I worked with a number of brilliant people at Bell Labs through the 1980s/1990s. The most comfortably competent among them, the most productive among them, were also the least abrasive. They were also the most self deprecating.
Not just one or two, but the majority of them. To the point that the aggressive geniuses stood out. And I worked for/with two abrasive ones as well, so I know the difference.
The same was true for the two startups I worked at after that, and Qualcomm, and now the third startup where I work.
The really productive geniuses in each situation were easy to work with, I think largely, because of their confidence in their own grasp of the subject at hand. They had nothing to prove, they knew that, and it showed. The difficult people were never stupid, far from it, but they felt like they needed to defend everything they did, every decision they made, and that made working with them less productive.
With the gentle geniuses, if you thought you came up with something that was an improvement on what was being done, they would look at it honestly, and if it was not better, they would calmly explain why, and if it was better, they would acknowledge it right out and discuss how to merge that into the current work.
The 'less gentle' ones would take pride in pointing out the flaws in your idea if you were wrong, and if you were right, would fight you over whether it had any real value at all, then would stiff arm you as far as getting it accepted as a change.
My favourite people to work with are the gentle geniuses. I love to be wrong around them because I get to learn, and I love opportunities to present something useful I've done and know it will become a valuable contribution.
I avoid the other kind of person like a plague now. They ruin otherwise excellent teams. They might be fine to have a drink with or something, but in day to day work, they are sand paper.
Another thing I find is that the gentle variety tend to understand and appreciate realistic timelines. Highly competitive "nerds" tend to fight on timelines, or suppress others using them. Why wasn't that done sooner? Wait, all you did in 3 days was this? It's a terrible tool used to knock team mates down a peg on a routine basis.
I know, right? It is one of the greatest things in the world to be the dumbest guy in a room full of really smart, secure people. It’s like you’re getting a mini postdoc education for free, compressed into a few minutes.
It's the best thing that's happened to my career by a wide margin. I'm 15 years in and definitely not the smartest person in the room on most topics, and I'm finally moving forward and really enjoying it after quite a stagnant period.
I try to remind myself to show some gratitude, not just for my team's knowledge and insights that they share, but for having selected me as a person to join them as well. It's a real privilege to have a good team. I think they consider me more of an equal than I give myself credit for but I really do get an education pretty much every day. Life is interesting.
I have had that same experience with many people, re criticising other people’s timelines. But I don’t think that’s the kind of “fierce nerd” Paul is talking about. I rather think he’s talking about the person who is so involved in doing their own work, that they don’t spend the time to evaluate other people’s productivity.
You’re right, I guess I’m pulling other qualities in here from people I’ve known who have overlap with the type Paul is describing. It’s not exactly in line.
If I had to guess, I would guess these would often be "fierce nerds" who mellowed with age.
I think this "fierceness" is an expected sign of intellectual dominance of your peers at 15-20. At 25+, it's a sign that you've either never entered a pond with genuinely big fish, or you've never managed to recognize that big fish are swimming around you.
Of course, you could just be dominating big fish at 25+. It's logically possible. But the incident of "fierceness" is muuuuch higher than the incidence of that level of genius.
it's frustrating to me that Paul conflated fierceness with competitiveness, because I see passion & vigor & energy as very decoupled from the forces of personization & ego that this part of the thread are wrapped around, that Paul linked together.
another comment mentioned that it's a matter of tamping down the inner asshole, having self awareness. this still allows for an enormous domineering ego but supposes it can be self regulated, held back.
I feel like even that is still a radical take. fierce nerds just see opportunity in the world. they want to strike, want to seize good, promote the paths everyone else disregards as too difficult too hard top unknown, to say, let's really find out. fiercely try. try to learn if we fail & try again next time too. thw competition is not with each other, not about who; it's a competition against mediocrity & safety & fragility. a competition to collaboratively find excellence & further truths.
you should remain fierce. there are not many other real big fish on the sea. most folk have narrow windows of experience, limited views, & your nerdly bigger picture takes of the fierce are direly needed. especially when we don't attach ourselves to the try, when we are all aligned to try greatly & learn & adjust as we go, with fierceness, but without ego.
Maybe factors in someone good at something being humble about it includes:
* Confidence of not needing to prove something to themselves.
* Comfort with their situation, aka not needing to prove something to others -- for practical reasons, separate from validation of own security/insecurity. (In your Bell Labs example, having gotten into there, getting to do the kind of work they want, presumably having sufficient respect of others for a pleasant environment, not feeling like they have to fight their way to opportunity and respect.)
* Intellectual humility that comes with experience, having realized how easy and frequent it is to be mistaken.
* Maybe differences of personality wiring. (I know nothing of the psychological research, but, anecdotally, there seems to be variation among people in how problem-solving interacts with emotions, for example, and maybe how that affects their interactions in that context.)
Also, taking a step back, I don't know how good our perceptions of humility. (Of course, different people express themselves differently, which I suppose affects perceptions of those people's humility. And maybe, when we're characterizing humility of others, we're usually basing that on perceptions, rather than some more objective criteria.)
* Perhaps, humility from knowing how much you don't know. The older I get, the bigger the circle of what I don't know grows. I now know that there is no way in my lifetime I will be able to learn even a tiny percentage of all that I would like to learn. It is humbling to learn how little you really know, no matter how quickly you acquire new knowledge.
Thank you for bringing up humility. Can't believe he got through this entire post without once mentioning it. Says as much about the author as it does about the world in which fierce nerds operate.
Humility is simply not seen as a virtue in a business environment anymore.
Career coaches teach you how you can get ahead and to be confident.
But having knowledge also means you know about your limits, so your only option is to pretend to know everything.
It can be useful to convince people with low tech literacy of your solution, but I don't think confidence is a good metric. It is basically a dysfunctional form of communication.
Yeah, it's remarkable to me that this article could be written to provide advice to "fierce nerds", and not include a single sentence about not being an asshole.
I work with "fierce nerds". Some of them are self-aware, and try very very hard not to be assholes to the people around them. They do this without sacrificing their passion. And they are tolerable to work with only because they consciously push back against their inner asshole.
It takes a lot of effort in some areas to stay calm and allow the other side to play out their argument, and I recognize how critical it is in maintaining a positive attitude towards work.
I find that minimizing unnecessary conference calls was a monumental step in the right direction. When a technical conversation is serialized through a Github issue, it tends to get a lot more thought and time applied. It is also easy to walk away from a frustrating issue, go for a run, come back, and write a much more reasonable reply than you otherwise would have if compelled to do so.
Microsoft vet from 1990s-2000: same. Got to work with many of my programming heroes, and many of the same people influencing programming language design, Azure, and .NET even now. The vast majority were a pure joy to work with, just as you describe.
> The difficult people were never stupid, far from it, but they felt like they needed to defend everything they did, every decision they made, and that made working with them less productive.
I assume the implication here is that the productive folks didn't necessarily defend everything they did, and thus went with other people's solutions sometimes even when their own was better? Is that what you're trying to convey? or should I be reading it differently? Curious how their behavior contrasted in your experience.
I interpreted this differently. My takeaway was that the abrasive ones constantly defend everything they do, even when it’s not necessary, and the gentle genius doesn’t feel the need to be defensive at every step.
It doesn’t have to mean that the gentle genius never defends their viewpoints, but highlights the key differences in how these personality types operate on a day-to-day basis, and the resulting impact on the team around them.
"Fierce nerds" can be valuable. Sure. But the folks who truly stand out in my mind are a level higher. They're the ones at the top of their game, who know how to demand & command excellence, without being jerks about it.
I'm reminded of this episode of "The Chef Show" where Jon Favreau compliments Roy Choi behind his back. He tells Bill Burr that he had followed Roy around for a full day, going to all his restaurants and food trucks, and not once did Roy raise his voice to his staff. It's pretty cool to see how much admiration one artist/leader has for the other, not because of their technical skills but because they choose to be kind.
I don't think we need to settle for being "fierce nerds".
> "Will you be clever at the expense of others, or will you be kind?" -Jeff Bezos
That an interesting read, thanks.
I struggle to square what Bezos is saying with what Amazon has become. He is clearly incredibly clever but appears devoid of any kindness toward his low level employees. Am I missing something?
That's the feel I get from reading Brad Stone's "Amazon Unbound" .There were multiple instances where Bezos appear devoid of kindness towards employees.
E.g
'...In 2009, Onetto’s human resources deputy, David Niekerk, wrote a paper titled “Respect for People,” and presented it at an S-team meeting. The paper drew from Toyota’s proven Lean ideology and argued for “treating people fairly,” building “mutual trust between managers and associates,” and empowering leaders to inspire employees rather than act as disciplinarians.
Bezos hated it. He not only railed against it in the meeting but called Niekerk the following morning to continue the browbeating. Amazon should never imply that it didn’t have respect for people embedded in the very fabric of how it operated, he said...'
"...Among the final straws for Onetto was a September 2011 story in the Morning Call newspaper in Allentown, Pennsylvania. The paper reported that the company’s warehouse in the Lehigh Valley had gotten so swelteringly hot that summer that workers were passing out and being transported to nearby hospitals by ambulances that Amazon had waiting outside. An ER doctor even called federal regulators to report an unsafe work environment..."
"...Before the incident, Onetto had presented a white paper to the S-team that included a few paragraphs proposing to install rooftop air-conditioning units in Amazon’s facilities. But according to Niekerk, Bezos bluntly dismissed the request, citing the cost. After the Morning Call article drew widespread condemnation, Bezos approved the $52 million expense, establishing a pattern of making changes only after he read criticism in the media. But he also criticized Onetto for not anticipating the crisis.
Fuming, Onetto prepared to remind Bezos of his original proposal. Colleagues begged him to let it go, but he couldn’t. As they anticipated, the meeting did not go well. Bezos said that as a matter of fact, he did remember the paper and that it was so poorly written and ambiguous that no one had understood what course of action Onetto was recommending. As other S-team members cringed, Bezos declared that the entire incident was evidence of what happens when Amazon puts people in top jobs who can’t articulate their ideas clearly and support them with data..."
"...Bezos didn’t want another empathetic business philosopher to replace Onetto as the head of Amazon’s operations; he sought an uncompromising operator..."
Sounds like a very one-sided story based on an interview with Onetto and nobody else...[1]
> people in top jobs who can’t articulate their ideas clearly and support them with data..."
That IS a legitimate problem. Through the lens of Hindsight, and based on an interview with Onetto it's easy to retell this story as "Bezos was told upfront, had all the available information upfront, and chose to do nothing until it was too late."
But another way to present the same story is "Onetto didn't articulate the importance of his ideas. Did not present data to support it. And it led to a catastrophic outcome."
I'm not saying the latter interpretation is correct. The truth is somewhere in the middle - probably closer to the original telling of the story. But the key is that good ideas are useless unless you can convince the right people of them. Ultimately, Onetto did not convince Bezos of his ideas. The blame for that can't rest solely with Bezos, because clearly there is ample evidence throughout Amazon's history that people can convince him, and situations like this are an outlier.
I actually think this is worse for Onetto because the "one-sided story based on...Onetto..." has Onetto extolling high abstract ideas for the ostensible wellbeing of employees when he obviously needed to be presenting hard cause and effect realities to his boss and caring for employee welfare directly on the ground. If you are discussing the lives of warehouse workers I just don't see how it's being responsible to spend your time writing academic papers only possibly able to affect very much more privileged employees if at all.
> > "Will you be clever at the expense of others, or will you be kind?" -Jeff Bezos
> I struggle to square what Bezos is saying with what Amazon has become. He is clearly incredibly clever but appears devoid of any kindness toward his low level employees.
That seems perfectly consistent - he chose option A.
Are you only believing what you read in the media or do you know people that actually work at Amazon? The fact that Amazon employees in a warehouse rejected unionization speaks volumes. And I know plenty of Amazon engineers that love working there.
To put it in perspective, there may be employees that hate working at Amazon, but there are also 100,000 employees. If only 10% of the employees hated working there, that's still 10,000 employees. But a 90% satisfaction rate for any company is amazingly high.
I've only once had an employer I would describe as kind. Even then, it was but for the generosity of an aberrant manager, and not a commercial institution.
In most low-skill positions (especially the ones which favor physical labor over soft-skills), you are a body to be instrumentalized until you either leave leave or are disposed of. That's the reality of most work. Retention is as high as it needs to be to ensure continuous operations, and employee happiness is either incidental or primarily a slogan. The human element is made to be as irrelevant as the market will allow.
The Amazon Warehouse workers I've known have described it as warehouse work. Little better or worse in their experience than working at any other distribution center, though some centers are naturally likely to be ran more poorly than others.
Once you have achieved significant status and money you no longer need to be fierce since people listen anyway. But most people worth listening to doesn't have significant status and money, instead we wait until they found their own companies and become rich before we listen to them.
This may be true for you, but not for me. I listen to many people who are not well known, and who are not rich, and who arae not startup founders. For instance, none of my friends are rich startup founders, neither is my partner, nor my therapist, nor my coworkers, yet I consider all their opinions valuable (more so than the rich "fierce nerds"). Most of the podcasts I listen to are not run by the rich and powerful, either.
It is true for society in aggregate, which is why big companies often loses to small startups on their own strong points. That should be basically impossible if the big companies were anywhere close to rational, but as we know such things happens all the time.
I find this ironic coming out of Jeff Bezos. There are plenty of examples of people that are exactly opposite of what you describe as. Steve Jobs - massive jerk, but demanded and commanded excellence. I don't personally condone this type of personalities but they exist. Linus Torvalds is another example. There is much more to it.
> He tells Bill Burr that he had followed Roy around for a full day, going to all his restaurants and food trucks, and not once did Roy raise his voice to his staff.
Sorry what are you trying to say here? It's admirable or difficult not to yell at your employees?
That still doesn't mean that not yelling should receive any sort of admiration. You don't get bonus points for doing what should be the bare minimum, regardless of what the current norms are.
I don't see why not.
Should the anti-slavery campaigners of the 1800s receive no admiration, despite social norms at the time, because vocal opposition to slavery "should be the bare minimum"?
What about companies now that go out of their way to make sure none of the workers in their supply chain are exploited? That should be the bare minimum - should we ignore the effort that they've gone to?
What about a family member who's been clean from drugs for 10 years? Should we celebrate with them, or just ignore their achievement because not being addicted to drugs is pretty much considered the bare minimum by broader society?
Man, who would have thought "not yelling at your employees isn't an accomplishment" would be controversial...
> Should the anti-slavery campaigners of the 1800s receive no admiration, despite social norms at the time, because vocal opposition to slavery "should be the bare minimum"?
Not even close to the same. This case would be like admiring all the people that happened to not own slaves. Congrats?
Anti-slavery campaigners were doing way more than the bare minimum. No one lost their lives over just not having slaves.
> What about companies now that go out of their way to make sure none of the workers in their supply chain are exploited? That should be the bare minimum - should we ignore the effort that they've gone to?
Not even close to the same. This case would be like admiring the factory manager for not exploiting their employees. Congrats?
> What about a family member who's been clean from drugs for 10 years? Should we celebrate with them, or just ignore their achievement because not being addicted to drugs is pretty much considered the bare minimum by broader society?
Maybe if yelling at employees was incredibly physically addictive.
Literally my whole point is that you all are saying, "Wow, it's so admirable that you're not a piece of shit!".
I am 100% for real.
Everyone is a piece of shit in one way or another - and rarely do people stop being a piece of shit until some sort of external judgement/pressure is applied.
The fact that this guy refused to shout at his staff, even though he was in an environment where shouting at staff is completely tolerated, is an admirable and frankly rare trait.
It shows he actually cares about other people, rather than doing what is socially acceptable/beneficial to himself.
Since pg's essay is of a psychoanalytic nature, I'll reply in a psychoanalytic frame, for the sake of conversation, not criticism. [Protip: never psychoanalyze anyone! This likely applies even to psychoanalysts.]
During the last year or two pg has written more than a few essays and tweets which appear to be of a defensive nature. People like him contribute more than other people, it's alright to to be fierce, can't speak the "truth," etc.
