I don’t know why you’d think “being interested in nerdy stuff like computers” would somehow translate into virtuous behavior. They seem like entirely different things to me, in the sense that I wouldn’t expect a writer, or a baker, or a chef to have typical ethical behaviors as a group.
“What happened” was just that some people got rich and powerful and their real personalities showed through. This is not a new thing in any sense at all, from Rockefeller to Bill Gates – both “technology entrepreneurs”.
The OP is mostly talking about image, not reality. What image do tech founders choose to project.
OPs timeline is somewhat off. They posit a golden era for the 1980s-2007 but that’s not right. Tech CEOs have often been hard-charging salespeople and businessmen. Look at early Wired magazines and there was much celebration of random rich guys in suits, as much as the nerdy tech creators. This was the “suit/hacker” dichotomy.
Google was the company that really exploded that paradigm, from their rise to prominence circa 2002 or so, to their IPO and post-IPO halo, around 2005-2007.
Now the nerds didn’t need the suits. They would run their own company.
They were shockingly wealthy and powerful but it was made to seem as a kind of distraction from their true nature. They marketed their own virtue and renunciation, both to the public, and to their own staff. Their business model rejected the previous search engine paradigm (backroom deals and paying for placement) in favor of a new one (complex math to produce the best results). They told the public and their staff the famous “don’t be evil”, and also “focus on the user and all else follows”. There was even a pronouncement that Google would never do such tawdriness as horoscopes.
The theme was that nerdiness was a kind of incorruptibility because a nerd was honest, unconcerned with social status, and unworldly. Let them into your life and they’ll make it all better. Larry Page and Sergey Brin cultivated that image, holding internal and external events where they made themselves look ever nerdier than they actually are, even wearing lab coats.
Now, this didn’t last and was never true. Soon after the IPO, Larry and Sergey bought themselves not just a corporate jet, but a commercial airliner. They justified it as something that was “good for the world” because they could use it to get entire teams of NGO workers on missions of mercy. It actually became a party plane, as far as I know.
People have made "nerdiness" a premium because other nerds view it as passion. The rationale is that if you craft something out of passion, it will somehow be better than. I think it also comes down to the fact that many tech nerds view engineering more as a art than cold engineering, and they view themselves as artists and artisans.
There's also this age-old belief that if you do something out of passion, you're willing to pull more hours, and do whatever it takes to reach your goals.
I also believe that nerds, whatever thing they are obsessed with, make their nerdiness a personality defending trait. Their nerdiness is their personality. And if others aren't as willing to commit, they're simply frauds or wannabes.
Probably one of the most ego-crushing realizations (if you're a nerd) is to discover that there are people out there MUCH more talented and higher performing than what you'll ever be, but with none of the obsession or pride. In other profession that's not really a topic. You can be a top performer in other professions, without a deep interest, clock out 4 daily, and never think about work outside work.
In tech, however, it is too often assumed that you must be consumed by tech. Otherwise you're not really that passionate about it.
> Probably one of the most ego-crushing realizations (if you're a nerd) is to discover that there are people out there MUCH more talented and higher performing than what you'll ever be, but with none of the obsession or pride. In other profession that's not really a topic. You can be a top performer in other professions, without a deep interest, clock out 4 daily, and never think about work outside work.
You could clock out, but I don't think the top performers ever stop thinking about work. Everything you've written here has to be wrong.
Depends on the work. I've worked places (military intel) where you leave work at work, simply because it is impossible to take work with you home. Some of the people I worked with said that was exactly why they chose that line of work - so that they never had to think about work when they came home. Some of those were also top performers.
But I also knew other top performers that basically had geopolitics as their hobby, and would study OSINT (open-source intelligence) when they came home.
And obviously there are many other professions where you can do really well, and don't think a second about work when your day is over. Really depends on how your work is structured!
Some people are naturally talented at things. It’s no different than an average athlete who works extremely hard and an elite athlete who puts in half the work but still outperforms the average.
What? Elite athletes put in unimaginably more work than average athletes.
