The Weird Nerd comes with trade-offs

https://www.writingruxandrabio.com/p/the-weird-nerd-comes-with-trade-offs

by jseliger • 2 years ago

445 477 2 years ago

writingruxandrabio.com

Waterluvian• 2 years ago

I’m not sure I follow the first sentence. What does this have to do with Women in STEM?

(I’m not being political. I just don’t follow the connection)

whilenot-dev• 2 years ago

I'm on the same page as you here.

Even the proposed rule

Any system that is not explicitly pro-Weird Nerd will turn anti-Weird Nerd pretty quickly

just feels like a misunderstanding of the paradox of tolerance[0] ("in order to maintain a tolerant society, the society must retain the right to be intolerant of intolerance").

So we need to question what the author means with "Weird Nerd", because if a weird nerd just isn't expressing intolerance, I can't fathom how anyone could have an issue with it ...and become "anti-Weird Nerd".

[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paradox_of_tolerance

at_a_remove2• 2 years ago

The first half of the sentence ("women in STEM") is meant to reflect on the confounding approach to the person mentioned in the second half of the sentence, a woman in STEM. First half "YAY GIRL POWER GO!," second half is that same bunch of people, presumably the Twitterati in question, being down on an opinion held by a woman in STEM who, well, the Nobel Prize is pretty good as a confirmation that you are STEMming very hard, when what they ought to be doing is, "Hey, we were just talking about women in STEM, maybe we should not reflexively criticize the very model of the person we were praising when she has an opinion which might be new or troublesome to us."

orwin2• 2 years ago

It's because of a lot of the people who push for more women in STEM (i think there is a movement called that too) also called out Karico for her vision on politiking and asskissing in academia (and science in general. My sister interned in a private lab in the past spring, it seemed to be even worse than academia on those point, although the pay was way better).

It's not a dig at the movement or their values, i do think its a minority who do this, but its a vocal minority who might be capturing the movement (i don't think this is the case, but this is a danger. look at what HAES as become).

red_admiral2• 2 years ago

There is an argument that, to make STEM more friendly to women, it needs a culture change - which implies less weird-nerd culture. Whether this argument is correct or not is a separate matter (I'm leaning towards "it's complicated, but I'll round off to 'no'.") But what's going on here is people holding this argument are dunking on a woman in STEM.

ianbicking2• 2 years ago

There's definitely been a move to demand individuals be good at everything... old stereotypes of the nerd brought a lot of negatives, but they were also apologetic, acknowledging the trade off, that paying attention deeply to one thing does lead to being worse at other things.

The exact stereotype differed by domain... the performer who is a diva, the self destructive author, the manic artist... each with a hint of nobility but also quite off-putting.

The author wanting to combine Weird Nerd with autistic is very incorrect IMHO... I've known a lot of weird nerds, am one myself, and there's lots of different flavors, most of them not autistic.

So much of talent is just really caring about something specific. Caring about it above other things. Specifically above external motivation and incentives. Do that and the weirdness grows naturally, neurodivergence isn't even necessary (though it might help)

jacobolus2• 2 years ago

"Performer who is a diva" is not directly about focusing on one thing at the expense of another. Performers are trained to be divas by having no real friends willing to confront them, and by being infantilized by the people around them who lie about their faults, are excessively accommodating of bullshit, and don't ever make them take responsibility for mistakes or reflect on their impact on other people. The result is often the same for people in positions of authority, such as CEOs. Cf. Elon Musk.

IggleSniggle• 2 years ago

I somewhat agree, but I think there's more to it than that. To be a great performer, you have to care about delivering your own "message" as authentically or at least "in totality" more than anything else. Critique may be useful in understanding how your vision is being received, but actually delivering the vision requires believing in your own vision more than the visions of others. The same could be said of CEOs. It's not just that there are adoring fans / sycophants, it's that to be a great success in these areas you need to be able to disregard the criticisms of others when the criticism doesn't really connect with what you are trying to achieve.

makeitdouble8• 2 years ago

The line you draw between "weirdness" and "neurodivergence" is interesting.

Would neurodivergence have to be native (so, not grown "naturally") and at which point does weirdness fit on the spectrum ?

Recently I think people are more receptive to lower degrees of neurodivergence. I see it the same way people understand that you have a gradation between having difficulties climbing stairs and not being able to walk. We could probably have it more in the open that many are not full blown clinically diagnosed ASD patients, and I wouldn't see it as an issue to have "false positives" of diversity lumped into neurodivergence if it was destigmatized.

kristjansson2• 2 years ago

At some point the question is “why?”. We can keep atomizing human variability into smaller, more graduated buckets of neurodivergence, but what’s the point, esp. for those that don’t really suffer negative impacts, and for which there isn’t really any remedy besides acceptance?

giantg24• 2 years ago

ASD has different levels of diagnosis. I've been told by a therapist specializing in ASD that there are a lot of diagnosed and undiagnosed ASD workers in tech. It's very possible the only reason they are "full blown clinically diagnosed" is because they haven't been tested.

parineum3• 2 years ago

You didn't use this word specifically but this whole conversation has the underlying prior of the "everything is a spectrum" mindset.

In that context, everyone is neurodivergence because, afterall it's a spectrum we're all on and nobody is going to be deadest average. At some point we have to define at what point these spectrums become clinical. The kind of language you see in the DSM for stuff like this is "does it affect daily living/relationships/health in a negative way".

Being neurodivergent isn't a disorder, not showering because you're obsessed with programming probably is.

dbtc• 2 years ago

The phrase has sounded weird to me for some time but here it strikes me as especially so: "the spectrum"

Just one spectrum, 2 dimensions? Is that all we get? It's a linguistic short-cut, I get that, but I wonder how useful it is, how much nuance it conceals.

walt_grata2• 2 years ago

I duno on some of that. Until I was about 39 I was a "weird nerd" and then my wife (Dr of special education) finally convinced me to talk to a Dr and get get tested for autism. Turns out I'm ASD 1, would have been Asperger's in the past. Autism has a very wide range of ways it shows itself.

sneed_chucker3• 2 years ago

Well, to me your comment also speaks to the increasing degree to which we medicalize personality traits.

I'm sure your diagnosis is legitimate, but also I'm inferring from your comment that you are married and gainfully employed; so it sounds like you're able to build and maintain relationships, as well hold conversations with strangers or non-close acquaintances when necessary.

In years past would any professional have bothered to test someone like you for a disorder?

antisthenes2• 2 years ago

my wife (Dr of special education) finally convinced me to talk to a Dr and get get tested for autism. Turns out I'm ASD 1, would have been Asperger's in the past.

Can I ask candidly, what did you gain from knowing this? Presumably this didn't have much effect on you, since you seem to be fairly successful - finding a partner and getting married and presumably also having a decent job.

Seems kind of like a vanity validation for your wife rather than a benefit to you.

ben_w• 2 years ago

I'm very weird, but whatever I am is rare (or harmless) enough to not be commonly discussed or have a well known group identity the way autism does — I've done online tests for a bunch of psychological conditions, including autism, and all of them rate me as absolutely normal.

But I draw my ingroup/outgroup boundary broadly enough to include all non-sociopathic humans and several other species; I have zero motivation towards spectator sport; music only holds my interest for a few plays and then bores me; I can "visualise" my sense of balance strongly enough to completely override my actual sense of which way is down; my body self-image is almost entirely under conscious control (as in: I can't be body-dysmorphic because I don't have a consistent morph to dis).

mattm2• 2 years ago

Somewhat off topic - I'm curious if the diagnosis has helped in any way. I'm early 40s and have gone so far as taking an online test for autism where I scored very high.

I've thought of being tested by a doctor but always think "What's the point? How is it going to help knowing?" so I'm curious as someone also well into adulthood if you've had any impact from knowing.

I'm also married and am able to keep a job and function relatively well even though I'm not the most sociable person.

015a• 2 years ago

The article literally reads:

I recently argued that many Weird Nerds (I called them autistics, but people really hated that)

These are the same thing. The author recognizes that. Everyone recognizes that.

qq66• 2 years ago

Do you think that receiving this diagnosis increased or decreased your happiness?

UniverseHacker7• 2 years ago

Caring about something deeply above external motivations, especially external validation is by itself neurodivergent. At the very least, you have to be highly introverted, which is rare.

fdw2• 2 years ago

I'm understanding your statement to mean that caring about something because of itself, without external motivation (like validation or money), is neurodivergent. So neurotypical would be to only care about something if you profit from you caring about it? Is that reading correct?

If so, I have to disagree vehemently. That is not my experience at all and feels extremely homo economicus and - to be honest - depressing. I want to care about things I like and that bring me joy, even if no-one pays me for that or validates my choice.

mattgreenrocks6• 2 years ago

I want to check that I’m parsing this correctly.

Caring about something beyond a typical amount for intrinsic reasons is a neurodivergent marker?

Is this really the HN I grew up with?

pclmulqdq• 2 years ago

Mental illness is somewhat linked to creative productivity, sadly. Bipolar disorder is somewhat overrepresented in highly-accomplished musicians, artists, and writers (with the trend going as far back as the 1800s).

It would not surprise me if ASD is overrepresented in scientists and engineers.

However, people also imitate their tribe, and seeing "weird nerds" with mental illness may get other nerds to emulate that behavior without actually being mentally ill.

fragmede10• 2 years ago

Or plain just getting away with shitty behavior. Uncle Rick's a raging asshole and we still accept him as part of the family, which means so can I.

throwthrowuknow• 2 years ago

Pretty sure the weird nerds the article is talking about are not the type of people that are looking at their “tribe” trying to figure out what to imitate next in order to maintain or increase their social status. They’re Weird because they pay no attention to those fads and eschew social effort in favour of dedicating the largest portion of their time to their passion. They tend to be idiosyncratic in the extreme because they aren’t constantly synchronizing their behaviour with society at large. But maybe you’re right that there are people in science and engineering that put on those trappings as a way of blending in. I think the article is arguing that the balance of poseurs is increasing and that of the genuine article decreasing.

shufflerofrocks• 2 years ago

So much of talent is just really caring about something specific. Caring about it above other things

This is a really nice statement. Definitely agree with it. I've often seen so many fast-starters in many fields who just taper away, because the subject just isn't interesting to them, and it was the peeps who stayed in the field that ended up becoming really good at it. Definitely holds up the old "Average intelligence and persistence has accomplished much more than genius" quote

paulpauper4• 2 years ago

You have to be good, and also care, which is like effort. a lot of young people care or put effort into playing sports but most do not have the talent to make a living at it.

"Average intelligence and persistence has accomplished much more than genius"

For hard problems, high IQ is necessary but still insufficient. You are not going to solve a hard math problem with average IQ no matter how much persistence you throw at it.

red_admiral2• 2 years ago

I think part of the problem with "autistic" is that, although there is an official diagnostic protocol for it, it's far from clear whether that cleaves reality at the joints, as the philosophers say. It's also still mostly an open question if and how autism in women might present differently from in men.

shrimp_emoji• 2 years ago

MBAs wanna justify less staff so everyone has to be good at and do more things now. :D Be a dev and tech support and business relations and...

galfarragem• 2 years ago

I've known a lot of weird nerds, am one myself

I suspect most of us here are... At least in some degree.

CalRobert2• 2 years ago

This bizarre romanticization of autism is frustrating for those who are or have loved ones who are nonverbal, stim all day, etc..

I almost wonder if nerfing autism to the point where it's a fun thing to talk about having on tiktok is a way to demonize effective interventions so insurance companies won't have to pay for them.

esskay• 2 years ago

It's been a similar pattern with ADHD, it feels like its almost been turned into a trend. Although that being said we've had a number of people at our place been diagnosed with ADHD, Autism and in some cases both, all developers, all within the last 3-5 years, and you know what, they're absolutely correct diagnosis.

It's a mix of romanticization and a change in acceptance and understanding of the two, and they do often go hand in hand as we've seen.

But things like the tiktoks mentioning "My Ausistic brain" or "My ADHD brain" are a bit over the top and are making it feel like it's being treated as a 'cool thing' to have.

For me personally I knew I had some sort of autism or ADHD decades ago. It was only when I started having massive issues focusing on work a couple of years back, combined with stimming and an increase in sensory issues that I decided it was time to investigate and sure enough, diagnosed with both. Out of the ~20 developers at my workplace a good 2/3 of them are either diagnosed with one or the other, or exhibit strong signals that would indicate they've likely got at very least ADHD.

mhluongo• 2 years ago

For many autistic people, they prefer it this way. Eg avoiding person-first language and being out on social media and also part of this "romanticization", right?

lukan• 2 years ago

It is a complicated topic. But I rather see people relaxed with the topic, than freaking out. There was a case of a australian immigrant doctor, who was denied immigration, because his child had autism.

https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2017/feb/23/outcr...