Whenever there is dichotomous thinking, cognition has moved away from clarity. If it were me, I'd be asking myself, What is being defended? (This kind of question can be a multi-decade inquiry.)
Although most of us are easily baited into self-justification or self-promotion, I think going down that path it is ultimately a distraction from doing real work and knowing who you are.
PG, if you asked him, might describe himself as defending people who do real work from a larger culture that all too often prioritizes serving the status quo over accomplishing the goals that the status quo was established to accomplish. One example of that would be SpaceX doing the launch vehicle design work that the NASA/Boeing/Big Government Contractor complex was established to do. At the same time, SpaceX works its people extremely hard and is lead by a billionaire with abnormally unsophisticated PR. So there you have cultural and business forces set against a new company that has nothing going for it except the fact that it actually does stuff. Actually doing stuff is a surprisingly small advantage in a world that is interested in so many other qualities.
I would like people to stop believing that this is a real example, at least around here (I'm close to a few NASA missions). SpaceX was selected by NASA for some lunar lift services, and everyone I know is quite excited by US's expanding lift / launch capabilities. I think that I and those around me exist in these roles to serve the needs of the nation and priorities of congress and the scientific community, and will use any tools at our disposal to do so.
Other companies may fight this, sure, but stop throwing NASA (an exploration agency) in with those who would benefit from suppressing SpaceX.
SpaceX + vendor-agnostic NASA contracts are a world away from the cost-plus launch vehicle design projects with heavy involvement from NASA engineers that got us to the moon, built the ISS, and also spent a long time going nowhere once the corruption caught up with the system.
I'm not close to any NASA missions at all, so this is just my take.
It seems clear that NASA is more happy than not about what SpaceX is bringing to the table. Any model that spins a NASA-vs-SpaceX narrative is confused and wrong. I think that's an agreement with your point.
But when you look at what SpaceX is operating in opposition to, whether it's cost-plus bids, or closed contracts for various launch services, etc etc, NASA has been very much a part of that whole system.
So, my point is, it makes sense to talk about SpaceX's model vs the model of "the NASA/Boeing/Big Government Contractor complex".
Why can’t we have both? A job where we can “actually do stuff” without getting mistreated by psychotic billionaires. There’s a lack of compassion in tech.
Assuming you are in the US: I’d say that, if anything, tech is a fantastic little bubble when compared to the rest of corporate America. We, the “nerds”, exert a level of control over our work/careers that is unparalleled in other industries. We have plenty of opportunities available if we dislike our current situation. Tech companies provide excellent benefits and compensation. Maybe only doctors have the same level of mobility/compensation.
You will always be mistreated by someone if you work for a corporation. We have it easier than almost everybody else, really.
Speaking as someone who has come to my tech career later in life (and after another career), this is absolutely correct. All industries have their problems: software is no exception, there are things that could be better. There are bad days, even bad months.
But at nearly 6 years in I still wake up every day amazed that I get paid as much as I do to do this thing that I really enjoy. With overall reasonable hours. Without having to deal with the general public. Considered an asset despite the fact that I cost so much and write bugs. And with people banging on my door constantly to get me to work for them. I feel extremely fortunate.
Maybe there is something wrong with our society that tends to cause organizational dysfunction and make it hard to do stuff. Perhaps it takes someone seriously atypical (maybe a little psychotic) to manage to build an institution that can actually accomplish things at scale in this environment. If there are 10000 well-adjusted bureaucrats standing between you and your aspiration to build electric cars and rockets, it will take some serious force of personality (a personality disorder?) to defy all of them.
I'm speculating, but perhaps with all the YC IPOs in the past year they are now liquid billionaires, and he is thinking it through, out loud, via essays, which is how he figured out things from Lisp to startups to investing?
> Protip: never psychoanalyze anyone! This likely applies even to psychoanalysts.
Underrated advice. Psychoanalytics helps with self reflection, not with reading minds.
I can recommend Erich Fromm "Fear of Liberty" these days, because it describes many dilemma we face today. Might be interesting if you can see some effects he describes in yourself or others.
Psychoanalysis should be eaten with a pack of salt though. I think it vastly more fitting to model behavior than what writers from the field of psychology produce these days, apart perhaps from advertisers.
This is a deep topic worthy of an essay, the kind of essay pg might write! The concise reply is, when you catch yourself in dichotomous thinking, you should assume you have misunderstood or oversimplified.
Sometimes you have to go with your misunderstanding or oversimplification to make a decision or to make progress, but keep in mind you are doing so based on beliefs which are unlikely to correspond to reality.
It's striking that so many mental health difficulties are characterized by dichotomous thinking. [1]
Rationality itself can be profitably critiqued at the meta-level.[2] So, don't be an asshole, unless you need to be. Do you see the world as consisting of assholes and non-assholes? How does that feel? What are the advantages of that view? What are the disadvantages? Is considering that question worth your time?
You can't see anything in this world without dividing things up. That's how your senses (sensory inputs plus processing plus cognition) work. So this version of "clarity" seems hard to achieve.
Maybe just settle for "try to limit the extent to which your cognitive biases and priors shape how you think the world is". You can't reduce them to zero, but you can reduce them a bit.
I agree on the practical level, which is pertinent here.
It is possible to experience non-dual consciousness in high concentration states. [EDIT: For many, this experience is a milestone in psychospiritual development, which undermines the habit of dichotomous thinking.] Awareness and perception aren’t the same thing. Way, way off the subject, but your main point stands, be mindful of priors.
> Protip: never psychoanalyze anyone! This likely applies even to psychoanalysts.
Beside your point, but wondering if you could expand on this.
I have a tendency to do this, and while it's fun, I'm starting to get the sense that it's a bad habit, possibly because I sense I'm overly confident on something that might be 100% wrong and it feels... invasive?
I've asked myself the same question. While I don't go as far as "never", I do it much less than I used to.
Thinking this way can certainly lead to worthwhile and actionable insights. But I think any skilled amateur will overestimate their abilities. Therapists build their insights on top of huge amounts of biographical information that they gather in intense, concentrated sessions. Their observational skills are trained, and they use them to gather as much information from posture, tone, and expression as they do from narrative. Even if an amateur's observational skills are good, they won't have the right context (the session) to gather that kind of information. So the amateur will be lacking in both theory, and information - compared to the pros. And yet the amateur often has more confidence than the pro - leaping at the first theory that "clicks", not considering alternatives, and with an unwillingness to revise.
The next pitfall comes if/when you decide to act on your insights. And once you have those insights, it becomes tempting to act on them. Then, when you do act, you're almost by definition being manipulative. Your behavior towards the other person is no longer a straightforward reaction to what they're sending your way, but is instead following an agenda constructed to fit a diagnosis that is unknown to them. If they knew what you were up to, they would most likely object, even if your agenda was "for their own good." At best it's paternalistic. Therapists do act on their insights in opaque ways (and often screw up despite all their training) but the particulars of the patient-therapist relationship resolve the ethical violations that us civilians are likely to stumble into.
So, I would say that the tendency to psychoanalyze needs to come with heaps of humility, openness to revision, and a reluctance to act on the resulting insights in 9 out of 10 cases.
"Therapists build their insights on top of huge amounts of biographical information that they gather in intense, concentrated sessions."
Agreed with all of your post, I think this is the most crucial point here. Genuine, skilled psychoanalysis is less about being some master discerner of psychological motives, and instead being very good at giving the subject of analysis a lot of psychological safety to express their innermost thoughts and most personal life experiences. Unless you build that kind of (responsible and professional) intimacy for lack of a better term, you're largely just projecting imo.
Not OP, but as someone who holds this view (who also used to engage in the practice): a lot of armchair psychoanalysis is based less on a genuine understanding of the other person's life and circumstances, and more on the assumption of what their life and circumstances must be combined with a surface-level knowledge of psychoanalytic practice.
Armchair psychoanalysis ostensibly seeks to understand the subject of analysis, but rarely makes the effort to first understand the subject on their terms or in a way where they can articulate their own experience; instead, someone usually has their presumptive conclusion about the subject in mind ("they're just doing this because they haven't gotten over being bullied as a kid" or whatever), and tries to wrangle the limited information they have about that person into their conclusion.
I think you have to detach to get value out of it -- not "what's the reason this person is like this" but "what are three different mechanisms by which a person might become like this". A bit like how a history student of a certain level isn't asked "why did WWI happen" but "contrast the materialist and post-revisionist explanations for the origins of WWI".
I see what you are saying. I mean the topics do have something of a defensive nature. Though arguably PG could just be making a valid point on topics that are contentious and widely misunderstood
I see the description he puts forward as essentially fitting contrarian types.
Speaking as a contrarian myself, I think the biggest challenge / trap is it's easy to point out things that are wrong or stupid, but tougher to do anything positive about it. I think this equates to the idea about avoiding becoming bitter.
Also, something he missed, and the curse of the contrarian, is "the market can stay irrational long enough for you to lose all your money". This happens all the time with unorthodox ideas, you can be right but if the mainstream doesn't shift in your favor before too long, you get ignored, discredited, or worse. I'd argue this is a bigger problem now, there is more polarization and a shorter feedback cycle so ideas get shot down and people fall out of favor much more quickly. Popular but wrong ideas, once they have "network effects" are much stickier than they once were. All this is tougher on the contrarian, or "fierce nerd".
The biggest problem facing contrarians is how more people are people stake out contrarian positions for the express purpose of building personal brands, despite any genuine conviction. A contrarian used to be dependably passionate. Now it's just another tool for audience building. As such, all contrarians now have an uphill battle of gaining trust because not only do you have to convince people of your views but you also have to convince them you're not just some charlatan on their latest grift.
In the tech world, it also seems to stem from insecurity (I'm sure many here have held their tongue in meetings when someone with little experience talks well above their level of competence in the subject).
Fwiw, I have the opposite perspective (maybe because I used to be one of these people!). All of the people I've worked with who go out on a limb in technical discussions and engage with their technical seniors are independent-minded and intellectually curious. Anybody can reason (albeit not as well) about a system they're working on, and a good team is able to foster this type of growth in their more junior engineers. This includes knowing ones limits, but does not include being perfect at knowing ones limits from day one.
I'm not convinced that it's a bigger problem now. In many ways, the ancient world was much stickier. A king could have a bad idea, and it could persist through generations before it falls to better ideas.
Are we talking about the Bronze Age, or about the early '00s?
In the '00s, before the FAANG giants had arisen, I would say things were more dynamic than they are now, and there was more room for smaller players.
If we're talking about the Bronze Age then this is a different conversation entirely. Then there was more continuity in each place with the past, but more difference between different places.
I’m not convinced that there was “more room for smaller players” in the ‘00s, the mobile switch created a lot of work for small players. The desktop-web atrophied a bit, particularly in areas where FAANG expanded, but the web and IT as a whole continues to grow and create opportunities for small players to emerge.
>This happens all the time with unorthodox ideas, you can be right but if the mainstream doesn't shift in your favor before too long, you get ignored, discredited, or worse. I'd argue this is a bigger problem now,
If I'm understanding you correctly, he doesn't miss this. He addresses it directly and comes to the opposite conclusion.
> The good news is that your fierceness will be a great help in solving difficult problems. And not just the kind of scientific and technical problems that nerds have traditionally solved. As the world progresses, the number of things you can win at by getting the right answer increases. Recently getting rich became one of them: 7 of the 8 richest people in America are now fierce nerds....In the past century we've seen a continuous transfer of power from dealmakers to technicians — from the charismatic to the competent — and I don't see anything on the horizon that will end it.
Im sure all of us see ourselves in this essay, in part because it's ego catnip. But this part resonated very strongly with me. I was in my early 20s when I realized how crucial it was for me to work somewhere where my work was measured as objectively as possible, which has finally led me to hone in on small/mid-sized co applied research[1] as the path that fits me.
It's definitely my perception that the world supports this more now than it ever used to. You can't ignore people skills entirely, but the path to success through technical work instead of management has never been better (eg the IC ladder at my co easily goes up to $1M/yr).
> Popular but wrong ideas, once they have "network effects" are much stickier than they once were. All this is tougher on the contrarian, or "fierce nerd".
I'm not convinced that this is __worse_ than it once was. There's too much heterodoxy, too much pluralism, too low barriers to entry, and too much opportunity for the quiet dissenter to build their niche and wait out the irrationality longer than they could ever have dreamed in the world of 50 or even 20 years ago.
[1] driven by well-defined problems instead of product people's beliefs about the market, or the politics and bureaucracy of academia. It's actually been very useful ground for me to practice my political skills, since the impact of rubbing people the wrong way while figuring it out is heavily mitigated by the clear and measurable impact of my work.
The first rush of comments are all negative, mostly of the ad hominem sort, accusing PG of publicly psychoanalyzing himself. And yet, I really liked the essay because it reads like a lifeline to those who doubt themselves, perhaps profoundly. To PG the same qualities that alienate a "fierce nerd" in so many contexts are precisely the same qualities that could lead to success (even dominance) in other contexts.
The useful follow on to this essay, I would think, is to give a list, as long as possible, of places where "fierce nerds" are wanted, demanded, needed - both well-known institutions and startups.
Another useful follow up would be to give better advice about achieving harmony. Everyone deserves peace; to put it another way, progress that requires a human to sacrifice love isn't worth making.
>The useful follow on to this essay, I would think, is to give a list, as long as possible, of places where "fierce nerds" are wanted, demanded, needed - both well-known institutions and startups.
This article promises "how to deal", but all it delivers is a list of difficult stereotypes, prefaced by reasons you are not allowed to disagree with the stereotypes, and never discusses how to deal with them.
> And yet, I really liked the essay because it reads like a lifeline to those who doubt themselves, perhaps profoundly
Do they? I mean one of the define characteristics is an overconfidence in themselves.
I think PG is trying to justify some kind of assholish behaviour in his past by reframing it as a virtue.
Really, I think the “fierceness” is incidental. Do immensely successful people need to be somewhat competitive? Sure. Do they have to interrupt everyone, lack social awareness, etc? Probably not.
I went to school at MIT with tons of people who had world-class intelligence, productivity and even accomplishments, but imposter syndrome was still rampant.
Even if someone happens to be exceptional at everything you choose to do and thus have confidence, they can only do so many things. And that means that for every thing they are exceptional at, there are a thousand things where they are unimaginably outclassed by others. MIT was awful for that.
For me personally, the more I learn about my areas of expertise, the more I realize how clueless I am about so many other areas. But if the knowledge of your general cluelessness makes you timid outside of your domain of expertise, it limits how much you can accomplish.
Also, I didn’t really read ‘fierceness’ to mean ‘assholeness’. I’ve been around some people who had ideas that they desperately wanted to see out into the world. They were fiercely passionate and they did have a tendency to interrupt, but they definitely weren’t assholes.
> I think PG is trying to justify some kind of assholish behaviour in his past by reframing it as a virtue.
I couldn't help but read part of it as a response to/rationalization of the recent pushback he (and other "fierce nerds") have been receiving lately...the former underdogs are now the establishment.
The bad news is that if it's not exercised, your fierceness will turn to bitterness, and you will become an intellectual playground bully: the grumpy sysadmin, the forum troll, the hater, the shooter down of new ideas.
I think "shooter down of new ideas" is getting unfairly lumped in with those other actually-bad traits. If there's one thing a lot of "idea guys" and optimistic entrepreneurs tend to lack and need, it's a skeptical partner who keeps them grounded in reality. Someone who is experienced, seen it all, constructively critical. Someone who will say "Wait a minute, this was tried in the '80s, and it won't work. Maybe try this instead." If you lump "people who push-back" in with haters and trolls, you're going to end up surrounded by yes-men.
The tech landscape is littered with failed projects that could have been stopped early if the idea person had a sounding board that keep him/her realistic.
Absolutely agree. The best and most creative environments I have worked in have been full of people who you could turn to and say "What if we did X?", and they would immediately come up with reasons that X would fail or be impossible. If your idea hadn't been absolutely annihilated after 5 or 10 minutes of this, it was probably pretty decent.
