This happens in any industry where value/status are at a premium.
Finance, Law, VC guys were good too in the beginning but when the value/status change happens it attracts certain kind of guys who are average in talent but excel in demonstrating value and social management of the value/status.
Another change which has happened recently is that the economics of engagement farming have become common place wisdom as already proven effective for everything from selling books, personal brand, career skill/virtue signalling, staying relevant.
Due to this everyone is talking more without restraint and not keeping in their own lane of earned expertise.
Academia is the most relevant, toxic example that I can think of. Be horrible to others on a short term contract (grad students, postdocs) and break them whilst extracting maximum value -- get more papers, more grants written -- more money -- success.
Be nice, think about hard problems for a long period of time, only speak up when you have something positive to contribute -- be labelled an underperforming academic and managed into obscurity.
A great example of this is Peter Higgs, who famously said that he'd be unemployed pretty quickly in the academia of 2013. [0]
The challenge is to distinguish "think about hard problems for a long period of time, only speak up when you have something positive to contribute" from slacking.
I am not arguing for bullshit metrics - I personally love working on things that may or may not pay off on a 10 year+ horizon and wish I could do more of that. But at the same time I've seen enough people coast to accept that most places that either isn't - or won't be seen as - tenable, at least not until/unless you've established a stellar track-record first.
A system that can’t tolerate occasional coasting is a system that can’t tolerate creative bursts. The trick is detecting “I secretly lost hope but my stream of income is very comfortable” when paying a costly salary; which would be mitigated somewhat by switching the tenure benefit of either pay enough to afford, or outright gift of, a single-family home (looks pointedly at Stanford) to a variation of residence halls, where the salary gift can be much less in exchange for benefits due creativity: reserved whiteboards, option for neighboring private rooms (table/bed/bath/shower) and research office, a couple of quiet floors, 120/240 and ether/fiber in every room, presentation rooms with ‘lives next door’ IT support, etc.
Hell, I’d take that IT job. Keeping projectors working for a bunch of impatient creative types in exchange for getting to listen in on their presentations and earn their confidence enough to discuss their research as an interested peer while I repair their computers? Eating good food in a mess hall as I listen to quantum physics in one ear and mathematical networks in the other?! Onto the dream jobs list it goes, impossible as it might be in today’s academia.
Agree with this. Occasional coasting is great. Sometimes you need to recharge. Sometimes it's when you'll get inspiration or find time to do that experiment that feels like leisure because it's fun but ends up paying off massively.
Slack is important.
But so much so that you become a magnet for people who intend to do nothing, or somewhere where people who have fallen into doing nothing aren't noticed and dig their heels in and never leave quickly becomes a problem...
Academia has tenure which basically allows the most capable researchers to "coast" as long as they have previously proven their skills via their tenure-track work. It seems to work quite well.
Way back MBARI was looking for a role that in part included keeping the servers on their research ships going. That was my dream job. Only interview I completely failed because I wanted it so much and froze. Imagine eating Phils when it was still a hole in the wall, chilling in Moss Landing. Decades later I still daydream about that job.
Their open house is next month; if you stopped by in the morning and asked to learn more about their vessel IT and told your story, odds are they’ll have someone with that role ashore from last month’s expedition that could chat with you for an afternoon. They exist because of dedication and are likely to respect it in kind. At worst you’d get to visit MBARI with seasoning, at best live another life-sheaf vicariously through someone else’s experiences :D
Many billionaires are starting up ocean expedition places, surely they'll want IT. Off the top of my head I can think of OceanX (Ray Dalio), Inkfish (Gabe Newell), RevOcean (Kjell Inge Rokke out of Norway). They're all building or already have massive ships with sophisticated IT and research equipment.
We shouldn't really seek to punish "slacking off" though. Because when the opposite of valuable contribution isn't slacking off it becomes unintentional sabotage. It's a lot less noticeable in jobs that don't have immediate consequences for poor performance, but it really stands out in jobs where it immediately matters like construction. In a lot of cases everyone is getting paid the same but talent stands out and some people work 5x faster, but at thing they are good at. If you aren't the guy that lays 10x tiles perfectly flat and straight per minute then just bring the materials, set out a couple tiles and wait around. You will literally see this play out on most construction projects as it looks like 10 people are standing around while 1 person works, but that's because everyone tends to recognize that it's better to do what you are best at or just don't do anything. And the foreman will tell you that too, when all the dirt has to be moved, the shovel guys are just as important as the guy that can separate two nickels with an excavator.
I agree we shouldn't, but until we're at a post scarcity point, we kinda have to at least keep it somewhat in check.
But if you're standing around because there isn't anything positive you can contribute at a given moment, that isn't "slacking off" to me. That isn't the problem.
The problem is if you create situations that effectively encouraged people to seek them out because slacking off won't get noticed.
If an IT department doesn't appear to be slacking off it is doing a poor job. It's much better to pay someone who prevents fires and sits around appearing to not be doing much, than a team constantly running around putting out fires that are costing a tone via lost productivity but look really busy.
I imagine scientific inspiration/insight comes in flashes. The ability to be honest in the job/what is going on/realistic is going to get much better results long term with better mental health, and trust making better internal dynamics.
That's the basic tenet of bureaucracy. A formalized way of doing something when nothing actually needs to be done but in a way that you can notice and respond to things that actually do need doing.
In the end we have to face that systems have failed to replace competent managers. If there isn't a chain of accountability starting at the top that can manage people without extensive justification in metrics and is properly incentivised to keep the organisation healthy, whatever we are left with will be gamed to the detriment of everyone.
And the Xerox Alto had a budget for 10 years. Unthinkable in today's "What did you publish?? Publish or it didn't happen. No R01 for you! (2 year funding)" culture.
I’m not in academia so I might not know what I’m talking about at all, but: “Number if papers published” smells an awful lot like bs industry metrics like number of lines of code written, number of features shipped, number of bugs fixed and so on, that the industry wrongly rewards.
I don’t know what you’d replace “number of papers” with, but it probably should not be so easily quantifiable and gameable.
The actual article was intended as a joke: https://vixra.org/abs/2405.0051 yet fraudulent publishers continue to treat it as a serious article.
It would be nice if publishing a fake paper every now and then could serve like a sinkhole for scammers, but I would be too optimistic or naive. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DNS_sinkhole
And academia will become even more toxic as opportunities shrink along with declining student enrollment. A lot of the third-tier colleges will close entirely.
I feel great about my degree from my third tier college. I learned a lot I didn't expect to, got into a top tier grad school afterwards, and came away with no debt. Maybe me and the millions of other third tier college students are too dumb to know what's good for us, though.
> Be nice, think about hard problems for a long period of time, only speak up when you have something positive to contribute -- be labelled an underperforming academic and managed into obscurity.
I'm in academy and I'm mostly quiet and seek to contribute honestly and I've been managed into obscurity but I'm also quite happy, pay the bills, and more or less enjoy the work. If you want glory you have to deal with bullshit. If you don't want glory, life provides many opportunities to live a modest but productive life.
I'm not tenured and I doubt I will ever be and I'm not even interested in it. I have a support role in academia, get to teach, and am pretty well compensated (though I make 2-3x less than I could in the private sector. But its enough.)
It's the money side that applies pressure there. It's great that you're able to make enough money but a lot of people who aspire to the quiet academic life are stuck in the lower tiers making a pittance.
This is because there are far more people wanting a quiet academic life than there are jobs providing a quiet academic life with a livable wage.
And this is likely to become even more out of balance as college enrollment declines and there are smaller and smaller cohorts of freshmen as fertility continues to decline.
There are pittances and then there are pittances. I make a bit more than a typical adjunct or whatever because I have very specialized skills, but its ok not to make a lot of money.
I mean this is a place where the founder just wrote a blog post about being a billionaire. I'll never be a billionaire, thats for sure.
But I genuinely believe that pursuing that goal is vanity, bad for people mentally and "spiritually" and bad for the world.
To get tenure in STEM, you need to publish 1 to 3 papers a year. If you only publish once per year, you'd be on the low end, so you always have to think about your next paper. You always have to try to work on something that would be publishable within the next 6 months to a year, but preferably within 6 months.
All of the low hanging fruit that could be discovered by self-funded gentlemen scientists has been picked. That doesn't scale to a supercollider or a large RCT. Funding at the whims of rich benefactors is very susceptible to petty politics.
Politics is irreducible from human affairs, privatization doesn't eliminate politics. It relocates it to a different set of actors. That could be a better set, but when it is it's because it's a more local and hands on group of people, not because those people happen not to work for the government. Governments are awkward because they are deep bureaucracies, and deep bureaucracies divorce the decision makers from the impact of their decisions. Weaker feedback leads to worse decision making. Not because there is a magic property of government that makes it uniquely bad. Large corporations, universities, and other deep non-governmental bureaucracies have similar pathologies.
That's something of an exaggeration, they are empowered to do violence and collect taxes and other things that are more problematic when abused, but still, privatization isn't a silver bullet.
>Politics is irreducible from human affairs, privatization doesn't eliminate politics. It relocates it to a different set of actors.
We ideologically privatised the water sector into regional private monopolies in the UK, and anyone who's had experience with the water monopolies knows this is the truth.
I don't know, maybe it's the way I was raised, but to me it just seems like common sense that a privatised monopoly is going to be worse in literally every metric imaginable, than maintaining public ownership - not just with regards to water and/or similar critial-to-life infrastructure, but everything in general. Highway 407, the most expensive toll road on the planet, is a prime reminder to Ontarians why privatisation is objectively bad.
I think you can in the limited sense it supports the idea privatisation doesn't remove politics, just relocates it and often into a less democratically accountable place to boot.
Whenever a person or group has power over another person or group, politics necessarily exists. I don't think this fact can be avoided, as much as advocates of privatisation often argue that it can be.
That sounds like excellent grounds for suspicious but I don't know what you mean. We were talking about Peter Higgs for example. I don't think Peter Higgs could have self funded CERN. I don't think a thousand Peter Higgs could have. Nation state level resources are the table stakes for fundamental research into particle physics, because everything beneath that barrier has already been explored - I don't think that's really controversial.
It's definitely an exaggeration to say that all science on a shoestring budget has already been accomplished, there are new frontiers out there. But once they start gaining momentum, the low hanging fruit will be consumed in due course. Methodically searching a domain works and works from the most tractable end up until it is at the frontier of what is tractable given our current technology/constraints.
I don't really understand the alternative hypothesis. That there's an infinite amount of low hanging fruit? What's this 100% failure rate?
The points your making make sense. I am thinking of it like this: Say there is an elegant argument. It checks out at first. Then you do the unit analysis, and find out the units don't match! But you still don't find the flaw in the original argument; maybe because it's suble in some way. That's where I am: Very smart people have been writing things in the vein of your post here for millenia, and it always seems convincing in the light of contemporary knowledge! Then is proven to be incorrect by major advancements.
Perhaps this will help: Indeed high energy physics is a very high budget project! But there are many areas of the natural sciences which are not high energy physics. This area has been a big deal over the past few decades, and I wonder if it's an over-commitment at the expense of other areas.
You can do many molecular bio lab techniques with a budget of $10k in equipment and reagents, for example. (If used/entry level) I believe there are also many areas in science, chem, and bio which can be done on a theoretical level, or with computers, etc.
Another angle: We are in the earliest steps of neuroscience. Many biology tools and techniques are borrowing something serendipitous we found in nature (CRISPR, TAQ polymerase etc, leveraging living cells' equipment to produce proteins etc). We have no concept of a general chemistry simulator. Molecular dynamics simulations can only work on very small systems for very small timescales, and are based on many approximations, and assumptions which provincialize them. We are very likely missing a big picture of the lower levels of GR/QM. It is very hard for me to agree with "Yep we're good; nothing left to discover here without really expensive equipment!".
Yeah, I agree. It works as an argument for why science can't rely on wealthy benefactors, not for understanding what is possible with a given budget at a given point in time. And biology and chemistry are good counterexamples where capabilities are getting smaller and cheaper.
I would point out that that's on the back of a huge amount of research funded by grants and performed in national labs, but it doesn't impact your argument.
> I don't think Peter Higgs could have self funded CERN. I don't think a thousand Peter Higgs could have
Higgs didn't use the LHC to write the paper which won him the Nobel prize.
Additionally, I think it's worth considering that the availability of the money that built the LHC alleviates the drive to find different solutions.
As they say, "necessity is the mother of invention." I frequently think of the great pyramids and people being baffled on how they would build something of that scale without modern equipment. It's hard to get your mind to come up with novel ideas when it already knows that you'd use cranes, trucks, etc. to do it today.
> Whenever something gets subsidized by the government it inevitably becomes dominated by exploitive petty politics.
When younger I've had job in grocery stores and saw petty politics.
There's nothing particular to being subsidized or not: politics is something humans do, and the pettiness is simply a reflection of the people involved.
Have you worked in a corporation? How sane was that corporation? Did it seem to even value its own survival? (Not corporations in general. In general they seem great. Just curious about the ones you actually did time in.)
"Whenever something gets subsidized, it inevitably becomes dominated by exploitive petty politics."
I think it's just limited resources + the single most natural way for humans to compete for limited resources. This isn't actually an inevitable outcome - just the most likely one.
The "self-funding" regime requires people who are both rich enough to afford to fund science and sharp and driven enough to advance science to exist. That's a high bar. And while there is some correlation between intelligence and wealth, the tails come apart hard. People driven to pursuit wealth above all may not be driven to pursue scientific discovery.
We have plenty of billionaires, and preciously few of them actively pursue pushing the frontiers of science and technology. Even by funding the endeavors - let alone by being in the trenches themselves.
It has crossed my mind that being a scientist is for people who are already financial independent. Same as being an artist. For the rest of us, we need focus on careers where we can make a living. Of course, we can still do science and art as hobbies, but it is rather risky pretending to make a living from it.
> Whenever something gets subsidized by the government it inevitably becomes dominated by exploitive petty politics.
Your US-blend of anti-state brainwashing is showing. There is nothing inherently different in the for-profit status of an organization that prevents the occurrence of "exploitive petty politics". You see those from any organization from homeowners organization to full blown FANGs. I mean, have you ever paid attention to the crap being pushed by the likes of Tesla/SpaceX/Twitter?
Law was good people when? During the era of the 3/5ths compromise? Dredd Scott? Plessy? Lochner v NY? Buck v Bell? Korematsu?
Finance was good people when? When Swiss banks captured all the war spoils of WW2? When they ran Penny Auctions during the Great Depression? When they financed slave ships? When the Medici financed endless war across Europe?
I’m not saying people are all awful, but I don’t think there’s any “before times” where people were better than they have been since then in any ageless profession. Perhaps there’s some degree of variance or even ebb-and-flow patterns.
> Law was good people when? During the era of the 3/5ths compromise? Dredd Scott? Plessy? Lochner v NY? Buck v Bell? Korematsu?
All of those are only things because there were lawyers willing and eager to sue the government over the evils at issue, so your point is much weaker than you think.
That’s actually exactly my point. That all these fields have had good and bad people the entire time and that the ratios probably don’t change all that much.
Artistophanes lampooned the Sophists and lawyers in his Greek comedies. When using words as your literal way to power and change, you will have demagogues.
I think you miss the point, it's not that they were morally good or only in pursuit of lofty goals. But the culture was different and the profession wasn't dominated by monetary opportunity seekers. Look back in historical newspapers and you won't find a single ad for personal injury attorneys.
How do we remove that? Those are the exact kind of people most intelligent people find quite grating in an organization - though because they self-promote so much its difficult to unpack the truth until they have kind of weaseled their way into an entrenched position (normally they are reasonably good at politics).
I'll use the All-in podcast as a perfect example of the type of person described. They have some value in that they have palace intrigue + arguably asymetric access to information.
>Those are the exact kind of people most intelligent people find quite grating in an organization
Most intelligent people contribute to this as well though. Being intelligent doesn't automatically remove egoistical traits, for some it's even supercharged if it results in personal growth within the organization.
public defender lawyers who fought for workers rights and against items like company towns, abolitionists, etc. many good lawyers
finance people who invented life insurance, health insurance, car insurance, friendly societies. as much as we complain about insurance here in the US, life was immeasurably worse when there was none. there was no such thing as state health care or social security in those days
you would be surprised to find that there are many people in finance who never tried to make a quick buck, and are pretty altruistic. this is evidenced by the large amount of family owned banks
tech now going through what finance did in the 1980s, shift to greed and excess
The "good lawyer" is/was a major archetype in modern Western culture. See "The Devil and Daniel Webster", "To Kill a Mockingbird", "Paths of Glory", just to name a few examples.
Totally. I feel the author, we just used to nerds, but now the space is occupied by social media and false narrative that revolves around founders. No ego hurt here of course - but it is hard to imagine Woz or Stallman to ask for a mass surveillance program or ads in AI or pushed AI search in internet search. I believe this article actually went to this realm - tech for tech, having fun…but all we get is maxxxx enshitification.
Yeah, for law I imagine these "nice" beginnings were 2000 years ago at best. If they even existed at all. But all these jobs where talking to other humans is paramount will be dominated by extroverted quacks by default. Same goes for the capital raising college dropout pseudo-tech-bros. They were never nice, they just weren't so engaged in public discourse before, when billion dollar net worths still meant you actually had revenue and not just a vague trendy idea.
Not that far. Lawyers had a great deal of influence in creation of all modern nation-states, human rights, international law and maintenance of the core social contract in the modern society.
Similarly lawyers/bankers were the ones who built in trust in capital, contracts, businesses and protection of investor rights. Delaware c corp is not an outcome of bad guys.
Yes. It might be a general property of all human organizational structures, to degrade over time in terms of intent drift and erosion of public goodwill.
It offers some predictive power if so, like OBAFGKM + luminosity is enough to determine where a star is on its lifecycle. Maybe there's a similar domain that maps some human coordination structure onto a deterministic trajectory from birth to death.
If that were the case, I wouldn't be surprised to see venture capital--as an organizing principle for the tech industry--reaching a later stage of life.
Hey it's the one that Turchin managed to have not named... psychohistory. Fair enough, that's not absolutely about a one-way life-cycle (From not overly much to sometimes less than zero, or its counterpart There and back again).
For VC, go back to the Medicis? Obsession with Roman over Athenian (ie, not even Macedonian or ahem Florentinian, whom, as you know, were blessed-- by themselves-- with nonTrumpian^W (-"anti"-)papist perturbations) can only push them closer to all of extant theory. They don't get to have Germanics explain their early policy failures, eg
Update: for the record, I hold the opinion that libertarianism and liberalism (social, political but not to forget the far less trendy "fiscal") should be right next to each other in parameter space. One may be allowed to define a metric that puts a firewall, or, if you are less amused, an event-horizon _around_ them. I'd suggest "make things people want"
Sure, but Turchin's overproduction of elites doesn't suggest a birth and death cycle right?
It's a system that gets out of balance and needs to adjust over time. He calls the process that moves the system out of whack the "wealth pump". I don't think tech oligarchs are responsible for the wealth pump, they just benefit from it.
Whatever causes organizational structures to decay seems like something more general than that. Or maybe it doesn't exist at all. Or maybe it's just some Nth level effect of entropy itself. Except so far removed from simple physical measurements that it feels intellectually lazy to just label whatever is happening as "entropy" and move on.
Unknown. Fun to think about. It also makes aging a little more interesting, because it creates a framework for me to the world events I live through within--even if it's all bs in the end.
To your other points, I need to clear cache for them overnight, not now.. maybe I can have a response tomorrow
I haven't played with the model myself, it's possible that there's energy getting pumped into the model (unlikely to be the same thing as the wealth pump--- that seems to be internal. This energy pump _could_ take care of entropy but in all likelihood it does not
insisted stories in Astounding Science Fiction had to have. (Also disappointing because it wasn't really finished but filled in with 1980s sequels that revealed more lies behind the lies instead of following the thread through the 1000 year interregnum)
I got into programming and computers due to their intellectual depth, and the exciting opportunities they opened to explore everything from electronics to obscure areas of mathematics... through to theory of mind and the dream of making silicon think.
The combination of endless trend-chasing, software churn, and techbro culture made me hate everything about software, so I jumped ship to biology.
> ... through to theory of mind and the dream of making silicon think.
I think part of your naiveté was thinking this goal was likely to turn out as a net benefit for humanity. Maybe it eventually will. But the current scenario was always the most likely scenario for machines rivaling or surpassing humans in intelligence.
Well, and now with the push towards AI slop and letting agents do work for you, it is even less about creativity and talent. You can't even chase trends in libraries while still being clever about it any longer, you gotta chase more and more braindead ways of getting code generated based on tons and tons of mediocre code found online, gobbled up by big tech without the original creator s' consent.
I think that plenty of 'nerds' would very much disagree about that. Steering agents effectively is something that can take massive amounts of creativity and talent and be quite helpful wrt. the final result. There's no real analogue of this in traditional programming.
It's being the tech lead of a team of junior to mid level developers. You design roughly what the solution should look like, split it into reasonable sized tasks so they don't go off the deep end, advise them on some of the details, then assign them the tasks and let them get on with it, keeping an eye on what they're doing, reviewing their output, and course correcting them when they go wrong.
Just like with a team of humans, you have to use your judgement as to how much supervision they need individually and how large a task you can give them without them going off the rails.
Thats my thought as well, LLM agents put you in the role of a (often micromanaging) tech/team lead of a small team, but the speed and fast feedback loop makes it look different.
Oh it's different alright. Yell at a human employee to tell them they're a fucking loser enough times and at best they'll quit on you. The way some people talk to their LLM is ghastly.
What’s hard to automate about management is getting employees on board, not the concrete tasks. If an AI instructed you to spend 5 minutes a day talking to it about your day, would you do it?
No, thats not what gets automated. My comment was for the parent where IC roles transformed to agent managment roles, which I think just another role for agents to manage - themselves. In other words coordination of other agents, not humans, who are now out of the loop.
Hm, on each interview since ever, every time the inevitable "where do you see yourself in X years" question popped up, I was like, I have no ambition of getting promoted to managers, if that's what you mean. I like coding. I want to keep coding. I can advise juniors if _that's_ what you mean. But I want to code.
And here I am. Coding is becoming management in front of my eyes.
The logical end seems to be another case of pulling up the ladder behind them as they climb up, others be damned. Sadly seems to be a pretty universal human trait, whether intentional or not.
> Finance, Law, VC guys were good too in the beginning but when the value/status change happens it attracts certain kind of guys who are average in talent but excel in demonstrating value and social management of the value/status.
Those career paths were always crooked. We see that going back to my great grandparents time with Black friday of 1929. They fucked around with unrestricted capitalism, and found out. Quite a few killed themselves by throwing themselves off of buildings.
It was only when FDR took office and worked with Congress to make tons of rules keeping the money hoarders from destroying the economy yet again. And it bloody worked. For those of you who say FDR was a communist, absolutely not. He was fighting against a large contingent of the population who were socialists and communists. He did appease some of their demands, bit not many.
FDR led us into our most glorious 20 years, the 1950's to 1960's. Cheap education, cheap homes, plentiful well paying jobs, only needed 1 worker per house. Thats what the boomers remember and want.
And it was systematically dismantled piece by piece.
'VC guys were good too'?!?! I take it you do t remember the 1980's Mergers and Acquisitions crisis? Thats when enough data was available for a company, that mergers, acquisitions, and liquidations coukd make a handful of people scads of money, and destroy the economy to boot.
And i also scarce remember a time when 'Finance' was good. Their slur was beancounters. Something costs $20 but saves $1000? Nope, its -20$. The loss is never analyzed. Every job Ive woeked in has had this perverse logic.
And especially with money, Goodharts Law comes to mind. "When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure".
"Men living in democratic ages have many passions but most of their passions either end in the love of riches or proceed from it." Alexis de Toqueville
I know youre trying be inflammatory, but also accurate.
US culture has always had an out-group that could be sacrificed to the capitalist machine. And even Northern rhetoric woukd have people believe that slavery didnt exist there. Ive been in Boston at the slave docks. Banned in 1830's btw there. And slavery also benefitted the North even if banned.
And after the Civil war, black folks were still 3rd class. Took another 100 years to get the same legal rights. And even now, blacks are underpaid compared to the same jobs by whites.
Most of wealth extraction to black communities is mostly complete. Musk runs datacenters using methane generators in black communities, horrifically polluting them. And the republicans who run the cities/states dont care.
But the USA has effectively run out of people to sacrifice. Now, theyre coming for the middle-income whites. Thats the squeeze we're seeing. And thats not going to end well. Likely will be horrifically violent.
I don’t know why you’d think “being interested in nerdy stuff like computers” would somehow translate into virtuous behavior. They seem like entirely different things to me, in the sense that I wouldn’t expect a writer, or a baker, or a chef to have typical ethical behaviors as a group.
“What happened” was just that some people got rich and powerful and their real personalities showed through. This is not a new thing in any sense at all, from Rockefeller to Bill Gates – both “technology entrepreneurs”.
The OP is mostly talking about image, not reality. What image do tech founders choose to project.
OPs timeline is somewhat off. They posit a golden era for the 1980s-2007 but that’s not right. Tech CEOs have often been hard-charging salespeople and businessmen. Look at early Wired magazines and there was much celebration of random rich guys in suits, as much as the nerdy tech creators. This was the “suit/hacker” dichotomy.
Google was the company that really exploded that paradigm, from their rise to prominence circa 2002 or so, to their IPO and post-IPO halo, around 2005-2007.
Now the nerds didn’t need the suits. They would run their own company.
They were shockingly wealthy and powerful but it was made to seem as a kind of distraction from their true nature. They marketed their own virtue and renunciation, both to the public, and to their own staff. Their business model rejected the previous search engine paradigm (backroom deals and paying for placement) in favor of a new one (complex math to produce the best results). They told the public and their staff the famous “don’t be evil”, and also “focus on the user and all else follows”. There was even a pronouncement that Google would never do such tawdriness as horoscopes.
The theme was that nerdiness was a kind of incorruptibility because a nerd was honest, unconcerned with social status, and unworldly. Let them into your life and they’ll make it all better. Larry Page and Sergey Brin cultivated that image, holding internal and external events where they made themselves look ever nerdier than they actually are, even wearing lab coats.
Now, this didn’t last and was never true. Soon after the IPO, Larry and Sergey bought themselves not just a corporate jet, but a commercial airliner. They justified it as something that was “good for the world” because they could use it to get entire teams of NGO workers on missions of mercy. It actually became a party plane, as far as I know.
I don’t know about everyone else but “nerds” have never had a positive image to the general population.
Nerds as honest or incorruptible? In popular media, from Revenge of the Nerds to The Simpsons to Big Bang Theory, the defining feature of “nerds” is that they have poor social skills and less regard for their fellow humans.
Now people like Jeff Bezos or Elon Musk look like the nerds that now have money and power! Ah ha! “It doesn’t matter what others think of me now! This is revenge for looking down on me before!”
I always interpreted terms geek and nerd as: geek is someone knowledgeable extremely into a some tech or scifi or some such".
Nerd is geek plus low social skills. He may be just awkward and once you get used to it he is actually nice. Or, he may be as asshole. But always weird.
You may be right. Ut that’s just pointless bike-shedding.
harrall is right that to the general populace, nerds/geeks are interchangeable terms for people who prefer to study/play with computers rather than socialise with the rest of us.
That doesn’t necessarily mean they have a better moral compass and will always do the right thing. Those are images that nerds put onto themselves.
But I genuinely find it weird that Musk and CEOs in general are called geeks or nerds. Their whole thing is that they made a choice to spend less time doing actual tech work and a lot more time doing business, managing, dealing, etc. Whole their success is predicated on their ability to make people do what they want. They are not spending time tinkering with computers, they are spending time schmoozing for investment contacts. That is literal opposite of a nerd or a geek.
In the "revenge of the nerds" drama, they would be ultrasocial jocks bullies with cool computer game at home.
People have made "nerdiness" a premium because other nerds view it as passion. The rationale is that if you craft something out of passion, it will somehow be better than. I think it also comes down to the fact that many tech nerds view engineering more as a art than cold engineering, and they view themselves as artists and artisans.
There's also this age-old belief that if you do something out of passion, you're willing to pull more hours, and do whatever it takes to reach your goals.
I also believe that nerds, whatever thing they are obsessed with, make their nerdiness a personality defending trait. Their nerdiness is their personality. And if others aren't as willing to commit, they're simply frauds or wannabes.
Probably one of the most ego-crushing realizations (if you're a nerd) is to discover that there are people out there MUCH more talented and higher performing than what you'll ever be, but with none of the obsession or pride. In other profession that's not really a topic. You can be a top performer in other professions, without a deep interest, clock out 4 daily, and never think about work outside work.
In tech, however, it is too often assumed that you must be consumed by tech. Otherwise you're not really that passionate about it.
> Probably one of the most ego-crushing realizations (if you're a nerd) is to discover that there are people out there MUCH more talented and higher performing than what you'll ever be, but with none of the obsession or pride. In other profession that's not really a topic. You can be a top performer in other professions, without a deep interest, clock out 4 daily, and never think about work outside work.
You could clock out, but I don't think the top performers ever stop thinking about work. Everything you've written here has to be wrong.
Depends on the work. I've worked places (military intel) where you leave work at work, simply because it is impossible to take work with you home. Some of the people I worked with said that was exactly why they chose that line of work - so that they never had to think about work when they came home. Some of those were also top performers.
But I also knew other top performers that basically had geopolitics as their hobby, and would study OSINT (open-source intelligence) when they came home.
And obviously there are many other professions where you can do really well, and don't think a second about work when your day is over. Really depends on how your work is structured!
Some people are naturally talented at things. It’s no different than an average athlete who works extremely hard and an elite athlete who puts in half the work but still outperforms the average.
I think what he meant was that you can take a group of people and train them for a sport. Some of those people (genetically elite athletes) will improve very quickly with minimal training, others can do massive amounts of training and never reach beyond a certain level.
Yes, this is what I mean. It's not that talent doesn't exist, but it's never the case that people on the top of their domain work less hard than others. In fact, it's the opposite. People don't have talent, the talent has them.
I promise you top performers aren't always thinking about work. There is proof in going detached from work problems and doing other things can help produce novel solutions. Same principle as getting a good night's sleep vs cramming the night before a test. Your subconscious does a lot of lifting. Never being able to put down work is just anxiety masked as dedication, in my book.
I agree with you there's a lot of gatekeeping around "passion" for tech. I don't like that framing, but having seen the effect of success and the type of people it has brought into the industry that would never have even considered a few decades ago, I see why people look for supplemental signals, even if the ones they pick are wrong and effectively just shallow tribalism.
However I think this really misses the mark:
> Probably one of the most ego-crushing realizations (if you're a nerd) is to discover that there are people out there MUCH more talented and higher performing than what you'll ever be, but with none of the obsession or pride. In other profession that's not really a topic. You can be a top performer in other professions, without a deep interest, clock out 4 daily, and never think about work outside work.
This is a strawman based around immature, fragile-ego individuals. There are plenty of nerds who realize intelligence, talent, and resourcefulness are completely orthogonal traits from interest in tech. The former is over-represented in online discourse, and the latter is more common in engineering leadership in top companies. You can't really be a top-performer in any large-scale effort without realizing that there are top performers in all domains, and they have insights you don't have. You can't do great things if you don't leave space to learn about your own blind spots, and have a productive dialogue with people who have a completely different mental framework than you.
Nerd-dom has also somehow merged with the world of fantasy and fandom. These are subcultures obsessed with hero journeys, morality tales, escapism, and cartoonish black-and-white ethical systems. I don't expect such people to handle fame and wealth well at all.
> I don't expect such people to handle fame and wealth well at all.
Maybe this is just a human trait in general? Seems every person from any subculture fall victim to "fame and wealth" basically turning them into an evil and greedy person, maybe 1/1000 manages to still stay human in such transition. Or is there any subcultures in particular where most people seem to actually be able to handle "fame and wealth" without the problems that you've observed people from other subcultures?
There's plenty of wealthy folks who aren't especially evil or greedy in any real way, but you wouldn't know that because they don't tend to show off or spend their wealth to begin with, they just shepherd it and grow it carefully. Sometimes over generations, eventually turning it into sustainable 'old money'.
> There's plenty of wealthy folks who aren't especially evil or greedy in any real way, but you wouldn't know that because they don't tend to show off or spend their wealth to begin with
I'm well aware, I'm personally early-retired person with financial independence, and of course I have friends too :) With that said, many of them are greedy, some in big ways others in smaller ways, even if they're generally good people too.
I think it's the combination of "famous + wealthy" that seems to poison people, pick one of them and it doesn't seem so bad, but both together seems like a recipe for disaster.
My first- and second- hand experience with rare counterexamples is that if you meet a Hollywood star in person they will make a good impression; as if they make a bad impression it will make an impression and you will tell your friends.
Lately I’ve been doing a sort of street performance which makes it very likely people will remember me and that again motivates me to be nice.
On the other hand I hear Elon Musk comes across better in person than he does on X and Trump seemed pretty cordial meeting with Zohran Mamdani.
Actors, trained to get to their cognitively resonant freq at a snap. Graham Norton show is complex enough to show off their basic charisma. No need for "reverse-psycho" multidim post-AI inoffensive-charm-offense that has Thiel's approval. Prediction: not going to see Karp appear, guy is too "complicated" (normies: creepy) for an "ivy league" game. with respect to sama. Needs an academic-sociopath drinking game show together with Sarah Payne, Thiel himself, Catherine,David Deutsch etc. it's probably going to be some kind of faux-snobbish LATAM liquor. Fernet con Coca?
Musk is basically a nerd who's ever surprised at what he can get away with, other times over his head in technical matters, and still other times suffering the South African typr of elite arrested development.
Trump recognised that he was facing a equal or better operator. Musk would feel insecure in the same situation. That's nerd. Maybe Trump has a similar training as actors (by actors?), just not to the frequencies normies expect :)
Obsessed fans will talk your ear off about the amazing scene where the superhero had to choose between saving humanity and the magical macguffin as though it were the most sophisticated storytelling ever created. Their frame of reference is very narrow.
I’m sure there are lots of sophisticates on here who enjoy that stuff along with a wider variety of literature. But the ones I know who love it are almost exclusively into it.
It's not just the nerds who enjoy lowbrow culture.
It's almost tautological that most people enjoy middle brow or low brow cultural products. Reality TV shows, soap operas, romance novels, professional wrestling, etc.
Back in those times we made a distinction between nerds and geeks, with geeks really being a sort of subset of nerds that was just interested in the technicals.
I always found attempted distinctions between nerds and geeks to be kinda fake. As long as I've been alive, there's been so much overlap that any distinction is at best a slight and unreliable shade of meaning (e.g. nerd "sounds" a shade more academic/grades focused, but "computer geek" and "computer nerd" are synonyms).
I think maybe a simpler explanation is that tech has been such a story of purportedly humble people becoming wildly successful. Classic rags to riches. Makes it easy to think of nerds as one of the common people, even the rich ones.
This is so true. The obsession with framing things in black and white permeates everything, including unfortunately work in tech. This has always had me keep my distance from “fellow” nerds, despite ostensibly being one.
Bill Gates was always a POS, reading about his behaviour earlier on doesn't make him seem in any way virtuous. The whole 'charity' persona he put on afterwards is just PR.
Gates was (is) definitely a huge nerd. Much more than most of the people here.
He was also the poster boy for tech nerd assholes, until the scale of tech assholery shifted wildly for the worse, and he switched to legacy building mode.
A lot of high-performing nerds are by nature competitive, and really dial the "I'm always correct until proven wrong, and even then I might correct" personality trait up to 11.
Some guys, like Gates, seemed to have extremely opinionated views on what Microsoft products should have been like. That should be a given, as he was the co-founder and CEO, but when you see older footage of him, he has (had?) this "This doesn't make sense to me, so it is shit" way of seeing things. He also seemed to have a typical brutally honest way of reviewing stuff, which can make one come off as very abrasive.
Can't remember where I read it, but there was this psychology paper that studied elite performers, those that were considered to be at the very top of their game (sports, business, art, culinary, etc.) - and toxic/abrasive leadership is just more accepted, because the top performers strive for perfection, no mater the cost. Their subordinates and co-workers just consider it "tough love", instead of abusive behavior.
Persona is very much the outward facing acts and image of a person and could be orthogonal to personality. So to parse the posters comment you need to assume that being a charitable person is more than the act of given money to people in need and can also be a personality trait (or at least constituent virtues that expressing charity indicates can be part of personality).
For instance if there was a homeless person on my street and I figured that giving them $500 would have good odds of having them OD and no longer being on my street... what looks like a charitable act very much isn't. So while it would contribute to a charitable persona it wouldn't reflect personality.
