> nerds in particular get shit for respect
I have no idea what world you're living in, but it's not mine.
I have no idea what world you're living in, but it's not mine.
From a personal level, few people have the capability to appreciate what we care about. They can measure us with yard sticks & jira points & dollars-of-valued-delivered, but none of these outsiders can adopt our value system & see us as we see ourselves, none can rate us by what matters to us & how we go about & care about our lots.
This post is about opening one's view & recognizing other peoples game. Im contending nerds find few who can rate their game, see what they're really playing at, what real success is & what matters to them. Who else out there has hard really hard to understand games, has a value-system alien to others? That is the defining question to me.
Often we see mis-allocated respect too. Nerds given undeserved respect, sourced in shallow understanding, undermining our trust in the world's sensibility & discernment. The "cowboy coders" and 10x discourse revolves around these outsider/alien/unsensing values being used to determine respect & rank, causing endless offense & distrust & alienation to nerds, confirming to us we are alone in chasing our good game.
The respect you consider is shallow & exterior & the respect we want & that matters to us is often trapped & esoteric. Real success - often yes of the business - often derives from what others cannot see.
100% of employees are regarded as human resources for management's usage, so "nerds" aren't unique in that regard. The idea that money goes in and business value comes out applies to business nerds, facilities management nerds, HR nerds, accounting nerds, etc. Everyone is beholden to a business operating system responsible for creating value.
This can seem like a bit of a downer when viewed through the "what's it all mean?" lens, but hey, that's capitalism.
I'm a nerd, and I consider myself pretty successful in life. I totally agree with the other poster that your view on the world is very different.
According to what metrics?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Two_Cultures
I know lots of engineers and scientists are devoted to art, opera, literature, history.
Next to zero artists or singers who are familiar with say, the laws of thermodynamics.
In my school, the top athletes were also good students. The dux was the linchpin of the football team and also wrote poetry.
You don't have to dig very deep to find counterexamples. Dr. Brian May was the lead guitarist and a founding member of Queen. He holds a PhD in astrophysics. Tom Scholz was a founding member of Boston and has a master's degree in mechanical engineering from MIT. Dr. Brian Holland is the lead vocalist for The Offspring and has a PhD in molecular biology.
As a more personal example, I spent my high school science classes competing on each test for top marks against Wesley MacInnes, who today is an actor and country music singer. (He was the school bully in the last Power Rangers movie. It was an amusing role. Wesley was an extraordinarily kind person in real high school.)
> graduated as class valedictorian in 1984. During high school, Holland was the best student in mathematics in his year,
from wikipedia
But I agree with him that nerds get little respect from non-nerds.
There's a whole idea of "workwife," as in, the professional partner that can comprehend & share & commiserate & bond over the "other" 40 hours of our lives. Someome else to co-play the work game with. Because so so rarely are our partners positioned to be able to, no?
The post is about a lot more than respect. We can give each other respect for all kinds of things, all manner of reasons & successes. Respect can says more about the person giving respect than it can the person getting respect. This post is about a different kind of empathy, of understanding people as they want to be be seen, find ways to meet people on their courts & finding ways to be good witnesses to their moves/triumphs.