www.datingvr.ru

Just show me what changed. Math, and physics, and computers are just most common, martial arts a bit less so. This is less astronomically unlikely; the odds are a mere one to one hundred quintillion against. At 40-40 they do — they realize how much they need them.

Out of pure self-interest, she decides not to eat them again, and tells her friends the same. This one chart comes from unpublished data from anonymous source. The issue is that these are really multiple and maybe not so much related groups.

www.datingvr.ru - Overall, I think the simplest classification that includes ESR, myself and those we find some commonality with in one broad stroke is: people of moderate to high intelligence say IQ 130+ that perceive their environment as adversarial to their person.

I spent parts of the the last couple of days reading the archives of the very thought-provoking blog. I think I can fairly claim to know a geek or nerd when I meet one. Yet what Slate Star Codex reminds me of is that all we have to explain about why this population and its cluster of linked subcultures exists is a cloud of not-very-well-confirmed folk theory. Which is maybe a problem, because geeks and nerds matter. Might be nice if we could optimize these people — help them be happier and more productive. So far so good. Slate Star Codex plays with this theory, also with the notion that nerds might be distinguished by low testosterone level, or implicitly a combination of low testosterone and high IQ. But there are important ways in which I fail to fit the standard nerd profile. Nor do I psychometrically resemble an Aspie at all. I have been assured by multiple sources with ties to the culture of U. A few interesting patterns emerged. Both report that the sexual-isolation thing reverses for women. Like male nerds, female nerds are bored by or uncomprehending of normal status games. Once you accept the reality of muscular nerds and nerdgirls the standard nerd profile seems pretty seriously challenged. There might be other such natural kinds. I think the pattern emerging here is of two drivers: high intelligence and reduced interest in monkey politics and status games. This denigrates both hard science and soft science simultaneously, which is not an easy thing to do. Observation and participation must be quantified in order to make it anything more than opinion. Where is the statistical data? That said, there is a deep question buried here. A more rigorous investigation would benefit humanity. Observation and participation must be quantified in order to make it anything more than opinion. Narrative ethnography still has its place. What role would a hard-wired preference for truth over fakery play? Disdain for social conventions that seem dishonest or hypocritical, or obsession with gnostic conspiracy theories in search of The Truth, or bold forthrightness in the face of opposition, etc. Nerd girl chiming in! I think it is a way to convince bright, not-too-socially-apt people that they have a pathological psychiatric condition, now codified by inclusion in the DSM-V. Who is the sinister party behind it? There are bright, curious, often multiple degree holding women in applied science or tech fields who are feminine, like dating, dancing, want to get married but also have amateur radio licences and spend too much time on StackOverflow. Many, but not all, are in academia or the military, it seems. Again, this is merely speculation, just as Chuck cautioned about. It is awkward to be the only woman in a group. Well, not awkward necessarily, but gender tends to become invisible. That is good for working relationships of course. The most socially comfortable settings, even among the nerds, have men and women; equal proportions are not necessary. I think it is a way to convince bright, not-too-socially-apt people that they have a pathological psychiatric condition, now codified by inclusion in the DSM-V. What matters more is the actually effects of the cluster and how correlated the traits are. Started at offensive tackle every football game junior and senior HS years, lettered in two other sports plus band and quiz bowl. I do not hold you to that standard. The question is a valid one, for which we do not have data and for which no one is seeking data scientifically. Hence, my call to arms. You hit directly on an important question, one that shakes the foundations of civilization. How do we falsify this hypothesis? I see how they are sloppily applied. Whatever happened to just being yourself and fuck the rest? I like your blogroll, very much! Iowa Hawk is fun. It is similar to Legal Insurrection. Is there an aspect of vanity to it? A question as usual :P : 1. However, I do like reading popular science and have been in love with strategy games since I was nine courtesy of Civilization II ;D. At my current age twenty-six , is it possible to get better at those things? Human social circles tend to exhibit a fractal structure — within each sub-group is another similar but subtly distinct sub-group, until you get down to the differences between individuals. This was actually an objection commenters on SSC raised. I read this aloud to my wife and asked her feedback. IE, they can see all the eyecandy they want at the beach or movies — but wants to come home to someone who has intelligent things to say and will not be threatened by their own intelligence. Nerd guys feel this way too. This is not to say that J. But the true alphas, who started out not giving a