> The whole 'charity' persona he put on afterwards is just PR.
Indeed. Even in the middle ages rich people leaned heavily on charity to whitewash their legacy. I mean, the Catholic church even made this accessible to the masses through indulgence.
It’s related to the trope that non-rich people are more ethical than rich people, or nerds would treat women better than jocks. Confusing lack of opportunity to engage in certain behavior for lack of propensity.
That's an interesting point since in practice, athletic ("jock") women tend to be more common than nerdy women to begin with. Women being into tech or science (stereotypical "nerdy" pursuits) is something that tends to happen more in lower-income countries, which suggests a large self-interest or incentive component, while the opposite is true for athletic women. Perhaps the proper counterpart of the "nerd" among women is engaged in very different, more traditional crafts or intellectual interests which aren't highlighted as "nerdy" by mainstream culture.
I was referring to the "Revenge of the Nerds" trope, which involves nerds who are men. But as to your point, the "nerd" characterization arises not only from the field of interest, but the hyperfocus nature of the pursuit. Hyperfocus behaviors get coded as "nerdy" in men but don't get coded as such in women. For example, my daughter, my wife, and I have the same personality. My hyperfocus interests as a teenager, such as computers, got coded as "nerdy." My daughter, meanwhile, hyperfocuses in the same way on knitting or drawing, but those don't get coded as "nerdy" at all.
Nerd-dom in women is also only judged if we don't adhere to the social requirements of womanhood. You can be as obsessive as you want as long as you're bubbly, socially adept, and take care to look pretty. Our interests aren't considered a necessary component to our identity culturally in the same way men's are.
I think hyper focus on anything is more likely to be classified as "nerdy" today. People will say "I'm a huge guitar nerd" or "I'm a huge gardening nerd" or whatever.
Related (for the non-grey/whitebeards who saw Revenge of the Nerds): Calling someone a nerd used to be fairly demeaning. Today I would say it swings between okay/acceptable and funny/cool, depending on the social circle.
> Perhaps the proper counterpart of the "nerd" among women is engaged in very different, more traditional crafts or intellectual interests which aren't highlighted as "nerdy" by mainstream culture.
This is it.
Nerdy women are in fiber arts, fandom (especially generative fandom), etc. Nerdy women definitely exist, they just tend to take their penchant for nerd/obsessive/systems thinking to more 'appropriately female' areas. (For example, things like indie perfume houses, or my obsession with the mechanics of bra manufacturing and fitting). They also tend to pick apart relationships instead of objects: This is why female fandom is so dominated by tropes and boxes to shove characters into. They like the organization and clean categories just like male nerds do, they just apply them to different domains.
They also usually have a different but related stereotype. We're pathetic shut in cat ladies instead of pimply nerds. It's also not usually considered a problem until we hit ~25 (or whatever age the culture at the time considers a woman ready for motherhood) since a shy, obsessive, escapist woman who doesn't want to engage with people can make a fine wife/gf. Most of the grief is directed at us for not caring about our appearance enough more than anything else.
> I don’t know why you’d think “being interested in nerdy stuff like computers” would somehow translate into virtuous behavior.
Whatever tenuous link there was between the two, only existed as long as computers were not really seen as a path to wealth and power. Because then a smart person with the capability to enter fields traditionally associated with wealth and power choosing computers reflected putting personal curiosity and interest over pursuing wealth and power as the sole objective.
As someone who's been in both engineering school and medical school, I would say you're very wrong. Most doctors aren't in any way virtuous, most are in it for status or money and plenty don't care one bit about humans (some just like the thrill of being in charge of someone their life). There's only a small minority that's extremely virtuous.
This might've been different 50 years ago but it's the number one striver job there is.
Admittedly this is anecdotal, but I've visited many doctors over the years, as a patient, and pretty much all of them treated me well, practiced their jobs professionally and gave me good advice and treatments. I never had a doctor give me advice that turned out to be wrong or ill intentioned.
Again ... maybe it's just my experience. None of these were super life threatening conditions. However I did go under the operating knife at least once; in that case, the operation was successful, healed me of the condition, and never caused any negative side-effects to this day.
Maybe there's a difference in regulation. A lot of the "entrepreneurial" landscape seems unregulated and a kind of Wild West, and I suppose that allows for certain kinds of personalities to succeed by suspect means. The medical field, by contrast, is quite regulated and there are very real risks to malpractice. Thus, I think it attracts better people and allows them to succeed.
Maybe it's similar to how dictators often take over in poor or struggling countries, whereas they find it harder to get a foothold in developed, prosperous countries with strong institutions.
Being non-virtuous doesn't all of a sudden turn them into some kind of evil monster. It's just a job for most of them, one that pays well. Being professional and giving treatment like they should (basically following orders) is the easiest way to avoid problems for doctors.
This all changes when they get more difficult patients. As someone who's been told bogus by doctors, even lightly pushing back many will completely change demeanor, you're no longer some easy money but a risk/annoyance. So your good experiences basically just show doctors in their 'perfect state'.
This isn't the same in every country as you say it's a regulated field and the regulations differ wildly from country to country and so does the view and behaviour of doctors.
But it's good that being virtuous is the "easy path" for them. That's how I want it to be. Why would I want to make it difficult or put impediments in the way of my doctors doing their job well?
My point is that, when the institution supports and encourages virtuous behaviour, the actors within the institution are more likely to practice virtue.
I think this is also largely the point of Plato's Republic.
You're absolutely, completely, 100% correct that the nature of good institutions is to make the virtuous path the easy one, and also that medical norms and practices do a (generally) good job achieving this.
You're also missing your interlocutor's point.
> Why would I want to make it difficult or put impediments in the way of my doctors doing their job well?
Doctors very often don't do a good job with complex cases - like rare conditions, complicated histories, or multiple interacting factors - and some will treat the patient as "difficult" or "an impediment" when they (the doctor) haven't grokked the situation. Very few patients are trying to be an impediment - 99% are trying to help achieve a good outcome, though sometimes their definition of that is misguided or impossible - but it is frustrating to be treated that way by someone who genuinely knows less about your situation than you do. ("Doc, I've taken that test before, and I've tried that medication before - I know it's not in your EMR, but here is a printout - what are you looking for this time that you expect to be different than before?" That conversation doesn't always go well - and even when it does, you're likely to be told "I can't [read: hospital / insurance policy won't permit] try something else until we've done those again" - so you'll end up going back to step A with each new provider.)
In fairness to doctors, many of them work within horrible constraints: it's impossible to get a handle on a complex situation in one twenty minute appointment every six months, and there's little point trying when it's likely the patient will be reassigned to a new provider by next year, anyway. The tension between medical ethics and practice and hospital (let alone, in the US, insurance) ethics and practice is enormous, and (for the individual doctors and patients caught up in it) intractable.
> I've visited many doctors over the years, as a patient, and pretty much all of them treated me well, practiced their jobs professionally and gave me good advice and treatments. I never had a doctor give me advice that turned out to be wrong or ill intentioned.
You are extremely lucky, then.
As a man, I've been gaslit by my doctors about my depression. My PC in my early 20s told me I was just lazy and needed to get a "real" job.
For women, by all accounts, it's much worse. I have not met a woman yet who has not had a story about some doctor treating her like a child, minimizing her pain, etc.
Well I've had more mixed experiences with other kinds of professions. Real estate agents have fibbed to me about the condition of the property, recruitment agents have misrepresented the role, financial advisors have given me sub-optimal advice. There didn't seem to be much in the structure to prevent this. Doctors, nurses and surgeons on the other hand were very careful and thorough, and that included telling me things I didn't want to hear. This makes sense. Medicine is much more serious - people's long-term health and lives are at risk.
I don't deny there's privilege involved in my case. Again, this seems an institutional problem. The medical field as a whole needs more inclusive frameworks to deal with women's health, racial justice, LGBTIQ, ageism and much more. These are issues need to be addressed at an institution and even whole-of-society level. You can't expect each individual to independently solve for them all. At the very least, they need education.
It's hard to claim that the initial generation of Free Software developers in the 1980s and 1990s weren't virtue-minded people. The issue isn't spending one's entire life in front of a computer, it's being outcompeted by people who do the same but with mercenery aims.
Seeing unscrupulous people make it while the principled pay the price can break even the most virtuous person. It causes disappointment, resentment and a sense of injustice that can very easily radicalize into actual sociopathy. Society needs to realign itself if it wants to prevent this. Good people should win and be rewarded.
Creating a society where the unscrupulous are not unduly rewarded has been a long, painstaking slog over millennia that still hasn't been solved. And whatever progress has been made is always fragile as the lessons are so very easy to forget.
I remember when I was in high school knowing a bunch of people who wanted to be doctors (and had good grades). It was strange to me so many people wanted to be doctors so I asked why. The answer was one word: Money. In my adult life I have also heard of multiple people who demand to be called “doctor” in social situations.
“Virtuous” is not a word I’d associate at all with wanting to become a doctor. Veterinarians are a different matter, though.
>“Virtuous” is not a word I’d associate at all with wanting to become a doctor. Veterinarians are a different matter, though.
For those that don't know, veterinarian education is just as rigorous, time consuming, and expensive as human medical education, yet the median annual wage for practicing veterinarians is $125,510.
And the work can be considerably harder. Human doctors tend to specialise on a certain area of a single species, and they can communicate with their patients. Veterinaries are expected to know every part of a huge range of species (though there are specialties as well) and have to be able to diagnose patients who not only can’t explain themselves in our language, they are usually terrified by being in a strange environment with a strange person and thus alter or hide their behaviour. Not to mention having to deal with the owners and regular euthanasias.
It’s an incredibly stressful job with a huge rate of suicide.
That’s also the money in the US, not everywhere, and not every veterinarian goes into it for the rural stuff. I know plenty of veterinarians who have zero interest in that, and being vegan don’t even approve of the industry.
I have a friend who worked in kindergarten taking care of the children. From what they told me, I can tell you, it's no easy lunch for virtuous people with ideals, who want to help and educate the children there. The amount of playing hierarchy games and bickering and bullying and whatnot, that happens when someone wants to improve things for the children... It basically crushed that friend and often made them cry, until they got out of those shit holes named kindergarten.
Doctors with big egos are a huge problem because they don’t listen to patients. I deal with some medical issues and, if a self-absorbed doctor walks into the room, I know my problem isn’t being solved today.
There are Black Mirror episodes for people in all sorts of careers who find themselves with too much power, poorly handled; the show's narratives depend on the fact that the technology is the axe but not the executioner.
People succumbing to parental pressure become doctors.
A lot of folk go into teaching because there's high demand for workers & the academic path is relatively accessible.
You're probably mostly right about social workers, but it's a vague term & there's at least some categories of social worker that fill the same appeal as teaching.
Virtuosity is so hard to define, I'd say there's some virtue in almost every career direction but less in some than others. Certainly in my experience tech entrepreneurship has some of the lowest levels I've encountered.
For virtuous people, look at jobs where the average person in the field could get a much better job doing something else. That’s not the case for your average teacher, who tend to be on the low end of the scale of college educated workers. Public defenders are a good example of the opposite. These are generally lawyers who have the credentials to make a lot more money in private practice.
as a former teacher, a former receiver of social services, and someone who makes great money helping teams move bits efficiently, I can say most assuredly that most teachers or social workers are regular, non-expert people. My former teaching colleague thought the screen of his monitor was watching him. And my last social worker had "personal struggles balancing his faith's view on evolution and what the science says." The classic computer nerd who "can't human," but my job is aligning hundreds of people to work on the same software. Education and social work is divorced from the "real world" in many ways, not unlike how those stuck on a screen are divorced from the "real world."
Bill Gates is a great counterexample to the article's premise. Always clearly a nerd, yet led a company that no one loved and many people hated for its strategy of embrace, extend, extinguish.
Post-CEO, he had completely refurbished his image via philanthropy, only to throw it away with the Epstein stuff.
Your perception of him is the result of a very carefully crafted image and PR management going back decades to the 80's. His behaviour and controversies with Microsoft have been well known since the 90's (Melinda Gates relationship, anti-trust probe etc.) and even with more recent allegations in 2019.
Link: https://www.wsj.com/business/microsoft-directors-decided-bil...
Grandpa Gates was PR bullshit - he was always a notorious asshole.
It really demonstrates the nature of people. Richest guy on the planet for quite awhile, but can’t manage his relationships and spends his time chasing skirts. To the point where he’s a target for Epstein the apex predator.
In the Microsoft cinematic universe, Ballmer is the foil.
Gates has done some good with his money but a lot of stuff about him reads like pure PR to me.
Its like hearing about how Ford supposedly increased wages so people could buy cars, but when you actually look at the details that was just the PR spin to having hired, worked to injury, then fired so many people that large wages were the only way to keep enough employees to run the factories by convincing people in other states to come blindly move in under the promise of money.
Most every "good" story about him outside of donating money later on ends up with not so great details and reality.
>Most every "good" story about him outside of donating money later on ends up with not so great details and reality.
It's pretty well known he was a huge antisemite.
Then again, from what I understand, antisemitism was pretty popular in the US in the early 20th century. It was only after WWII that it became more of a taboo.
2) I would challenge all the commenters claiming his philanthropic work is "falsified" or "just PR" or "mostly self-serving" to prove it, keeping in mind there are ample public records all over the place.
You can dislike a person, especially Gates who was famously a huge jerk, but really... let's stick to facts please.
> I don’t know why you’d think “being interested in nerdy stuff like computers” would somehow translate into virtuous behavior.
Because doing something you're genuinely interested is virtuous relative to doing something for personal/reputational gain or due to other social pressures.
> some people got rich and powerful and their real personalities showed through
This could not be more deluded - the negative equivalent of the hustle culture myth: anyone can become a selfish asshole if they work hard enough. The idea that every person who's ever taken an academic interest in tech is just another William Gates III waiting to happen is a very weird way of looking at nerd culture.
I think nerd -> believes in science.
Science -> requires honesty, curiousity, humility, persistence (i.e. admit you are wrong, accept you losses).
Generally I'm not sure you'd be considered a nerd if you weren't too honest for your own good. Not that this covers all types of virtuous behavior - there do exist nasty scientists. (And there is some level of fraud/dishonesty in academia, too).
I wonder how personality forming it is, being a curious kid growing up hacking on computers. If you don't get what you expected, it's almost never the computer's fault - it means you did it wrong, and need to reconsider. There's no excuses and no dumping responsibility on anyone or anything else.
I have the feeling it probably teaches you something, or at least it should. Something not too unlike epistemic humility, maybe.
As a kid, that's what I loved about computers. They were fair in ways society wasn't. The rules were clear, and breaking the rules resulted in badness. Unlike grade school, for example, where the rules were always changing and badness would just occur randomly and capriciously.
The mistake comes with the very first arrow. You don't have to believe in "science" to be a nerd. You have to be passionate about technology. And that's a very different thing.
Most of the scientists I know can spend years of their life pursuing a hypothesis that turns out to be wrong, shrug their shoulders, and dive back into it. Technologists are all about output. If it's not outputting, you have to give up and seek a different avenue. Scientists (except the very famous and successful ones) tend to be humble and curious. Technologists less so.
Both terms are overloaded, because neither has been used with any consistency. Like the long forgotten trekkie/trekker divide, it was a way for some people to feel superior to other people, but the lines were never clear.
Musk is a fascinating example. Incredibly hard working, visionary, detail oriented. Without him we'd probably not have had reusable rockets for another generation or more. With Tesla he also accelerated electric car adoption. He was also brutally honest about their chances of success, when pitching SpaceX to the other initial investors he gave it a 10% chance of success. He was little more confident about Tesla, saying the main objective was to prove the concept and push adoption across the industry. Yes he's famous for giving absurdly short time scales for advances like "full self driving", and this is reckless and irresponsible, but I think he genuinely believes what he says at the time.
Yet he's also a sociopathic fascist arsehole. It turns out these traits are not all on the same axis.
Sure, but I've no problem with that. I think there is a role for government helping get new technologies and industries off the ground. It can make sense to offer tax breaks to get new future sources of tax revenue going for example. I'm not a fan of intrusive industrial policy in general, but that's a practical and not an ideological objection. It can make sense to meet some strategic goals.
The government also legitimately needs space launch capacity, they're a customer for that. Look at how commercial companies invest in the buildout of supplier infrastructure, or offer framework contracts to help suppliers to make necessary investments.
They seem like entirely different things to me, in the sense that I wouldn’t expect a writer, or a baker, or a chef to have typical ethical behaviors as a group.
Shouldn't you? Bakers and chefs aren't just "interested in nerdy stuff like chemical reactions," they make food for people. Writers have ethical obligations, both individually and as a group?
I don’t know why you’d think “being interested in nerdy stuff like computers” would somehow translate into virtuous behavior.
The cultural perception of nerds being relentlessly bullied for the crime of having imaginations/GPAs/acne, I think, presented a culturally sympathetic view to the extent that the latent bro-ism caught some off guard, like we'd expect them to emerge from sweet gentle Stranger-Things style basement nerds to adulthoods as, say, Randall Munroe or something
>> I don’t know why you’d think “being interested in nerdy stuff like computers” would somehow translate into virtuous behavior.
> The cultural perception of nerds being relentlessly bullied for the crime of having imaginations/GPAs/acne, I think, presented a culturally sympathetic view to the extent that the latent bro-ism caught some off guard, like we'd expect them to emerge from sweet gentle Stranger-Things style basement nerds to adulthoods as, say, Randall Munroe or something
To emphasize that point, I think the assumption was that being bullied and ostracized would lead nerds to have greater empathy and be nice people, because they experienced how bad it is when people aren't nice.
But I think the reality, obvious in hindsight, is that was a totally unreasonable assumption. IIRC, the experience of abuse can actually create future abusers. With geeks/nerds, I think a fairly common outcome as been a combination of arrogance with a kind of social ineptness/unawareness that is not nice.
Yeah, exactly, "man hands on inhumanity to man" and all that. I have to admit I was a little surprised when I saw it firsthand, myself, so it's not like I was any less naive about it.
Contrast matters. Being awake to bigotry and pseudoscience also predates the tech industry, TBF, but eugenics, "scientific" racism, etc. used to be a lot more common. Don't look down on people for expecting better now, even from people who apparently have unresolved issues about what happened in South Africa.
I don't think being nerdy makes someone virtuous, that's true. However, I think SV of 20-40 years ago had a distinct culture (best symbolized by Woz) that's basically been lost to the MBA-types and the hustle culture bros. Sometimes they wear it around like a creepy skin suit but it comes across as deeply inauthentic.
This is a common refrain but my point is that it's nonsense. Most of the people running top companies do not have MBAs and are technical, aka nerds. This trope is a false narrative designed to portray one group as pure, ethical people that were corrupted from outside.
You listen to the Radio Channel you picked. I understand the complaint, though it's like a complain that nerds featured in Cosmopolitan aren't as nerdy as they were.
Musk for me was never a nerd. Many "founders" aren't nerds for me. In the end, I wouldn't classify anyone who is "money" first as a nerd - to me they are businessmen (and businesswomen) in their core.
Want to see "the lost nerds"? Here, on HN there are many very high-profile nerds. People who built the internet and the most popular tools exchanging insight and jokes over posts. Many founders who aren't loud, who aren't about PR.
So - nothing happened. Author looks for them in wrong places.
I was about to make this point, but with some clarifications:
A nerd, when I was growing up, had to have a "thing", and that thing had to be unfashionable. Being a nerd was not a good thing. You loved your subject despite the stigma. (although later on people loved a subject because of the stigma)
There was a difference between a $subject nerd, and an arsehole/weirdo. To be liked, you needed to hide the nerd streak and learn to interact with people using commonly accepted rules. This is partly why the internet flourished in the 90s because you could be surrounded by other nerds and talk nerd shit.
The downside is that a lot of people felt marginalised, but you were in touch with the "normies", so still had to act like a normal high functioning member of society.
Ruthless buisness types were seen as that (at least in the UK) out to make money, and fuck you if you got in the way.
The problem for us now is, ruthless business types now own all the media, and want to shape the world in their image.
"Nerd" means whatever you want it to mean. I've known people who called themselves nerds because they played d&d and smoked tons of weed. I've known other people who were really focused on technical stuff. I'm sure both types think they're smarter than everyone else, just like most people do.
There were people who told me 15 years ago that I’m not like others who go to software engineering universities. Because although I’m a nerd, I can speak about non nerdy things, and I don’t speak about them in non nerd environments. This happened to me many-many times. They were even surprised that I’m in this field.
Not anymore. I haven’t heard this for a while now, and I didn’t change regarding this. But people behave very differently when I say “software developer” recently. Now they think immediately, that I’m rich. Not that I’m a freak nerd. They are not surprised anymore at all.
I experienced this very obviously with something else too. I born in Hungary, but I moved to Austria. There is a huge difference between how people behave with me if I say that I’m from Hungary, than if I say that I’m from Austria when I travel. They immediately recommend me things which are more expensive. The beaches, restaurants, pubs for rich tourists. Not when I say Hungary. That’s the only time when they say to me that something is expensive.
I state openly, that if somebody says that the public perception didn’t change and also the people in this field didn’t change to be more money focused, then those people lying, probably even to themselves. The current discussions about AI make this obvious. Most developers, engineers, founders are fine to ship shit on every single level, if they get the same money for it. They became “developers” only for the money.
I've definitely met some finance folks who are nerds. Had a very fun conversation with one where we concluded that Culver's Scoopie Tokens are dairy forwards.
I actually agree with the author's evaluation, but the irony is that their post is the first time I heard about this Founders Mafia thing. They're right that last thing we need is more people looking past the sins of the Thiels and Altmans of the world. Maybe this kind of thing works within 100 miles of the Pacific coast. But as a non-SV native still getting used to the culture around here, I see zero risk of this kind of content sowing any fondness for tech CEOs outside of the most tech-brainwormed regions of the world.
Very much similar thoughts. The examples provided are not nerds, except a few. It is just tech is a lucrative path to make money and it attracts a variety of “interesting” personalities, specifically those that can captivate and persuade masses to invest in them. By all means tech is just a means to an end to such founders. A nerd is someone who is interested in tech for the sake of it, because it is beautiful, not because it will aid drones in killing targets more efficiently and not because it will land a great contract.
Yup, the nerds are still here. They're people like Jeff Geerling, Stefan Hermann, Andreas Spiess, Jan Roetz and many more. They're very visible if you end up on the 'right' side of the algorithm, it's a much more positive side of the internet in general IMHO.
But it's easy to slide back into the fear mongering, engagement bait side if you don't pay really close attention to how you're feeding the algorithm.
I'd say, you are looking at this from the angle of a nerd. For you Elon or Sam are not (primarily) nerds because you know nerdier nerds (what you called very high-profile nerds).
But for the general public Elon and Sam are very much the definition of a nerd. They have never heard of any of the high-profile nerds you know.
And that's exactly the argument of the article IMO, that the famous nerds went from well-meaning eccentrics to evil greedy overlords.
> Musk for me was never a nerd. Many "founders" aren't nerds for me. In the end, I wouldn't classify anyone who is "money" first as a nerd - to me they are businessmen (and businesswomen) in their core.
People can fall into multiple categories at the same time. A lot of them aren't mutually exclusive.
IMHO Musk can be put into both the nerd/geek bucket and the asshole businessman bucket at the same time.
> Musk for me was never a nerd. Many "founders" aren't nerds for me.
It's pretty hard to describe Elon Musk's ventures in space exploration, robots and human-like AI as anything other than prototypical, "core" nerd culture. Especially when it turns out that the very word 'Elon' shows up in obscure magazine excerpts from the 1950s as the leader of a science-fictional Martian government, and apparently this somehow plays a part into why Musk gets named Elon.
> It's pretty hard to describe Elon Musk's ventures in space exploration, robots and human-like AI as anything other than prototypical, "core" nerd culture.
To me (and I realise this might not be a broadly accepted definition) a nerd does things for the passion and without regard for the money. Woz was a nerd, Jobs was not.
Musk has always been about monetising these things. Not to discount that he's interested in them, but for me personally he's not a true nerd. He's a businessman with nerdy interests.
A nerd that perennially wrong about their passion pits (e.g. when self driving is coming, the viability of his tunnel projects) would be mortally embarrassed about being so publicly wrong. Musk doesn't care.
Nerds used to have a internet to discuss tech in, you were allowed to make an argument based on logic and reasoning.
Then the ideologues and political commissars showed up, giving zero shit about tech or logical reasoning, this pulled the discourse down to the lowest common denominator and the rest is history.
Why should I take the moral high ground and listen to an argument I dislike if I'm not offered the same courtesy.
> you were allowed to make an argument based on logic and reasoning.
Old man here, No this was never the case. Nerds were always hysterical and used the ban hammer frequently. the difference between then and now is that there were more distinct islands of nerdary you could escape to, and they wouldn't blend together.
also they generally had a "no outside opinions" rule that meant that forums were single subject. This allowed you to socialise with degenerates like emacs users in different contexts without descending into flame wars (mostly...)
Nerds were often seen as poorly social since "logic and reasoning" would go against socially accepted norms.
This where the fedora tipping meme comes from: "everybody understands that religion is not literal, but we have to all accept the lie for social cohesion".
But "nerds" would be the ones willing to take the ridicule and ostracism because truth would be more important than conformity.
Reddit was the place to be for nerds and spread like a pandemic.
However, karma points turned this on its head since you have a mechanism to enforce conformity in non-conformity that was the basis for "nerd communities".
Nerds hobbies that would be the gateway are gated behind such platforms that enforce a social credit system in a totalitarian way.
The would have been nerds are thus mostly integrated into the redittor archetype that is so fundamentally opposed to the nerd archetype; a contorted version of itself trying to fit through distorting mirrors.
I'm not disagreeing with you; but why did the nerds not destroy the ideologues with logic and reasoning if not for the horizontal pressure of other "nerds" subverting the concept?
> I'm not disagreeing with you; but why did the nerds not destroy the ideologues with logic and reasoning if not for the horizontal pressure of other "nerds" subverting the concept?
Why should I spend my energy to discuss with someone who doesn't want to listen, and not rather build something I like or learn something I wonder about, or converse with the people I care about?
Life is too short to talk with walls disguised as humans. Talking with a wall, the ocean or oneself is more productive than doing unproductive self-torture.
>>Why should I spend my energy to discuss with someone who doesn't want to listen
One of the reasons why I stopped going on Facebook, even though a lot of communities I care about have moved there. I wrote a long comment about someone's suggestion about car maintenance, only to get a reply "I didn't come here to discuss this, if you don't like what I said then go somewhere else". Like, WHY EVEN BE IN A PUBLIC FORUM THEN. But I feel like that's just me and my early internet sensibilities. Nowadays people want to post something, get some likes, and not be challenged. Even a mild disagreement is met with immediate aggression a lot of the time, because people are just not used to talking on the internet at all(imho).
> Nerds were often seen as poorly social since "logic and reasoning" would go against socially accepted norms. This where the fedora tipping meme comes from: "everybody understands that religion is not literal, but we have to all accept the lie for social cohesion". But "nerds" would be the ones willing to take the ridicule and ostracism because truth would be more important than conformity.
I don't think nerds are/were seen as poorly social because logic and reasoning go against social norms. I'll bite on the religion focus. If everyone understands religion is not literal, being smirk about taking it literally is not logical or reasoning or making anyone look smarter. It just makes you look like a dork. Subtext and not being meant to read literally are a core part of social interaction.
I see the same in school, when some overly literal students argue about the interpretation of a book they are assigned to read. "the author can't possible mean that" or "show me where it says that on the page" is a common lazy criticism with little value. Some people are just like that, and (warning: personal observation) nerds tend to be a bit more like that. But the arguments I hear from that corner against religion are seldom great, they are just some minor gotchas.
I don't want to get into the whole religion debate, and I'll admit that there are also groups of Christians that take the bible very literally, as I'm sure there are for other religions as well. From what I can see, these don't make up the canon of religion, and I kind of believe they're mostly concentrated in North America, but that might be my skewed perspective.
It's quite sad that social mechanics in our society don't work well for some people, but that doesn't mean they don't exist and it doesn't make everyone except nerds "illogical".
If "everyone understands religion is not literal", why do so many people take it literally? You could just as sensibly flip the argument and argue that the garden-variety 'nerdy' atheist is talking literally about atheism but really doing negative theology ("your idea of God is totally wrong and does not exist, because the true God is necessarily inaccessible to human reason") but that would be silly and make you look like a dork too.
As for the why, I don't have an answer, but I thought I addressed it with this:
> I'll admit that there are also groups of Christians that take the bible very literally, as I'm sure there are for other religions as well. From what I can see, these don't make up the canon of religion, and I kind of believe they're mostly concentrated in North America, but that might be my skewed perspective.
There will always be people falling off on one side of the spectrum or the other. Personally, I haven't met anyone who takes the bible literally, and I know a _lot_ of Christians, including pastors and priests. Some people simply just believe that there is something more, others have a feeling that you can sense that, some just need this believe to feel safe, etc. I guess it depends on where you're from, I believe biblicism is more common in North America, or at least more visible.
Additionally, the "everyone understands religion is not literal" was citing my parent. Usually, "everyone" is kind of understood not to mean "exactly 100%". It's a device to communicate intent.
> You could just as sensibly flip the argument and argue that the garden-variety 'nerdy' atheist is talking literally about atheism but really doing negative theology ("your idea of God is totally wrong and does not exist, because the true God is necessarily inaccessible to human reason") but that would be silly and make you look like a dork too.
Yeah, it'd make you look like a dork because it'd be obviously incorrect. The intentions of your garden-variety nerd talking about atheism are pretty clear, and it's not to make some greater theological point. When you talk to people who talk down on religion and believers, it's usually really easy to tell whether it's because only they themselves understand the True Intention Of God or whether they just think Christians are stupid and if you're smart you have to be an atheist. Said garden-variety nerd is the latter.
> There will always be people falling off on one side of the spectrum or the other. Personally, I haven't met anyone who takes the bible literally, and I know a _lot_ of Christians, including pastors and priests.
I grew up, and still live, in a conservative state and a conservative family. That hasn't been my experience at all: I know a lot of people for whom the bible is a literal truth.
That's fair. Experiences have a great influence on opinions you form, and everyone's experience is different. You live in a different part of the world than I do and know different people. I even conceded that in North America, the amount of people that take the bible literally might be higher or at least more visible than other parts of the world, and I'm going to assume you are from the USA because you said "state".
According to one survey I found[0], around ~20% of Americans (25% of Christian adults) say the bible is the literal word of god. Not exactly a huge amount of people, but a very considerable number nonetheless. I didn't find any numbers for other regions, but maybe it would help to see number of followers by denomination and try to derive some data from that. The official stance of the Catholic Church e.g. is that the bible should not be taken literally. Most protestants in Europe also don't practice much fundamentalism, but there are an estimated 25 million Evangelicals in Europe, around 2.5% to 3% of the population. There's probably more people preaching biblicism than only fundamental evangelicals, but I just wanted to look up two examples real quick.
> The intentions of your garden-variety nerd talking about atheism are pretty clear, and it's not to make some greater theological point.
I agree about the underlying intentions, but I was talking about the typical, literal arguments for garden-variety 'rational' atheism. The point that these arguments tend to map quite cleanly to negative theology would usually be considered a pretty strong one as a matter of philosophy. Of course, this can only be said to further highlight the difference in intentions.
Yeah, but only if you take the arguments fully out of context and only if you view a subset of the arguments.
First, the argument of your garden-variety nerd atheist don't always map so cleanly to negative theology. I've seen plenty of arguments in the realm of "The bible contradicts itself, so you're stupid if you believe in it. Checkmate", etc. You get the idea. Just some of the arguments map well to negative theology.
Secondly, the context is missing. In my original comment, I was talking about how being very literal is seen as poor social adaptation because subtext, inaccuracies etc are part of social communication. Pretending to not understand that, or not understanding that, does not make one a logical being, it just makes you look like a dork.
Your argument is applying a very literal take of the hypothetical garden variety atheist we've brewed up. This is the same as taking the bible very literal and then calling people stupid when they believe in it. It's not arguing the main point, but picking out something that's easy to criticize and building your argument around it. My point is that taking something very literal is exactly a sign of poor social adaptation when there is a relatively big agreement on not taking it literally by society.
Now, your garden-variety nerd's arguments hold up very well against people who actually do take the bible literally, but I'm getting to a point where I want to get off the religion debate, because that's not really what I wanted to point out originally.
Circling back to my original: Logic and reasoning is not against social norms. Being a dork who pretends to not understand or actually doesn't understand social norms just to make a point is. Being hurtful just to feel superior is against social norms. Pretending you're interested in "truth" and that's why you are not conforming to social norms is also a pretty stupid take, imo. Yeah, social norms aren't always great, and they certainly don't work for everyone and a lot of people are left out being the "weird" ones, it sucks. But the reason these people are the "weird" ones is not because they're on a noble crusade for truth and logic.
I'm pointing this out even though you're not the original commenter I was responding to because we kind of got derailed into the details of this thing that was more meant as an example than really the main argument.
> there is a relatively big agreement on not taking it literally by society.
I think you're seeing a relatively big agreement where there really isn't one. It's not just the U.S. or biblical literalism, it's also about most people not really being familiar with the notion that even the strangest religious doctrines might be "true in a non-literal (but still worthwhile!) sense". From that POV, the garden variety atheist's argument is raising that very point. You don't have to take the atheism literally to understand that it's hard to believe everything about religion in a literal sense.
> why did the nerds not destroy the ideologues with logic and reasoning
Because everyone has bias and ego and nobody has perfectly logical reasoning.
Why brag about how smart you are to people who’ll just think you’re arrogant and annoying? Why tell someone their religion isn’t real if they’ll just think you’re a heretic, or “best case” despair they’ve been living a lie? You don’t study (especially in lieu of fitness) unless you have motivation which is ultimately based on emotion. I believe it’s usually the same ego that makes alpha men, just that these nerds (usually men) are too weak to be jocks.
Nerds have always had their own social norms, with illogical conformity, groupthink, status signaling, gatekeeping, etc.
I feel that too many people are confusing arguments they agree with with logical arguments. Most of people, when they claim that something is rational or logical, actually mean that it's a position that they agree with.
I have no reason to believe that back in the day when internet was only for nerds the situation was different.
> I have no reason to believe that back in the day when internet was only for nerds the situation was different.
Strong disagree. Having lived those times, it really really was different, and there are a bunch of reasons for it.
1. First, back then (90s, early 00s) there was very little financial incentive to participate in discussions. BBSs, IRC, forums etc. were mostly non commercial. People joined without any expectation of making a profit, just for "the fun" of it. And for something new, interesting, evolving. Way less perversion of topics for monetary gain.
2. People back then made a clear separation between being online and offline. We literally had the term IRL coined. So a lot of discussions were "in abstract" and much less prone to be taken literally or seriously. A lot less identity / ideology stuff as well. Having a clear separation made it easier to not confuse your real world self with your online persona. Having an idea debated wasn't about you / your identity.
3. Politics was much less divisive back then. There was political debate, but again a bit more "abstract" and theoretical. I'd say the moment when this changed was 2008s US presidential campaign. Until then the Internet was seen as "not important". It has changed a lot since then.
4. Entry barrier. This might sound elitist or disparaging, but it really was a thing back then. The people online were mostly tech inclined, or curious enough to learn. It was much more educational, and (linked to point 1 above) everyone wanted to learn the cool new thing, without any monetary incentives. Much more sharing of pure knowledge, helping out and so on. It of course changed over time, but the early days were really something beautiful. I have very fond memories.
> 3. Politics was much less divisive back then. There was political debate, but again a bit more "abstract" and theoretical. I'd say the moment when this changed was 2008s US presidential campaign.
At least as one of the "first ones" from the AOL days (too young for the Eternal September, old enough to have gotten online too early) - most of "us" were young and didn't care about News. We were more interested in Mr. Burns getting shot and whatever internal drama was happening in our online fan clubs. I remember 9/11 happening, but instead of switching websites I continued to read online webcomics and my "Learn VB in 24 Hours" book.
A lot of us were just younger then and our social groups were more focused on other things. I am in an indie game Discord right now that's clearly not my demographic anymore. I don't interact, I'm just there for game updates. But, those kids are making their own memories right now. I think as adults, we just sort of ~forgot~.
The internet was different, for sure. But the post you are responding to just stated that they don't really believe arguments were rational and logical back then. I don't think any of your points refutes that.
It was different in several ways, one was far fewer people enforcing norms or doing marketing in those forums, far less moderation and tone policing, and far more tolerance (even rejoicing) into getting into deep technical argumentation and "well, actually" debate. No "influencing" and mere marketable "content" creation either.
