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I don't see anything what you describe as inherent and necessary to nerd culture. What you want is an abrasive culture and I oppose that. I certainly never "l

by Argorak 12y ago

I don't see anything what you describe as inherent and necessary to nerd culture. What you want is an abrasive culture and I oppose that. I certainly never "left the world" and certainly not because I found all those things useless or oppressive. I can still nerd out on a multitude of subjects from music to board games to digital culture and I do prefer to do it with people that don't use this culture as a reason to be terrible to other people. I run 3 meetups (one of them now the biggest NoSQL UG for one technology in Berlin), organised 8 very well-received conferences and moderated multiple bulletin boards. All are nerdy to the core - and are successful because you can expect not to be met with aggressiveness. Our credo is that the baseline to attend is interest in the subject. Anything else is hindering. Your nerdiness is definitely not mine.

hyperion2010 12y ago
I don't want to get into the nerd vs geek debate here but my interpretation of TFA was that it was specifically talking about the types of people that simply didn't want to play the social hierarchy game. Just being interested in and doing nerdy/geeky things does not place you in that group (unfortunately the terminology we have does a poor job of distinguishing this). I also don't think there is any implication that I want an abrasive culture. I do not think that early google style corporate culture is a good thing. I think we need to dissociate nerds behaving badly from simply not picking up on social signals or not caring about them. The reason I say this is because when you treat someone as a villain who is simply thinking out loud you basically stop any potential for real dialogue in its tracks.
- thequux 12y ago
  > Just being interested in and doing nerdy/geeky things does not place you in that group (unfortunately the terminology we have does a poor job of distinguishing this). The two groups are not identical, but the probability of being uninterested in playing the hierarchy game increases significantly when conditioned on being a nerd (and even more so, being in the infosec scene, where the author and I spend most of our time) to the point that they dominate the social scene.
  - throwaway9324 12y ago
    I'm not sure what you mean. The "infosec scene" has always had stricter social codes than any other form of hacking.
blfr 12y ago
What you want is an abrasive culture and I oppose that. Why? Why can't hyperion2010, or anyone else, have an abrasive culture if they want to? There is nowadays some controversy about, best as I can tell, gamers who like abrasive gaming, ie. shoot and insult each other. I can see how one might not want to participate, but why the need to force them to stop? Wouldn't leaving them to it be a reasonable solution? If some nerds prefer a different code of conduct than you, can you really oppose that? Do you really think you can or should go into their group and tell them how they should behave? What happened to live and let live?
- samastur 12y ago
  The problem here is that hacking, gardening or whatever else people do is not "owned" by those who practice it currently or did before others and neither should it be. If they wanted to start their own Abrasive gardening club, where they would be abrasive to each other, then not many people would complain. I don't think it would be healthy, but they are free to do so. What they aren't free to do without push-back is to tell others who want to do gardening that they should tolerate their abuse. I agree with Angorak that there is nothing in what we do that would require people being assholes which is why I, too, find it unacceptable.
  - sgift 12y ago
    > What they aren't free to do without push-back is to tell others who want to do gardening that they should tolerate their abuse. I agree with Angorak that there is nothing in what we do that would require people being assholes which is why I, too, find it unacceptable. The real problem is that there is no coherent definition of abuse and people who are better at playing the social game use that skill to define everything as abuse which they do not like / undermines their status. And that is what the article calls out in the context of 'nerds', 'nerd culture' and 'newcomers' (or at least that is my interpretation of it)
    - Argorak 12y ago
      That's exactly the reason why I put up CoCs for example - we define what is inacceptable in a certain space and put it in clear writing to avoid gaming. It binds the organizers as much as the attendees. It cuts out the play. For example, CoCs for dating environments look very differently then those for confs. (did you know there are cuddling meetups and they have very strict rules to ensure people feel comfortable?) There are many abusers that are quite good at the "social game" you describe, by exploiting insecurities about rules, especially in their absence. Saying they are "bad at the game" is actually one of the standard plays (and terribly harmful to those that are _actually_ "bad at the game"). The solution is not "there are no rules", but "we have rules here and others here". We need more spaces with with different sets of rules, where everyone can nerd out in their fashion, not chaos. The problem about society is that you can't cut out social interaction from humans. Any attempt to do so is doomed in my opinion.
k__ 12y ago
Sounds more like you do professional get-togethers than nerdy stuff. People behave more like "at work" at those meetups and conferences.
- Argorak 12y ago
  I used to run eurucamp (I'm on a hiatus), which is a very affordable summer community conference at a lake with impromptu bike rides, canoeing, parties and lots of visitor participation. We have only 1 invited speaker (keynote). We have people setting up podcasts programs for the whole conference just as a _community effort for fun_. On the peak, we ran a 5-day conference set with a one week program around it only on voluntary work. We currently have an attendance that is very diverse (we don't count) and we worked for that a lot. It couldn't be any less professional and if it can, we'd like to remove that. http://2014.eurucamp.org/concept/ http://2014.eurucamp.org/concept/ The Elasticsearch usergroup is run at a small community-driven coworking space (and existed before Elastic, the company) and the Rust usergroup definitely has no professional outset. I also ran devrooms on FOSDEM. One of the meetups the Ruby Berlin e.V. runs (the governing body for all of this) has _3 full talks_+Lightning talks every month, without any company involvement other then providing rooms. Suits are really of no interest to me in this case. Also, I'd like to say that I'm not discussing from a theoretical point here - I've been doing community work for more then 10 years and have put all the things I say here into production at some point and in multiple contexts. With measurable successes and failures.
  - k__ 12y ago
    I don't say you're an impostor :) I just say all this sounds more like "conference" (= prof) than "hacker space" (= hobby) Both can be fun. I'm from Stuttgart and going to the Shack is a whole different experience than going to any meetup or conference.
    - Argorak 12y ago
      They are all hobby, on top of my work time. Many of the attendees are there for fun, especially on eurucamp, off their own pocket. Obviously, 3 days of meeting with 300 international people isn't going to be all random (even things like the CCC only _seem_ hackish). I do help and attend spontanous meetups of all forms and fashions as well - still, they all have rules and they are all better for it.
randomsearch 12y ago
> What you want is an abrasive culture and I oppose that. I agree. I prefer to use the term "nerd" to mean that type of abrasive person and "geek" as someone who is enjoys the same interests but is not interested in point-scoring and other aspects of that abrasive culture.
sthreet 12y ago
I have no experience in this, but I don't feel like anything from the article is "abrasive", or even really anything from the previous poster you replied to. Sidenote: The word "hacker" doesn't seem to mean anything anymore, it has been used in so many different ways that it has become too ambiguous. I personally like the phrase "weird nerd" better, because it might be a little more specific, and it is how I feel. (Probably doesn't help that I don't have the skills that seem to go along with "weird nerds"/"hackers".)