damn, and the true what? Interestingly, I self-diagnosed my own ADHD and went and got a confirming diagnosis just a couple of months ago. The DSM, even the latest one, is crap, because a lot of the diagnostic criteria have to do with people who seek out help because they are failing badly at life. One of the reasons for this is that it turns out that I self-implemented a lot of recommended coping strategies. It is a nervous system that works well using its own set of rules. Can you be specific about those? I ask because on tests for ADHD traits I score just barely subclinical. The drive for self improvement, to fail better, IMO is more central than is talent. The world is full of problems both easy and hard, and there are more problems than people. Hunters sometimes hunt alone; sometimes in cooperation. But the type of cooperation required in hunting or warfare differs markedly from the type of cooperation required in sewing a quilt. And from a corporate standpoint, someone who is tasked with writing some software might be the kind of person to just write it, or might be the kind of person to go try to hunt it down and to collaborate in wrestling it to the ground, if necessary. Obscure things—if the field is too popular baseball stats, e. I have no input filters, and only learned the output filters over the last decade and a half. The whole low-T thing is boolshit. I was the second geekiest person in my Marine Corps squadron, the first having in 1987, on a E-3 salary his own computer that he built himself. I got the 20 pullups and 80 situps in 2 minutes, but was only able to run a 19:40 three mile run this would have been a sub-20 minute 5K for the runners in the crowd. I beat that run time once, barely, but was trying really hard not to throw up and my back was in spasms I was running in Chuck Taylor hightops. Marine—Muscles Are Required Intelligence Not Expected. That, fortunately is something my father inoculated me against almost accidentally , along with his insistence that I look him in the eye when I spoke to him. Especially for nerds of my age, who were nerdly before it was popular, the self-identification is usually just an acknowledgement of how others perceive them. But that is what causes the other effects. Normal people react emotionally slightly faster than rationally. They know how they feel before they know what they think. The nerd reverses this. Emotion occurs after reason, if at all. As to the physical, that simply depends on what they desire. If they go into Yoga, they will be able to tie themselves into knots. If they go for strength, they will be more than physically imposing. If they go for endurance, they will end up doing triathlons at a minimum. Violence as such rarely solves problems. That negates most kinds of conformity. I think it is a way to convince bright, not-too-socially-apt people that they have a pathological psychiatric condition, now codified by inclusion in the DSM-V. Who is the sinister party behind it? Some go vegetarian or vegan. While driving, walking, working some physical puzzle, or something else. We also are not monkeys, or to the extent that we are returning to that, it is a bad thing. Apparently genetics and the bell curve make nerdettes far more rare than nerds. Parents were less emotional about the choice of spouse. And there are four loves see CS Lewis. There is a love from the will, and a love from the reason. If you decide to love someone via will or reason, Eros can follow. But if you start with Eros, it is unlikely to go beyond. Even the British tackles are pretty rude. How many Geeks do you know who are complete dunderheads outside of their main field? And they can usually do it across a dozen fields. And they can usually do it across a dozen fields. Agreed, but there are serious conceptual pitfalls in interpreting this observation. One thing I think that factors into nerdiness is how it relates to coming of age experiences. A very common nerd story is being unpopular and awkward at that time. However this speaks back to the idea of getting hard numbers on this because I think everyone struggles with adolescence. I think another trait that many nerds share in this vein is a general leaning towards libertarianism. It sounds like you do it fairly consistently — if so, that would go a long way towards explaining why your symptoms are minimal. This never happens to me. The recommended coping strategy is to have a place by the front door where these go. But I go one further — I keep my shoes at my desk, because when I go out, they get put on and the keys and wallet and phone go in the pocket. When I was younger, I used to change jobs a lot because the first year at a new job is almost always challenging and exciting. I always try to seek out a few varied small jobs to go along with the big one so that I can do something else for awhile if I get bored. In addition to the general coping strategies, there are many that are specific to software development, or even more specific to my own situation. It was boring enough the first time — who wants to do it again? Just show me what changed. The python module xlrd is my friend, allowing me to accept multiple spreadsheet revisions, and get the actual data I care about into revision control, where I can go back and point out inconsistencies to the spreadsheet author if he gives me bad data later. I make sure I know the capabilities of spectrum analyzers, logic analyzers, phase noise analyzers, etc. It would be so even if the guy doing