Not to mention for a good while, FOSS was a big nerd holy grail (informing many discussions and forums, away from corporate solutions shilling and careerism), and a big goal of every tech nerd (unlike after about 2010).
Also nerd culture was by nerds, for nerds, not dilluted and "championed" by every mainstream hipster.
Remember when even Comicon was something mostly nerds, the kind "normie" people used to point and laugh at, went, and sci-fi/superhero movies excited the same small demographic niche?
This feels like maybe even the majority of the problem.
In general corporate social media favors memetic content and disfavors "inconvenient" content. Inconvenient meaning things that cause non-trivial numbers of users to mash the thumbs down or "report content" button. The premise of that is supposed to be that people are reporting spam and trolling etc.
The problem naturally being that people will also use the platform's "make it go away" mechanism to penalize anyone who tells them things they don't want to hear. And then the sort of people who insist on telling the technical truth even when it's inconsistent with the political lie tend to get shadow banned into irrelevance, which leaves what in everyone's feed instead?
That’s a ZIRP problem. You didn’t have massive sprawl communities until the investment was there to build systems to keep Nazis and trolls away.
Slashdot really highlighted this for me - if you followed the site and the core forum of founders, dealing with moderation was horrible. The writing of CmdrTaco over the years really made it sound like it just made him miserable.
Your interpretation of behaviour is slightly off. Nerds use discussion to explore what they don't understand. There is no value in discussing something you already know everything about. What could you learn from that? If someone claims that something is rational or logical, they are seeking feedback to see if others can poke holes in where it is not rational/logical. Think something akin to Cunningham's Law.
> Most of people, when they claim that something is rational or logical, actually mean that it's a position that they agree with
I'd claim a relevant axis is argument as deduction (common in mathematics) vs argument as rhetoric/persuasion (common in politics).
It's not that the former type is necessarily rational. "All birds have wings, planes have wings, therefore planes are birds" is the former type of argument and fallacious, whereas "are you really comparing birds to planes?" is the latter type.
I feel the former can allow deeper exploration of some topic, but sometimes involves things like playing devil's advocate for stances outside of social norms - and requires others to engage at that level rather than taking the rhetoric path of shaming you for even considering it.
I remember Usenet in the 90s being 50% interesting conversations mostly about niche topics and 50% randomly devolving into flame wars in larger communities.
Even "Eternal September" as a concept was something from around 1993/1994 right?
Same for the 2000s era online-bulletin-board. I often go to thegearpage.net and am appalled at the amount of shilling, dismissals and disrespect, but then I remember that in the 2000s the main guitar forum was Harmony Central, which was mostly kids calling other kids moms names.
EDIT: But coldtea makes a good point about some (IMO) more recent changes: tone-policing, excessive marketing. There's IMO also a different attitude towards curiosity today.
One thing I do miss from the early internet was less anonymity being the norm on Usenet/forums/etc. Discussions tend to stay more civil when both parties know there's a "real" person on the other end.
Otherwise, my memory of early 90s internet supports exactly your conclusion. There may have been better opportunities for small discussions, but big ones devolved the same way they do today.
For a counterpoint, you only need to look at the cancer that is Facebook comments from people on their own name and face and a lot of bio attached. It's not the anonymity. At least not by itself.
I am remembering the same Internet. I got into lots of flame wars on comp.software-eng and before that on Compuserve and various FIDO boards.
It was never a very placid or friendly place. There was more tolerance for vigorous debate than there is now. The debate didn’t change many minds, I suppose.
I think there is a difference when you can assume that the other person probably isn't a complete idiot. Compare Reddit's technical subs and HN and there is a vast difference in general civility. Non-nerds look at this site's CSS and their mental parsing breaks entirely, so that filtering still exists.
I have found those who I would consider nerds to be far from logical or rational. They are some of the most fervent people about the things they care about, which can make them very illogical and irrational.
True, but that's not really a bad thing. It feels like the passion has been watered down, with less and less space for being yourself, with the need to self-censor for the sake of advertisers', with hopes of monetization of every interaction ruining everything.
But besides bots, there's also "low value" comments, the "who's listening in 2026" type comments. Undiscernable from a bot, adds no value, can be omitted and you wouldn't miss anything.
And the worst part is that LLMs can generate more interesting comments than a large chunk of online people can.
> Nerds used to have a internet to discuss tech in, you were allowed to make an argument based on logic and reasoning.
I don't remember this internet. Ever since I got my first modem, I remember the kinds of vitriolic posts that led to the publication of IEN 137 (On Holy Wars and a Plea for Peace).
Whether it was endianness or RISC vs CISC or ZModem vs Kermit or Microsoft or Kirk vs Picard or Kimagure Orange Road, flame wars erupted everywhere. The smaller the stakes, the bigger the war.
> Then the ideologues and political commissars showed up
I think you're seeing the world through rose-tinted glasses. In some FLOSS circles the discussions were dominated by ideologues, to the point some discussions seemed like Monty Python skits. I mean, your choice of window manager, let alone Linux distro, was something you'd be judged by.
'Were'? There are still people claiming that fronted isn't real coding. It is deeply embedded in human nature to define an us v them, and if skin colour is off the table substitutes must be found.
Most of them had quarter/midlife crises and got partners/children/mortgages etc. and no longer care. The next generation know nothing else other than the current internet.
Yeah sadly that's it. The great forums all died off when it was no longer doing ridiculous stuff to entertain internet friends, and instead having super lame adult responsibilities.
Speaking for myself, kids even with a hands off parenting approach are a ridiculous amount of work.
HN is one of the closest to it IMO. I sometimes think the very Web1.0-ness of its interface and its hostility to mobile browsers are purposefully made speed bumps before becoming fully mainstream.
Also time passes and people change. Many of the people on HN today were once dialup users. They are the same people but also different.
Ah yes, the internet where we had polite conversations on the merits of Vim vs Emacs, and women wanting to participate were warmly welcomed with a friendly "tits or gtfo"...
Shitposting, trolling, and harassment has been around since the very beginning of the public internet. If you didn't see it, it has to have been because you were (unconsciously or not) looking away.
The "ideologues and political commissars" didn't ruin your "friendly technical discussions", they merely pointed out how toxic a lot of those communities had always truly been.
If anything, if you really want to focus on the technical details, you should welcome their attempts to make it a friendlier and more professional space!
I didn't see any shitposting on the internet in the 1990s or the decade after that, nor anything remotely like "tits or gtfo" before I saw it on 4chan (which started in 2003).
I did see a lot of trolling and a little harassment (not of women or other disadvantaged groups).
> Why should I take the moral high ground and listen to an argument I dislike if I'm not offered the same courtesy.
I mean not using the Dutch translation of the n-word as part of your username and thinking you're clever for hiding it in a plausibly deniable way would certainly help with me believing you're arguing in good faith.
Some of nerds earned a lot, a lot of money, some of the other nerds they employed also earned a lot of money, and they all decided to screw up the world we all live in. Fuck the nerds! The jocks back in the '70s and the '80s were right, these nerds should have been bullied to hell and back, maybe that way we wouldn't have had today's Musks and Thiels, shitheads that are bringing this world over the edge.
A society that creates bullies and thinks they are right is the same one that big surprise, doesn't give a shit about you. But you're stupid enough to be a cheerleader to bullies out of envy so you deserve whatever you get from it.
You look like the one of the nerds that got bought by the likes of Thiel and Musk, congrats on that. Interesting how you people still have the guts to bring up the “society” you supposedly care so much about, the same society your lot is so happy to fuck over for some extra financial juice. When will you people stop? What it will mage you people stop? Genuine questions, both of them.
It seems to me the role of venture capital has changed and is somewhat responsible for this. The obsession with MVPs followed by hyper-growth and then moat-building has warped our relationship with technology. It's driven by a desire for VC funds to "return the fund" with each investment, and increasingly, by a SoftBank approach which requires inundating the market leader with capital that forces out all competition. Technology has been financialized.
I feel like, as an industry or social group, we're going through a midlife crisis. There were so many people in tech who I looked up to as a young engineer, and now it feels especially bleak for young people in tech to find role models. But that could just be me being ~40 and despising what so many of these people became at ~60+.
Cleve Moler, the creator of MATLAB, died a few weeks ago. I've had the opportunity to meet him a few times, and despite him being a genuine mathematical genuis, the thing that impressed me so much was how humble he was, how anti-braggadocious. He was like this in person, privately, and also in public. Moler was an early post-WW2 engineer, his cohort is a shrinking class, and I'm worried about those who are taking their place, and then what happens when my generation and the younger replace them.
At the other side of the "midlife crisis" is the self-acceptance and maturity to become that role model.
I'm not saying that to glorify anything. The sentiments in your comment could have been written at any point in human history. Part of that maturity is to lose the ego too. You're not a hero for doing what feels natural, and that is to share what you have been fortunate enough to gather so far.
The gentle nerd trope was always a lie (as all tropes were). For every woz you’ve got some egotistical anti-social nerd deriding “bean counters” and “sales guys” because of some deeply held problems dealing with the outside world (especially women).
If you haven’t met someone who is rude and inconsiderate and thinks that’s ok because they believe they are way smarter than they are, then you haven’t worked in tech.
This sort of archetype navel gazing is appealing because you can cast any story you want that way. Buy it doesn’t actually help to understand the complex problems we face, it just lets you blame some “other”.
If a critique of bean counters is coming from incels, I hope that a lot more men stop having sex. By your logic, the more men have problems with women, the better society will become.
A lot of society is actively fucked up by hyperoptimization, especially in business.
All those C*Os and founders are good and successful politicians, not nerds. There was a colossal PR campaign to picture them as nerds for multiple reasons, but most of them never created like nerds would do (with a passion, going deep, enjoying the process & the result).
Politicians become successful due to skills incompatible with nerd mindset. Look at Linus, he could built an empire but he's a git.
> We plan to build this the way we've developed WhatsApp: focus on the most fundamental and private use case -- messaging -- make it as secure as possible, and then build more ways for people to interact on top of that, including calls, video chats, groups, stories, businesses, payments, commerce, and ultimately a platform for many other kinds of private services.
If Julian Assange had taken his privacy principles and built a social network instead of leaking government secrets things might have turned out differently.
This is one of those sampling bias/availability heuristic problems.
Of course the ‘nerds’ you hear about and see online are extroverted self-promoters. Of course the most visible people in the internal culture of large organizations are the ones who do more talking than doing.
Those are the people who are doing all the talking.
It is a massive over sampling problem that leads you to think, by looking at eg LinkedIn, ‘why is everyone on here writing engagement-bait algorithm-maxing posts?’
Everyone is not; The content you see is by definition the content that maxed its algorithmic exposure.
Given your blatant generalisation, I simply believe you didn't pass the vibe check of that person and they would not want to have anything to do with you. Just how bullies detect nerds, nerds detect people who shun them, they just avoid conflict because it's a legit waste of time.
I'm a nerd that codes and I shun the vast majority of tech workers that continue to sell out humanity for a paycheck.
Maybe take some time and consider the political economical ramifications of the industry because it has been a net negative towards humanity for a good decade+ now.
At the outset of my career I was lucky (in a way) to have the veil ripped forcefully off of my face as to the ugliness inherent in the VC backed tech world.
I was believing I was working on something very important as one of the initial hires in a 10 person standup, with series B funding "on the way any minute now," knew it was a risk but believed strongly in the tech, maybe naively.
Found out later, the CEO had been given a generous buyout offer by a competitor, in the 8 figures, a modest amount but far exceeding our level of debt/investment to that point, would have made several of us including him a decent chunk of change. This guy got it in his head at that point that the offer was insulting, and we should be worth billions, not this 'paltry' sum. I could barely believe it when I heard it way after the fact (I would have quit earlier if I had known). What I understand is the board of investors was not very happy with this and there would be no more funding to come in after that point. Within 6 months of that, I went from this bright eyed person to a person not receiving a paycheck for several months, wiping out my early-grad finances in record time, and a significant amount of debt, all the while they shopped our team around the country desperately looking for a buyer. (they did not find one and had to borrow more money to pay our wages).
Needless to say after that I resolved never ever ever to work at any kind of 'startup' ever again, and my career many years later has finally recovered (though my cynicism has not).
Anyway, the answer to the question: 'Nerds', like any cultural grouping, are a product of their environment. The United States of today has developed much higher inequality, debt burdens, rent demands, maintenance cost demands and trade deficits than the same environment had in the past, largely due to the Fed policies of the 21st century, with some help in worsening things by all administrations.
Companies such SpaceX are not built primarily by CEOs, rather by thousands of engineers, staff members, and state and private funders. Many of them are top graduates of best universities in the world. CEOs play important role too, of course, but they work as hard as engineers.
It’s a scam: people like Musk take credit for the work of thousands of people and even states. It’s ridiculous that a few people capture the value commonly generated.
We can go back to decades of public funding of research and development through taxes at universities and other public institutions, that’s a separate post.
The premise of this post is that tech founders used to be admirable nerds, but have since changed. I wonder if it isn't the other way around. We're the nerds. Us. Here. We used to admire tech founders because sometimes they were nerds too, but then we changed. We grew up. We got wise to it.
The author wants founders to stop projecting “an obsession with wealth and power” and instead “focus carefully on projecting an obsession with core nerd values”. And maybe it doesn't occur to them (as a fellow nerd) that _wealth and power were the whole point_. The author enjoyed being blind to the greed of it all, and now being unable to unsee they are begging the founders “please please just pretend a bit better”.
>Jobs was flawed and everyone knew it, but it was all par for the course. He was aggressive in his ambition, uncompromising about even the most minute details of his company, and occasionally arrogant (not always, IMO. Sometimes you're just right.)
If you're a visionary, by definition you see what others do not. Which means that there's a lag between being right and being seen as right. That lag looks like arrogance.
Of course, the trick is how do you tell the difference from the outside? I used to think "be right about everything all the time" would be enough, but I've seen it fail constantly for myself and for others.
Now I think it boils down to "some people will decide to love you and some will decide to hate you, based mostly on tribal affiliation[0] -- how much will liking him cost me socially? -- and how often you've been proven right actually has very little bearing on the situation."
[0] Also apparently your spinal posture matters a lot more than what you're saying. Crucially both are social-emotional, not logic-based.
Wherever there's big money to be made, will also attract ambitious people hungry for money and power - it's that simple.
Now that FAANG jobs aren't looking all that attractive, many such people have set their sights on AI research/dev and quant finance jobs. The latter one has exploded in popularity / virality the past years. Previously a niche profession within finance which, frankly, most had no clue existed, has become almost a mainstream ambition. Some of the people that never identified themselves as nerds, will wander from industry to industry, which one that pays the most.
But back to the nerds: Some nerds obviously changed. If you throw generational wealth at most people, they will change. Few people are so disinterested in money that it is simply not a thing they care about.
What's more, many nerds discovered that with enormous amounts of money, comes enormous amounts of power. You can now actually lobby for your sci-fi dream world, which is what some of the billionaire nerds are doing.
I just want enough money to retire and write interesting open source software, but doing that in my 20s made me poor, so since then I am trying to speed run retirement so I can go back to it.
Sadly, while I find AI effective, I also find it's removed the craft and personal reward I get from open source. So I will instead grow potatoes.
I'm coming full circle on the AI thing, it's almost entirely useless at creating a crafted result, so counterintuitively it places a greater premium on craft just at a time the industry as a whole are running in the opposite direction. There are some pieces of software I've thought of building now that I would not have considered a worthwhile pursuit a few years ago, solely due to this idea that a crafted result may have an increasingly inherent value in its own right
Even if machines can be made to produce compact, well thought out and beautiful, the interaction pattern almost inevitably ensures the "developer" produces something that is neither compact, well thought out or beautiful
100%. What matters most is always the intention of why a person does something. If it is based on external factors like money or power, and not intrinsic motivation like being fascinated or interested in new technology, this will happen.
Multiple rounds of gamergate happened. All nerds without 7 figure income were kicked out as loosers (insoles). Now being nerd means larping as bilionare.
> What's more, many nerds discovered that with enormous amounts of money, comes enormous amounts of power. You can now actually lobby for your sci-fi dream world, which is what some of the billionaire nerds are doing.
> The money and power corrupted them.
Actually accomplishing things in the world that constitute building a sci-fi dream world requires significant amounts of money and power, and any person or institution at all that could in principle have the capacity to do this would also have the capacity to become corrupt, at least by someone's judgement.
Personally, I'm pretty happy with many of the sci-fi things that tech billionaire nerds have made their money by bringing into existence. I rode across town in a self-driving Tesla the other day while giving orders to its AI system about how and where to go. That was a pretty sci-fi dream world experience. That's worth quite a bit of corruption.
> I rode across town in a self-driving Tesla the other day while giving orders to its AI system about how and where to go. That was a pretty sci-fi dream world experience. That's worth quite a bit of corruption.
Yeah but there's a good chance they didn't cause the death of millions, reintroduce the screwworm fly into the US, or force millions of people to starve or have a degraded life.
It would be fair to reflect for a moment, perhaps you are not impacted by the negative aspects of the corruption making this a much easier stance to take.
It became obvious / accepted wisdom that a moderately successful startup exit is the only way to have a decent future as a living person.
This used to be only one of many paths available to a nerd, but now: (a) academia is dead thanks to overly competitive publish-or-perish set-up (probably the biggest loss of the three), (b) corporate jobs do not pay enough to safely survive downturns that leave you jobless for extended periods, (c) government jobs have been made even more onerous and even less paying in real terms.
So everyone has to become a self-promoting, trend-chasing startup-founder type. Even if you don't found a startup, you have to be always ready for a new "business opportunity".
To expand on this: certain people have learned how to capitalize on “nerdiness” - i.e. how to virtue signal in a way so that investors and general public treat you like an engineering genius.
Elizabeth Holmes persuaded for years that she was a groundbreaking innovator, even with non-existent product. Other manipulators are smart enough to have a real product that protects them via benefit of a doubt. Society is still not immune to people like that.
The original sin is earlier, when people with a dream and a million dollars were dubbed Hackers. And then articles like these calls these Stanford and Harvard guys nerds. Have they ever seen a true computer nerd, you know, the type of people that can actually write code and are not just paying other people to?
Interesting that he mentions Elon as being the archetypal "phase 3" nerd, since he was fairly high profile in all 3 phases and his reputation during the "phase 1" and "phase 2" timelines pretty much matched the author's description of the archetypal founder from those periods too.
I guess in a roundabout way, what I'm trying to say is that I wonder how much of this is a change in PR rather than a change in the people themselves.
If you email the mods and ask them to do so, they’ll either agree or let you know why they didn’t. I don’t have a solid enough grasp on how their logic works to predict the outcome here.
Hear me out: back in the day founding a company wasn't an identity, it was just an action, a verb. Stuff started going sideways when people started thinking of themselves as "founders". Suddenly the product wasn't the top priority anymore, instead it was second to defending their identity as a "founder". Seemingly stupid decisions followed, but seen from the perspective of a CEO who wants nothing more than to be a founder, they start to make sense.
We see something similar in politics, I think. Note that it doesn't apply to everyone, but it's interesting to compare people who are engaged in a social justice struggle, Vs people who identify as "activist". The latter will be very prone to doing things that are counter-productive to their started cause, because they don't really care about any cause, they're just defending their identity as activist.
I reckon the same idea holds elsewhere as well.
(Disclaimer: I'm not sure how common that last thing is in the US, but where I live, it definitely happens a fair bit. But even here it does not apply to everyone, it's just a very loud minority)
Second disclaimer: I use the word identity in a very specific way in this comment. It is not to be confused with other uses of the same word, for example in the phrase "gender identity". That is a completely different kind of identity and is completely orthogonal and irrelevant to what I'm trying to express in this comment
> If people can't think clearly about anything that has become part of their identity, then all other things being equal, the best plan is to let as few things into your identity as possible.
Of course one can't not have any identity whatsoever, afterall ethics is a type of identity and no one should in their right frame of mind contest basic things like human rights.
As with sibling comment, it's my first time reading this, it's a great read, and author really managed to write down into words some things I have vaguely thought about before.
One thing I notice, which may be the worst part of it, although I realize it might be bit too pessimistic: It doesn't matter whether A identifies with X — if B thinks A identifies with X, the discussion still breaks down and it becomes difficult to have a fruitful argument.
In other words, one party can shut down and degenerate a discussion for both (or many).
It makes me think once again about the adage: Communication is a two-way street; can't have communication otherwise.
That was a great read! Thanks for linking it! Paul certainly has a way with words that I simply don't, and he expresses the same idea I had, only much more clearly.
I wonder if being "engaged by identity" can be automatically detected somehow? Would be a cool experiment to build a automatic moderator that just hides identity based responses.
Also makes me wonder if there's a reliable way to detect it in yourself? If I could reliably identify when my identity is engaged, that would seem to be the first step towards disengaging it.
Or put differently, i would assume I carry labels unconsciously, in order to clear my cupboard I must find what's in it.
I am surprised you haven't read it before, because when I read your comment I immediately remembered that essay haha.
For conscious bias a good test is if being exposed to new facts prevent you from changing your opinion on something.
For example, imagine I was a very big believer of full-blown libertarianism and I was exposed to very concrete evidence that say, for example, government run healthcare is both more efficient and cheaper than private healthcare[1]. Would I still be full-blown libertarian and try to put holes on the data or would I embrace that libertarianism doesn't bring good outcomes in healthcare[2]?
Unconscious bias is much harder though, in fact libertarians tend to be very much fueled by ideology than facts. One could say that unconscious bias is fundamentally the same thing as ideology.
Another example, like I mentioned before I am very much a pro human rights ideologist. So I am inherently against some things like eugenics, even though one could provide data to me saying that eugenics would lead to "better" outcomes in society I would still be against it on principle.
[1]: Personally I sympathize with most libertarian views, but I don't consider myself a libertarian. I don't think a full private healthcare system is good for example. And this is the core issue the essay brings out, being a libertarian is assuming an identity and it closes you off to new ideas.
[2]: it is very hard to have absolute evidence to anything, but one must be willing to look over their own pre-existing world view when analyzing information available. A certain level of suspicion of information is warranted, but if you can't get past that, your world view is essentially ideology.
I can't find it now, but I distinctly remember dang talking about his moderation philosophy being based on what he's read about the activation of the parasympathetic nervous system
The fate of many nerdy interests: you want it to become popular and widespread. Then it does, and you realise you've lost control of it and it becomes commoditised. So went comic books, goes tech.
Damn, I remember playing games in 90s instead of watching TV like my classmates, and daydreaming one day I’d be able to talk about games instead of what was on the TV yesterday.
Now everyone plays, watches or at least knows games, but most games are lowest common denominator focus group tested commodity crap. Huge budgets and production value, almost zero innovation. Even indies are 80% slop to make a quick buck.
If you have a hobby no one cares about, hold it dear and close to your chest, and be happy that no one cares about it.
> If you have a hobby no one cares about, hold it dear and close to your chest, and be happy that no one cares about it.
Yes and yes. I've often likened [unpopular] hobbies these days to how Joel tries to hide Clementine deeper and deeper into the recesses of his mind to try and avoid his memories of her from being erased in "Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind". He fails, but somehow, they find each other and start again.
You comment is probably one of the most important here. The gate keepers (generally the nerds) who produced useful products/services allowed the non-nerds in (to management), and from then on it's a slippery slope.
You will see similar dynamics where a bunch of people are involved.
And then there were no 'safe spaces' for socially awkward/on-the-spectrum nerds. The spaces once created to escape the school bullies had let in new types of bully.
The sociopaths tried to abduct my friends to a Discord-Server, but my true friend rebelled against them trying to take over my DnD round and he left, saying that he won't betray me for their cult. In the end the Discord people turned out to be deadbeats without a decent GM willing to do the hard work and their posse crumbled, probably preying on the next group of nerds/geeks/whatever victim they pick.
Most nerds became collateral damage from society's attempts to contain something much darker: something we mostly forgot even existed, and only fought through outdated traditions. We meant well when we tore out those countermeasures, and we did end that collateral damage. But we no longer remembered what we were keeping at bay, and so we also set the darkness free. The monsters at the top are only part of the problem, and might not even be the biggest: they have plenty of counterparts at the bottom who are in some ways even worse.
Now we have to figure out a new way forward. We need a way to put what needs chaining up back in its chains without harming the innocent weirdos. I don't have an answer. There might not be one. But it is the challenge.
They're still around, even if Musk is excluded. Torvalds springs to mind pretty quickly. I think society is increasingly adverse to people having personality flaws, than it is in favour of people having strengths such as technical knowledge or ability.
Better to have a bland guy running McDonalds who can't stomach eating the "product" than some passionate chef doing his best to improve mass market food but rubbing people up the wrong way.
It's failure of capitalism if the money goes to the guy in the shiny suit instead of the person, or team, who can actually innovate. I don't want to be too melodramatic, but maybe this is all part of the fall of the empire.
> This will probably catch on slower and be less viral, but it will pay off in the long-run once people 'turn against' tech founders as reality stars, which they eventually will.
The whole problem with opening Pandora's box is that you don't get to close it if you don't like what came out.
Why would things eventually get better? Especially on a time scale that matters to anyone who is currently alive?
Jobs is a hack who promoted rampant consumerism and e-waste backed by slave-like manufacturing conditions. People need to stop putting him on a pedestal as separate from other Big Tech founders. He's just the flavor of egomaniac that appealed to your personality.
“Tech Otakus Save the World!” Yes thats the official corporate motto and philosophy of the huge mobile game company miHoYo (creators of Genshin Impact). I live next to their HQ and had to look twice when seeing guys wearing tshirts with that slogan
Their founding story is also very interesting, highly recommend reading it! Did you know that one of the founders (Liu Wei) personally did customer support in the early years? https://mihoyo.fandom.com/wiki/MiHoYo
Woz really does seem to be both a brilliant and nice guy.
Steve Jobs was brilliant and complicated with many down sides, but he also seemed to have good taste and to care about user experience as well as good design, and his era at Apple produced exceptional products that redefined their categories: Mac, iMac, iPod, iPhone, iPad, etc. Even Jobs' failures were interesting: NeXT, Mac G4 Cube, iPod Hi-Fi. Well, except for the hockey puck mouse which seems like an obviously bad idea.
because 400k TC plus attracts people who optimize for earning high TC and not necessarily being “passionate” about the actual tech.
i’d say it’s worse for founders. i barely see any nerdy founders anymore in sf.
it is all striver types whose parents are execs or other wealthy types, and all these people want to do is rent seek or attention seek instead of making something interesting.
so many of their ai products don’t even work. the entire goal is to get suckers to pay for a few months or sign a contract to lock down “$insaneAmount arr in six months” and then blow the VC money on yacht parties and other lame stuff.
What does any of that have to do with "nerds"? You are complaining about business and management people in tech. None of them is a "nerd" and never was. Or otherwise said, what does the "nerd" even means to you? I thought that nerd means a person who is a person with lower social skills, obsessed over technical details so much they are unable to discuss anything else.
People whose whole career always was to manipulate and impress people, to talk well, to convince investors to give them money, to lead companies just are not nerds. Regardless of whether they are narcistic assholes or not.
Did someone mention Pournelle's Iron Law of Bureaucracy yet? It's not one organization, but there's just so much money in tech and it's so mainstream, that it just attracts more people that want to be successful not as a byproduct of skill, but just on its own. This bit me recently when changing jobs, I underestimated that despite all the problems I had, at my previous job there were a lot of people prioritizing being good at their job. Now it's just kicking the can so it's someone else's problem.
I think the turning point was not 10 years ago, but 15 years ago with Facebook's IPO.
Since then, the only thing that's mattered in tech is "how will you monetize", and monetization doesn't mean a modestly successful software company, no, it's a billion dollar unicorn or bust. Or getting your company to a high valuation and then sell and gtfo, rinse and repeat.
So why do you get? The people who care very much about making a billion dollars. And for the most part, people who care very much about that are assholes.
This is easy to answer -- the nerds are out there, but they don't push themselves into the spotlight. The reason Sam Altman gets more press than Linus Torvalds is because Altman is a media spectacle and Torvalds is a technologist. In terms of importance, Torvalds outranks Altman. In terms of flash, the reverse.
Consider this: present-day historians say Alexsandr Solzhenitsyn was a writer in the time of Leonid Brezhnev. 100 years from now they'll say Brezhnev was a politician in the time of Solzhenitsyn.
It's simple, marketing dominates everything. With attention being very expensive, appearance is what matters.
It doesn't matter if you write fantastic library, nobody is gonna use it because they won't know about it, the one with a gif of the terminal (ffs) will win that has a good page describing what it does (and being the most popular one can even become better than your library because of the following but that's not the point here).
It's everywhere, products, hiring, services. We have no network of trust (sigh), we need to trust some heuristics based on a shallow information. If somebody focuses on the shallow he wins, because nobody can ever dive into everything.
Once tech became glamorous, it started attracting people with narcissistic traits - much like Hollywood did. Expect to see more antisocial behavior as a result.
At least there's still plenty of places for real nerds to be nerds. HN, hanging around in IRC, Eternal September, among other places. Finding myself more and more drifting away from "mainstream" internet stuff, and as a result I'm finding a lot more engaging and thought-provoking things and am overall happier as a result.
Nerds became an industry field - that's what it happened. Back in the 90'ies we were doing IT things because it geniunely interested us, not that it would "net us high salaries". I'd do this even if you didn't pay a single centa because it triggered my dopamine receptors.
Then the world digitalized, and people who do not have any interest in computing and computers in general became "experts". That's when the ball begin to roll. This created people who can't give a french fry about the work they are doing? Quality? Efficiency? What do they matter, it was a job you did for 9-5 and you got your salary. If money was in say, haystacking, they'd be doing haystacking.
Now whenever someone utters "crypto" I do a doubleback and realize they mean cryptocurrencies, not cryptography. I do not expect any of my new hires to know the word "grok" (other than the AI of course), enjoy science fiction or any nerdy things we did. IT was a community where like minded people were working, now it is not.
We won. I used to stay up all night watching Nasa launches and landings as a kid. I felt like an outcast. Now everyone’s wearing Nasa shirts like it’s cool and they don’t really have any good launches.
We used to be outcasts and now I look at youngsters and they’re doing the same things and it’s cool…? It’s like suddnely the jocks are the outcasts.
> He and DH Hansson have retained the nerd-dom that made tech interesting/fun/curiosity-driven/charming for an audience with a certain taste in the first place. With them, it at least 'feels' like what you see is what you get. That does wonders for your reputation.
Doesn’t seem like you’ve been keeping up with DHH’s reputation. He’s at best controversial. He has publicly expressed fervent views about subjects outside tech that were definitely not fun/curiosity-driven/charming and has gotten plenty of backlash. I also see no reason to believe he’d decline to be on that Mafia game, he feels as much a “personality” as the others.
All fine and dandy, until I found out how others talk about us nerds. When I was interviewed once on TV (about some sports I was representing), the TV folks constantly joked about me as the "pulli-guy" (guy wearing a pullover). You are certainly not considered serious, if you just don't dress like them. Or talk like them.
does anyone else get the feeling this comments section is being subtly astroturfed to sabotage the spirit of good-willed idealism and innovation? Look closely, there's reasons the powers that have insane capital would do this.
I remember one of my first interactions with someone when I got to one of the big companies. I thought, “He’s a nerd!” It was both joy and surprise. We had the same speech impediment. We were both nerds. The job was hell, but everyone cared a lot.
I don’t give a damn about any company’s goals now.
I don’t understand what we’re talking about here. Plenty of founders still embrace nerd-dom, Jensen Huang constantly runs around signing people’s graphics cards. They’re just no longer part of the story media outlets wish to tell about tech.
Who can forget the MeetUp crazed scene with mostly early 20 something tech startup cosplaying 'founders', mostly lounging and tweeting from their macbook seated on a brown leather couch in their exposed brick 'offices' with a pool table in the back?
Weird twist at the end. Media plays a large role. Some people watch zero news and just listen to talk shows and influencers. Doesn’t surprise me they fall for narratives so easily.
> Ten years ago, the cultural idea of the technologist was still basically Jobs and Wozniak.
Nah, that's been dead since 2010 or earlier. It was probably dead during DotCom too. Anytime tech is hot again, it attracts the kind of money/status chasers that move to whatever is hottest.
I mean Zuck was a Harvard grad and Bezos was a hedge fund guy first. Thiel was in law and derivates trading before tech.
I think the issue boils down to money, lots of it.
When I worked in the Bay Area, I noticed the nerd-culture was still more or less predominant in South Bay. The arrogant, shallow types were always there (as witnessed by their fancy cars--"should we take the Jag or the Merc today?"), but I could still tolerate it. San Francisco was a different story. I started a new job at a startup once and remember thinking "I'm surrounded by Ivy Leaguers who look like models--this place is not for me". I think the crazy amounts of money just brought in everyone looking to make a buck, and the nerds no longer were the majority.
But then you have the company missions. It seems like most of the companies in the Bay Area are all about advertising or compiling info on individuals and selling it. It's mostly B2B and not so much "cool products".
We're on the downside of the tech bubble, and maybe that's a good thing.
> We're on the downside of the tech bubble, and maybe that's a good thing.
I think it'll keep having waves, but I agree that a bit of cooling off could be a good thing.
The technologies are genuinely cool, interesting stuff, it's a super exciting time to be building stuff. But the business side of things seems quite vapid and desperate for many companies.
I wonder if more tangible industries like manufacturing have had similar peaks? Was there a time where the Wood Industry was going crazy, making everything out of wood, stuff that didn't need to exist?
nerds built companies largely as a byproduct of their own interests. they made a lot of money because their technologies were great, but it was always about the tech, not the person. then vcs came in and convinced themselves that actually it was about the person, and started deploying money based on the people instead of the technology
Big companies tend to be somewhat older companies. The people who run them tend to be older. Older people have had a longer time to adjust to society, open up, get out of their shell. People who run large companies also end up adapting to social contact, which is not something we tend to define nerds by. That is all amplified by social media and youtube which help scale up interpersonal examples for people to adjust to for good or for bad.
Some subset of these big companies will be run by people who appreciate that they're having an impact on society and feel that it's important for them to be more public so people can better appreciate who they are. Jeff Bezos was a bit awkward in the 1990s, Bill Gates was way more awkward back then, oh man, it was physically uncomfortable to watch him in interviews. Mark Zuckerberg was absolutely out of touch and forcing himself into the spotlight of his company was a disaster, he rolled -1000 charisma. They had to get Elon Musk to make dice just for that to be possible.
Most of them get better over time. These are not people that generally started hugely confident in public or with lots of people, but when you run these companies you gain both confidence and money which make public appearance less painful. You could argue they might sometimes veer into overconfidence to make up for confidence slipping, which can also be seen as ego.
There are plenty of nerds out there. Statistically based on population growth and also increases in autism spectrum diagnoses, there are more than ever.
This seems to be a critique of "Can Tech Legends Find the Liar? (Mafia
Episode 1)" on Youtube but critiqued from a "nerd subculture" angle, which is a thing in the USA, I guess? As a European, this took me a moment to figure it out.
There definitely is/was a nerd subculture in Europe, it's just that those who represent it were always only vaguely aware of the existence of Jobs and Wozniak.
Linus Torvalds on the other hand - that is a household name.
Jobs is not the one to think of when relating to nerds, Wozniak is. Jobs is the one who comes in and takes most of the money as well as the limelight when some nerds have done something interesting but then act like the dog who has caught the car. European nerd culture is more Fabrice Bellard and Linus Torvalds, less Steve Jobs.
It's the logical conclusion of the acceptance of hacktivist/activist groups in the tech community. Activists/Hacktivists want something their way. If they don't get it, they resort to violence, disruption, and/or harassment (rather than use mainstream political tools like trying to get elected into office or trying to get new laws passed).
This sort of behavior is authoritarian. During Covid, this was was very apparent. I saw tech leaders supporting forced vaccinations, suppressing opinions online, and getting people fired from their job for simply stating their opinion.
Magazines like 2600, who always championed freedom of speech and expression during multiple administrations, showed their true colors. They supported suppression of people they disagreed with politically.
Twitter/Facebook were found to be colluding with the government to target individuals that made the government look bad or had contrarian views.
The worst part? It was swept under the rug. Nobody in the tech industry cared.
This is why I support the suppression of rights of people I disagree with politically. This tit for tat will need to continue, until lessons are learned, and it stops for everyone.
Im so sick of Steve Jobs and apple glaze. You like it because marketing targeted at you. It was no more slick than other products at the time and worked no better. You liked it because the company threw money at a very successful marketing campaign. These people are not nerds they are extreme outliers and not much different to the CEOs of today.
I think the bigger social problem is that too many people think it is counter-cultural to be defending rich people and billionaires, and an act of rebellion to mindlessly consume.
