Comment by mike_hearn
10 years ago
Diligent study of how biases are formed? Sure.
Nerds working daily towards that? Lol, no. Psychologists, maybe.
"Nerds" of the Hacker News variety are every bit as susceptible to various psychological failings as anyone else. There's nothing special about programming or physics or chemistry that makes you into some sort of uber-rational superhuman and it's very dangerous to believe that.
As time goes by, the more it seems to me that deep down we're all pretty much the same. The spectrum of human nature is pretty small: the gap between the most intellectual and moral and the least isn't anywhere near as big as some would like to think. For every intellectual with a convoluted theory that leads to an unintuitive conclusion, there's a man on the street armed with common sense and a degree from the University of Life who can blow it out of the water with a single sharp observation.
I don't know. If we're talking about the self-described "rationalist" technologist clique, you have a point. Their relative insularity and elitism sometimes serves to intensify their own biases.
However, I think it's too pessimistic to say that people can't learn to be better at this. Just knowing that bias exists is a step in the right direction. I can have productive discussions with those self-described rationalists, (although I have to learn their terms of debate first since they keep making up their own). But there's something admirable in people trying to adapt these great intellectual traditions to their lives now.
And furthermore, who else are you going to turn to? Maybe there will eventually be professional bias-shattering specialists you can call on, but for now we all have to do what we can.
> Diligent study of how biases are formed? Sure.
> Nerds working daily towards that? Lol, no.
You realize that the only difference between those two is a piece of paper? Getting a college education is - or rather, was - literally being a nerd of $SUBJECT_MATTER.
If you describe anyone with a college education as a nerd then the word loses almost all meaning, as it'd describe a huge number of people.
Well, the word nerd (and geek) used to mean someone who you'd expect to be better in their domain than your average college degree holder, so me having to defend nerds only shows we've already reversed the meaning.
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Simple miscommunication. I didn't mean that all nerds are like that. I meant that of those who are like that, they are disproportionately nerds.