Finance, Law, VC guys were good too in the beginning but when the value/status change happens it attracts certain kind of guys who are average in talent but excel in demonstrating value and social management of the value/status.
Another change which has happened recently is that the economics of engagement farming have become common place wisdom as already proven effective for everything from selling books, personal brand, career skill/virtue signalling, staying relevant.
Due to this everyone is talking more without restraint and not keeping in their own lane of earned expertise.
Be nice, think about hard problems for a long period of time, only speak up when you have something positive to contribute -- be labelled an underperforming academic and managed into obscurity.
A great example of this is Peter Higgs, who famously said that he'd be unemployed pretty quickly in the academia of 2013. [0]
[0]: https://www.theguardian.com/science/2013/dec/06/peter-higgs-...
I'm in academy and I'm mostly quiet and seek to contribute honestly and I've been managed into obscurity but I'm also quite happy, pay the bills, and more or less enjoy the work. If you want glory you have to deal with bullshit. If you don't want glory, life provides many opportunities to live a modest but productive life.
Politics is irreducible from human affairs, privatization doesn't eliminate politics. It relocates it to a different set of actors. That could be a better set, but when it is it's because it's a more local and hands on group of people, not because those people happen not to work for the government. Governments are awkward because they are deep bureaucracies, and deep bureaucracies divorce the decision makers from the impact of their decisions. Weaker feedback leads to worse decision making. Not because there is a magic property of government that makes it uniquely bad. Large corporations, universities, and other deep non-governmental bureaucracies have similar pathologies.
That's something of an exaggeration, they are empowered to do violence and collect taxes and other things that are more problematic when abused, but still, privatization isn't a silver bullet.
It's definitely an exaggeration to say that all science on a shoestring budget has already been accomplished, there are new frontiers out there. But once they start gaining momentum, the low hanging fruit will be consumed in due course. Methodically searching a domain works and works from the most tractable end up until it is at the frontier of what is tractable given our current technology/constraints.
I don't really understand the alternative hypothesis. That there's an infinite amount of low hanging fruit? What's this 100% failure rate?
Perhaps this will help: Indeed high energy physics is a very high budget project! But there are many areas of the natural sciences which are not high energy physics. This area has been a big deal over the past few decades, and I wonder if it's an over-commitment at the expense of other areas.
You can do many molecular bio lab techniques with a budget of $10k in equipment and reagents, for example. (If used/entry level) I believe there are also many areas in science, chem, and bio which can be done on a theoretical level, or with computers, etc.
We ideologically privatised the water sector into regional private monopolies in the UK, and anyone who's had experience with the water monopolies knows this is the truth.
Almost like private investment generates return for investors, not customers. Sometimes those align.
When younger I've had job in groceries stores and saw petty politics.
There's nothing particular to being subsidized or not: politics is something humans do, and the pettiness is simply a reflection of the people involved.
I think it's just limited resources + the single most natural way for humans to compete for limited resources. This isn't actually an inevitable outcome - just the most likely one.
The "self-funding" regime requires people who are both rich enough to afford to fund science and sharp and driven enough to advance science to exist. That's a high bar. And while there is some correlation between intelligence and wealth, the tails come apart hard. People driven to pursuit wealth above all may not be driven to pursue scientific discovery.
We have plenty of billionaires, and preciously few of them actively pursue pushing the frontiers of science and technology. Even by funding the endeavors - let alone by being in the trenches themselves.
Your US-blend of anti-state brainwashing is showing. There is nothing inherently different in the for-profit status of an organization that prevents the occurrence of "exploitive petty politics". You see those from any organization from homeowners organization to full blown FANGs. I mean, have you ever paid attention to the crap being pushed by the likes of Tesla/SpaceX/Twitter?
Finance was good people when? When Swiss banks captured all the war spoils of WW2? When they ran Penny Auctions during the Great Depression? When they financed slave ships? When the Medici financed endless war across Europe?
I’m not saying people are all awful, but I don’t think there’s any “before times” where people were better than they have been since then in any ageless profession. Perhaps there’s some degree of variance or even ebb-and-flow patterns.
All of those are only things because there were lawyers willing and eager to sue the government over the evils at issue, so your point is much weaker than you think.
It sounds like you’d agree with me.
I'll use the All-in podcast as a perfect example of the type of person described. They have some value in that they have palace intrigue + arguably asymetric access to information.
Most intelligent people contribute to this as well though. Being intelligent doesn't automatically remove egoistical traits, for some it's even supercharged if it results in personal growth within the organization.
finance people who invented life insurance, health insurance, car insurance, friendly societies. as much as we complain about insurance here in the US, life was immeasurably worse when there was none. there was no such thing as state health care or social security in those days
you would be surprised to find that there are many people in finance who never tried to make a quick buck, and are pretty altruistic. this is evidenced by the large amount of family owned banks
tech now going through what finance did in the 1980s, shift to greed and excess
Similarly lawyers/bankers were the ones who built in trust in capital, contracts, businesses and protection of investor rights. Delaware c corp is not an outcome of bad guys.
aka techbros
The combination of endless trend-chasing, software churn, and techbro culture made me hate everything about software, so I jumped ship to biology.
It's being the tech lead of a team of junior to mid level developers. You design roughly what the solution should look like, split it into reasonable sized tasks so they don't go off the deep end, advise them on some of the details, then assign them the tasks and let them get on with it, keeping an eye on what they're doing, reviewing their output, and course correcting them when they go wrong.
Just like with a team of humans, you have to use your judgement as to how much supervision they need individually and how large a task you can give them without them going off the rails.
And here I am. Coding is becoming management in front of my eyes.
Meh :-|
Not everyone wants to be a team lead not doing coding any longer.
Those career paths were always crooked. We see that going back to my great grandparents time with Black friday of 1929. They fucked around with unrestricted capitalism, and found out. Quite a few killed themselves by throwing themselves off of buildings.
It was only when FDR took office and worked with Congress to make tons of rules keeping the money hoarders from destroying the economy yet again. And it bloody worked. For those of you who say FDR was a communist, absolutely not. He was fighting against a large contingent of the population who were socialists and communists. He did appease some of their demands, bit not many.
FDR led us into our most glorious 20 years, the 1950's to 1960's. Cheap education, cheap homes, plentiful well paying jobs, only needed 1 worker per house. Thats what the boomers remember and want.
And it was systematically dismantled piece by piece.
'VC guys were good too'?!?! I take it you do t remember the 1980's Mergers and Acquisitions crisis? Thats when enough data was available for a company, that mergers, acquisitions, and liquidations coukd make a handful of people scads of money, and destroy the economy to boot.
And i also scarce remember a time when 'Finance' was good. Their slur was beancounters. Something costs $20 but saves $1000? Nope, its -20$. The loss is never analyzed. Every job Ive woeked in has had this perverse logic.
