A comment I made on Sailer:
Udolpho.com said:
No. Nerd culture is pathological, with its infantile dress, eating habits, and recreation. It is regressive, and most nerds aren't very smart, they are simply socially maladroit and by dint of spending 10,000 hours in front of a computer they pick up a trick or two (but seldom more than that).
Nerd culture is telling you that something is going wrong (as with the general rise in social pathology). What it is most certainly not telling you is that we are enjoying the eugenic effects of a high tech, prosperous society. Quite the opposite.
By the way, is the Flynn Effect perhaps making people fatter as well? What a strange idea.
But hardly the strangest--the same comment thread had this eyebrow-raising assertion:
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Answer: Yes.
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Of course many of the worst comments probably came from nerds themselves, who have powers of self-awareness that can barely pass the mirror test. Take the subject of Sailer's post, Wikipedia editors. As I noted in another comment:
Udolpho.com said:
Contrary to the image of nerds as intellectual savants "capable of working with gadgets on a level our grandparents could never dream of" (granddad beat his iPod for its music), nerds seem mainly to be incompetent at almost everything but fiddling uselessly with gadgets. Really, on what "level" are nerds working their iPhones and Androids? If anything, computing devices get simpler and more infantile as time goes on, and have been reduced to electronic pacifiers. Is the person thumbing away at a video game, in order to shoo away every moment that could be spent in thought, doing anything at a higher level?
Of course this conduct has spread outward from nerds, but it is with nerds where we see it at its most intense. They make up the behavioral sink, a biological mass huddling together because it has broken down. Aware of little, least of all itself, notions of identity eroding until there is only impulse and stimulus.