the schematic entry never forgot what I told him, but he has issues. Maintaining a library that helps me check a schematic, and writing 500 — 3000 schematic-specific lines of Python is much easier. Perhaps I now have unconscious coping habits that prevent this. Totally not me; I cheerfully digest huge volumes of not especially surprising facts, confident that they will eventually be useful. The degree to which I fear and hate paperwork is possibly the most ADHD thing about me. This is probably why I invariably have three or four projects running concurrently. It was boring enough the first time — who wants to do it again? That is totally me. Just show me what changed. I use every tool I can bring to bear. I routinely run no fewer than 4 different code analyzers on GPSD. It would be so even if the guy doing the schematic entry never forgot what I told him, but he has issues. Maintaining a library that helps me check a schematic, and writing 500 — 3000 schematic-specific lines of Python is much easier. That does sound like what I do with boring tasks. I should note my history of head injuries precludes a normal ADHD diagnosis. Four of the first five coping mechanisms are quite similar, though. Keys, wallet, phones, comb, knives, and cash go as near as possible from one place in the dirty pair to the same place in the clean pair. I pay early rather than late and do all of my manual payments for the month at once, from the same seat, in roughly the same order each time. I then try to refine both my understanding and the code as time and priorities allow. And they can usually do it across a dozen fields. Others might not, because they may worry that it will be a stupid question. As I was mentioning earlier, a hallmark of intelligent functional ADHD seems to be a focus on surprising facts. I actually should have added this to the list of coping strategies. I use every tool I can bring to bear. I routinely run no fewer than 4 different code analyzers on GPSD. Well, I did overstate my case a bit. Obviously I use compilers, etc. I also use a lot of specialized code translation tools, and being a software guy, I make a lot of tools. I also find and use tools that nobody else in the company knows about. For example, I recently used an open source verilog compiler called verilator to compile a model of some of our hardware blocks into a DLL that can be used from Matlab, C, or Python. But a lot of tools have opaque interfaces, and I refuse to invest two days learning a tool that, if it works correctly, will give me everything I need to know in an hour. Yet, all around me, I see people who will cheerfully spend a week trying to make a commercial piece of hardware do what they need, before they give up and come to me so I can whip up some small custom FPGA load for them. This is exceptionally problematic for debugging, where, almost by definition, you are having to maintain a lot more state in your mind than in other programming activities. I almost never attempt to debug at the end of the day — always start fresh in the morning. So people often come to me with problems, and I ask them to do a few things that I would consider boring and repetitive, and get back to me, and then I tell them the answer. This is one of the reasons I suspect an overlap with ADHD. I think the terms nerd and geek are simply colloquialisms that loosely describe a set of noticeable and somewhat unique features found in people that we may meet and interact with in our daily lives. It this way, these terms are similar in use to the characterizations of jock and stoner. They allow us to use language to communicate summary knowledge in a concise fashion. However, the edges of these characterizations are amorphous and fluid, and trying to pigeonhole people into strict categories can be somewhat arbitrary and misleading. One of the features of urban living is that differentiation often requires pushing the envelope of common cultural types and creating new tribal associations. Which came first, the computer or the nerd? I have almost no use for smoking, outside the occasional cigar. I suspect that if one were to survey more European geeks and nerds, one would find more who drank or smoked. In the week I spent in Vienna this summer, I observed that having a beer or glass of wine with a meal was not uncommon and no big deal. The same applied to lighting up a cigarette when one stepped outside. Hell, the hackerspace I visited even had a smoking room. That would leave me out then. But where does someone who can recite the drop out to 1000m for. Just ask a serious shooter to justify a pet load or caliber choice. Jeremy: I spent a year in Germany, and went on regular dinner outings with the computer science department at the university I was studying at. I see no contradiction actually. The nerds naturally attracted to any activity that offers zero social rating growth and infinite number of level of self-improvement and internal development. Math, and physics, and computers are just most common, martial arts a bit less so. Rarer such activities are tango dancing, chemistry, ornithology, and rock climbing. I wonder why people stereotypize nerds as physically weak. Maybe the group in America has different genetics. Here in Europe, the diversity of nerdish body types is quite big, and there are some large muscular types there. Accidentally, one of my grandfathers was a village blacksmith and the other one had extremely physically demanding job in industry, both were very muscular