by Argorak 12y ago

hyperion2010 12y ago

I don't want to get into the nerd vs geek debate here but my interpretation of TFA was that it was specifically talking about the types of people that simply didn't want to play the social hierarchy game. Just being interested in and doing nerdy/geeky things does not place you in that group (unfortunately the terminology we have does a poor job of distinguishing this). I also don't think there is any implication that I want an abrasive culture. I do not think that early google style corporate culture is a good thing. I think we need to dissociate nerds behaving badly from simply not picking up on social signals or not caring about them. The reason I say this is because when you treat someone as a villain who is simply thinking out loud you basically stop any potential for real dialogue in its tracks.

thequux 12y ago
> Just being interested in and doing nerdy/geeky things does not place you in that group (unfortunately the terminology we have does a poor job of distinguishing this). The two groups are not identical, but the probability of being uninterested in playing the hierarchy game increases significantly when conditioned on being a nerd (and even more so, being in the infosec scene, where the author and I spend most of our time) to the point that they dominate the social scene.
- throwaway9324 12y ago
  I'm not sure what you mean. The "infosec scene" has always had stricter social codes than any other form of hacking.

blfr 12y ago

What you want is an abrasive culture and I oppose that. Why? Why can't hyperion2010, or anyone else, have an abrasive culture if they want to? There is nowadays some controversy about, best as I can tell, gamers who like abrasive gaming, ie. shoot and insult each other. I can see how one might not want to participate, but why the need to force them to stop? Wouldn't leaving them to it be a reasonable solution? If some nerds prefer a different code of conduct than you, can you really oppose that? Do you really think you can or should go into their group and tell them how they should behave? What happened to live and let live?