And especially with money, Goodharts Law comes to mind. "When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure".
"Men living in democratic ages have many passions but most of their passions either end in the love of riches or proceed from it." Alexis de Toqueville
“What happened” was just that some people got rich and powerful and their real personalities showed through. This is not a new thing in any sense at all, from Rockefeller to Bill Gates – both “technology entrepreneurs”.
There's also this age-old belief that if you do something out of passion, you're willing to pull more hours, and do whatever it takes to reach your goals.
I also believe that nerds, whatever thing they are obsessed with, make their nerdiness a personality defending trait. Their nerdiness is their personality. And if others aren't as willing to commit, they're simply frauds or wannabes.
Probably one of the most ego-crushing realizations (if you're a nerd) is to discover that there are people out there MUCH more talented and higher performing than what you'll ever be, but with none of the obsession or pride. In other profession that's not really a topic. You can be a top performer in other professions, without a deep interest, clock out 4 daily, and never think about work outside work.
In tech, however, it is too often assumed that you must be consumed by tech. Otherwise you're not really that passionate about it.
You could clock out, but I don't think the top performers ever stop thinking about work. Everything you've written here has to be wrong.
But I also knew other top performers that basically had geopolitics as their hobby, and would study OSINT (open-source intelligence) when they came home.
And obviously there are many other professions where you can do really well, and don't think a second about work when your day is over. Really depends on how your work is structured!
passion is necessary but not sufficient to be the best. you can be top 20% without passion, but you can't be top 1%
Maybe this is just a human trait in general? Seems every person from any subculture fall victim to "fame and wealth" basically turning them into an evil and greedy person, maybe 1/1000 manages to still stay human in such transition. Or is there any subcultures in particular where most people seem to actually be able to handle "fame and wealth" without the problems that you've observed people from other subcultures?
I'm well aware, I'm personally early-retired person with financial independence, and of course I have friends too :) With that said, many of them are greedy, some in big ways others in smaller ways, even if they're generally good people too.
I think it's the combination of "famous + wealthy" that seems to poison people, pick one of them and it doesn't seem so bad, but both together seems like a recipe for disaster.
Lately I’ve been doing a sort of street performance which makes it very likely people will remember me and that again motivates me to be nice.
On the other hand I hear Elon Musk comes across better in person than he does on X and Trump seemed pretty cordial meeting with Zohran Mamdani.
Star Trek, Star Wars, Dune, LOTR, Asimov, Clarke, Hobbes, are all nerd-dom mainstays, like D&D.
Also a lot of those properties had a lot of substance there decades ago and have since been watered down and turned into memeable cliches.
Indeed. Even in the middle ages rich people leaned heavily on charity to whitewash their legacy. I mean, the Catholic church even made this accessible to the masses through indulgence.
Because doing something you're genuinely interested is virtuous relative to doing something for personal/reputational gain or due to other social pressures.
> some people got rich and powerful and their real personalities showed through
This could not be more deluded - the negative equivalent of the hustle culture myth: anyone can become a selfish asshole if they work hard enough. The idea that every person who's ever taken an academic interest in tech is just another William Gates III waiting to happen is a very weird way of looking at nerd culture.
Shouldn't you? Bakers and chefs aren't just "interested in nerdy stuff like chemical reactions," they make food for people. Writers have ethical obligations, both individually and as a group?
I don’t know why you’d think “being interested in nerdy stuff like computers” would somehow translate into virtuous behavior.
The cultural perception of nerds being relentlessly bullied for the crime of having imaginations/GPAs/acne, I think, presented a culturally sympathetic view to the extent that the latent bro-ism caught some off guard, like we'd expect them to emerge from sweet gentle Stranger-Things style basement nerds to adulthoods as, say, Randall Munroe or something
> The cultural perception of nerds being relentlessly bullied for the crime of having imaginations/GPAs/acne, I think, presented a culturally sympathetic view to the extent that the latent bro-ism caught some off guard, like we'd expect them to emerge from sweet gentle Stranger-Things style basement nerds to adulthoods as, say, Randall Munroe or something
To emphasize that point, I think the assumption was that being bullied and ostracized would lead nerds to have greater empathy and be nice people.
But I think the reality, obvious in hindsight, is that was a totally unreasonable assumption. IIRC, the experience of abuse can actually create future abusers. With geeks/nerds, I think a fairly common outcome as been a combination of arrogance with a kind of social ineptness/unawareness that is not nice.
People who spend their entire life in front of computers should not be the ones with the keys to society yet here we are.
This might've been different 50 years ago but it's the number one striver job there is.
Again ... maybe it's just my experience. None of these were super life threatening conditions. However I did go under the operating knife at least once; in that case, the operation was successful, healed me of the condition, and never caused any negative side-effects to this day.
Maybe there's a difference in regulation. A lot of the "entrepreneurial" landscape seems unregulated and a kind of Wild West, and I suppose that allows for certain kinds of personalities to succeed by suspect means. The medical field, by contrast, is quite regulated and there are very real risks to malpractice. Thus, I think it attracts better people and allows them to succeed.
Maybe it's similar to how dictators often take over in poor or struggling countries, whereas they find it harder to get a foothold in developed, prosperous countries with strong institutions.
This all changes when they get more difficult patients. As someone who's been told bogus by doctors, even lightly pushing back many will completely change demeanor, you're not no longer some easy money but a risk/annoyance. So your good experiences basically just show doctors in their 'perfect state'.
This isn't the same in every country as you say it's a regulated field and the regulations differ wildly from country to country and so does the view and behaviour of doctors.
You are extremely lucky, then.
As a man, I've been gaslit by my doctors about my depression. My PC in my early 20s told me I was just lazy and needed to get a "real" job.
For women, by all accounts, it's much worse. I have not met a woman yet who has not had a story about some doctor treating her like a child, minimizing her pain, etc.
I remember when I was in high school knowing a bunch of people who wanted to be doctors (and had good grades). It was strange to me so many people wanted to be doctors so I asked why. The answer was one word: Money. In my adult life I have also heard of multiple people who demand to be called “doctor” in social situations.
“Virtuous” is not a word I’d associate at all with wanting to become a doctor. Veterinarians are a different matter, though.
For those that don't know, veterinarian education is just as rigorous, time consuming, and expensive as human medical education, yet the median annual wage for practicing veterinarians is $125,510.
It’s an incredibly stressful job with a huge rate of suicide.
https://www.bbc.com/worklife/article/20231010-the-acute-suic...
And by the time medical school and residency are done with them, many if not most will be sociopaths to rival all the top CEOs.
Generally I'm not sure you'd be considered a nerd if you weren't too honest for your own good. Not that this covers all types of virtuous behavior - there do exist nasty scientists. (And there is some level of fraud/dishonesty in academia, too).
