ZH version is available. Content is displayed in original English for accuracy.
Advertisement
Advertisement
⚡ Community Insights
Discussion Sentiment
69% Positive
Analyzed from 11976 words in the discussion.
Trending Topics
#nerds#more#tech#nerd#money#don#something#things#social#where
Discussion (235 Comments)Read Original on HackerNews
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.
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-...
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.
When younger I've had job in groceries 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.
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.
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?
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
[…]
despite the novel's thematic focus on racial injustice, its black characters are not fully examined.[79] In its use of racial epithets, stereotyped depictions of superstitious blacks, and Calpurnia, who to some critics is an updated version of the "contented slave" motif and to others simply unexplored, the book is viewed as marginalizing black characters.[130][131] One writer asserts that the use of Scout's narration serves as a convenient mechanism for readers to be innocent and detached from the racial conflict. Scout's voice "functions as the not-me which allows the rest of us—black and white, male and female—to find our relative position in society".[79] A teaching guide for the novel published by The English Journal cautions, "what seems wonderful or powerful to one group of students may seem degrading to another".[132] A Canadian language arts consultant found that the novel resonated well with white students, but that black students found it "demoralizing".[133] With racism told from a white perspective with a focus on white courage and morality, some have labeled the novel as having a "white savior complex",[134] a criticism also leveled at the film adaptation with its white savior narrative.[135] Another criticism, articulated by Michael Lind, is that the novel indulges in classist stereotyping and demonization of poor rural "white trash".
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/To_Kill_a_Mockingbird
Most overrated book since “night” by elie Wiesel
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.
So, all of them?
aka techbros
The combination of endless trend-chasing, software churn, and techbro culture made me hate everything about software, so I jumped ship to biology.
“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”.
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.
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.
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!
Woz, maybe he actually was a nerd.
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.
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?
Star Trek, Star Wars, Dune, LOTR, Asimov, Clarke, Hobbes, are all nerd-dom mainstays, like D&D.
Post-CEO, he had completely refurbished his image via philanthropy, only to throw it away with the Epstein stuff.
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.
People who spend their entire life in front of computers should not be the ones with the keys to society yet here we are.
This might've been different 50 years ago but it's the number one striver job there is.
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.
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 by the time medical school and residency are done with them, many if not most will be sociopaths to rival all the top CEOs.
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 have the feeling it probably teaches you something, or at least it should. Something not too unlike epistemic humility, maybe.
But then you see people with very questionable morals having made a key discovery or having produced a fundamental technology. Reality is complicated
Yet he's also a sociopathic fascist arsehole. It turns out these traits are not all on the same axis.
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.
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.
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.
And that's exactly the argument of the article IMO, that the famous nerds went from well-meaning eccentrics to evil greedy overlords.
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.
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.
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”.
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.
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?
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 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".
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.
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).
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
I'm sure it has a different meaning, though
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!
And HN isn't it...
If you belong, you'll find them and know how to get past the gates.
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.
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.
Capitalizing the work of others, Cannibalizing smaller entities, creating monopolies, controlling the government and the narrative.
The way of Jobs is how you "earn" a billion dollars.
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.
One was framed and tortured, the other was given an empire.
The message was received.
We now only have the Zuckerberg type.
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.
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.
Anyway, I got some important coding to do now.
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.
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.
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".
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.
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.
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
> 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 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...
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.
Instantly thought of the big short: “they’re not confessing. They’re bragging”
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.
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
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.
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.
This kind of self-reflection about identity is also very important for your own internal communication with yourself.
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.
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.
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”.
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.
I don’t give a damn about any company’s goals now.
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.
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.
Just create enough FOMO among the monied and you win. This is not nerd stuff... it's psychopath stuff.
In fairness the exposed brick was already there when they rented the place.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
Linus Torvalds on the other hand - that is a household name.
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 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.
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...
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.
did this guy ever hear of Larry Ellison? He also claims Gates wasn't a terrifying overlord
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.
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.
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.
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".
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.
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.
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 probably most of all, he was the one who took fringe edge lord behavior and elevated to something to be admired.
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!
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.
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
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.
Patrick Boyle seems to cover the SPCX trajectory fairly well...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wKXgeNwNRJ4
So now instead of programming it makes more sense to go to the gym.