Yes, it is true that new ideas need criticism. However, if one is almost always critical of new ideas, especially ones that push beyond your wheelhouse, then that is a problem because you'll never innovate. PG lumps it with haters and trolls because that's what being a negative person entails. The point is the extremity. There is nothing wrong with being a hater, proportionately, as you can only love something if you hate its opposite.
Wow this describes me to a T. My parents were constantly praising me and making me feel like a genius. Yet in the real world I'd estimate I'm around 120 IQ. So definitely not genius level.
It's almost like a positive form of gaslighting which unfortunately still has negative consequences like you've pointed out.
Is there a clear definition of self-doubt that doesn’t overlap with underconfidence? Because if the terms we’re using are so broad that a person can both be described as overconfident and underconfident, then as I say elsewhere this just looks like cold reading.
People are really complex systems, they don’t just have one emotion, even at one time. I know several people who seem to swing between overconfidence and self doubt, sometimes very suddenly. Maybe some will eventually settle in the middle. But if someone has something in their psyche that just keeps pushing them back into an overconfident mindset, then it’s hard to see how they wouldn’t also experience regular injections of humiliation leading to growing self doubts over time.
It's the difference between feeling and acting. A person can feel a lack of confidence and feel doubt and still act confident or overconfident.
Lots of people, like artists, visionaries, and weirdos who make strides to live a unique life have to act confidently to get to that life yet many also have a lot of self doubt. They just do the brave thing to move ahead with their vision even though it could likely end in failure. For many it does, whether they are remembered posthumously or not.
I’m not saying you can’t be both under- and overconfident. I’m saying that if you’re using terms so broad and vague, you could probably describe anyone that way.
If we really want to go in this direction and criticize other people calling famous tech businessmen assholes, at least give credit where it's due - Jobs deserves this much more than Gates. Gates documented unethical behavior was mostly against other companies, not so much individuals, with a few notable exceptions.
I doubt Jobs--who died nearly ten years ago--was as likely a trigger for this essay as Gates, who is currently in the daily news due to his alleged bad behavior.
On the other hand, Gates' recently reported "bad behavior" seems to be largely stuff like infidelity and inappropriate sexual relationships which is not what the essay touches on at all. Jobs' assholery is exactly business & engineering related in the way that PG is talking about.
That's a pretty good description, and many of the posts here are about fierce nerds with petty issues which I think the essay is not about.
I've grown into that fierce nerd. Being in forced conscription in my 20s has made me wary of the 'wait to rush for nothing meaningful' culture. Then I joined companies and it feels like a ton of my time is wasted by processes, norms and ideologies. I did break out once to try and make a business but that hasn't worked out. So now I'm in employment just to earn/invest to have enough for a certain level of financial independence and I'm feeling that bitterness rise up again.
I'm very likely destined to burn out of industries/companies that aren't my own quickly, and this could cascade into bad looking resumes. It feels like a do or die situation sometimes.
Being an ordinary success is fine too. Been there, done that, more than once. Being fierce worked sometime and not others. Found the sweet spot in some companies, fired in others. Moderate success as a consultant (made a living for 7 years), failed at other business(lost a years salary). Learned how to write resumes out of that pastiche so I am still working on nerd stuff 3/4 time, enough to save money, leaving me time to play with other fun nerd stuff.
Heard a "rockstar" lamenting he would never win Grammy because of his niche but was not unsatisfied with the 60 year arc of his career.
Retrospectively, I see I could have been a contender several time but me then (brash) nor me now (wiser, possibly) could have been capable of elevating myself from a working nerd to a famous rich nerd.
>Then I joined companies and it feels like a ton of my time is wasted by processes, norms and ideologies.
I work in biotech and I smiled when I read this. The entirety of our business relies on people following processes, norms and ideologies. Once the "thinking" stage is done - the rules and framework are now in-place. You need to trust them and follow through to produce results for the company.
In tech so many nerds are constantly sharpening their tools or creating new ones and chasing some mythical 'perfection' that they lose sight of the results - the thing that matters the most to the company. Being entirely result oriented has changed my outlook completely, and made me a happier person. I am much more respectful towards people who produce actual results using any tools rather than judging someone who uses Java or Perl or whatever other language/tool that is not the flavor of the month. And working in biotech has made me value long term reliability over everything else. The single most thing that is important to me is that the tool be reliable and ready for me to use to produce results.
There are plenty of people in the tech industry who abhor any process, norm, or ideology (most often, especially if it’s not one they created). I don’t think it’s uncharitable to simply take the comment at its word, and adding an implied “excess,” “unnecessary,” or whatever constructs a different—and more ambiguous—argument to comment on.
Have you done mine prodding drills over 50 square meter fields? Sure it'll fulfill some superior's KPI but it's not very useful nowadays with all that modern military equipment. A good majority of these prescribed processes, norms and ideologies just aren't useful in the individual's growth.
Sounds like an excellent analogy: "We've been doing all these mine-detecting drills, but nobody ever gets blown up. We should stop doing mine-detecting drills." It's wise to take advantage of changes, but it's also wise to ensure that you're not taking down Chesterton's Fence[1] without knowing why the fence was put up.
Some processes, norms, and ideologies exist for reasons that aren't obvious. It's often not difficult to find somebody to explain them to you, but you have to be prepared to genuinely listen to the answer. It's easy to be impatient when you see them as getting in your way, and the first explanation you get may not actually be a very good one. (If you don't know why the fence was put up there's a good chance others won't either -- but that doesn't mean that an unsatisfactory explanation implies that there isn't a satisfactory one.)
That does slow you down, and that's hard when you're not the one who gets harmed by violating those norms, processes, and ideologies. But that doesn't mean nobody gets hurt, and such harms have a way of making society around you worse though mechanisms you don't see -- even though they do end up affecting you, too, eventually.
Joel Spolsky used the dilemma of being ambushed on a minefield (to make a different and almost orthogonal point) in a way that illustrates how norms that are not individually useful -- or even rational -- can be essential for group survival. [1](https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2006/08/08/the-command-and-co...)
A ton of his time his wasted by other people trying not to waste their time. If we all just agreed to do everything his way, it would be a huge time saver... for him.
> And moreover it's clear from the story that Crick and Watson's fierce nerdiness was integral to their success.
I dare say PG's analysis of the psychology of Crick & Watson is correct, but one should not take only Watson's word for it about the source of their success. Rosalind Franklin was the first to observe the double-helix structure, a fact omitted from Watson's book.
Very much agree on not taking Watson's word for it. As for Franklin, it would be nice to think the Nobol committee would have agonised long and hard had she lived long enough to make it an issue for them (given at most 3 people can share a nobel, her early death ruled her out - a fact often ignored).
> Fierce nerds also tend to be somewhat overconfident, especially when young.
I wonder if that statement is overly specific. AFAIK, young people in general, or at least young men in general, have a reputation for being overconfident.
Maybe it's because I'm living in a latino country, but it certainly seems like men start with too much confidence since teenage years, and slowly brings it down so everyone stop calling them arrogant, then there is their appropriate level. While for females (again, at least here in this latino country) it's the opposite, they start off being super humble and careful, and while growing up gaining more and more confidence until finding the right level.
Of course, this is a broad generalization, but seems to fit where I'm living right now, but it's all anecdotal as it's based on my own perceived view of things of course.
Sounds right in line with my experiences and exposure to the "Machismo" portions of many Latino cultures. I always brought this up to my far leftist friends who tried to pretend that the cuban revolution was somehow good for the LGBT minority of Cuba. LOL you think that they abandoned machismo just because they got a hammer and sickle? They call queerness "capitalist decadence" there...
I think the "fierce need" / INTJ archetype the author is describing takes it a step above that of young men in general when it comes to overconfident / arrogance. And I agree with the author in that it's related to independent-mindedness. I can reflect on memories growing up where other young men were much more "in tune" to the group. They more intuitively understood the social cost of adopting an unpopular position. Or they just had the sensitivity to know that a position or statement wouldn't be well-received within the group. Or they just valued social harmony in general more than accurately representing what they believed to be true.
That's a bit different than when I think of young men in general being more confident than they ought to be. It has more to do with the goal: status within a group vs putting effort into finding what you believe is true and accurately representing that truth potentially at a social cost.
It's a fact that all humans are overconfident. That's why we have biases that make us confident in what we "know", and make us reject information to the contrary even if the information is factually accurate.
The overconfidence is not a trait endemic only to male "nerds".
Of course, it's still helpful to concede that humans should recognize and be aware of that weakness in themselves. Overconfidence is the reason so many spend the healthy end years of their lives so much less well off financially than they spent their healthy prime years. It behooves us all to be on guard against our overconfidence.
Using James Watson as an example is an interesting choice.
When I think of James Watson, I think of someone who a) stole his major work (the one thing for which he is famous) from a woman without giving credit, and b) has been almost-literally cancelled for being consistently racist, also by his colleague-science-nerds who consistently report that they don't like him.
Not someone that I want to celebrate for being a 'fierce nerd'.
Interestingly, Rosalind Franklin herself may have been something of a "fierce nerd":
> From the outset, Franklin and Wilkins simply did not get on. Wilkins was quiet and hated arguments; Franklin was forceful and thrived on intellectual debate. Her friend Norma Sutherland recalled: “Her manner was brusque and at times confrontational – she aroused quite a lot of hostility among the people she talked to, and she seemed quite insensitive to this.”
I didn't see it as defending sexism. It was more pointing out the hypocrisy of Apple for firing Martinez while selling and promoting 'Beats by Dre'. In both cases the creative works were well-known before the hire/acquisition.
Pointing out that hypocrisy is a strategy some took with criticizing Apple, but it's not the direction PG chose. [1]
He said nothing about Dre, focusing entirely on saying "He's a good guy, actually", which is the epitome of the strategy taken by men historically to defend other shitty men.
That's not "defending sexism" per se, but it is excusing sexism because of the content of someone's character. "Sure he said sexist things but he is not sexist". It does not pass even the most baseline level of scrutiny.
I think it's also worth saying here that the comparison to Dre is super irrelevant:
1) Musicians may write lyrics in the first person, but the general default for all musical content is it's "fictional", and not representive of their personal views on the matter. It's artistic license with ideas - occasionally problematic. That is not the case with "autobiographies", which is what Antonio's book was purported to be.
2) Dre has taken complete ownership of all of his past indiscretions and apologized for them [2]. Antonio double down.
Which is a poor critique considering Martinez would be working directly with other Apple employees while Dre is barely involved with Apple as far as I know. The issue isn't the creative work alone, the issue is the impact on fellow employees and the working environment.
The idea that Watson "stole" his major work from Franklin is absurd. Franklin was on a completely different track and thought Watson & Crick's approach was a dead end.
If you're going to be this sort of fierce nerd, make sure you come from money, because you're getting fired if you pursue these traits in the workplace.
FWIW, this isn't my experience at all. There's a difference between being an asshole and the contrarian bent+ relatively-minor rough edges Graham describes. The essay touches on this, by saying that it's become a lot easier to thrive as this sort of person than it used to be. In particular, you need to find your way to a field and role where results matter more than glad-handing and ego-stroking, and where the subjectivity and discretion of measuring those results is minimized. This used to be vanishingly rare, but in my perception (and experience), it no longer is.
In my case, my fatal flaw career-wise wasn't abrasiveness or asshole-ish behavior, but a strong aversion to promoting my work or any of the other non-goal tasks required to advance in an organization. I hate every minute I have to spend making it clear that I'm productive instead of just _being_ productive.
However, this is almost unavoidable in most organizations that aren't tiny. You either have to "manage your brand" and play politics, or you have to make sure that you're fitting a squishy, inherently-subjective rubric. At a bare minimum, you need to craft a presentation of your output at performance review time, and hope your interpretation of the rubric matches the decision-makers'.
My solution was to find a company with fairly objective and well-defined measures of output[1], where there's more than enough impact to go around. You can't avoid having people skills to get things done, but I don't mind using my people skills in service of getting shit done instead of internal organizational BS.
[1] This does not mean that we're tolerant of assholes. We've fired people for being pathological "brilliant jerks", though everyone I've come into close personal contact with is well above the jerk bar. What this does is separate "are you toxic in a way that hurts your coworkers or the company" from "what is your output", allowing people who are awkward and well-intentioned to thrive on one axis and grow on the other. This is in contrast to the usual case, where measuring output is polluted by interpersonal skills that are not related to output, and being awkward means your work isn't recognized either.
> It's hard to be independent-minded without being somewhat socially awkward, because conventional beliefs are so often mistaken, or at least arbitrary. No one who was both independent-minded and ambitious would want to waste the effort it takes to fit in
Or maybe you keep quitting jobs, because you are the precocious one who can always see why things aren't working well long before anyone else. Yet nobody wants your feedback because it's too something. Too fierce, or scary because it's predictive, or they're just annoyed that you have no social skills.
And socially maybe the people at work can keep you in check without firing you, because you can't respond well in a socially-clever environment for example, no matter how amazing your insights.
This essay feels like it really panders to the reader.
It excuses poor social skills, tells you that you too can become rich by simply "getting the right answer" and that it's the best time ever to be a nerd.
I don't buy it. The only way this makes sense is in hindsight if you're massively successful. Otherwise you're just the weird person who has poor social skills and is obsessed with "solving problems".
Although questionable as a psychometric test, he is describing the Myers–Briggs INTJ [1] or INTP [2] personality type here. In terms of the Big-Five [3], I would suggest: Moderately-high Openness, High Conscientiousness, Average-to-Low Extraversion, Low Agreeableness, Average-to-low Neuroticism.
I have found the MBTI to be useful despite the empirical inaccuracy of the test itself. Even without taking the test, people can self-identify as one (or more) types. This then serves as a meaningful basis for discussion as well as raising awareness that people are deeply different in terms of their ways of thinking. It is quite an eye opener the first time you see someone self-identify as a personality type that is very different to your own.
None of the personality theories are 'proven' of course. We won't get that until we have a fuller understanding of the brain. But it is well accepted within psychology that personality is a thing. And personality types (Big 5, MBTI, etc) are useful models for now despite their shortcomings.
That's an interesting article but I just have a few questions about it. How would someone exactly prove that a certain theory in a field as subjective as psychology to be true? What kind of studies would prove the usefulness of something like MBTI? While I agree it does limit people to certain binaries that aren't necessarily always 100% accurate, I have found it to be fairly accurate myself and think it describes people to a decent degree of accuracy.
I think the problem with Paul Graham's writing is that it always comes down to talking about getting rich.
A lot of people - including very intelligent people - have other things they'd rather do than play such a stupid game. Unfortunately the world is pushing everyone in that direction which will create a lot of bitterness because most people necessarily lose that game.
I'm inclined to agree, but in fairness to Paul Graham I'll note that one of his essays I think relates back to your point.
His observation was that even if you aren't trying to do things for the money and just want to solve some problem, a lot of times the only practical option is to form a company. Maybe that isn't always true, but at least it seems plausible. He also notes that not chasing money can have advantages: craigslist isn't a charity, but they run it like one. That makes them pretty hard to compete against.
Exerpt:
> Back when I was working on spam filters I thought it would be a good idea to have a web-based email service with good spam filtering. I wasn't thinking of it as a company. I just wanted to keep people from getting spammed. But as I thought more about this project, I realized it would probably have to be a company. It would cost something to run, and it would be a pain to fund with grants and donations.
> That was a surprising realization. Companies often claim to be benevolent, but it was surprising to realize there were purely benevolent projects that had to be embodied as companies to work.
> I didn't want to start another company, so I didn't do it. But if someone had, they'd probably be quite rich now. There was a window of about two years when spam was increasing rapidly but all the big email services had terrible filters. If someone had launched a new, spam-free mail service, users would have flocked to it.
I still fail to understand how we've organised society so that the losers of a particular game don't eat. It's virtually decoupled from helping other people with stuff (which is what the economy purports to represent); you have old money, and nth-generation new money, and people working two jobs to afford rent.
“Invest” in the stock market in X way, and you can stop working earlier – that is, if you had enough savings to do so.