Most of the scientists I know can spend years of their life pursuing a hypothesis that turns out to be wrong, shrug their shoulders, and dive back into it. Technologists are all about output. If it's not outputting, you have to give up and seek a different avenue. Scientists (except the very famous and successful ones) tend to be humble and curious. Technologists less so.
I have the feeling it probably teaches you something, or at least it should. Something not too unlike epistemic humility, maybe.
But then you see people with very questionable morals having made a key discovery or having produced a fundamental technology. Reality is complicated
Yet he's also a sociopathic fascist arsehole. It turns out these traits are not all on the same axis.
Post-CEO, he had completely refurbished his image via philanthropy, only to throw it away with the Epstein stuff.
It really demonstrates the nature of people. Richest guy on the planet for quite awhile, but can’t manage his relationships and spends his time chasing skirts. To the point where he’s a target for Epstein the apex predator.
In the Microsoft cinematic universe, Ballmer is the foil.
Can’t we just be adults interested in different topics and hobbies?
Musk for me was never a nerd. Many "founders" aren't nerds for me. In the end, I wouldn't classify anyone who is "money" first as a nerd - to me they are businessmen (and businesswomen) in their core.
Want to see "the lost nerds"? Here, on HN there are many very high-profile nerds. People who built the internet and the most popular tools exchanging insight and jokes over posts. Many founders who aren't loud, who aren't about PR.
So - nothing happened. Author looks for them in wrong places.
A nerd, when I was growing up, had to have a "thing", and that thing had to be unfashionable. Being a nerd was not a good thing. You loved your subject despite the stigma. (although later on people loved a subject because of the stigma)
There was a difference between a $subject nerd, and an arsehole/weirdo. To be liked, you needed to hide the nerd streak and learn to interact with people using commonly accepted rules. This is partly why the internet flourished in the 90s because you could be surrounded by other nerds and talk nerd shit.
The downside is that a lot of people felt marginalised, but you were in touch with the "normies", so still had to act like a normal high functioning member of society.
Ruthless buisness types were seen as that (at least in the UK) out to make money, and fuck you if you got in the way.
The problem for us now is, ruthless business types now own all the media, and want to shape the world in their image.
Not anymore. I haven’t heard this for a while now, and I didn’t change regarding this. But people behave very differently when I say “software developer” recently. Now they think immediately, that I’m rich. Not that I’m a freak nerd. They are not surprised anymore at all.
I experienced this very obviously with something else too. I born in Hungary, but I moved to Austria. There is a huge difference between how people behave with me if I say that I’m from Hungary, than if I say that I’m from Austria when I travel. They immediately recommend me things which are more expensive. The beaches, restaurants, pubs for rich tourists. Not when I say Hungary. That’s the only time when they say to me that something is expensive.
I state openly, that if somebody says that the public perception didn’t change and also the people in this field didn’t change to be more money focused, then those people lying, probably even to themselves. The current discussions about AI make this obvious. Most developers, engineers, founders are fine to ship shit on every single level, if they get the same money for it. They became “developers” only for the money.
“IT crowd” is unimaginable today.
It's similar to the "old Internet" argument: it's still there, but buried in layers and layers of stuff that isn't the real thing.
And that's exactly the argument of the article IMO, that the famous nerds went from well-meaning eccentrics to evil greedy overlords.
But it's easy to slide back into the fear mongering, engagement bait side if you don't pay really close attention to how you're feeding the algorithm.
It's pretty hard to describe Elon Musk's ventures in space exploration, robots and human-like AI as anything other than prototypical, "core" nerd culture. Especially when it turns out that the very word 'Elon' shows up in obscure magazine excerpts from the 1950s as the leader of a science-fictional Martian government, and apparently this somehow plays a part into why Musk gets named Elon.
To me (and I realise this might not be a broadly accepted definition) a nerd does things for the passion and without regard for the money. Woz was a nerd, Jobs was not.
Musk has always been about monetising these things. Not to discount that he's interested in them, but for me personally he's not a true nerd. He's a businessman with nerdy interests.
A nerd that perennially wrong about their passion pits (e.g. when self driving is coming, the viability of his tunnel projects) would be mortally embarrassed about being so publicly wrong. Musk doesn't care.
For the nerdy ones, he bought his way in; he never actually founded Tesla.
Everything you think you know about him, at least as expressed in this post, is a result of his carefully crafted PR propaganda.
Capitalizing the work of others, Cannibalizing smaller entities, creating monopolies, controlling the government and the narrative.
The way of Jobs is how you "earn" a billion dollars.
Then the ideologues and political commissars showed up, giving zero shit about tech or logical reasoning, this pulled the discourse down to the lowest common denominator and the rest is history.
Why should I take the moral high ground and listen to an argument I dislike if I'm not offered the same courtesy.
Old man here, No this was never the case. Nerds were always hysterical and used the ban hammer frequently. the difference between then and now is that there were more distinct islands of nerdary you could escape to, and they wouldn't blend together.
also they generally had a "no outside opinions" rule that meant that forums were single subject. This allowed you to socialise with degenerates like emacs users in different contexts without descending into flame wars (mostly...)
Nerds were often seen as poorly social since "logic and reasoning" would go against socially accepted norms. This where the fedora tipping meme comes from: "everybody understands that religion is not literal, but we have to all accept the lie for social cohesion". But "nerds" would be the ones willing to take the ridicule and ostracism because truth would be more important than conformity.
Reddit was the place to be for nerds and spread like a pandemic. However, karma points turned this on its head since you have a mechanism to enforce conformity in non-conformity that was the basis for "nerd communities". Nerds hobbies that would be the gateway are gated behind such platforms that enforce a social credit system in a totalitarian way. The would have been nerds are thus mostly integrated into the redittor archetype that is so fundamentally opposed to the nerd archetype; a contorted version of itself trying to fit through distorting mirrors.
I'm not disagreeing with you; but why did the nerds not destroy the ideologues with logic and reasoning if not for the horizontal pressure of other "nerds" subverting the concept?
Why should I spend my energy to discuss with someone who doesn't want to listen, and not rather build something I like or learn something I wonder about, or converse with the people I care about?
Life is too short to talk with walls disguised as humans. Talking with a wall, the ocean or oneself is more productive than doing unproductive self-torture.
One of the reasons why I stopped going on Facebook, even though a lot of communities I care about have moved there. I wrote a long comment about someone's suggestion about car maintenance, only to get a reply "I didn't come here to discuss this, if you don't like what I said then go somewhere else". Like, WHY EVEN BE IN A PUBLIC FORUM THEN. But I feel like that's just me and my early internet sensibilities. Nowadays people want to post something, get some likes, and not be challenged. Even a mild disagreement is met with immediate aggression a lot of the time, because people are just not used to talking on the internet at all(imho).
I don't think nerds are/were seen as poorly social because logic and reasoning go against social norms. I'll bite on the religion focus. If everyone understands religion is not literal, being smirk about taking it literally is not logical or reasoning or making anyone look smarter. It just makes you look like a dork. Subtext and not being meant to read literally are a core part of social interaction.
