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Nerds tend to operate in a sphere of "once I know something, nobody must ever tell me again." So, they know something and, just by feelings, assume everybody e
by seiji 11y ago
Nerds tend to operate in a sphere of "once I know something, nobody must ever tell me again."
So, they know something and, just by feelings, assume everybody else knows it too. They assume hearing repeated information wastes the time of everybody.
The truth is, average people don't even pick up on ideas until the 5th or 8th time they hear them.
Even the Snowden revelations weren't revelations per se. We knew about Carnivore before and about the AT&T splicing room and even in the 90s people would half joke half serious comment about how the government watched all online communications.
The Snowden documents just solidified the nerd fears. Plus, since the 90s, the Internet grew so big and so popular that people just kinda gave up on the idea that it could even be monitored or tapped en masse. The benefit of the Snowden dump was showing it is possible and it is happening (instead of just being conspiracy theories) and you can't do squat about it.
- xeromal 11y agoI must be average as shit then.
- vezzy-fnord 11y agoeven in the 90s people would half joke half serious comment about how the government watched all online communications The 90s actually had one of the most visible examples of NSA intervention, that of the Clipper chip. They assume hearing repeated information wastes the time of everybody. The issue isn't really repeating things, as much as the fact that it took up until Snowden for people to start being legitimately shocked, when they bluntly dismissed decades of prior art.
- vidarh 11y agoIt is quite depressing. I remember conversations at school in the early 90's where other students would flat out refuse to accept e.g. CIA involvement in operations that former CIA directors had publicly accepted responsibility for, because there was this perception from certain circles that the US just couldn't possibly be behaving that way. And that has persisted. What is not denied becomes implicitly accepted under the doctrine that if it's done, it must mean it's necessary, or what they should be doing. What is new with Snowden is that a portion of people who previously refused to entertain this possibility have finally accepted it. And are now "shocked" despite having been told for a very long time. I think a lot of people just don't get how deep the denial has run.
- tdaltonc 11y agoI see the mechanism you're talking about, but as I said, this doesn't seem to happen with technical information. For example, if some one writes an intro to AsyncIO, there are basically never comments like "this should be obvious to anyone who read the PEP," or "there's nothing here that you couldn't infer from the source." It seems to be something about privacy/security stories. I think that it stems more from a nihilist-chic then a borderline autistic inability to understand that other minds contain other information.
- seiji 11y agonihilist-chic Yeah, as this comment node pointed out, the whole "I knew about it first" force is in full effect here. The other root cause here: when people have self-pride over the information they are sharing as if it were new, but you knew the new information a long time ago, and you just want to knock them down a few prideful rungs. Or, just https://xkcd.com/1053/ https://xkcd.com/1053/