I think what he meant was that you can take a group of people and train them for a sport. Some of those people (genetically elite athletes) will improve very quickly with minimal training, others can do massive amounts of training and never reach beyond a certain level.
Elites who put in a lot of work are world class. You can’t outwork genetics.
I promise you top performers aren't always thinking about work. There is proof in going detached from work problems and doing other things can help produce novel solutions. Same principle as getting a good night's sleep vs cramming the night before a test. Your subconscious does a lot of lifting. Never being able to put down work is just anxiety masked as dedication, in my book.
> Everything you've written here has to be wrong.
This is certainly incorrect.
all the best coders and engineers I've worked with have been nerds and very passionate about computers
passion is necessary but not sufficient to be the best. you can be top 20% without passion, but you can't be top 1%
I agree with you there's a lot of gatekeeping around "passion" for tech. I don't like that framing, but having seen the effect of success and the type of people it has brought into the industry that would never have even considered a few decades ago, I see why people look for supplemental signals, even if the ones they pick are wrong and effectively just shallow tribalism.
However I think this really misses the mark:
> Probably one of the most ego-crushing realizations (if you're a nerd) is to discover that there are people out there MUCH more talented and higher performing than what you'll ever be, but with none of the obsession or pride. In other profession that's not really a topic. You can be a top performer in other professions, without a deep interest, clock out 4 daily, and never think about work outside work.
This is a strawman based around immature, fragile-ego individuals. There are plenty of nerds who realize intelligence, talent, and resourcefulness are completely orthogonal traits from interest in tech. The former is over-represented in online discourse, and the latter is more common in engineering leadership in top companies. You can't really be a top-performer in any large-scale effort without realizing that there are top performers in all domains, and they have insights you don't have. You can't do great things if you don't leave space to learn about your own blind spots, and have a productive dialogue with people who have a completely different mental framework than you.
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.
> 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.
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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.
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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.
> 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?
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.
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.
Bill Gates was always a POS, reading about his behaviour earlier on doesn't make him seem in any way virtuous. The whole 'charity' persona he put on afterwards is just PR.
Same with Jobs, but without the charity.
Woz, maybe he actually was a nerd.
Gates was (is) definitely a huge nerd. Much more than most of the people here.
He was also the poster boy for tech nerd assholes, until the scale of tech assholery shifted wildly for the worse, and he switched to legacy building mode.
> The whole 'charity' persona he put on afterwards is just PR.
What do you mean by "persona"? Do you mean he's not really giving money away?
> The whole 'charity' persona he put on afterwards is just PR.
Indeed. Even in the middle ages rich people leaned heavily on charity to whitewash their legacy. I mean, the Catholic church even made this accessible to the masses through indulgence.
It’s related to the trope that non-rich people are more ethical than rich people, or nerds would treat women better than jocks. Confusing lack of opportunity to engage in certain behavior for lack of propensity.
That's an interesting point since in practice, athletic ("jock") women tend to be more common than nerdy women to begin with. Women being into tech or science (stereotypical "nerdy" pursuits) is something that tends to happen more in lower-income countries, which suggests a large self-interest or incentive component, while the opposite is true for athletic women. Perhaps the proper counterpart of the "nerd" among women is engaged in very different, more traditional crafts or intellectual interests which aren't highlighted as "nerdy" by mainstream culture.
I was referring to the "Revenge of the Nerds" trope, which involves nerds who are men. But as to your point, the "nerd" characterization arises not only from the field of interest, but the hyperfocus nature of the pursuit. Hyperfocus behaviors get coded as "nerdy" in men but don't get coded as such in women. For example, my daughter, my wife, and I have the same personality. My hyperfocus interests as a teenager, such as computers, got coded as "nerdy." My daughter, meanwhile, hyperfocuses in the same way on knitting or drawing, but those don't get coded as "nerdy" at all.
I think hyper focus on anything is more likely to be classified as "nerdy" today. People will say "I'm a huge guitar nerd" or "I'm a huge gardening nerd" or whatever.
