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Nerds who aren't that smart

Started by Mesozoic Mister Nigel, November 30, 2014, 05:34:58 PM

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Mesozoic Mister Nigel

Also, just to use myself as an example, I enjoy bowling, but I'm terrible at it. And I don't give any fucks at all because I'm good at things I care about, like math and chemistry (which I should be studying right now instead of internetting, if I want to keep my "good at it" status).
"I'm guessing it was January 2007, a meeting in Bethesda, we got a bag of bees and just started smashing them on the desk," Charles Wick said. "It was very complicated."


rong

i thought the thread title "nerds who aren't that smart" implied a dichotomy - that is, "nerds who are that smart" and "nerds who aren't that smart"

i got the vibe from some of the posts in this thread that the dichotomy was then re-interpreted to be:

there are some genuinely smart people who tend to be nerds
there are some not so smart people who identify as nerds

it then occurred to me that bowling might make for a test.

of course, in the process of this - I think you are right that there isn't really a dichotomy - because I think, while scientists and engineers can both be exceptionally intelligent and nerdy, i think their "stereotypical" approaches to bowling would be quite different.
"a real smart feller, he felt smart"

rong

i love bowling and i was pretty terrible when i started.

i don't understand: you say you enjoy bowling and you are terrible at it

you also say you are good at things you care about.

does this mean you don't care about bowling, but you enjoy it? 

i'm not sure if there is anything i enjoy, but don't care about. . . 
"a real smart feller, he felt smart"

Doktor Howl

Quote from: Mesozoic Mister Nigel on November 30, 2014, 10:45:24 PM
Quote from: Doktor Howl on November 30, 2014, 08:57:31 PM
Quote from: Mesozoic Mister Nigel on November 30, 2014, 05:46:42 PM
I'm having a niggling thought in the back of my mind that there is some kind of tie-in with the differences in neurophysiology of the liberal brain vs. the conservative brain. I can't put my finger on it though.

I think maybe it could be that because scientists tend to be liberal (either because the liberal brain is better suited to science or because science tends to create liberal brains), liberals tend to associate liberalism with intelligence and assume that because they are liberal, they must be more intelligent. Statistically there is a correlation, but not a huge one.

Gonna guess, here:  I think liberal brains make better scientists. 

I am going to qualify that, though, to what you'd call "Classic Liberals" or "Franklin Liberals", because the kind of liberals you get on tumblr and much of Facebook are worse than conservatives in some ways.  They might believe the right things, but they do it for all the wrong reasons (as spelled out in the OP).

These are the same people who take satire articles seriously without a second thought, however outrageous they are, because they fit in with what they want to believe.

The idea that grapefruit is an antidote for lead poisoning comes to mind.

There is something decidedly anti-science about the general population these days, and that's a shame.  Because if even a fraction of that population survives the next quarter-century, it will be on account of science.
Molon Lube

Mesozoic Mister Nigel

Quote from: rong on December 01, 2014, 12:49:01 AM
i love bowling and i was pretty terrible when i started.

i don't understand: you say you enjoy bowling and you are terrible at it

you also say you are good at things you care about.

does this mean you don't care about bowling, but you enjoy it? 

i'm not sure if there is anything i enjoy, but don't care about. . .

Really? I enjoy a great many things, including things that I don't seek out. I'll go bowling and have fun if someone invites me, but it's not something I care about enough to seek out and work on to improve my skills.

Life's too short to fail to enjoy as many things as possible, and it's also too short to care about everything I enjoy to the point of making time to be good at it.

I'm good at a lot of things that I do make time to work at, and that's good enough for me.
"I'm guessing it was January 2007, a meeting in Bethesda, we got a bag of bees and just started smashing them on the desk," Charles Wick said. "It was very complicated."


Mesozoic Mister Nigel

Quote from: Doktor Howl on December 01, 2014, 12:55:28 AM
Quote from: Mesozoic Mister Nigel on November 30, 2014, 10:45:24 PM
Quote from: Doktor Howl on November 30, 2014, 08:57:31 PM
Quote from: Mesozoic Mister Nigel on November 30, 2014, 05:46:42 PM
I'm having a niggling thought in the back of my mind that there is some kind of tie-in with the differences in neurophysiology of the liberal brain vs. the conservative brain. I can't put my finger on it though.

I think maybe it could be that because scientists tend to be liberal (either because the liberal brain is better suited to science or because science tends to create liberal brains), liberals tend to associate liberalism with intelligence and assume that because they are liberal, they must be more intelligent. Statistically there is a correlation, but not a huge one.

Gonna guess, here:  I think liberal brains make better scientists. 

I am going to qualify that, though, to what you'd call "Classic Liberals" or "Franklin Liberals", because the kind of liberals you get on tumblr and much of Facebook are worse than conservatives in some ways.  They might believe the right things, but they do it for all the wrong reasons (as spelled out in the OP).

These are the same people who take satire articles seriously without a second thought, however outrageous they are, because they fit in with what they want to believe.

The idea that grapefruit is an antidote for lead poisoning comes to mind.

There is something decidedly anti-science about the general population these days, and that's a shame.  Because if even a fraction of that population survives the next quarter-century, it will be on account of science.