and strong. Now I do not have that much exercise, but I still received those same genes and the body structure corresponds to them. There are at least two quite muscular programmers in my company; if you gave them different clothing and a war hammer into the hand, they would look absolutely naturally like medieval warriors up to the moment when they would start discussing the correct angle of the swing. My experience and hypotheses, with predictions: — A boy is perceived, for some reason, as weak and an easy bullying target. Age 4 to 10. He develops a certain self-hatred. He may decide to regain his self-respect for using his well working brain for productive purposes math, science, programming but now I would like to talk about the other type of nerd. His primary motivation is not even sex drive, but the drive for acceptance and validation. He has a tendency to see potential girlfriends as replacements for his mother unconditional love — which really repulses most women. Instead of improving himself, e. Predictions: — Submissive, whipped-dog look e. Obsessively copying dance-club fashion yet unable to wear it well because he is a fundamentally different type etc. This means they invest 100% of their ego into being the perfect programmer or scientist. Every time they make a mistake or are proven wrong their whole newly made self identity is in danger, so they obsessively defend it. You all know this type. Suggest he made a mistake or got a fact wrong and you get an obsessively flood of words, a huge rant, defending it, from a sweaty, clearly distressed face. Interestingly, all this should result in very low testosterone losing competitions reduces it, and all that bullying and disrespect is basically that , yet nerdy boys tend to get hairy legs earlier than non-nerdy boys! Also, nerdy men are more likely to start male pattern baldness around 25. While the whipped-dog submissive nerdy behavior predicts low-T, the opposite seems to be true. Potential cure: regain self respect by realizing at least certain types of nerds are respected and not seen as worthless. Programmers are respected, but still not sexy. I realized writers are respected in the sexy sense. Writers are clearly nerds, and yet they never have a problem getting laid. I realized that while I am not a writer, being an avid reader, writership is not far from my real personality and self. Thus imitating sexy writers is not a self-loathing masquarade, but an actual self-improvement. So I began dressing and behaving like writers. My ultimate goal was to develop an Albert Camus type charme. ESR your idea of Heinlein as a role model also worked well. This is much more realistic, and closer to the real self, and thus not self-loathing but self-improving, than either giving it up or imitating the mainstream. Ages ago, : Clothing is only the most visible battleground in the war against formality. Nerds tend to eschew formality of any sort. I found myself talking recently to someone from Hollywood who was planning a show about nerds. I thought it would be useful if I explained what a nerd was. A nerd, in other words, is someone who concentrates on substance. In technical matters, you have to get the right answers. Jon Brase — good you mentioned Germany. There are some people on Reddit who argue the geeks vs. In my experience, Central European culture also has this tension, despite this lack of specialization. This has old traditions — 100 years ago humanism around here dictated the only sport suitable for a gentleman is fencing. It would be easier to find cultures where this tension does NOT exist. I think Britain is a good exception, largely because they have a strong cultural feature of pushing upper-class or intellectual boys to do sports, and often violent ones. Tolkien was a good rugby player. Also girls — Kate Middleton played hockey, not a very princessly sport. My opinion is that precisely this, the British upper class model of the boxing intellectual, is what could put an end to the recurring curse of nerddom in the negative sense and save this kind of suffering for the future generation of boys. I think they miss that testosterone. This is probably a very predictive trait. If there is one thing common in geeks is the sheer horror of data entry type tasks and similar stuff. Does this predict ADHD? I thought it simply predicts intelligence. By the way, the drugs used to treat ADHD in children are similar to the drugs ravers take when going to dance on techno music. I mean, okay, that kind of music is repetitive too, but in a different, hypnothic, mesmerizing way. Excel is not a data entry tool, it is a Swiss Army Knife. After I realized half the middle managers are too lazy to log on to an ERP system and run a report, I wrote a lot of scripts that generate and e-mail reports fully automatically so they have no excuse for not looking at them, and after many tries I ended up making all the reports as Excel files. The reason is that the recipients want to WORK with them, not just read them, like copy-paste three monthly reports together and analyse the trend or something like that. They take an inventory aging report and re-work it into a format the top management wants to have the info etc. Excel is not a data entry tool, it is a Swiss Army Knife. With Excel mostly providing the glossy front cover and Octave providing the background oomph and with a touch of DB access added for spice.. The engineers are overwhelmingly dominated by the conscientiousness trait. The particular