Related (for the non-grey/whitebeards who saw Revenge of the Nerds): Calling someone a nerd used to be fairly demeaning. Today I would say it swings between okay/acceptable and funny/cool, depending on the social circle.
Nerd-dom in women is also only judged if we don't adhere to the social requirements of womanhood. You can be as obsessive as you want as long as you're bubbly, socially adept, and take care to look pretty. Our interests aren't considered a necessary component to our identity culturally in the same way men's are.
It wasn’t always that way. In 1984 almost 40% of CS grads were women.
> Perhaps the proper counterpart of the "nerd" among women is engaged in very different, more traditional crafts or intellectual interests which aren't highlighted as "nerdy" by mainstream culture.
This is it.
Nerdy women are in fiber arts, fandom (especially generative fandom), etc. Nerdy women definitely exist, they just tend to take their penchant for nerd/obsessive/systems thinking to more 'appropriately female' areas. (For example, things like indie perfume houses, or my obsession with the mechanics of bra manufacturing and fitting). They also tend to pick apart relationships instead of objects: This is why female fandom is so dominated by tropes and boxes to shove characters into. They like the organization and clean categories just like male nerds do, they just apply them to different domains.
They also usually have a different but related stereotype. We're pathetic shut in cat ladies instead of pimply nerds. It's also not usually considered a problem until we hit ~25 (or whatever age the culture at the time considers a woman ready for motherhood) since a shy, obsessive, escapist woman who doesn't want to engage with people can make a fine wife/gf. Most of the grief is directed at us for not caring about our appearance enough more than anything else.
> I don’t know why you’d think “being interested in nerdy stuff like computers” would somehow translate into virtuous behavior.
Whatever tenuous link there was between the two, only existed as long as computers were not really seen as a path to wealth and power. Because then a smart person with the capability to enter fields traditionally associated with wealth and power choosing computers reflected putting personal curiosity and interest over pursuing wealth and power as the sole objective.
Virtuous people become doctors, social workers or kindergarten teachers.
People who spend their entire life in front of computers should not be the ones with the keys to society yet here we are.
It's hard to claim that the initial generation of Free Software developers in the 1980s and 1990s weren't virtue-minded people. The issue isn't spending one's entire life in front of a computer, it's being outcompeted by people who do the same but with mercenery aims.
Seeing unscrupulous people make it while the principled pay the price can break even the most virtuous person. It causes disappointment, resentment and a sense of injustice that can very easily radicalize into actual sociopathy. Society needs to realign itself if it wants to prevent this. Good people should win and be rewarded.
You say this like it's a recent development.
Creating a society where the unscrupulous are not unduly rewarded has been a long, painstaking slog over millennia that still hasn't been solved. And whatever progress has been made is always fragile as the lessons are so very easy to forget.
As someone who's been in both engineering school and medical school, I would say you're very wrong. Most doctors aren't in any way virtuous, most are in it for status or money and plenty don't care one bit about humans (some just like the thrill of being in charge of someone their life). There's only a small minority that's extremely virtuous.
This might've been different 50 years ago but it's the number one striver job there is.
Admittedly this is anecdotal, but I've visited many doctors over the years, as a patient, and pretty much all of them treated me well, practiced their jobs professionally and gave me good advice and treatments. I never had a doctor give me advice that turned out to be wrong or ill intentioned.
Again ... maybe it's just my experience. None of these were super life threatening conditions. However I did go under the operating knife at least once; in that case, the operation was successful, healed me of the condition, and never caused any negative side-effects to this day.
Maybe there's a difference in regulation. A lot of the "entrepreneurial" landscape seems unregulated and a kind of Wild West, and I suppose that allows for certain kinds of personalities to succeed by suspect means. The medical field, by contrast, is quite regulated and there are very real risks to malpractice. Thus, I think it attracts better people and allows them to succeed.
Maybe it's similar to how dictators often take over in poor or struggling countries, whereas they find it harder to get a foothold in developed, prosperous countries with strong institutions.