Somewhere around here there's a thread where we started to talk about this... the fact that one of the side effects of the internet is that it is so easy for people to obtain misinformation that leads them to THINK they're researching science-based information. So there are tons of people who think they care deeply about science, but are on the wrong track completely.
"I'm guessing it was January 2007, a meeting in Bethesda, we got a bag of bees and just started smashing them on the desk," Charles Wick said. "It was very complicated."


rong

i think maybe it is not really bowling that you enjoy

but, i didn't mean to jack this thread and our little portion seems to be turning into a different debate. 
"a real smart feller, he felt smart"

Mesozoic Mister Nigel

Quote from: rong on December 01, 2014, 02:09:15 AM
i think maybe it is not really bowling that you enjoy

but, i didn't mean to jack this thread and our little portion seems to be turning into a different debate.

I don't think you're qualified to tell other people what they do or don't find enjoyable. :lol: I don't think anyone is. If you want to explore what other people find enjoyable, and how, how much, and why they find them enjoyable, that would make a pretty decent thread, IMO. You might find that people have very different perspectives from one another when it comes to enjoyable activities.
"I'm guessing it was January 2007, a meeting in Bethesda, we got a bag of bees and just started smashing them on the desk," Charles Wick said. "It was very complicated."


Drake75


I'd like to thank everyone in this thread for having this conversation. It helped me realize a joke regarding chaos magic, and also that its practice is far more widespread than I ever knew.

Quote from: Demolition Squid on November 30, 2014, 06:21:51 PM

Now, the rules of discourse have changed it into a kind of competition, with a right side and a wrong side, and admitting there might be some validity to someone else's point of view means you're weak. The aim of public debate is completely divorced from the truth, as any polisci rhetoric text will tell you, and we're taking that model of 'win or lose' into our lives more and more every day. The person who walks away from an argument is the person who loses.


I mean, we're having wizard duels in public and they're being mistaken for real debates nowadays!

LMNO

Did this thread become a question if a specific physical activity denotes the intellectual capacity over a socially constructed niche?

Mesozoic Mister Nigel

Quote from: LMNO, PhD (life continues) on December 01, 2014, 03:38:08 AM
Did this thread become a question if a specific physical activity denotes the intellectual capacity over a socially constructed niche?

Somehow, that seems to have happened.
"I'm guessing it was January 2007, a meeting in Bethesda, we got a bag of bees and just started smashing them on the desk," Charles Wick said. "It was very complicated."


rong

"a real smart feller, he felt smart"

P3nT4gR4m

In fairness, it aint easy (and it's becoming increasingly hard) to separate science from bullshit and pseudo science. Back in the old days it seemed easier. Newton did the apple thing. You could try it. Drop an apple, yup down it goes. But scientific knowledge grows like a mushroom. discoveries branch into fields, discoveries in those fields branch into more fields, til you end up where we are now, with a lot of cutting edge research being so fucking narrow focus that the guys discovering the latest particle stuff being unable to explain it to the guys in the next room studying a different particle.

I look at scientific papers and they're written in whatever dialect of whatever language that particular branch of science uses and it's gobbledygook to me (unless it's computer science) so I have to make do with popular articles written after the fact in layman's english. That's fine but, click on the wrong website and you'll find bullshit, indistinguishable from the real thing. There's also so much nowadays that it's easy to miss stuff. Like the other day when Nigel informed me they were back into testing psychedelics. Totally missed that memo.

The worst offender, though, has to be quantum physics. Those bastards just had to come up with popular metaphors to explain their calculations, that essentially sound like witchcraft. What the fuck did they think was going to happen when the lay public found out that looking at an experiment changes it or that the particle goes through both holes at the same time. What the fuck are you supposed to think?

I'm up to my arse in Brexit Numpties, but I want more.  Target-rich environments are the new sexy.
Not actually a meat product.
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Awful and Bent Behemothic Results of Last Night's Painful Squat.
High Altitude Haggis-Filled Sex Bucket From Beyond Time and Space.
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walking the fine line line between genius and batshit fucking crazy

"computation is a pattern in the spacetime arrangement of particles, and it's not the particles but the pattern that really matters! Matter doesn't matter." -- Max Tegmark

LMNO

You realize that most of those silly metaphors were created about 100 years ago, when they honestly had no idea of what was going on, right?  For the most part, physicists have stopped doing that a while ago.

Your above rant sounds like a person who only knows about a Turing-style card-fed Automatic Computing Engine trying to describe the Watson supercomputer.

Meunster

Well tbh, nerd doesn't mean smart, and when it does there are alot of different kinds of 'smart'.

In truth nerds today is more a fashion. It happened around the time being nerdy became cool. Like the big bang theory, sure they have 'smart' jokes, but anyone with a GED can get the jokes. Truth be told, looking smart is 90% of what you need. Because a 'nerd' today is like a wizard 100 years ago. Normal people have no clue how they work so they don't question it, and when an actually wizard shows up shooting lighting at the other wizards who just throw dirt to defend themselves. Normal people don't know which is which, that's wizard business I'm a fucking farmer, I didn't spend my free time reading wizard books and shitting in my friends mouth while exploring my sexuality, i tended the farm.

That one real wizard is going to be labeled a 'none' wizard by the wanna be wizards and a wizard by the farmer, so he's fucked. We're all fucked.

Cause nerds are magic now, leftest, egolectual, mages who can spout facts, but can't spout anything that matters.


Poe's law ;)