AstralMateus
3mo ago
Might be a difference in the cultural context – I reside in a European country, and the local intelligentsia still cares quite a bit about poetry and literature more broadly. I did hear that the US is pretty different in that regard though.
AstralMateus
3mo ago
Haven't been keeping very up to date with competitive MtG lately (I've gotten into Legends of Runeterra last year, which is roughly everything I like about Magic stripped of a lot of the annoying parts), but I generally dislike cards that warp the meta around itself and make you play either decks with it or decks, that reliably beat it. I enjoy diverse metas with a lot of options quite a bit more. While I don't think Nadu is as game-breaking as many people seem to suggest (high T1, maybe T0.5, but nowhere near a true tier 0 like Hogaak), I haven't seen much of it.
AstralMateus
3mo ago
Thanks, that's genuinely helpful! I generally enjoy reading about history, so I'm sure I'll be able to find something of the sort.
AstralMateus
3mo ago
Yep, I try to hide my power level and pretend to be a plain, inoffensive sort of dude. Sports is not that popular in my circles. The culture at my workplace is, for a lack of better word, quite feminine, and even men tend to balk at "sportsball". Ironically for a nerd, I used to be quite into soccer, but I've fallen out of the habit of watching soccer matches on my days off some 5-7 years ago.
AstralMateus
3mo ago
Do you watch the JP branch or are you still watching Kurosanji?
JP-only pretty much. Sometimes I look up what the EN branch is up to, like a rubbernecker stopping to gawk at a train wreck.
AstralMateus
3mo ago
I'm sorry brother, you lost me at nijisanji.
That's fair. If it makes it any better, I mostly watch the JP branch (Shirayuki Tomoe, Yumeoi Kakeru) and steer clear of EN. To be frank, I just don't think HoloJP is all that entertaining due to inherent limitations of what an idol is expected to do and say. Granted, while JP Nijis can generally handle that degree of freedom, in EN it quickly turns into "e-girls with an avatar" shitshow.
Long time lurker, first time poster with a general life question here.
My current situation is as follows: I've recently finished graduate school (in social sciences) and landed a research-adjacent position at a large organization. So far I've found myself fitting in quite well in terms of professional skills, but it's been an uphill battle socially.
The problem, to put it bluntly, is that I'm basically a walking stereotype of a weeaboo neckbeard with specific nerdy interests, who was suddenly thrust into a milieu of reasonably high-IQ, well-educated if somewhat snobbish upper-middle class background normies, who are well-versed in highbrow and middlebrow culture, and expect their interlocutors to be at the same level of general cultural awareness. I knew people like these in college and avoided them like the plague (didn't have anything against them, but we didn't exactly jive), however it no longer seems to be an option, as I realize that if I stick with my field, I'll be looking at working alongside people like these for the next 30 years, give or take, and I would prefer for this experience to be more pleasant and not feel like a perpetual outsider. Not to mention that I'd probably need to fit in culturally in order to eventually move up the ladder.
As for my own level of general cultural awareness, it is abysmally low, which makes communication very embarassing at times. I'd be able to discuss at length untranslated Japanese visual novels, Magic the Gathering meta, Super Mario 64 speedrun strats, Nijisanji vtubers or obscure internet trivia, but I managed to walk around God's green Earth for ~30 years without ever having watched Titanic, becoming able to recognize more than two songs from the Beatles or learning a single verse of poetry by heart. I want to fix that, and I'm willing to spend my commutes and several evenings a week on this project, even if the task at hand seems quite daunting. I''ve made peace with the fact that I'll probably never be a literati, but I want to be at least functional in such social settings.
However, because the gaping hole in my knowledge is so massive, I don't even know where to begin. Do I divide things up into subprojects like "Movies", "Music", "Literature", etc. with their own schedules and goals? (E.g. "Movies project – knock out 2 movies from imdb top 250 a week for a year before moving on to more obscure stuff".) Is there a smarter way to go about it?
Not caring and keeping to myself at work is not an option.
tl;dr version: adult nerd with very little cultural knowledge wants to fill in that gap (speedrun it, if possible) and become pleasant enough company in educated upper middle class non-STEM milieu. What would be the best way to achieve that?
Meet Bob. He's in his late twenties, and has not done any math since high school, where he was a B- student in STEM-related subjects and moderately disliked most of them. Bob is of above average intelligence, but not exceptionally bright (think +1 SD, midwit extraordinaire territory). One day Bob decides to renounce his wordcel ways and try to learn enough math in his spare time to leave his fake e-mail job and join a rigorous quantitative PoliSci program.
How many hours of intensive study do you estimate it would take Bob to get to the level of mathematical prowess of an average incoming first-year grad student in such a program?
Claude seems to ballpark that number at 600-800 hours (200-300 to relearn math up to Calculus, and 400-500 hours for undergrad math). To me this feels like a real lowball (there are like half a dozen videogames where I have twice as many hours, surely learning an extremely valuable skill must take a lot more time and effort – otherwise everyone would do it, right?), but maybe math is that easy, and Bob, like many people, just never really tried.
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