I see the same in school, when some overly literal students argue about the interpretation of a book they are assigned to read. "the author can't possible mean that" or "show me where it says that on the page" is a common lazy criticism with little value. Some people are just like that, and (warning: personal observation) nerds tend to be a bit more like that. But the arguments I hear from that corner against religion are seldom great, they are just some minor gotchas.
I don't want to get into the whole religion debate, and I'll admit that there are also groups of Christians that take the bible very literally, as I'm sure there are for other religions as well. From what I can see, these don't make up the canon of religion, and I kind of believe they're mostly concentrated in North America, but that might be my skewed perspective.
It's quite sad that social mechanics in our society don't work well for some people, but that doesn't mean they don't exist and it doesn't make everyone except nerds "illogical".
> I'll admit that there are also groups of Christians that take the bible very literally, as I'm sure there are for other religions as well. From what I can see, these don't make up the canon of religion, and I kind of believe they're mostly concentrated in North America, but that might be my skewed perspective.
There will always be people falling off on one side of the spectrum or the other. Personally, I haven't met anyone who takes the bible literally, and I know a _lot_ of Christians, including pastors and priests. Some people simply just believe that there is something more, others have a feeling that you can sense that, some just need this believe to feel safe, etc. I guess it depends on where you're from, I believe biblicism is more common in North America, or at least more visible.
Additionally, the "everyone understands religion is not literal" was citing my parent. Usually, "everyone" is kind of understood not to mean "exactly 100%". It's a device to communicate intent.
> You could just as sensibly flip the argument and argue that the garden-variety 'nerdy' atheist is talking literally about atheism but really doing negative theology ("your idea of God is totally wrong and does not exist, because the true God is necessarily inaccessible to human reason") but that would be silly and make you look like a dork too.
Yeah, it'd make you look like a dork because it'd be obviously incorrect. The intentions of your garden-variety nerd talking about atheism are pretty clear, and it's not to make some greater theological point. When you talk to people who talk down on religion and believers, it's usually really easy to tell whether it's because only they themselves understand the True Intention Of God or whether they just think Christians are stupid and if you're smart you have to be an atheist. Said garden-variety nerd is the latter.
I grew up, and still live, in a conservative state and a conservative family. That hasn't been my experience at all: I know a lot of people for whom the bible is a literal truth.
I agree about the underlying intentions, but I was talking about the typical, literal arguments for garden-variety 'rational' atheism. The point that these arguments tend to map quite cleanly to negative theology would usually be considered a pretty strong one as a matter of philosophy. Of course, this can only be said to further highlight the difference in intentions.
Because everyone has bias and ego and nobody has perfectly logical reasoning.
Why brag about how smart you are to people who’ll just think you’re arrogant and annoying? Why tell someone their religion isn’t real if they’ll just think you’re a heretic, or “best case” despair they’ve been living a lie? You don’t study (especially in lieu of fitness) unless you have motivation which is ultimately based on emotion. I believe it’s usually the same ego that makes alpha men, just that these nerds (usually men) are too weak to be jocks.
Nerds have always had their own social norms, with illogical conformity, groupthink, status signaling, gatekeeping, etc.
I have no reason to believe that back in the day when internet was only for nerds the situation was different.
Strong disagree. Having lived those times, it really really was different, and there are a bunch of reasons for it.
1. First, back then (90s, early 00s) there was very little financial incentive to participate in discussions. BBSs, IRC, forums etc. were mostly non commercial. People joined without any expectation of making a profit, just for "the fun" of it. And for something new, interesting, evolving. Way less perversion of topics for monetary gain.
2. People back then made a clear separation between being online and offline. We literally had the term IRL coined. So a lot of discussions were "in abstract" and much less prone to be taken literally or seriously. A lot less identity / ideology stuff as well. Having a clear separation made it easier to not confuse your real world self with your online persona. Having an idea debated wasn't about you / your identity.
3. Politics was much less divisive back then. There was political debate, but again a bit more "abstract" and theoretical. I'd say the moment when this changed was 2008s US presidential campaign. Until then the Internet was seen as "not important". It has changed a lot since then.
4. Entry barrier. This might sound elitist or disparaging, but it really was a thing back then. The people online were mostly tech inclined, or curious enough to learn. It was much more educational, and (linked to point 1 above) everyone wanted to learn the cool new thing, without any monetary incentives. Much more sharing of pure knowledge, helping out and so on. It of course changed over time, but the early days were really something beautiful. I have very fond memories.
Not to mention for a good while, FOSS was a big nerd holy grail (informing many discussions and forums, away from corporate solutions shilling and careerism), and a big goal of every tech nerd (unlike after about 2010).
Also nerd culture was by nerds, for nerds, not dilluted and "championed" by every mainstream hipster.
Remember when even Comicon was something mostly nerds, the kind "normie" people used to point and laugh at, went, and sci-fi/superhero movies excited the same small demographic niche?
This feels like maybe even the majority of the problem.
In general corporate social media favors memetic content and disfavors "inconvenient" content. Inconvenient meaning things that cause non-trivial numbers of users to mash the thumbs down or "report content" button. The premise of that is supposed to be that people are reporting spam and trolling etc.
The problem naturally being that people will also use the platform's "make it go away" mechanism to penalize anyone who tells them things they don't want to hear. And then the sort of people who insist on telling the technical truth even when it's inconsistent with the political lie tend to get shadow banned into irrelevance, which leaves what in everyone's feed instead?
Slashdot really highlighted this for me - if you followed the site and the core forum of founders, dealing with moderation was horrible. The writing of CmdrTaco over the years really made it sound like it just made him miserable.
Oh, it kept the trolls and Nazis just fine (even brought some close to power).
What the investment killed was the regular curious / not-for-profit nerd.
I remember Usenet in the 90s being 50% interesting conversations mostly about niche topics and 50% randomly devolving into flame wars in larger communities.
Even "Eternal September" as a concept was something from around 1993/1994 right?
Same for the 2000s era online-bulletin-board. I often go to thegearpage.net and am appalled at the amount of shilling, dismissals and disrespect, but then I remember that in the 2000s the main guitar forum was Harmony Central, which was mostly kids calling other kids moms names.
EDIT: But coldtea makes a good point about some (IMO) more recent changes: tone-policing, excessive marketing. There's IMO also a different attitude towards curiosity today.
Otherwise, my memory of early 90s internet supports exactly your conclusion. There may have been better opportunities for small discussions, but big ones devolved the same way they do today.
It was never a very placid or friendly place. There was more tolerance for vigorous debate than there is now. The debate didn’t change many minds, I suppose.
I'd claim a relevant axis is argument as deduction (common in mathematics) vs argument as rhetoric/persuasion (common in politics).