(after the outcry, the decision was reversed)

But yes, it is a serious condition and feeling awkward is not in the same basket.

harimau777• 2 years ago

I think that there's a big difference between high functioning and low functioning autism. It's not surprising that people with high functioning autism want it romanticized in order to help protect themselves against discrimination or being thrown away for not being useful.

hoseja• 2 years ago

Well then let us undo the work of Hans Asperger.

trustno2• 2 years ago

My relative has an autistic daughter.

At 7 years old, she has mental capacity of 2 year old.

With the right help, she can be somehow functioning, but surely won't get into STEM. Being "weird nerd" is pretty orthogonal to being actually autistic.

itsoktocry• 2 years ago

This bizarre romanticization of autism is frustrating for those who are or have loved ones who are nonverbal, stim all day, etc..

Look at every thread about the subject on these boards: it's filled with people claiming to be "on the spectrum" (aren't we all?).

nerfing autism...is a way to demonize effective interventions so insurance companies won't have to pay for them

What a bizarre conspiracy. Are treatments even expensive?

imbnwa• 2 years ago

Actual Obsessive Compulsive Disorder is a crippling pathology

AbstractH24• 2 years ago

I've never understood this.

Even assuming that someone is a high-functioning autistic person - now what? As far as I know, there is no course of treatment that can cure it.

Is it just about wanting a label for one of many reasons (to find a tribe, evade responsibility, get accommodations of one form or another, etc)

Don't know anything about the topic and am kind of curious.

davidthewatson• 2 years ago

"The author wanting to combine Weird Nerd with autistic is very incorrect IMHO... I've known a lot of weird nerds, am one myself, and there's lots of different flavors, most of them not autistic."

That makes one of us - no consensus required.

Monotrope? AuDHD? Brenner's Lacanian "Way of Being"?

Forensic accounting of which spectrum owns which symptoms is the new ultra-sport - winner take all. The thought that we wind up with yet another control vs. uncontrollable dichotomy of Stoicism worries me, at least in the West.

Walk around an Amazon warehouse unannounced for an afternoon observing its transformation of surveillance capitalism into a set of funhouse mirrors where the observer cannot discern between observer and observed - an infinitely extensible Heisenbug. It's as if you took a page from the 1980's PC design playbook and decided that delightful beige was the architecture of the future - a kind of inorganic revenge of the techno-typicals.

ab5tract2• 2 years ago

Can I ask you to explain how this is at all relevant to the clear statistical fact that not every weird nerd is autistic?

hiAndrewQuinn2• 2 years ago

Passion and ambition are just not neuro-vanilla traits. I think that's what you're picking up on.

Some people these days who are anything but call themselves autistic, ADHD, etc because they don't have a defensible banner anymore under which they can be passionate or ambitious without some reason behind the reason for it.

The only way out is empathy - true empathy, a willingness to accept sometimes (often) people do things for the sheer joy of doing them.

DavidPiper• 2 years ago

Passion and ambition are just not neuro-vanilla traits.

Hard disagree, which I think is your point. I see this as an offshoot of anti-intellectualism: distaste for / absence of passion and ambition is cultural, not biological, and culture becomes self-sustaining.

The only way out is empathy - true empathy, a willingness to accept sometimes (often) people do things for the sheer joy of doing them.

Strong agree, and it's wild to me that this has indeed become a radical idea.

Yossarrian222• 2 years ago

The author is missing a crucial pressure that pushes against weird nerds, the people that have to work underneath them. I’ve had to answer to a Weird Nerd when I was starting out in my field, it was the worst fucking experience of my life, and I’ve spent the years since warning people away from that person, their career and their contributions to their field have stagnated due to all the people like me that they burned.

pavel_lishin8• 2 years ago

Yep. Just because you're a Weird Nerd who's good at something, the world doesn't owe you respect and friendship unless you're willing to do the same.

p_l• 2 years ago

Beware though that the inverse is also true.

No matter if one is "weird nerd" or not

glitchc5• 2 years ago

You conflate two things that are actually quite different. You don't need to be friends with the Weird Nerd, but you do absolutely have to respect their expertise in the subject matter, especially when it exceeds yours. It's in your employer's interest to do so. Not doing so means you're being less than professional and might secretly be jealous of this person for having attained a higher level of technical achievement than your own.

Michelangelo113• 2 years ago

What exactly was the issue, and did they burn people on purpose or through some kind of extreme carelessness and indifference?

seanmcdirmid6• 2 years ago

Many weird nerds are on the spectrum and require very good people managers above them to mitigate their quirks, and should never go into people management themselves.

The industry has really changed though. It is much easier to hire social well adapted people who can code at all than to hire a bunch of people with social problems who can code really good. The former is scalable at least, the latter breaks down as no one can get along.

the_snooze2• 2 years ago

Any non-trivial engineering or research is a team effort. It's good to have a mix of perspectives and temperaments in a team to keep poeple creative and honest. But the team ultimately has to cohere in order to deliver. That's really the core job of a manager: to create an environment where people can work together meaningfully and direct it to productive ends.

newzisforsukas2• 2 years ago

The industry has really changed though. It is much easier to hire social well adapted people who can code at all than to hire a bunch of people with social problems who can code really good

If you have no financial constraints? In what world do you spend massive amounts of money to mitigate people being "weird"?

PartiallyTyped• 2 years ago

the former is scalable at least,

I’d argue that it’s not due to communication costs. The more you attempt to parallelise a problem the harder communication gets.

idiotsecant4• 2 years ago

Yes, the weird nerd is rarely a good people manager. As useful as they might be as an individual contributor when property channeled, they can easily be a -10x contributor when you put them in charge of people.

doug_durham2• 2 years ago

I disagree. A "weird nerd" is much better in leadership than a socially adept careerist to parachutes in to get a bump on their resume. To build good products you need to care. A "weird nerd" is more likely to care.

ToucanLoucan3• 2 years ago

The author bemoans that any org that is not sufficiently pro-weird-nerd becomes anti-weird-nerd, and in conjunction with this comment which laments the experience of working under one alongside my own experiences of similar, I think it's worth remarking that many Weird Nerds not only do not foster social skills of any sort, but in fact view this as a badge of honor, as "proof" of their weirdness, and just, I'm over that shit.

I love weird nerds, I love the sort of people who obsess about things, who work on them as obsessively as I do, I love info dumps, I love people who are passionate even about bizarre, niche shit I don't care about (actually, I love them even more for it!) but seriously. You need to be able to hold a conversation. You need to be able to talk productively with your fellow people, including difficult conversations. You need to open to negative feedback, to be able to take criticism or contrary viewpoints without turning into a puddle of some combination of depression/rage/self-hatred, or people are just not going to get on with you.

And I fully accept that autism runs through this pack of people like a freight train, and that's fair, I am always down to provide accommodations, I will talk to people how they need to be talked to, I will bend the norms of social interaction so it's more palatable, all of that, zero issues whatsoever. But even with that in consideration, relationships of all kinds are a give and take, and if all you do is take, people will notice, and people will avoid you.

anal_reactor3• 2 years ago

but seriously. You need to be able to hold a conversation. You need to be able to talk productively with your fellow people, including difficult conversations. You need to open to negative feedback, to be able to take criticism or contrary viewpoints without turning into a puddle of some combination of depression/rage/self-hatred, or people are just not going to get on with you.

You implying that non-nerds have any of these traits lol no they don't it's just that they exhibit more of group-thinking and less individualism, so they provoke less situations that might potentially cause conflict.

My experience with nerds is "ok each has their own opinion this is going to be difficult but let's try cooperating" whereas non-nerds act exclusively "my way or the highway" because they have never previously encountered the idea that their view of the world might be wrong "because I'm the majority".

icodemuch• 2 years ago

I read the article as acknowledging this pressure by arguing that Weird Nerds should not be forced into people management positions. Without the workplace pressure on Weird Nerds to become people managers, would they still manage people? Maybe not.

I can’t speak for academia, but in tech companies I’ve worked at I’ve seen a marked improvement in management when there’s a tech track for engineer advancement such that they never need to become managers, if they don’t want.

Yossarrian222• 2 years ago

Even if you’re not doing performance reviews there’s still a need for directing people technically when the work exceeds what one person(even a 10xer(if such a thing really exists), and that’s where you need some minimum amount of EQ

the_snooze2• 2 years ago

Being a professor at a research university is really multiple non-overlapping jobs all at once: managing your research group, bringing in funding and publicity, helping run your department and research community, and teaching classes. PhD programs really only prepare you for the nuts-and-bolts of research, and maybe teaching. Only if you're lucky, your advisor was thoughtful enough to make proper introductions to help you get started on funding and prestige out of the gate.

It's not surprising that lots of people opt out or wash out of this system because the expectations don't match the formal preparation for it.

dsign• 2 years ago

Weird Nerds should not be forced into people management positions

Let's forget the Weird Nerds for a minute and look at the following situation: a person W is technically savvy enough to have accomplished a big chunk of project X. Say, 90%. And then there is a 10% left which takes as much work. So management hires people from a consultancy to pick up the 10%. Except that these guys don't write much code. They are adept at finding their way into technical management at light speed and want to push what should be their work back to W, while doing the bare minimum otherwise. Now W has more work than before, because he has been pushed into politics. At the very least, he will need to communicate to his colleagues that they need to pick up the slack for real. With some luck, W will find a nice way to do that, but that's the kind of problem he is ill-equipped to handle.

There is something in this article which is overlooked in these comments: people like Katalin Karikó are often under a lot of pressure to perform. They can have crippling debts, or be supporting an elderly parent or relative. Or fear something as life-wrecking as a deportation. They don't get the luxury of being "average", because there are more desirable "average" candidates than them: people who speaks with the right accent or in the right cultural code.

jltsiren2• 2 years ago

From a certain perspective, there are two kinds of fields in the academia: "laboratory science" and everything else. If you want to make a career in laboratory science, you need to be a manager and a professional beggar. You need to bring in money to hire people to do your research, and you need to support the administration with grant overheads. If you are good at the job, you pay the administration more than they pay you. Long-term non-manager positions are rare, because they are more expensive for the university than successful managers.

Outside laboratory science, the expectation to bring in funding is not as strong. You don't need much money to do research, and grants are not as readily available. As far as the administration is concerned, if you do your teaching duty without too many issues, you can use the rest of your time as you see fit. Academic politics revolve more around personal relationships with the tenured people at your department.

koolala5• 2 years ago

i had to be in a confinement center designed by a nerd who put a computer where it shouldn't belong, im sorry thank you for sharing your story

koolala5• 2 years ago

im sorry

neilv3• 2 years ago

I’ve had to answer to a Weird Nerd when I was starting out in my field, it was the worst fucking experience of my life,

I wouldn't want to tar all people who might be perceived as Weird Nerd, based on one data point (which AFAIK might not even be due to them being a Weird Nerd).

Almost all of the too-many people I've seen burn others under their influence, I wouldn't have called any of them Weird Nerd. And none of them appeared to be geniuses. Rather they tended to be at least somewhat successful as political operators, unlike how the article characterizes Weird Nerd. (Arrogant seemed to be the most common attribute, then greedy, dishonest, and unprintable bad word.)

Someone might decide to call some of those FTX cryptocurrency scammers Weird Nerds, but you could also just call them overprivileged brats with consequently warped worldviews.

Aurornis7• 2 years ago

The author sidesteps the problem entirely by picking the most idealistic Weird Nerd possible: A person who is indisputably talented, accomplished, perseverant, and even benevolently forgives those who wronged her in the past.

In the real world, the "Weird Nerd" rarely checks all of these boxes, let alone most of them. I bet a lot of people will read this and identify as the Weird Nerd despite checking none of the boxes. That's the nature of articles that leave out the nuance and instead give us the most idealized view of a noble scientist who was a victim of the system. It leaves an opening for everyone to feel like they were a victim of the system.

That's why this problem is far more complicated than articles like this would lead you to believe. Many of the "Weird Nerd" people out there aren't perfect scientists or engineers unfairly shunned by the system. Many of them have real flaws of varying degrees that would require a lot of guidance and mentoring even within a perfect system. And it's not easy! In fact, it can be very taxing on teams to work around the quirks of your average (non Noble Prize winning, like this article) Weird Nerd even if they can produce good output, which is why so many companies select for Boring Nerds instead.

bjornsing3• 2 years ago

I’ve had to answer to a Weird Nerd when I was starting out in my field, it was the worst fucking experience of my life, and I’ve spent the years since warning people away from that person, their career and their contributions to their field have stagnated due to all the people like me that they burned.

