Geeky conversations

[andrewducker]

I just added this link to delicious for tomorrow's link post.  It's about geek conversational behaviours, and is quite interesting.  It follows up nicely from this post from 10 years ago about the conversational behaviour of sf-fans.

What I found vastly more interesting was the conversation that followed on from it on Hacker News - 134 comments so far, varying from "Normal people suck, the way I speak is more technically correct, and therefore better!" to "Wow, how did you get inside my head?" via all sorts of interesting examples of problems people have had communicating with colleagues, friends and partners.  It's very much worth spending 5 minutes reading down it.

Comments

[communicator.livejournal.com]

Very funny conversation: the aware, the unaware. I think it is difficult for a person who is very intelligent, because the people who are different from them are also generally (just through statistical average) less intelligent. Thus they get a lot of confirmation that 'being unlike me is dumb'. In this case, the impression has been formed in some of those 'geeks' that left brain people are more intelligent than right brain people. For instance: 'an intelligent person will need to accommodate a normal person. The term condescension has come to have a pejorative connotation but is actually fitting in this context.' You'd have to dig deep to unpick this world view. They need to realise that people with different neural ecologies can be their peers.

[andrewhickey.livejournal.com]

I think it's more likely that they're just mildly intelligent, rather than 'very' intelligent. Even someone of average intelligence has plenty of confirmation that 'people unlike me are stupid' ("You see how dumb the average guy is? Well by definition half of them are dumber than that"). And most people think they're more intelligent than they are.
Any even quite bright person would quickly also come to the conclusion "People *like* me are stupid" - and very bright people I've known tend also to have come to the conclusion "*I* am stupid"...

[communicator.livejournal.com]

Nicely put.

[major-clanger.livejournal.com]

That original post from 1999 is absolutely fascinating. I wonder if it ever got followed up? It would certainly make an excellent Hay Lecture for an Eastercon.

[broin.livejournal.com]

Really good stuff, thankyou. Fwded to many.

[kurosau.livejournal.com]

Seems like it's a fair amount of anecdotal evidence built up to justify belief in a stereotype to me. I don't really jive on these sorts of articles because they're usually a bit of poppycock supported by a few commonly observable behaviors. Personally, I'd like to see more material about how, just like everyone else, geeks can communicate just fine and there are some geeks that can't, just like everyone else's stereotype/sub-culture.

[andrewducker]

I'd like to see more material about how, just like everyone else, geeks can communicate just fine and there are some geeks that can't, just like everyone else's stereotype/sub-culture.

Feel free to research and write some, or find someone else who already has.