Trying to See Through: A Unified Theory of Nerddom (2012) | Hacker News Reader

Trying to See Through: A Unified Theory of Nerddom (2012)

theviewfromhell.blogspot.com

22 pointsgwern11 comments

I'd suggest this article, "Sanity for Sociality", as a perhaps less longwinded and cleaner elucidation of the same idea.

http://thefutureprimaeval.net/sanity-for-sociality/

The gist of it:

...analyze the adoption of...Mormonism:

Price:

A small piece of sanity...[express belief in assorted weird Mormon things]...Some freedom...

Value:

Access to high-quality mates. Friendship, community, etc. A stable and sure flourishing life. Spiritual well-being.

Most or all societies have similar requirements to sacrifice sanity for sacred beliefs, e.g. in my society I need to express a belief in the figurative Hitlerness of Trump. Applying this to the post under discussion, the author's theory seems to be that nerds are people less willing to sacrifice a piece of sanity in favor of sociality.

> Applying this to the post under discussion, the author's theory seems to be that nerds are people less willing to sacrifice a piece of sanity in favor of sociality.

We nerds just need to make our own religion. ;)

First off - I hope you picked up that blog from my comment last week - it's a high quality blog (I'm just a reader)

- Beliefs about weird Mormon things aren't even falsifiable. In other words, it's possible that religion isn't even wrong about ultimate reality.

- In my observation, nerdness is correlated correlated with "sensitive sensory" behavior. Nerds tend to be more curious about odd sights & sounds than regular people. My theory is that nerdly curiosity is related to some kind of abnormal sensory processing.

i once had a friend, of whom english was a second language, ask me, 'what is the purpose of nerd?' after someone called me a nerd in front of her

i still hold to my answer, 'a nerd is someone who cares a lot about something you care little for'

This is reaching quite a bit. I'm the stereotype mentioned, but I only exhibit ~30% of the traits treated as universal. The author's self-conception, and conception of the groups they partake in, isn't enough to support anything after the first couple sentences.

I appreciate the idea of having more perspective on socially constructed reality than others.

As Robert Kegan might say instead of being fully embedded in socially-constructed reality, the nerd can objectify it.

Now if you want to go next level, see if instead of being embedded in subject/object duality (I am here and that is over there) see if you can disembed and objectify. Here is a nerdy manual for how to accomplish that: http://integrateddaniel.info/book/

I have no idea what this guy is talking about. Maybe it's just me, but this seems like a bunch of incoherent gobbledygook.

He's nerdy about nerdiness

It spoke to me and accurately described many parts of my experience of the world. You may not be the target audience.

These days we often identify as rationalists, skeptics, or atheists, interested in cognition and cognitive biases;

Does he not mean empiricist instead of rationalist? Rationalism means, mentally, rationalizing something as true, which tie in with religiosity.

Hmm. I don't think so. I've consistently heard "rationalist" to mean someone committed to or pursuing rationality. This is very different than "rationalization", which is coming up with reasons to believe something after you've decided what to believe by other means. It's sad that such words are so close when they mean polar opposite things.

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