And in what way is Katalin Karikó responsible for your mistreatment? I doubt you would have said something similar about a black or gay former manager, attributing your mistreatment to their race or sexual orientation. But for some reason it’s perfectly acceptable to attribute it to a Weird Nerd personality.

hot_gril• 2 years ago

There's really no such thing as "working with computers" (as is often said), because every piece of tech was made by and for humans, so social skills always matter. The hardest projects I've succeeded at depended on looking at things that way, even purely technical solo ones.

pavel_lishin8• 2 years ago

Everyone get your bucket ready, I'm going to throw an anecdote into it.

I play D&D. This exposes me to a wide variety of people, but unsurprisingly, a lot of them are probably what the author would consider Weird Nerds.

Most of them are perfectly pleasant people, and I look forward to spending time in their company, both in the context of playing D&D, and just as a way to socialize. Heck, at my last session, a player proposed doing a regular board game night, and I am very excited to do this with those people.

But. Occasionally, you meet someone who is just fucking unpleasant to be around. Maybe they're on the spectrum (as the author really wants to lump all Weird Nerds on the far end of), maybe they're just poorly socialized, maybe they're just assholes. And unless they're just awful people [more on this later], you learn to put up with their idiosyncracies - because in the end, they're pretty good at playing D&D, and it's fun to slay a dragon or solve the mystery of the mermaid pond, or finally get revenge on your vampire stepfather from hell or whatever. But those people? They're not coming to board game night, and they're not fucking coming to any of my BBQs. They're ok in the context of playing D&D for three hours, but I'm not willing to spend more time with them.

I think that's another reason why some Weird Nerds who are unpleasant to be around have found a safe haven on the internet, as the author puts it: because while they're still unpleasant, you can read their unpleasant words and then walk away for awhile. They're not standing in front of you, demanding your time face to face. If someone is the world's expert on a thing you're collaborating on online, it doesn't matter if you groan every time you have to talk to them, because your time with them is largely limited, and you can walk away at literally any point during the interaction and regain the will to live and spend more time with them.

I'm not sure what my point is. Maybe that it's kind of ok to not want to be around people who are unpleasant to be around, and that despite that, it's also ok for them to still meaningfully participate in the things that matter to them.

[About the awful people in D&D: it's a game, and it's made to be fun. Not every table is made for every player, and vice versa. If you're in a game, and someone is truly ruining the game for the other players by being a generally unpleasant person, I am begging you to just fucking stop playing with them. Life is short, don't surround yourself with assholes. I promise you can find more players. And if you're the one being asked to leave a D&D table because other people find your unpleasant, reflect on your actions. Maybe you're just at a table that's a bad fit for you. Or maybe you're an asshole.]

(If I currently play D&D with you, rest assured that I am not talking about you; all the examples are from past games.)

doublerabbit4• 2 years ago

I ask, if that person is truly unpleasant have you spoken to them about how unpleasant they are?

Not to defend but how is someone to recognise a fault of their own if they're not called upon? Unless its truly terrible and they know they are doing it on purpose.

The issue we live in nowadays we are all scared how to tell each other how we feel towards and that we now safe harbour them by throwing them a label and approving that to a degree.

I'm direct and blunt, if someone is doing something in a group I call them out of it; I expect folk to do the same for me.

I may be offended but you should be offended, there's no harm in that.

Granted it's a double edged sword. You tell them; they preach to their safe haven and breathe the toxic fumes of their peers. Or they actually recognise it.

pavel_lishin8• 2 years ago

Sometimes, yes, we talk to them.

But I'm a DM, not their therapist or their dad - I'm not obligated to hand-hold someone through a radical restructuring of their personality.

And, it might not surprise you to find out, some people react very badly to being criticized. And I'm not particularly interested in having an argument over my subjective opinion of a person. I just don't want to be around them anymore.

idiotsecant4• 2 years ago

I think we both know the kind of That Guy we're talking about and a conversation isn't going to change things.

wumbo• 2 years ago

If it’s their general emotional candor, I don’t think it’s worth wondering if they are self aware.

Not your emotions, not your circus.

numpad0• 2 years ago

Normies don't require feedbacks to be verbally and explicitly delivered most of the time. It's the last resort path. Constantly delivering and being delivered clear and blunt express feedback is not normal. It's "sad"-"agitated" state if you ask them

It might be true that allowing minute variances between normie nonverbal feedback gatherer people to be a factor to their successes has its own problems, but encouraging everyone to drop that BS and just be offensive and blunt to make things simple is at least not a widely supported solution.

So be nice... it sometimes gets complicated to be just a nice and happy person, but you actually don't have to be a fearless warrior at all times.

nurple2• 2 years ago

I had a "friend" like you once. We got along well, he would excitedly dive deep with me in tech because he wanted to learn programming, and I would excitedly dive deep with him into creating coffee and beer because I find the stricture in creation leading to creativity endlessly interesting.

However, whenever he'd have his "cool" friends over for parties I wouldn't get an invite, in fact never met any of his other acquaintances. He explained to me once that he likes to keep his different social lives separate, and I was apparently the only one in his "tech" social circle.

That made me feel like shit, and reinforced my self-view as failing to be a normal human.

This is a theme that's continued with multiple "friends" throughout my life, to the point where I eventually just gave up trying, gave up giving of myself to others to simply be siloed or discarded once they got what they wanted from me. I got tired of the lack of reciprocation in giving me a chance to be a part of their actual life even though they were apparently getting enough from me that they were willing to keep me around when it suited their needs.

I hope some day you gain some compassion and can see that people who are different than you are still people, and that treating them as lesser except when you can get something from them (like an interesting dnd game) is a huge part of the problem in these types of people retreating even more from the social and emotional norms.

At this point, why in the hell do you think I would even _want_ to be willful part of the society you inhabit, that treats other humans as you do?

pavel_lishin8• 2 years ago

I don't know you, and you don't know me. I won't hypothesize about your situation - though based on what you've written, you're right, and it was an objectively terrible experience for you, and I'm sorry you had to go through it..

But please don't equate me with someone who treated you badly, based on five paragraphs I banged out this afternoon.

Just because I don't want to invite a casual acquaintance who regularly says things I find vile to my house, doesn't make me an incompassionate villain.

lainga2• 2 years ago

I still stand by my association of Weird Nerds with autism, but for some reason people really do not like to call Weird Nerds autistic.

I'm sorry, what, even if they're preponderant you can't just call all of them that any more than you can collectively call all basketball players "Marfan Syndrome havers"

idiotsecant4• 2 years ago

Tell me honestly that most weird nerds are not on the spectrum and I might be able to work up enough energy to clutch my pearls at this.

I say this as a weird nerd who is definitely on the spectrum, like I suspect many HN readers are.

lainga2• 2 years ago

Allow me a bit of poetic license with the original statement and maybe it will explain my objection better.

but for some reason people really do not like to call marathon winners "Kenyans".

Why might other marathon runners not like being lumped in with that country, given its incredible winningness at long-distance racing?

lawn• 2 years ago

Maybe many and even most are on the spectrum, but not all are.

And even then, its a _spectrum_ meaning every person has a their own unique mix of, lets just call them quirks.

Meaning they (and you) are more than a single word like "autism". In fact in Sweden we've moved away from the "autistic diagnosis" because it's too simplistic. It's dangerous to be too caught up in "being autistic" that we hinder ourselves and others when we can do more.

Signed, a dad with autistic tendencies and a 4-year old child with may quirks that already give us quite a lot of challenges.

sureglymop• 2 years ago

I am on the spectrum but I definitely know nerds (although not necessarily weird nerds) who are insanely good programmers/computer scientists (and do have that as their hyper specialized interest) who are not on the spectrum.

But the thing is, it's a spectrum.. Personally I do find it a little ridiculous because the biggest parts of autism have absolutely nothing to do with my work/interests but with social life, sensory issues, etc. And it's definitely more a struggle than a superpower (at least to me).

65• 2 years ago

Yeah, this is a dumb insinuation.

The author is conflating people who are motivated internally by making great contributions to society with autism. Many of the best artists and scientists aren't autistic, and perhaps are quite the opposite: deeply emotional and socially aware. I'd argue you need a deep understanding of social value to even want to make a great contribution to society.

Also, it's not like people with autism are automatically geniuses. Anecdotally I've found autism to not really contribute to original and innovative thinking, more with excessive fixation on a subject. There is a difference.

faeriechangling13• 2 years ago

I'd argue you need a deep understanding of social value to even want to make a great contribution to society.

Autistics only nessecarily misunderstand social value in a superficial way. They are frequently compensating for a sort of "social blindness" with unusual strengths like pattern recognition to get insights into social situations in a more detached way through a different lens.

People also can be on a team with somebody who has a deep understanding of social value who doesn't have it themselves. Jobs/Woz comes to mind.

ModernMech8• 2 years ago

It seems like you're saying autistic people are not deeply emotional or socially aware, or capable of understanding social value. This is not what autism is -- it's a developmental disability that leads to impairment in social situations, not an inability to understand society and emotions.

analog31• 2 years ago

I qualify as a weird nerd, and I'm definitely not autistic.

I don't like to call anybody autistic because it invites paternalism or even outright discrimination. I even object to using much milder labels such as "introvert."

at_a_remove2• 2 years ago

I've witnessed more than a little of this. I worked in a university, in a library (though not as a librarian), and realized that everyone at a certain level or above in administration Came From Money. While "has a house in another country" is not subtle, "father was on an Everest expedition" is. Once I began noticing this soft ceiling I could not help but see it everywhere in the university. Meritoriousness was not on the menu and it took me entirely too long to "get" that I was locked out of promotion and that it was just a way to keep me dancing like a little dog standing up for a treat.

The "bundle of tradeoffs," which is a more humane and human way of thinking, is at odds with the "cog in the machine" approach which began with interchangeable machined parts and progressed on to the human element. Being replaceable then becomes a prized characteristic. Indeed, one of the administrative staff suggested that anyone who seemed like they were too valuable to replace ought to be let go on those grounds alone. It's a recipe for a kind of predictable mediocrity.

Business loves predictable mediocrity, and we see it in various forms of intellectual property. Why sell a copy of Office for unlimited use when you can charge monthly and predict out your next few quarters? Own a movie? No, rent. And as academic institutions continue their transformation into administratively bloated credential assembly lines, we will see more business-y strategies worm their way in.

neilv3• 2 years ago

and realized that everyone at a certain level or above in administration Came From Money

There's a lot of that. And in academia in general.

Many/most are decent people. But even those often haven't been exposed to the ordinary life experience of the majority people from their country. And that often seems to affect how they think about themselves and the world.

Also, there's often implicit self-promotion and self-interest behavior. Which they might think is normal, since it's in their upbringing, and in the circles they now travel in. But it's not necessarily normal to the masses of their countries (which I'd expect to tend towards more cooperative and egalitarian in some ways).

makeitdouble8• 2 years ago

I didn't fully understand what the author meant by "Weird Nerd", and this bit was the key for me:

Weird Nerds (I called them autistics, but people really hated that)

And I totally get why they're trying to come up with a word that markets better, and yes many people react negatively to "autist" or calling someone "on the spectrum".

At the same time, man prominent people are making public their diagnostics and assert being on the autism spectrum, and I wonder if it becomes a disservice to them to not use the term when appropriate, precisely because of how it's perceived now.

meesles• 2 years ago

I think you're circling some valid points, but realistically I don't think this happens in the current climate. There's a couple of forces at play - a) it's a medical issue that people are really passionate about b) there's an ironic (or not, at times) subculture of calling oneself 'autistic' when it's just exhibiting an interest and c) there's still no 100% accurate test, not everyone will want to out themselves, etc. So the shroud of mystery + confusion persists for the vast majority outside of those that advocate and speak out.

I think it's a good thing to come up with some other term to refer to these extrinsically motivated nerds that don't really care for typical social constructs but bring immense value to a bunch of types of work. That way whether they identify or are diagnosed as autistic isn't necessarily the important piece, more the result of their person.

slillibri• 2 years ago

I react negatively to "autist" because it's not a good description. "ist" is usually used for something people do, or more to the point something they choose to do, see cyclist, artist, etc.