You've presented a false dichotomy. There's a lot of room between "get rich" and "don't eat." I'd wager that most software developers fit very comfortably between the two.
I agree with GP's dislike of Graham's emphasis on getting rich. There's more to life.
It's not a dichotomy; there are plenty of people who are doing okay. But there are definitely winners, and definitely losers, and it's a game for some and survival for others.
The “fierce nerd” sounds a lot like what Reed Hastings (Netflix, Founder) calls “brilliant jerks.” To quote his recent book:
> Sometimes really talented people have heard for so long how great they are, they begin to feel they really are better than everybody else. They might smirk at ideas they find unintelligent, roll their eyes when people are inarticulate, and insult those they feel are less gifted then they are.
At Netflix, they say “no brilliant jerks” because they will “rip your organization apart from the inside”.[0]
A lot of this sounds like justification for a brilliant jerk’s behavior. While it’s tempting to take the “fierce nerd” badge and wear it proudly, ferocity can turn into jerkiness pretty quickly.
We're not talking about people who disrespect waitresses.
fierce =/= jerk. There are many well intentioned nerds who try their best to be considerate and kind that can't help but be impatient in technical discussions. Some organizations don't tolerate that and some do, and those who do are at a natural advantage.
> We're not talking about people who disrespect waitresses
Right, we’re not. We’re referring to behavior in the workplace.
> There are many well intentioned nerds who try their best to be considerate and kind that can't help but be impatient in technical discussions.
This is true, but I don’t think that accurately describes pg’s definition of a “fierce nerd” in the article. Also, Netflix would probably still classify someone like this as a “brilliant jerk”. Maybe they would give this nerd a chance to change their behavior, since it’s unintentional.
> Some organizations don't tolerate that and some do, and those who do are at a natural advantage.
These days, no one could confidently make the claim that Netflix has a “natural disadvantage” in this respect. They have the strongest technology in their market and have no lack of talent in any of their technical departments.
Companies that win have top talent, but this talent needs to be able to work with the team effectively. Whether you want to use the term “jerk” or “fierce”, if a team member is being disrespectful to other team members then the team breaks down.
To young "fierce nerds": The single best piece of advice I got for dealing with normals was, "Act like a dumbass and they'll treat you like an equal." (from the Book of the Subgenius.)
- - - -
There's a lot to unpack in this essay, some good some bad IMO.
One thing I feel is worth mentioning: I don't think the cure for bitterness is success, I believe it's helping others.
Particularly so when placed into a position where help is expected, but then immediately rejected once delivered. It's the sort of double bind that makes for a toxic environment -- you must assist others; if you don't, you will be accused of hindering and hoarding, but if you do (no matter how generously, politely, and tactfully) you will be accused of patronizing or interfering.
It might do for you, and I'd say it does for me a little too (i.e. If I get the answer in less than one google search I need to take a breather because I'll get annoyed), but I have come across people who are just as clever/nerdy/knowledgeable (take your pick) who really derive pleasure from teaching and explaining things in the best way they can - so I wouldn't assume.
> Another solution may be to somehow turn off your fierceness, by devoting yourself to meditation or psychotherapy or something like that. Maybe that's the right answer for some people. I have no idea.
I do, and I think you should invest in these things (not "devote your life", PG shows his deep ignorance here of these things as though they are black and white). if you are in the overwhelming vast majority of "fierce nerds" that does not become a billionaire, or even if you do, you will invariably have a lot of problems in social situations and close relationships until some investment is made in tempering this extreme sort of personality.
> But it doesn't seem the optimal solution to me. If you're given a sharp knife, it seems to me better to use it than to blunt its edge to avoid cutting yourself.
PG encouraging people to be emotionally unhealthy so that they can add to his pool of talent for him to profit from. The fierce nerd, great term btw, is ambitious and brilliant. they can do all of these things at the same time. It might just cut down the full on "become a billionaire" mindset, but that's a good thing, since it's unethical to be a billionaire.
Yeah this part was especially disappointing given pg's influence, and I think this is one of his weaker essays because the advice is not well thought out. If you have a chip on your shoulder, are insufferable, can't shut off aggressiveness, etc, the best thing you can do is learn when and how to channel it. That's the missing piece.
I know a lot of people that fit this mold, and for this type of personality there's nothing that will meaningfully dull the edge [1]. But, if they learn how to control it, they can avoid cutting their friends and themselves, and live a much happier life.
The last thing this world needs is more emotionally stunted leaders alone in their suffering.
[1] This point in particular seemed like pg engaging in pure speculation, not something based on specific examples
I have some good news, and some bad news. The good news is that your fierceness will be a great help in solving difficult problems. And not just the kind of scientific and technical problems that nerds have traditionally solved. As the world progresses, the number of things you can win at by getting the right answer increases. Recently getting rich became one of them: 7 of the 8 richest people in America are now fierce nerds.
starting one of the 10 most successful businesses of the past 2-4 decades business vs solving a problem are not the same thing though. Problem solvers on average do not make that much money. Look at all the problems solved everyday on stack overflow/exchange. How many of those ppl are making lots of money. Same for freelancing sites. The rates are pretty low. making money means a lot to PG, but it's a separate type of skill than solving problems. It is something that is probably harder in many respects because it requires not only solving problems but making money from it, which means competition and other aspects of business.
I think we should confine this to the primarily US setting (and maybe parts of the English speaking world like Canada). In most of the rest of the world being top in academics is expected from everyone especially to pass standardized tests (the only way in many countries) to get into universities. The poor outnerd the rich fiercely so that they can step up. The rich try to nerd so that they can maintain their privilege.
There are no secret backdoors (like athletics) for the rich in the public schooling and university realm that exist in most of these countries. In essence everyone is a nerd or trying to be a nerd.
In the US system, one could make the argument that elite legacies and the fencing team help the manufactured diversity and lower the “nerd” (achievement oriented) “toxicity.”.
A study abroad for just a semester would be an eye-opener for many of us on the normalcy of nerdness in many societies. Most parents hope their kids become doctors, engineers etc.
I think what you're describing is undergraduates. In the US we don't typically say that undergraduates are academics. Usually, people who are academics will complete a masters and/or PhD where they do independent study and publish a thesis. Afterwards, many of them hope to stay in academia for life, or continue their work as a researcher in a private organization.
Academics have to go through undergraduate programs too, but most non-academics end their education with a bachelor's degree simply to help them get a (typically) non-nerdy job.
Other countries have students who study harder than Americans, for sure. As someone with a multi-ethnic background, I find that students in lesser developed countries have fewer options in their future so they study hard as a student for the chance to make it out of poverty. Students in highly developed nations don't worry as much because they think they have a decent standard of living waiting for them regardless.
I don't think that (for example) India has dramatically more nerds than (for example) America because being a nerd is driven by your personality. Nerds genuinely enjoy studying <x> in particular and they find ways to do just that. Nerds can end up as doctors or engineers but typically nerds aren't primarily motivated by careers. I think you notice this difference in the wide prevalence of cheating in poorer countries. Non-nerds feel the pressure to study but they're not actually interested in the work so they cheat to get by. Cheating exists in America too, but there's less risk of falling into poverty so students who aren't interested in a subject will more often accept a low passing grade.
"I have some good news, and some bad news. The good news is that your fierceness will be a great help in solving difficult problems. And not just the kind of scientific and technical problems that nerds have traditionally solved. As the world progresses, the number of things you can win at by getting the right answer increases. Recently getting rich became one of them: 7 of the 8 richest people in America are now fierce nerds."
It's good that we've gotten past the tedious "solving society's problems" blather.
"If you do choose the ambitious route, you'll have a tailwind behind you. There has never been a better time to be a nerd. In the past century we've seen a continuous transfer of power from dealmakers to technicians — from the charismatic to the competent — and I don't see anything on the horizon that will end it. At least not till the nerds end it themselves by bringing about the singularity."
Isn't Graham a dealmaker? Isn't that exactly what Y Combinator does?
And given Graham's comments about inequality, why am I ambivalent about the singularity of the fierce nerds?
PG hacked the VC system so he didn't have to be a dealmaker. YC has standard terms so there's no haggling on price, pro rata, board seats, or anything else. They've automated a lot of what they do via software and their network. And because of the content they put out and the reputation they've built, founders from all over the world come to them and accept much worse terms than any normal VC would offer.
The big question is whether this leads to better overall outcomes.
If the company fails, or is aquihired by the skin of its teeth, it doesn't matter which terms the various rounds offered when.
YC is perceived as offering a greater chance of success, a combination of being plugged into a large network of alumni and having the halo effect which comes from getting into a cohort.
As long as that perception is there, founders will keep taking the deal. If that perception is accurate, then they're smart to: and the terms aren't worse than any normal VC would offer, they're better.
So there's a lot riding on that being true, which I have no special insight into. Having to guess, I suspect it's less true than it used to be.
The terms are worse in the sense that they're at a much lower valuation than most VCs would offer, not that it wasn't a good deal for the startup. Almost every YC alumni I've talked to believes it was worth it.
After reading some of his books, essays and hearing people talking about him, I think Graham is first and foremost a nerd and hacker, the other stuff is secondary. At least that's how it looked before the last couple of years, his view on things seems to have slightly changed recently, so not sure anymore actually.
He certainly started that way; his Common Lisp stuff is interesting, although I don't usually agree that it's the best approach. But as far as I know, the only technical thing he's done since selling Viaweb is ... this forum. You apply to YC for money and for contacts---exactly what dealmakers do.
I think "Hackers & Painters" was after ViaWeb as well, a book I'd consider technical. I'm sure there are more technical things he been doing since ViaWeb also.
I think the idea is that some people are naturally dealmakers, and the whole idea of YC was technical-minded people taking over the job that would normally be done by social-minded people and doing it better.
Same with artists; the ones who became famous or at least successful in their lifetime were good at making deals. And self-promotion. The ones who could not fit in socially, not so much.
”There has never been a better time to be a nerd. In the past century we've seen a continuous transfer of power from dealmakers to technicians — from the charismatic to the competent — and I don't see anything on the horizon that will end it.”
I think the continuous transfer is in nerds learning how to be dealmakers, not in some magic power shift to nerds.
George Westinghouse was an inventor. So was Thomas Edison. You can think of both as “fierce nerds” in my book.
Surprisingly, I'd argue that athletes are an example of fierce nerds. I think people vastly underestimate how nerdy top athletes are. They're people willing to devote their entire lives to obsessively analyzing a single game. Somebody like Jordan had to spend hours, days, years of their life just constantly shooting a ball at a basket. Not to mention the obsession with meta and strategy.
We like to see people like Jordan or Kobe as normal people who happen to be really good at basketball. I disagree. They're nerds who happened to do a profession that doesn't seem nerdy to the public.
Once, the YouTube "algorithm" led me to video featuring a bodybuilder that explained that being a professional bodybuilder = being a professional eater.
To bodybuilders (and I assume, also athletes), eating in a methodical and structured way is an important part of their job. The guy grew his own vegetables and spent a lot of time selecting food at markets, ate at very specific times, etc.
That, combined with supplements, experimenting with different training regimes, etc... it's a lot of experimentation and certainly there's a lot of cognitive work behind all of that.
This is especially true in endurance sports. The level of competition is so high now that now one can succeed just based on talent and grit. In order to win you need to understand physiology, psychology, nutrition, aerodynamics, equipment maintenance, etc. Elites even run their own informal private scientific experiments with detailed data analytics to determine empirically which techniques deliver the best results.
One of the traits of top footballers in the modern game is that their teammates are pretty much - and keep in mind these are already some of the best players in the world by a long way - in disbelief of how hard and how efficiently they train. That's how Cristiano Ronaldo is as good as he is at an age when many have already retired.
Jordan is an incredible athlete and an incredible person. Not long ago a friend sent me a recording of Jordans last game against the Jazz, and man, I was seriously impressed at his tactical prowess. Two really amazing teams playing a game of human chess with some might and force of will mixed in was awe inspiring all over again. Watching Jordan rise to the occasion on top of that gave me goosebumps. I'm quite proud to have grown up watching his games.
By redefining anyone who has worked very hard and enjoyed success as a 'fierce nerd', you make the term meaningless, and the supposed payoff from being one into a tautology.
I think there’s a difference between the sort of subject-matter-preference driven obsessiveness that characterizes nerds and the one-of-the-few-visible-though-high-odds-of-failure-ways-out-of-a-miserable life that drives a lot of black kids to a focus lots of time and energy on basketball.
Very odd comment. Jordan and Kobe did not grow up miserably at all. Jordan grew up in a stable middle-class home and Kobe's dad was an NBA player-turned-coach.
I don't think they were talking about Jordan or Kobe specifically. There does seem to be a kind of seductive lie (not just in black communities) that sports or other long shots are a viable career path for the dedicated kid. Where I grew up, there were plenty of kids who believed they would be famous basketball players one day as a matter of fact, skaters who believed a fat sponsorship was in reach if they just got that kick flip down tight, even culinary artists who think they can join the ranks of the rich by catering their private dinners.
It's probably the same with startups -- most startups fail, mine included, but either we delude ourselves into thinking that it's just a matter of putting in enough effort, or we are in situations where we really can't see any other option to escape the gravity well of our situations. Not so far off from someone obsessively playing ball to try to get out, except for the broader applicability of the skills gained if the long shot doesn't pay off.
For me, as much as I am competitive, I feel like it only drives me when the odds of what I am competing for feel somewhat fair.
To give an example, a lot of my friends have been into Magic the Gathering for many years, and I recently tried to get into it myself, but the asymmetric gaps were too large for me to enjoy it -- they had way more knowledge, more cards, had spent more money, and had more time to spend playing outside of work hours, resulting in me getting crushed again and again.
There was two options I could take: 1) Try to catch up on years of accumulated knowledge, or 2) Change tactics, and see if instead I could play a game we all were more similarly matched with. I chose the latter.
In entrepreneurship, I feel like it's no different. For me, fighting a large startup on common ground is a losing game -- they have the money, the manpower, the knowledge, the social proof, and more. As competitive as I am, and as hard as I push, it's not going to be a fair fight to begin with. So instead, it's about me finding a battlefield where the odds change more in my favor -- perhaps something that doesn't scale, something I have innate knowledge in, etc.
Not sure if that lines up perfectly with what PG is saying here, but it's worked well for me.
[1] To be a nerd is to be socially awkward, and there are two distinct ways to do that: to be playing the same game as everyone else, but badly, and to be playing a different game. The smart nerds are the latter type.
PG probably agrees with you, as that's the first footnote from his article above.
>There's also a natural connection between nerdiness and independent-mindedness.
Is it, or it's just an anecdotal projection from PGs own experience ("I'm nerdy and I consider myself independently minded, also know a few others like that").
This is just extrapolating from the diminishingly small number of nerds who are also SV entrepreneurs.
But historically nerds (e.g. 50s and 60s "propellerheads") were just working for companies and research labs as employees, and mostly on what they were told. Most still do exactly that.
Socially also many nerds otherwise follow the herd and "try to belong" with the "cool people" (often in vain).
> Most people think of nerds as quiet, diffident people. [...] In fact some nerds are quite fierce.
That someone would think nerds are not competitive is, to me, the strangest thing about this article.
Perhaps because I'm one, but whether it's Magic the gathering, Demoparties, rubics cube solving, chess, Counterstrike LANs, academia, or any of my tech jobs, every "nerdy" activity I've ever engaged with has always been overly competitive.
The fact that so many open source projects have had to adopt "code of conducts" is IMO a direct reflection of the fierce competition that has always been inherent to software development. Whether it's code quality, clever hacks, optimization... everything about what we do has a competitive element.
Come to think of it, I can't actually think of any nerdy activity that isn't, in practice, extremely competitive.
It is probably because competition is so commonly attributed to physical athletics. Physical strength or stamina exhibited on the playing field is competition.
Spelling bee competitors are seen positively, but also almost as a joke compared to quarterbacks. Mathlete? A joke in popular culture.
There is some evidence that this is changing, but there is also a lot of bad art. The Social Network, and Steve Jobs the film portray fierce nerds that basically no one wants to know.