flavor of nerd that I believe ESR exemplifies is more strongly aligned to the dominance trait. Overall, I think the simplest classification that includes ESR, myself and those we find some commonality with in one broad stroke is: people of moderate to high intelligence say IQ 130+ that perceive their environment as adversarial to their person. However, I am curious to learn more about people for whom the first criterion applies but not the second. Patrick: Aaargghh, the cache flushing. You get all the details into your head you need to finally make some progress on a problem and then the phone rings. Context switches are expensive. You both left out self-medication. Stimulants help ADHD people relax and concentrate. Up to a point, I find caffeine relaxing and soothing. That straightedge thing splits both ways. When nerds cut loose, they do it very seriously. I do want to comment on the disbelief of Aspergers. I have worked with a kid who was diagnosed with Aspergers and he truly does have no real ability to asses or respond to some social interactions. He does fit the nerd stereotype, focus on deep specifics on issues, intelligent, etc. However, having dealt with someone with real Aspergers, I can tell you that A LOT of nerds try to claim Aspergers and most definitely do not have it. Aspergers is real, but so is nerds claiming they have it. Tolkien was a good rugby player. Also girls — Kate Middleton played hockey, not a very princessly sport. And yes, American nerds have martial arts and guns. I think the physical characteristics are a red herring. I think for many nerds the scrawny physique is more a matter of lack of training, which comes from a lack of ability or lack of interest in sport. The mental attributes are much more important: high intelligence, and a love of problem solving. I can see that this would tend to lead to an interest in the hard sciences, maths and computers where there are hard answers, and an underlying order to things. I suspect that this lack of drinking alcohol is another aspect that is not a core part of being a nerd, but just a consequence of other circumstances. I would say, for the second type, something like LARPing is the match made in heaven. None of us became an engineer. Poor or unconventional social abilities. Love of technical or intellectual topics. Note that I am leaving out anything about high intelligence. David Michael Barr, I had never heard of the DiSC test until m employer had me take it as part of the job application process. I come out high on both the dominance and conscientiousness scales, and low on the other two influence and steadiness. Shenpen touched on some of the negative sides of the nerd stereotype. I keep close track of what I drink and take detailed tasting notes I maintain a blog to that end as well. To me, it was a problem that needed solving, so I solved it. The same goes for my other costumes, and other things in general. I have a 1983 Mercedes 380SL. Last June, a major suspension component rusted through, causing the right rear spring to poke through the bottom of it. This rendered the car unsafe to drive. I wound up, over a period of about 5 months, disassembling the rear suspension, replacing the component, then putting it all back together — a little bit at a time, thinking my way through each step. I think that approach to solving the problem was nerdy; the average shade tree mechanic would have gotten the job done faster, but sloppier. OTOH, how many nerds would have done that, instead of either paying someone to do the job or else junking the car? At least, it makes me hard to account for: diagnosed HFA, pretty inept at the dating game, yet lettered as a varsity swimmer in high school despite a number of then-undiagnosed chronic health issues, and now run and hike in -30° weather as my idea of fun and have occasionally been observed picking things up and putting them down. You are correctly pointing out that you are a standard-profile nerd who happens to be athletic. I started coding games at the age of 12 Apple IIe , but then computing resources were no longer available to me, so I got into weight training, but was more interested in the epistomological aspects than the noterity that came with it. Got a job where I graviated towards the computers I was exposed to and have been a computer geek since then. And as others have pointed out, there are extensive exceptions to the common patterns. I ride a mountain bike over 5,000 miles a year in serious terrain and can outperform most jocks in riding athleticism. And we seriously discuss physics, cosmology, genetics, and game theory modeling of evolution while doing so. This makes them good at leading math, physics, and computers. This also manifests as creating elaborate rationalizations for potholes in their favorite fictional universes. There is something specific about what gets substituted for monkey status games that makes the nerd — pursuit of mastery of a specific, usually intellectual, activity, perhaps? To me these things are almost the same, or rather the former is the cause of the latter. I think smarter people have the capacity to seek higher goals than the baser desires that give rise to monkey games. I was thinking about what examples there were of highly intelligent people who are also highly interested in the latter. I suppose many of the super alphas, like CEOs and successful politicians are often very intelligent and often very interested in status seeking. They seem to be outliers though, and