Being non-virtuous doesn't all of a sudden turn them into some kind of evil monster. It's just a job for most of them, one that pays well. Being professional and giving treatment like they should (basically following orders) is the easiest way to avoid problems for doctors.
This all changes when they get more difficult patients. As someone who's been told bogus by doctors, even lightly pushing back many will completely change demeanor, you're no longer some easy money but a risk/annoyance. So your good experiences basically just show doctors in their 'perfect state'.
This isn't the same in every country as you say it's a regulated field and the regulations differ wildly from country to country and so does the view and behaviour of doctors.
They obviously won't say it to your face so I'm not sure that your anecdote says anything.
> I've visited many doctors over the years, as a patient, and pretty much all of them treated me well, practiced their jobs professionally and gave me good advice and treatments. I never had a doctor give me advice that turned out to be wrong or ill intentioned.
You are extremely lucky, then.
As a man, I've been gaslit by my doctors about my depression. My PC in my early 20s told me I was just lazy and needed to get a "real" job.
For women, by all accounts, it's much worse. I have not met a woman yet who has not had a story about some doctor treating her like a child, minimizing her pain, etc.
I don't believe doctors and kindergarten teacher needed to be virtuous at all
I have a friend who worked in kindergarten taking care of the children. From what they told me, I can tell you, it's no easy lunch for virtuous people with ideals, who want to help and educate the children there. The amount of playing hierarchy games and bickering and bullying and whatnot, that happens when someone wants to improve things for the children... It basically crushed that friend and often made them cry, until they got out of those shit holes named kindergarten.
Doctors with big egos are a huge problem because they don’t listen to patients. I deal with some medical issues and, if a self-absorbed doctor walks into the room, I know my problem isn’t being solved today.
Not necessarily no - but sustainably doing good work while shoulder-to-shoulder with human frailty and confounding diversity does raise the chances.
People succumbing to parental pressure become doctors.
A lot of folk go into teaching because there's high demand for workers & the academic path is relatively accessible.
You're probably mostly right about social workers, but it's a vague term & there's at least some categories of social worker that fill the same appeal as teaching.
Virtuosity is so hard to define, I'd say there's some virtue in almost every career direction but less in some than others. Certainly in my experience tech entrepreneurship has some of the lowest levels I've encountered.
There are Black Mirror episodes for people in all sorts of careers who find themselves with too much power, poorly handled; the show's narratives depend on the fact that the technology is the axe but not the executioner.
as a former teacher, a former receiver of social services, and someone who makes great money helping teams move bits efficiently, I can say most assuredly that most teachers or social workers are regular, non-expert people. My former teaching colleague thought the screen of his monitor was watching him. And my last social worker had "personal struggles balancing his faith's view on evolution and what the science says." The classic computer nerd who "can't human," but my job is aligning hundreds of people to work on the same software. Education and social work is divorced from the "real world" in many ways, not unlike how those stuck on a screen are divorced from the "real world."
> Virtuous people become doctors
I remember when I was in high school knowing a bunch of people who wanted to be doctors (and had good grades). It was strange to me so many people wanted to be doctors so I asked why. The answer was one word: Money. In my adult life I have also heard of multiple people who demand to be called “doctor” in social situations.
“Virtuous” is not a word I’d associate at all with wanting to become a doctor. Veterinarians are a different matter, though.
>“Virtuous” is not a word I’d associate at all with wanting to become a doctor. Veterinarians are a different matter, though.
For those that don't know, veterinarian education is just as rigorous, time consuming, and expensive as human medical education, yet the median annual wage for practicing veterinarians is $125,510.
That's a lot of money out in rural country, which is where veterinarians tend to be especially useful.
But much less than most doctors make.
That’s also the money in the US, not everywhere, and not every veterinarian goes into it for the rural stuff. I know plenty of veterinarians who have zero interest in that, and being vegan don’t even approve of the industry.