The actual people?
Zuck and Dorsey just got through extracting maximum advertising value from the heart of US democracy.
Bezos hasn't done fierce nerds any favors with his squeezing of the lowest paid people in his organization.
Bill Gates' reputation is headed downhill right now faster than ever before.
Tim Cook has real potential. But the jury is still out. We do not know the calculus involved in compromising privacy values in China.
It is going to take a lot more well-known, rich, fierce nerds that also manage to round out their personality before we see mainstream positive portrayal and following of competitiveness in intellectual exercises.
I think its mostly due to the diffusion of what a "nerd" is. Being a "nerd" or a "geek" used to be a insult, now its trendy for some reason, and seems to mostly be a term for modern consumerist culture (buy lots of stuff in some sort of genre and be a nerd)
> The fact that so many open source projects have had to adopt "code of conducts" is IMO a direct reflection of the fierce competition that has always been inherent to software development.
This is something that has bothered me about a lot of people's views on competition, whether it's sports or business or whatever. Being competitive does not have anything to do with being an asshole.
I never got into trash-talking during games. It was always just easier for me to ignore it/use the other person's trash-talking as their own distraction against me running circles around them.
And then in software, Code of Conducts are not covering anything about how the project interacts with other projects. They're covering how contributors treat each other within the project. You're not in competition with your project mates. The sorts of harassing and belitting behavior that CoCs are supposed to address (whether they do or not is a different discussion) comes about from some sort of glory-hog mentality that is ultimately anti-productive. Insert roll-safe meme: "If I drive away most of the other contributors, my own efforts will be a much bigger proportion of the overall whole".
> Perhaps because I'm one, but whether it's Magic the gathering, Demoparties, rubics cube solving, chess, Counterstrike LANs, academia, or any of my tech jobs, every "nerdy" activity I've ever engaged with has always been overly competitive.
I think that is little bit you choosing very competitive things to engage in. People who were obsessed with start trek for example did not build competitive societies. And I worked in multiple teams that did not felt overly competitive to me at all.
Through, I would not see Counterstrike nerdy at all. This sort of games is more of the most stereotypical guy pastime that exists.
I enjoy reading Paul Graham's musings on nerds / nerdiness, but I can't help but have difficulty relating.
Maybe it's a generational thing (born in '92), but Graham often seems to paint a picture of nerds similar to what you might see in movies and TV shows depicting the 80s, like the kids in Stranger Things.
Even this article, while I can certainly conjure which of my friends growing up were the "fierce nerd", it still feels a little disconnected from my reality.
For example, Graham begins by explaining that the concept of a fierce nerd is one unknown to the general public. But I'm not sure I agree. In the era I grew up, there was not so much social distinction between who is a nerd, but there was a lot of social distinction for those who were argumentative, or "fierce". In my experience, everyone knew who the "fierce nerds" were (although not by that name), because they were known for their awkwardness and combativeness - not for their nerdiness. Indeed, my own nerdy friend circle in high school spanned a wide range of popularities and I would say "fierceness" (or rather, lack thereof) was probably the best indicator of popularity.
I see these themes spanning Graham's other musings on nerds, typically trying to characterize a class of kids who are hated for their interests and passions, but that's just never been my experience. I think it's a generational thing.
Same, born in 92 and his characterization of being nerdy and young seems super antiquated. “Nerdy” interests don’t make you a social pariah, they transcend groupings all together; the star quarterback plays dnd, the head cheerleader builds robots in her basement, the stigma on having unique or “nerdy” hobbies and interests is mostly gone. When I think of what PG is describing, it’s characterized by poor social skills and bad hygiene.
I'm just five years older than you and strongly relate to these descriptions of being a nerd, having academic interests not shared by young peers and consequently caring very little for social games. Even in adulthood, unless I carefully choose who I hang out with. And I'm from Europe, not the US, so it's not a thing local to the US either.
If it's truly a generational change, that would be a very interesting development. Especially if it happened in just the five years between when we were teenagers - I had no impression that people a few years younger than me had a wildly different experience than me. But I could certainly be mistaken.
Do you find no familiarity at all in these descriptions? Meaning some of the following - Being more interested in reading than gossiping, liking technical projects more than team sports, being uninterested in popularity contests and social status games to such a degree that you barely care about losing them, prioritizing learning over number of superficial acquaintances, having ideas and thoughts that you assume to be true but for which you experience lashback for stating out loud. Potentially experiencing some loneliness or hostility over this, not necessarily making that part of your identity, eventually seeking a small number of like-minded folks...
Has the world really changed this much? From my perspective, it seems likely that you're just not the target demographic for this essay.
I knew many people who fit that description, but with even a little social intelligence it seemed to me their experiences in highschool were pretty great; they weren’t nerds, they were just smart and studious and many were very well liked. Our homecoming king was on the academic decathalon team. Im not saying that smart, introverted folks with underdeveloped social skills don’t exist, just that they don’t exist opposite to bros and jocks and cool kids (and weren’t mercilessly bullied for being themselves).
On the other end, nerd-culture had permeated all levels of the social strata, and my very popular friends who partied every weekend were also semi-pro halo players and avid anime fans and didn’t hide either of those facts.
It’s only six years, but it could have been wide exposure to the internet? Also very possible I’m seeing the past through rose colored glasses.
There is a pretty wide variance from school to school, town to town, and state to state/country to country. Maybe you were in a particularly well-adjusted school, and other schools and communities are still more judgmental of non-blessed interests? Or maybe the nerds remain, but they had different interests from the new main-stream. I'd hardly call Halo a nerd thing, for example.
Maybe it was a well adjusted school, or maybe it was a school in which achievement culture and college application stacking and reverse engineering had fully run their course. After all, 'well rounded' on paper people get into elite colleges, and people from elite colleges have a better shot at becoming rich. Nothing less nerdy than wanting to be rich.
How old is PG? Born in 1964, so age 56, according to Wiki. I'm from the same era. Being young and nerdy in the '60s and '70s was pretty isolating.
Computers weren't available until the early '80s, and weren't affordable for another decade, so few kids had easy access to them, and networks didn't arise until about 1990. So if you were born before '80-'85, you had a tough time rallying around tech toys with other nerds/geeks to share your enlightened world view.
Stewing nerds in their own juices through adolescence tends to foment fierceness, which is just another word for not understanding or tolerating non-nerds very well. With today's omnipresent social connectivity, isolation should be less a problem in 2021, since tech content and cool devices are everywhere today.
What I would have given to play around with RPi or robots in my teens...
I can tell you as someone that graduated college in 92 that being nerdy as a kid in the 70s/80s it was very different from that, at least in my area of the world (Midwest USA).
If you want a not very distorted glimpse of what it was like watch the movie, "Revenge of the Nerds".
In that movie, nerds publicly sexually harass and worst their enemies girlfriend. Yes, girlfriend mocks him at one moment, but the response is ridiculous. Are you sure you want to claim that is how things actually were?
Edit: in the movie nerds sell secretly taken naked pictures of said girlfriend to earn money. The movie is old and ridiculous, but when you start to claim this is how things were, I want to know wtf was going on in your school.
stuff like that happened at my high school, and not that long ago. do you not believe that kind of thing happens/happened, or do you just not believe that "nerds" can be the perpetrators?
these kinds of events can fly under the radar if you aren't involved. I only know of the situation I'm thinking of because the girl found out and complained to the school, which ended up expelling the others involved.
I do not think the movie is "a not very distorted glimpse of what it was like".
More importantly, if movie is accurate, then nerds are no better then evil jocks. They are just two groups of bullies and assholes locked in a fight where everybody who avoids them is doing something smart.
In your school, did the girl that got her nudes public got together with the dude that took them and sold them? You can peel levels of that movie how much you want, you won't get meaningfull image of reality.
Where are you (or GP) from?
Im also ‘92. I grew up in California, but in a rural part of the state. Nerdy interests absolutely had a stigma. My high school didn’t even have a CS class, no academic decathlon team, and certainly no robotics club. It was the “best” school in my district, too.
In challenging or AP classes you had essentially two groups, the jocks, who were trying to follow a college track, for which sports were essentially requisite in our district, and the nerds who just liked learning stuff. The jocks(male and female) did their homework as a group, complained loudly about difficult tests/assignments and consistently used their relative influence to affect their grades. The nerds brought in their own lessons, asked questions that lead the class off topic, consistently read the textbook and stayed late to ask questions rather than negotiate.
Anyway, thought I’d throw this anecdote out there for variety.
I was in a semi-rural suburb of San Antonio, Texas. We had a CS class, our academic decathalon team team placed 6th in state (I was a C but placed 3rd in individual), and I took a lot of AP science and math so I spent a lot of time with the top people in our class. It was… a great time. Non-AP classes were hit or miss, but AP physics C, calculus B/C, and art history were some of my all time favorite school experiences. I feel very lucky to have had the time I did.
You're a bit young then. I'm a decade older, and see very clear similarities in my age cohort to what he's describing, particularly when I was in my early 20s and teens. Which is interesting, because a good theory of behavior is not limited that tightly in time.
If there are star QBs that play DND (somehow I doubt there actually are that many) this is just proof that DND has gone mainstream and is therefore being commercialized as nerdy while actually not nerdy any more. This is known in some parlances as 'nerd-chic'.
I think after the dotcom craze, it stopped being "edgy" or "different" to be passionate/ambitious about technology. If anything, it's the most straightforward thing to pursue ideas or business interests with these days, especially if you have a "fierce" personality.
To be fair, there's a lot more to the "nerd" archetype than just technology. But, from my experience, it was not particularly edgy or differentiating to be passionate about video games, board games, card games, literature, obscure TV, fanfics, internet culture, etc.
there's a lot more to the "nerd" archetype than just technology.
I'd probably go as far as saying that technology (or at least practical technical skills) has become far less relevant as a 'nerd' marker.
Many of the self identifying 'nerds' I meet might be avid technophiles, but it's not like most of them know how to code better than anybody else (or at all in many cases).
Is the word "geek" no longer used for what you are describing? Although there a lot of overlap, I thought nerd referred to strong interests in academic subjects and geek referred to niche cultural subjects.
True, I've been conflating the two in all of my posts. As far as how they were used when I was growing up, the distinction tended to be moot because they were most commonly used ironically or jokingly.
Yeah... if anything that seems normal these days? Many young adults are passionate about at least one of those things, whereas for Gen-X (Paul's generational cohort) those were far more underground interests.
Paul Graham himself muses in this post that the main contrast is between people who are "good at making deals" and those who are actually competent in some relevant domain. We can see this shift happening in politics as well.
The two group categorization is a rhetorical device commonly used everywhere, throughout the world, to help drive a point, worldview, or allegory home. In it's correct form, it is never intended to be a dichotomy (as this would make it fallacious).
So perhaps the way to understand it is PG believes people fit in these two groups, but those are not the only two groups you fit in, and they are by no means all-encompassing.
It's kind of like, you are either a member of team red, or team blue. You may be a blue type of person, another is a red, but that by no means defines the entirety of your being.
Let's try to have a little more good faith here, when trying to understand people's musings. The reality is, most of us here wouldn't have the courage to put our thoughts and opinions out there on the internet for the whole world to see, at least not to the extent PG does.
The reason that 4 quadrant divisions of the world seem like they always work is because any two vectors chosen at random in a high dimensional space are nearly orthogonal with high probability.
If one were suitably cynical (and independent-minded, another of his bugaboos) one might suggest that it's always been "the kind Paul appeals to" and "the bad people".
The article is an attempt of classifying people into neat groups with certain characteristics, without acknowledging their true inner personality as a result of the cultural background and the particular individual qualities. "Nerd" is one such classification, "fierce" is a sub-classification. Semantic word-play with little empirical or anecdotal evidence.
Well, we could certainly speak to the difference between those whose emotional needs are served by sharing their advice with the world, and those for whom they aren't.
I’d take PG more seriously if he actually had to work to maintain his flock. Folks who struck it rich in the lottery talk about how suddenly everyone wanted to be their friend.
I’ve been rummaging around the human experience for 41 years, applying technology to problems at public uni and big corp, building houses, growing food, hunting, earned degrees in electrical engineering and math.
To me that’s all there is, to go do directly.
All this feels like is someone who is riding off that lottery ticket.
That is, I’m not seeing an information advantage. Just a political capital advantage.
I thought we did away with allegiance to unelected political agents?
There's definitely some eccentric people in the field, but a vast majority people I've met working in tech were hardly the Poindexter type characterized in these articles
> Maybe it's a generational thing (born in '92), but Graham often seems to paint a picture of nerds similar to what you might see in movies and TV shows depicting the 80s, like the kids in Stranger Things.
Graham's characterizations of nerds reminds me of the "They don't know" meme[1] guy.
The punchline was that, IIRC, it's an Electron app.
Also PG and others were evidently very upset that, aside from just laughing at the obvious humor of the situation, lots people expressed wishes—for a bunch of reasons; e.g its most viable business models all seem to involve spying or other shady behavior; it's just a bad sign for where the Web is at so it would be sad to see that become normal—that the company doesn't do very well.
I don't see the point in inventing some arbitrary social category, when it's only backed by what seems like little more than speculative drivel.
> Another solution may be to somehow turn off your fierceness, by devoting yourself to meditation...
Huh? Lots of highly successful and effective people (who he would probably call fierce) cite meditation as a crucial tool for increasing their focus and mental discipline. This is just a bizarre take.
A lot of this essay feels a lot like cold reading of tech workers. PG brings up the 8 richest people in America, but if you look at the top like 10-15, the VAST majority are tech CEOs. So that’s who we’re talking about here.
First, “independent-mindedness”. I’m guessing that if you survey people, approximately 95% of people would consider themselves “independent-minded”.
Then he talks about social awkwardness and intelligence. I would say about 90% of tech workers would consider themselves both of those things.
And competitiveness? Probably any CEO could be considered somewhat competitive. Just to succeed at that scale probably requires some competitiveness.
Almost anyone reading this would think "oh wow, he's talking about me!" Like you point out, his criteria and statements are vague enough that anyone would think it applies to them. Such only need to follow PG's advice - be "fierce", ie, be an asshole to people to get ahead.
I wouldn't quite equate "be fierce" with "be an asshole". My take: PG is suggesting that smart people who are formidable and stick to their guns are more likely to change the course of things. If you are overly 'kind' and allow all of your good ideas to be dismissed by others, you aren't going to be as successful. This doesn't mean you have to intentionally hurt others in the process. It could mean you take your ferocity and point it at starting your own company because you believe you have a better way and are tired of trying to convince others to your way of thinking.
I met a lot of nerds in graduate school. In my experience the "fierce" nerds weren't smarter or successful than the "nonfierce" nerds. The fierce nerds were just more insecure and emotionally immature. They felt more threatened by being surrounded by other people who might smarter or more successful than them. It threatened their identity of being uniquely intelligent. They responded by lashing out.
It may be that this source of insecurity is a driving force. But years later, when I see who is more successful I think it is the nonfierce nerds. The fierce nerds exhausted themselves with petty disagreements and arbitrary hills to die on. The nonfierce nerds were able to focus on the hills worth climbing and recruit others to work with them.
As someone who feels like this description of "fierce nerd" applies to themselves, I'd agree. I'm clever, but not particularly so. And I'm not particularly successful either. And my abrasiveness has lost me many friendships and relationships over the years too.
Perhaps it's a flattener of the bellcurve of success. If you only look at the right hand side you will see lots of fierce nerds. But you aren't seeing the many, many more who are just ordinary, annoying assholes.
Indeed, although I think it's a huge mistake to represent these failures as permanent, and bitterness as an immutable, defining characteristic of fierce, unsuccessful nerds. Not only have some of the greatest intellectuals overcome decades of repeated failure and mistakes, but we often only see one small part of their personality: the extremes that draw the most attention. This is even more true in the social media era where people are reduced to bite-sized summaries. Haters and successes. An incredibly reductive, childlike view of the business word, itself a tiny corner of humanity that gets all the attention because people love money.