It's not that the former type is necessarily rational. "All birds have wings, planes have wings, therefore planes are birds" is the former type of argument and fallacious, whereas "are you really comparing birds to planes?" is the latter type.
I feel the former can allow deeper exploration of some topic, but sometimes involves things like playing devil's advocate for stances outside of social norms - and requires others to engage at that level rather than taking the rhetoric path of shaming you for even considering it.
But besides bots, there's also "low value" comments, the "who's listening in 2026" type comments. Undiscernable from a bot, adds no value, can be omitted and you wouldn't miss anything.
And the worst part is that LLMs can generate more interesting comments than a large chunk of online people can.
I don't remember this internet. Ever since I got my first modem, I remember the kinds of vitriolic posts that led to the publication of IEN 137 (On Holy Wars and a Plea for Peace).
Whether it was endianness or RISC vs CISC or ZModem vs Kermit or Microsoft or Kirk vs Picard or Kimagure Orange Road, flame wars erupted everywhere. The smaller the stakes, the bigger the war.
Shitposting, trolling, and harassment has been around since the very beginning of the public internet. If you didn't see it, it has to have been because you were (unconsciously or not) looking away.
The "ideologues and political commissars" didn't ruin your "friendly technical discussions", they merely pointed out how toxic a lot of those communities had always truly been.
If anything, if you really want to focus on the technical details, you should welcome their attempts to make it a friendlier and more professional space!
I'm sure it has a different meaning, though
And HN isn't it...
I think you're seeing the world through rose-tinted glasses. In some FLOSS circles the discussions were dominated by ideologues, to the point some discussions seemed like Monty Python skits. I mean, your choice of window manager, let alone Linux distro, was something you'd be judged by.
I mean not using the Dutch translation of the n-word as part of your username and thinking you're clever for hiding it in a plausibly deniable way would certainly help with me believing you're arguing in good faith.
One was framed and tortured, the other was given an empire.
The message was received.
We now only have the Zuckerberg type.
Oh how quickly we have forgotten:
> We plan to build this the way we've developed WhatsApp: focus on the most fundamental and private use case -- messaging -- make it as secure as possible, and then build more ways for people to interact on top of that, including calls, video chats, groups, stories, businesses, payments, commerce, and ultimately a platform for many other kinds of private services.
March 6 2019; https://web.archive.org/web/20190306191516/https://www.faceb...
Of course, none of that happened. But he did make a big fuss about it.
Anyway, I got some important coding to do now.
Of course the ‘nerds’ you hear about and see online are extroverted self-promoters. Of course the most visible people in the internal culture of large organizations are the ones who do more talking than doing.
Those are the people who are doing all the talking.
It is a massive over sampling problem that leads you to think, by looking at eg LinkedIn, ‘why is everyone on here writing engagement-bait algorithm-maxing posts?’
Everyone is not; The content you see is by definition the content that maxed its algorithmic exposure.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48504361
Anyway, the answer to the question: 'Nerds', like any cultural grouping, are a product of their environment. The United States of today has developed much higher inequality, debt burdens, rent demands, maintenance cost demands and trade deficits than the same environment had in the past, largely due to the Fed policies of the 21st century, with some help in worsening things by all administrations.
It’s a scam: people like Musk take credit for the work of thousands of people and even states. It’s ridiculous that a few people capture the value commonly generated.
We can go back to decades of public funding of research and development through taxes at universities and other public institutions, that’s a separate post.
If you haven’t met someone who is rude and inconsiderate and thinks that’s ok because they believe they are way smarter than they are, then you haven’t worked in tech.
This sort of archetype navel gazing is appealing because you can cast any story you want that way. Buy it doesn’t actually help to understand the complex problems we face, it just lets you blame some “other”.
A lot of society is actively fucked up by hyperoptimization, especially in business.
If you're a visionary, by definition you see what others do not. Which means that there's a lag between being right and being seen as right. That lag looks like arrogance.
Of course, the trick is how do you tell the difference from the outside? I used to think "be right about everything all the time" would be enough, but I've seen it fail constantly for myself and for others.
Now I think it boils down to "some people will decide to love you and some will decide to hate you, based mostly on tribal affiliation[0] -- how much will liking him cost me socially? -- and how often you've been proven right actually has very little bearing on the situation."
[0] Also apparently your spinal posture matters a lot more than what you're saying. Crucially both are social-emotional, not logic-based.
Elizabeth Holmes persuaded for years that she was a groundbreaking innovator, even with non-existent product. Other manipulators are smart enough to have a real product that protects them via benefit of a doubt. Society is still not immune to people like that.
Wherever there's big money to be made, will also attract ambitious people hungry for money and power - it's that simple.
Now that FAANG jobs aren't looking all that attractive, many such people have set their sights on AI research/dev and quant finance jobs. The latter one has exploded in popularity / virality the past years. Previously a niche profession within finance which, frankly, most had no clue existed, has become almost a mainstream ambition. Some of the people that never identified themselves as nerds, will wander from industry to industry, which one that pays the most.
But back to the nerds: Some nerds obviously changed. If you throw generational wealth at most people, they will change. Few people are so disinterested in money that it is simply not a thing they care about.
What's more, many nerds discovered that with enormous amounts of money, comes enormous amounts of power. You can now actually lobby for your sci-fi dream world, which is what some of the billionaire nerds are doing.
The money and power corrupted them.
Sadly, while I find AI effective, I also find it's removed the craft and personal reward I get from open source. So I will instead grow potatoes.
Even if machines can be made to produce compact, well thought out and beautiful, the interaction pattern almost inevitably ensures the "developer" produces something that is neither compact, well thought out or beautiful
> The money and power corrupted them.
Actually accomplishing things in the world that constitute building a sci-fi dream world requires significant amounts of money and power, and any person or institution at all that could in principle have the capacity to do this would also have the capacity to become corrupt, at least by someone's judgement.
Personally, I'm pretty happy with many of the sci-fi things that tech billionaire nerds have made their money by bringing into existence. I rode across town in a self-driving Tesla the other day while giving orders to its AI system about how and where to go. That was a pretty sci-fi dream world experience. That's worth quite a bit of corruption.
This is why people hate nerds. Will not explain.
The author wants founders to stop projecting “an obsession with wealth and power” and instead “focus carefully on projecting an obsession with core nerd values”. And maybe it doesn't occur to them (as a fellow nerd) that _wealth and power were the whole point_. The author enjoyed being blind to the greed of it all, and now being unable to unsee they are begging the founders “please please just pretend a bit better”.
Hear me out: back in the day founding a company wasn't an identity, it was just an action, a verb. Stuff started going sideways when people started thinking of themselves as "founders". Suddenly the product wasn't the top priority anymore, instead it was second to defending their identity as a "founder". Seemingly stupid decisions followed, but seen from the perspective of a CEO who wants nothing more than to be a founder, they start to make sense.