Also, "on the spectrum" is used today much like "depression" was used in the '90s. It's a catch all excuse used at the expense of people actually suffering the disorder. Much like sometimes you are just sad, I would wager many people who claim to be "on the spectrum" are just assholes.

makeitdouble8• 2 years ago

I'd argue assholes would merit the same attention as the people on the spectrum, but it might be another discussion.

something they choose to do

Point taken, but then switching that for "weird" doesn't feel like helping, it's still a pejorative and not really focused description.

people actually suffering the disorder

An issue I'd take with that is the effect to which it's penalizing depends a lot on the environment and what the person is trying to do. Would two people with the same condition, but one suffering and the other not, need to be identified in two different ways ?

__MatrixMan__3• 2 years ago

This spectrum they speak of, are there labels for its extremes? Other spectra have things like hot/cold, large/small, etc.

Is it the autistic/not-autistic spectrum? Because if so, we're all on it.

throw46365• 2 years ago

I am pretty certain I am a Weird Nerd.

I have good reasons to consider myself neurodivergent (and others do consider me such). There are definite divergences that have caused me problems. I have what people consider "superpowers" and what people consider "difficulties".

Not certain I am autistic. Might have been considered mild or (the then-termed) "high functioning" as a kid in the 80s.

But on the other hand, I don't think it's necessarily wrong to put me in the same broad category as autistic people, because I have the same issues in the context of the article -- with being conventionally "ambitionless", having relatively little grasp of (or instinct for) power games etc., and needing the kind of support that others often do.

That category needs a name. (In the UK we'd traditionally go for "boffin", which is broadly a term of affection, but it's a little harder to spot a boffin these days because of casual clothing at the office)

idiotsecant4• 2 years ago

The path of the weird nerd has never been easy. Humans are inherently social animals and when you don't fully fit that mold you will, by definition, exist somewhat on the perimeter of society, no matter how valuable your skills.

The best thing for a Weird Nerd to do is to find a trustworthy 'patron' who can appreciate that it benefits them to handle the messy human stuff and let the Weird Nerd do the nerd work. The problem is that Weird Nerds are often terrible at figuring out who is trustworthy and a good fit for a symbiotic relationship like this.

Michelangelo113• 2 years ago

I do think it's a major issue that academia is increasingly bureaucratic and corporate, but I don't quite agree with the article. It's not that very smart, truth-motivated people have bad people skills (e.g., off the top of my head - von Neumann, Feynman, and Newton were all pretty good with people when they needed to be), it's that they are motivated largely by discovery and not by status and money. But academia today is essentially a machine for amassing status and money at the expense of creating genuine new knowledge, which drives away those who want to create knowledge.

FormerBandmate• 2 years ago

Academia pays absolutely terribly for an elite job, it's all status. You could make more than 90% of tenured professors as a manager of Buc-ee's

Michelangelo113• 2 years ago

Yes, good point, thanks. I was thinking of the high end of disciplines with strong ties to industry, mainly STEM and business, but that's actually just a very small, although prominent, part of academia.

dukeyukey2• 2 years ago

"Earning" doesn't necessarily come with a truly elite status job, because you're not relying on a salary to live. Having to live off a salary is lower status.

tatrajim2• 2 years ago

The shift in the US from the 1980s to banning forced retirement age has only added to the trend toward accruing and maintaining status through navigating an established, and increasingly sclerotic, hierarchy. The quest for lifelong tenure has become increasingly and necessarily political as the length of future job security has extended into one's 80s.

swayvil• 2 years ago

Speaking as a weird nerd (wn)

A wn is disconnected from society. This gives him the power to think and act independently. The non-wn can't do that.

(And, being disconnected like that, the wn is oblivious to a million social hints and cues. He is blind that way)

It isn't voluntary, being a wn. It's an artifact of habitual, excessive concentration, or something.

The non-wn's state is involuntary too.

Both are products of nature/society/habit/etc. Both trapped in their respective shape.

I suppose some of us are not trapped like that. There might even be a way to escape it. To make that habit-shape into something conscious and voluntary.

woopwoop3• 2 years ago

I've met a handful of people who have won at least one of the top prizes in mathematics, i.e. a Fields medal, Abel prize, or Wolf Prize. I would describe none of them as "weird nerds", and I don't think any of them are autistic. I chafe pretty hard at the suggestion here that one has to be socially ill-adjusted to advance scientific knowledge at the highest level.

megadal3• 2 years ago

That's not the suggestion though. It's that a lot of high performers in STEM tend to be "Weird Nerds" and by selecting against that type, you alienate a large number of potentially great researchers.

Not selecting against weird nerds doesn't mean selecting against "socially well-adjusted Nerds".

In fact, the article says that a person can in fact be exceptional at politic and science, despite their tenets being antithetical in many cases.

woopwoop3• 2 years ago

It says there is a "strong anti-correlation" between being a weird nerd and being pleasant to be around socially. This may be true, but it is not my experience that there is a strong anti-correlation between being an exceptional mathematician and being pleasant to be around socially. Despite the stereotype, in my experience the best mathematicians are not the ones who stare at their shoes when you talk to them.

paulcole4• 2 years ago

I chafe pretty hard at the suggestion here that one has to be socially ill-adjusted to advance scientific knowledge at the highest level.

This is very similar to the idea of the tortured artist or that to be a great comedian you have to be depressed.

The happy and well adjusted comedian or socially adept mathematician doesn’t make for an interesting story — it just doesn’t fit the popular narrative and so it gets ignored.

In every discipline there are total weirdos and normal people at every step of the way, from terribly inept to amazingly world-class.

charlieyu12• 2 years ago

And that’s the problem. How many weird nerds were driven out because they aren’t playing the academia game well?

Jensson2• 2 years ago

Selection bias, the people who likes to socializes meets more persons so you are much more likely to encounter such people than the ones who keep to themselves. So even if most of those math winners hated socializing you wouldn't meet those so your conclusion would be the same, meaning we can't tell much about it.

godelski• 2 years ago

At the root of it is a lot of "yes man" behavior, and I don't think it's just academia. But I think academia has a stronger history and stereotype of allowing people to be weird.

It's essentially the bureaucrats taking over. Putting metrics on things that can't be measured well and treating those as if they're the answer. Saying "good enough" or "something is better than nothing" when they don't apply. Because it's easier to deal with that than the chaos and uncertainty of innovation.

I think this is also something silicon valley lost. We definitely stopped dreaming. Stopped building the future we wanted and instead just started doing work. There's been a lot of stagnation. It's not just about making things smaller

neilv3• 2 years ago

Weird Nerds (I called them autistics, but people really hated that^2) [...] But it’s also hard to believe someone like her could ever become the most pleasant interlocutor at a dinner party, or the most socially adept and organized manager.

The part about "organized manager" is surprising. If we're going to stereotypes, I would've guessed that a manager who was autistic would likely have being organized as one of their strengths.

Regarding "socially adept [...] manager", I've worked with two software engineering project managers who were autistic. They were both very different (one amiable, and had much better than average understanding of human behavior and emotions; the other came off as making an effort to tolerate people). Both were not only well-respected, but liked, and were effective at difficult work&people-herding jobs.

Even with the manager who came off as not really liking anyone by default, and even on a very difficult project, almost everyone on large teams respected the project manager (excepting one person, who couldn't stand something about the project manager, or the nature of the project). And I didn't hear the grumbling like I'd normally hear about a manager who was unfair, incompetent, or dishonest.

bee_rider• 2 years ago

Academia is just messed up because the path to the top is to become an absolute expert in some topic, (PhD, postgrad), then become a performer/people manager/grant writer/office politics master (professor). It is really dumb. You are rolling the dice twice for expert level skills, and the second roll comes after huge personal investment.

Not really sure what the solution is. Maybe a huge increase in the number of national labs, as a vent for those who hit the first roll but fail the second.

We also need a vent for people who are good at teaching but not super focused on research. Drastically increase the community college system, IMO, and start paying the instructors enough to have nice middle-class lifestyles. Stop making people-people and weird nerds compete for rare grants and let them both do the things they are better at.

pyrale• 2 years ago

The alternative would be that public performance/management/grant writing/office politics are handled by someone who has absolutely no clue about what science is.

It doesn't take very long to find corporate examples of this alternative, and why it's not great either.

Khelavaster• 2 years ago

Introduce struggle sessions for supervisors of scientists like her. Clear the cruft quickly. Careerist ciminals have no place running research labs.

monitorlizard• 2 years ago

Could you expand more on your struggle session idea? I'm aware of the analogy to Mao's China but I'm curious how you'd see it playing out in this setting.

mberning3• 2 years ago

There is a similar parallel in the corporate world. Being involved with tech and software has never had less to do with actually being good at those things. I just remarked to my director the other day that the only innovation we have had in the org in the last 5 years was relentless self promotion, marketing, and branding. When did being known as an excellent and reliable engineer stop being “enough”.

paulcole4• 2 years ago

I just remarked to my director the other day that the only innovation we have had in the org in the last 5 years was relentless self promotion, marketing, and branding.

What was your director’s response?

Do you think there’s any chance you’re biased and blind to other innovations because you really dislike self-promotion, marketing, and branding?

mberning3• 2 years ago

They agreed, but we have a similar viewpoint on the overall technical excellence of the org, so that part is unsurprising.

I am definitely biased, but whether I am blinded to real innovation or progress is something I think about all the time.

I think I would not be opposed to the self-promotion, marketing, and branding were it in support of some significant achievement or accomplishment. Unfortunately we have a culture that seems to think showering and getting dressed in the morning is a noteworthy event.

To use a more concrete example, I ran a project to upgrade a significant piece of software in our environment that had been neglected for some time. The project went well and I moved on to more interesting work. I had multiple people tell me that we should promote it, give talks about how it was done, pound our chest about how hard of a project it was, etc. I refused. In my mind it was a normal upgrade of a system we were responsible for and frankly was disgraceful that it was in such a bad state of deferred maintenance. There was no way I would be comfortable “taking credit” for doing what should have been done years ago.

Fast forward a few years and another team responsible for doing a similar project is giving multiple presentations all around the org and all the way up to the 2nd in command of the company. I’m like wow, maybe we should have taken the opportunity when we had it to pretend like we are superheroes for doing the bare minimum of our job and not having a vendor drop our support contract.

zafka• 2 years ago

I really like this new term! I was working R&D / Development at J&J for about 14 years. I was one of the early members of a group called: "Mental Health Diplomats" When I first got involved, and over the years, I would try to pitch ideas to set up a system/program for neurodivergants who were under utilized.

In retrospect, it is pretty hard for a weird nerd to gain traction with any ideas other than obviously profitable products. Strategic thinking needs to be done by the MBA's /s

yedava• 2 years ago

I want to say this article describes me, but then I realized that it's just my confirmation bias. Who doesn't like to think that they are the smartest ones around and it's everyone else who is stupid and clueless?

Science ultimately is a collective effort. The collaboration doesn't need to happen in real time, in the same physical place. Ideas can be spread out across time and geographies and finally one person puts them together and given our bias for hero worship, we call that one person a genius and go on a wild goose chase of how can we create more geniuses instead of asking how can we foster a environment for ideas, an environment which sometimes needs to last for decades in order to bear fruit.

gavinhoward5• 2 years ago

As a Weird Nerd who can't get a job in the industry [1], this resonates.

On one hand, I understand that I can't get a job because of my own flaws. After all, who needs a solo-only C-only [2] programmer who can't build theory of mind and thus, can't read code written by others and who refuses to prioritize employer over user?

On the other hand, it is hard, and I secretly hope the industry can change so that people like me can have a place.

Edit: To clarify, I don't think I am a Genius, just a Weird Nerd in the sense that I do not like politicking. However, I am trying to learn from my empath wife how to do it because yes, it is a necessary evil right now.

[1] https://gavinhoward.com/2024/06/my-programming-journey/

[2] https://gavinhoward.com/2023/02/why-i-use-c-when-i-believe-i...

meiraleal• 2 years ago

People like you have a lot of places to shine nowadays. Having a job/boss isn't the right way for many (much less a given).

gavinhoward5• 2 years ago

Thank you.

I have also tried to start my own business, but that is not going well.

wyldfire2• 2 years ago

On the other hand, it is hard, and I secretly hope the industry can change so that people like me can have a place.

In some ways, things are better than ever for folks like you. Starting and running a one-person business making software is feasible now but would've been much harder in decades past.

Second, I work alone on code that is entirely in my head. ... Rust is great for teams ...

Unfortunately, industry has problems that are big enough that they're not easily solved with one person. So tools that work to bring about a team's success will be valuable. As will individuals who work well in teams.

gavinhoward5• 2 years ago

In some ways, things are better than ever for folks like you. Starting and running a one-person business making software is feasible now but would've been much harder in decades past.

