Hacker News Reader

this is all a function of the media reporting, the change in ‘nerd culture’ has been vastly overreported.

these companies are staffed by spectrum-y nerds that we are being desperately propagandized into thinking are actually frat ‘bros’.

View on HN

No, they aren't. Locally, the person with the most esoteric knowledge is probably a weird nerd. It's mostly an accident that they chose to invest time in things typically associated with smarts. But globally, the best wizards got there by making it their profession. So maybe at your middling university, the people who could land a job at a frontier lab were nerdy wannabe frats, but at decent universities like MIT or Tsinghua, they're usually just better in every aspect of their lives. E.g. MIT has "math olympiad fraternities" all the cool kids join.

I went to a top 5 ranked school globally (~these lists fluctuate) and have been in elite circles since then. I can promise you that even there the autistic nerd fully outcompetes the renaissaince man.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com