And the work can be considerably harder. Human doctors tend to specialise on a certain area of a single species, and they can communicate with their patients. Veterinaries are expected to know every part of a huge range of species (though there are specialties as well) and have to be able to diagnose patients who not only can’t explain themselves in our language, they are usually terrified by being in a strange environment with a strange person and thus alter or hide their behaviour. Not to mention having to deal with the owners and regular euthanasias.
It’s an incredibly stressful job with a huge rate of suicide.
https://www.bbc.com/worklife/article/20231010-the-acute-suic...
For virtuous people, look at jobs where the average person in the field could get a much better job doing something else. That’s not the case for your average teacher, who tend to be on the low end of the scale of college educated workers. Public defenders are a good example of the opposite. These are generally lawyers who have the credentials to make a lot more money in private practice.
> Virtuous people become doctors
And by the time medical school and residency are done with them, many if not most will be sociopaths to rival all the top CEOs.
Talk about peak arrogance. Who the hell are you to think you get to be the one to decide who should have the key to society?
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They seem like entirely different things to me, in the sense that I wouldn’t expect a writer, or a baker, or a chef to have typical ethical behaviors as a group.
Shouldn't you? Bakers and chefs aren't just "interested in nerdy stuff like chemical reactions," they make food for people. Writers have ethical obligations, both individually and as a group?
I don’t know why you’d think “being interested in nerdy stuff like computers” would somehow translate into virtuous behavior.
The cultural perception of nerds being relentlessly bullied for the crime of having imaginations/GPAs/acne, I think, presented a culturally sympathetic view to the extent that the latent bro-ism caught some off guard, like we'd expect them to emerge from sweet gentle Stranger-Things style basement nerds to adulthoods as, say, Randall Munroe or something
>> I don’t know why you’d think “being interested in nerdy stuff like computers” would somehow translate into virtuous behavior.
> The cultural perception of nerds being relentlessly bullied for the crime of having imaginations/GPAs/acne, I think, presented a culturally sympathetic view to the extent that the latent bro-ism caught some off guard, like we'd expect them to emerge from sweet gentle Stranger-Things style basement nerds to adulthoods as, say, Randall Munroe or something
To emphasize that point, I think the assumption was that being bullied and ostracized would lead nerds to have greater empathy and be nice people, because they experienced how bad it is when people aren't nice.
But I think the reality, obvious in hindsight, is that was a totally unreasonable assumption. IIRC, the experience of abuse can actually create future abusers. With geeks/nerds, I think a fairly common outcome as been a combination of arrogance with a kind of social ineptness/unawareness that is not nice.
Yeah, exactly, "man hands on inhumanity to man" and all that. I have to admit I was a little surprised when I saw it firsthand, myself, so it's not like I was any less naive about it.
oooh pinched a nerve among the xkcd fans I guess
> I don’t know why you’d think “being interested in nerdy stuff like computers” would somehow translate into virtuous behavior.
Because doing something you're genuinely interested is virtuous relative to doing something for personal/reputational gain or due to other social pressures.
> some people got rich and powerful and their real personalities showed through
This could not be more deluded - the negative equivalent of the hustle culture myth: anyone can become a selfish asshole if they work hard enough. The idea that every person who's ever taken an academic interest in tech is just another William Gates III waiting to happen is a very weird way of looking at nerd culture.
I think nerd -> believes in science. Science -> requires honesty, curiousity, humility, persistence (i.e. admit you are wrong, accept you losses).
Generally I'm not sure you'd be considered a nerd if you weren't too honest for your own good. Not that this covers all types of virtuous behavior - there do exist nasty scientists. (And there is some level of fraud/dishonesty in academia, too).
I wonder how personality forming it is, being a curious kid growing up hacking on computers. If you don't get what you expected, it's almost never the computer's fault - it means you did it wrong, and need to reconsider. There's no excuses and no dumping responsibility on anyone or anything else.
I have the feeling it probably teaches you something, or at least it should. Something not too unlike epistemic humility, maybe.