Yes, you are absolutely right.

Unfortunately, I have been trying that and failing. I don't blame anyone for that either.

Unfortunately, industry has problems that are big enough that they're not easily solved with one person. So tools that work to bring about a team's success will be valuable. As will individuals who work well in teams.

You are absolutely correct. And yes, that is why people shouldn't hire me.

Nevertheless, I think there are some problems that one person can solve.

I want to make the next-gen version control system. I think that may be small enough for one person. Other infrastructure software can be like that too.

giantg24• 2 years ago

Not going to lie, I would like to see myself as one of these smart people who was held back by lack of social skills like selling oneself and capitalizing on political situations. I think that's probably unrealistic. However I do sympathize with much of what the article describes. It would be nice if politics and stuff wasn't so important.

adolph• 2 years ago

This skill alone would cause most of the Internet and politics to shut down:

being agreeable when you disagree, even when you are 100% certain you are correct

doubloon• 2 years ago

i would like to see more hard data on this instead of what amounts to a rant. or does that make me a weird nerd?

prof-dr-ir• 2 years ago

There should be word for the fallacy where you conflate a group's average opinion with that of the inevitable subgroup that sends angry tweets about a topic.

iamwil• 2 years ago

As startups become a viable path to status and success, it too gets infiltrated with non-weird nerds.

renewiltord• 2 years ago

This is just Geeks, MOPs, Sociopaths restated. It's the nature of all fields: explorers discover, exploiters scale. But there are explorer mimics and exploiter mimics and they succeed at some rate dependent on the cost of verification.

andrefuchs• 2 years ago

While I agree with the notion of the article, please stop calling gifted, driven, and non-conforming people "weird nerds." Both terms have negative connotations.

croes• 2 years ago

If you replace words with negative connotations with other words, those new words sooner or later get the same connotations.

doug_durham2• 2 years ago

The intent is to de-stigmatize the labels. I consider myself a "weird nerd". I find the use of the label affirming. Perhaps ASD or other symptom descriptive way to describing things would be more "correct". However "weird nerd" is what the other parts of society use to describe these terms. Using the term to describe the positive aspects of these symptoms helps to take the sting out.

programjames5• 2 years ago

I think "genius" fits the author's meaning and connotation much better than "weird nerd". If the author wants to fight for genius rights, why start from a position of weakness?

__MatrixMan__3• 2 years ago

If we're gonna find a better way to work together we need something neutral so that there's no reason to miscategorize yourself. I definitely prefer "weird nerd," to anything that feels like a diagnosis or like praise.

In education they call this "twice exceptional".

jchw• 2 years ago

Any system that is not explicitly pro-Weird Nerd will turn anti-Weird Nerd pretty quickly.

Wow. Sure as hell feels that way.

See, I actually feel like this is happening across the Internet, too, in a different way.

Firstly, I'd consider myself some sort of "Weird Nerd" but certainly not a genius or even especially intelligent; I would be willing to indulge in the idea that my contingent and I have some unusual qualities that, while not remarkable, are still somewhat unique and indeed basically a package deal with our "other" traits.

Secondly, while "weird nerds" are prominent on the Internet of today, they're definitely struggling to keep control over their own spaces. Anyone remember forums, and have routine thoughts about how different it is from social media? I think that forums were controlled by weird nerds, and social media is clearly not, it's controlled by people who play the political games better and more often. Weird nerds are forced to try to adhere to the rules of this system, they get increasingly tired of it, burn out and start behaving erratically. I think a lot of people are deeply in denial that this is happening, and some of them may have never even known a world where it wasn't happening, so they find other reasons why.

Being driven by truth and put off by bullshit is something that I think is very core to a lot of people who are currently struggling to find anywhere to fit in. No matter how much time passes, it will never feel "right". It feels like people can only ever be their true and honest selves in small quantities, in closed groups, being careful with who to trust.

Note that this person seems to be somewhat convinced that the Internet is the best place for weird nerds, but also note that the critique they are talking about happened on X, one of the largest and most influential social websites on the Internet. I think this should speak volumes to how much weird nerds are not in control of the "rules" and narratives of the Internet right now. I'm not sure what the authors thoughts are on this (and I'm sure it's detailed in other posts if I wanted to know) but I think this is a huge battleground. It's a bit hard to see it because it's obfuscated by the broader "culture war" of the Internet, which makes it appear as if the "fight" is between two hyper-partisan groups that have completely opposite views. I think that's neither the cause nor the reality of why the Internet is full of so much strife; I think those hyper-partisan spats formed around more interesting and nuanced conflicts and overshadowed them. I hope that some day there will be a moment of clarity where everything starts to make sense...

nurple2• 2 years ago

Agreed. Having been part of the internet since its genesis, every day I mourn the loss of the critical mass of the weird and curious that pervaded it. I absolutely abhor the exploiters that came from behind and effected a nerd diaspora to simply transformed it into the same manipulative, self-congratulating trash hole that is so widely lauded as "normal".

I lost my job in a layoff over 6 months ago and really struggled to find something in the state that tech has been in since zirp and section 174 went away.

If there's any positive I see from all of this is that there are a lot of weird nerds out there feeling unmoored, unmotivated, and are looking for somewhere to fit in and do the greatest work of their career. I think that someone(s) with resources who creates such a nerd commune will create something truly special, something that transcends the "normal", giving these misfits something that they fully own, drive, but still share with the same world that looks down on them as "divergent". I have never met a more passionate or selfless group of people.

I think Steve Jobs was an example of this type of nerd whisperer. He knew what drove the people that actually create things in this world, and he gave them a powerful outlet to show their value. I think he deeply felt and meant what they were selling at the time: "the people who are crazy enough to think they can change the world, are the ones who do".

https://invidious.privacydev.net/watch?v=VCz_SiPD_X0

mattgreenrocks6• 2 years ago

A case study in this:

"Normal person," 2002: "you use the Internet? How weird and anti-social!"

Same person, 2012: addicted to Internet in public, oblivious to people around them

Interesting how the social acceptability changed so drastically in ten years time. It's almost as if it is completely arbitrary and based on political (e.g. relative) observations. And not a hint of incongruity is felt between the former and latter opinions.

intended7• 2 years ago

someone else said it well here.

Weird nerds are suited for environments with high growth that need experts and will transfer resources to get the most out of them.

This is in general true - groups will spend resources on an advantage, when the need for it is painfully obvious.

akozak2• 2 years ago

I have a lot of experience working with the weird nerd archetype and watching them navigate large orgs.

First it's absolutely true that orgs that purport to support weird nerds will revert back to rewarding politicians. I've seen it happen, and typically has to do with who is doling out money.

However, in my experience the vast majority of brilliant nerds way overextend themselves, and are much too confident outside their domain. They're also much more likely to be jerks and will tumble from conflict to conflict until they get their way by attrition or status. Conflicts are strangely more personal because so much ego is tied up into it. They're more likely to assume they're right in every (non-tech/science related) situation.

My advice to weird nerds (assuming emotional intelligence isn't an innate skill) is: Find a way to turn your brainpower onto this challenge as equally important as your core interest. Treat interacting with your institution like a long term engineering project or investigation. Think long term and be strategic, create and track longer term plans, try to learn what people respond to, what works and what doesn't. Always try to be kind and maintain some humility, but assuming you aren't sure what that really means, then ask for lots of feedback. Or you can just find someone you trust and delegate all of this to them, like a technical founder hiring a CEO.

(Edit: relatedly, if you work for or with weird nerds in a support role, my advice is to take full advantage! They might have a useful point, so set your own ego aside, don't take it personally (they are weird), and try to listen charitably. Their work is what you're here to support, after all.)

fragmede10• 2 years ago

assuming emotional intelligence isn't an innate skill

it's a skill like any other, so if you put in dedication and practice, you can get better at it, just like practicing leetcode. whether or not an individual wants to do so is on them.

AlexandrB2• 2 years ago

While I think this is true, some people have it harder than others. So sure, anyone can learn emotional intelligence, but if it's 2x the effort for someone the ROI is much worse.

eikenberry4• 2 years ago

And like any other skill some people are more gifted in learning that skill than others. Anyone can learn to paint, but not everyone is going to be a Monet or a Rembrandt.

rustyboy4• 2 years ago

Do you have any tips for practicing this? I feel like I often "take the oxygen out of the room" when I offer suggestions or get talking. Conversely when I bite my tongue (or just unplug my mic) most people don't talk or offer very weak tacit agreement with the last thing that was said.

edit: I wish I had more skill at building coalitions and/or pushing an organization in a direction without saying "we need to do X".

bradleyjg4• 2 years ago

Your next paragraph gives advice to the weird nerds, but this is practically a genre. What I haven’t seen much of is advice to an organization about how to deal with what you’re pointing out here.

You have an employee that’s brilliant in technical area X but also has very strong and very wrong opinions about how the company ought to structure its cap table, pay its cleaning staff, and market to potential customers. He gets into constant arguments about these things. What do you do?

cbozeman3• 2 years ago

"You're out of your depth."

That's what you do.

A lot of very smart people think because they're very smart they have some kind of exceptional insight into the inner workings of all things. They don't. And they need to be reminded of that. Intelligence allows someone to gain that insight faster than those in the middle of the bell curve of IQ, but it doesn't magically confer it. It still takes time, reading, research, and seeing it in practice.

Or put another way - what I call the "Iceberg Analogy" - every discipline in life is like an iceberg. The average person sees about 10% of what's actually happening, and is able to comprehend that without too much effort, but the other 90% that's below the surface takes a lot to fully make sense of.

akozak2• 2 years ago

This won't be a satisfying answer (and won't work for startups), but the solution I saw most frequently was to assign them dedicated diplomats or maintain a middle mgmt class who are well suited to coddle them, absorb most of their emotional energy, and channel it productively (or not) into the wider institution.

Dalewyn• 2 years ago

You have an employee that’s brilliant in technical area X but also has very strong and very wrong opinions about how the company ought to structure its cap table, pay its cleaning staff, and market to potential customers. He gets into constant arguments about these things. What do you do?

Call him to your office and warn him his behaviour is unacceptable as it is interrupting the business. If he still persists, fire him for insubordination and/or disrupting the workplace.

The difference between a master and a nerd is whether the talent is socially desired, and the difference between being employed and unemployed is whether you can be productive to society regardless of your personal leanings.

AmericanChopper2• 2 years ago

You have an employee that’s brilliant in technical area X but also has very strong and very wrong opinions about how the company ought to structure its cap table, pay its cleaning staff, and market to potential customers. He gets into constant arguments about these things. What do you do?

The same thing you do with any highly anti-social employee, fire them. It doesn’t matter how sophisticated their technical skills are, if they are incapable of transforming that into value for the company, then their value to the organisation is at best nothing, and more likely negative.

Companies/institutions are social systems, and the phrase “politics” is mostly just used to refer to “social skills”. If too many of the participants are corrupt or incompetent then the social network of the organisation can become especially toxic. But that’s a different problem to the fact that if you want to contribute value in such a system, you need to have social skills.

Can you get value out of somebody who has terrible social skills? Maybe sometimes, but it takes a lot of babysitting. Even then, you’ll never be able to properly trust that you’ll be able to rely on them to do anything ever. So it’s almost never worth the cost.

samvher• 2 years ago

This hurts to read. At my previous employer I more or less carried the technical part of the organization, but also had strong opinions about high level strategy and equity (in terms of pay distribution across staff). In my defense, it was an NGO where I was working well below market rates and the opinions I pushed came from caring a lot about the mission, but it definitely led to a lot of conflict.

I think it's an interesting question, how organizations should deal with this. I think my previous employer actually dealt with it quite well - for the issues I cared about I _was_ given the opportunity to express my opinions and also share them with the people who were in the positions for making decisions around these issues. I was generally listened to patiently and also got (sometimes unsatisfying) explanations for why the actual course of action was different. I was _not_ given the authority to make these decisions or push these issues (the ones outside my area of expertise) through. I ended up leaving the organization in quite a bit of frustration, which I think was probably unavoidable, but I learned a ton from this episode, and we're otherwise still on good terms (I help out with little things now and then).

hnthrow289570• 2 years ago

I usually see both happening at the same time, but the real money still goes to the politicians.

Brilliant nerds that solve problems for the organization on their own usually don't get rewarded as much as politicians despite the skills perhaps being more rare at the organization than politics.

For example, you could deep dive into a bug that's been hanging around, finally find the really technical solution to it, but most of the money holders won't be able to appraise that value from the technical details alone.

In general, simply giving away things to companies will usually get you taken advantage of (usually not maliciously).