We see something similar in politics, I think. Note that it doesn't apply to everyone, but it's interesting to compare people who are engaged in a social justice struggle, Vs people who identify as "activist". The latter will be very prone to doing things that are counter-productive to their started cause, because they don't really care about any cause, they're just defending their identity as activist.
I reckon the same idea holds elsewhere as well.
(Disclaimer: I'm not sure how common that last thing is in the US, but where I live, it definitely happens a fair bit. But even here it does not apply to everyone, it's just a very loud minority)
Second disclaimer: I use the word identity in a very specific way in this comment. It is not to be confused with other uses of the same word, for example in the phrase "gender identity". That is a completely different kind of identity and is completely orthogonal and irrelevant to what I'm trying to express in this comment
https://www.paulgraham.com/identity.html
> If people can't think clearly about anything that has become part of their identity, then all other things being equal, the best plan is to let as few things into your identity as possible.
Of course one can't not have any identity whatsoever, afterall ethics is a type of identity and no one should in their right frame of mind contest basic things like human rights.
One thing I notice, which may be the worst part of it, although I realize it might be bit too pessimistic: It doesn't matter whether A identifies with X — if B thinks A identifies with X, the discussion still breaks down and it becomes difficult to have a fruitful argument. In other words, one party can shut down and degenerate a discussion for both (or many).
It makes me think once again about the adage: Communication is a two-way street; can't have communication otherwise.
This kind of self-reflection about identity is also very important for your own internal communication with yourself.
I wonder if being "engaged by identity" can be automatically detected somehow? Would be a cool experiment to build a automatic moderator that just hides identity based responses.
Also makes me wonder if there's a reliable way to detect it in yourself? If I could reliably identify when my identity is engaged, that would seem to be the first step towards disengaging it.
Or put differently, i would assume I carry labels unconsciously, in order to clear my cupboard I must find what's in it.
For conscious bias a good test is if being exposed to new facts prevent you from changing your opinion on something.
For example, imagine I was a very big believer of full-blown libertarianism and I was exposed to very concrete evidence that say, for example, government run healthcare is both more efficient and cheaper than private healthcare[1]. Would I still be full-blown libertarian and try to put holes on the data or would I embrace that libertarianism doesn't bring good outcomes in healthcare[2]?
Unconscious bias is much harder though, in fact libertarians tend to be very much fueled by ideology than facts. One could say that unconscious bias is fundamentally the same thing as ideology.
Another example, like I mentioned before I am very much a pro human rights ideologist. So I am inherently against some things like eugenics, even though one could provide data to me saying that eugenics would lead to "better" outcomes in society I would still be against it on principle.
[1]: Personally I sympathize with most libertarian views, but I don't consider myself a libertarian. I don't think a full private healthcare system is good for example. And this is the core issue the essay brings out, being a libertarian is assuming an identity and it closes you off to new ideas.
[2]: it is very hard to have absolute evidence to anything, but one must be willing to look over their own pre-existing world view when analyzing information available. A certain level of suspicion of information is warranted, but if you can't get past that, your world view is essentially ideology.
I guess in a roundabout way, what I'm trying to say is that I wonder how much of this is a change in PR rather than a change in the people themselves.
You will see similar dynamics where a bunch of people are involved.
And then there were no 'safe spaces' for socially awkward/on-the-spectrum nerds. The spaces once created to escape the school bullies had let in new types of bully.
This used to be only one of many paths available to a nerd, but now: (a) academia is dead thanks to overly competitive publish-or-perish set-up (probably the biggest loss of the three), (b) corporate jobs do not pay enough to safely survive downturns that leave you jobless for extended periods, (c) government jobs have been made even more onerous and even less paying in real terms.
So everyone has to become a self-promoting, trend-chasing startup-founder type. Even if you don't found a startup, you have to be always ready for a new "business opportunity".
When I worked in the Bay Area, I noticed the nerd-culture was still more or less predominant in South Bay. The arrogant, shallow types were always there (as witnessed by their fancy cars--"should we take the Jag or the Merc today?"), but I could still tolerate it. San Francisco was a different story. I started a new job at a startup once and remember thinking "I'm surrounded by Ivy Leaguers who look like models--this place is not for me". I think the crazy amounts of money just brought in everyone looking to make a buck, and the nerds no longer were the majority.
But then you have the company missions. It seems like most of the companies in the Bay Area are all about advertising or compiling info on individuals and selling it. It's mostly B2B and not so much "cool products".
We're on the downside of the tech bubble, and maybe that's a good thing.
I think it'll keep having waves, but I agree that a bit of cooling off could be a good thing.
The technologies are genuinely cool, interesting stuff, it's a super exciting time to be building stuff. But the business side of things seems quite vapid and desperate for many companies.
I wonder if more tangible industries like manufacturing have had similar peaks? Was there a time where the Wood Industry was going crazy, making everything out of wood, stuff that didn't need to exist?
People bought Apple because they were subscribed to Steve Job's personality cult. Heck, they might've even bought a "not-a-flamethrower" if he tried to sell one.
Also, Steve Job's "font obsession" is overrated. The fonts on Windows have always been much better and render way better as well (even to this day). Helvetica Neue is widely considered one of the worst fonts and Apple used it for a whole 3 decades.
Better to have a bland guy running McDonalds who can't stomach eating the "product" than some passionate chef doing his best to improve mass market food but rubbing people up the wrong way.
It's failure of capitalism if the money goes to the guy in the shiny suit instead of the person, or team, who can actually innovate. I don't want to be too melodramatic, but maybe this is all part of the fall of the empire.
I don’t give a damn about any company’s goals now.
Instantly thought of the big short: “they’re not confessing. They’re bragging”
Nah, that's been dead since 2010 or earlier. It was probably dead during DotCom too. Anytime tech is hot again, it attracts the kind of money/status chasers that move to whatever is hottest.
I mean Zuck was a Harvard grad and Bezos was a hedge fund guy first. Thiel was in law and derivates trading before tech.
The founders in garage era was more 70s/80s vibe.
In fairness the exposed brick was already there when they rented the place.
I am not so sure I agree with this take. The "nerds" are building incredibly powerful technologies (Amazon, Starlink/SpaceX, search, algorithmic social media, AI, etc.) that literally control our lives now. It isn't any great mystery that the tech titans realized they had this power, and hence are questioning whether democracy is some outdated concept. They all want to be Plato's philosopher (or in this case, technologist) kings. At the risk of sounding like an AI, it isn't just grifting (or a con game) - these guys really do think of themselves as the new feudal lords. So I don't think this author is thinking big enough...
I'm gonna disagree on the timeline and maybe get some flak for it: phase 3 was 1995-2000ish. When the first advertisement script and web analytics were born and disseminated. That's where all the tech grifts originate.