As a kid, that's what I loved about computers. They were fair in ways society wasn't. The rules were clear, and breaking the rules resulted in badness. Unlike grade school, for example, where the rules were always changing and badness would just occur randomly and capriciously.
The mistake comes with the very first arrow. You don't have to believe in "science" to be a nerd. You have to be passionate about technology. And that's a very different thing.
Most of the scientists I know can spend years of their life pursuing a hypothesis that turns out to be wrong, shrug their shoulders, and dive back into it. Technologists are all about output. If it's not outputting, you have to give up and seek a different avenue. Scientists (except the very famous and successful ones) tend to be humble and curious. Technologists less so.
You are confusing “nerd” and “geek”, historically.
Both terms are overloaded, because neither has been used with any consistency. Like the long forgotten trekkie/trekker divide, it was a way for some people to feel superior to other people, but the lines were never clear.
Musk is a fascinating example. Incredibly hard working, visionary, detail oriented. Without him we'd probably not have had reusable rockets for another generation or more. With Tesla he also accelerated electric car adoption. He was also brutally honest about their chances of success, when pitching SpaceX to the other initial investors he gave it a 10% chance of success. He was little more confident about Tesla, saying the main objective was to prove the concept and push adoption across the industry. Yes he's famous for giving absurdly short time scales for advances like "full self driving", and this is reckless and irresponsible, but I think he genuinely believes what he says at the time.
Yet he's also a sociopathic fascist arsehole. It turns out these traits are not all on the same axis.
Makes sense at first sight
But then you see people with very questionable morals having made a key discovery or having produced a fundamental technology. Reality is complicated
Contrast matters. Being awake to bigotry and pseudoscience also predates the tech industry, TBF, but eugenics, "scientific" racism, etc. used to be a lot more common. Don't look down on people for expecting better now, even from people who apparently have unresolved issues about what happened in South Africa.
I don't think being nerdy makes someone virtuous, that's true. However, I think SV of 20-40 years ago had a distinct culture (best symbolized by Woz) that's basically been lost to the MBA-types and the hustle culture bros. Sometimes they wear it around like a creepy skin suit but it comes across as deeply inauthentic.
This is a common refrain but my point is that it's nonsense. Most of the people running top companies do not have MBAs and are technical, aka nerds. This trope is a false narrative designed to portray one group as pure, ethical people that were corrupted from outside.
"I identify as a nerd and think I'm virtuous, therefore other people who identify as nerds should be virtuous in order to validate me"
Yeah maybe it’s just me, but the whole idea of “identifying as a nerd” seems so silly, something out of a bad high school movie.
Can’t we just be adults interested in different topics and hobbies?
Bill Gates is a great counterexample to the article's premise. Always clearly a nerd, yet led a company that no one loved and many people hated for its strategy of embrace, extend, extinguish.
Post-CEO, he had completely refurbished his image via philanthropy, only to throw it away with the Epstein stuff.
Your perception of him is the result of a very carefully crafted image and PR management going back decades to the 80's. His behaviour and controversies with Microsoft have been well known since the 90's (Melinda Gates relationship, anti-trust probe etc.) and even with more recent allegations in 2019. Link: https://www.wsj.com/business/microsoft-directors-decided-bil...
Gates has done some good with his money but a lot of stuff about him reads like pure PR to me.
Its like hearing about how Ford supposedly increased wages so people could buy cars, but when you actually look at the details that was just the PR spin to having hired, worked to injury, then fired so many people that large wages were the only way to keep enough employees to run the factories by convincing people in other states to come blindly move in under the promise of money.
Most every "good" story about him outside of donating money later on ends up with not so great details and reality.
Bill Gates' nerd image was as falsified as his philanthropic one. He was a shrewd businessman & knew PR well, that is all.
Grandpa Gates was PR bullshit - he was always a notorious asshole.
It really demonstrates the nature of people. Richest guy on the planet for quite awhile, but can’t manage his relationships and spends his time chasing skirts. To the point where he’s a target for Epstein the apex predator.
In the Microsoft cinematic universe, Ballmer is the foil.