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Comment by m_fayer | Hacker News Reader

Nerd-dom has also somehow merged with the world of fantasy and fandom. These are subcultures obsessed with hero journeys, morality tales, escapism, and cartoonish black-and-white ethical systems. I don't expect such people to handle fame and wealth well at all.

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> I don't expect such people to handle fame and wealth well at all.

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?

There's plenty of wealthy folks who aren't especially evil or greedy in any real way, but you wouldn't know that because they don't tend to show off or spend their wealth to begin with, they just shepherd it and grow it carefully. Sometimes over generations, eventually turning it into sustainable 'old money'.

> There's plenty of wealthy folks who aren't especially evil or greedy in any real way, but you wouldn't know that because they don't tend to show off or spend their wealth to begin with

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.

My first- and second- hand experience with rare counterexamples is that if you meet a Hollywood star in person they will make a good impression; as if they make a bad impression it will make an impression and you will tell your friends.

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.

Actors, trained to get to their cognitively resonant freq at a snap. Graham Norton show is complex enough to show off their basic charisma. No need for "reverse-psycho" multidim post-AI inoffensive-charm-offense that has Thiel's approval. Prediction: not going to see Karp appear, guy is too "complicated" (normies: creepy) for an "ivy league" game. with respect to sama. Needs an academic-sociopath drinking game show together with Sarah Payne, Thiel himself, Catherine,David Deutsch etc. it's probably going to be some kind of faux-snobbish LATAM liquor. Fernet con Coca?

Musk is basically a nerd who's ever surprised at what he can get away with, other times over his head in technical matters, and still other times suffering the South African typr of elite arrested development.

Trump recognised that he was facing a equal or better operator. Musk would feel insecure in the same situation. That's nerd. Maybe Trump has a similar training as actors (by actors?), just not to the frequencies normies expect :)

Obsessed fans will talk your ear off about the amazing scene where the superhero had to choose between saving humanity and the magical macguffin as though it were the most sophisticated storytelling ever created. Their frame of reference is very narrow.

I’m sure there are lots of sophisticates on here who enjoy that stuff along with a wider variety of literature. But the ones I know who love it are almost exclusively into it.

It's not just the nerds who enjoy lowbrow culture.

It's almost tautological that most people enjoy middle brow or low brow cultural products. Reality TV shows, soap operas, romance novels, professional wrestling, etc.

But Nerd-dom was always merged with fantasy and sci-fi?

Star Trek, Star Wars, Dune, LOTR, Asimov, Clarke, Hobbes, are all nerd-dom mainstays, like D&D.

Back in those times we made a distinction between nerds and geeks, with geeks really being a sort of subset of nerds that was just interested in the technicals.

I always found attempted distinctions between nerds and geeks to be kinda fake. As long as I've been alive, there's been so much overlap that any distinction is at best a slight and unreliable shade of meaning (e.g. nerd "sounds" a shade more academic/grades focused, but "computer geek" and "computer nerd" are synonyms).

I think that distinction was invented post-facto. For most people they were pretty much synonyms in every day usage.

Fandom-as-identity was a niche thing even within nerddom until quite recently.

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.

I think maybe a simpler explanation is that tech has been such a story of purportedly humble people becoming wildly successful. Classic rags to riches. Makes it easy to think of nerds as one of the common people, even the rich ones.

This is so true. The obsession with framing things in black and white permeates everything, including unfortunately work in tech. This has always had me keep my distance from “fellow” nerds, despite ostensibly being one.

I'm not claiming everyone uses the terms this way but for your consideration:

Geeks - Obsessed over fictional world(s). Nerds - Obsessed over the real world (or a specific part of it).

Comics Geek Math Nerd

There's a decent amount of overlap though.

> These are subcultures obsessed with hero journeys, morality tales, escapism, and cartoonish black-and-white ethical systems.

Which subcultures do not tend to value these things?

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