I heavily disagree. Any fierce nerd ive known all know they are VERY good at what they do (in terms of some intellectual persuit) and know how to assert themselves
Maybe it’s me, but I think “fierce” has thrown a lot of people off. I would classify what you are describing as what PG terms “the bitter nerds”, not necessarily “fierce”.
As Graham says, the difference between fierce and bitter is success. And given that, in a very competitive environment, the difference between success and failure is largely luck...
>Fierce nerds also tend to be somewhat overconfident, especially when young. It might seem like it would be a disadvantage to be mistaken about one's abilities, but empirically it isn't. Up to a point, confidence is a self-fullfilling prophecy.
As a child I was mathematically precocious and often (to myself) compared my modest accomplishments to stories of prodigies like Gauss or von Neumann. Looking back it seems patently ridiculous, but I might not have spent dozens of hours per week reading math textbooks and Wikipedia if I had had a more realistic self-perception. I can't say I regret it.
Nobody who knows me would call me "woke", except as part of some joke.
But as the father of a kid with Asperger Syndrome, and as someone with a likely diagnosis myself (according to neuropysch testing), I'm a little bothered by the broad brush with which P.G. is painting.
+1, and with all due respect to PG's technical background, reductive and stereotyping pieces like this kind of feel like he's looking at the people who thrust him into his lofty VC position with contempt.
I can sort of get over all that, I'm not going to sit here and take it personally because I know it's just broad strokes, but at the same time, if it is broad strokes, there is nothing to be gained here because nothing is factual and everything can be dismissed because it is too general.
If he focused on something more defined than a vague and derogatory term for smart people in general heay have had something worth reading.
Ps. Seriously, why is the grey subtext so hard to read? Stop with grey text. Please.
Umm... just so ya know, practically everything in "wokeness" is about somebody saying "Please don't paint me with the broad brush you're using."
I think most of what you identify as "wokeness" is other people who aren't directly affected trying to help out, since the affected people are usually a minority who won't be heard if it's just them. That can lead to its own forms of tone-deafness and "you're not helping" behavior, but that just leads to more cases of people who are sincerely and effectively helping being dismissed as "SJWs" out of hand. That's a cheap way of avoiding genuine problems with one tiny all-purpose acronym.
I just wanted to point that out because what you wrote can be read like "I didn't care about anything except when it happens to me". It might give you a moment's pause the next time you want to deride something as "woke".
> practically everything in "wokeness" is about saying.... Please don't paint me with the broad brush you're using.
Err.. really? I mean, that's the definition of individualism against which many "woke" people would object. Even you say, "since the affected people are usually a minority". This is just false, if we take minority to refer to the usual "protected subgroups".
The relevant sense of Woke here, seems to me, to be concerned not with people's individual needs -- but their needs qua some alleged group. Esp., as you offer, "minority" groups.
It's a sort of perverse individualism. It's just substituting a different type of broad brush. Rather than starting with a maximally individual analysis (and hence construe treatment in terms of procedural fairness), rather, start by a group analysis and place individuals within those groups (and hence talk about aggregate distributional outcomes).
The derision here is the conflict in having to raise an issue because you are autistic, without inviting the Woke-style "and autistic people are a minority who need protected". The latter substitutes the underlying lack of procedural concern for individual needs with exactly the same problem: again ignoring individual difference expect now substituting alleged "group needs".
Woke analysis of this kind prescribes, a typically condescending, set of redresses for alleged group grievances. Individualism prescribes nothing of this sort, rather, adjusting the rules so as to maximise each person's ability to get what they each, as individuals, need.
"Don't paint me with a broad brush" means let me speak for myself alone. This attitude is antithetical to analysis which begins with "minorities", which by construction, are not people who are each individually empowered to speak for themselves.
> It's a sort of perverse individualism. It's just substituting a different type of broad brush. Rather than starting with a maximally individual analysis (and hence construe treatment in terms of procedural fairness), rather, start by a group analysis and place individuals within those groups (and hence talk about aggregate distributional outcomes).
> Don't paint me with a broad brush" means let me speak for myself alone. This attitude is antithetical to analysis which begins with "minorities",
This is, I think "just be race blind". Wokeness, as you seem to be describing it is an ideology that recognizes that identities impact how a person is perceived. To fairly judge an individual, you have to take into account that, because of their race or gender, their work may have been misvalued or falsely attributed.
For better or worse, society discriminates, and recognition of that is a part of fairly judging people as individuals.
Well I think we have to take "woke" to mean the most plausible worst version of this ideology; or else we'd just name it charitably. Ie., the OP comment is nervous about being associated with the type of thinking i'm talking about.
It's entirely fair to say that whilst accommodating and judging people individually we need to account for that person's particular difficulty in first being judged in this manner -- because we, the judger, may be unable to properly understand their situation; and likewise they may not be able to argue their case, state their need, etc.
The problem enters when we take the goal of our project to actually be removing such "prejudices and obstacles" and, not rather, the empowerment of each individual. The former is an often optional detour to the latter.
Consider, for example, the most effective civil rights president in US history (LBJ) was a racist: did we need to solve his prejudice first? Would that have done anything positive?
Wokeism, if it means anything at all, I think has to be identified with this ends-means confusion. It's raising to the status of an end in itself the elimination of (minority) group hatred, (minority) group prejudice, etc.
This a deeply confused project; and routinely gets in the way of the actual end everyone cares about: each person, in their own particular situation, being able to live the way that best suits them.
If I read the message here correctly, the woke-dissenter is saying this: "My difficulties are particular to me, and all I want is to be able to solve them. I don't want to participate or "ally" with a society-wide war against the possibility I will be misunderstood or mistreated; rather I simply want the rules (,tools, practices) in place to empower me when I am."
Wokeism is the political incarnation of New Atheism, or likewise Evangelism: first we fight a total war against The Sins of The Mind themselves; and then, much much later, we help people in their particular situations.
> Consider, for example, the most effective civil rights president in US history (LBJ) was a racist: did we need to solve his prejudice first? Would that have done anything positive?
The current iteration of the civil rights movement is solving a different problem than that of 1968. Due to LBJ's actions, minorities are equal under the law. You can't just pass laws to make them more equal. They already are.
But if you look around, they clearly aren't, so the question becomes, well why not? If you subscribe to woke ideology, the answer is something like "pervasive cultural and systemic biases across various aspects of society". I'll draw a parallel to another evergreen topic, "cancel culture". The idea being that a large group of distributed people can ruin someone's life by changing how they interact with that person and making them a pariah.
Well many of these systemic biases are similar, if less sudden. People and systems trained to see or treat people as lesser. How do you solve that problem? I only see one solution: to get the distributed group of people to be aware of and ultimately counteract those biases, to undue the incidental cancellation of these people. And what is that but raising awareness of and reducing those ingrained prejudices.
All of the other approaches are things that routinely get called "reverse-racist" themselves, things like affirmative action and such which ignore the individual.
> "My difficulties are particular to me, and all I want is to be able to solve them. I don't want to participate or "ally" with a society-wide war against the possibility I will be misunderstood or mistreated; rather I simply want the rules (,tools, practices) in place to empower me when I am."
And the response to this is that while your difficulties are particular to you, it's likely that the best tools and practices to empower you when you are mistreated are allies who are willing to stand up for you agains the person mistreating you. As in the limit, if no one believes you are being mistreated except you, you will have no recourse.
There's no law that says that PG isn't allowed to say things that make GGP uncomfortable. In fact, there's laws that say that we can't prevent PG from doing that. All we can hope for is that said mistreatment is recognized by others, and that people pressure him to correct his behavior.
Wokeness is a recognition that this is a political (in the sense of like human-interaction, not election-related), not legal issue.
I think there's a means-ends thing going on here. Everything you say here is very plausible.
The problem with Wokeism (a term I don't like btw) is the means. We all broadly agree on the ends.
The individualist things this type of change can be bottom-up (individual -> group) and the wokeist wants it to be top-down (group -> individual).
In the former case the intuition is that we aren't going to be able to solve the group problem, so starting at the group level is a waste of time and a bit tyrannical. All we can do is empower individuals who, over time, will aggregate and approximately solve the group problem.
I agree however that it has to be both top-down and bottom-up. I think wokeism as ideology of over-reaction, is towards the extreme end of that top-down approach.
Thanks for raising that point. I'm only now realizing that the term "woke" means different things to different people. I'm grateful for your correction.
I agree with a lot of what the 'woke' are trying to achieve; police reform, less bias (call it institutional racism, etc..) in government institutions, address massive generational wealth gaps, etc... but the 'woke' are mostly reductive and reactionary and are the kings and queens of painting with a broad brush.
Do you think young African-Americans lucky enough to have never had the N word used as racial epithet against them ought to ignore other parts of the community that tell them this is a very painful term and they should not throw it around causally?
What right do you have to reclaim something that was never a source of harm for you to begin with? Doesn’t that make you just another set of bullies metaphorically shoving people into lockers?
No. Generational reclamation of words is fairly common. The best examples aren't actually race (comparing how "nerd" and the n-word are reclaimed doesn't really work, for reasons that should be obvious in that I'm censoring one).
On the other hand, within the LGBT community, tons of terms have been fully or partially reclaimed. Most notably "queer". That also isn't without controversy (and queer has been in the process of reclamation for longer than "nerd" has been an insult in its current context), but almost no one seems to think that by self-identifying as something (in good faith) you're bullying someone else.
Bad words belong to all of us. I use words that can hurt, and words that have been used to hurt me.
The N word is interesting because most white people are very hesitant to utter it. It's a rare, off-limits place that isn't accessible to every person of privilege who otherwise feels entitled to go where they please.
Plus it's not as though people don't still make fun of nerds. They just don't throw the term itself around anymore. Twitter (not that we should be paying any attention to the thought pit anyway) is rife with jabs at smart/technical people and some of our more common idiosyncrasies.
The butthurt at our (collective) success is also obvious from a wide variety of sources. My gun-loving red state relatives have impressed upon me multiple times about how the high pay that engineers get and general cushy life that they get is really bad for society and that eventually when the power turns off due to a solar flare we will be essentially their slaves. There's even a comic of this exact scenario that gets posted all the time on 4chan which I cannot for the life of me find but documents this exact scenario happening.
It really sucks I guess to make 45K fixing tractors all day with demanding managers hearing all about how the person half your age is making 4x what you make by writing yaml files with basically no stress and good WLB.
The right answer to "how do I stop getting exploited" for many is unironically "learn to code" (yes, including to many of those coal miners in WV), but they HATE when you say this. Kinda sad too since most of the hate is from people that never even tried it. They seethe at our success, and would take it away from us in a heartbeat if ever given the chance. Just look at the culture war being waged against "big tech" right now.
It's misplaced anger, but that anger is valid. Not everyone can adapt nor gets the opportunity to adapt. Our society leaves millions behind, a cruelty that keeps the wheels of capitalism lubricated with fear of the same happening to you.
> The bad news is that if it's not exercised, your fierceness will turn to bitterness, and you will become an intellectual playground bully: the grumpy sysadmin, the forum troll, the hater, the shooter down of new ideas.
Can’t stress this enough. Some reach for what others have. Others reach for what they need but get trolled into thinking they have nothing and start reaching for what others have.
This is the equation for misery. And the opposite is the equation for success. But I admit this is just one dimension and datum on the look of life.
Most of us doing tech for more than 20 years grew up as a fierce award nerd.
Them somewhere aroud early 2010s being a nerd was the new cool and paid off. Tech teams had more non-nerd competent engineers, and suddenly nerds are a target for complains and a bad example of teamwork.
>As the world progresses, the number of things you can win at by getting the right answer increases.
Either that or in history there are certain junction points in which a number of hard problems arise and if you are good at solving hard problems at that point you are going to do well for yourself. After which there is a period of consolidation until the next rise of hard problems. Probably Mr. Graham wouldn't like to consider that idea though.
With descriptions of social clumsiness, being independent minded, and difficulty navigating two-way communication (when to start/stop) pg's depiction of "nerds" resonates because these traits are frequently associated with asd.
But what surprised me is that instead of washing away negative traits as part of the package, two options for the "fierce nerd" are presented:
Does anyone else feel sort of weird when Paul Graham talks about nerds? It feels like he's trying to deal with something on his end, and we're just watching him rationalize to himself.
I feel like the Gen-X terminology of a nerd just isn't a thing anymore. Being an older millennial, I fully understand what sort of person Graham is talking about, however I don't think Zoomers or even younger Millennials would describe these people as "nerds".
Also, these days if you are a smart ambitious person looking to make an impact with technology you're not terribly edgy and you certainly aren't defying any major social norms. And that's a good thing.
So what would the modern generation call somebody like this:
In 9th grade insists "I don't see the point of these classes I'm going to be a programmer," takes AP comp sci as sophmore finds it insultingly easy [gets in trouble for going ahead of teacher], resents homework vocally and refuses to do it on principle but still gets great scores on tests, places in the school math competition but initially gets kicked out of the award ceremony for refusing for the "National Honor Society" performance, 12-grade gets official permission to work half-time coding and only take half classes.
That's what I was, and I don't think anybody else has ever given me a word for it. I knew pedantic nerds, and intense nerds, and condescending nerds, but few with real conviction.
This sounds exactly like one of my friends in high school. He was not considered a nerd though. However, he had decent social skills, had a girlfriend, etc. Incidentally, he went on to found several companies!
Curious question about terminology: The word 'nerd' no longer has obvious negative connotations. It also seem to no longer apply to many folks who would have been branded obvious nerds in 2003. And vice versa - many people laughingly named nerd today wouldn't qualify in 2003.
Could the terminology just be in flux, and therefore create confusion? With woke et al., we've got pleeeeeenty of examples of smart folks who miss the social norm du jour, attempt to say something true but rather say something unacceptable. And then they get ostracized or fired.
Maybe these folks are some examples of what used to be called nerds. Do we have a name for them?
I have found a few of his essays very good, indeed expressing things I haven't seen anywhere else. I think he has provided very good advice to young people at times.
The vast majority I would say that he is trying to retcon his huge success and the success of some businesses he has been associated with into a coherent worldview. I believe that in 'Hackers and Painters' he actually goes through some back-of-envelope calculations that show that the money he made when Yahoo bought Viaweb corresponded closely to the real value he had created, in some sense.
It is baffling to me why he isn't able to say "I got lucky - I worked hard and created something very valuable, but I was also in the right place at the right time." Clearly there were special factors at play selling an e-commerce platform to Yahoo in 1998. He's also done intelligent and pro-social things with both his money and his time since then it appears. I don't know what the shame is in saying "I won a lottery - but I have tried to do the right thing with my good fortune."
I think if you asked Jamie Zawinski, who I think was no less technically skilled, nor less purposeful about working on interesting and important things (nor, tbh, any worse at writing thoughtful essays), he would readily admit to having been extremely lucky. I don't know what the difference is between these two personalities. I think I'd rather be jwz in similar circumstances.
For years I've labeled this nonsense the Midas Delusion: people get dramatically unusual success with their startup, and then conclude that they somehow have superior insight into every banal topic they choose to opine on. They fail to properly understand the path dependency and sheer luck that played a roll in their success, nor that the biggest lesson their success should teach them is humility in the socratic ignorance sense.
This is a very large number of words to essentially say "when I was a jerk in the past it was actually virtue." If you don't see that plainly and transparently I'm not sure what to say to you.
PG deserves credit for creating YC, but from the narrative in this essay it's clear he does not even understand how that happened or his own role in it (assuming he's not being straight up dishonest in his writing). He's a deal making power player, nearly a king maker, not a technocratic nerd. No amount of essay writing will erase that reality.
I am so very weary of this nonsense being taken seriously as sage advice.
We already have too many reductive stereotypes in tech. Let's not lionize them.
> I am so very weary of this nonsense being taken seriously as sage advice.
Agreed.
In fact, in the featured article, the author makes reference to the hard science achievement of Watson and Crick's discovery of the double helix structure of DNA as follows.