> Jobs was flawed and everyone knew it, but it was all par for the course. He was aggressive in his ambition, uncompromising about even the most minute details of his company, and occasionally arrogant
What is it, exactly, which inherently separates Job’s behavior from Altman’s? I’d argue that both rely/relied on available publicity, marketing and VC management tools of their era.
> Then there was Woz, the patron saint of computer science: bashful, generous, humble, averse to the spotlight, and content with having a reasonable amount of wealth but not an absurd, evil-seeming amount of wealth
Tech co-founders like Woz are still out there, so cherry picking to paint a different picture and widely generalise immoral wrongdoings / lack of nerds in certain companies management structures to the whole industry does not help.
I think broader problem is HN’s laser focus on few managers that are 1) doing [subjectively] immoral things 2) doing things not in a way busines and tech industry were doing it 15-20 years ago.
Down to a point where people start painting an “us vs them” picture with white knights of old and scary liars of new.
What happened is that the computing industry was acquired by the advertising industry.
What kept things sane for a long time was the focus on products. Someone made something and sold it to end users. The end users had to be kept happy. That leads to a sane industry.
Now, most of the big names in computing are ad-supported. That's a completely different dynamic. The hype is the product. The user is the enemy.
On August 9, 2006, Eric Schmidt, head of Google, spoke at the Search Engine Strategies conference.[1] Before that, "search engine optimization" was considered a scumbag business, and it was the job of search engine companies to fight it. On that day, Google made it legitimate and turned evil.
I am in no way supportive of monopolies though taking "the need to compete" out of the equation and having steady flow of money that won't be cut off if "someone beats you to market" was pretty revolutionary. Consider Bell Labs, staffed with real "nerds" that never had to prostitute themselves or to pitch an idea on the merits of making money -- they simply did stuff that was fun, in ther nerdy way. Because of this we have wireless communication, transistors, digital cameras sensors, c, and many others.
(There were a lot of negatives due to this AT&T monopoly but we are talking about nerds here and having to socialize your own worth/value. It's a shitty game that real nerds aren't necessary interested in playing)
"The digital commons of 2026 is defined by its grifters. So it's not purely tech's fault that its now seen as a sort of avenue for getting rich quick and amorally"
I am not so sure I agree with this take. The "nerds" are building incredibly powerful technologies (Amazon, Starlink/SpaceX, search, algorithmic social media, AI, etc.) that literally control our lives now. It isn't any great mystery that the tech titans realized they had this power, and hence are questioning whether democracy is some outdated concept. They all want to be Plato's philosopher (or in this case, technologist) kings. At the risk of sounding like an AI, it isn't just grifting (or a con game) - these guys really do think of themselves as the new feudal lords. So I don't think this author is thinking big enough...
Increasingly men have been disenfranchised over the last decade so the only way forward is to take on such titles to at least appear successful.
It looks like normal behaviour to me.
For tenure-track positions—the pipeline for future faculty—white men have gone from 49 percent in 2014 to 27 percent in 2024 (in the humanities, they’ve gone from 39 percent to 21 percent).
27 percent is roughly the same percentage of white men that are in that age bracket in the US. The lower 21 percent in the humanities could be explained by there being less interest in the those fields from the white male population in the first place.
I wouldn't call that disenfranchised; I'd call that a correction. I suppose you could make the argument that more white men should be incentivized to go into the humanities though.
> Phase three (2015 to now): the tech industry as grift-adjacent.
I'm gonna disagree on the timeline and maybe get some flak for it: phase 3 was 1995-2000ish. When the first advertisement script and web analytics were born and disseminated. That's where all the tech grifts originate.
When I first heard of "Hackers" being equated with startups (viz. this very forum's name!) I was disgusted. A hacker, to me, was personified by Richard Stallman, or a phreaker, or Neo from the Matrix. But here we are.
Wow, this comment section alone speaks to how much things have changed.
As someone who started to read this forum because it was y-combinator startup-friendly, business-friendly and investor-friendly, I never would have imagined the anger and ridicule on display here.
Obviously, the nerds have left the building--or at least this forum.
Did anyone read this article?
"There is no reason founders should disappear from public life. There are too many advantages to building in public to ignore it."
Someone has to say this: don't be a victim--get out there and build something valuable for yourself.
There are no overlords, except in your imagination. Go build great things.
I think the ire is from people who were nerds pre 2000. Before software was a way to wealth. People who made weird stuff because they wanted to. Then some of those people made weird stuff that made them wealthy, leading some people to make boring stuff that made them wealthy. Then the phrase startup started being common and people entered the field with wealth on their mind. It is the complaint you would hear from any niche career if suddenly it became lucrative. Your advice is solid though. Ignore all those people and keep making weird stuff that you love without worrying about whether it will pay for more than food and shelter. Not with you on the overlord thing though, there are plenty of people looking to control, oppress and pull up ladders.
Nerds are no better or worse than other people. Dump massive money and power into an industry and you will get unhinged shit like this that bubbles to the surface.
Some of it is the mask falling off and some of it is people genuinely getting warped by it. It’s a little of both.
In finance it’s covered over by a buttoned down ivy league veneer, but the coke snorting maniac is there.
Same in politics where there’s pomp and ceremony to cover it, but when it comes out in the open there it’s probably the most ugly. Governments have armies and police.
In nerd-dom it comes in a form that’s uniquely tone deaf to the point of coming off like a comic book or anime villain.
Everything the author complains about occurred in the dot-com bubble as well. His view that until 2007 founders were lovable nerds is completely off-base. In Silicon Valley, the same dynamics of start-ups chasing money, then getting it and proclaiming their genius, as they were “going to change the world” happened in 2000 as in similar ways today. The popping of the internet bubble brought back a lot of humility.
I think that the title should be more, what the fuck happened to tech executives as compared to nerds.
because previously it was mostly the nerds who were at the forefront of the innovation (they still are), but they now have a playbook where they see all the other people (grifters) who are entering tech for money and the playbook of the attention economy and doing that because its a profitable strategy.
It's basically the fact that there are multiple companies where a grift culture is promoted within tech (ironically I am on YC website and YC had a company which you might've heard called delve :D)
As people realized that the technology has value and finance people realizing it to pour head over fist money into it.
With such eggregious trillions of dollars worth of money (basically the whole economy getting floated by tech), you are bound to see people within this do the grift playbook and talk about themselves and succeed and that has become the playbook.
So I think this is what has happened to nerd culture. It simply became profitable and then commoditized and used by people who could then grift.
BUT people are respecting the nerd culture (well the non grift version of it) a lot more
For some reason, I wish to recommend Weird Al video song about White & Nerdy[0] and how people within the comments are saying that Nerd culture has its own unique identity and many if not all appreciating the nerd culture
So TLDR: people like the previous nerd culture and it still exists, especially on HN but on platforms like twitter and others, as discussed within the article itself, with the attention economy. The grift culture is getting more attention than the nerd culture and because of the overlap in tech, the nerd culture is getting some bad rep but overall people appreciate the actual nerd culture (IMO) as interesting and unique (whereas previously, people wouldn't have appreciated it so much)
You don't hear about the actual nerd culture because it isn't algorithmic hungry but it still exists on platforms like Hackernews IMO!
Also, you can find a lot of nerds on Mastodon, PeerTube, and other non-mainstream, federated social media platforms that were not captured by the finance people (and cannot be thanks to their distributed design).
Exactly but because I suppose that the author is conflating tech founders on twitter (refuse to call it X) and other standard platforms which all share the same playbook and conflating it to all
Although I would wish for less overlap with tech-bros but it is sadly what it is and there are ways to mitigate it by being on more nerd friendly websites like hackernews.
Also, one more observation I wish to share is that not all nerds are tech product creators and neither should they be. Some just create for the sake of creation and IMO there is long way to go after creation as well and the nerd culture doesn't have standardized playbook as compared to grift culture.
Basically the nerd culture is immeasurable and is driven by it and the grift culture is measurable and is also driven by it. It's just that tech has more overlap but if trillions of dollars were thrown in physics instead of AI (quantum computing?), I would consider physics to have a lot of tech-bro culture as well.
> With such eggregious trillions of dollars worth of money (basically the whole economy getting floated by tech), you are bound to see people within this do the grift playbook and talk about themselves and succeed and that has become the playbook.
This is going to be buried, but I'll say it anyway.
I've been thinking about this a fair amount over the past 5-10 years, and I think a lot of the issues that we have can be traced to our demography and specifically 'the zeal of the convert' along with existing cultural dysfunction that would have been addressed if we'd grown more slowly as a group.
There's a lot of discussion about tech as an industry, but much less about tech as a culture, encompassing people's lives outside of their work/career.
Most people who are into tech in their 40s-60s came into it via a strong interest as an adolescent or young adult, and a fair number of them felt misunderstood and/or were abused/taunted/bullied/etc by mainstream culture. Then they discover this part of the world where people think like them and things make sense. They make friends who see things in systems! They can argue with facts! They agree what is important to argue about! They agree that consistency in thinking principles matters! Etc. This means a lot of people in tech, particularly the ones who hold the most power (even outside of founders) are decently likely to have either a disdain of or fear of non-tech cultures due to bad experiences, feel that tech culture needs to be defended from outside influences who don't understand and would crush it, and are well... zealots about it.
The problem is zealots are really bad at accepting and pinpointing issues within a culture. They want to defend it beyond all reason because to them, that culture/group is their safe place. If someone is bad in the culture, it can't be a sign of something wrong with the culture (because the culture is a safe place). Instead, that person 'isn't a true X'. Or that person is just a bad apple. The other influence is that converts absolutely don't want to lose their place. In the case of tech culture, because we've intertwined the culture with a career, that means people being afraid of losing their career/network/etc.
This is a different than being born into something. The perspectives are different. People born into tech culture/grey tribe/however you want to label it get to see more of how the culture expresses itself in different relationships (including its problems). They see disagreements between nerd adults that aren't mediated with corporate or monetary power/status structures, they have a choice about how much of the culture they participate in or not (like how someone born Catholic who goes to Mass once a year at Xmas is still considered Catholic regardless). There's more wiggle room, and more a sense of how those virtues play out over an entire lifetime instead of being limited to how they're expressed in a workplace between the ages of 20 and 45. Depending on the particular situation, it's also possible to have someone in tech culture who doesn't hold any personal grudges against the other cultures they share space with.
Right now, since we're dominated by converts between the ages of 20 and 50 and we've grown so quickly, we haven't had the time to create the cultural guardrails that would allow us to do things like 'agree on what constitutes an abuse of power' or 'agree on what we should teach our kids about morals', etc.
And because of the lopsided age pyramid, we have next to no elders, which doesn't help either.
This is shifting slightly as the first generation of explosive growth is starting to reproduce, and soon they'll start aging out of the workplace and we'll start to see more contemplative behavior. It's already somewhat starting: there's hints of people reaching that stage in their lives.
(NB: Yes, I'm aware that the tech industry pre-dates the 80s, but demographically those numbers are minuscule in comparison to the people who joined during and after the dot com boom. My grandmother used punchcards and knew C and was born in 1934, but there just aren't enough people with that experience for them to exert a cultural pull. Almost all of the elders we do have are regarded individually: we know (or know of) those people, but that's different from 'I'm struggling with this moral question, I'm going to go ask John because he's both wise and will understand what I'm talking about enough to give decent advice'.)
Nerds were commoditized by Hollywood, who exploited the rising digital era to develop stereotypical caricatures which could be easily pigeon-holed, and thus controlled.
They were compelled to do this, because nerds ate Hollywoods' lunch.
Just look at the show, Big Bang Theory. A heinous exposition of nerd culture which derides and degrades nerd'ism and aligns it with the neo-fascist Ayn Rand'ian ideology being propagated by Hollywoods' culture class in order to promulgate division and derision.
The Wests' copycat culture, not really able to develop culture of its own, simply picked up the baton and ran with it.
Now, gullible impressionable generations assume - courtesy of incessant mass-media groupthink - that its necessary to be a misanthropic asshole if you want to sound clever.
I miss Jobs. He was the one all these tech founders wanted to be. And Job, for all his faults always really cared about the product he made.
I feel like every founder is now some kind of grifter. Bouncing from new idea to new idea on how to make more money even if the whole thing is just smoke and mirrors.
I think it started with “developers developers developers” and kids went to colleges for CS degrees to get rich not to solve problems or geek out on hard problems but to get wealthy. That dropped in a lot of new personalities some of which were highly narcissistic.
The mafia game aspect is something I had not thought of. Have science fiction / dystopian novels focused on propaganda like that? Novels seem to have cartoonishly evil societies but the real world has stuff like this.
Not gone forever though. There were nerds at the start of the industrial revolution, they were there when electrification happened, when radio became feasible, rinse and repeat to the most recent iteration of "computer nerds".
A new thing will come along which the finance types won't recognise for its potential, nerdy types will start experimenting with it, make progress, gain some small successes but being nerds they're not really interested in creating large markets for their things. People with less eye for the detail but more for the market potential will pick it up, sometimes together with the nerds (Wozniak/Jobs), sometimes without them and create larger markets. If it really takes off like computers did there will be a wild-west period in which those who understand the technology - i.e. nerds - get to step out of the shadows for a bit until the technology is commoditised and the market is consolidated. Eventually there is less need to know the tech which has become 'boring' anyway so the nerds disappear into the shadows again to tinker with whatever scratches their itch.
The market is like society in that it needs both conservatives who recognise a good thing and do their best to keep it alive as well as progressives who are less interested in keeping things going than they are in changing things in search of some Platonic ideal. While the good thing is good the progressives are doing their things in their workshops without being seen much. When the good thing starts going bad the conservatives are mostly ignored because nearly everyone is looking at the progressives for a solution which is not "a faster horse" or "a lighter buggy whip".
Nothing happened to the Nerds. They are all showing their true colours.
They may have shared a love for technology, what they also shared is a deep immaturity.
The immaturity of a person not wanting to acknowledge and cary any responsibility for other people, for the consequences of their work, for any kind of accountability. Just play with their toys without any concern for the external world.
'I'm just here playing with tech and code'. Sure! but that stuff you're building is being weaponised by other (the venn diagram unfortunately overlaps) tech bro's so men can film women with their glasses in public like the little sick creeps they are. Or steal all their data. You can't pretend you are not responsible and complicit.
They want "what's theirs" and anything in their way - including people - have to comply or be destroyed.
We got old, slowly approaching retirement age, and now what is cool is being that guy or girl on Silicon Valley show, naturally with VC backing hoping to win the startup lottery.
It really changed when the game went from "Build the best product" to "Get the highest valuation" and the means of doing so were specifically NOT about building the best product. VC money was a factor, public exits were a factor, but even more generally, the idea became that you could become a billionaire without making anything at all.
Just create enough FOMO among the monied and you win. This is not nerd stuff... it's psychopath stuff.
Yes - Psychopathy is a thing, last time I researched, in the CEO territory.
I assume it is selected for.
I assume it benefits those at the tippy-top of the western corporate structure.
They make more money, taking advantage of situations that squish other people, in my view more quickly than those with fewer pathologies. In my personal experience they seem to be tacitly accepted by boards & investors. I understand "maximizing profits" is the job.
It became all about money. YC is actually really the epitome of this transformation. VCs started deploying massive amounts of money, turbocharged by Covid.
This is looking back at Apple through some very rose-tinted lenses. Apple had a big role in moving the tech industry toward "grift-adjacent". There were at least 2 contiguous decades when Apple products were unusable, poorly designed, self-important, overpriced pieces of junk. Some would argue they still are.
People bought Apple because they were subscribed to Steve Job's personality cult. Heck, they might've even bought a "not-a-flamethrower" if he tried to sell one.
I don't like Apple products really but 2 contiguous decades is a bit much? The first mac was good, os x when it first came out was phenomenal, and there aren't 2 decades in between there.
OS X was never good and still isn't. I need to install like 7 third-party usability tools to make myself productive on a Mac, including a tiling manager, a clipboard manager, and a not-broken replacement for Spotlight - very basic things.
Also, Steve Job's "font obsession" is overrated. The fonts on Windows have always been much better and render way better as well (even to this day). Helvetica Neue is widely considered one of the worst fonts and Apple used it for a whole 3 decades.
Nerds were bought out and turned into money and thus wife having chads. Now, the basement dwellers of today are actually tech illiterate and skillless with no charming qualities at all. Blame capitalism.
Seems illogical that you can quantify a subset of people that wouldn't even want to interact with the average joe on the clearweb. We're alive, intelligent and active on our IRC.
I know sites you have no idea about running on pure spite and strangeness. I am banned from almost all mainstream social media for wrongthink. What do you know about underground spaces?
Hell, just few weeks ago we ddosed one of new text only social media sites for having a bad font. There is a real microcosm down there. And war.
Don't go there. People would eat you alive for breakfast, doxx and possibly hack you as soon as you would start bragging about 'intelligence'.
That must be very cool for you, I know a lot of stuff too, and yet.. I don't go around about it like poser. I am not interested in any further "intellectual" exchange.
> Phase three (2015 to now): the tech industry as grift-adjacent. The digital commons of 2026 is defined by its grifters. So it's not purely tech's fault that its now seen as a sort of avenue for getting rich quick and amorally, even if you are an otherwise ordinary person. But it is our fault that many of our 'figureheads' are leaning way the hell in on this. Elon Musk is the most absurd example of this, but he almost doesn't count because he is in his own tier of ridiculously self-promotional and attention hungry.
There's a new trend to call everyone you don't like a "grifter". How is Elon a grifter? The dude has been getting shit done on and on for years. This is the opposite of grifter.
> One of them builds autonomous weapons for the Pentagon
Also what is this? Wasn't the whole point to have an agreement to not build AI weapons? I think the author is on some emotional screed.
Boring company was an anti-mass transit grift. Dogecoin. Humanoid robots as the future of Tesla. Colonizing Mars is a grift on unmatured boys who grew up on scifi. Etc.
Which is to say: you really couldn't remember any grifts?
come on man, what are you doing. must admit that i haven't followed this guy closely, but i thought with him being a part of Signal he would know better.
that actually makes me even more suspicious about Signal...
Great post, and largly captures my own experience.
I can only speak for my institution, but eagerness to lock down ip and keep ownership of everything tightly controlled and out of the hands of said nerds/inventors doesnt really incentivise me to do beyond what I'm paid for.
The one time I tried, I was hit by the full force of my institutions commercialization goons and lawyers, to a degree that it killed my drive to do anything novel for them. Despite being promised partial ownership, in the end, after federal grant funds were secured and product developed, they took everything using "loopholes" that go against the law and the institutions own rules, but to fight it I need resources I don't have, which the institution no doubt knows. All that despite me initially being fully aligned with my institution, and happy to only take a very minor share of actual profit, in-line with what i'd get anway, only stipulation was veto rights in application (as the tech has very real applications in offline autonomous drones, which I consider an X-treat).
If my own institution is a hostile actor, and willing to fuck me over nothing, simply because they can, why do anything?
So, current state of Copyright law favours institutions over the very individuals it was meant to protect, and there are no options to protect one self if anything interesting is developed without serious capital and legal might. So, fuck it, im not doing anything except hobby related, GPL licensed stuff. If I can do anything to make it hard to commercialize, I will. If it can be kept in house, it is kept there.
Capital interest has become a rather ugly and hostile egregore with interest aligned against that of humanity. All those building cool and novel shit I know hold similar opinions, so it is no surprise to me. I was strongly advised against working with the institution by older folks i look up to, people who have built really powerful tools of their own. Their warnings ended up being proven valid with deafening clarifty. I've always found the statement that capitalism breeds innovation to be a joke, and while it works in the chinese model, the "western" model is sick and suffers a sort of cultural psychosis that makes it rather unttractive to engage with.
Silicon Valley has always had a bit of a libertarian bent, but I really think a lot of people have spent a significant and successful effort at pushing it towards Objectivism.
Objectivism is a stupid, angry idea borne out of the atrocities of the Bolsheviks. It exists in a vacuum. Eddie Lampert named his yacht the Fountainhead which is amusing since, while I don’t question he has talent, he got millions in seed money to start his own fund from Richard Rainwater. Elon Musk is not some scrappy kid; the vast majority of founders are from comfortable and increasingly upper middle class families where they can tolerate the risk of failing with a reasonable safety margin and then delude themselves that they bootstrapped everything themselves.
Curtis Yarvin does not exist in a vacuum. These are awful people and the fact that we’ve allowed them to be taken seriously and control the conversation is…obscene.
What happened? Tech companies became trillion dollar companies and tech founders became billionaires. As a trillion dollar company, you are a military contractor and are deeply invested in and intertwined with the American imperial project.
Tim Apple [sic], Sundar Pichai, Sergey Brin, Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg, Sam Altman and Jeff Bezos all went to the inauguration to bend the knee. They all paid 7 figures plus to be there.
Being a billionaire is fundamentally incompatible with being a countercultural nerd. If anything, this was Silicon Valley returning to its roots. The first companies were founded before WWI (eg Federal Telegraph Co) but the true origins of the name "Silicon Valley" came from semiconductors and the likes of HP and Lockheed Martin as a Cold War defense offshoot.
The premise of the article is faulty. "Nerds" became "cool" as technology became more important, so sociopaths in leadership positions stated to pretend to be nerds. It's as simple as that.
I think a far more important question is why we no longer have more reasonable public figures. Who are the modern equivalents of Isaac Asimov or Richard Feynman?
The missing piece of data that distinguishes what happened to nerds and to finance bros is that nerds got sold on post-religious cults like Landmark, The Secret, or the metastasized principles thereof (see also Silicon Valley s01’s guru, the marketing for Devs, the documentary The Institute, et al.) — but finance bros were insulated against this because their employers and industry had rigorous belief systems already in place centered around money, profits, and self-confidence; and, most importantly, a much higher tolerance for arrogance.
So, in Civ6 terms: Nerds didn’t have an existing industry pantheon that could stand up to religious pressure by non-religious entities. This is part of what made Jobs and Apple so successful: arrogance is a stellar defense against religious pressure, and Jobs was implemented a rigorous culture that resists religious pressure very strongly. It’s not invulnerable to sects from within, but it’s nearly impenetrable to sects from without.
There’s also a subtler reason why Jobs and Woz could coexist at all: Jobs wasn’t arrogant and cruel to people because he looked down upon them; he was arrogant and cruel to ideas, and so to work with him, that detachment of idea from self-worth and ego and etc. was mandatory.
To use Woz and Jobs as a constructed spectrum analogy: Everyone perceives me as being more like Woz than Jobs interpersonally, though never fully Woz (I’m a little too distant for the tastes of the needy), until they invite me to critique their ideas or listen to my describe my own, at which point they (permanently thereafter) perceive me as being much more towards the Jobs end of the scale. It can be somewhat isolating and uncomfortable to ride alongside someone like that long-term, but that’s compensated for somewhat by having a work culture that prioritizes hallway chats over cubicle farms. (No coincidence the UFO, then!)
Most nerds lacked both the arrogance and unconcern for other people’s feelings that insulated Jobs against the belief grifters and the innate confidence that insulated Woz, and instead have what we see in Elon Musk: a deep and desperate craving for other people to like them, to value them, to adore them. (Praise him.) So of course most successful nerds fell prey to the basic grift that hooks people on religious and secular cults every day: “we’ll sell you a feeling of belonging, of being valued, in exchange for your adoption and propagation of our beliefs”. Jobs didn’t give a fuck if you propagated his beliefs or not, so long as you adhered to them at work; and Woz clearly doesn’t need to belong to be confident in his value to others.
Zuckerberg is a good example of someone who has the arrogance/asocial of Jobs down pat, but in contrast is fully decoupled from prosocial outcomes. Investigating what the guiding forces in Jobs’ life were that directed him towards prosocial outcomes, rather than asocial outcomes like Zuckerberg, would perhaps be quite revealing; Jobs built a company that tends to minimize harm to its customers, while Zuckerberg built a company that tends to maximize harm to its customers, but both succeeded at building institutions that resist external religious pressures. That’s a distinction missed by this post, and separates the outcomes neatly into a simple 2x2 matrix: asocial/prosocial (Jobs), asocial/apathetic (Zuckerberg), social/confident (Woz), social/needy (Musk).
the technology industry spent forty years accumulating a very specific kind of trust and mostly had boring motives, which made us appear trustworthy and largely benign
Are we on the same planet? Trust and motives? Is this some kind of secret that we’re not supposed to talk about? Tech, from its very beginnings, has been about libertarianism, subversion, counter culture, trying to be cooler than the people, wanting to wield power over them, misogyny, abusing free speech, racism, gatekeeping. The list keeps going of so many bad characteristics.
“core nerd values: a love of learning, curiosity, an obsessive interest in your domain, and an admirable humility”
Again what planet is this? Most nerds are some of the most self important condescending better than you social weirdos.
Ohhhh yes. Here it comes
“occasionally arrogant (not always, IMO. Sometimes you're just right.”
Ah yes applauding arrogance as correctness.
Phase One. Holy. The delusion here thinking that 1970-2007 was some golden CEO age. Do you live your life never understanding the incredible pain and exclusion and mistreatment that people experienced and continue to everyday? Is that by choice (willfully ignorant) or are you just this privileged that you thought the world was fantastic?
Here’s the fact: These CEOs, SVPs, Directors, Managers, Engineers didn’t just magically become shitty people in recent years. They’ve always been terrible people right down to the no-social-skills neckbeard who manages IT. This has always been the case. Might I remind you that computing was full of women? That’s how it started. What did boys do? They came in, kicked all the women out. Took over and then invited their buddies. It gets worse because then it also became racist. This was never a surprise. The root cause was that terrible people came in and ….. SURPRISE …. behave terribly.
This is some of the most delusional and downright offensive stuff I’ve ever read and I don’t even want to begin to read some of the HN comments. And HN has had far worse discussions and articles on the front page. Most of us have never experienced the depressingly (yes actual clinical depression) horrible treatment that people have been experiencing either as potential employees or full time employees ever since those ENIAC days. Go look at your team. And then look at your other teams. And then your line of management. You’ll see the pattern. Now go back and look at history for the same things. You’ll once again see the same thing. It’s the same people. Young terrible hateful xenophobic racist homophobic freaks grew up and continued their ways. Nerds being the good guy is as cringe as the incel nice guy. Yuck.
Our industry is rotten because it has rotten people all through the ranks. It’s not just CEOs or founders. It’s everyday working people who are terrible to each other. And sorry to say but nerds geeks whatever you want to call them are at the top of the most terrible. That’s what make this industry suck. We never actually sat down and told most of these people (and us) to goto a therapist and deal with our trauma, demons, etc. and stop propagating that hurt to others. Start there.
Oh and this is the same blog with a different URL from 2 days ago and commenter pointed out. Yikes.
This happens in any industry where value/status are at a premium.
Finance, Law, VC guys were good too in the beginning but when the value/status change happens it attracts certain kind of guys who are average in talent but excel in demonstrating value and social management of the value/status.
Another change which has happened recently is that the economics of engagement farming have become common place wisdom as already proven effective for everything from selling books, personal brand, career skill/virtue signalling, staying relevant.
Due to this everyone is talking more without restraint and not keeping in their own lane of earned expertise.
Academia is the most relevant, toxic example that I can think of. Be horrible to others on a short term contract (grad students, postdocs) and break them whilst extracting maximum value -- get more papers, more grants written -- more money -- success.
Be nice, think about hard problems for a long period of time, only speak up when you have something positive to contribute -- be labelled an underperforming academic and managed into obscurity.
A great example of this is Peter Higgs, who famously said that he'd be unemployed pretty quickly in the academia of 2013. [0]
[0]: https://www.theguardian.com/science/2013/dec/06/peter-higgs-...
The challenge is to distinguish "think about hard problems for a long period of time, only speak up when you have something positive to contribute" from slacking.
I am not arguing for bullshit metrics - I personally love working on things that may or may not pay off on a 10 year+ horizon and wish I could do more of that. But at the same time I've seen enough people coast to accept that most places that either isn't - or won't be seen as - tenable, at least not until/unless you've established a stellar track-record first.
A system that can’t tolerate occasional coasting is a system that can’t tolerate creative bursts. The trick is detecting “I secretly lost hope but my stream of income is very comfortable” when paying a costly salary; which would be mitigated somewhat by switching the tenure benefit of either pay enough to afford, or outright gift of, a single-family home (looks pointedly at Stanford) to a variation of residence halls, where the salary gift can be much less in exchange for benefits due creativity: reserved whiteboards, option for neighboring private rooms (table/bed/bath/shower) and research office, a couple of quiet floors, 120/240 and ether/fiber in every room, presentation rooms with ‘lives next door’ IT support, etc.
Hell, I’d take that IT job. Keeping projectors working for a bunch of impatient creative types in exchange for getting to listen in on their presentations and earn their confidence enough to discuss their research as an interested peer while I repair their computers? Eating good food in a mess hall as I listen to quantum physics in one ear and mathematical networks in the other?! Onto the dream jobs list it goes, impossible as it might be in today’s academia.
Agree with this. Occasional coasting is great. Sometimes you need to recharge. Sometimes it's when you'll get inspiration or find time to do that experiment that feels like leisure because it's fun but ends up paying off massively.
Slack is important.
But so much so that you become a magnet for people who intend to do nothing, or somewhere where people who have fallen into doing nothing aren't noticed and dig their heels in and never leave quickly becomes a problem...
Academia has tenure which basically allows the most capable researchers to "coast" as long as they have previously proven their skills via their tenure-track work. It seems to work quite well.
Way back MBARI was looking for a role that in part included keeping the servers on their research ships going. That was my dream job. Only interview I completely failed because I wanted it so much and froze. Imagine eating Phils when it was still a hole in the wall, chilling in Moss Landing. Decades later I still daydream about that job.
Their open house is next month; if you stopped by in the morning and asked to learn more about their vessel IT and told your story, odds are they’ll have someone with that role ashore from last month’s expedition that could chat with you for an afternoon. They exist because of dedication and are likely to respect it in kind. At worst you’d get to visit MBARI with seasoning, at best live another life-sheaf vicariously through someone else’s experiences :D
Many billionaires are starting up ocean expedition places, surely they'll want IT. Off the top of my head I can think of OceanX (Ray Dalio), Inkfish (Gabe Newell), RevOcean (Kjell Inge Rokke out of Norway). They're all building or already have massive ships with sophisticated IT and research equipment.
We shouldn't really seek to punish "slacking off" though. Because when the opposite of valuable contribution isn't slacking off it becomes unintentional sabotage. It's a lot less noticeable in jobs that don't have immediate consequences for poor performance, but it really stands out in jobs where it immediately matters like construction. In a lot of cases everyone is getting paid the same but talent stands out and some people work 5x faster, but at thing they are good at. If you aren't the guy that lays 10x tiles perfectly flat and straight per minute then just bring the materials, set out a couple tiles and wait around. You will literally see this play out on most construction projects as it looks like 10 people are standing around while 1 person works, but that's because everyone tends to recognize that it's better to do what you are best at or just don't do anything. And the foreman will tell you that too, when all the dirt has to be moved, the shovel guys are just as important as the guy that can separate two nickels with an excavator.
I agree we shouldn't, but until we're at a post scarcity point, we kinda have to at least keep it somewhat in check.
But if you're standing around because there isn't anything positive you can contribute at a given moment, that isn't "slacking off" to me. That isn't the problem.
The problem is if you create situations that effectively encouraged people to seek them out because slacking off won't get noticed.
If you don’t “punish” slacking off your institution falls behind even if there is no sabotage
If an IT department doesn't appear to be slacking off it is doing a poor job. It's much better to pay someone who prevents fires and sits around appearing to not be doing much, than a team constantly running around putting out fires that are costing a tone via lost productivity but look really busy.
I imagine scientific inspiration/insight comes in flashes. The ability to be honest in the job/what is going on/realistic is going to get much better results long term with better mental health, and trust making better internal dynamics.
We pay firemen to just sit in a house and hang out! I saw them the other day, just going for ice cream!
How do we apply the perception that that's a desirable state elsewhere?
That's the basic tenet of bureaucracy. A formalized way of doing something when nothing actually needs to be done but in a way that you can notice and respond to things that actually do need doing.
In the end we have to face that systems have failed to replace competent managers. If there isn't a chain of accountability starting at the top that can manage people without extensive justification in metrics and is properly incentivised to keep the organisation healthy, whatever we are left with will be gamed to the detriment of everyone.
Anyone relying on metrics should know about Goodhart's law.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goodhart%27s_law
The certainly don't teach you that in business school :)
And the Xerox Alto had a budget for 10 years. Unthinkable in today's "What did you publish?? Publish or it didn't happen. No R01 for you! (2 year funding)" culture.
Why is publishing papers an unreasonable expectation?
Isn't that the primary mechanism for exchanging knowledge and driving discussion among academics?
If not, what should replace it?
I’m not in academia so I might not know what I’m talking about at all, but: “Number if papers published” smells an awful lot like bs industry metrics like number of lines of code written, number of features shipped, number of bugs fixed and so on, that the industry wrongly rewards.
I don’t know what you’d replace “number of papers” with, but it probably should not be so easily quantifiable and gameable.
I have published all my papers since 2023 on the web. None were peer reviewed, but on pre-print servers.
Einstein's 1905 papers were published without peer review.
I still get spam emails asking me to pay for papers I've already uploaded to public servers years ago.
Here's one from this morning- already deleted by Google's spam filter: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1h8YVu5-DEx-1mOibiLpfJHrErvX...
The actual article was intended as a joke: https://vixra.org/abs/2405.0051 yet fraudulent publishers continue to treat it as a serious article.
It would be nice if publishing a fake paper every now and then could serve like a sinkhole for scammers, but I would be too optimistic or naive. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DNS_sinkhole
And academia will become even more toxic as opportunities shrink along with declining student enrollment. A lot of the third-tier colleges will close entirely.
This seems good, honestly. A degree from a third-tier college doesn't do anyone any good except the administrators at that college.
I feel great about my degree from my third tier college. I learned a lot I didn't expect to, got into a top tier grad school afterwards, and came away with no debt. Maybe me and the millions of other third tier college students are too dumb to know what's good for us, though.
I have been to a "third tier" college, but do you learn nothing there?
The competition for faculty jobs at any college is typically fierce, which means you can find excellent faculty almost anywhere.
> Be nice, think about hard problems for a long period of time, only speak up when you have something positive to contribute -- be labelled an underperforming academic and managed into obscurity.
I'm in academy and I'm mostly quiet and seek to contribute honestly and I've been managed into obscurity but I'm also quite happy, pay the bills, and more or less enjoy the work. If you want glory you have to deal with bullshit. If you don't want glory, life provides many opportunities to live a modest but productive life.
Over 99% of students who attempt your "mostly quiet" strategy are managed entirely out of academia long before tenure.
You won the lottery, which is great for you, but it's not a strategy to promote to others as life advice.
I'm not tenured and I doubt I will ever be and I'm not even interested in it. I have a support role in academia, get to teach, and am pretty well compensated (though I make 2-3x less than I could in the private sector. But its enough.)
It's the money side that applies pressure there. It's great that you're able to make enough money but a lot of people who aspire to the quiet academic life are stuck in the lower tiers making a pittance.
This is because there are far more people wanting a quiet academic life than there are jobs providing a quiet academic life with a livable wage.
And this is likely to become even more out of balance as college enrollment declines and there are smaller and smaller cohorts of freshmen as fertility continues to decline.
There are pittances and then there are pittances. I make a bit more than a typical adjunct or whatever because I have very specialized skills, but its ok not to make a lot of money.
I mean this is a place where the founder just wrote a blog post about being a billionaire. I'll never be a billionaire, thats for sure.
But I genuinely believe that pursuing that goal is vanity, bad for people mentally and "spiritually" and bad for the world.
There's a lot of wisdom here.
Great little article. 12 years later, he is still right on every count. Who would have thought that Peter Higgs was a very clever, clear-thinking man
I'm an academic mathematician in a US research-oriented department.
I'm happy to report that I've observed very little of what you describe.
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To get tenure in STEM, you need to publish 1 to 3 papers a year. If you only publish once per year, you'd be on the low end, so you always have to think about your next paper. You always have to try to work on something that would be publishable within the next 6 months to a year, but preferably within 6 months.
presumably in between thinking they're teaching classes, advising grad students, and publishing something -- because it's "publish or perish"
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All of the low hanging fruit that could be discovered by self-funded gentlemen scientists has been picked. That doesn't scale to a supercollider or a large RCT. Funding at the whims of rich benefactors is very susceptible to petty politics.