they seem to be people who have an augmented capacity allowing them to master both worlds. Your comments reminded me of from the ever insightful Paul Graham. In it he argues that nerds are unpopular because they care less about popularity than other things, because they are smart enough to know that there are other things more interesting to care about. It carries all those social consequences that you mentioned. I would not, for example, call you a nerd, from what I know of you. The word geek seems more appropriate. This is a word that has some color of nerd, but definitely is much less pejorative, and in fact has become quite complementary. I doubt any woman would say she was attracted to nerds, but many would say they are attracted to geeks. It seems to fit somewhere between nerd and geek on the spectrum. It carries all those social consequences that you mentioned. I would not, for example, call you a nerd, from what I know of you. The word geek seems more appropriate. This is a word that has some color of nerd, but definitely is much less pejorative, and in fact has become quite complementary. On high IQ: I think it is simply a bias: low-IQ nerds are so deep in the chasm of loserdom that their existence hardly even gets noticed. But when people are forced to admit that damn that awkward guy is actually smart, that draws a certain kind of attention, and through this kind of noticing is the high-IQ nerd stereotype born. When I was 12 my favorite book s was Dragonlance Chronicles. And the main reason it was such a nerd icon is that we could very, very much identify with Raistlin. Not because it was a smart book. Look at the state of open source. Little benevolent dictators each followed by their own squad of followers, heated controversies that are no longer technical but rather political systemd? In it he argues that nerds are unpopular because they care less about popularity than other things, because they are smart enough to know that there are other things more interesting to care about. This created the escapism from the social world into fantasy, or computers. Emanual From my angle, not. First — too old. From my angle the negative aspects the difference between nerds and non-nerds disappears 30+ and especially 40+. Nerds gain the social skills, basic looks,self-confidence slowly etc. It is quite common that two high schoo classmates, one being a celebrated popular guy and the other being the always marginalized dork, are pretty much on the same level at 40 and become friends. You can see it at work. The 20 years old salesguy does not respect 20 years old programmers. At 40-40 they do — they realize how much they need them. Second, Taleb is too confident for that. He does not give out the escapist, fantasy oriented vibes. He is a respect-commaning type. No, Taleb is more scholar than nerd. Another corner case — Woody Allen? Not a STEM type, doesn ot have the productive aspects of it, but is an excellent example of the negative aspects of it. Including myself, everybody I know who has the negative aspects of it is at least half-jewish. I cannot only be the IQ. Including myself, everybody I know who has the negative aspects of it is at least half-jewish. On the other hand, given the standard-deviation mean IQ advantage of Ashkenazic Jews, any phenomenon that coorrelates with or is partly driven by IQ is going to concentrate them. When the Macintosh first came out, most of the programs for it were surprisingly good. IIRC, a fairly common consensus was that the programming environment was simultaneously so foreign and so unforgiving that you had to be good just to get something to work at all. Excel is the opposite of this. Anybody can do anything with it, just not very well. And it used to be an impenetrable binary format, and is now a very fragile XML format. It tries hard not to play nicely with other tools. The reason is that the recipients want to WORK with them, Which is awesome. Until they start to think that their own spreadsheet is some sort of master document and they are master programmers. Yeah, engineer can be a good career choice for a nerd, and marketing or sales, maybe not so much. Greg: Yes, caffeine is a very important part of my daily life. OTOH, how many nerds would have done that, instead of either paying someone to do the job or else junking the car? I do the same thing on, e. I had to replace the breaker box, and it took a lot longer but looks a lot tidier than if I had hired someone else to do it. This brings up something I often wonder about. Eugene Nier: Your idea of a nerd seems 180 degrees out from mine. The people I consider nerds are out of the mainstream precisely because they do question things. The semantic fields of both have shifted significantly over the last several decades. The best programmer I know responsibly does this all the time. I myself code this way occasionally, however poorly though I use very sparsely. You imply that this is a fairly reliable way to spot posers. That seems plausible to me Sure. Depends on relative frequencies in the population — nerds is low, drugs is much higher. The main reason I ended up selling off the car was a lack of resources. Had I a place to work on the car and the money to get the parts needed, I absolutely would have worked on fixing it myself. Unfortunately, as much as I would have loved to fix it myself, getting working transportation as immediately as possible had to take greater priority. So I sold it to someone who did have the space, time