> And moreover it's clear from the story that Crick and Watson's fierce nerdiness was integral to their success. Their independent-mindedness caused them to consider approaches that most others ignored, their overconfidence allowed them to work on problems they only half understood (they were literally described as "clowns" by one eminent insider), and their impatience and competitiveness got them to the answer ahead of two other groups that would otherwise have found it within the next year, if not the next several months.
Pointing to this as an example of fierceness producing contrarian success completely ignores the sheer amount of luck that contributed to the timing of Watson and Crick's discovery. Given a different roll of the experimental dice, Watson and Crick's method might have had temporary setbacks that resulted in their names being relegated to footnotes.
As luck and effort would have it, two of the most ornery scientists of the twentieth century will figure as pioneers in the annals of science history.
I interpret this pretty differently, and PG seems pretty well positioned to make claims about something like this. I don't think this is so much about PG's journey as a founder.
PG has personally mentored hundreds, perhaps thousands of founders – whatever it is, a sufficiently huge sample size to identify some traits that correlate with founder success and happiness.
Sure, the truth is probably more nebulous than presented here, but archetypes can be useful.
> PG has personally mentored hundreds, perhaps thousands of founders – whatever it is, a sufficiently huge sample size to identify some traits that correlate with founder success and happiness.
However, in this article the correlation only goes one way: He's not saying that most successful founders have these traits; he's saying that people with these traits can become successful founders. And the traits he talks about happen to perfectly match his own traits?
I'm sorry, but this reads very much like someone looking at their own past, not the result of an extensive, unbiased review of successful startup founders.
I'm just so tired about people like PG and Scott Aaronson (who I otherwise respect) talking about nerds all the time. Why is everything framed in this black-and-white nerds vs. the world narrative? I'm just going to accept that this essay and others incessantly talking about "nerds vs jocks"(or the more modern Gen-Z framing, "chads vs virgins") just isn't for me.
PG is not particularly "fierce" in the way he's describing. He's talking about what he's observed in other people more than in himself. He's more laid-back and encouraging and positive than aggressive and competitive.
> If you don't see that plainly and transparently I'm not sure what to say to you.
I beseech you, in the bowels of Christ, think it possible that you may be mistaken.
Or, to say it differently, sometimes people might disagree with you, not because they're stupid, but because they know something you don't, or because you've made an error.
I have less problems with stereotyping than with the hum of a million managers patronizing remarks, like this article from PG.
I've grown accustomed to negs' (microaggressions) like these, but they do a greater injustice to actual genius. Mutual respect in a team will never be achieved when people treat others in this manner.
I agree that even PG at times falls prey to the Midas Delusion. However, I don't understand this attack on his technical competence given PG's history of starting starting a successful startup, introducing modern spam filtering, and deep-diving into lisp.
Any fierce person can be overconfident, productive, and a giant douchebag. With fierceness, you can "win" even if you're stupid. (Recent worldwide national political appointees make this a fact.) The "Nerd" part just means this fierce person lacks social awareness.
It's good to be fierce and intelligent, but it's really important to be compassionate and empathetic too. IQ without EQ is wealth without health. If you truly want to enjoy life, if you don't want to make other people miserable, and you would like other people to raise you up in good company, you need to work on how you treat and think about other people. For nerds I think this is as difficult a problem to solve as any other they could attempt.
As usual, there's a fair bit of "just so" equivocating going here (success being the antidote to bitterness stands out as especially over-rationalized, as if anyone was really wondering why the successful are so cheerful, ignorance is bliss Paul). That said, I like this essay a bit more than recent previous entries. The level of fierceness your workplace can tolerate definitely varies a lot, and on multiple axis, one of which is whether or not it's currently fashionable for people of your category to have an attitude. There's also a difference between "fierce" and "anti-social" which could be explored a bit more. And lastly, competition has been ramping up since forever, and with it comes unproductive, unnecessary fierceness and extreme focus on short horizons for everyone,even those not naturally inclined toward either, which is lamentable.
Overall though, I'd say this does describe a certain set you are likely to find in tech quite accurately, although the correlation with success and wealth probably has more to do with investment preferences than any actual operational advantage created by this behavior. Believing in the need for hyper-competitive fierceness while also having influence over the direction of funding turns it into a self-fulfilling prophecy, when the reality is that luck and timing are much more impactful. No VC will ever just admit they're playing craps, and would rather everyone believe they have special knowledge that allows them to count cards.
Paul Graham is a good writer - I give him that. But this piece can't be taken seriously. Please don't go interrupting everybody in meetings to show that you are intellectually superior.
In the essay, nerds are identified as socially awkward, not necessarily quiet but out of their element in social situations. And sure, Crick rubbed people the wrong way, because he was loud and overly-sociable. But wasn't he, by Watson's account, absolutely in his element in social situations? Isn't the main complaint about Crick the fact that he was too loud (especially his laugh), too willing to solve other people's problems?
And was Watson a nerd at all? I think the magic of The Double Helix is that Watson tells the truth (or "his truth") to a fault. That's necessary for good biography and it's very rare but I don't get the sense that Watson is unaware of what he's doing or what the consequences will be. It seems like a conscious decision to write down everything he thinks and, as they say, publish and be damned.
Anyway, I think the essay is making a semantic error here by identifying the usual heroes (odd men out, innovators, people who refuse to go along, people who do their own thing) as nerds. There's no doubt that going against the grain is almost a prerequisite for being an admirable person and also for being someone who changes the world. I just don't see that as nerdiness.
> Another solution may be to somehow turn off your fierceness, by devoting yourself to meditation or psychotherapy or something like that. Maybe that's the right answer for some people. I have no idea. But it doesn't seem the optimal solution to me. If you're given a sharp knife, it seems to me better to use it than to blunt its edge to avoid cutting yourself.
Meditation doesn't necessarily lead to a reduction in "ferocity." The Buddha was a fierce nerd, according to Graham's characterization of "fierce." He took on an ambitious goal, and made immense sacrifices to see it through. He could also be quite "fierce in his speech, post-enlightenment. E.g.
> "And to whom, worthless man, do you understand me to have taught the Dhamma like that? Haven't I, in many ways, said of dependently co-arisen consciousness, 'Apart from a requisite condition, there is no coming-into-play of consciousness'? [2] But you, through your own poor grasp, not only slander us but also dig yourself up [by the root] and produce much demerit for yourself. That will lead to your long-term harm & suffering."
I greatly dislike the emphasis on competitveness. I think that's incredidnly wrong & not at all a part of fierceness.
many who have great vast deep activation potential (belief & knowledge & could mpetrncy, long & hard accrued) do not personalize themselves so.
Becoming comfortable with ambiguity, with not knowing, with mystery is one of the finest clearest signs of intellect to me. these folk are both deeply empassioned, fierce, but receptive able to be persuaded, not decidi ares to a side or themselves. they recognize the non-zero sum nature of reality, recognize that there are many lessons & potentials for improvement everywhere. to be fierce is to be hungry, to want to find the right & true & uncover & make use of as much as possible, to learn more, see more, experience more, much of which will be tainted & not right but in those failures equally constructive & establishing.
deeply dislike some of the characterizations here, but also grateful to have some persona of some kind of integrity that somewhat resembles the mensches I still identify the nerds as being strivers for.
PG often writes about people as if they have immutable characteristics, like being mean, or a hater, or a loser, or having fierceness. It's a dull, incomplete way to look at the world that makes his writing wooden and unrelatable. Observing the world, especially fellow human beings, in such rigid, discrete contrasts would seem to drain life of any dynamism, producing a grayscale vision of reality that belies all but the most shallow information about any subject. Despite admitting his ignorance of their origins, he still doesn't hold back on suggesting motivations and life stories that might explain people's behavior. Why anyone would turn to a VC for this kind of writing baffles me, but I guess there are people out there who entertain themselves by reading appliance manuals and the like.
Though there is room for fierceness as an engine for motivation, generally kindness/understanding over bluntness/abrasiveness is the way to go for meaningful long term impact. There’s a reason, for example, why Sundar Pichai became CEO instead of anyone else. This is also an argument against Paul’s proclamation of “fierce” leaders being required for successful businesses.
Overall though, I agree with the general sentiment of the post. The end paragraph was a nice touch:
> There has never been a better time to be a nerd. In the past century we've seen a continuous transfer of power from dealmakers to technicians — from the charismatic to the competent — and I don't see anything on the horizon that will end it. At least not till the nerds end it themselves by bringing about the singularity.
Eh, as in all things 'it depends'. Sundar could not have built Google to be what it became (and he ended up running), anymore than Tim Cook could have done that for Apple. Larry and Sergei could not run what Google became, but it would not have gotten there without their leadership (As many problems as there were).
It takes different kinds of leaders to be successful in different kinds of environments/challenges. Especially early on, you rarely win by making everyone happy or following the rules. You can rarely run a huge megacorporation if you aren't a master of keeping people on message and motivated across a huge swath of expertise and experience, and if you aren't following (or making) the rules in a wider sense you're going to get stomped by lawsuits and other legal issues once you reach a certain size. Before that, you often can't make much progress if you're not willing to do that (and can often get away with it).
The list of people who can be the best effective leaders in both environments is even smaller than the list of billionaire tech founder CEOs and giant megacorp unicorn FAANGs.
Expertise with people, technology, and finances could be view as three legs of a startup. Each has their own form of fierceness. As a casual observer, it seems to me that the ideal founder formula is a fierce networker/marketer, a fierce nerd, and a fierce businessperson.
If you don't let the word nerd affect you with bad feelings, the post is pretty OK.
I don't think nerd is a bad thing to say anymore.
Also I can identify me with this personality. Last few years I can find myself turning more into bitterness and I just started realising that the cause is not external.
I like to be clear and differentiate between "dorks" and "nerds". Dorks are insufferable by definition. Nerds might sometimes act like dorks (ex: talking about bitcoin throughout a dinner), but nerds have, on balance, more redeeming qualities than the dork. There is a lot of overlap in the definition of the two[1][2]. I don't hear "dork" used much anymore -- it should be used more.
Very good. One thing I’m surprised wasn’t mentioned (or at least I didn’t catch on the first read) — IMO, on average, this kind of person will have much better experiences on the bitterness to invigoration spectrum at startups vs. bigco.
>[1] To be a nerd is to be socially awkward, and there are two distinct ways to do that: to be playing the same game as everyone else, but badly, and to be playing a different game. The smart nerds are the latter type.
while I value the observation and concur, I'd like to semantically edit it vis :%s/socially awkward/behaviorally atypical/g
'awkward' just rubs me as poor word choice. for instance, throw me into a cs:go chat and I am the norm, complete with trolling, voices, and other things.
The success and bitterness footnote seems very off. In my experience and observations bitterness seems to be more driven by "scarring" than current success. A bad situation doesn't help but a good one is no antidote.
There is the "one who made it out" archetype for one example. The kind who left a very unsuccessful community and have even less sympathy for them than those taking a priveledged background for granted.
>To be a nerd is to be socially awkward, and there are two distinct ways to do that: to be playing the same game as everyone else, but badly, and to be playing a different game.
Perhaps I'm mistaken, but I've always been under the impression that this is what it's like to be a geek. Maybe someone can help me understand the two. I've always identified more as a geek for this reason, but maybe I'm a nerd.
And of course being one, or both, or none, and liking math, or liking star wars, or both, or disliking math, or disliking star wars, etc. are all valid combinations.
Only the boring ones are humorless. I actually think most decent satirists would match up to the fierce nerd persona pretty well. Voltaire comes to mind.
Thanks, Paul, for writing this. It really puts a few of my traits into perspective, including being rude (interrupting people... just get to the point, dammit!) and being awkward (yeah, I just don't care about the game of "emotions" or whatever most people are playing)...
> In the past century we've seen a continuous transfer of power from dealmakers to technicians — from the charismatic to the competent
... writes a man who was evidently not paying attention to the US presidential election of 2016 or the UK Conservative Party leadership election of 2019.
I can't help thinking that "fierce nerd" and Asperger syndrome go together. There will be some random Steve Jobs assholes as well but I think they are the exception.
Exactly my thoughts as well. Almost all fierce nerd traits PG describes are signs typically seen in Asperger/ASD/Gifted. I recognise myself in the article, as well as a number of my friends/colleagues who are all diagnosed with one or more of the above.
> There has never been a better time to be a nerd. In the past century we've seen a continuous transfer of power from dealmakers to technicians — from the charismatic to the competent
What happens if a nerd learns how to be charismatic? It's a winning combo, I guess.
To be fair, this man's job was to identify the type of person who is likely to succeed at startups, and by most accounts he was very successful at it.
Understanding personality traits and how they relate to the people you're looking for has felt critically important as I work on my startup. It has come up over and over again in hiring (including MANY more inbound, exploratory conversations than I would have expected) and in client management (identifying the best point of contact on their side, but also keeping clients on track and responsive during an onboard).
> It's weird to read an "essay" about "nerds" from a 56 year old. It's like he never got over the high school caste system of cliques.
“Nerds” being a meaningful category isn’t an idea limited to high-school caste/cliques, especially in tech; one of the reasons software flipped from being predominantly female to predominantly male is the popularization of the idea (IIRC, in the late 1960s or early 1970s) that stereotypical nerds (socially maladapted, querulous, technophilic males) were the optimal workers in the field.
The idea, which best as I know was only grounded in thin popular management quasi-science, has become increasingly less popular in the last few decades.
It is weird, though, that Graham’s affected contrarianism requires him to pretend that fierceness as opposed to diffidence is contrary to the popular stereotype, nerds lacking the skills to manage/moderate conflict manifesting in both conflict avoidance where they are uncomfortable and fierce, intractable, often petty conflict within their comfort zone has always been central to the stereotype.
My 70 year old grand-father, whose getting increasingly worse bouts of dementia, still remembers all the names and deeds of the various school bullies who tormented him in High School like it was yesterday. School seems like it was a very traumatic time for many, many people. Bullys do enormous amounts of damage to people and I am very happy to see the slow death of the "high school caste system" from the new generation. A lot of genuine social justice will come from increasing culture shaming and rejection of people who act like bullys.
I agree with you initially, but I tried to read it from the lens of someone who is reflecting on his past experiences and applying them to a certain archetype of people he meets throughout life working in tech.
With computer science being one of the most popular degrees being held by Gen Z, the "nerd" casting will slowly fade as computer work becomes more and more the norm vs. traditional trades and fields that require higher education.
Average Joe caught wind you could make Lawyer and Doctor money with a Bachelor's or less, makes sense to me.
I've noticed as I myself get older that a lot of things that older people used to say, which seemed particularly out of touch then, are actually starting to make some amount of sense to me. I even find myself repeating some of those things. However, I try to be careful to temper that with my memories of hearing them from older folks when I was young. I think part of the disconnect is/was that older people actually do forget what it was like to be young or how they thought/felt when they were young. I'd suspect that's what's going on in OP's mind - he's mostly forgotten the trials and tribulations of youth (maybe even defensively blocked out some of the traumatic memories) and to him it doesn't even make sense for an older person to remember how important social interactions are to teenagers.
The problem with glorifying fierce nerds is that there are already too many of them. (Or us, perhaps, but not for me to say.) Sure it's great to have a few fierce nerds trying unconventional things, challenging orthodoxy, etc. Unfortunately, when there are many fierce nerds, they start to compete among themselves to have the most contrarian ideas and often to establish themselves as the earliest champions of those ideas as soon as possible.
This rush, not only to be right but to be right when everyone else is wrong and to show them the light, is what makes people susceptible to bandwagons, cargo cults, and conspiracy theories. We see it plenty right here. Elsewhere we see it in QAnon. In both we see it in arguments about COVID origins and countermeasures.
Like a chemical compound that's therapeutic in one dose but toxic in another, fierce nerds can be either a good thing or a bad thing. We're already well into the toxic side, so I think this is a poor moment for pg or anyone else to glorify more.
A difficult topic. Everyone of us has a story to tell and a burden to carry. Focusses on some fierce nerds and misses all others. The gamut of personalties is vast. Got to try to bring out the best in people.
TIL "fierce" in the nerd world means having a massive ego and a severe over-estimation of how awesome you are. These kinds of people make me sick, regardless of whether they're nerds.