Politics is irreducible from human affairs, privatization doesn't eliminate politics. It relocates it to a different set of actors. That could be a better set, but when it is it's because it's a more local and hands on group of people, not because those people happen not to work for the government. Governments are awkward because they are deep bureaucracies, and deep bureaucracies divorce the decision makers from the impact of their decisions. Weaker feedback leads to worse decision making. Not because there is a magic property of government that makes it uniquely bad. Large corporations, universities, and other deep non-governmental bureaucracies have similar pathologies.
That's something of an exaggeration, they are empowered to do violence and collect taxes and other things that are more problematic when abused, but still, privatization isn't a silver bullet.
>Politics is irreducible from human affairs, privatization doesn't eliminate politics. It relocates it to a different set of actors.
We ideologically privatised the water sector into regional private monopolies in the UK, and anyone who's had experience with the water monopolies knows this is the truth.
I don't know, maybe it's the way I was raised, but to me it just seems like common sense that a privatised monopoly is going to be worse in literally every metric imaginable, than maintaining public ownership - not just with regards to water and/or similar critial-to-life infrastructure, but everything in general. Highway 407, the most expensive toll road on the planet, is a prime reminder to Ontarians why privatisation is objectively bad.
We in the US did the same with PG&E (gas and electric utility) out in California. It goes as well as expected, which is to say poorly.
In the UK, gas & electric is also privatised and in a poor state too :)
Almost like private investment generates return for investors, not customers. Sometimes those align.
Can't really compare a natural monopoly (water utility) that should be the government with something that isn't a natural monopoly (research).
I think you can in the limited sense it supports the idea privatisation doesn't remove politics, just relocates it and often into a less democratically accountable place to boot.
Whenever a person or group has power over another person or group, politics necessarily exists. I don't think this fact can be avoided, as much as advocates of privatisation often argue that it can be.
I am suspicious of this fruit-altitude analogy due to its long history of use, and 100% failure rate.
That sounds like excellent grounds for suspicious but I don't know what you mean. We were talking about Peter Higgs for example. I don't think Peter Higgs could have self funded CERN. I don't think a thousand Peter Higgs could have. Nation state level resources are the table stakes for fundamental research into particle physics, because everything beneath that barrier has already been explored - I don't think that's really controversial.
It's definitely an exaggeration to say that all science on a shoestring budget has already been accomplished, there are new frontiers out there. But once they start gaining momentum, the low hanging fruit will be consumed in due course. Methodically searching a domain works and works from the most tractable end up until it is at the frontier of what is tractable given our current technology/constraints.
I don't really understand the alternative hypothesis. That there's an infinite amount of low hanging fruit? What's this 100% failure rate?
The points your making make sense. I am thinking of it like this: Say there is an elegant argument. It checks out at first. Then you do the unit analysis, and find out the units don't match! But you still don't find the flaw in the original argument; maybe because it's suble in some way. That's where I am: Very smart people have been writing things in the vein of your post here for millenia, and it always seems convincing in the light of contemporary knowledge! Then is proven to be incorrect by major advancements.
Perhaps this will help: Indeed high energy physics is a very high budget project! But there are many areas of the natural sciences which are not high energy physics. This area has been a big deal over the past few decades, and I wonder if it's an over-commitment at the expense of other areas.
You can do many molecular bio lab techniques with a budget of $10k in equipment and reagents, for example. (If used/entry level) I believe there are also many areas in science, chem, and bio which can be done on a theoretical level, or with computers, etc.
Another angle: We are in the earliest steps of neuroscience. Many biology tools and techniques are borrowing something serendipitous we found in nature (CRISPR, TAQ polymerase etc, leveraging living cells' equipment to produce proteins etc). We have no concept of a general chemistry simulator. Molecular dynamics simulations can only work on very small systems for very small timescales, and are based on many approximations, and assumptions which provincialize them. We are very likely missing a big picture of the lower levels of GR/QM. It is very hard for me to agree with "Yep we're good; nothing left to discover here without really expensive equipment!".
Yeah, I agree. It works as an argument for why science can't rely on wealthy benefactors, not for understanding what is possible with a given budget at a given point in time. And biology and chemistry are good counterexamples where capabilities are getting smaller and cheaper.
I would point out that that's on the back of a huge amount of research funded by grants and performed in national labs, but it doesn't impact your argument.
> I don't think Peter Higgs could have self funded CERN. I don't think a thousand Peter Higgs could have
Higgs didn't use the LHC to write the paper which won him the Nobel prize.
Additionally, I think it's worth considering that the availability of the money that built the LHC alleviates the drive to find different solutions.
As they say, "necessity is the mother of invention." I frequently think of the great pyramids and people being baffled on how they would build something of that scale without modern equipment. It's hard to get your mind to come up with novel ideas when it already knows that you'd use cranes, trucks, etc. to do it today.
> Whenever something gets subsidized by the government it inevitably becomes dominated by exploitive petty politics.
When younger I've had job in grocery stores and saw petty politics.
There's nothing particular to being subsidized or not: politics is something humans do, and the pettiness is simply a reflection of the people involved.
Have you worked in a corporation? How sane was that corporation? Did it seem to even value its own survival? (Not corporations in general. In general they seem great. Just curious about the ones you actually did time in.)
"Whenever something gets subsidized, it inevitably becomes dominated by exploitive petty politics."
I think it's just limited resources + the single most natural way for humans to compete for limited resources. This isn't actually an inevitable outcome - just the most likely one.
The "self-funding" regime requires people who are both rich enough to afford to fund science and sharp and driven enough to advance science to exist. That's a high bar. And while there is some correlation between intelligence and wealth, the tails come apart hard. People driven to pursuit wealth above all may not be driven to pursue scientific discovery.
We have plenty of billionaires, and preciously few of them actively pursue pushing the frontiers of science and technology. Even by funding the endeavors - let alone by being in the trenches themselves.
It has crossed my mind that being a scientist is for people who are already financial independent. Same as being an artist. For the rest of us, we need focus on careers where we can make a living. Of course, we can still do science and art as hobbies, but it is rather risky pretending to make a living from it.
> Whenever something gets subsidized by the government it inevitably becomes dominated by exploitive petty politics.
Your US-blend of anti-state brainwashing is showing. There is nothing inherently different in the for-profit status of an organization that prevents the occurrence of "exploitive petty politics". You see those from any organization from homeowners organization to full blown FANGs. I mean, have you ever paid attention to the crap being pushed by the likes of Tesla/SpaceX/Twitter?
the only ingredient needed is humans
The stakes are never higher when the stakes are so low.
Law was good people when? During the era of the 3/5ths compromise? Dredd Scott? Plessy? Lochner v NY? Buck v Bell? Korematsu?
Finance was good people when? When Swiss banks captured all the war spoils of WW2? When they ran Penny Auctions during the Great Depression? When they financed slave ships? When the Medici financed endless war across Europe?
I’m not saying people are all awful, but I don’t think there’s any “before times” where people were better than they have been since then in any ageless profession. Perhaps there’s some degree of variance or even ebb-and-flow patterns.
> Law was good people when? During the era of the 3/5ths compromise? Dredd Scott? Plessy? Lochner v NY? Buck v Bell? Korematsu?
All of those are only things because there were lawyers willing and eager to sue the government over the evils at issue, so your point is much weaker than you think.
That’s actually exactly my point. That all these fields have had good and bad people the entire time and that the ratios probably don’t change all that much.
It sounds like you’d agree with me.
Well, yeah, I suppose I don't disagree with your overall point lol, sorry if comment sounded overly combative
Law and finance were sources of and avenues to money and power from the outset. Took some time for tech to emerge as such.
Artistophanes lampooned the Sophists and lawyers in his Greek comedies. When using words as your literal way to power and change, you will have demagogues.
> Law was good people when?
I'm a fan of Cicero.
Cicero was so obnoxiously pompous and vain. Maybe go further back to Solon?
I think you miss the point, it's not that they were morally good or only in pursuit of lofty goals. But the culture was different and the profession wasn't dominated by monetary opportunity seekers. Look back in historical newspapers and you won't find a single ad for personal injury attorneys.
That's because it was illegal for lawyers to advertise their services until 1976. See Bates v. State Bar of Arizona:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bates_v._State_Bar_of_Arizona
Yes ultimately it's advertising the leads heavily to the enshifification of any industry.
> That's because it was illegal for lawyers to advertise their services until 1976
I'd have thought limited-liability partnerships (and with it, the mega shops) did more damage.
How do we remove that? Those are the exact kind of people most intelligent people find quite grating in an organization - though because they self-promote so much its difficult to unpack the truth until they have kind of weaseled their way into an entrenched position (normally they are reasonably good at politics).
I'll use the All-in podcast as a perfect example of the type of person described. They have some value in that they have palace intrigue + arguably asymetric access to information.
>Those are the exact kind of people most intelligent people find quite grating in an organization
Most intelligent people contribute to this as well though. Being intelligent doesn't automatically remove egoistical traits, for some it's even supercharged if it results in personal growth within the organization.
None of those categories were ever “nice”, wtf.
public defender lawyers who fought for workers rights and against items like company towns, abolitionists, etc. many good lawyers
finance people who invented life insurance, health insurance, car insurance, friendly societies. as much as we complain about insurance here in the US, life was immeasurably worse when there was none. there was no such thing as state health care or social security in those days
you would be surprised to find that there are many people in finance who never tried to make a quick buck, and are pretty altruistic. this is evidenced by the large amount of family owned banks
tech now going through what finance did in the 1980s, shift to greed and excess
The "good lawyer" is/was a major archetype in modern Western culture. See "The Devil and Daniel Webster", "To Kill a Mockingbird", "Paths of Glory", just to name a few examples.
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Totally. I feel the author, we just used to nerds, but now the space is occupied by social media and false narrative that revolves around founders. No ego hurt here of course - but it is hard to imagine Woz or Stallman to ask for a mass surveillance program or ads in AI or pushed AI search in internet search. I believe this article actually went to this realm - tech for tech, having fun…but all we get is maxxxx enshitification.
Yeah, for law I imagine these "nice" beginnings were 2000 years ago at best. If they even existed at all. But all these jobs where talking to other humans is paramount will be dominated by extroverted quacks by default. Same goes for the capital raising college dropout pseudo-tech-bros. They were never nice, they just weren't so engaged in public discourse before, when billion dollar net worths still meant you actually had revenue and not just a vague trendy idea.
Not that far. Lawyers had a great deal of influence in creation of all modern nation-states, human rights, international law and maintenance of the core social contract in the modern society.
Similarly lawyers/bankers were the ones who built in trust in capital, contracts, businesses and protection of investor rights. Delaware c corp is not an outcome of bad guys.
That’s a system though that seems to be at the breaking point.
Yes. It might be a general property of all human organizational structures, to degrade over time in terms of intent drift and erosion of public goodwill.
It offers some predictive power if so, like OBAFGKM + luminosity is enough to determine where a star is on its lifecycle. Maybe there's a similar domain that maps some human coordination structure onto a deterministic trajectory from birth to death.
If that were the case, I wouldn't be surprised to see venture capital--as an organizing principle for the tech industry--reaching a later stage of life.
Hey it's the one that Turchin managed to have not named... psychohistory. Fair enough, that's not absolutely about a one-way life-cycle (From not overly much to sometimes less than zero, or its counterpart There and back again).
For VC, go back to the Medicis? Obsession with Roman over Athenian (ie, not even Macedonian or ahem Florentinian, whom, as you know, were blessed-- by themselves-- with nonTrumpian^W (-"anti"-)papist perturbations) can only push them closer to all of extant theory. They don't get to have Germanics explain their early policy failures, eg
Update: for the record, I hold the opinion that libertarianism and liberalism (social, political but not to forget the far less trendy "fiscal") should be right next to each other in parameter space. One may be allowed to define a metric that puts a firewall, or, if you are less amused, an event-horizon _around_ them. I'd suggest "make things people want"
Sure, but Turchin's overproduction of elites doesn't suggest a birth and death cycle right?
It's a system that gets out of balance and needs to adjust over time. He calls the process that moves the system out of whack the "wealth pump". I don't think tech oligarchs are responsible for the wealth pump, they just benefit from it.
Whatever causes organizational structures to decay seems like something more general than that. Or maybe it doesn't exist at all. Or maybe it's just some Nth level effect of entropy itself. Except so far removed from simple physical measurements that it feels intellectually lazy to just label whatever is happening as "entropy" and move on.
Unknown. Fun to think about. It also makes aging a little more interesting, because it creates a framework for me to the world events I live through within--even if it's all bs in the end.
https://youtu.be/B5cMfyFqKmM?t=25m37s
You can play with his model
To your other points, I need to clear cache for them overnight, not now.. maybe I can have a response tomorrow
I haven't played with the model myself, it's possible that there's energy getting pumped into the model (unlikely to be the same thing as the wealth pump--- that seems to be internal. This energy pump _could_ take care of entropy but in all likelihood it does not
Eyeballing
https://youtu.be/B5cMfyFqKmM?t=24m8s it seems to be buried in the g(S) term but I'll have to get into the weeds)
Whatever is not (vaccuosly) true about T's model should be something he hasn't yet anticipated. Ime with other proven-relevant models
what about Seldon's :)?
Louisiana (or say. Crimea) X GPT
Asimov trashed that word!
Foundation is so disappointing because the science of civilization turned out to be a front for mind controllers armed with the psychic powers that
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_W._Campbell
insisted stories in Astounding Science Fiction had to have. (Also disappointing because it wasn't really finished but filled in with 1980s sequels that revealed more lies behind the lies instead of following the thread through the 1000 year interregnum)
Y'all not gonna like this..
https://youtube.com/shorts/tp0vpuQxNpc
You don’t have to go back that far. Read To Kill a Mockingbird for an example of a really nice lawyer.
I mean, it is a work of fiction.
A work of fiction which has been revealed to be semi-autobiographical.
Along these lines always watch the flow of entrepreneurial Asians.
> This happens in any industry where value/status are at a premium.
So, all of them?
Right? Isn’t that just tautology? This happens in industries where value is valued and status confers status?
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> guys who are average in talent but excel in demonstrating value and social management of the value/status
aka techbros
I got into programming and computers due to their intellectual depth, and the exciting opportunities they opened to explore everything from electronics to obscure areas of mathematics... through to theory of mind and the dream of making silicon think.
The combination of endless trend-chasing, software churn, and techbro culture made me hate everything about software, so I jumped ship to biology.
> ... through to theory of mind and the dream of making silicon think.
I think part of your naiveté was thinking this goal was likely to turn out as a net benefit for humanity. Maybe it eventually will. But the current scenario was always the most likely scenario for machines rivaling or surpassing humans in intelligence.
Well, and now with the push towards AI slop and letting agents do work for you, it is even less about creativity and talent. You can't even chase trends in libraries while still being clever about it any longer, you gotta chase more and more braindead ways of getting code generated based on tons and tons of mediocre code found online, gobbled up by big tech without the original creator s' consent.
I think that plenty of 'nerds' would very much disagree about that. Steering agents effectively is something that can take massive amounts of creativity and talent and be quite helpful wrt. the final result. There's no real analogue of this in traditional programming.
Sure there's an analogue.
It's being the tech lead of a team of junior to mid level developers. You design roughly what the solution should look like, split it into reasonable sized tasks so they don't go off the deep end, advise them on some of the details, then assign them the tasks and let them get on with it, keeping an eye on what they're doing, reviewing their output, and course correcting them when they go wrong.
Just like with a team of humans, you have to use your judgement as to how much supervision they need individually and how large a task you can give them without them going off the rails.
Thats my thought as well, LLM agents put you in the role of a (often micromanaging) tech/team lead of a small team, but the speed and fast feedback loop makes it look different.
Oh it's different alright. Yell at a human employee to tell them they're a fucking loser enough times and at best they'll quit on you. The way some people talk to their LLM is ghastly.
And there are also papers that tell thats effective https://arxiv.org/pdf/2510.04950
Yes.
As AI improves every white collar job becomes a management job. With the previous conception of an Individual Contributor role disappearing.
And isnt that management job also tomorrow's disappearing IC role? A management agent seems quite possible to me.
https://ceobench.com/
What’s hard to automate about management is getting employees on board, not the concrete tasks. If an AI instructed you to spend 5 minutes a day talking to it about your day, would you do it?
No, thats not what gets automated. My comment was for the parent where IC roles transformed to agent managment roles, which I think just another role for agents to manage - themselves. In other words coordination of other agents, not humans, who are now out of the loop.
Hm, on each interview since ever, every time the inevitable "where do you see yourself in X years" question popped up, I was like, I have no ambition of getting promoted to managers, if that's what you mean. I like coding. I want to keep coding. I can advise juniors if _that's_ what you mean. But I want to code.
And here I am. Coding is becoming management in front of my eyes.
Meh :-|
Sure there is, offshoring, now the chat window is with my computer instead on the other side of the planet.
Not everyone wants to be a team lead not doing coding any longer.
Also, I'd rather lead a team of humans that I can interact and talk with in real life instead of a team of bots.
How so?
The models get better and better at understanding the intent of a prompt and doing more useful work with less intervention.
You keep telling yourself that.
The problem was very few nerds realized this was the most likely outcome as they devoted themselves to improving machine intelligence.
And yet even more nerds than ever are devoting themselves to AI. I just wonder - to what end?
It’s the only path for being able to pay your rent or mortgage without leaving the technology field altogether.
The phrase "fuck you, I got mine" comes to mind.
The logical end seems to be another case of pulling up the ladder behind them as they climb up, others be damned. Sadly seems to be a pretty universal human trait, whether intentional or not.
I'm a SWE, helping build AI infrastructure.
I get where you're coming from, but I haven't "got mine", at least not yet. I'm still relatively early in my career.
If AI fulfills its promise, I might lose my job. If the bubble bursts, I'll definitely lose my job.
For now, it's where the money is. I'd like to make money now so that I won't have a completely horrible time if things ever take a turn for the worse.
> Finance, Law, VC guys were good too in the beginning but when the value/status change happens it attracts certain kind of guys who are average in talent but excel in demonstrating value and social management of the value/status.
Those career paths were always crooked. We see that going back to my great grandparents time with Black friday of 1929. They fucked around with unrestricted capitalism, and found out. Quite a few killed themselves by throwing themselves off of buildings.
It was only when FDR took office and worked with Congress to make tons of rules keeping the money hoarders from destroying the economy yet again. And it bloody worked. For those of you who say FDR was a communist, absolutely not. He was fighting against a large contingent of the population who were socialists and communists. He did appease some of their demands, bit not many.
FDR led us into our most glorious 20 years, the 1950's to 1960's. Cheap education, cheap homes, plentiful well paying jobs, only needed 1 worker per house. Thats what the boomers remember and want.
And it was systematically dismantled piece by piece.
'VC guys were good too'?!?! I take it you do t remember the 1980's Mergers and Acquisitions crisis? Thats when enough data was available for a company, that mergers, acquisitions, and liquidations coukd make a handful of people scads of money, and destroy the economy to boot.
And i also scarce remember a time when 'Finance' was good. Their slur was beancounters. Something costs $20 but saves $1000? Nope, its -20$. The loss is never analyzed. Every job Ive woeked in has had this perverse logic.
And especially with money, Goodharts Law comes to mind. "When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure".
"Men living in democratic ages have many passions but most of their passions either end in the love of riches or proceed from it." Alexis de Toqueville
Unless you were black then you might think good god these yts gonna displace us again with a new new deal.
I know youre trying be inflammatory, but also accurate.
US culture has always had an out-group that could be sacrificed to the capitalist machine. And even Northern rhetoric woukd have people believe that slavery didnt exist there. Ive been in Boston at the slave docks. Banned in 1830's btw there. And slavery also benefitted the North even if banned.
And after the Civil war, black folks were still 3rd class. Took another 100 years to get the same legal rights. And even now, blacks are underpaid compared to the same jobs by whites.
Most of wealth extraction to black communities is mostly complete. Musk runs datacenters using methane generators in black communities, horrifically polluting them. And the republicans who run the cities/states dont care.
But the USA has effectively run out of people to sacrifice. Now, theyre coming for the middle-income whites. Thats the squeeze we're seeing. And thats not going to end well. Likely will be horrifically violent.
I pray you are right, this country deserves a good spanking.
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I don’t know why you’d think “being interested in nerdy stuff like computers” would somehow translate into virtuous behavior. They seem like entirely different things to me, in the sense that I wouldn’t expect a writer, or a baker, or a chef to have typical ethical behaviors as a group.
“What happened” was just that some people got rich and powerful and their real personalities showed through. This is not a new thing in any sense at all, from Rockefeller to Bill Gates – both “technology entrepreneurs”.
The OP is mostly talking about image, not reality. What image do tech founders choose to project.
OPs timeline is somewhat off. They posit a golden era for the 1980s-2007 but that’s not right. Tech CEOs have often been hard-charging salespeople and businessmen. Look at early Wired magazines and there was much celebration of random rich guys in suits, as much as the nerdy tech creators. This was the “suit/hacker” dichotomy.
Google was the company that really exploded that paradigm, from their rise to prominence circa 2002 or so, to their IPO and post-IPO halo, around 2005-2007.
Now the nerds didn’t need the suits. They would run their own company.
They were shockingly wealthy and powerful but it was made to seem as a kind of distraction from their true nature. They marketed their own virtue and renunciation, both to the public, and to their own staff. Their business model rejected the previous search engine paradigm (backroom deals and paying for placement) in favor of a new one (complex math to produce the best results). They told the public and their staff the famous “don’t be evil”, and also “focus on the user and all else follows”. There was even a pronouncement that Google would never do such tawdriness as horoscopes.
The theme was that nerdiness was a kind of incorruptibility because a nerd was honest, unconcerned with social status, and unworldly. Let them into your life and they’ll make it all better. Larry Page and Sergey Brin cultivated that image, holding internal and external events where they made themselves look ever nerdier than they actually are, even wearing lab coats.
Now, this didn’t last and was never true. Soon after the IPO, Larry and Sergey bought themselves not just a corporate jet, but a commercial airliner. They justified it as something that was “good for the world” because they could use it to get entire teams of NGO workers on missions of mercy. It actually became a party plane, as far as I know.
I don’t know about everyone else but “nerds” have never had a positive image to the general population.
Nerds as honest or incorruptible? In popular media, from Revenge of the Nerds to The Simpsons to Big Bang Theory, the defining feature of “nerds” is that they have poor social skills and less regard for their fellow humans.
Now people like Jeff Bezos or Elon Musk look like the nerds that now have money and power! Ah ha! “It doesn’t matter what others think of me now! This is revenge for looking down on me before!”
I always interpreted terms geek and nerd as: geek is someone knowledgeable extremely into a some tech or scifi or some such".
Nerd is geek plus low social skills. He may be just awkward and once you get used to it he is actually nice. Or, he may be as asshole. But always weird.
You may be right. Ut that’s just pointless bike-shedding.
harrall is right that to the general populace, nerds/geeks are interchangeable terms for people who prefer to study/play with computers rather than socialise with the rest of us.
That doesn’t necessarily mean they have a better moral compass and will always do the right thing. Those are images that nerds put onto themselves.
I agree with more compass.
But I genuinely find it weird that Musk and CEOs in general are called geeks or nerds. Their whole thing is that they made a choice to spend less time doing actual tech work and a lot more time doing business, managing, dealing, etc. Whole their success is predicated on their ability to make people do what they want. They are not spending time tinkering with computers, they are spending time schmoozing for investment contacts. That is literal opposite of a nerd or a geek.
In the "revenge of the nerds" drama, they would be ultrasocial jocks bullies with cool computer game at home.
People have made "nerdiness" a premium because other nerds view it as passion. The rationale is that if you craft something out of passion, it will somehow be better than. I think it also comes down to the fact that many tech nerds view engineering more as a art than cold engineering, and they view themselves as artists and artisans.
There's also this age-old belief that if you do something out of passion, you're willing to pull more hours, and do whatever it takes to reach your goals.
I also believe that nerds, whatever thing they are obsessed with, make their nerdiness a personality defending trait. Their nerdiness is their personality. And if others aren't as willing to commit, they're simply frauds or wannabes.
Probably one of the most ego-crushing realizations (if you're a nerd) is to discover that there are people out there MUCH more talented and higher performing than what you'll ever be, but with none of the obsession or pride. In other profession that's not really a topic. You can be a top performer in other professions, without a deep interest, clock out 4 daily, and never think about work outside work.
In tech, however, it is too often assumed that you must be consumed by tech. Otherwise you're not really that passionate about it.
> Probably one of the most ego-crushing realizations (if you're a nerd) is to discover that there are people out there MUCH more talented and higher performing than what you'll ever be, but with none of the obsession or pride. In other profession that's not really a topic. You can be a top performer in other professions, without a deep interest, clock out 4 daily, and never think about work outside work.
You could clock out, but I don't think the top performers ever stop thinking about work. Everything you've written here has to be wrong.
Depends on the work. I've worked places (military intel) where you leave work at work, simply because it is impossible to take work with you home. Some of the people I worked with said that was exactly why they chose that line of work - so that they never had to think about work when they came home. Some of those were also top performers.
But I also knew other top performers that basically had geopolitics as their hobby, and would study OSINT (open-source intelligence) when they came home.
And obviously there are many other professions where you can do really well, and don't think a second about work when your day is over. Really depends on how your work is structured!
Some people are naturally talented at things. It’s no different than an average athlete who works extremely hard and an elite athlete who puts in half the work but still outperforms the average.
What? Elite athletes put in unimaginably more work than average athletes.
I think what he meant was that you can take a group of people and train them for a sport. Some of those people (genetically elite athletes) will improve very quickly with minimal training, others can do massive amounts of training and never reach beyond a certain level.
Yes, this is what I mean. It's not that talent doesn't exist, but it's never the case that people on the top of their domain work less hard than others. In fact, it's the opposite. People don't have talent, the talent has them.
Not necessarily. See George Best
Elites who put in a lot of work are world class. You can’t outwork genetics.
I promise you top performers aren't always thinking about work. There is proof in going detached from work problems and doing other things can help produce novel solutions. Same principle as getting a good night's sleep vs cramming the night before a test. Your subconscious does a lot of lifting. Never being able to put down work is just anxiety masked as dedication, in my book.
> Everything you've written here has to be wrong.
This is certainly incorrect.
all the best coders and engineers I've worked with have been nerds and very passionate about computers
passion is necessary but not sufficient to be the best. you can be top 20% without passion, but you can't be top 1%
I agree with you there's a lot of gatekeeping around "passion" for tech. I don't like that framing, but having seen the effect of success and the type of people it has brought into the industry that would never have even considered a few decades ago, I see why people look for supplemental signals, even if the ones they pick are wrong and effectively just shallow tribalism.
However I think this really misses the mark:
> Probably one of the most ego-crushing realizations (if you're a nerd) is to discover that there are people out there MUCH more talented and higher performing than what you'll ever be, but with none of the obsession or pride. In other profession that's not really a topic. You can be a top performer in other professions, without a deep interest, clock out 4 daily, and never think about work outside work.
This is a strawman based around immature, fragile-ego individuals. There are plenty of nerds who realize intelligence, talent, and resourcefulness are completely orthogonal traits from interest in tech. The former is over-represented in online discourse, and the latter is more common in engineering leadership in top companies. You can't really be a top-performer in any large-scale effort without realizing that there are top performers in all domains, and they have insights you don't have. You can't do great things if you don't leave space to learn about your own blind spots, and have a productive dialogue with people who have a completely different mental framework than you.
There’s also the over inflated sense of self worth. Programmers are a breed apart when it comes to arrogance.
Nerd-dom has also somehow merged with the world of fantasy and fandom. These are subcultures obsessed with hero journeys, morality tales, escapism, and cartoonish black-and-white ethical systems. I don't expect such people to handle fame and wealth well at all.
> I don't expect such people to handle fame and wealth well at all.
Maybe this is just a human trait in general? Seems every person from any subculture fall victim to "fame and wealth" basically turning them into an evil and greedy person, maybe 1/1000 manages to still stay human in such transition. Or is there any subcultures in particular where most people seem to actually be able to handle "fame and wealth" without the problems that you've observed people from other subcultures?
There's plenty of wealthy folks who aren't especially evil or greedy in any real way, but you wouldn't know that because they don't tend to show off or spend their wealth to begin with, they just shepherd it and grow it carefully. Sometimes over generations, eventually turning it into sustainable 'old money'.
> There's plenty of wealthy folks who aren't especially evil or greedy in any real way, but you wouldn't know that because they don't tend to show off or spend their wealth to begin with
I'm well aware, I'm personally early-retired person with financial independence, and of course I have friends too :) With that said, many of them are greedy, some in big ways others in smaller ways, even if they're generally good people too.
I think it's the combination of "famous + wealthy" that seems to poison people, pick one of them and it doesn't seem so bad, but both together seems like a recipe for disaster.
My first- and second- hand experience with rare counterexamples is that if you meet a Hollywood star in person they will make a good impression; as if they make a bad impression it will make an impression and you will tell your friends.
Lately I’ve been doing a sort of street performance which makes it very likely people will remember me and that again motivates me to be nice.
On the other hand I hear Elon Musk comes across better in person than he does on X and Trump seemed pretty cordial meeting with Zohran Mamdani.
Actors, trained to get to their cognitively resonant freq at a snap. Graham Norton show is complex enough to show off their basic charisma. No need for "reverse-psycho" multidim post-AI inoffensive-charm-offense that has Thiel's approval. Prediction: not going to see Karp appear, guy is too "complicated" (normies: creepy) for an "ivy league" game. with respect to sama. Needs an academic-sociopath drinking game show together with Sarah Payne, Thiel himself, Catherine,David Deutsch etc. it's probably going to be some kind of faux-snobbish LATAM liquor. Fernet con Coca?
Musk is basically a nerd who's ever surprised at what he can get away with, other times over his head in technical matters, and still other times suffering the South African typr of elite arrested development.
Trump recognised that he was facing a equal or better operator. Musk would feel insecure in the same situation. That's nerd. Maybe Trump has a similar training as actors (by actors?), just not to the frequencies normies expect :)
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Obsessed fans will talk your ear off about the amazing scene where the superhero had to choose between saving humanity and the magical macguffin as though it were the most sophisticated storytelling ever created. Their frame of reference is very narrow.
I’m sure there are lots of sophisticates on here who enjoy that stuff along with a wider variety of literature. But the ones I know who love it are almost exclusively into it.
It's not just the nerds who enjoy lowbrow culture.
It's almost tautological that most people enjoy middle brow or low brow cultural products. Reality TV shows, soap operas, romance novels, professional wrestling, etc.
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But Nerd-dom was always merged with fantasy and sci-fi?
Star Trek, Star Wars, Dune, LOTR, Asimov, Clarke, Hobbes, are all nerd-dom mainstays, like D&D.
Back in those times we made a distinction between nerds and geeks, with geeks really being a sort of subset of nerds that was just interested in the technicals.
I always found attempted distinctions between nerds and geeks to be kinda fake. As long as I've been alive, there's been so much overlap that any distinction is at best a slight and unreliable shade of meaning (e.g. nerd "sounds" a shade more academic/grades focused, but "computer geek" and "computer nerd" are synonyms).
I think that distinction was invented post-facto. For most people they were pretty much synonyms in every day usage.
Fandom-as-identity was a niche thing even within nerddom until quite recently.
Also a lot of those properties had a lot of substance there decades ago and have since been watered down and turned into memeable cliches.
I think maybe a simpler explanation is that tech has been such a story of purportedly humble people becoming wildly successful. Classic rags to riches. Makes it easy to think of nerds as one of the common people, even the rich ones.
This is so true. The obsession with framing things in black and white permeates everything, including unfortunately work in tech. This has always had me keep my distance from “fellow” nerds, despite ostensibly being one.
I'm not claiming everyone uses the terms this way but for your consideration:
Geeks - Obsessed over fictional world(s). Nerds - Obsessed over the real world (or a specific part of it).
Comics Geek Math Nerd
There's a decent amount of overlap though.
> These are subcultures obsessed with hero journeys, morality tales, escapism, and cartoonish black-and-white ethical systems.
Which subcultures do not tend to value these things?
Bill Gates was always a POS, reading about his behaviour earlier on doesn't make him seem in any way virtuous. The whole 'charity' persona he put on afterwards is just PR.
Same with Jobs, but without the charity.
Woz, maybe he actually was a nerd.
Gates was (is) definitely a huge nerd. Much more than most of the people here.
He was also the poster boy for tech nerd assholes, until the scale of tech assholery shifted wildly for the worse, and he switched to legacy building mode.
A lot of high-performing nerds are by nature competitive, and really dial the "I'm always correct until proven wrong, and even then I might correct" personality trait up to 11.
Some guys, like Gates, seemed to have extremely opinionated views on what Microsoft products should have been like. That should be a given, as he was the co-founder and CEO, but when you see older footage of him, he has (had?) this "This doesn't make sense to me, so it is shit" way of seeing things. He also seemed to have a typical brutally honest way of reviewing stuff, which can make one come off as very abrasive.
Can't remember where I read it, but there was this psychology paper that studied elite performers, those that were considered to be at the very top of their game (sports, business, art, culinary, etc.) - and toxic/abrasive leadership is just more accepted, because the top performers strive for perfection, no mater the cost. Their subordinates and co-workers just consider it "tough love", instead of abusive behavior.
> The whole 'charity' persona he put on afterwards is just PR.
What do you mean by "persona"? Do you mean he's not really giving money away?
Persona is very much the outward facing acts and image of a person and could be orthogonal to personality. So to parse the posters comment you need to assume that being a charitable person is more than the act of given money to people in need and can also be a personality trait (or at least constituent virtues that expressing charity indicates can be part of personality).
For instance if there was a homeless person on my street and I figured that giving them $500 would have good odds of having them OD and no longer being on my street... what looks like a charitable act very much isn't. So while it would contribute to a charitable persona it wouldn't reflect personality.
Well fuck the charitable personality of it doesn’t result in actually giving to people in need. I’ll take the charitable actions over that any day.
> The whole 'charity' persona he put on afterwards is just PR.
Indeed. Even in the middle ages rich people leaned heavily on charity to whitewash their legacy. I mean, the Catholic church even made this accessible to the masses through indulgence.
It’s related to the trope that non-rich people are more ethical than rich people, or nerds would treat women better than jocks. Confusing lack of opportunity to engage in certain behavior for lack of propensity.
That's an interesting point since in practice, athletic ("jock") women tend to be more common than nerdy women to begin with. Women being into tech or science (stereotypical "nerdy" pursuits) is something that tends to happen more in lower-income countries, which suggests a large self-interest or incentive component, while the opposite is true for athletic women. Perhaps the proper counterpart of the "nerd" among women is engaged in very different, more traditional crafts or intellectual interests which aren't highlighted as "nerdy" by mainstream culture.
I was referring to the "Revenge of the Nerds" trope, which involves nerds who are men. But as to your point, the "nerd" characterization arises not only from the field of interest, but the hyperfocus nature of the pursuit. Hyperfocus behaviors get coded as "nerdy" in men but don't get coded as such in women. For example, my daughter, my wife, and I have the same personality. My hyperfocus interests as a teenager, such as computers, got coded as "nerdy." My daughter, meanwhile, hyperfocuses in the same way on knitting or drawing, but those don't get coded as "nerdy" at all.
Nerd-dom in women is also only judged if we don't adhere to the social requirements of womanhood. You can be as obsessive as you want as long as you're bubbly, socially adept, and take care to look pretty. Our interests aren't considered a necessary component to our identity culturally in the same way men's are.
I think hyper focus on anything is more likely to be classified as "nerdy" today. People will say "I'm a huge guitar nerd" or "I'm a huge gardening nerd" or whatever.
Related (for the non-grey/whitebeards who saw Revenge of the Nerds): Calling someone a nerd used to be fairly demeaning. Today I would say it swings between okay/acceptable and funny/cool, depending on the social circle.
It wasn’t always that way. In 1984 almost 40% of CS grads were women.
> Perhaps the proper counterpart of the "nerd" among women is engaged in very different, more traditional crafts or intellectual interests which aren't highlighted as "nerdy" by mainstream culture.
This is it.
Nerdy women are in fiber arts, fandom (especially generative fandom), etc. Nerdy women definitely exist, they just tend to take their penchant for nerd/obsessive/systems thinking to more 'appropriately female' areas. (For example, things like indie perfume houses, or my obsession with the mechanics of bra manufacturing and fitting). They also tend to pick apart relationships instead of objects: This is why female fandom is so dominated by tropes and boxes to shove characters into. They like the organization and clean categories just like male nerds do, they just apply them to different domains.
They also usually have a different but related stereotype. We're pathetic shut in cat ladies instead of pimply nerds. It's also not usually considered a problem until we hit ~25 (or whatever age the culture at the time considers a woman ready for motherhood) since a shy, obsessive, escapist woman who doesn't want to engage with people can make a fine wife/gf. Most of the grief is directed at us for not caring about our appearance enough more than anything else.
