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I think 'geek chic' (i.e poseurs) went mainstream a while ago, but actual nerds will never be popular by definition. I've tried in vain to find people at parti

I think 'geek chic' (i.e poseurs) went mainstream a while ago, but actual nerds will never be popular by definition. I've tried in vain to find people at parties who care about my favourite arcane programming languages and obscure political doctrine, it's impossible :(

walthamstow 4y ago
Other nerds don't have to care about the same stuff as you, they just have to be interested. I am still tight with my group of 7 guys from school and we are all nerds but hardly share a single interest. We are interested in hearing about each other's niche shit and that's what keeps us together.
- capableweb 4y ago
  > I am still tight with my group of 7 guys from school While that's nice and all, it's not super helpful advice for people who are trying to make new friends, as we cannot go back in time and repeat school from younger days...
  - walthamstow 4y ago
    You appear to have missed my point. My second para is simply an example, not the point I'm making. The point is: your friends don't have to be interested in exactly the same stuff as you, they just need to be interested in you.
    - capableweb 4y ago
      Ah, but the parent made the explicit point of trying to find people they have two specific topics in common with. To argue that they shouldn't, doesn't help them in their quest for what they are specifically asking about. It's ok to want to look for people with common interests, just as it's ok to feel it's enough to spend time with people you don't have a lot of common interests with.
capableweb 4y ago
Some sub-groups of people are more frequent visitors of some type of events than others. Depending exactly what you mean with "parties", it could be that those types of events are not the right one to find the sub-group you're out after. If you wanna find people to talk about finance, you wouldn't attend a football match, for example. So if you wanna find programmers, you're gonna have to attend programming related events, or some related area like hardware hacking, or just generally "makers" meetup. For political groups, there tend to be groups of those all over the world, for every affiliation, but depending on the ideology and the overall political temperature, sometimes people try to avoid letting those opinions bleed over to other areas of interest.
NavinF 4y ago
FWIW I consider myself an "actual nerd", but I also find "arcane programming languages and obscure political doctrines" to be extremely boring. No offense, but I would definitely snub you at one of those parties where you're looking for nerds. To me programming languages are just a means to an end and political doctrines are for nontechnical people. I'm more interested in building stuff. Eg I wanted to benchmark the CPU inside my Apple Watch last week and I couldn't find any off-the-shelf apps that do this, so I had to learn enough Swift to create a basic UI with a start button and a multiply-and-add loop that pegs a CPU core. I would never learn a new language if I didn't have to. Another example: I couldn't find any reasonably priced tool chests so I bought a table saw with the intention of building my own tool chests out of plywood next week. When I mentioned this to nerdy/technical friends, they were all interested because they also had a metric fuckton of tools, computer hardware, solvents, etc that they wanted to store efficiently. I think if you worked on more practical projects like this you'd be a lot more popular at parties where most attendees are engineers.
- HeckFeck 4y ago
  Fair criticism. I think I need to move away from politics for my own sanity. I've thought this way for a while, even though I've avoided partisanship and focused on philosophy. Even there it's all heat and not much light, and in my experience building things is always more fun.
bazoom42 4y ago
If every other person cared about it wouldnt be arcane or obscure, would it? Given you talk about ‘poseurs’ you sound more like a hipster than a geek.

walthamstow 4y ago

Other nerds don't have to care about the same stuff as you, they just have to be interested. I am still tight with my group of 7 guys from school and we are all nerds but hardly share a single interest. We are interested in hearing about each other's niche shit and that's what keeps us together.

capableweb 4y ago
> I am still tight with my group of 7 guys from school While that's nice and all, it's not super helpful advice for people who are trying to make new friends, as we cannot go back in time and repeat school from younger days...
- walthamstow 4y ago
  You appear to have missed my point. My second para is simply an example, not the point I'm making. The point is: your friends don't have to be interested in exactly the same stuff as you, they just need to be interested in you.
  - capableweb 4y ago
    Ah, but the parent made the explicit point of trying to find people they have two specific topics in common with. To argue that they shouldn't, doesn't help them in their quest for what they are specifically asking about. It's ok to want to look for people with common interests, just as it's ok to feel it's enough to spend time with people you don't have a lot of common interests with.

capableweb 4y ago

Some sub-groups of people are more frequent visitors of some type of events than others. Depending exactly what you mean with "parties", it could be that those types of events are not the right one to find the sub-group you're out after. If you wanna find people to talk about finance, you wouldn't attend a football match, for example. So if you wanna find programmers, you're gonna have to attend programming related events, or some related area like hardware hacking, or just generally "makers" meetup. For political groups, there tend to be groups of those all over the world, for every affiliation, but depending on the ideology and the overall political temperature, sometimes people try to avoid letting those opinions bleed over to other areas of interest.

NavinF 4y ago

FWIW I consider myself an "actual nerd", but I also find "arcane programming languages and obscure political doctrines" to be extremely boring. No offense, but I would definitely snub you at one of those parties where you're looking for nerds. To me programming languages are just a means to an end and political doctrines are for nontechnical people. I'm more interested in building stuff. Eg I wanted to benchmark the CPU inside my Apple Watch last week and I couldn't find any off-the-shelf apps that do this, so I had to learn enough Swift to create a basic UI with a start button and a multiply-and-add loop that pegs a CPU core. I would never learn a new language if I didn't have to. Another example: I couldn't find any reasonably priced tool chests so I bought a table saw with the intention of building my own tool chests out of plywood next week. When I mentioned this to nerdy/technical friends, they were all interested because they also had a metric fuckton of tools, computer hardware, solvents, etc that they wanted to store efficiently. I think if you worked on more practical projects like this you'd be a lot more popular at parties where most attendees are engineers.

HeckFeck 4y ago
Fair criticism. I think I need to move away from politics for my own sanity. I've thought this way for a while, even though I've avoided partisanship and focused on philosophy. Even there it's all heat and not much light, and in my experience building things is always more fun.

bazoom42 4y ago

If every other person cared about it wouldnt be arcane or obscure, would it? Given you talk about ‘poseurs’ you sound more like a hipster than a geek.