> Jobs was flawed and everyone knew it, but it was all par for the course. He was aggressive in his ambition, uncompromising about even the most minute details of his company, and occasionally arrogant
> Then there was Woz, the patron saint of computer science: bashful, generous, humble, averse to the spotlight, and content with having a reasonable amount of wealth but not an absurd, evil-seeming amount of wealth
I think broader problem is HN’s laser focus on few managers that are 1) doing [subjectively] immoral things 2) doing things not in a way busines and tech industry were doing it 15-20 years ago.
Down to a point where people start painting an “us vs them” picture with white knights of old and scary liars of new.
Then the world digitalized, and people who do not have any interest in computing and computers in general became "experts". That's when the ball begin to roll. This created people who can't give a french fry about the work they are doing? Quality? Efficiency? What do they matter, it was a job you did for 9-5 and you got your salary. If money was in say, haystacking, they'd be doing haystacking.
Now whenever someone utters "crypto" I do a doubleback and realize they mean cryptocurrencies, not cryptography. I do not expect any of my new hires to know the word "grok" (other than the AI of course), enjoy science fiction or any nerdy things we did. IT was a community where like minded people were working, now it is not.
They were compelled to do this, because nerds ate Hollywoods' lunch.
Just look at the show, Big Bang Theory. A heinous exposition of nerd culture which derides and degrades nerd'ism and aligns it with the neo-fascist Ayn Rand'ian ideology being propagated by Hollywoods' culture class in order to promulgate division and derision.
The Wests' copycat culture, not really able to develop culture of its own, simply picked up the baton and ran with it.
Now, gullible impressionable generations assume - courtesy of incessant mass-media groupthink - that its necessary to be a misanthropic asshole if you want to sound clever.
Linus Torvalds on the other hand - that is a household name.
It's not particularly difficult to understand. "Show me the incentives, and I'll show you the results." - Charlie Munger.
It doesn't matter if you write fantastic library, nobody is gonna use it because they won't know about it, the one with a gif of the terminal (ffs) will win that has a good page describing what it does (and being the most popular one can even become better than your library because of the following but that's not the point here).
It's everywhere, products, hiring, services. We have no network of trust (sigh), we need to trust some heuristics based on a shallow information. If somebody focuses on the shallow he wins, because nobody can ever dive into everything.
does anyone else get the feeling this comments section is being subtly astroturfed to sabotage the spirit of good-willed idealism and innovation? Look closely, there's reasons the powers that have insane capital would do this.
They've done it to every other space already.
did this guy ever hear of Larry Ellison? He also claims Gates wasn't a terrifying overlord
i’d say it’s worse for founders. i barely see any nerdy founders anymore in sf.
it is all striver types whose parents are execs or other wealthy types, and all these people want to do is rent seek or attention seek instead of making something interesting.
so many of their ai products don’t even work. the entire goal is to get suckers to pay for a few months or sign a contract to lock down “$insaneAmount arr in six months” and then blow the VC money on yacht parties and other lame stuff.
I feel like every founder is now some kind of grifter. Bouncing from new idea to new idea on how to make more money even if the whole thing is just smoke and mirrors.
Doesn’t seem like you’ve been keeping up with DHH’s reputation. He’s at best controversial. He has publicly expressed fervent views about subjects outside tech that were definitely not fun/curiosity-driven/charming and has gotten plenty of backlash. I also see no reason to believe he’d decline to be on that Mafia game, he feels as much a “personality” as the others.
Just create enough FOMO among the monied and you win. This is not nerd stuff... it's psychopath stuff.
A new thing will come along which the finance types won't recognise for its potential, nerdy types will start experimenting with it, make progress, gain some small successes but being nerds they're not really interested in creating large markets for their things. People with less eye for the detail but more for the market potential will pick it up, sometimes together with the nerds (Wozniak/Jobs), sometimes without them and create larger markets. If it really takes off like computers did there will be a wild-west period in which those who understand the technology - i.e. nerds - get to step out of the shadows for a bit until the technology is commoditised and the market is consolidated. Eventually there is less need to know the tech which has become 'boring' anyway so the nerds disappear into the shadows again to tinker with whatever scratches their itch.
The market is like society in that it needs both conservatives who recognise a good thing and do their best to keep it alive as well as progressives who are less interested in keeping things going than they are in changing things in search of some Platonic ideal. While the good thing is good the progressives are doing their things in their workshops without being seen much. When the good thing starts going bad the conservatives are mostly ignored because nearly everyone is looking at the progressives for a solution which is not "a faster horse" or "a lighter buggy whip".
Objectivism is a stupid, angry idea borne out of the atrocities of the Bolsheviks. It exists in a vacuum. Eddie Lampert named his yacht the Fountainhead which is amusing since, while I don’t question he has talent, he got millions in seed money to start his own fund from Richard Rainwater. Elon Musk is not some scrappy kid; the vast majority of founders are from comfortable and increasingly upper middle class families where they can tolerate the risk of failing with a reasonable safety margin and then delude themselves that they bootstrapped everything themselves.
Curtis Yarvin does not exist in a vacuum. These are awful people and the fact that we’ve allowed them to be taken seriously and control the conversation is…obscene.
People whose whole career always was to manipulate and impress people, to talk well, to convince investors to give them money, to lead companies just are not nerds. Regardless of whether they are narcistic assholes or not.
come on man, what are you doing. must admit that i haven't followed this guy closely, but i thought with him being a part of Signal he would know better.
that actually makes me even more suspicious about Signal...
There's a new trend to call everyone you don't like a "grifter". How is Elon a grifter? The dude has been getting shit done on and on for years. This is the opposite of grifter.
> One of them builds autonomous weapons for the Pentagon
Also what is this? Wasn't the whole point to have an agreement to not build AI weapons? I think the author is on some emotional screed.
Some of it is the mask falling off and some of it is people genuinely getting warped by it. It’s a little of both.
In finance it’s covered over by a buttoned down ivy league veneer, but the coke snorting maniac is there.
Same in politics where there’s pomp and ceremony to cover it, but when it comes out in the open there it’s probably the most ugly. Governments have armies and police.
In nerd-dom it comes in a form that’s uniquely tone deaf to the point of coming off like a comic book or anime villain.
They may have shared a love for technology, what they also shared is a deep immaturity.
The immaturity of a person not wanting to acknowledge and cary any responsibility for other people, for the consequences of their work, for any kind of accountability. Just play with their toys without any concern for the external world.
'I'm just here playing with tech and code'. Sure! but that stuff you're building is being weaponised by other (the venn diagram unfortunately overlaps) tech bro's so men can film women with their glasses in public like the little sick creeps they are. Or steal all their data. You can't pretend you are not responsible and complicit.
They want "what's theirs" and anything in their way - including people - have to comply or be destroyed.
I can only speak for my institution, but eagerness to lock down ip and keep ownership of everything tightly controlled and out of the hands of said nerds/inventors doesnt really incentivise me to do beyond what I'm paid for.