> I don’t know why you’d think “being interested in nerdy stuff like computers” would somehow translate into virtuous behavior.
Whatever tenuous link there was between the two, only existed as long as computers were not really seen as a path to wealth and power. Because then a smart person with the capability to enter fields traditionally associated with wealth and power choosing computers reflected putting personal curiosity and interest over pursuing wealth and power as the sole objective.
Virtuous people become doctors, social workers or kindergarten teachers.
People who spend their entire life in front of computers should not be the ones with the keys to society yet here we are.
As someone who's been in both engineering school and medical school, I would say you're very wrong. Most doctors aren't in any way virtuous, most are in it for status or money and plenty don't care one bit about humans (some just like the thrill of being in charge of someone their life). There's only a small minority that's extremely virtuous.
This might've been different 50 years ago but it's the number one striver job there is.
Admittedly this is anecdotal, but I've visited many doctors over the years, as a patient, and pretty much all of them treated me well, practiced their jobs professionally and gave me good advice and treatments. I never had a doctor give me advice that turned out to be wrong or ill intentioned.
Again ... maybe it's just my experience. None of these were super life threatening conditions. However I did go under the operating knife at least once; in that case, the operation was successful, healed me of the condition, and never caused any negative side-effects to this day.
Maybe there's a difference in regulation. A lot of the "entrepreneurial" landscape seems unregulated and a kind of Wild West, and I suppose that allows for certain kinds of personalities to succeed by suspect means. The medical field, by contrast, is quite regulated and there are very real risks to malpractice. Thus, I think it attracts better people and allows them to succeed.
Maybe it's similar to how dictators often take over in poor or struggling countries, whereas they find it harder to get a foothold in developed, prosperous countries with strong institutions.
Being non-virtuous doesn't all of a sudden turn them into some kind of evil monster. It's just a job for most of them, one that pays well. Being professional and giving treatment like they should (basically following orders) is the easiest way to avoid problems for doctors.
This all changes when they get more difficult patients. As someone who's been told bogus by doctors, even lightly pushing back many will completely change demeanor, you're no longer some easy money but a risk/annoyance. So your good experiences basically just show doctors in their 'perfect state'.
This isn't the same in every country as you say it's a regulated field and the regulations differ wildly from country to country and so does the view and behaviour of doctors.
But it's good that being virtuous is the "easy path" for them. That's how I want it to be. Why would I want to make it difficult or put impediments in the way of my doctors doing their job well?
My point is that, when the institution supports and encourages virtuous behaviour, the actors within the institution are more likely to practice virtue.
I think this is also largely the point of Plato's Republic.
You're absolutely, completely, 100% correct that the nature of good institutions is to make the virtuous path the easy one, and also that medical norms and practices do a (generally) good job achieving this.
You're also missing your interlocutor's point.
> Why would I want to make it difficult or put impediments in the way of my doctors doing their job well?
Doctors very often don't do a good job with complex cases - like rare conditions, complicated histories, or multiple interacting factors - and some will treat the patient as "difficult" or "an impediment" when they (the doctor) haven't grokked the situation. Very few patients are trying to be an impediment - 99% are trying to help achieve a good outcome, though sometimes their definition of that is misguided or impossible - but it is frustrating to be treated that way by someone who genuinely knows less about your situation than you do. ("Doc, I've taken that test before, and I've tried that medication before - I know it's not in your EMR, but here is a printout - what are you looking for this time that you expect to be different than before?" That conversation doesn't always go well - and even when it does, you're likely to be told "I can't [read: hospital / insurance policy won't permit] try something else until we've done those again" - so you'll end up going back to step A with each new provider.)
In fairness to doctors, many of them work within horrible constraints: it's impossible to get a handle on a complex situation in one twenty minute appointment every six months, and there's little point trying when it's likely the patient will be reassigned to a new provider by next year, anyway. The tension between medical ethics and practice and hospital (let alone, in the US, insurance) ethics and practice is enormous, and (for the individual doctors and patients caught up in it) intractable.
> I've visited many doctors over the years, as a patient, and pretty much all of them treated me well, practiced their jobs professionally and gave me good advice and treatments. I never had a doctor give me advice that turned out to be wrong or ill intentioned.
You are extremely lucky, then.
As a man, I've been gaslit by my doctors about my depression. My PC in my early 20s told me I was just lazy and needed to get a "real" job.
For women, by all accounts, it's much worse. I have not met a woman yet who has not had a story about some doctor treating her like a child, minimizing her pain, etc.
Well I've had more mixed experiences with other kinds of professions. Real estate agents have fibbed to me about the condition of the property, recruitment agents have misrepresented the role, financial advisors have given me sub-optimal advice. There didn't seem to be much in the structure to prevent this. Doctors, nurses and surgeons on the other hand were very careful and thorough, and that included telling me things I didn't want to hear. This makes sense. Medicine is much more serious - people's long-term health and lives are at risk.
I don't deny there's privilege involved in my case. Again, this seems an institutional problem. The medical field as a whole needs more inclusive frameworks to deal with women's health, racial justice, LGBTIQ, ageism and much more. These are issues need to be addressed at an institution and even whole-of-society level. You can't expect each individual to independently solve for them all. At the very least, they need education.
They obviously won't say it to your face so I'm not sure that your anecdote says anything.
It's hard to claim that the initial generation of Free Software developers in the 1980s and 1990s weren't virtue-minded people. The issue isn't spending one's entire life in front of a computer, it's being outcompeted by people who do the same but with mercenery aims.
Seeing unscrupulous people make it while the principled pay the price can break even the most virtuous person. It causes disappointment, resentment and a sense of injustice that can very easily radicalize into actual sociopathy. Society needs to realign itself if it wants to prevent this. Good people should win and be rewarded.
You say this like it's a recent development.
Creating a society where the unscrupulous are not unduly rewarded has been a long, painstaking slog over millennia that still hasn't been solved. And whatever progress has been made is always fragile as the lessons are so very easy to forget.
> Virtuous people become doctors
I remember when I was in high school knowing a bunch of people who wanted to be doctors (and had good grades). It was strange to me so many people wanted to be doctors so I asked why. The answer was one word: Money. In my adult life I have also heard of multiple people who demand to be called “doctor” in social situations.
“Virtuous” is not a word I’d associate at all with wanting to become a doctor. Veterinarians are a different matter, though.
>“Virtuous” is not a word I’d associate at all with wanting to become a doctor. Veterinarians are a different matter, though.
For those that don't know, veterinarian education is just as rigorous, time consuming, and expensive as human medical education, yet the median annual wage for practicing veterinarians is $125,510.
And the work can be considerably harder. Human doctors tend to specialise on a certain area of a single species, and they can communicate with their patients. Veterinaries are expected to know every part of a huge range of species (though there are specialties as well) and have to be able to diagnose patients who not only can’t explain themselves in our language, they are usually terrified by being in a strange environment with a strange person and thus alter or hide their behaviour. Not to mention having to deal with the owners and regular euthanasias.
It’s an incredibly stressful job with a huge rate of suicide.
https://www.bbc.com/worklife/article/20231010-the-acute-suic...
That's a lot of money out in rural country, which is where veterinarians tend to be especially useful.
That’s also the money in the US, not everywhere, and not every veterinarian goes into it for the rural stuff. I know plenty of veterinarians who have zero interest in that, and being vegan don’t even approve of the industry.
But much less than most doctors make.
I don't believe doctors and kindergarten teacher needed to be virtuous at all
I have a friend who worked in kindergarten taking care of the children. From what they told me, I can tell you, it's no easy lunch for virtuous people with ideals, who want to help and educate the children there. The amount of playing hierarchy games and bickering and bullying and whatnot, that happens when someone wants to improve things for the children... It basically crushed that friend and often made them cry, until they got out of those shit holes named kindergarten.
Doctors with big egos are a huge problem because they don’t listen to patients. I deal with some medical issues and, if a self-absorbed doctor walks into the room, I know my problem isn’t being solved today.
Not necessarily no - but sustainably doing good work while shoulder-to-shoulder with human frailty and confounding diversity does raise the chances.
There are Black Mirror episodes for people in all sorts of careers who find themselves with too much power, poorly handled; the show's narratives depend on the fact that the technology is the axe but not the executioner.
People succumbing to parental pressure become doctors.
A lot of folk go into teaching because there's high demand for workers & the academic path is relatively accessible.
You're probably mostly right about social workers, but it's a vague term & there's at least some categories of social worker that fill the same appeal as teaching.
Virtuosity is so hard to define, I'd say there's some virtue in almost every career direction but less in some than others. Certainly in my experience tech entrepreneurship has some of the lowest levels I've encountered.
For virtuous people, look at jobs where the average person in the field could get a much better job doing something else. That’s not the case for your average teacher, who tend to be on the low end of the scale of college educated workers. Public defenders are a good example of the opposite. These are generally lawyers who have the credentials to make a lot more money in private practice.
as a former teacher, a former receiver of social services, and someone who makes great money helping teams move bits efficiently, I can say most assuredly that most teachers or social workers are regular, non-expert people. My former teaching colleague thought the screen of his monitor was watching him. And my last social worker had "personal struggles balancing his faith's view on evolution and what the science says." The classic computer nerd who "can't human," but my job is aligning hundreds of people to work on the same software. Education and social work is divorced from the "real world" in many ways, not unlike how those stuck on a screen are divorced from the "real world."
Talk about peak arrogance. Who the hell are you to think you get to be the one to decide who should have the key to society?
> Virtuous people become doctors
And by the time medical school and residency are done with them, many if not most will be sociopaths to rival all the top CEOs.
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Bill Gates is a great counterexample to the article's premise. Always clearly a nerd, yet led a company that no one loved and many people hated for its strategy of embrace, extend, extinguish.
Post-CEO, he had completely refurbished his image via philanthropy, only to throw it away with the Epstein stuff.
Your perception of him is the result of a very carefully crafted image and PR management going back decades to the 80's. His behaviour and controversies with Microsoft have been well known since the 90's (Melinda Gates relationship, anti-trust probe etc.) and even with more recent allegations in 2019. Link: https://www.wsj.com/business/microsoft-directors-decided-bil...
Grandpa Gates was PR bullshit - he was always a notorious asshole.
It really demonstrates the nature of people. Richest guy on the planet for quite awhile, but can’t manage his relationships and spends his time chasing skirts. To the point where he’s a target for Epstein the apex predator.
In the Microsoft cinematic universe, Ballmer is the foil.
Gates has done some good with his money but a lot of stuff about him reads like pure PR to me.
Its like hearing about how Ford supposedly increased wages so people could buy cars, but when you actually look at the details that was just the PR spin to having hired, worked to injury, then fired so many people that large wages were the only way to keep enough employees to run the factories by convincing people in other states to come blindly move in under the promise of money.
Most every "good" story about him outside of donating money later on ends up with not so great details and reality.
>Most every "good" story about him outside of donating money later on ends up with not so great details and reality.
It's pretty well known he was a huge antisemite.
Then again, from what I understand, antisemitism was pretty popular in the US in the early 20th century. It was only after WWII that it became more of a taboo.
Bill Gates' nerd image was as falsified as his philanthropic one. He was a shrewd businessman & knew PR well, that is all.
All the replies questioning Gate's nerd cred and philanthropy are incorrect.
1) There is ample evidence of him being a huge nerd. You can find dozens of references about how sharp he was technically at Microsoft. Here's one of the better known blogs: https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2006/06/16/my-first-billg-rev...
He even published a paper on a Math problem in undergrad before dropping out to start MSFT: https://www.npr.org/2008/07/04/92236781/before-microsoft-gat...
2) I would challenge all the commenters claiming his philanthropic work is "falsified" or "just PR" or "mostly self-serving" to prove it, keeping in mind there are ample public records all over the place.
You can dislike a person, especially Gates who was famously a huge jerk, but really... let's stick to facts please.
> I don’t know why you’d think “being interested in nerdy stuff like computers” would somehow translate into virtuous behavior.
Because doing something you're genuinely interested is virtuous relative to doing something for personal/reputational gain or due to other social pressures.
> some people got rich and powerful and their real personalities showed through
This could not be more deluded - the negative equivalent of the hustle culture myth: anyone can become a selfish asshole if they work hard enough. The idea that every person who's ever taken an academic interest in tech is just another William Gates III waiting to happen is a very weird way of looking at nerd culture.
I think nerd -> believes in science. Science -> requires honesty, curiousity, humility, persistence (i.e. admit you are wrong, accept you losses).
Generally I'm not sure you'd be considered a nerd if you weren't too honest for your own good. Not that this covers all types of virtuous behavior - there do exist nasty scientists. (And there is some level of fraud/dishonesty in academia, too).
I wonder how personality forming it is, being a curious kid growing up hacking on computers. If you don't get what you expected, it's almost never the computer's fault - it means you did it wrong, and need to reconsider. There's no excuses and no dumping responsibility on anyone or anything else.
I have the feeling it probably teaches you something, or at least it should. Something not too unlike epistemic humility, maybe.
As a kid, that's what I loved about computers. They were fair in ways society wasn't. The rules were clear, and breaking the rules resulted in badness. Unlike grade school, for example, where the rules were always changing and badness would just occur randomly and capriciously.
The mistake comes with the very first arrow. You don't have to believe in "science" to be a nerd. You have to be passionate about technology. And that's a very different thing.
Most of the scientists I know can spend years of their life pursuing a hypothesis that turns out to be wrong, shrug their shoulders, and dive back into it. Technologists are all about output. If it's not outputting, you have to give up and seek a different avenue. Scientists (except the very famous and successful ones) tend to be humble and curious. Technologists less so.
You are confusing “nerd” and “geek”, historically.
Both terms are overloaded, because neither has been used with any consistency. Like the long forgotten trekkie/trekker divide, it was a way for some people to feel superior to other people, but the lines were never clear.
Makes sense at first sight
But then you see people with very questionable morals having made a key discovery or having produced a fundamental technology. Reality is complicated
Musk is a fascinating example. Incredibly hard working, visionary, detail oriented. Without him we'd probably not have had reusable rockets for another generation or more. With Tesla he also accelerated electric car adoption. He was also brutally honest about their chances of success, when pitching SpaceX to the other initial investors he gave it a 10% chance of success. He was little more confident about Tesla, saying the main objective was to prove the concept and push adoption across the industry. Yes he's famous for giving absurdly short time scales for advances like "full self driving", and this is reckless and irresponsible, but I think he genuinely believes what he says at the time.
Yet he's also a sociopathic fascist arsehole. It turns out these traits are not all on the same axis.
we probably would. the key to both those things was government money and support
Sure, but I've no problem with that. I think there is a role for government helping get new technologies and industries off the ground. It can make sense to offer tax breaks to get new future sources of tax revenue going for example. I'm not a fan of intrusive industrial policy in general, but that's a practical and not an ideological objection. It can make sense to meet some strategic goals.
The government also legitimately needs space launch capacity, they're a customer for that. Look at how commercial companies invest in the buildout of supplier infrastructure, or offer framework contracts to help suppliers to make necessary investments.
They seem like entirely different things to me, in the sense that I wouldn’t expect a writer, or a baker, or a chef to have typical ethical behaviors as a group.
Shouldn't you? Bakers and chefs aren't just "interested in nerdy stuff like chemical reactions," they make food for people. Writers have ethical obligations, both individually and as a group?
I don’t know why you’d think “being interested in nerdy stuff like computers” would somehow translate into virtuous behavior.
The cultural perception of nerds being relentlessly bullied for the crime of having imaginations/GPAs/acne, I think, presented a culturally sympathetic view to the extent that the latent bro-ism caught some off guard, like we'd expect them to emerge from sweet gentle Stranger-Things style basement nerds to adulthoods as, say, Randall Munroe or something
>> I don’t know why you’d think “being interested in nerdy stuff like computers” would somehow translate into virtuous behavior.
> The cultural perception of nerds being relentlessly bullied for the crime of having imaginations/GPAs/acne, I think, presented a culturally sympathetic view to the extent that the latent bro-ism caught some off guard, like we'd expect them to emerge from sweet gentle Stranger-Things style basement nerds to adulthoods as, say, Randall Munroe or something
To emphasize that point, I think the assumption was that being bullied and ostracized would lead nerds to have greater empathy and be nice people, because they experienced how bad it is when people aren't nice.
But I think the reality, obvious in hindsight, is that was a totally unreasonable assumption. IIRC, the experience of abuse can actually create future abusers. With geeks/nerds, I think a fairly common outcome as been a combination of arrogance with a kind of social ineptness/unawareness that is not nice.
Yeah, exactly, "man hands on inhumanity to man" and all that. I have to admit I was a little surprised when I saw it firsthand, myself, so it's not like I was any less naive about it.
oooh pinched a nerve among the xkcd fans I guess
"I identify as a nerd and think I'm virtuous, therefore other people who identify as nerds should be virtuous in order to validate me"
Yeah maybe it’s just me, but the whole idea of “identifying as a nerd” seems so silly, something out of a bad high school movie.
Can’t we just be adults interested in different topics and hobbies?
Contrast matters. Being awake to bigotry and pseudoscience also predates the tech industry, TBF, but eugenics, "scientific" racism, etc. used to be a lot more common. Don't look down on people for expecting better now, even from people who apparently have unresolved issues about what happened in South Africa.
I don't think being nerdy makes someone virtuous, that's true. However, I think SV of 20-40 years ago had a distinct culture (best symbolized by Woz) that's basically been lost to the MBA-types and the hustle culture bros. Sometimes they wear it around like a creepy skin suit but it comes across as deeply inauthentic.
This is a common refrain but my point is that it's nonsense. Most of the people running top companies do not have MBAs and are technical, aka nerds. This trope is a false narrative designed to portray one group as pure, ethical people that were corrupted from outside.
You listen to the Radio Channel you picked. I understand the complaint, though it's like a complain that nerds featured in Cosmopolitan aren't as nerdy as they were.
Musk for me was never a nerd. Many "founders" aren't nerds for me. In the end, I wouldn't classify anyone who is "money" first as a nerd - to me they are businessmen (and businesswomen) in their core.
Want to see "the lost nerds"? Here, on HN there are many very high-profile nerds. People who built the internet and the most popular tools exchanging insight and jokes over posts. Many founders who aren't loud, who aren't about PR.
So - nothing happened. Author looks for them in wrong places.
I was about to make this point, but with some clarifications:
A nerd, when I was growing up, had to have a "thing", and that thing had to be unfashionable. Being a nerd was not a good thing. You loved your subject despite the stigma. (although later on people loved a subject because of the stigma)
There was a difference between a $subject nerd, and an arsehole/weirdo. To be liked, you needed to hide the nerd streak and learn to interact with people using commonly accepted rules. This is partly why the internet flourished in the 90s because you could be surrounded by other nerds and talk nerd shit.
The downside is that a lot of people felt marginalised, but you were in touch with the "normies", so still had to act like a normal high functioning member of society.
Ruthless buisness types were seen as that (at least in the UK) out to make money, and fuck you if you got in the way.
The problem for us now is, ruthless business types now own all the media, and want to shape the world in their image.
"Nerd" means whatever you want it to mean. I've known people who called themselves nerds because they played d&d and smoked tons of weed. I've known other people who were really focused on technical stuff. I'm sure both types think they're smarter than everyone else, just like most people do.
There were people who told me 15 years ago that I’m not like others who go to software engineering universities. Because although I’m a nerd, I can speak about non nerdy things, and I don’t speak about them in non nerd environments. This happened to me many-many times. They were even surprised that I’m in this field.
Not anymore. I haven’t heard this for a while now, and I didn’t change regarding this. But people behave very differently when I say “software developer” recently. Now they think immediately, that I’m rich. Not that I’m a freak nerd. They are not surprised anymore at all.
I experienced this very obviously with something else too. I born in Hungary, but I moved to Austria. There is a huge difference between how people behave with me if I say that I’m from Hungary, than if I say that I’m from Austria when I travel. They immediately recommend me things which are more expensive. The beaches, restaurants, pubs for rich tourists. Not when I say Hungary. That’s the only time when they say to me that something is expensive.
I state openly, that if somebody says that the public perception didn’t change and also the people in this field didn’t change to be more money focused, then those people lying, probably even to themselves. The current discussions about AI make this obvious. Most developers, engineers, founders are fine to ship shit on every single level, if they get the same money for it. They became “developers” only for the money.
“IT crowd” is unimaginable today.
Agree. I think that the complaint is about the dominating narrative in every radio channel you could possible pick from.
It's similar to the "old Internet" argument: it's still there, but buried in layers and layers of stuff that isn't the real thing.
I've definitely met some finance folks who are nerds. Had a very fun conversation with one where we concluded that Culver's Scoopie Tokens are dairy forwards.
I actually agree with the author's evaluation, but the irony is that their post is the first time I heard about this Founders Mafia thing. They're right that last thing we need is more people looking past the sins of the Thiels and Altmans of the world. Maybe this kind of thing works within 100 miles of the Pacific coast. But as a non-SV native still getting used to the culture around here, I see zero risk of this kind of content sowing any fondness for tech CEOs outside of the most tech-brainwormed regions of the world.
Very much similar thoughts. The examples provided are not nerds, except a few. It is just tech is a lucrative path to make money and it attracts a variety of “interesting” personalities, specifically those that can captivate and persuade masses to invest in them. By all means tech is just a means to an end to such founders. A nerd is someone who is interested in tech for the sake of it, because it is beautiful, not because it will aid drones in killing targets more efficiently and not because it will land a great contract.
Yup, the nerds are still here. They're people like Jeff Geerling, Stefan Hermann, Andreas Spiess, Jan Roetz and many more. They're very visible if you end up on the 'right' side of the algorithm, it's a much more positive side of the internet in general IMHO.
But it's easy to slide back into the fear mongering, engagement bait side if you don't pay really close attention to how you're feeding the algorithm.
Does anyone consider Musk a nerd? He's more into marketing than GOOGL.
Really? I heard @TeslaFan1337 saying that Tesla has a $0 marketing spend and it’s all about the engineering bravado Elon uniquely possesses.
Isn't that exactly the marketing part? He is the marketing and the channel, he has optimized marketing process.
I'd say, you are looking at this from the angle of a nerd. For you Elon or Sam are not (primarily) nerds because you know nerdier nerds (what you called very high-profile nerds). But for the general public Elon and Sam are very much the definition of a nerd. They have never heard of any of the high-profile nerds you know.
And that's exactly the argument of the article IMO, that the famous nerds went from well-meaning eccentrics to evil greedy overlords.
> Musk for me was never a nerd. Many "founders" aren't nerds for me. In the end, I wouldn't classify anyone who is "money" first as a nerd - to me they are businessmen (and businesswomen) in their core.
People can fall into multiple categories at the same time. A lot of them aren't mutually exclusive.
IMHO Musk can be put into both the nerd/geek bucket and the asshole businessman bucket at the same time.
AKA Woz vs Jobs
> Musk for me was never a nerd. Many "founders" aren't nerds for me.
It's pretty hard to describe Elon Musk's ventures in space exploration, robots and human-like AI as anything other than prototypical, "core" nerd culture. Especially when it turns out that the very word 'Elon' shows up in obscure magazine excerpts from the 1950s as the leader of a science-fictional Martian government, and apparently this somehow plays a part into why Musk gets named Elon.
His "ventures" started out with PayPal. Not exactly nerd culture.
For the nerdy ones, he bought his way in; he never actually founded Tesla.
Everything you think you know about him, at least as expressed in this post, is a result of his carefully crafted PR propaganda.
Suggesting nerds were never interested in electronic payment systems seems like a very No True Scotsman argument to me.
Buying one's way in doesn't exactly negate being interested in the underlying venture. He still had to provide significant funding.
Where did he get that funding?
> It's pretty hard to describe Elon Musk's ventures in space exploration, robots and human-like AI as anything other than prototypical, "core" nerd culture.
To me (and I realise this might not be a broadly accepted definition) a nerd does things for the passion and without regard for the money. Woz was a nerd, Jobs was not.
Musk has always been about monetising these things. Not to discount that he's interested in them, but for me personally he's not a true nerd. He's a businessman with nerdy interests.
A nerd that perennially wrong about their passion pits (e.g. when self driving is coming, the viability of his tunnel projects) would be mortally embarrassed about being so publicly wrong. Musk doesn't care.
Nerds used to have a internet to discuss tech in, you were allowed to make an argument based on logic and reasoning.
Then the ideologues and political commissars showed up, giving zero shit about tech or logical reasoning, this pulled the discourse down to the lowest common denominator and the rest is history.
Why should I take the moral high ground and listen to an argument I dislike if I'm not offered the same courtesy.
> you were allowed to make an argument based on logic and reasoning.
Old man here, No this was never the case. Nerds were always hysterical and used the ban hammer frequently. the difference between then and now is that there were more distinct islands of nerdary you could escape to, and they wouldn't blend together.
also they generally had a "no outside opinions" rule that meant that forums were single subject. This allowed you to socialise with degenerates like emacs users in different contexts without descending into flame wars (mostly...)
Exactly. I'm glad someone else remembers the pre-eternal-September internet. (For me mid to late 1980s.)
Old man here, it has never been perfect, but it used to be vastly better than today.
Even early BBS message boards and usenet were foul. Where does OP think the original internet archetypes came from, Mr Beast?
God, I miss off-topic rules and their enforcement...
Off topic rule discussion are banned, you will be shadowbanned for 1 week.
Isn't it the reddit model that absorbed them?
Nerds were often seen as poorly social since "logic and reasoning" would go against socially accepted norms. This where the fedora tipping meme comes from: "everybody understands that religion is not literal, but we have to all accept the lie for social cohesion". But "nerds" would be the ones willing to take the ridicule and ostracism because truth would be more important than conformity.
Reddit was the place to be for nerds and spread like a pandemic. However, karma points turned this on its head since you have a mechanism to enforce conformity in non-conformity that was the basis for "nerd communities". Nerds hobbies that would be the gateway are gated behind such platforms that enforce a social credit system in a totalitarian way. The would have been nerds are thus mostly integrated into the redittor archetype that is so fundamentally opposed to the nerd archetype; a contorted version of itself trying to fit through distorting mirrors.
I'm not disagreeing with you; but why did the nerds not destroy the ideologues with logic and reasoning if not for the horizontal pressure of other "nerds" subverting the concept?
> I'm not disagreeing with you; but why did the nerds not destroy the ideologues with logic and reasoning if not for the horizontal pressure of other "nerds" subverting the concept?
Why should I spend my energy to discuss with someone who doesn't want to listen, and not rather build something I like or learn something I wonder about, or converse with the people I care about?
Life is too short to talk with walls disguised as humans. Talking with a wall, the ocean or oneself is more productive than doing unproductive self-torture.
>>Why should I spend my energy to discuss with someone who doesn't want to listen
One of the reasons why I stopped going on Facebook, even though a lot of communities I care about have moved there. I wrote a long comment about someone's suggestion about car maintenance, only to get a reply "I didn't come here to discuss this, if you don't like what I said then go somewhere else". Like, WHY EVEN BE IN A PUBLIC FORUM THEN. But I feel like that's just me and my early internet sensibilities. Nowadays people want to post something, get some likes, and not be challenged. Even a mild disagreement is met with immediate aggression a lot of the time, because people are just not used to talking on the internet at all(imho).
> Nerds were often seen as poorly social since "logic and reasoning" would go against socially accepted norms. This where the fedora tipping meme comes from: "everybody understands that religion is not literal, but we have to all accept the lie for social cohesion". But "nerds" would be the ones willing to take the ridicule and ostracism because truth would be more important than conformity.
I don't think nerds are/were seen as poorly social because logic and reasoning go against social norms. I'll bite on the religion focus. If everyone understands religion is not literal, being smirk about taking it literally is not logical or reasoning or making anyone look smarter. It just makes you look like a dork. Subtext and not being meant to read literally are a core part of social interaction.
I see the same in school, when some overly literal students argue about the interpretation of a book they are assigned to read. "the author can't possible mean that" or "show me where it says that on the page" is a common lazy criticism with little value. Some people are just like that, and (warning: personal observation) nerds tend to be a bit more like that. But the arguments I hear from that corner against religion are seldom great, they are just some minor gotchas.
I don't want to get into the whole religion debate, and I'll admit that there are also groups of Christians that take the bible very literally, as I'm sure there are for other religions as well. From what I can see, these don't make up the canon of religion, and I kind of believe they're mostly concentrated in North America, but that might be my skewed perspective.
It's quite sad that social mechanics in our society don't work well for some people, but that doesn't mean they don't exist and it doesn't make everyone except nerds "illogical".
If "everyone understands religion is not literal", why do so many people take it literally? You could just as sensibly flip the argument and argue that the garden-variety 'nerdy' atheist is talking literally about atheism but really doing negative theology ("your idea of God is totally wrong and does not exist, because the true God is necessarily inaccessible to human reason") but that would be silly and make you look like a dork too.
As for the why, I don't have an answer, but I thought I addressed it with this:
> I'll admit that there are also groups of Christians that take the bible very literally, as I'm sure there are for other religions as well. From what I can see, these don't make up the canon of religion, and I kind of believe they're mostly concentrated in North America, but that might be my skewed perspective.
There will always be people falling off on one side of the spectrum or the other. Personally, I haven't met anyone who takes the bible literally, and I know a _lot_ of Christians, including pastors and priests. Some people simply just believe that there is something more, others have a feeling that you can sense that, some just need this believe to feel safe, etc. I guess it depends on where you're from, I believe biblicism is more common in North America, or at least more visible.
Additionally, the "everyone understands religion is not literal" was citing my parent. Usually, "everyone" is kind of understood not to mean "exactly 100%". It's a device to communicate intent.
> You could just as sensibly flip the argument and argue that the garden-variety 'nerdy' atheist is talking literally about atheism but really doing negative theology ("your idea of God is totally wrong and does not exist, because the true God is necessarily inaccessible to human reason") but that would be silly and make you look like a dork too.
Yeah, it'd make you look like a dork because it'd be obviously incorrect. The intentions of your garden-variety nerd talking about atheism are pretty clear, and it's not to make some greater theological point. When you talk to people who talk down on religion and believers, it's usually really easy to tell whether it's because only they themselves understand the True Intention Of God or whether they just think Christians are stupid and if you're smart you have to be an atheist. Said garden-variety nerd is the latter.
> There will always be people falling off on one side of the spectrum or the other. Personally, I haven't met anyone who takes the bible literally, and I know a _lot_ of Christians, including pastors and priests.
I grew up, and still live, in a conservative state and a conservative family. That hasn't been my experience at all: I know a lot of people for whom the bible is a literal truth.
That's fair. Experiences have a great influence on opinions you form, and everyone's experience is different. You live in a different part of the world than I do and know different people. I even conceded that in North America, the amount of people that take the bible literally might be higher or at least more visible than other parts of the world, and I'm going to assume you are from the USA because you said "state".
According to one survey I found[0], around ~20% of Americans (25% of Christian adults) say the bible is the literal word of god. Not exactly a huge amount of people, but a very considerable number nonetheless. I didn't find any numbers for other regions, but maybe it would help to see number of followers by denomination and try to derive some data from that. The official stance of the Catholic Church e.g. is that the bible should not be taken literally. Most protestants in Europe also don't practice much fundamentalism, but there are an estimated 25 million Evangelicals in Europe, around 2.5% to 3% of the population. There's probably more people preaching biblicism than only fundamental evangelicals, but I just wanted to look up two examples real quick.
[0]: https://news.gallup.com/poll/394262/fewer-bible-literal-word...
> The intentions of your garden-variety nerd talking about atheism are pretty clear, and it's not to make some greater theological point.
I agree about the underlying intentions, but I was talking about the typical, literal arguments for garden-variety 'rational' atheism. The point that these arguments tend to map quite cleanly to negative theology would usually be considered a pretty strong one as a matter of philosophy. Of course, this can only be said to further highlight the difference in intentions.
Yeah, but only if you take the arguments fully out of context and only if you view a subset of the arguments.
First, the argument of your garden-variety nerd atheist don't always map so cleanly to negative theology. I've seen plenty of arguments in the realm of "The bible contradicts itself, so you're stupid if you believe in it. Checkmate", etc. You get the idea. Just some of the arguments map well to negative theology.
Secondly, the context is missing. In my original comment, I was talking about how being very literal is seen as poor social adaptation because subtext, inaccuracies etc are part of social communication. Pretending to not understand that, or not understanding that, does not make one a logical being, it just makes you look like a dork.
Your argument is applying a very literal take of the hypothetical garden variety atheist we've brewed up. This is the same as taking the bible very literal and then calling people stupid when they believe in it. It's not arguing the main point, but picking out something that's easy to criticize and building your argument around it. My point is that taking something very literal is exactly a sign of poor social adaptation when there is a relatively big agreement on not taking it literally by society.
Now, your garden-variety nerd's arguments hold up very well against people who actually do take the bible literally, but I'm getting to a point where I want to get off the religion debate, because that's not really what I wanted to point out originally.
Circling back to my original: Logic and reasoning is not against social norms. Being a dork who pretends to not understand or actually doesn't understand social norms just to make a point is. Being hurtful just to feel superior is against social norms. Pretending you're interested in "truth" and that's why you are not conforming to social norms is also a pretty stupid take, imo. Yeah, social norms aren't always great, and they certainly don't work for everyone and a lot of people are left out being the "weird" ones, it sucks. But the reason these people are the "weird" ones is not because they're on a noble crusade for truth and logic.
I'm pointing this out even though you're not the original commenter I was responding to because we kind of got derailed into the details of this thing that was more meant as an example than really the main argument.
> there is a relatively big agreement on not taking it literally by society.
I think you're seeing a relatively big agreement where there really isn't one. It's not just the U.S. or biblical literalism, it's also about most people not really being familiar with the notion that even the strangest religious doctrines might be "true in a non-literal (but still worthwhile!) sense". From that POV, the garden variety atheist's argument is raising that very point. You don't have to take the atheism literally to understand that it's hard to believe everything about religion in a literal sense.
> why did the nerds not destroy the ideologues with logic and reasoning
Because everyone has bias and ego and nobody has perfectly logical reasoning.
Why brag about how smart you are to people who’ll just think you’re arrogant and annoying? Why tell someone their religion isn’t real if they’ll just think you’re a heretic, or “best case” despair they’ve been living a lie? You don’t study (especially in lieu of fitness) unless you have motivation which is ultimately based on emotion. I believe it’s usually the same ego that makes alpha men, just that these nerds (usually men) are too weak to be jocks.
Nerds have always had their own social norms, with illogical conformity, groupthink, status signaling, gatekeeping, etc.
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I feel that too many people are confusing arguments they agree with with logical arguments. Most of people, when they claim that something is rational or logical, actually mean that it's a position that they agree with.
I have no reason to believe that back in the day when internet was only for nerds the situation was different.
> I have no reason to believe that back in the day when internet was only for nerds the situation was different.
Strong disagree. Having lived those times, it really really was different, and there are a bunch of reasons for it.
1. First, back then (90s, early 00s) there was very little financial incentive to participate in discussions. BBSs, IRC, forums etc. were mostly non commercial. People joined without any expectation of making a profit, just for "the fun" of it. And for something new, interesting, evolving. Way less perversion of topics for monetary gain.
2. People back then made a clear separation between being online and offline. We literally had the term IRL coined. So a lot of discussions were "in abstract" and much less prone to be taken literally or seriously. A lot less identity / ideology stuff as well. Having a clear separation made it easier to not confuse your real world self with your online persona. Having an idea debated wasn't about you / your identity.
3. Politics was much less divisive back then. There was political debate, but again a bit more "abstract" and theoretical. I'd say the moment when this changed was 2008s US presidential campaign. Until then the Internet was seen as "not important". It has changed a lot since then.
4. Entry barrier. This might sound elitist or disparaging, but it really was a thing back then. The people online were mostly tech inclined, or curious enough to learn. It was much more educational, and (linked to point 1 above) everyone wanted to learn the cool new thing, without any monetary incentives. Much more sharing of pure knowledge, helping out and so on. It of course changed over time, but the early days were really something beautiful. I have very fond memories.
Just some counterpoints:
> 3. Politics was much less divisive back then. There was political debate, but again a bit more "abstract" and theoretical. I'd say the moment when this changed was 2008s US presidential campaign.
At least as one of the "first ones" from the AOL days (too young for the Eternal September, old enough to have gotten online too early) - most of "us" were young and didn't care about News. We were more interested in Mr. Burns getting shot and whatever internal drama was happening in our online fan clubs. I remember 9/11 happening, but instead of switching websites I continued to read online webcomics and my "Learn VB in 24 Hours" book.
