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>If you want to make something cool, don’t give it to geeks first. Does anyone else get really tired of stuff like this? Why is it that every possible differe
by farright 10y ago
>If you want to make something cool, don’t give it to geeks first.
Does anyone else get really tired of stuff like this? Why is it that every possible difference is celebrated except within liberal circles, with the exception that nerds are considered objectively bad. In fact the article comes across as body shaming.
- sidlls 10y agoOthering of "nerds" isn't restricted to liberals.
- farright 10y ago"othering" of nerds isn't restricted to liberals but it is especially hypocritical when they do it. Also liberals are predisposed to "other" nerds because they have chosen nerds to be the symbol of unaware privilege and crude libertarianism so in their thinking nerds deserve no sympathy.
- dragonwriter 10y agoI am somewhat amused by this because I've been a liberal and nerd my whole life, participated extensively in liberal activist circles, and never once encountered this among liberals (the closest to this I've seen would be some segments of the community's reaction to perceived ivory tower intellectuals that are distant from pragmatics, but even that isn't so much an othering as a sometimes white-hot debate about priorities and tactics within the movement.)
- vostok 10y agoEven as a liberal I think there's actually something to this idea. You can see it with things like the financial transaction tax proposals that are clearly meant to hurt nerdy HFTs rather than affect banks. I think part of it is that nerdy HFTs aren't eloquent enough to explain what they're doing and how it benefits the world.
- ethanbond 10y agoI would love to hear an explanation of how beating the next guy by 1ms is helping the world enough to justify obscene payouts. Go for it.
- maxerickson 10y agoLay out the case for the payouts being obscene. Probably keep in mind that the nominal value of the stocks changing hands on a given day is hundreds of billions of dollars and that an actively trading counterparty is facilitating the movement of that money. What's fair compensation for that?
- ethanbond 10y agoHow did markets function prior to HFT? They're only facilitating exchange between other algorithms, right? And in that case how is it helpful to the market? Note I'm actually asking these questions - not just being rhetorical. The whole concept of it seems plainly ridiculous to me but I don't know much about this area.
- yummyfajitas 10y agoHow did markets function prior to HFT? You had 10 very tall loud guys in brightly colored jackets yelling at each other in a pit. Mentally they were running the same algorithms as HFTs, just slower. Later on you had some fast fingered guys watching charts and mentally running the same algorithms as guys in the pit, just a bit faster.
- ethanbond 10y agoExcept the people were exploiting inefficiencies in markets (and still do today). HFT algorithms exploit inefficiencies in servers, ISPs, fiber optic cable, a competing algorithm's implementation, etc.
- 10y ago
- dragonwriter 10y agoI think you are confusing "liberal" and "mass consumer marketing"; in the latter, which is the issue here, focusing appeal on the interest of any isolated niche that isn't representative of the actual target market (nerds certainly qualify, but aren't the only niche with this problem) is objectively bad, in that it is manifestly harmful to the concrete objective.
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- forgottenpass 10y agoIt's almost enough to make you question whether "acceptance" as politic was actually about acceptance, or using the language of something agreeable to push a slightly different goal. I say "almost" glibly, a refusal to see the machinery at work is how political movements lie to themselves.
- gaius 10y agoObserve that those who say they want "acceptance", when they get it, complain about being "erased" or their thing "selling out". That has been a common refrain since at least the 60s... and it is even more common today.