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PaperclipPerfector  4mo ago (text post)   23789 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of June 17, 2024

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I wasn't there to have a personal historical anecfote, but I think how we remember the canonical "jocks v. nerds" conflict is heavily skewed because, to a large extent, the nerds won in the huge financial jackpot of the tech industry starting in probably the late 80s.

Although I think the categories are also poorly defined (sometimes to sway arguments being made): at least in my experience most of the sharpest, most technical people I've worked with manage to find enough time to stay at least moderately physically fit, so I don't think it's as well-defined a boundary as is frequently presented.

I think in the 1980s nerds and geeks were rather undifferentiated in the public mind. Geeks would have had intellectual interests, but there were a couple of things that separated them from nerds. First, those interests were generally useful skills — building things, fixing things, useful intellectual skills like math and science and later computers. Second, that they actually became quite skilled and those things — they could actually build a rocket model, do a chemical synthesis, write a program or speak a language. Third, they were, while somewhat introverted and awkward, not completely inept at social relationships. Nerds were the ones hyper interested in useless trivia. They’d memorize the call numbers on starships, they’d learn all the lore of their favorite TV shows and movies, they’d be interested in medieval history or something. If those things required skill, they probably wouldn’t be all that good at it. There is a bit of a difference between a Nerd who can quote S2E5 of Babylon 5 from memory and a Geek who can speak Korean because he’s just into learning a language.

The "nerds" that won those financial jackpots have little to do with fictional portrayals of nerds, because Steve Jobs, Bill Gates, etc were not unable to secure prom dates. Larry Ellison was a tennis player and popular at South Shore.

I don't know if it was true, but Gates has an anecdote about how it took him two weeks to work up the courage to ask a girl to prom, and she turned him down.

Jobs was more hippie than nerd; Wozniak was the nerd. I have no idea if either had a prom date.

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