A lot of us were just younger then and our social groups were more focused on other things. I am in an indie game Discord right now that's clearly not my demographic anymore. I don't interact, I'm just there for game updates. But, those kids are making their own memories right now. I think as adults, we just sort of ~forgot~.
The internet was different, for sure. But the post you are responding to just stated that they don't really believe arguments were rational and logical back then. I don't think any of your points refutes that.
It was different in several ways, one was far fewer people enforcing norms or doing marketing in those forums, far less moderation and tone policing, and far more tolerance (even rejoicing) into getting into deep technical argumentation and "well, actually" debate. No "influencing" and mere marketable "content" creation either.
Not to mention for a good while, FOSS was a big nerd holy grail (informing many discussions and forums, away from corporate solutions shilling and careerism), and a big goal of every tech nerd (unlike after about 2010).
Also nerd culture was by nerds, for nerds, not dilluted and "championed" by every mainstream hipster.
Remember when even Comicon was something mostly nerds, the kind "normie" people used to point and laugh at, went, and sci-fi/superhero movies excited the same small demographic niche?
> far less moderation and tone policing
This feels like maybe even the majority of the problem.
In general corporate social media favors memetic content and disfavors "inconvenient" content. Inconvenient meaning things that cause non-trivial numbers of users to mash the thumbs down or "report content" button. The premise of that is supposed to be that people are reporting spam and trolling etc.
The problem naturally being that people will also use the platform's "make it go away" mechanism to penalize anyone who tells them things they don't want to hear. And then the sort of people who insist on telling the technical truth even when it's inconsistent with the political lie tend to get shadow banned into irrelevance, which leaves what in everyone's feed instead?
That’s a ZIRP problem. You didn’t have massive sprawl communities until the investment was there to build systems to keep Nazis and trolls away.
Slashdot really highlighted this for me - if you followed the site and the core forum of founders, dealing with moderation was horrible. The writing of CmdrTaco over the years really made it sound like it just made him miserable.
If suffering more trolls is the price of not sterilizing the things that make humanity interesting then we've made the wrong trade off.
Agreed.
>You didn’t have massive sprawl communities until the investment was there to build systems to keep Nazis and trolls away.
Oh, it kept the trolls and Nazis just fine (even brought some close to power).
What the investment killed was the regular curious / not-for-profit nerd.
FWIW nerds pre-date the internet. We used to get together in user groups, like at public libraries, and talk tech, logic and reasoning.
Your interpretation of behaviour is slightly off. Nerds use discussion to explore what they don't understand. There is no value in discussing something you already know everything about. What could you learn from that? If someone claims that something is rational or logical, they are seeking feedback to see if others can poke holes in where it is not rational/logical. Think something akin to Cunningham's Law.
> Most of people, when they claim that something is rational or logical, actually mean that it's a position that they agree with
I'd claim a relevant axis is argument as deduction (common in mathematics) vs argument as rhetoric/persuasion (common in politics).
It's not that the former type is necessarily rational. "All birds have wings, planes have wings, therefore planes are birds" is the former type of argument and fallacious, whereas "are you really comparing birds to planes?" is the latter type.
I feel the former can allow deeper exploration of some topic, but sometimes involves things like playing devil's advocate for stances outside of social norms - and requires others to engage at that level rather than taking the rhetoric path of shaming you for even considering it.
It wasn't different.
Indeed.
I remember Usenet in the 90s being 50% interesting conversations mostly about niche topics and 50% randomly devolving into flame wars in larger communities.
Even "Eternal September" as a concept was something from around 1993/1994 right?
Same for the 2000s era online-bulletin-board. I often go to thegearpage.net and am appalled at the amount of shilling, dismissals and disrespect, but then I remember that in the 2000s the main guitar forum was Harmony Central, which was mostly kids calling other kids moms names.
EDIT: But coldtea makes a good point about some (IMO) more recent changes: tone-policing, excessive marketing. There's IMO also a different attitude towards curiosity today.
Discussion quality is, in my experience, mostly a function of group size. Online discussions scale better than in person, but there's a limit.
One thing I do miss from the early internet was less anonymity being the norm on Usenet/forums/etc. Discussions tend to stay more civil when both parties know there's a "real" person on the other end.
Otherwise, my memory of early 90s internet supports exactly your conclusion. There may have been better opportunities for small discussions, but big ones devolved the same way they do today.
For a counterpoint, you only need to look at the cancer that is Facebook comments from people on their own name and face and a lot of bio attached. It's not the anonymity. At least not by itself.
I am remembering the same Internet. I got into lots of flame wars on comp.software-eng and before that on Compuserve and various FIDO boards.
It was never a very placid or friendly place. There was more tolerance for vigorous debate than there is now. The debate didn’t change many minds, I suppose.
I think there is a difference when you can assume that the other person probably isn't a complete idiot. Compare Reddit's technical subs and HN and there is a vast difference in general civility. Non-nerds look at this site's CSS and their mental parsing breaks entirely, so that filtering still exists.
I have found those who I would consider nerds to be far from logical or rational. They are some of the most fervent people about the things they care about, which can make them very illogical and irrational.
True, but that's not really a bad thing. It feels like the passion has been watered down, with less and less space for being yourself, with the need to self-censor for the sake of advertisers', with hopes of monetization of every interaction ruining everything.
I’d say everyone got on the internet, and it turned into the equivalent of your local bar for discussions
Then LLM bots got on and it turned into an email spam folder.
That predates LLMs, but I get your point.
But besides bots, there's also "low value" comments, the "who's listening in 2026" type comments. Undiscernable from a bot, adds no value, can be omitted and you wouldn't miss anything.
And the worst part is that LLMs can generate more interesting comments than a large chunk of online people can.
> Nerds used to have a internet to discuss tech in, you were allowed to make an argument based on logic and reasoning.
I don't remember this internet. Ever since I got my first modem, I remember the kinds of vitriolic posts that led to the publication of IEN 137 (On Holy Wars and a Plea for Peace).
Whether it was endianness or RISC vs CISC or ZModem vs Kermit or Microsoft or Kirk vs Picard or Kimagure Orange Road, flame wars erupted everywhere. The smaller the stakes, the bigger the war.
Too many words to say: Nerds don't voice their opinions on the Internet because Eternal September IRL.
> Then the ideologues and political commissars showed up
I think you're seeing the world through rose-tinted glasses. In some FLOSS circles the discussions were dominated by ideologues, to the point some discussions seemed like Monty Python skits. I mean, your choice of window manager, let alone Linux distro, was something you'd be judged by.
'Were'? There are still people claiming that fronted isn't real coding. It is deeply embedded in human nature to define an us v them, and if skin colour is off the table substitutes must be found.
At least those were on technical merits. However imaginary or arbitrary those merits were... Which I think was more healthy place.
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I'm sure I'm not the first to say this, but interesting username. This would fly in my language, haha!
I'm sure it has a different meaning, though
Because it means you let those with unsavory behaviour define your behaviour
Why didn't they build a nerd oasis somewhere?
And HN isn't it...
Most of them had quarter/midlife crises and got partners/children/mortgages etc. and no longer care. The next generation know nothing else other than the current internet.
Yeah sadly that's it. The great forums all died off when it was no longer doing ridiculous stuff to entertain internet friends, and instead having super lame adult responsibilities.
Speaking for myself, kids even with a hands off parenting approach are a ridiculous amount of work.
The first rule of nerd oases is you don't talk about nerd oases.
If you belong, you'll find them and know how to get past the gates.
I'm skeptical of your second claim; being able to find such places ex nihilo would seem to require precisely the skills nerds lack
if there were nerd oases I would expect more second order impacts. More nerd organisations springing up as if from nowhere.
HN is one of the closest to it IMO. I sometimes think the very Web1.0-ness of its interface and its hostility to mobile browsers are purposefully made speed bumps before becoming fully mainstream.
Also time passes and people change. Many of the people on HN today were once dialup users. They are the same people but also different.
Ah yes, the internet where we had polite conversations on the merits of Vim vs Emacs, and women wanting to participate were warmly welcomed with a friendly "tits or gtfo"...
Shitposting, trolling, and harassment has been around since the very beginning of the public internet. If you didn't see it, it has to have been because you were (unconsciously or not) looking away.
The "ideologues and political commissars" didn't ruin your "friendly technical discussions", they merely pointed out how toxic a lot of those communities had always truly been.
If anything, if you really want to focus on the technical details, you should welcome their attempts to make it a friendlier and more professional space!
I didn't see any shitposting on the internet in the 1990s or the decade after that, nor anything remotely like "tits or gtfo" before I saw it on 4chan (which started in 2003).
I did see a lot of trolling and a little harassment (not of women or other disadvantaged groups).
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> Why should I take the moral high ground and listen to an argument I dislike if I'm not offered the same courtesy.
I mean not using the Dutch translation of the n-word as part of your username and thinking you're clever for hiding it in a plausibly deniable way would certainly help with me believing you're arguing in good faith.
Some of nerds earned a lot, a lot of money, some of the other nerds they employed also earned a lot of money, and they all decided to screw up the world we all live in. Fuck the nerds! The jocks back in the '70s and the '80s were right, these nerds should have been bullied to hell and back, maybe that way we wouldn't have had today's Musks and Thiels, shitheads that are bringing this world over the edge.
A society that creates bullies and thinks they are right is the same one that big surprise, doesn't give a shit about you. But you're stupid enough to be a cheerleader to bullies out of envy so you deserve whatever you get from it.
You look like the one of the nerds that got bought by the likes of Thiel and Musk, congrats on that. Interesting how you people still have the guts to bring up the “society” you supposedly care so much about, the same society your lot is so happy to fuck over for some extra financial juice. When will you people stop? What it will mage you people stop? Genuine questions, both of them.
It seems to me the role of venture capital has changed and is somewhat responsible for this. The obsession with MVPs followed by hyper-growth and then moat-building has warped our relationship with technology. It's driven by a desire for VC funds to "return the fund" with each investment, and increasingly, by a SoftBank approach which requires inundating the market leader with capital that forces out all competition. Technology has been financialized.
I feel like, as an industry or social group, we're going through a midlife crisis. There were so many people in tech who I looked up to as a young engineer, and now it feels especially bleak for young people in tech to find role models. But that could just be me being ~40 and despising what so many of these people became at ~60+.
Cleve Moler, the creator of MATLAB, died a few weeks ago. I've had the opportunity to meet him a few times, and despite him being a genuine mathematical genuis, the thing that impressed me so much was how humble he was, how anti-braggadocious. He was like this in person, privately, and also in public. Moler was an early post-WW2 engineer, his cohort is a shrinking class, and I'm worried about those who are taking their place, and then what happens when my generation and the younger replace them.
At the other side of the "midlife crisis" is the self-acceptance and maturity to become that role model.
I'm not saying that to glorify anything. The sentiments in your comment could have been written at any point in human history. Part of that maturity is to lose the ego too. You're not a hero for doing what feels natural, and that is to share what you have been fortunate enough to gather so far.
The gentle nerd trope was always a lie (as all tropes were). For every woz you’ve got some egotistical anti-social nerd deriding “bean counters” and “sales guys” because of some deeply held problems dealing with the outside world (especially women).
If you haven’t met someone who is rude and inconsiderate and thinks that’s ok because they believe they are way smarter than they are, then you haven’t worked in tech.
This sort of archetype navel gazing is appealing because you can cast any story you want that way. Buy it doesn’t actually help to understand the complex problems we face, it just lets you blame some “other”.
If a critique of bean counters is coming from incels, I hope that a lot more men stop having sex. By your logic, the more men have problems with women, the better society will become.
A lot of society is actively fucked up by hyperoptimization, especially in business.
Apart from Woz, I don't consider the rest of the individuals as nerds at all. Those are loan sharks in the garb of nerds.
Capitalizing the work of others, Cannibalizing smaller entities, creating monopolies, controlling the government and the narrative.
The way of Woz is how you earn the respect of fellow nerds.
The way of Jobs is how you "earn" a billion dollars.
I prefer the term “extract” in place of “earn” in this context.
Though Woz did ok there.
Looked for this comment!
All those C*Os and founders are good and successful politicians, not nerds. There was a colossal PR campaign to picture them as nerds for multiple reasons, but most of them never created like nerds would do (with a passion, going deep, enjoying the process & the result).
Politicians become successful due to skills incompatible with nerd mindset. Look at Linus, he could built an empire but he's a git.
Julian Assange and Mark Zuckerberg were two nerds on either side of the privacy spectrum in the twenty-teens.
One was framed and tortured, the other was given an empire.
The message was received.
We now only have the Zuckerberg type.
> on either side of the privacy spectrum
Oh how quickly we have forgotten:
> We plan to build this the way we've developed WhatsApp: focus on the most fundamental and private use case -- messaging -- make it as secure as possible, and then build more ways for people to interact on top of that, including calls, video chats, groups, stories, businesses, payments, commerce, and ultimately a platform for many other kinds of private services.
March 6 2019; https://web.archive.org/web/20190306191516/https://www.faceb...
Of course, none of that happened. But he did make a big fuss about it.
I don't think Assange was overly concerned with privacy, transparency was more his wheelhouse.
potato potatoe
If Julian Assange had taken his privacy principles and built a social network instead of leaking government secrets things might have turned out differently.
Nym vpn and its community show the outside the system tech spirit still lives on
This is one of those sampling bias/availability heuristic problems.
Of course the ‘nerds’ you hear about and see online are extroverted self-promoters. Of course the most visible people in the internal culture of large organizations are the ones who do more talking than doing.
Those are the people who are doing all the talking.
It is a massive over sampling problem that leads you to think, by looking at eg LinkedIn, ‘why is everyone on here writing engagement-bait algorithm-maxing posts?’
Everyone is not; The content you see is by definition the content that maxed its algorithmic exposure.
What "charming personality", lol? Nerds always had a higher than average probability of being total assholes. That has always been my experience.
Given your blatant generalisation, I simply believe you didn't pass the vibe check of that person and they would not want to have anything to do with you. Just how bullies detect nerds, nerds detect people who shun them, they just avoid conflict because it's a legit waste of time.
Anyway, I got some important coding to do now.
I'm a nerd that codes and I shun the vast majority of tech workers that continue to sell out humanity for a paycheck.
Maybe take some time and consider the political economical ramifications of the industry because it has been a net negative towards humanity for a good decade+ now.
It's impossible to shun anyone whilst being the minority.
At the outset of my career I was lucky (in a way) to have the veil ripped forcefully off of my face as to the ugliness inherent in the VC backed tech world.
I was believing I was working on something very important as one of the initial hires in a 10 person standup, with series B funding "on the way any minute now," knew it was a risk but believed strongly in the tech, maybe naively.
Found out later, the CEO had been given a generous buyout offer by a competitor, in the 8 figures, a modest amount but far exceeding our level of debt/investment to that point, would have made several of us including him a decent chunk of change. This guy got it in his head at that point that the offer was insulting, and we should be worth billions, not this 'paltry' sum. I could barely believe it when I heard it way after the fact (I would have quit earlier if I had known). What I understand is the board of investors was not very happy with this and there would be no more funding to come in after that point. Within 6 months of that, I went from this bright eyed person to a person not receiving a paycheck for several months, wiping out my early-grad finances in record time, and a significant amount of debt, all the while they shopped our team around the country desperately looking for a buyer. (they did not find one and had to borrow more money to pay our wages).
Needless to say after that I resolved never ever ever to work at any kind of 'startup' ever again, and my career many years later has finally recovered (though my cynicism has not).
Same blog from a different URL 2 days ago:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48504361
Anyway, the answer to the question: 'Nerds', like any cultural grouping, are a product of their environment. The United States of today has developed much higher inequality, debt burdens, rent demands, maintenance cost demands and trade deficits than the same environment had in the past, largely due to the Fed policies of the 21st century, with some help in worsening things by all administrations.
Companies such SpaceX are not built primarily by CEOs, rather by thousands of engineers, staff members, and state and private funders. Many of them are top graduates of best universities in the world. CEOs play important role too, of course, but they work as hard as engineers.
It’s a scam: people like Musk take credit for the work of thousands of people and even states. It’s ridiculous that a few people capture the value commonly generated.
We can go back to decades of public funding of research and development through taxes at universities and other public institutions, that’s a separate post.
The premise of this post is that tech founders used to be admirable nerds, but have since changed. I wonder if it isn't the other way around. We're the nerds. Us. Here. We used to admire tech founders because sometimes they were nerds too, but then we changed. We grew up. We got wise to it.
The author wants founders to stop projecting “an obsession with wealth and power” and instead “focus carefully on projecting an obsession with core nerd values”. And maybe it doesn't occur to them (as a fellow nerd) that _wealth and power were the whole point_. The author enjoyed being blind to the greed of it all, and now being unable to unsee they are begging the founders “please please just pretend a bit better”.
Nah. I think you got it wrong
>Jobs was flawed and everyone knew it, but it was all par for the course. He was aggressive in his ambition, uncompromising about even the most minute details of his company, and occasionally arrogant (not always, IMO. Sometimes you're just right.)
If you're a visionary, by definition you see what others do not. Which means that there's a lag between being right and being seen as right. That lag looks like arrogance.
Of course, the trick is how do you tell the difference from the outside? I used to think "be right about everything all the time" would be enough, but I've seen it fail constantly for myself and for others.
Now I think it boils down to "some people will decide to love you and some will decide to hate you, based mostly on tribal affiliation[0] -- how much will liking him cost me socially? -- and how often you've been proven right actually has very little bearing on the situation."
[0] Also apparently your spinal posture matters a lot more than what you're saying. Crucially both are social-emotional, not logic-based.
Money happened.
Wherever there's big money to be made, will also attract ambitious people hungry for money and power - it's that simple.
Now that FAANG jobs aren't looking all that attractive, many such people have set their sights on AI research/dev and quant finance jobs. The latter one has exploded in popularity / virality the past years. Previously a niche profession within finance which, frankly, most had no clue existed, has become almost a mainstream ambition. Some of the people that never identified themselves as nerds, will wander from industry to industry, which one that pays the most.
But back to the nerds: Some nerds obviously changed. If you throw generational wealth at most people, they will change. Few people are so disinterested in money that it is simply not a thing they care about.
What's more, many nerds discovered that with enormous amounts of money, comes enormous amounts of power. You can now actually lobby for your sci-fi dream world, which is what some of the billionaire nerds are doing.
The money and power corrupted them.
I just want enough money to retire and write interesting open source software, but doing that in my 20s made me poor, so since then I am trying to speed run retirement so I can go back to it.
Sadly, while I find AI effective, I also find it's removed the craft and personal reward I get from open source. So I will instead grow potatoes.
I'm coming full circle on the AI thing, it's almost entirely useless at creating a crafted result, so counterintuitively it places a greater premium on craft just at a time the industry as a whole are running in the opposite direction. There are some pieces of software I've thought of building now that I would not have considered a worthwhile pursuit a few years ago, solely due to this idea that a crafted result may have an increasingly inherent value in its own right
Even if machines can be made to produce compact, well thought out and beautiful, the interaction pattern almost inevitably ensures the "developer" produces something that is neither compact, well thought out or beautiful
100%. What matters most is always the intention of why a person does something. If it is based on external factors like money or power, and not intrinsic motivation like being fascinated or interested in new technology, this will happen.
Haven't quant jobs always been lucrative since the category had been invented?
Multiple rounds of gamergate happened. All nerds without 7 figure income were kicked out as loosers (insoles). Now being nerd means larping as bilionare.
> What's more, many nerds discovered that with enormous amounts of money, comes enormous amounts of power. You can now actually lobby for your sci-fi dream world, which is what some of the billionaire nerds are doing.
> The money and power corrupted them.
Actually accomplishing things in the world that constitute building a sci-fi dream world requires significant amounts of money and power, and any person or institution at all that could in principle have the capacity to do this would also have the capacity to become corrupt, at least by someone's judgement.
Personally, I'm pretty happy with many of the sci-fi things that tech billionaire nerds have made their money by bringing into existence. I rode across town in a self-driving Tesla the other day while giving orders to its AI system about how and where to go. That was a pretty sci-fi dream world experience. That's worth quite a bit of corruption.
> I rode across town in a self-driving Tesla the other day while giving orders to its AI system about how and where to go. That was a pretty sci-fi dream world experience. That's worth quite a bit of corruption.
This is why people hate nerds. Will not explain.
Plenty of people also hate whatever identity label you want to use for yourself.
Yeah but there's a good chance they didn't cause the death of millions, reintroduce the screwworm fly into the US, or force millions of people to starve or have a degraded life.
It would be fair to reflect for a moment, perhaps you are not impacted by the negative aspects of the corruption making this a much easier stance to take.
It became obvious / accepted wisdom that a moderately successful startup exit is the only way to have a decent future as a living person.
This used to be only one of many paths available to a nerd, but now: (a) academia is dead thanks to overly competitive publish-or-perish set-up (probably the biggest loss of the three), (b) corporate jobs do not pay enough to safely survive downturns that leave you jobless for extended periods, (c) government jobs have been made even more onerous and even less paying in real terms.
So everyone has to become a self-promoting, trend-chasing startup-founder type. Even if you don't found a startup, you have to be always ready for a new "business opportunity".
What happened to Nerds was HN started calling Musk an Engineer...and rockets he was developing...
To expand on this: certain people have learned how to capitalize on “nerdiness” - i.e. how to virtue signal in a way so that investors and general public treat you like an engineering genius.
Elizabeth Holmes persuaded for years that she was a groundbreaking innovator, even with non-existent product. Other manipulators are smart enough to have a real product that protects them via benefit of a doubt. Society is still not immune to people like that.
The original sin is earlier, when people with a dream and a million dollars were dubbed Hackers. And then articles like these calls these Stanford and Harvard guys nerds. Have they ever seen a true computer nerd, you know, the type of people that can actually write code and are not just paying other people to?
Interesting that he mentions Elon as being the archetypal "phase 3" nerd, since he was fairly high profile in all 3 phases and his reputation during the "phase 1" and "phase 2" timelines pretty much matched the author's description of the archetypal founder from those periods too.
I guess in a roundabout way, what I'm trying to say is that I wonder how much of this is a change in PR rather than a change in the people themselves.
Discussion from 3 days ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48504361
Do dupe's get necessarily de-ranked ?
If it has active participation in the form of new comments, it makes sense to merge the comments and not penalize the post.
If you email the mods and ask them to do so, they’ll either agree or let you know why they didn’t. I don’t have a solid enough grasp on how their logic works to predict the outcome here.
> Dupe's
It gets tiring to watch over autocorrects <sigh>
> Discussion from 3 days ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48504361
That post:
> 140 points by mrmarket 3 days ago | unvote | flag | hide | past | favorite | 110 comments
This post:
> 626 points by vrnvu 8 hours ago | flag | hide | past | favorite | 431 comments
IMHO, it's not a dup, because it's getting a lot more traction today.
The previous thread was only on the frontpage for 30 minutes so we can let this one stay up.
(I've taken "the fuck" out of the title - we don't care about profanity per se but that bit is a little linkbaity in this case.)
Maybe identity is the root of all evil?
Hear me out: back in the day founding a company wasn't an identity, it was just an action, a verb. Stuff started going sideways when people started thinking of themselves as "founders". Suddenly the product wasn't the top priority anymore, instead it was second to defending their identity as a "founder". Seemingly stupid decisions followed, but seen from the perspective of a CEO who wants nothing more than to be a founder, they start to make sense.
We see something similar in politics, I think. Note that it doesn't apply to everyone, but it's interesting to compare people who are engaged in a social justice struggle, Vs people who identify as "activist". The latter will be very prone to doing things that are counter-productive to their started cause, because they don't really care about any cause, they're just defending their identity as activist.
I reckon the same idea holds elsewhere as well.
(Disclaimer: I'm not sure how common that last thing is in the US, but where I live, it definitely happens a fair bit. But even here it does not apply to everyone, it's just a very loud minority)
Second disclaimer: I use the word identity in a very specific way in this comment. It is not to be confused with other uses of the same word, for example in the phrase "gender identity". That is a completely different kind of identity and is completely orthogonal and irrelevant to what I'm trying to express in this comment
I don't agree with Paul Graham on everything but he nailed this argument:
https://www.paulgraham.com/identity.html
> If people can't think clearly about anything that has become part of their identity, then all other things being equal, the best plan is to let as few things into your identity as possible.
Of course one can't not have any identity whatsoever, afterall ethics is a type of identity and no one should in their right frame of mind contest basic things like human rights.
As with sibling comment, it's my first time reading this, it's a great read, and author really managed to write down into words some things I have vaguely thought about before.
One thing I notice, which may be the worst part of it, although I realize it might be bit too pessimistic: It doesn't matter whether A identifies with X — if B thinks A identifies with X, the discussion still breaks down and it becomes difficult to have a fruitful argument. In other words, one party can shut down and degenerate a discussion for both (or many).
It makes me think once again about the adage: Communication is a two-way street; can't have communication otherwise.
Applying the principles of keeping your identity small also makes you more open to ideas from other people.
This kind of self-reflection about identity is also very important for your own internal communication with yourself.
That was a great read! Thanks for linking it! Paul certainly has a way with words that I simply don't, and he expresses the same idea I had, only much more clearly.
I wonder if being "engaged by identity" can be automatically detected somehow? Would be a cool experiment to build a automatic moderator that just hides identity based responses.
Also makes me wonder if there's a reliable way to detect it in yourself? If I could reliably identify when my identity is engaged, that would seem to be the first step towards disengaging it.
Or put differently, i would assume I carry labels unconsciously, in order to clear my cupboard I must find what's in it.
I am surprised you haven't read it before, because when I read your comment I immediately remembered that essay haha.
For conscious bias a good test is if being exposed to new facts prevent you from changing your opinion on something.
For example, imagine I was a very big believer of full-blown libertarianism and I was exposed to very concrete evidence that say, for example, government run healthcare is both more efficient and cheaper than private healthcare[1]. Would I still be full-blown libertarian and try to put holes on the data or would I embrace that libertarianism doesn't bring good outcomes in healthcare[2]?
Unconscious bias is much harder though, in fact libertarians tend to be very much fueled by ideology than facts. One could say that unconscious bias is fundamentally the same thing as ideology.
Another example, like I mentioned before I am very much a pro human rights ideologist. So I am inherently against some things like eugenics, even though one could provide data to me saying that eugenics would lead to "better" outcomes in society I would still be against it on principle.
[1]: Personally I sympathize with most libertarian views, but I don't consider myself a libertarian. I don't think a full private healthcare system is good for example. And this is the core issue the essay brings out, being a libertarian is assuming an identity and it closes you off to new ideas.
[2]: it is very hard to have absolute evidence to anything, but one must be willing to look over their own pre-existing world view when analyzing information available. A certain level of suspicion of information is warranted, but if you can't get past that, your world view is essentially ideology.
I can't find it now, but I distinctly remember dang talking about his moderation philosophy being based on what he's read about the activation of the parasympathetic nervous system
Words matter. They’re not only founders. They’re founders who generate money and create jobs.
I agree with your take, most of it boils down to ego, I believe.
Not at all, the issue is that money and glamour attracted techbros.
The fate of many nerdy interests: you want it to become popular and widespread. Then it does, and you realise you've lost control of it and it becomes commoditised. So went comic books, goes tech.
Damn, I remember playing games in 90s instead of watching TV like my classmates, and daydreaming one day I’d be able to talk about games instead of what was on the TV yesterday.
Now everyone plays, watches or at least knows games, but most games are lowest common denominator focus group tested commodity crap. Huge budgets and production value, almost zero innovation. Even indies are 80% slop to make a quick buck.
If you have a hobby no one cares about, hold it dear and close to your chest, and be happy that no one cares about it.
> If you have a hobby no one cares about, hold it dear and close to your chest, and be happy that no one cares about it.
Yes and yes. I've often likened [unpopular] hobbies these days to how Joel tries to hide Clementine deeper and deeper into the recesses of his mind to try and avoid his memories of her from being erased in "Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind". He fails, but somehow, they find each other and start again.
The ones who were good at becoming rich became rich. The ones who weren't were punished for not becoming rich.
They let in non-nerds. That's what happened.
You comment is probably one of the most important here. The gate keepers (generally the nerds) who produced useful products/services allowed the non-nerds in (to management), and from then on it's a slippery slope.
You will see similar dynamics where a bunch of people are involved.
This is such an obviously correct comment that I imagine it'll languish down below the fold.
Playing off of it, the submission says something worth highlighting:
> One of them builds autonomous weapons for the Pentagon.
Luckey was perfectly happy doing VR at Facebook until he got shoved out over politics.
It's not just letting the non-nerds in--it's a decade-plus long campaign to push nerds out if they have the wrong ideology.
Influencers, activists, narcissists, and grifters
And then there were no 'safe spaces' for socially awkward/on-the-spectrum nerds. The spaces once created to escape the school bullies had let in new types of bully.
The sociopaths tried to abduct my friends to a Discord-Server, but my true friend rebelled against them trying to take over my DnD round and he left, saying that he won't betray me for their cult. In the end the Discord people turned out to be deadbeats without a decent GM willing to do the hard work and their posse crumbled, probably preying on the next group of nerds/geeks/whatever victim they pick.
This but unironically! I normally hate gate keeping but in this one instance it’s all we have.
Most nerds became collateral damage from society's attempts to contain something much darker: something we mostly forgot even existed, and only fought through outdated traditions. We meant well when we tore out those countermeasures, and we did end that collateral damage. But we no longer remembered what we were keeping at bay, and so we also set the darkness free. The monsters at the top are only part of the problem, and might not even be the biggest: they have plenty of counterparts at the bottom who are in some ways even worse.
Now we have to figure out a new way forward. We need a way to put what needs chaining up back in its chains without harming the innocent weirdos. I don't have an answer. There might not be one. But it is the challenge.
They're still around, even if Musk is excluded. Torvalds springs to mind pretty quickly. I think society is increasingly adverse to people having personality flaws, than it is in favour of people having strengths such as technical knowledge or ability.
Better to have a bland guy running McDonalds who can't stomach eating the "product" than some passionate chef doing his best to improve mass market food but rubbing people up the wrong way.
It's failure of capitalism if the money goes to the guy in the shiny suit instead of the person, or team, who can actually innovate. I don't want to be too melodramatic, but maybe this is all part of the fall of the empire.
Nothing, I'm here since the 70s and haven't moved.
So you are in a totally different place now :-)
:-)
> This will probably catch on slower and be less viral, but it will pay off in the long-run once people 'turn against' tech founders as reality stars, which they eventually will.
The whole problem with opening Pandora's box is that you don't get to close it if you don't like what came out.
Why would things eventually get better? Especially on a time scale that matters to anyone who is currently alive?
Invoking LOTR analogy, Woz would be Tom Bombadil of the industry. Musk, Altman & Thiel, on the other hand, quite the opposite.
Jobs is a hack who promoted rampant consumerism and e-waste backed by slave-like manufacturing conditions. People need to stop putting him on a pedestal as separate from other Big Tech founders. He's just the flavor of egomaniac that appealed to your personality.
“Tech Otakus Save the World!” Yes thats the official corporate motto and philosophy of the huge mobile game company miHoYo (creators of Genshin Impact). I live next to their HQ and had to look twice when seeing guys wearing tshirts with that slogan
Their founding story is also very interesting, highly recommend reading it! Did you know that one of the founders (Liu Wei) personally did customer support in the early years? https://mihoyo.fandom.com/wiki/MiHoYo
Sure this story is bigger than Huawei, Xiaomi, BYD, Tencent etc. among ‘young’ Chinese (20-40). But prolly not here, thanks for sharing!
Woz really does seem to be both a brilliant and nice guy.
Steve Jobs was brilliant and complicated with many down sides, but he also seemed to have good taste and to care about user experience as well as good design, and his era at Apple produced exceptional products that redefined their categories: Mac, iMac, iPod, iPhone, iPad, etc. Even Jobs' failures were interesting: NeXT, Mac G4 Cube, iPod Hi-Fi. Well, except for the hockey puck mouse which seems like an obviously bad idea.
because 400k TC plus attracts people who optimize for earning high TC and not necessarily being “passionate” about the actual tech.
i’d say it’s worse for founders. i barely see any nerdy founders anymore in sf.
it is all striver types whose parents are execs or other wealthy types, and all these people want to do is rent seek or attention seek instead of making something interesting.
so many of their ai products don’t even work. the entire goal is to get suckers to pay for a few months or sign a contract to lock down “$insaneAmount arr in six months” and then blow the VC money on yacht parties and other lame stuff.
What does any of that have to do with "nerds"? You are complaining about business and management people in tech. None of them is a "nerd" and never was. Or otherwise said, what does the "nerd" even means to you? I thought that nerd means a person who is a person with lower social skills, obsessed over technical details so much they are unable to discuss anything else.
People whose whole career always was to manipulate and impress people, to talk well, to convince investors to give them money, to lead companies just are not nerds. Regardless of whether they are narcistic assholes or not.
Did someone mention Pournelle's Iron Law of Bureaucracy yet? It's not one organization, but there's just so much money in tech and it's so mainstream, that it just attracts more people that want to be successful not as a byproduct of skill, but just on its own. This bit me recently when changing jobs, I underestimated that despite all the problems I had, at my previous job there were a lot of people prioritizing being good at their job. Now it's just kicking the can so it's someone else's problem.
I think the turning point was not 10 years ago, but 15 years ago with Facebook's IPO.
Since then, the only thing that's mattered in tech is "how will you monetize", and monetization doesn't mean a modestly successful software company, no, it's a billion dollar unicorn or bust. Or getting your company to a high valuation and then sell and gtfo, rinse and repeat.
So why do you get? The people who care very much about making a billion dollars. And for the most part, people who care very much about that are assholes.
This is easy to answer -- the nerds are out there, but they don't push themselves into the spotlight. The reason Sam Altman gets more press than Linus Torvalds is because Altman is a media spectacle and Torvalds is a technologist. In terms of importance, Torvalds outranks Altman. In terms of flash, the reverse.
Consider this: present-day historians say Alexsandr Solzhenitsyn was a writer in the time of Leonid Brezhnev. 100 years from now they'll say Brezhnev was a politician in the time of Solzhenitsyn.
It's simple, marketing dominates everything. With attention being very expensive, appearance is what matters.
It doesn't matter if you write fantastic library, nobody is gonna use it because they won't know about it, the one with a gif of the terminal (ffs) will win that has a good page describing what it does (and being the most popular one can even become better than your library because of the following but that's not the point here).
It's everywhere, products, hiring, services. We have no network of trust (sigh), we need to trust some heuristics based on a shallow information. If somebody focuses on the shallow he wins, because nobody can ever dive into everything.
I must be the only one here loving those Mafia videos. I'm sad they are stopping after three episodes.
Links to the first two episodes:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EDCwQe7P8T0
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LP80Jrf2xrk
Once tech became glamorous, it started attracting people with narcissistic traits - much like Hollywood did. Expect to see more antisocial behavior as a result.
We need a new unglamorous tech, massaging floating point quants by hand in a hex editor.
At least there's still plenty of places for real nerds to be nerds. HN, hanging around in IRC, Eternal September, among other places. Finding myself more and more drifting away from "mainstream" internet stuff, and as a result I'm finding a lot more engaging and thought-provoking things and am overall happier as a result.
any examples? Even HN became too business focus. Very little software engineering.
Nerds became an industry field - that's what it happened. Back in the 90'ies we were doing IT things because it geniunely interested us, not that it would "net us high salaries". I'd do this even if you didn't pay a single centa because it triggered my dopamine receptors.
Then the world digitalized, and people who do not have any interest in computing and computers in general became "experts". That's when the ball begin to roll. This created people who can't give a french fry about the work they are doing? Quality? Efficiency? What do they matter, it was a job you did for 9-5 and you got your salary. If money was in say, haystacking, they'd be doing haystacking.
Now whenever someone utters "crypto" I do a doubleback and realize they mean cryptocurrencies, not cryptography. I do not expect any of my new hires to know the word "grok" (other than the AI of course), enjoy science fiction or any nerdy things we did. IT was a community where like minded people were working, now it is not.
> A short history of how tech leaders went from charming nerd to terrifying overlord
did this guy ever hear of Larry Ellison? He also claims Gates wasn't a terrifying overlord
What happened to nerds?
We won. I used to stay up all night watching Nasa launches and landings as a kid. I felt like an outcast. Now everyone’s wearing Nasa shirts like it’s cool and they don’t really have any good launches.
We used to be outcasts and now I look at youngsters and they’re doing the same things and it’s cool…? It’s like suddnely the jocks are the outcasts.
Nice shadow marketing for Kagi in there, linking to a Kagi image result page that asks you to sign up to view it, instead of the image.
> He and DH Hansson have retained the nerd-dom that made tech interesting/fun/curiosity-driven/charming for an audience with a certain taste in the first place. With them, it at least 'feels' like what you see is what you get. That does wonders for your reputation.