The one time I tried, I was hit by the full force of my institutions commercialization goons and lawyers, to a degree that it killed my drive to do anything novel for them. Despite being promised partial ownership, in the end, after federal grant funds were secured and product developed, they took everything using "loopholes" that go against the law and the institutions own rules, but to fight it I need resources I don't have, which the institution no doubt knows. All that despite me initially being fully aligned with my institution, and happy to only take a very minor share of actual profit, in-line with what i'd get anway, only stipulation was veto rights in application (as the tech has very real applications in offline autonomous drones, which I consider an X-treat).
If my own institution is a hostile actor, and willing to fuck me over nothing, simply because they can, why do anything?
So, current state of Copyright law favours institutions over the very individuals it was meant to protect, and there are no options to protect one self if anything interesting is developed without serious capital and legal might. So, fuck it, im not doing anything except hobby related, GPL licensed stuff. If I can do anything to make it hard to commercialize, I will. If it can be kept in house, it is kept there.
Capital interest has become a rather ugly and hostile egregore with interest aligned against that of humanity. All those building cool and novel shit I know hold similar opinions, so it is no surprise to me. I was strongly advised against working with the institution by older folks i look up to, people who have built really powerful tools of their own. Their warnings ended up being proven valid with deafening clarifty. I've always found the statement that capitalism breeds innovation to be a joke, and while it works in the chinese model, the "western" model is sick and suffers a sort of cultural psychosis that makes it rather unttractive to engage with.
Elon probably most of all, he was the one who took fringe edge lord behavior and elevated to something to be admired.
because previously it was mostly the nerds who were at the forefront of the innovation (they still are), but they now have a playbook where they see all the other people (grifters) who are entering tech for money and the playbook of the attention economy and doing that because its a profitable strategy.
It's basically the fact that there are multiple companies where a grift culture is promoted within tech (ironically I am on YC website and YC had a company which you might've heard called delve :D)
As people realized that the technology has value and finance people realizing it to pour head over fist money into it.
With such eggregious trillions of dollars worth of money (basically the whole economy getting floated by tech), you are bound to see people within this do the grift playbook and talk about themselves and succeed and that has become the playbook.
So I think this is what has happened to nerd culture. It simply became profitable and then commoditized and used by people who could then grift.
BUT people are respecting the nerd culture (well the non grift version of it) a lot more
For some reason, I wish to recommend Weird Al video song about White & Nerdy[0] and how people within the comments are saying that Nerd culture has its own unique identity and many if not all appreciating the nerd culture
[0]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N9qYF9DZPdw&list=RDN9qYF9DZP...
So TLDR: people like the previous nerd culture and it still exists, especially on HN but on platforms like twitter and others, as discussed within the article itself, with the attention economy. The grift culture is getting more attention than the nerd culture and because of the overlap in tech, the nerd culture is getting some bad rep but overall people appreciate the actual nerd culture (IMO) as interesting and unique (whereas previously, people wouldn't have appreciated it so much)
You don't hear about the actual nerd culture because it isn't algorithmic hungry but it still exists on platforms like Hackernews IMO!
Although I would wish for less overlap with tech-bros but it is sadly what it is and there are ways to mitigate it by being on more nerd friendly websites like hackernews.
Also, one more observation I wish to share is that not all nerds are tech product creators and neither should they be. Some just create for the sake of creation and IMO there is long way to go after creation as well and the nerd culture doesn't have standardized playbook as compared to grift culture.
Basically the nerd culture is immeasurable and is driven by it and the grift culture is measurable and is also driven by it. It's just that tech has more overlap but if trillions of dollars were thrown in physics instead of AI (quantum computing?), I would consider physics to have a lot of tech-bro culture as well.
Reminds me of Pink Floyd’s "Have a Cigar":
> And did we tell you the name of the game, boy?
> We call it Riding the Gravy Train
So, in Civ6 terms: Nerds didn’t have an existing industry pantheon that could stand up to religious pressure by non-religious entities. This is part of what made Jobs and Apple so successful: arrogance is a stellar defense against religious pressure, and Jobs was implemented a rigorous culture that resists religious pressure very strongly. It’s not invulnerable to sects from within, but it’s nearly impenetrable to sects from without.
There’s also a subtler reason why Jobs and Woz could coexist at all: Jobs wasn’t arrogant and cruel to people because he looked down upon them; he was arrogant and cruel to ideas, and so to work with him, that detachment of idea from self-worth and ego and etc. was mandatory.
To use Woz and Jobs as a constructed spectrum analogy: Everyone perceives me as being more like Woz than Jobs interpersonally, though never fully Woz (I’m a little too distant for the tastes of the gregarious), until they invite me to critique their ideas or listen to my describe my own, at which point they (permanently thereafter) perceive me as being much more towards the Jobs end of the scale. It can be somewhat isolating and uncomfortable to ride alongside someone like that long-term, but that’s compensated for somewhat by having a work culture that prioritizes hallway chats over cubicle farms. (No coincidence the UFO, then!)
Most nerds lacked the arrogance and unconcern for other people’s feelings that insulated Woz against the belief grifters, and instead have what we see in Elon Musk: a deep and desperate craving for other people to like them, to value them, to adore them. (Praise him.) So of course most successful nerds fell prey to the basic grift that hooks people on religious and secular cults every day: “we’ll sell you a feeling of belonging, of being valued, in exchange for your adoption and propagation of our beliefs”. Jobs didn’t give a fuck if you propagated his beliefs or not, so long as you adhered to them at work; and Woz clearly doesn’t need to belong to be confident in his value to others.
Zuckerberg is a good example of someone who has the arrogance/asocial of Jobs down pat, but in contrast is fully decoupled from prosocial outcomes. Investigating what the guiding forces in Jobs’ life were that directed him towards prosocial outcomes, rather than asocial outcomes like Zuckerberg, would perhaps be quite revealing; Jobs built a company that tends to minimize harm to its customers, while Zuckerberg built a company that tends to maximize harm to its customers, but both succeeded at building institutions that resist external religious pressures. That’s a distinction missed by this post, and separates the outcomes neatly into a simple 2x2 matrix: asocial/prosocial (Jobs), asocial/apathetic (Zuckerberg), social/confident (Woz), social/needy (Musk).
Tim Apple [sic], Sundar Pichai, Sergey Brin, Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg, Sam Altman and Jeff Bezos all went to the inauguration to bend the knee. They all paid 7 figures plus to be there.
Being a billionaire is fundamentally incompatible with being a countercultural nerd. If anything, this was Silicon Valley returning to its roots. The first companies were founded before WWI (eg Federal Telegraph Co) but the true origins of the name "Silicon Valley" came from semiconductors and the likes of HP and Lockheed Martin as a Cold War defense offshoot.
Patrick Boyle seems to cover the SPCX trajectory fairly well...
So now instead of programming it makes more sense to go to the gym.