Doing a tour to explain why it's a problem first, then providing the solution, is the much better alternative.

It really is true that it's a thankless job if everything is working well and you're being proactive by fixing problems before they become a problem.

There are exceptions where the money holders can deal with the technical details and don't need to be sold on the problem first, but it's rare and usually those are prestigious jobs in close proximity to lots money.

paulpauper4• 2 years ago

Status is immensely important. people who have status or convey it can get away with being wrong or espousing falsehoods and will not be called on on it. If anyone is guilty of speaking outside of his or her expertise and spreading bullshit, it is likely not going to be the nerd.

banannaise4• 2 years ago

However, in my experience the vast majority of brilliant nerds way overextend themselves, and are much too confident outside their domain. They're also much more likely to be jerks and will tumble from conflict to conflict until they get their way by attrition or status. Conflicts are strangely more personal because so much ego is tied up into it. They're more likely to assume they're right in every (non-tech/science related) situation.

If this behavior is rewarded, then you haven't eliminated politics - you've reinforced politics but eliminated social cohesion and decorum as elements thereof.

mattgreenrocks6• 2 years ago

It feels like more and more areas of life are regressing to the mean in terms of how status is distributed. The mean being some sort of centralized cabal-like structure (perhaps autonomously/accidentally centralized, like an algo) doling out status. By design, it is highly uneven, quasi-random (there are things that make you eligible but there are no guarantees), and their authority to do so unquestioned.

Take social media: it is more about who they've said you are rather than _what_ you say. The key message of the medium is less the content of the message itself (though it figures in!) and more the combination of your online persona's followers + likes along with the message itself. I'd argue social media is a real shift in the Internet itself where we began to take online reputation very, very seriously, to the point that we decided we'd believe that likes were more than just Internet Points.

And people _love_ this sort of structure because it means that something other than actual competence can be the deciding factor. They have a shot at being in the cabal and among the deciders. And it's a lot easier to evaluate people: simply see what other people say about them.

Not saying that non-technical factors don't matter. They matter a lot and are often very easy wins to pick up. But it's clear people like systems that aren't centered around competence as much as they may claim otherwise. And areas where that isn't the case seem to eventually be converted to more conventional hierarchies.

throwaway42668• 2 years ago

And people _love_ this sort of structure because it means that something other than actual competence can be the deciding factor.

It's different competence. Not incompetence. It's being competent at identifying marks to exploit, attention-seeking, etc.

I don't particularly care for it myself and feel pretty strongly that it's narrowing the gap between humans and apes, rather than widening it, but it's still some kind of skill.

mattgreenrocks6• 2 years ago

Good catch. It gets at technical competence, but it isn't constrained to that. It's more of "good at what the org ostensibly is about," vs "good at ensuring the org lives on."

mrcode007• 2 years ago

Thanks for a thoughtful comment

ryandv• 2 years ago

You can already see echoes of this in the software community, which was historically populated by such "weird nerds" and computer geeks who traded off social tact and grace for a childhood, or even a lifetime, spent understanding the technical minutiae of software, hardware, and computing in general.

Now we have self-identifying "computer hackers" and "security researchers" and "red team operators" who probably have never heard the words "shellcode" or "ASLR" in their life, and whose technical chops cap out at wrapping payloads from hardcoded URLs in a 100-line golang script and call it an advanced exploit. We used to call them "script kiddies." "Compiler developers" who couldn't tell you the difference between a regular expression and a context-free grammar, and simply wrap babel in a javascript snippet, calling their glorified terminal alias a real compiler.

Go look at the posers on r/programminghumor, or, god forbid, fucking Instagram influencers releasing content and memes about programming instead of having any technical competence with computing itself. While being a computer nerd used to be looked down upon with derision, it's now trendy and hip to be a "software engineer," much in the same way geek culture was appropriated and colonized by outsiders to the field. People think that 16 weeks spent studying JavaScript at a bootcamp puts them on even footing with shut-ins who spent tens of thousands of hours in front of a bash terminal and customizing their vim setups. It's the absolute depths of Dunning-Krugerism. These aren't geeks; they don't act or talk the same as people who have been embedded in this culture for years and lifetimes, even if they parade around superficial status markers to try to pose as one. It's as if an Anglophone went to a country where the predominant language was one other than English and started appropriating a few dozen words from the native tongue to pose as a local - "you're not from here, are you?"

Perhaps this stance on computer geek culture is "elitist" or not "inclusive" enough, but be aware that maximum inclusivity tends to result in the same regression to the mean that you describe. It's much easier to spin a narrative about how 31337 at programming you are when you can write any bullshit you want on social media and pose and identify as something you are not, while those who are actually out there writing software instead of posting about it, pushing commits instead of simply updating their GitHub READMEs, have scant little to show to the blithering masses of people who confuse Internet Points, narratives, and hearsay for actual competence. It's a continuation of the postmodern trend to socially construct status, narrative, and indeed, even truth, by manufacturing simulacra and digital content to stand in for and completely replace any underlying reality.

rustyboy4• 2 years ago

I completely agree with the sentiment. The catch here is that, unlike software in the past, there's (at least in America) ALOT of money on the line with software these days that attracts strategic and outgoing people which are "playing the game" more than they are actually interested in the technical details. I've noticed more and more peers interested in giving shallow talks, nice docs with easy diagrams, and those one page blog posts. I'm sure every industry is seeing the same thing as popularity becomes king.

Nasrudith2• 2 years ago

That explains some of the absolute rabid hatred of the veey concept of meritocracy. Not even "this isn't based on real merit it's the same old boys club" style complaints/arguments but an absolutely furious hatred towards competence determining progression.

mattgreenrocks6• 2 years ago

You see it in denials of 10x engineers, pushes for tooling to standardize everything, tons of transitive dependencies, obligatory blog posts about how tech is "really just about working well with others" and an overall un-seriousness about actually building things.

francisofascii• 2 years ago

I am mixed on how much we focus on posts by "a lot of people on academic X". Perhaps they offer some valuable insight here, or perhaps it is just a few grumpy individuals spouting off unwarrented critisim.

Animats• 2 years ago

It's the author of the article that seems weird, not the researcher.

A major risk in academia is picking a dead-end niche. We hear about the people who picked an unlikely winner. This one picked mRNA vaccines. The inventor of MRI scanning had similar problems. He was almost fired. Those two succeeded, eventually. But the people who work on E-beam lithography or vaccines against addiction didn't do so well. Both of those would have been huge if they worked well. You can't tell in advance. If you could, the problem didn't need research.

A more useful way to look at this is that doing it and selling it are different skills. This is why companies have separate R&D, production, and marketing departments. If you face a hard problem in one of those areas, you can't devote enough time to the others. This is to some extent a time management and division of labor problem.

Academia is not team-oriented in that sense. At least below the principal investigator level. Once reaching that level, university PR departments are happy to hype any modest advance into a major breakthrough. Below that level, it's a cold world. Academia seems to have built itself a dysfunctional world - a huge bureaucracy, not much of a career path for real researchers, and a shrinking pool of full professorships. So anybody who is any good goes to a startup now.

Henry Kissinger, who was not lacking in people skills, once commented that "academic policy is so vicious because the stakes are so low".

anewhnaccount3• 2 years ago

Shades of Graeber in this essay:

There was a time when academia was society’s refuge for the eccentric, brilliant, and impractical. No longer. It is now the domain of professional self-marketers. As for the eccentric, brilliant, and impractical: it would seem society now has no place for them at all.

https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/7004628-there-was-a-time-wh...

Aerbil3132• 2 years ago

I don't know. Does internet communities count?

incompatible• 2 years ago

They don't generally supply food, housing.

tatrajim2• 2 years ago

Thanks be for online investing. It's been my place of economic refuge to fund my lifelong impracticality.

programjames5• 2 years ago

In 2011, the average age at which a biomedical scientist gets their first R01 grant to establish their independent career as a PI is 42

This is ridiculous! The best researchers won't be much better at 45 than 25, so it's just wasting 20 years getting "experience" and moving up the ladder. But by nature of getting that experience, they're going to give up on actual innovation.

dagw2• 2 years ago

The best researchers won't be much better at 45 than 25

To get great research done you have to be great manager who can prioritise time and resources, balance a budget, forge connections with other researchers, get the most out of the people working for you and know where and how to get even more funding to keep the research going after the initial round of research dries up. Those 20 years might not make you a better 'scientist', but hopefully they will make you better at all the other 'soft' skills that are required for successful scientific research. At 25 you should be focusing on the science and doing research and not have to bother with all that 'crap'.

programjames5• 2 years ago

Getting other people to do research isn't doing research. You're misattributing who does what.

jltsiren2• 2 years ago

Research is very labor intensive. It's easy to reach a point where the lack of time is a bigger obstacle to pursuing your ideas than the cost of pursuing them. Which is why you need to apply for grants to hire people to do your work.

At 25, you are likely pursuing somebody else's ideas, because you have not proven yourself yet. At 35, you should be pursuing your own ideas, but it often gets delayed to 45, because taxpayers are stingy with their money.

taneq• 2 years ago

Not sure if I count as a 'weird nerd' or not but if there's been one constant in my life, it's the theme of "you're amazing at a whole range of things, but here's some things you're not amazing at, could you maybe just try being a version of yourself with all of your strengths and none of your inconvenient shortcomings?" and tbh it's fucking infuriating.

isotropy• 2 years ago

I read this as basically arguing that our filters throw up too many false negatives, like Kariko, in a high-risk/high-reward environment. It’s saying the cost of false negatives is way higher than the system realizes, and that’s because the system has drifted to be too much like the collaborative, incremental workplace that most of us live in. Typical work teams pay a high cost for false positives when hiring, so they guard against them at the cost of way more false negatives. The doesn’t work as well for moonshot fields.

AlexandrB2• 2 years ago

I think about this all the time in the context of the arts. Kanye, for example, definitely has extremely weird political ideas. He also created Dark Twisted Fantasy. The tolerance for this kind of "troubled genius" is dropping in artistic pursuits too. I wonder if that's why pop culture increasingly feels like a "content" slurry instead of anything identifiable.

corinroyal3• 2 years ago

So lack of respect for nazis with abhorrent personalities is what's dragging down the arts?

myself248• 2 years ago

I wish I had a source for it right now, but years ago I heard an anecdoate that Bell Labs had essentially dorms/hotels for scientists, where things like cooking and laundry were taken care of, so they could focus on their research.

This had the effect of embracing those people who hadn't necessarily figured out how to be independent adults. As long as they were lucky enough to be identified and brilliant enough to be hired, they could flourish at the Labs.

I'd love to know if other settings have made similar accommodations, and to what effect.

lo_zamoyski2• 2 years ago

I don't think I believe that. Look at the top scientists of previous decades. They weren't incompetent idiot savants or man-children.

r-zip• 2 years ago

But they likely did have their wives do a lot of the domestic heavy lifting.

philwelch2• 2 years ago

Big tech companies like Google and Facebook?

lo_zamoyski2• 2 years ago

Status seeking and envy are absolutely at the heart of it all. Status seekers and flatterers are weak people, because their lives are very much about agreeableness and approval seeking. Truth-seeking has always been at odds with "the world". You will know them by what they love.

Dante hated flattery so much, he immersed flatterers in excrement in the 8th circle of hell, below murderers. A fitting image given how full of crap such people are in this life.

In a riff on John Adams, no scientific enterprise will function in the absence of a moral people. You cannot have good scientists without first having virtuous men and women. You are wasting your time, and in fact, probably laying the groundwork for harm.

jarjoura• 2 years ago

Speaking from big tech, you get things like rust (mozilla) or React (facebook) when your engineers are given the space to solve industry scale problems. Those are both "weird nerd" contributions since the original creators weren't interested in the celebrity public facing side of it.

In the React case, I'm not sure it would have become the framework it is today unless Dan Abramhov pushed it outside of the company. That took an insane amount of effort and skill to do that, especially at the time when Angular was quickly establishing itself.

Rust required an entire company to organize behind it and Mozilla spent a fortune getting it on its feet. Otherwise, I am not sure it would have been more than an experiment on someone's laptop, long forgotten.