and money to get it running again, and spent the money on getting a new TDI. Taking apart a complex machine like an engine or transmission is fun. And if I can make some small tweak or change to make it work more to my satisfaction, awesome. This attitude tends to generalize to whatever catches my fancy.. Not satisfied with the sound out of one of my guitar amplifiers, I found a schematic, and spent several weeks studying it. You get the idea. ESR and lgz22 Thanks for your encouragement. Is it plausible that she said that? Is it plausible that she said that? I believe her opinion of the book matches mine; a masterpiece, though in important respects a flawed one. Some things are descriptively obvious. The standard-profile nerd is not psychologically well-equipped for sheepdogging; the intersection of those sets will be small. The muscular alpha nerd is, comparatively speaking, well equipped; you correctly note that my commenters include several members of that intersection set. I think early exposure to Heinlein by an alpha or sigma nerd type predicts eventual sheepdoggery pretty well. If you look at the difference between yourself and Woody Allen, you get it. And it seems to be a very jewish or half-jewish problem. My hypothesis is that it comes from self-loathing, due to bullying and similar experiences, and the nerdy hobbies are a form of escapism from that. The issue is that these are really multiple and maybe not so much related groups. Back around 1990 when not everybody had a computer, having one at 17, so not for working was one of the signs of being a nerd. But some folks were simply interested in it, and some other folks were more like fleeing from their lives into computers. And only the later are nerds in the sense I use the word. Drives my non-nerd wife nuts. Anybody with the technical chops to run a signal through a spice simulator and tease out the cause of a subtle behavior like that is probably not suffering through the kind of Dunning-Kreuger problems that would lead him to mistakenly self-identify as a nerd. In my experience, they are more willing than most to accept new data and change their mind accordingly. Now, it may seem that they are not doing this, because their lack of care for the social niceties will make their hostility to new data overt. What you are missing is that they were probably equally hostile to the original data that was used to establish their baseline viewpoint. This makes them good at learning math, physics, and computers. This also manifests as creating elaborate rationalizations for plotholes in their favorite fictional universes. This is the diametrical opposite of my experience: that nerds are more inclined to deeply examine the rules they are given—all three fields you mention are structured in a way that allows for quick identification of bad results. I want to ask two more questions: 1. It is a survey of the various biographical inclinations of a self chosen sample of Less Wrong readers. And so the information is interesting, but for entertainment only. The data point I found hardest was that only 10% were libertarians, which I find shocking for a group of intelligent people. If I recall correctly, you sometimes carry a concealed firearm. Such a thing tends to keep you aware of items on and about your person. My keys and wallet stay in my worn pants until the next day. I had my phone, wallet, and comb but went hours without my keys before I realized it. I find that the camera on my smart phone is one of my most valuable organization tools. It lets me capture information on a whiteboard, sign, hung to a refrigerator with a magnet, or in a book quickly to be transcribed later into textual format. A nearly perfect OCR would help even further. In primary school the advice to write down lessons in a notebook never helped. A pre-printed syllabus or e-textbooks would have been a boon. The ability to carry all of those heavy books around everywhere on one Kindle-like device would have helped so much, actually. A camera might have helped then, too. I can remember impactful facts and even whole snippets of important conversations in my memory for a long time. I was never a star athlete but I held my own in school sports. I eventually gave up team sports to focus on computers, marching band, dating, and quiz bowl. One confounding issue any research will have to figure out how to account for is the geek tendency to shore up the lacks social, athletic, etc they have earlier in life. I thought it was more shabby-chic hippy shit.

He has a tendency to see potential girlfriends as replacements for his mother unconditional love — which really repulses most women. Math, and physics, and computers are just most common, martial arts slate star codex bit less so. The data on jesus partners is, as he points out, minimal. I believe it was created in six days as we know them. I had a orthodox Rabbi tell me Darwin was wrong, once again I just kept my mouth shut. Out of pure self-interest, she decides not to eat them again, and elements her friends the same. We are considering not merely the truth of a doctrine, but the significance of an intellectual fashion in the history of post-Renaissance Europe. Accidentally, one of my grandfathers was a village blacksmith and the other one had extremely physically demanding job in industry, both were very solo and strong. I suspect that if one were to survey more European geeks and nerds, one would find more who drank or smoked. Where is the statistical data?.