Doesn’t seem like you’ve been keeping up with DHH’s reputation. He’s at best controversial. He has publicly expressed fervent views about subjects outside tech that were definitely not fun/curiosity-driven/charming and has gotten plenty of backlash. I also see no reason to believe he’d decline to be on that Mafia game, he feels as much a “personality” as the others.
All fine and dandy, until I found out how others talk about us nerds. When I was interviewed once on TV (about some sports I was representing), the TV folks constantly joked about me as the "pulli-guy" (guy wearing a pullover). You are certainly not considered serious, if you just don't dress like them. Or talk like them.
Once people get rich and gain power, they do everything to grow and maintain their wealth and power. It's a tale as old as time.
This sounds insane to say but...
does anyone else get the feeling this comments section is being subtly astroturfed to sabotage the spirit of good-willed idealism and innovation? Look closely, there's reasons the powers that have insane capital would do this.
They've done it to every other space already.
I remember one of my first interactions with someone when I got to one of the big companies. I thought, “He’s a nerd!” It was both joy and surprise. We had the same speech impediment. We were both nerds. The job was hell, but everyone cared a lot.
I don’t give a damn about any company’s goals now.
I don’t understand what we’re talking about here. Plenty of founders still embrace nerd-dom, Jensen Huang constantly runs around signing people’s graphics cards. They’re just no longer part of the story media outlets wish to tell about tech.
I think people should stop worshipping and stop putting them in a pedestal. Yeah even steve jobs
Who can forget the MeetUp crazed scene with mostly early 20 something tech startup cosplaying 'founders', mostly lounging and tweeting from their macbook seated on a brown leather couch in their exposed brick 'offices' with a pool table in the back?
I worked for a company which emulated this style.
In fairness the exposed brick was already there when they rented the place.
Weird twist at the end. Media plays a large role. Some people watch zero news and just listen to talk shows and influencers. Doesn’t surprise me they fall for narratives so easily.
It’s not a “nerds” thing.
Most CEOs are completely private.
Most people don’t post their thoughts on Facebook on random topics either.
Because when most people post all their private thoughts on matters publicly, it’s kind of embarrassing.
The money got big, and no one stops them from doing these things.
It's not particularly difficult to understand. "Show me the incentives, and I'll show you the results." - Charlie Munger.
> Ten years ago, the cultural idea of the technologist was still basically Jobs and Wozniak.
Nah, that's been dead since 2010 or earlier. It was probably dead during DotCom too. Anytime tech is hot again, it attracts the kind of money/status chasers that move to whatever is hottest.
I mean Zuck was a Harvard grad and Bezos was a hedge fund guy first. Thiel was in law and derivates trading before tech.
The founders in garage era was more 70s/80s vibe.
[dupe] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48504361
I think the issue boils down to money, lots of it.
When I worked in the Bay Area, I noticed the nerd-culture was still more or less predominant in South Bay. The arrogant, shallow types were always there (as witnessed by their fancy cars--"should we take the Jag or the Merc today?"), but I could still tolerate it. San Francisco was a different story. I started a new job at a startup once and remember thinking "I'm surrounded by Ivy Leaguers who look like models--this place is not for me". I think the crazy amounts of money just brought in everyone looking to make a buck, and the nerds no longer were the majority.
But then you have the company missions. It seems like most of the companies in the Bay Area are all about advertising or compiling info on individuals and selling it. It's mostly B2B and not so much "cool products".
We're on the downside of the tech bubble, and maybe that's a good thing.
> We're on the downside of the tech bubble, and maybe that's a good thing.
I think it'll keep having waves, but I agree that a bit of cooling off could be a good thing.
The technologies are genuinely cool, interesting stuff, it's a super exciting time to be building stuff. But the business side of things seems quite vapid and desperate for many companies.
I wonder if more tangible industries like manufacturing have had similar peaks? Was there a time where the Wood Industry was going crazy, making everything out of wood, stuff that didn't need to exist?
They all got rich, hopped on trt and are huge now
Bullied in their childhood, they will reflect the cruelty back on the society once they get into position of power. You reap what you sow.
nerds built companies largely as a byproduct of their own interests. they made a lot of money because their technologies were great, but it was always about the tech, not the person. then vcs came in and convinced themselves that actually it was about the person, and started deploying money based on the people instead of the technology
Oof, the section on the founders fund mafia video pointed out things I hadn’t realized about the degree of planning behind it.
>why are they doing this?? [the mafia game show]
Instantly thought of the big short: “they’re not confessing. They’re bragging”
Big companies tend to be somewhat older companies. The people who run them tend to be older. Older people have had a longer time to adjust to society, open up, get out of their shell. People who run large companies also end up adapting to social contact, which is not something we tend to define nerds by. That is all amplified by social media and youtube which help scale up interpersonal examples for people to adjust to for good or for bad.
Some subset of these big companies will be run by people who appreciate that they're having an impact on society and feel that it's important for them to be more public so people can better appreciate who they are. Jeff Bezos was a bit awkward in the 1990s, Bill Gates was way more awkward back then, oh man, it was physically uncomfortable to watch him in interviews. Mark Zuckerberg was absolutely out of touch and forcing himself into the spotlight of his company was a disaster, he rolled -1000 charisma. They had to get Elon Musk to make dice just for that to be possible.
Most of them get better over time. These are not people that generally started hugely confident in public or with lots of people, but when you run these companies you gain both confidence and money which make public appearance less painful. You could argue they might sometimes veer into overconfidence to make up for confidence slipping, which can also be seen as ego.
There are plenty of nerds out there. Statistically based on population growth and also increases in autism spectrum diagnoses, there are more than ever.
This seems to be a critique of "Can Tech Legends Find the Liar? (Mafia Episode 1)" on Youtube but critiqued from a "nerd subculture" angle, which is a thing in the USA, I guess? As a European, this took me a moment to figure it out.
There definitely is/was a nerd subculture in Europe, it's just that those who represent it were always only vaguely aware of the existence of Jobs and Wozniak.
Linus Torvalds on the other hand - that is a household name.
Jobs is not the one to think of when relating to nerds, Wozniak is. Jobs is the one who comes in and takes most of the money as well as the limelight when some nerds have done something interesting but then act like the dog who has caught the car. European nerd culture is more Fabrice Bellard and Linus Torvalds, less Steve Jobs.
A post complaining about the spectacle of tech CEOs media image, rather than people's real lives.
It's the logical conclusion of the acceptance of hacktivist/activist groups in the tech community. Activists/Hacktivists want something their way. If they don't get it, they resort to violence, disruption, and/or harassment (rather than use mainstream political tools like trying to get elected into office or trying to get new laws passed).
This sort of behavior is authoritarian. During Covid, this was was very apparent. I saw tech leaders supporting forced vaccinations, suppressing opinions online, and getting people fired from their job for simply stating their opinion.
Magazines like 2600, who always championed freedom of speech and expression during multiple administrations, showed their true colors. They supported suppression of people they disagreed with politically.
Twitter/Facebook were found to be colluding with the government to target individuals that made the government look bad or had contrarian views.
The worst part? It was swept under the rug. Nobody in the tech industry cared.
This is why I support the suppression of rights of people I disagree with politically. This tit for tat will need to continue, until lessons are learned, and it stops for everyone.
Im so sick of Steve Jobs and apple glaze. You like it because marketing targeted at you. It was no more slick than other products at the time and worked no better. You liked it because the company threw money at a very successful marketing campaign. These people are not nerds they are extreme outliers and not much different to the CEOs of today.
Things like ycombinator and their censorship, they all went someplace else.
I think the bigger social problem is that too many people think it is counter-cultural to be defending rich people and billionaires, and an act of rebellion to mindlessly consume.
I think broader problem is HN’s laser focus on few managers that are 1) doing [subjectively] immoral things 2) doing things not in a way busines and tech industry were doing it 15-20 years ago.
Down to a point where people start painting an “us vs them” picture with white knights of old and scary liars of new.
> Phase one (late 1970s to 2007): the founder as charismatic, mysterious byproduct
> Phase two (2007 to 2015): the founder as parable.
> Phase three (2015 to now): the tech industry as grift-adjacent.
This pops out at me for a few reasons.
1. The grift era started long before 2015.
2. The dotcom era (which falls in the absurdly large 1970s-2007 range) was pretty grifty.
3. Come to think of it, maybe the parable we were sold in the 2007 era was ... Wait for it... A grift?
What happened is that the computing industry was acquired by the advertising industry.
What kept things sane for a long time was the focus on products. Someone made something and sold it to end users. The end users had to be kept happy. That leads to a sane industry.
Now, most of the big names in computing are ad-supported. That's a completely different dynamic. The hype is the product. The user is the enemy.
On August 9, 2006, Eric Schmidt, head of Google, spoke at the Search Engine Strategies conference.[1] Before that, "search engine optimization" was considered a scumbag business, and it was the job of search engine companies to fight it. On that day, Google made it legitimate and turned evil.
[1] https://www.zdnet.com/article/google-ceos-new-paradigm-cloud...
Also- everyone is a whore now, and not in the fun literal way.
[dead]
I am in no way supportive of monopolies though taking "the need to compete" out of the equation and having steady flow of money that won't be cut off if "someone beats you to market" was pretty revolutionary. Consider Bell Labs, staffed with real "nerds" that never had to prostitute themselves or to pitch an idea on the merits of making money -- they simply did stuff that was fun, in ther nerdy way. Because of this we have wireless communication, transistors, digital cameras sensors, c, and many others.
(There were a lot of negatives due to this AT&T monopoly but we are talking about nerds here and having to socialize your own worth/value. It's a shitty game that real nerds aren't necessary interested in playing)
"The digital commons of 2026 is defined by its grifters. So it's not purely tech's fault that its now seen as a sort of avenue for getting rich quick and amorally"
I am not so sure I agree with this take. The "nerds" are building incredibly powerful technologies (Amazon, Starlink/SpaceX, search, algorithmic social media, AI, etc.) that literally control our lives now. It isn't any great mystery that the tech titans realized they had this power, and hence are questioning whether democracy is some outdated concept. They all want to be Plato's philosopher (or in this case, technologist) kings. At the risk of sounding like an AI, it isn't just grifting (or a con game) - these guys really do think of themselves as the new feudal lords. So I don't think this author is thinking big enough...
Increasingly men have been disenfranchised over the last decade so the only way forward is to take on such titles to at least appear successful. It looks like normal behaviour to me.
Could you elaborate? In what ways have men been disenfranchised?
For tenure-track positions—the pipeline for future faculty—white men have gone from 49 percent in 2014 to 27 percent in 2024 (in the humanities, they’ve gone from 39 percent to 21 percent).
https://www.compactmag.com/article/the-lost-generation/
27 percent is roughly the same percentage of white men that are in that age bracket in the US. The lower 21 percent in the humanities could be explained by there being less interest in the those fields from the white male population in the first place.
I wouldn't call that disenfranchised; I'd call that a correction. I suppose you could make the argument that more white men should be incentivized to go into the humanities though.
You only say that because you benefit from it.
> Phase three (2015 to now): the tech industry as grift-adjacent.
I'm gonna disagree on the timeline and maybe get some flak for it: phase 3 was 1995-2000ish. When the first advertisement script and web analytics were born and disseminated. That's where all the tech grifts originate.
When I first heard of "Hackers" being equated with startups (viz. this very forum's name!) I was disgusted. A hacker, to me, was personified by Richard Stallman, or a phreaker, or Neo from the Matrix. But here we are.
Wow, this comment section alone speaks to how much things have changed.
As someone who started to read this forum because it was y-combinator startup-friendly, business-friendly and investor-friendly, I never would have imagined the anger and ridicule on display here.
Obviously, the nerds have left the building--or at least this forum.
Did anyone read this article?
"There is no reason founders should disappear from public life. There are too many advantages to building in public to ignore it."
Someone has to say this: don't be a victim--get out there and build something valuable for yourself.
There are no overlords, except in your imagination. Go build great things.
I think the ire is from people who were nerds pre 2000. Before software was a way to wealth. People who made weird stuff because they wanted to. Then some of those people made weird stuff that made them wealthy, leading some people to make boring stuff that made them wealthy. Then the phrase startup started being common and people entered the field with wealth on their mind. It is the complaint you would hear from any niche career if suddenly it became lucrative. Your advice is solid though. Ignore all those people and keep making weird stuff that you love without worrying about whether it will pay for more than food and shelter. Not with you on the overlord thing though, there are plenty of people looking to control, oppress and pull up ladders.
Nerds are no better or worse than other people. Dump massive money and power into an industry and you will get unhinged shit like this that bubbles to the surface.
Some of it is the mask falling off and some of it is people genuinely getting warped by it. It’s a little of both.
In finance it’s covered over by a buttoned down ivy league veneer, but the coke snorting maniac is there.
Same in politics where there’s pomp and ceremony to cover it, but when it comes out in the open there it’s probably the most ugly. Governments have armies and police.
In nerd-dom it comes in a form that’s uniquely tone deaf to the point of coming off like a comic book or anime villain.
Nerds never went away, they just migrated to Signal chats or obscure IRC channels. Non-interaction beats bad interaction by miles.
That's incredibly disappointing from Moxie
LinkedIn, Twitter and tons of money
Everything the author complains about occurred in the dot-com bubble as well. His view that until 2007 founders were lovable nerds is completely off-base. In Silicon Valley, the same dynamics of start-ups chasing money, then getting it and proclaiming their genius, as they were “going to change the world” happened in 2000 as in similar ways today. The popping of the internet bubble brought back a lot of humility.
I think that the title should be more, what the fuck happened to tech executives as compared to nerds.
because previously it was mostly the nerds who were at the forefront of the innovation (they still are), but they now have a playbook where they see all the other people (grifters) who are entering tech for money and the playbook of the attention economy and doing that because its a profitable strategy.
It's basically the fact that there are multiple companies where a grift culture is promoted within tech (ironically I am on YC website and YC had a company which you might've heard called delve :D)
As people realized that the technology has value and finance people realizing it to pour head over fist money into it.
With such eggregious trillions of dollars worth of money (basically the whole economy getting floated by tech), you are bound to see people within this do the grift playbook and talk about themselves and succeed and that has become the playbook.
So I think this is what has happened to nerd culture. It simply became profitable and then commoditized and used by people who could then grift.
BUT people are respecting the nerd culture (well the non grift version of it) a lot more
For some reason, I wish to recommend Weird Al video song about White & Nerdy[0] and how people within the comments are saying that Nerd culture has its own unique identity and many if not all appreciating the nerd culture
[0]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N9qYF9DZPdw&list=RDN9qYF9DZP...
So TLDR: people like the previous nerd culture and it still exists, especially on HN but on platforms like twitter and others, as discussed within the article itself, with the attention economy. The grift culture is getting more attention than the nerd culture and because of the overlap in tech, the nerd culture is getting some bad rep but overall people appreciate the actual nerd culture (IMO) as interesting and unique (whereas previously, people wouldn't have appreciated it so much)
You don't hear about the actual nerd culture because it isn't algorithmic hungry but it still exists on platforms like Hackernews IMO!
Also, you can find a lot of nerds on Mastodon, PeerTube, and other non-mainstream, federated social media platforms that were not captured by the finance people (and cannot be thanks to their distributed design).
Exactly but because I suppose that the author is conflating tech founders on twitter (refuse to call it X) and other standard platforms which all share the same playbook and conflating it to all
Although I would wish for less overlap with tech-bros but it is sadly what it is and there are ways to mitigate it by being on more nerd friendly websites like hackernews.
Also, one more observation I wish to share is that not all nerds are tech product creators and neither should they be. Some just create for the sake of creation and IMO there is long way to go after creation as well and the nerd culture doesn't have standardized playbook as compared to grift culture.
Basically the nerd culture is immeasurable and is driven by it and the grift culture is measurable and is also driven by it. It's just that tech has more overlap but if trillions of dollars were thrown in physics instead of AI (quantum computing?), I would consider physics to have a lot of tech-bro culture as well.
> With such eggregious trillions of dollars worth of money (basically the whole economy getting floated by tech), you are bound to see people within this do the grift playbook and talk about themselves and succeed and that has become the playbook.
Reminds me of Pink Floyd’s "Have a Cigar":
> And did we tell you the name of the game, boy?
> We call it Riding the Gravy Train
And then Britney Spears albums out sold The Dark Side of the Moon
This is going to be buried, but I'll say it anyway.
I've been thinking about this a fair amount over the past 5-10 years, and I think a lot of the issues that we have can be traced to our demography and specifically 'the zeal of the convert' along with existing cultural dysfunction that would have been addressed if we'd grown more slowly as a group.
There's a lot of discussion about tech as an industry, but much less about tech as a culture, encompassing people's lives outside of their work/career.
Most people who are into tech in their 40s-60s came into it via a strong interest as an adolescent or young adult, and a fair number of them felt misunderstood and/or were abused/taunted/bullied/etc by mainstream culture. Then they discover this part of the world where people think like them and things make sense. They make friends who see things in systems! They can argue with facts! They agree what is important to argue about! They agree that consistency in thinking principles matters! Etc. This means a lot of people in tech, particularly the ones who hold the most power (even outside of founders) are decently likely to have either a disdain of or fear of non-tech cultures due to bad experiences, feel that tech culture needs to be defended from outside influences who don't understand and would crush it, and are well... zealots about it.
The problem is zealots are really bad at accepting and pinpointing issues within a culture. They want to defend it beyond all reason because to them, that culture/group is their safe place. If someone is bad in the culture, it can't be a sign of something wrong with the culture (because the culture is a safe place). Instead, that person 'isn't a true X'. Or that person is just a bad apple. The other influence is that converts absolutely don't want to lose their place. In the case of tech culture, because we've intertwined the culture with a career, that means people being afraid of losing their career/network/etc.
This is a different than being born into something. The perspectives are different. People born into tech culture/grey tribe/however you want to label it get to see more of how the culture expresses itself in different relationships (including its problems). They see disagreements between nerd adults that aren't mediated with corporate or monetary power/status structures, they have a choice about how much of the culture they participate in or not (like how someone born Catholic who goes to Mass once a year at Xmas is still considered Catholic regardless). There's more wiggle room, and more a sense of how those virtues play out over an entire lifetime instead of being limited to how they're expressed in a workplace between the ages of 20 and 45. Depending on the particular situation, it's also possible to have someone in tech culture who doesn't hold any personal grudges against the other cultures they share space with.
Right now, since we're dominated by converts between the ages of 20 and 50 and we've grown so quickly, we haven't had the time to create the cultural guardrails that would allow us to do things like 'agree on what constitutes an abuse of power' or 'agree on what we should teach our kids about morals', etc.
And because of the lopsided age pyramid, we have next to no elders, which doesn't help either.
This is shifting slightly as the first generation of explosive growth is starting to reproduce, and soon they'll start aging out of the workplace and we'll start to see more contemplative behavior. It's already somewhat starting: there's hints of people reaching that stage in their lives.
(NB: Yes, I'm aware that the tech industry pre-dates the 80s, but demographically those numbers are minuscule in comparison to the people who joined during and after the dot com boom. My grandmother used punchcards and knew C and was born in 1934, but there just aren't enough people with that experience for them to exert a cultural pull. Almost all of the elders we do have are regarded individually: we know (or know of) those people, but that's different from 'I'm struggling with this moral question, I'm going to go ask John because he's both wise and will understand what I'm talking about enough to give decent advice'.)
Nerds were commoditized by Hollywood, who exploited the rising digital era to develop stereotypical caricatures which could be easily pigeon-holed, and thus controlled.
They were compelled to do this, because nerds ate Hollywoods' lunch.
Just look at the show, Big Bang Theory. A heinous exposition of nerd culture which derides and degrades nerd'ism and aligns it with the neo-fascist Ayn Rand'ian ideology being propagated by Hollywoods' culture class in order to promulgate division and derision.
The Wests' copycat culture, not really able to develop culture of its own, simply picked up the baton and ran with it.
Now, gullible impressionable generations assume - courtesy of incessant mass-media groupthink - that its necessary to be a misanthropic asshole if you want to sound clever.
they're sieg heiling at the podium now.
Putin is right now considering how to get on that Mafia show and improve his public image in the US
I miss Jobs. He was the one all these tech founders wanted to be. And Job, for all his faults always really cared about the product he made.
I feel like every founder is now some kind of grifter. Bouncing from new idea to new idea on how to make more money even if the whole thing is just smoke and mirrors.
I think it started with “developers developers developers” and kids went to colleges for CS degrees to get rich not to solve problems or geek out on hard problems but to get wealthy. That dropped in a lot of new personalities some of which were highly narcissistic.
Money happened
nerds and geeks are different beasts
The mafia game aspect is something I had not thought of. Have science fiction / dystopian novels focused on propaganda like that? Novels seem to have cartoonishly evil societies but the real world has stuff like this.
The nerds era is gone. Welcome to the era of super-villains and self-entitled smartasses.
Not gone forever though. There were nerds at the start of the industrial revolution, they were there when electrification happened, when radio became feasible, rinse and repeat to the most recent iteration of "computer nerds".
A new thing will come along which the finance types won't recognise for its potential, nerdy types will start experimenting with it, make progress, gain some small successes but being nerds they're not really interested in creating large markets for their things. People with less eye for the detail but more for the market potential will pick it up, sometimes together with the nerds (Wozniak/Jobs), sometimes without them and create larger markets. If it really takes off like computers did there will be a wild-west period in which those who understand the technology - i.e. nerds - get to step out of the shadows for a bit until the technology is commoditised and the market is consolidated. Eventually there is less need to know the tech which has become 'boring' anyway so the nerds disappear into the shadows again to tinker with whatever scratches their itch.
The market is like society in that it needs both conservatives who recognise a good thing and do their best to keep it alive as well as progressives who are less interested in keeping things going than they are in changing things in search of some Platonic ideal. While the good thing is good the progressives are doing their things in their workshops without being seen much. When the good thing starts going bad the conservatives are mostly ignored because nearly everyone is looking at the progressives for a solution which is not "a faster horse" or "a lighter buggy whip".
Yes, I agree that nerds still exist… I myself am one, LOL. But there are so much noise out there that our voices can no longer be heard. :(
Nothing happened to the Nerds. They are all showing their true colours.
They may have shared a love for technology, what they also shared is a deep immaturity.
The immaturity of a person not wanting to acknowledge and cary any responsibility for other people, for the consequences of their work, for any kind of accountability. Just play with their toys without any concern for the external world.
'I'm just here playing with tech and code'. Sure! but that stuff you're building is being weaponised by other (the venn diagram unfortunately overlaps) tech bro's so men can film women with their glasses in public like the little sick creeps they are. Or steal all their data. You can't pretend you are not responsible and complicit.
They want "what's theirs" and anything in their way - including people - have to comply or be destroyed.
We got old, slowly approaching retirement age, and now what is cool is being that guy or girl on Silicon Valley show, naturally with VC backing hoping to win the startup lottery.
Money
It really changed when the game went from "Build the best product" to "Get the highest valuation" and the means of doing so were specifically NOT about building the best product. VC money was a factor, public exits were a factor, but even more generally, the idea became that you could become a billionaire without making anything at all.
Just create enough FOMO among the monied and you win. This is not nerd stuff... it's psychopath stuff.
Yes - Psychopathy is a thing, last time I researched, in the CEO territory.
I assume it is selected for.
I assume it benefits those at the tippy-top of the western corporate structure.
They make more money, taking advantage of situations that squish other people, in my view more quickly than those with fewer pathologies. In my personal experience they seem to be tacitly accepted by boards & investors. I understand "maximizing profits" is the job.
Not a new thing.
- https://www.cnbc.com/2019/04/08/the-science-behind-why-so-ma...
Money
It became all about money. YC is actually really the epitome of this transformation. VCs started deploying massive amounts of money, turbocharged by Covid.
This blog looks AI generated to me.
This is the era of unbridled, shameless narcissism and tech is no different. Money and publicity are excellent vehicles for the narcissist.
I absolutely despised the game "Mafia" when my friends played it in college. Now I know I'm not alone in that.
This is looking back at Apple through some very rose-tinted lenses. Apple had a big role in moving the tech industry toward "grift-adjacent". There were at least 2 contiguous decades when Apple products were unusable, poorly designed, self-important, overpriced pieces of junk. Some would argue they still are.
People bought Apple because they were subscribed to Steve Job's personality cult. Heck, they might've even bought a "not-a-flamethrower" if he tried to sell one.
I don't like Apple products really but 2 contiguous decades is a bit much? The first mac was good, os x when it first came out was phenomenal, and there aren't 2 decades in between there.
OS X was never good and still isn't. I need to install like 7 third-party usability tools to make myself productive on a Mac, including a tiling manager, a clipboard manager, and a not-broken replacement for Spotlight - very basic things.
Also, Steve Job's "font obsession" is overrated. The fonts on Windows have always been much better and render way better as well (even to this day). Helvetica Neue is widely considered one of the worst fonts and Apple used it for a whole 3 decades.
You can certainly say that now, but in 2000, a Unix with a polished desktop really was amazing imo. Agree to disagree I guess.
Nerds were bought out and turned into money and thus wife having chads. Now, the basement dwellers of today are actually tech illiterate and skillless with no charming qualities at all. Blame capitalism.
Seems illogical that you can quantify a subset of people that wouldn't even want to interact with the average joe on the clearweb. We're alive, intelligent and active on our IRC.
I know sites you have no idea about running on pure spite and strangeness. I am banned from almost all mainstream social media for wrongthink. What do you know about underground spaces?
Hell, just few weeks ago we ddosed one of new text only social media sites for having a bad font. There is a real microcosm down there. And war.
Don't go there. People would eat you alive for breakfast, doxx and possibly hack you as soon as you would start bragging about 'intelligence'.
That must be very cool for you, I know a lot of stuff too, and yet.. I don't go around about it like poser. I am not interested in any further "intellectual" exchange.
You can tell you’re slop weary when it feels enjoyable just to read text at length written purely by a human.
> Phase three (2015 to now): the tech industry as grift-adjacent. The digital commons of 2026 is defined by its grifters. So it's not purely tech's fault that its now seen as a sort of avenue for getting rich quick and amorally, even if you are an otherwise ordinary person. But it is our fault that many of our 'figureheads' are leaning way the hell in on this. Elon Musk is the most absurd example of this, but he almost doesn't count because he is in his own tier of ridiculously self-promotional and attention hungry.
There's a new trend to call everyone you don't like a "grifter". How is Elon a grifter? The dude has been getting shit done on and on for years. This is the opposite of grifter.
> One of them builds autonomous weapons for the Pentagon
Also what is this? Wasn't the whole point to have an agreement to not build AI weapons? I think the author is on some emotional screed.
Boring company was an anti-mass transit grift. Dogecoin. Humanoid robots as the future of Tesla. Colonizing Mars is a grift on unmatured boys who grew up on scifi. Etc.
Which is to say: you really couldn't remember any grifts?
Almost like no group of humans is above the usual human vices.
Its a lot harder for poor or powerless people to have child sex orgies on yachts though.
> Moxie Marlinspike
come on man, what are you doing. must admit that i haven't followed this guy closely, but i thought with him being a part of Signal he would know better.
that actually makes me even more suspicious about Signal...
> Phase three (2015 to now): the tech industry as grift-adjacent... Elon Musk is the most absurd example of this
Elon? Grift? Give me a break. He's the greatest true technologist of all time.
I couldn't fine even one other defender in either discussion. Maybe its true that HN has been BlueSky'd and Twitter is the new HN
ps. Great post aside from this
Come on, are you really complaining that they played a game of Mafia? Please.
Great post, and largly captures my own experience.
I can only speak for my institution, but eagerness to lock down ip and keep ownership of everything tightly controlled and out of the hands of said nerds/inventors doesnt really incentivise me to do beyond what I'm paid for.
The one time I tried, I was hit by the full force of my institutions commercialization goons and lawyers, to a degree that it killed my drive to do anything novel for them. Despite being promised partial ownership, in the end, after federal grant funds were secured and product developed, they took everything using "loopholes" that go against the law and the institutions own rules, but to fight it I need resources I don't have, which the institution no doubt knows. All that despite me initially being fully aligned with my institution, and happy to only take a very minor share of actual profit, in-line with what i'd get anway, only stipulation was veto rights in application (as the tech has very real applications in offline autonomous drones, which I consider an X-treat).
If my own institution is a hostile actor, and willing to fuck me over nothing, simply because they can, why do anything?
So, current state of Copyright law favours institutions over the very individuals it was meant to protect, and there are no options to protect one self if anything interesting is developed without serious capital and legal might. So, fuck it, im not doing anything except hobby related, GPL licensed stuff. If I can do anything to make it hard to commercialize, I will. If it can be kept in house, it is kept there.
Capital interest has become a rather ugly and hostile egregore with interest aligned against that of humanity. All those building cool and novel shit I know hold similar opinions, so it is no surprise to me. I was strongly advised against working with the institution by older folks i look up to, people who have built really powerful tools of their own. Their warnings ended up being proven valid with deafening clarifty. I've always found the statement that capitalism breeds innovation to be a joke, and while it works in the chinese model, the "western" model is sick and suffers a sort of cultural psychosis that makes it rather unttractive to engage with.
Elon Musk happened. Zuckerberg happened (yes, before the current bro transformation, we had The Social Network showing us).
Elon probably most of all, he was the one who took fringe edge lord behavior and elevated to something to be admired.
Silicon Valley has always had a bit of a libertarian bent, but I really think a lot of people have spent a significant and successful effort at pushing it towards Objectivism.
Objectivism is a stupid, angry idea borne out of the atrocities of the Bolsheviks. It exists in a vacuum. Eddie Lampert named his yacht the Fountainhead which is amusing since, while I don’t question he has talent, he got millions in seed money to start his own fund from Richard Rainwater. Elon Musk is not some scrappy kid; the vast majority of founders are from comfortable and increasingly upper middle class families where they can tolerate the risk of failing with a reasonable safety margin and then delude themselves that they bootstrapped everything themselves.
Curtis Yarvin does not exist in a vacuum. These are awful people and the fact that we’ve allowed them to be taken seriously and control the conversation is…obscene.
What happened? Tech companies became trillion dollar companies and tech founders became billionaires. As a trillion dollar company, you are a military contractor and are deeply invested in and intertwined with the American imperial project.
Tim Apple [sic], Sundar Pichai, Sergey Brin, Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg, Sam Altman and Jeff Bezos all went to the inauguration to bend the knee. They all paid 7 figures plus to be there.
Being a billionaire is fundamentally incompatible with being a countercultural nerd. If anything, this was Silicon Valley returning to its roots. The first companies were founded before WWI (eg Federal Telegraph Co) but the true origins of the name "Silicon Valley" came from semiconductors and the likes of HP and Lockheed Martin as a Cold War defense offshoot.
The premise of the article is faulty. "Nerds" became "cool" as technology became more important, so sociopaths in leadership positions stated to pretend to be nerds. It's as simple as that.
I think a far more important question is why we no longer have more reasonable public figures. Who are the modern equivalents of Isaac Asimov or Richard Feynman?
The missing piece of data that distinguishes what happened to nerds and to finance bros is that nerds got sold on post-religious cults like Landmark, The Secret, or the metastasized principles thereof (see also Silicon Valley s01’s guru, the marketing for Devs, the documentary The Institute, et al.) — but finance bros were insulated against this because their employers and industry had rigorous belief systems already in place centered around money, profits, and self-confidence; and, most importantly, a much higher tolerance for arrogance.
So, in Civ6 terms: Nerds didn’t have an existing industry pantheon that could stand up to religious pressure by non-religious entities. This is part of what made Jobs and Apple so successful: arrogance is a stellar defense against religious pressure, and Jobs was implemented a rigorous culture that resists religious pressure very strongly. It’s not invulnerable to sects from within, but it’s nearly impenetrable to sects from without.
There’s also a subtler reason why Jobs and Woz could coexist at all: Jobs wasn’t arrogant and cruel to people because he looked down upon them; he was arrogant and cruel to ideas, and so to work with him, that detachment of idea from self-worth and ego and etc. was mandatory.
To use Woz and Jobs as a constructed spectrum analogy: Everyone perceives me as being more like Woz than Jobs interpersonally, though never fully Woz (I’m a little too distant for the tastes of the needy), until they invite me to critique their ideas or listen to my describe my own, at which point they (permanently thereafter) perceive me as being much more towards the Jobs end of the scale. It can be somewhat isolating and uncomfortable to ride alongside someone like that long-term, but that’s compensated for somewhat by having a work culture that prioritizes hallway chats over cubicle farms. (No coincidence the UFO, then!)
Most nerds lacked both the arrogance and unconcern for other people’s feelings that insulated Jobs against the belief grifters and the innate confidence that insulated Woz, and instead have what we see in Elon Musk: a deep and desperate craving for other people to like them, to value them, to adore them. (Praise him.) So of course most successful nerds fell prey to the basic grift that hooks people on religious and secular cults every day: “we’ll sell you a feeling of belonging, of being valued, in exchange for your adoption and propagation of our beliefs”. Jobs didn’t give a fuck if you propagated his beliefs or not, so long as you adhered to them at work; and Woz clearly doesn’t need to belong to be confident in his value to others.
Zuckerberg is a good example of someone who has the arrogance/asocial of Jobs down pat, but in contrast is fully decoupled from prosocial outcomes. Investigating what the guiding forces in Jobs’ life were that directed him towards prosocial outcomes, rather than asocial outcomes like Zuckerberg, would perhaps be quite revealing; Jobs built a company that tends to minimize harm to its customers, while Zuckerberg built a company that tends to maximize harm to its customers, but both succeeded at building institutions that resist external religious pressures. That’s a distinction missed by this post, and separates the outcomes neatly into a simple 2x2 matrix: asocial/prosocial (Jobs), asocial/apathetic (Zuckerberg), social/confident (Woz), social/needy (Musk).
the technology industry spent forty years accumulating a very specific kind of trust and mostly had boring motives, which made us appear trustworthy and largely benign
Are we on the same planet? Trust and motives? Is this some kind of secret that we’re not supposed to talk about? Tech, from its very beginnings, has been about libertarianism, subversion, counter culture, trying to be cooler than the people, wanting to wield power over them, misogyny, abusing free speech, racism, gatekeeping. The list keeps going of so many bad characteristics.
“core nerd values: a love of learning, curiosity, an obsessive interest in your domain, and an admirable humility”
Again what planet is this? Most nerds are some of the most self important condescending better than you social weirdos.
Ohhhh yes. Here it comes
“occasionally arrogant (not always, IMO. Sometimes you're just right.”
Ah yes applauding arrogance as correctness.
Phase One. Holy. The delusion here thinking that 1970-2007 was some golden CEO age. Do you live your life never understanding the incredible pain and exclusion and mistreatment that people experienced and continue to everyday? Is that by choice (willfully ignorant) or are you just this privileged that you thought the world was fantastic?
Here’s the fact: These CEOs, SVPs, Directors, Managers, Engineers didn’t just magically become shitty people in recent years. They’ve always been terrible people right down to the no-social-skills neckbeard who manages IT. This has always been the case. Might I remind you that computing was full of women? That’s how it started. What did boys do? They came in, kicked all the women out. Took over and then invited their buddies. It gets worse because then it also became racist. This was never a surprise. The root cause was that terrible people came in and ….. SURPRISE …. behave terribly.
This is some of the most delusional and downright offensive stuff I’ve ever read and I don’t even want to begin to read some of the HN comments. And HN has had far worse discussions and articles on the front page. Most of us have never experienced the depressingly (yes actual clinical depression) horrible treatment that people have been experiencing either as potential employees or full time employees ever since those ENIAC days. Go look at your team. And then look at your other teams. And then your line of management. You’ll see the pattern. Now go back and look at history for the same things. You’ll once again see the same thing. It’s the same people. Young terrible hateful xenophobic racist homophobic freaks grew up and continued their ways. Nerds being the good guy is as cringe as the incel nice guy. Yuck.
Our industry is rotten because it has rotten people all through the ranks. It’s not just CEOs or founders. It’s everyday working people who are terrible to each other. And sorry to say but nerds geeks whatever you want to call them are at the top of the most terrible. That’s what make this industry suck. We never actually sat down and told most of these people (and us) to goto a therapist and deal with our trauma, demons, etc. and stop propagating that hurt to others. Start there.
Oh and this is the same blog with a different URL from 2 days ago and commenter pointed out. Yikes.
[dead]
TLDR, "Yoink" =3
Patrick Boyle seems to cover the SPCX trajectory fairly well...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wKXgeNwNRJ4
Nerds have made themselves obsolete by inventing LLMs.
So now instead of programming it makes more sense to go to the gym.