I'm not sure what the solution for that is, or how else you push through all of the noise. Every great discovery and advancement in history is driven by the folks who can sell their hard work or at least have someone else willing to do it for them.

cod1r• 2 years ago

What industry scale problems does React solve? I don't have the most experience in React but it feels like it's gotten very complex in recent years.

klysm2• 2 years ago

React is a very good framework for writing _web_ frontends in my opinion. Writing web frontends is complex, there is no getting around that. React being complex isn't a fault of react, it reflects the nature of the problem.

motohagiography• 2 years ago

weird nerds depend on a kind of nobility and magnanimity from the people they work with that is perhaps a bit much to expect in academia, or anywhere that isn't a high-growth environment where participants can afford the risks of eccentricity. middling people indexed on in-group status aren't equipped to handle exceptional people who don't reciprocate what is essentially corruption, and so they force them out.

bjornsing3• 2 years ago

middling people indexed on in-group status aren't equipped to handle exceptional people who don't reciprocate what is essentially corruption, and so they force them out.

I think you hit the head of the nail there.

Jensson2• 2 years ago

weird nerds depend on a kind of nobility and magnanimity from the people they work with that is perhaps a bit much to expect in academia

I thought academia was created by the nobility to be a place for weird nerds since the weird nerds were useful.

shadowgovt2• 2 years ago

Good article, but I would probably have stopped at "Nobody should give any weight to the opinions of people still using Twitter in this day and age."

klysm2• 2 years ago

Stopping reading something because of one sentence you disagree with doesn't exactly resonate with your stance.

shadowgovt2• 2 years ago

Not reading it, I would have stopped at writing it. The author's impetus for writing it was apparently a response to Twitter comments, and that's half a step above writing a hot take in response to YouTube comments in terms of worthiness of the data source.

Gimpei• 2 years ago

I really wish somebody had sat me down before grad school and told me just how important it is to sell yourself. So much of research is a form of sales: you have to sell your work and by extension your ability; you need to convince the department that you are a star so that they go to bat for you; you have to convince star professors to co-author with you so that you can get good publications; you need to attend all the conferences in your field and sell your research to potential reviewers and editors. Putting your head down and just doing your work is a terrible strategy and will get you absolutely nowhere.

jdblair• 2 years ago

I think for a "weird nerd" to be successful, they need the support of someone (a manager, a mentor, a project leader, department head, etc.), who does have political and social savvy.

ChrisMarshallNY• 2 years ago

I'm a bit "spectrumish." It's definitely way better, this late in life, than it was, when I was younger, but it's still there, if you know what to look for (my wife knows what to look for).

One aspect of it, that has always been a part of the package, is that folks Just. Don't. Like. Me.

Most, if questioned about their dislike, may come up with a couple of things, like "He's abrupt," or "He's arrogant," but these are also exactly the traits present in many folks that they do like. They are just trying to justify this "feeling" that they have about me.

As anyone in my shoes can tell you, we're "bully magnets." Most of us were recipients of multiple atomic wedgies, in school. My grade school days were a living hell. Again, there's no real "reason" for the hate. There's just something about us that pisses them off. I suspect that the "resting bitch face," prevalent amongst us may have something to do with it. It often looks as if we're being hostile, when we're not. I spent many years, training my "resting" face to be one that's basically "harmless dork," as opposed to "angry bastard." Doesn't win me a lot of respect, but, at least, I'm not being attacked out of the starting gate, anymore.

I've gotten used to it. It doesn't even really bother me too much, these days, and it happens a lot less. Feeling sorry for myself is a waste of time. I used to get all butthurt about it, but that was just stupid of me. Others have far worse crosses to bear. In the aggregate, it's been a good thing. I'm fairly decent at my software development.

The folks that matter, stick around. I do have a fairly large circle of close friends and associates that don't let my "oddness" get in the way, and enough folks have respected me, that I was able to make a decent living.

But many of us don't have those "soft" skills, that can be important, when working in a team, or trying to establish relationships with other people.

corinroyal3• 2 years ago

"He's abrupt," or "He's arrogant," ... "angry bastard."

It sounds like those are totally fixable personality defects, yet here you are acting persecuted and making excuses. What if you didn't blame other people and instead took responsibility for your own off-putting behavior?

I've worked with too many men who think they're too special to follow social etiquette, when they are actually just garden-variety jerks who use their nerd identity as a get out of jail free card.

intended7• 2 years ago

Why did you write that? You come across as insensitive, and likely someone who hasn't put the effort to understand the comment and the context.

It's far too easy to conclude that you aren't heeding your own advice. Was this some next level attempt to show what being a bully magnet looks like?

I don't understand.

lazyeye• 2 years ago

In other words your typical academic institution likes all kinds of diversity except diversity of thought.

And they hide this behind a smokescreen by focusing on all the superficial forms of diversity (gender, skin color, orientation etc).

jauntywundrkind• 2 years ago

I think the biggest hardest tradeoff is just relating to a world where not only is there a huge dissonance between your strong stirring passions & beliefs & other's, but where most people flat out don't have strong stirring passions. Most people are not absurdly driven into deep shit. Most people don't love their day feeling torn apart by wanting to know or wanting to make the things, most people aren't living in their future possibles.

Paul Graham talks about an underrated quality one needs for extreme success, namely the willingness to be low status. And Karikó had plenty of that: she lived her convictions, in this case the conviction in the importance of mRNA through rejections, humiliations (her office was vacated without her having received prior notice) and hardship. I would go even further and say: she had intellectual courage

Spoken of as courage and low status, being on the pursuit. But societally what I think is most under-stated is the dissonance.

Bruce Sterling's Reboot 2011 put forward two modern archetypes. The first isn't super relevant here, but Favella Chic, being low resources but amazingly cool, bending & reusing whatever you can scrape together to be cool as hell & on top of your shit. The other is High Tech Gothic, where you are wired to the 9's, a master of your domain, amazingly capable & competent, but desperately alone & on your own; a It's Lonely At The Top / The Crown Wears Heavily sentiment.

This idea of apartness, the stark difference of values and beliefs and actions between the individual and the world they see about them: I am so glad to have had some referents for this notion, it's been so helpful. And personally, mulling it over, I keep thinking, it's not really the Weird Nerd's issue. It's not really their problem per se; another view is that the world is failing to hook people, failing to expose them to the raw awe and majesty of possibility and science, failing to inspire exploration & discovery & maker-ship that such an amazing universe of possibilities and circumstance has created around us.

As the Butthole Surfers song Weird Revolution says, The so-called weirdos in this country stand as completely freaked out by the normal man as the normal man is completely freaked out by the weird masses reaction to him. It's worth assessing not just the weirdos as the weird ones! And it's worth telling them, letting them know, this dissonance between your world and the so called normality isn't necessarily your fault, isn't necessarily something wrong with you. I don't think we duly sympathize or grok the alienation the weirdos suffer with.

bitwize2• 2 years ago

As the Butthole Surfers song Weird Revolution says, The so-called weirdos in this country stand as completely freaked out by the normal man as the normal man is completely freaked out by the weird masses reaction to him.

The Butthole Surfers' observation was -- only recently -- given scientific support in autism research, where it's called the "double-empathy problem". Previously, the prevailing theory was that autistics suffer from "lack of empathy" or "mind-blindness"; the double-empathy theory posits that it's rather a case of mutual incomprehensibility between autistic and allistic minds. Dogs and cats get into conflict because they have difficulty reading each other's body language, but if you are a dog person (as most people are) you have a tendency to always blame the cat.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Double_empathy_problem

booleandilemma• 2 years ago

I wonder, with tools like ChatGPT available, how much more time before society feels they don't need to put up with the weird nerd any longer?

I'm something of a weird nerd myself, and though I haven't tried it, I'm sure ChatGPT could spit out some of the most complicated code I've written and make it look easy.

charlieyu12• 2 years ago

I’d say ChatGPT is helping me writing a lot of things that I won’t bother but apparently you need it to play the social game

bitwize2• 2 years ago

I found Eric S. Raymond's take on this interesting (and most likely false):

https://x.com/esrtweet/status/1795088812944584781

He contends that autism is brain damage that limits your max IQ and that all the smartest people are neurotypical -- the genius brain is almost necessarily a normie brain, but better.

I think that what's closer to the truth is that extremely high intelligence is itself a form of neurodivergence, which is likely to be comorbid with other forms of neurodivergence. Eric himself I believe to be neurodivergent (in some non-autistic way) with 95% confidence: one of the tells is his choice of desktop environment: a minimalist tiling window manager (likely i3) with Emacs full screen on one of his displays -- anything else he deems too distracting and a drag on his brain. This sounds very ADHD and in any case is an almost archetypal Weird Nerd setup. Neurotypicals love their Windows and Mac style UIs, and every NT software engineer I've met has no problem managing -- and mousing through -- multiple windows: Visual Studio Code for coding, Postman for making HTTP calls, DBVisualizer for database interactions, etc.

NTs also love what people like Eric (and I as well sometimes) dismiss as "monkey socio-sexual games"; and if you are smart as well, you tend to get really, really good at these. Having been around extremely intelligent people who otherwise seem neurotypical (in particular, having married one and thus gained two more as in-laws), they tend to get less into hard science fields like math and physics, and more into fields where they can wield their impressive social skills for maximum benefit such as law, psychology, or entertainment. (Great actors, like Orson Welles or Sir Patrick Stewart, fit this profile to a T, though there are some great actors -- like Dan Aykroyd -- with autism!) My in-laws were legal professionals for the entertainment industry; after that long and successful career they retired, went to seminary, and joined the clergy of the Episcopal church!

Eric's observation that all the best scientists are neurotypical-ish may be a result of what's described in TFA: in today's world, being a prominent scientist selects very hard against Weird Nerd traits because at that level, beyond a baseline level raw skill in the discipline doesn't correlate well with success; schmoozing and marketing do. The same has been true of professional software engineering for at least a decade and a half or so.

bjornsing3• 2 years ago

Eric's observation that all the best scientists are neurotypical-ish may be a result of what's described in TFA: in today's world, being a prominent scientist selects very hard against Weird Nerd traits because at that level, beyond a baseline level raw skill in the discipline doesn't correlate well with success; schmoozing and marketing do.

I definitely think so. If Eric had gone to tea with faculty at the Institute of Advanced Study back when Einstein and Gödel were top dogs he may well have had the opposite impression.

temporarely• 2 years ago

The Manhattan Project was a very successful model of managing big brains or "weird nerds". The key it turns out is having a big brain manage other big brains, while himself managed by a corporate type from the US Army. Another key element is a shared sense of insecurity tied to mission failure. I predict future weird nerds will be herded together in 'safe corporate cities' (like the Googleplex prototype) shielding them from the outside unwashed. They may be weird but they can do the math.

Aerbil3132• 2 years ago

Here's a different take.

Everything comes at a cost: spend more time worrying about politics, there will be less time for science. What’s more, the kind of people who really care about science or truth to the extent that Karikó did, are not the same people that get motivated by playing politics or being incredibly pleasant.

Obvious answer: We should incentivize and structure our institutions to be more receptive to Weird Nerds in order to enable further progress of science.

My take: Scientific work is by its nature unnatural for human beings. Human beings played politics for millenia and are structured to do so, mentally, physically, biologically. Structuring our society to be more receptive to the people which we are wired to not be receptive is swimming against the current.

The same argument can be applied to a lot of modern phenomena.

yew• 2 years ago

The neckbeards are leaking again. Someone go beat them with a spanner.

Kina• 2 years ago

I agree with most of this story, but I really find the assertion that weird nerds are just autistic rather offensive and dismissive. It reminds me way too much of lazy teachers in the 90s insisting students they didn't want to manage were just suffering from ADD and hoping they could just get their parents to dope them up on Ritalin.

madelgi• 2 years ago

i think the whole argument is kind of confused because it groups a bunch of separate nerd characteristics into one "weird nerd" archetype. feeling like your career shouldn't be stymied because you're bad at playing politics and socially awkward is totally understandable. specifically in the university context, i sympathize with the critique of how much begging for funding is required by the job, especially at more senior levels. but i feel like these reasonable sentiments basically cloak what the essay is really trying to defend: the asshole nerd. i've never worked with kariko, i do not know if she falls under this category, but that seems to be the archetype that is implicitly being discussed in the hn comment section, presumably because a lot of us work in tech and have worked with or under an asshole nerd.

agieocean• 2 years ago

These comments prove compsci has a long way to go on respecting marginalized people

tqi2• 2 years ago

The idea that IQ and EQ are negatively correlated is dubious at best.

I would venture a guess that the vast majority of "Weird Nerds" are not Katalin Karikós, and instead are simply difficult jerks who are not nearly as smart as they think they are. Hubris mixed with obstinance is a recipe for misanthropy.