It is possible on HN to hide certain posts. I really like this feature. I wonder whether it is possible to hide some websites like paulgraham.com altogether. That would be great.
Paul Graham, The Fierce Nerd Eater. Feed him fierce nerds. Many will be chewed and spit out. Some will succeed. Like highly competitive athletes (even more so, some become billionaires!). Those spit out need help with mental health.
Or maybe instead of abusing mentally fragile people, we need something a bit more healthy.
We need to make it honorable to fail and those that fail get the help they need. We need to make the harms as small as possible and the benefits as broadly shared as possible. But many nerds trying many things don't need to be fierce. We can have many experiments with cooperation not competition. We need decentralization not centralization.
With respect, has there been any social science or psychological studies on the "fierce nerd" and its observed characteristics as Graham has noted here?
Not a big fan of this essay. I believe quite strongly that ~what you are~ is a product of ~what you do~ and not the other way around. In this framing, "Fierce Nerd" is nothing more than an arbitrary categorization of a set of exhibited behaviors.
Graham has observed that intelligent, competitive, inquisitive, and confident individuals can do well in today's economy. He has also identified pitfalls associated with being too aggressive, too confident, or lacking other skills.
I am unable to find the positive value of sticking a label on this coincidence of qualities and strongly implying the quantities and characteristics of these qualities are at least mostly inherent (with the exception of "fierceness", which apparently can be "turned off"). Of course nature does play a role, but why ignore nurture? It must be quite depressing to believe you are condemned to a life of little personal development.
Nerdiness is an expression of trauma. Pain in our lives leads us to recede into areas of interest. These can be things that "fix" us or things that we are naturally good at or become good at. Its all therapy to feel better about ourselves. Everyone has trauma and everyone is a nerd in some area. Aggression is projection. When lashing out we chose areas of safety from which to do it. Thus people who have been hurt chose to be aggressive in their areas of expertise. Boom fierce nerds.
This essay falls flat for me because I think Paul Graham is only talking about nerds of my generation, people who are in their forties and older. I don't see any nerds like myself and my friends in the generation that is in their twenties now.
It's interesting to think about the difference, though, and he does nail a few things about nerds from my generation. Most importantly, that being socially awkward was a prerequisite, because functioning social instincts would have prevented you from ever saying anything unconventional or investing time in learning things that were outside the norm. Without the internet to expose people to a diversity of views packaged in well-edited, easily digestible chunks, the socially acceptable range of interest was limited entirely to what people heard from tradition, network television, and if you were "edgy," MTV. Any progressive ideas you got, any historical perspective you got, anything you learned about different cultures, any cool ideas you had about the future, you got from books and magazines, and you were a total weirdo if you treated them as part of the shared world you inhabited with other people.
And I'm talking about pretty mainstream stuff. Like, if you remembered something out of a National Geographic article you read and repeated it in conversation, that was already letting your freak flag fly. So we came to identify reading, curiosity, and a progressive attitude with social inappriopriateness, with grossness, and this had an enormous impact on us. It affected the way we presented ourselves, the way we dressed, everything.
A hugely consequential example is our gut response to the feeling that we're about to say something that other people would find off-putting or offensive. We learned the habit of embracing that feeling. That was the feeling we got whenever we admitted to liking a book we read in English class, or talked about anything to do with science or math, or said, hey, did you know the last time that country had a democratic government we overthrew it? If those things were good, then it was good to embrace the feeling of social disapproval they generated, the way an athlete embraces the burning in their muscles in a hard workout. To be honest and intellectually engaged, we had to be weird and distasteful, and we learned not to trust anybody who shied away from that.
The younger generations of nerds, I feel like they trust peer influence more. When they feel like they're about to say something inappropriate, their instinct is to pause and recheck their thinking, which, I have to say, I'm kind of jealous of that. They take it for granted that the people they feel pressure from are people they choose as their peers, people who reflect their own values and therefore have the potential to improve them.
For my generation, being socially maladjusted felt like a moral imperative. We had to be socially maladjusted to be the people we wanted to be: curious, open-minded, engaged with the information and ideas trickling in from outside our little towns and schools. It was necessary, but it selected for people who already had a difficult time integrating socially and then further warped us in a way that maybe the generations after us aren't warped.
> When they feel like they're about to say something inappropriate, their instinct is to pause and recheck their thinking
This is something all intellectually honest people learn to do, one way or the other. We're all very familiar with claims that are simple, mostly plausible, and totally wrong for $COMPLICATED_REASON. After a while, you learn to double-check your thinking to avoid being nerd-sniped by someone saying "Bzzzzzzzt, that's wrong."
Inappropriate and incorrect are very different things. One thing they have in common, though, is that after processing feedback over and over again that doesn't affect your thinking at all because it comes from a perspective you fundamentally disagree with, you learn to tune it out. For example, if you're talking about Covid 19 vaccines and there's an anti-vaxxer in the group, you'll eventually stop engaging with the content of what they say, because it isn't worth your time.
A significant difference is that incorrectness is context-sensitive in a different way than inappropriateness. Saying something incorrect can be a productive part of a conversation that serves a shared goal of achieving correctness. I'm not going to feel inhibited or embarrassed about saying something incorrect unless I haven't put in the appropriate level of preparation for the context. Saying something inappropriate cannot serve a higher shared goal of avoiding inappropriateness, because it spoils that goal from the start.
Is this not just a broad ad hominem against people with whom this venture capitalist has had prior disagreements? If only you choose to do risky things that are (inexplicably in many cases) capital intensive -- i.e. engage investors in ways good for them -- then you will be a good nerd. Investors will make you rich. Everyone will be happy. But if you don't engage investors, then you will become a bad nerd! Bad nerd! Bad!
> In ordinary social situations they are — as quiet and diffident as the star quarterback would be if he found himself in the middle of a physics symposium
I don't think a QB is ever "diffident". I bet he'd feel a lot more confident there than the nerd on a football field, or really anywhere.
Impatience due to rules not applying to them. And delay is often some form of BS. "Strategic" impatience when patience encourages faster results. (Manipulating people on the highway to drive faster or change lanes through various techniques.)
Nothing precludes actual fierceness rather than strictly fitting to an archetype. I used to illegally street race for cash. I can detail strip most Glocks, ARs, and AKs, and fire each without occluded aiming. Grandfathers were both competition military wheel gun marksmen. There are such people as nerdy bodybuilders.
I took the SAT-I without any preparation (absolutely zero) and aced the math section, 5 on AP Calc BC with minimal preparation at school; no coaches, no practice tests, and no bootcamp classes after school. My school was supposed to be good but it sucked in one particular way as it picked me through testing to represent a math tournament but sent me completely unprepared in the fields and subject matter, it was embarrassing. I was usually the lone white dude amongst mostly Asian and Indian overachievers who had rich af parents with every sort of coach and social help. I road a steel-framed bicycle to school 4 miles each way everyday, they had hand-me-down BMWs and Mercedes parked in the school parking lot.
The other issue is like BUD/S and specops, the people told they couldn't or were unsuited also tend to be the ones with the most heart. Someone can't wish to be more fluidly-intelligent, but they can become more relentlessly-resourceful and dog-with-a-bone. Wisdom, experience, and mastery trends to swamp raw intelligence as someone ages... plus, fluid intelligence tends to decline.
Just wondering if it is good idea to compile a list of such Gentle Genius. If you folks think it is a good idea - please share it here. https://forms.gle/FxDYS3hC3JmHDieo7
[Here's my best summary of what a "fierce nerd" is, according to this essay]
Most non-nerds think of nerds as:
* quiet
* diffident
In fact some nerds are quite fierce. "Fierce nerds" are:
* small group [subset of nerds overall?]
* more competitive than highly competitive non-nerds
* competition is more personal for them; they're not
emotionally mature enough to distance themselves
personally from competition
* work in areas that are less random in the kinds of
competition they engage in [no points for
persuasion or style, I suppose]
* somewhat overconfident, especially when young
* intelligent, at least moderately so
* independent-mindeded, see fitting it as wasted effort
* annoyed by rules
* impatient, not sure why
Like knows like. That description definitely fits me, my husband and a few other people I in my life who I care about deeply. We all know we're obnoxious sometimes - but we're all just trying to root out the truth of things and improve things as well as we know how. It's a little annoying that we are pushed into pursuing capitalist endeavors over other things right now - but practically speaking, you can make a lot more change in less time if you have the capital for it.
Still, it's stuff like Andrew Yang's presidential run that really give me hope that we might be on the cusp of changing things outside of business as well. Not just in politics (obviously, since he lost) but at least in culture - with coherent ideas and platforms that can't be ignored. There have been others in the past who were like us and tried similar things (Huey Long comes to mind), but understanding technology gives our generation a huge economic tool that we can also use to our advantage. Of course, if my peers are any indication: our society and entire economic system seem designed for the express purpose of making millennials depressed. And it's not really easy to shrug that off and just build things when the state of so many people you care about is so dire.
"In the past century we've seen a continuous transfer of power from dealmakers to technicians — from the charismatic to the competent" hard to justify given Trump
Random question about PaulGraham.com: I noticed that the header of his blog posts are always images; not text. e.g. "fierce-nerds-1.gif". Does anyone have any idea why he renders the title as an image? And do we think this happens programmatically? Or is he firing up ImageMagick every time he posts?
"If you do choose the ambitious route, you'll have a tailwind behind you. There has never been a better time to be a nerd. In the past century we've seen a continuous transfer of power from dealmakers to technicians — from the charismatic to the competent — and I don't see anything on the horizon that will end it. At least not till the nerds end it themselves by bringing about the singularity."
I’ve witnessed music scenes come and go. It wasn’t until recently I noticed the startup culture or visible ethos, at least online, morphed into something new. Perhaps like music we are seeing new trends evolve or we are in a transition phase where the new culture leaders are yet to emerge. But, PG is like alternative rock in in 2020 and beyond, out of style.
PG gets dunked on on Twitter for defending Antonio Garcia Martinez but he knows he's right even though everyone is making fun of him so his natural defense mechanism is to go back and create an elaborate framework to prove he's right and it's just that nobody else can see he's right.
You see, AGM isn't a misanthrope misogynist, he's fierce! He says the things everyone else is afraid to say and thinks the things everyone else is too afraid to think because he's an Unconventional Thinker (TM). Everyone else is simply just too threatened to acknowledge this and that's why they're bullying PG.
For anyone who isn't currently on Twitter, AGM is the guy who publicly called Bay Area women "soft, weak and full of $#!+" and was recently canned from a management role at Apple when people pointed out that his performance assessments of subordinates might not be free from bias. Sucks to be him of course, but what's the alternative?
He wrote a gonzo book full of insensitive over-the-top passages, like the one you're referencing, in order to sell books. It worked. He created a literary persona that people loved or loved to hate.
It's a huge leap to go from "you wrote x passage" to "you may be biased against women". If you want to fire someone for bias, you need evidence of bias, not a theory that someone might be biased.
You don't actually "need evidence of bias". You can let someone go if they are not an asset to the company. This guy certainly wasn't once the amount of annoyance and upset his words had caused others in the company was pointed out to management.
It's always lovely to see people who, I'm sure, are staunch defenders of "workers rights" turn around and say "yeah just fire anyone who isn't currently an asset to the company by whatever criterion".
The difference between "can" and "should" is the entire moral universe.
I think if you write something which says 'I am biased', the burden of proof is now on you to show hiring managers that it was all a bit, rather than on them to demonstrate that it wasn't.
This feels like an unreasonable expectation for the people who would be reporting to him.
If someone in your future/present management chain wrote a "I think people like slibhb are bad at this job" missive somewhere, would you then feel the need to wait for examples of bias?
To be fair, his comments (and the entire book) is pretty gonzo, and he sets up a contrast with his romantic partner based on the theoretical other women of the Bay Area.
It's a literary device, and it's sad that it's biting him in the ass (I don't know him, but know lots of people who do, and they mostly seem to think he's OK).
> Sucks to be him of course, but what's the alternative?
Uh, not firing people over Twitter drama? I swear America is getting more insane by the day. It's even more obvious if you take a break from social network sites and then come back after a while.
This wasn't even Twitter drama. He wrote that in a published book, that then went on and on and on demeaning women in all sorts of "fun" ways (i.e. this isn't a single throwaway statement that might be misunderstood; the misogyny is core to what he was saying). His girlfriend is "special" of course, but he still manages to say very not-nice things about her.
I don't think that Dr Dre gets to evaluate the performance of Apple employees who are women (or Korean, etc) simply because they have a JV making headphones.
The book is like 5 years old... So, why now? Because of Twitter drama?
Edit: Well, it seems that, according to Wikipedia, the impetus might have been an article in tech media (which seems to mean anti-tech media these days).
He also was hired at Apple in April. ~2k Apple employees then signed a letter condemning his hiring after excerpts of his book circulated. This wasn't so much a Twitter mob resurfacing an old book, as a group of Apple employees using a published work to criticize the hiring of a new manager.
This feels weirdly like someone working out emotional issues by describing them in an emotionally distant "rational" way. Like what does this have to do with anything other then the thoughts in Paul Grahams head?
When you have to justify to yourself why you're a millionaire or a billionaire and "dumb luck, some modicum of skill, and being first" isn't a satisfying reason, you have to rationalize to yourself that you deserve it because you've got something that those ivory-tower eggheads and non-nerdy simpletons don't. And that thing is fierceness.
I've never seen a blog post more worthy of a good old fashioned fisking. I mean come on - "confidence is a self-fullfilling prophecy" - are we being serious here? It's only self-fulfilling because of survivorship bias. Maybe he's running with a crew of super successful founders and that's true, but from my point of view, I remember the dudes at my place of work that could very confidently talk my ear off about something that they half-understood (or very confidently describe an unworkable solution to a problem) and then got fired a month later because they weren't productive enough to meet even the super-low requirements of software development at a car insurance company. It's easy to spin narratives about confidence and restlessness and intelligence when you've surrounded yourself with the winners. Less visible are the people who go all-in on a fintech startup and end up broke a year later. Those people have all the same traits and end up in the same boat as all the other un-fierce nerds.
It's a classic refrain in a petty "revenge of the nerds" mindset. All the "haters" are wrong, unconditionally, and acting like an asshole is excused as being very special and brave.
It's a siege mentality designed to shore up one's sense of superiority, and ensure that one doesn't need to do very much soul-searching.
> The bad news is that if it's not exercised, your fierceness will turn to bitterness, and you will become an intellectual playground bully: the grumpy sysadmin, the forum troll, the hater, the shooter down of new ideas.
Knowing that someone is a man doesn’t mean knowing their pronouns; gender identity and pronoun preference are correlated but not 1:1 tied. It is somewhat inconvenient that the long traditional use of “they” for semantically singular cases where the correct pronoun is unknown has become blurred by “they/their/them” becoming a reasonably common preferred pronoun (especially among the nonbinary but also among some who identify as men or women), so its use to avoid the risk of an incorrect specific pronoun can be misread.
Has PG, or anyone else, ever referred to him as anything but a "he"? Since 99.9% of men refer to themselves as men, that would seem like a useful default.
Not just one or two, but the majority of them. To the point that the aggressive geniuses stood out. And I worked for/with two abrasive ones as well, so I know the difference.
The same was true for the two startups I worked at after that, and Qualcomm, and now the third startup where I work.
The really productive geniuses in each situation were easy to work with, I think largely, because of their confidence in their own grasp of the subject at hand. They had nothing to prove, they knew that, and it showed. The difficult people were never stupid, far from it, but they felt like they needed to defend everything they did, every decision they made, and that made working with them less productive.
With the gentle geniuses, if you thought you came up with something that was an improvement on what was being done, they would look at it honestly, and if it was not better, they would calmly explain why, and if it was better, they would acknowledge it right out and discuss how to merge that into the current work.
The 'less gentle' ones would take pride in pointing out the flaws in your idea if you were wrong, and if you were right, would fight you over whether it had any real value at all, then would stiff arm you as far as getting it accepted as a change.