samastur 12y ago
The problem here is that hacking, gardening or whatever else people do is not "owned" by those who practice it currently or did before others and neither should it be. If they wanted to start their own Abrasive gardening club, where they would be abrasive to each other, then not many people would complain. I don't think it would be healthy, but they are free to do so. What they aren't free to do without push-back is to tell others who want to do gardening that they should tolerate their abuse. I agree with Angorak that there is nothing in what we do that would require people being assholes which is why I, too, find it unacceptable.
- sgift 12y ago
  > What they aren't free to do without push-back is to tell others who want to do gardening that they should tolerate their abuse. I agree with Angorak that there is nothing in what we do that would require people being assholes which is why I, too, find it unacceptable. The real problem is that there is no coherent definition of abuse and people who are better at playing the social game use that skill to define everything as abuse which they do not like / undermines their status. And that is what the article calls out in the context of 'nerds', 'nerd culture' and 'newcomers' (or at least that is my interpretation of it)
  - Argorak 12y ago
    That's exactly the reason why I put up CoCs for example - we define what is inacceptable in a certain space and put it in clear writing to avoid gaming. It binds the organizers as much as the attendees. It cuts out the play. For example, CoCs for dating environments look very differently then those for confs. (did you know there are cuddling meetups and they have very strict rules to ensure people feel comfortable?) There are many abusers that are quite good at the "social game" you describe, by exploiting insecurities about rules, especially in their absence. Saying they are "bad at the game" is actually one of the standard plays (and terribly harmful to those that are _actually_ "bad at the game"). The solution is not "there are no rules", but "we have rules here and others here". We need more spaces with with different sets of rules, where everyone can nerd out in their fashion, not chaos. The problem about society is that you can't cut out social interaction from humans. Any attempt to do so is doomed in my opinion.

k__ 12y ago

Sounds more like you do professional get-togethers than nerdy stuff. People behave more like "at work" at those meetups and conferences.

Argorak 12y ago
I used to run eurucamp (I'm on a hiatus), which is a very affordable summer community conference at a lake with impromptu bike rides, canoeing, parties and lots of visitor participation. We have only 1 invited speaker (keynote). We have people setting up podcasts programs for the whole conference just as a _community effort for fun_. On the peak, we ran a 5-day conference set with a one week program around it only on voluntary work. We currently have an attendance that is very diverse (we don't count) and we worked for that a lot. It couldn't be any less professional and if it can, we'd like to remove that. http://2014.eurucamp.org/concept/ http://2014.eurucamp.org/concept/ The Elasticsearch usergroup is run at a small community-driven coworking space (and existed before Elastic, the company) and the Rust usergroup definitely has no professional outset. I also ran devrooms on FOSDEM. One of the meetups the Ruby Berlin e.V. runs (the governing body for all of this) has _3 full talks_+Lightning talks every month, without any company involvement other then providing rooms. Suits are really of no interest to me in this case. Also, I'd like to say that I'm not discussing from a theoretical point here - I've been doing community work for more then 10 years and have put all the things I say here into production at some point and in multiple contexts. With measurable successes and failures.
- k__ 12y ago
  I don't say you're an impostor :) I just say all this sounds more like "conference" (= prof) than "hacker space" (= hobby) Both can be fun. I'm from Stuttgart and going to the Shack is a whole different experience than going to any meetup or conference.
  - Argorak 12y ago
    They are all hobby, on top of my work time. Many of the attendees are there for fun, especially on eurucamp, off their own pocket. Obviously, 3 days of meeting with 300 international people isn't going to be all random (even things like the CCC only _seem_ hackish). I do help and attend spontanous meetups of all forms and fashions as well - still, they all have rules and they are all better for it.

randomsearch 12y ago

> What you want is an abrasive culture and I oppose that. I agree. I prefer to use the term "nerd" to mean that type of abrasive person and "geek" as someone who is enjoys the same interests but is not interested in point-scoring and other aspects of that abrasive culture.

sthreet 12y ago

I have no experience in this, but I don't feel like anything from the article is "abrasive", or even really anything from the previous poster you replied to. Sidenote: The word "hacker" doesn't seem to mean anything anymore, it has been used in so many different ways that it has become too ambiguous. I personally like the phrase "weird nerd" better, because it might be a little more specific, and it is how I feel. (Probably doesn't help that I don't have the skills that seem to go along with "weird nerds"/"hackers".)