Also, the notion that the internet is a place where your outputs are judged solely on their merits, so that you don't have the "ability to sell yourself and your work", is absolutely hysterical.

throwaway2037• 2 years ago

Your last paragraph is interesting. When I think back about at Perl, Python, and Ruby, all of them have/had charismatic leaders -- Larry Wall, Guido van Rossum, and Yukihiro Matsumoto. This would help to explain part of the success of their programming languages. My guess: All three of them have high IQ and EQ. To be clear: I don't write this post to take anything away from the incredible accomplishments of those people. Rather, I am trying to say that having a good personality (and probably higher EQ) only helped their cause.

azernik2• 2 years ago

I would even argue that Linus Torvalds's famous abrasiveness is its own kind of charisma, well adapted to its target audience.

tqi2• 2 years ago

I think what this article misses is that for most real-world problems, there is a) not an objectively "right" or "best" solution (just varying degrees of partial solutions that are imperfect in different ways), and b) there are reasons to coalesce around a single solution. So it seems perfectly reasonable to me that individuals who are able to be "the most socially adept and organized manager" could rally a community around their solution.

TeMPOraL7• 2 years ago

The idea that IQ and EQ are negatively correlated is dubious at best.

How about: IQ and EQ are mostly fixed in any given individual. You can use one to simulate the other - e.g. using EQ to get help or bullshit your way through a problem your IQ is insufficient for, or using IQ to intentionally behave in a way that would be totally natural if you had higher EQ. So it's not that they're negatively correlated per se, just that if you're being pressured past your limit in one, the other will effectively drop.

gr__or• 2 years ago

I find it dubious to make this comparison in an article which does not talk about EQ, but about ability (willingness?) to play company politics. I'd wager that one is *at most* slightly correlated with EQ.

mrcartmeneses2• 2 years ago

It’s really harsh that Katalin Karikó got such a backlash for calling academia like it is in her book.

Academics are as much courtiers these days as they are researchers.

derbOac2• 2 years ago

I agree, I think it's victim blaming or a diversion tactic or something.

I think the real problem isn't so much the skillsets of the researcher involved as much as is what is implied about the environments and the vagaries thereof.

The argument this piece is referring to and the way it is responding to it seem to deflect attention from the real problems, or rather, recasts it in the wrong way. My focusing on whether or not Karikó is "too weird" or whether it's time to abandon "weirdness", it deflects attention from all the problems that people are dealing with in academics. For every person who is "weird", there are many others who are not and still get screwed, or still others who are not but also not particularly bright and still "milk" the system or are in the right place at the right time.

This whole debate strike me a bit like climate change debates, specifically the criticism that berating people for not recycling or using plastic straws or whatever is just blaming the victim, or is hiding the real offenders behind the curtain. In the same way it strikes me as kind of besides the point whether Karikó is weird or not, or how weird is too weird, or whatever. The bottom like is academics is no longer really about science in many fields, and not even really about how socially skilled you are, it's about politics and random dynamics of fate.

My impression of academics is that it blew way past "social skill" long ago and is now in a very different realm altogether. I've seen too much fraud and manipulation to blame anyone who has good ideas for "not being socially skilled enough."

I didn't read the original tweets but the idea that Karikó should be shamed for complaining because "that's just the way it is" seems like condoning the problems and then blaming her for calling them out. The next step is complaining about people calling out fraud because "that's just what everyone does".

mrcartmeneses2• 2 years ago

For real. I was talking to an academic friend who claims that she doesn’t do politics then I had to remind her about the 5 steps she uses when she wants to get someone fired (starts with creating negative narratives then gets worse from there)

patrickhogan1• 2 years ago

My dad was the prototypical weird nerd. He was a physics teacher that was allergic to schmoozing yet could read a 600 page book in 5 minutes. He had limited career success which was opposite to his intellect and ability.

Unfortunately my only solution to this is to learn from my dad’s experience and lean into instead of away from the areas Katalin disdains. Success seems to require leaning into these areas of social reciprocity. Especially in startups. Yes you must make a product that people want, but to become big it requires distribution, which requires schlepping by performing these social reciprocity hacks.

hi-v-rocknroll• 2 years ago

I guess I'm biased because I worked with so many other comparatively "weird nerds" that were given some space to be themselves in nuclear energy from hoarding old WSJs to dripping burger sauces into their keyboards, and in an academic research department we had a PI who ran between his office and the elevator like I did until I was about 15-16 and someone clued me in.

One thing is to always be looking for one's own blindspots and examining how your or other people's behavior might be misinterpreted, and defusing any potential awkwardness with honesty and humor. For example, forgetfulness or anxiety rather than intentional snubbing. And err on the side of humor mixed with some self-deprecation and self-awareness because it demonstrates you're cool, reciprocate, are domesticated, and strive to not embarrass others intentionally.

A while back, the department dean was a mildly-weird nerd but developed politician-/salesman-like cheerfulness and political skills taking some of the burden off PIs and supporting them in whatever ways were needed to bring in the big grants, licensing deals, and industry collaboration. Having 2 expert, dedicated, highly-productive grant writers were also invaluable. The grad students were absolutely going places and startups were on the minds of about 80% of folks. It was a good spot to branch out from or build a research CV but there weren't profits to be had directly there.

kazinator2• 2 years ago

Yes; with more and more people having degrees just to get into lame jobs that previously required no degree, academia necessarily changes away from being Weird Nerd ranch. Key positions of power in the academic organization will end up staffed by fewer Weird Nerds, making the structure less sympathetic toward Weird Nerds.

theK• 2 years ago

We need her in the lab, not at fancy dinners.

I think it is naive to take such a stance. This is the thinking that leads to layers of management, institutional bloat, non experts with MBAs calling shots and ultimately loss of the opportunity to fund genius as it becomes all the blurier who really has the vision and capability and who is just good with filling out grant applications.

SillyUsername• 2 years ago

I'm probably somewhat autistic and introverted in that I often don't care (much) about other people's opinion unless backed by fact proving I am wrong.

Societal niceties are difficult to navigate as I just can't predict the effects of what people do as a consequence of what I say and personal opinion may not be grounded in fact.

For example the job interview, technically I have no issues at all, but initially I did not know the "right" way to behave in them, and I would come across arrogant (statement of fact comparing oneself's achievements to others invariably tend to do this). I expected to be hired based on technical merit and that I am generally amenable.

I wasn't hired until I started manipulating the interview, faux humble, quiet, hiding smaller achievements, exactly the kind of thing you're taught in school is the opposite of what to do.

I'd also investigate the interviewers to find out their interests and hobbies for leverage e.g. they like paint balling, ok, I don't do that but I can use some of their common phrases in parlance "by accident" and without giving away my background research on the interviewer.

I shouldn't have to do this, and I despise it (mainly from resentment of the process) but the results speak for themselves. In 4 interviews since I started it I've landed all 4 jobs.

Side note: I'm wondering what will happen with this comment will people downvote because it's showing I'm manipulative in interviews, or up vote due to agreement / feeling the same way. Obviously I want the latter as I like points, but society (perhaps not community) tends to go the other way when you speak uncomfortable truths.

precompute• 2 years ago

I found this article to be quite vexing; she seems to dance around the actual terms and instead likes to define them by exclusion, which is pretty weird.

dbttdft• 2 years ago

It was *very* hard to decode what this article is about when it started off with "quickly forgot about their support for “Women in STEM”", which (after 3 reads of the first 2 paragraphs and then closing the page) has nothing to do with anything, but makes it sound as if the article is about identity politics, which it isn't.

jerf• 2 years ago

"And I believe the conversation here starts with accepting a simple truth, which is that Weird Nerds will have certain traits that might be less than ideal, that these traits come “in a package” with other, very good traits"

I think the point here can be strengthened by removing the issue of "weird traits" entirely. The simple reality is, if you are hiring someone to be very, very smart in their field, at a world-class, there is literally no one who can just parachute in and replace them, level, you need to minimize the amount of other things they have to do in order to operate at that level.

Why hire a world-class irreplaceable expert to do anything if you're going to require them to spend 90% of their time doing things other than being a world-class irreplaceable expert? Even if the expert is the nicest person in the history of humanity, it's still a complete waste if you can't support them and they have to do all this other stuff just to be allowed to function as a world-class expert.

In local parlance, this is no different than hiring a senior engineer and then 100% filling their schedule with meetings. Or expecting to hire a unicorn that is an expert in seven distinct languages and is also a manager and a high-level sales person. If I put that job listing out HR would laugh and send it back to me. Essentially making "world class scientist AND good manager AND expert sales/politician" the baseline for functionality in the sciences is just a recipe for futility.

There doesn't even have to be a correlation with "weird traits"; even a population-average distribution of the ability to me a manager + politician + sales + something else is a very, very tall ask. Add back in that there are certainly good reasons that outlier personality traits are fairly likely to go with outlier skills and it just makes it worse, but it would be plenty bad enough without that.

throwawayffffas• 2 years ago

There was a time when academia was society’s refuge for the eccentric, brilliant, and impractical. No longer. It is now the domain of professional self-marketers. As for the eccentric, brilliant, and impractical: it would seem society now has no place for them at all.

There never was such a time, since at least the time of Newton and Euler Academics are a popularity and status contest. You got to be eccentric only after you climbed to the top of your field.

philwelch2• 2 years ago

A few weeks ago, a lot of people on academic X quickly forgot about their support for “Women in STEM” and got angry at, of all people, Katalin Karikó, the co-inventor of the mRNA technology used in COVID-19 vaccines and 2023 Nobel Prize winner. Her crime? A passage from her book where she laments that academia involved way too much people pleasing and political games for her…. A couple of months ago I wrote a piece called “The flight of the Weird Nerd from academia”, in which I argued there is a trend wherein Weird Nerds are being driven out of academia by the so-called Failed Corporatist phenotype. Katalin Karikó is a perfect example of a Weird Nerd.

What this misses is the fact that a massive element of the “support for women in STEM” discourse was the blatant demonization of the Weird Nerd in favor of the Failed Corporatist.

dfxm12• 2 years ago

Was the reaction to that excerpt of Karikó's book really that bad? The author mentions one deleted tweet, but nothing else specific.

I ask because I hear/read very similar things to what she wrote from people in all kinds of fields (not just STEM or academia).

edelsohn• 2 years ago

When it becomes beneficial to game a system (fame, power, money), people will learn to game the system. "Weird Nerds" weren't drawn to their interests with the intent to game the system. Sometimes "weird nerds" can achieve more success if they find a political animal who recognizes the benefit of teaming with them.

ab5tract2• 2 years ago

It’s absolutely mind boggling that this author tries to fundamentally equate “weird nerds” as autistic, only to then present an example of a weird nerd who has never been documented as autistic.

1vuio0pswjnm7• 2 years ago

Kariko is biochemist who got her PhD in 1982 before the public internet even existed.

Number of times the words "weird", "nerd" or "autistic" appear in Kariko's memoir: 0

Number of times the word "internet" appears in the book: 3

#1 referrring to her mother ("there was nothing she couldn't find on the internet") who would call Kariko daily to keep her informed of current events because Kariko was too busy working the lab (not publishing silly ideas to a substack blog about "Weird Nerds")

#2 referring to a book about stress by an endocrinologist that she read as a teenager ... she describes how the author in 1925 noticed that many diseases have the same symptoms and comments that "anyone looking up symptoms on the internet today" would also notice this

#3 referring to a period "in the 1990s, before the dawn of the internet bubble"

Thus, Kariko appears to have achieved success without being autistic and without heavy use of the internet. In fact, she achieved success despite an "internet bubble".

Let's hope the blogger finishes her PhD despite the distractions of the internet. It is likely that the only "Weird Nerds" she has identified are an internet audience who likely worship university dropouts and who are most certainly not doing real work on real biological problems in a wet lab. Instead, they are staring at screens and playing video games.

Trying to put computer addicts that idolise university dropouts whose idea of biotech is life extension in the same category as Nobel Prize-winning biochemists who have solved real problems is pure fantasy, like computer games. But coming from web bloggers, it's not surprising.

It's also not surprising that Kariko refers to an "internet bubble". That bubble arguably needlessly diverted investment away from biotech during Kariko's career. The example she cites is gene therapy which in the 1990s was "the next big thing", only to be later overshadowed when the internet bubble arrived.

jarbus• 2 years ago

I really enjoyed this article, as someone who is learning to play the politics game while also trying to still do interesting and unique research that’s slightly off the mainstream. I’ve felt horrible for not doing “popular” research, or research that employers might care about first and foremost, but this is what academia is about I think.

fl0ki• 2 years ago

If you read this and think it doesn't apply in corporate technology jobs, either you're already doing so well at it that you take it for granted, or you are so unaware of the relationship dynamics going on around you that you don't even know what opportunities you've missed.

The Weird Nerd comes with trade-offs

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