recalled: “Her manner was brusque and at times confrontational – she aroused quite a lot of hostility among the people she talked to, and she seemed quite insensitive to this.”
https://www.theguardian.com/science/2015/jun/23/sexism-in-sc...