nerds

Link	Quote	Tags	Author
28c1ff0	Be nice to nerds. You may end up working for them. We all could.	misattributed-to-bill-gates work nerds nerd	Charles J. Sykes
419e7ac	"Star Trek?" I asked her. "Really?" "What?" she demanded, bending unnaturally black eyebrows together. "There are two kinds of people in the universe, Molly," I said. "Star Trek fans and Star Wars fans. This is shocking." She sniffed. "This is the post-nerd-closet world, Harry. It's okay to like both." "Blasphemy and lies," I said."	nerds star-wars molly-carpenter star-trek	Jim Butcher
bd7f3b5	If you want to annoy a poet, explain his poetry.	poetry wisdom details autism wisdom-vs-nerds nerdiness intuition nerds nerd	Nassim Nicholas Taleb
eef2c98	"There's not even real popularity at my school." "That," Coli said emphatically, "is a sentence that has only ever been spoken by popular people."	nerds	John Green
66dd6a1	Wit seduces by signaling intelligence without nerdiness.	humor intelligence wisdom autism wisdom-vs-nerdiness sense-of-humor nerds nerd wit	Nassim Nicholas Taleb
9004430	"The best way to measure the loss of intellectual sophistication - this "nerdification," to put it bluntly - is in the growing disappearance of sarcasm, as mechanic minds take insults a bit too literally."	irony intellectual-sophistication post-ironic sophistication post-modern post-modernism nerdery reddit wisdom-vs-nerds nerdiness nerds nerd internet wit	Nassim Nicholas Taleb
9d63e13	"You don't understand!' Foaly objected. Trouble cut him off with a chop of his hand through the air. 'I never understand. That's why we pay you and your dork posse." Foaly objected again. 'They are not dorks!' Trouble found space for yet another holster. 'Really? That guy brings a Beanie Baby to work every day. And your nephew, Mayne, speaks fluent Unicorn.' 'They're not dorks,' said Foaly, correcting himself."	nerds	Eoin Colfer
71c60e3	The imagination of the genius vastly surpasses his intellect; the intellect of the academic vastly surpasses his imagination	criticism imagination genius-stupidity nerdery critics art genius nerds nerd artist	Nassim Nicholas Taleb
b7baf78	I suspect the I.Q., SAT, and school grades are tests designed by nerds so they can get high scores in order to call each other intelligent...Smart and wise people who score low on IQ tests, or patently intellectually defective ones, like the former U.S. president George W. Bush, who score high on them (130), are testing the test and not the reverse.	intelligence wisdom iq wisdom-vs-nerds nerdiness nerds nerd	Nassim Nicholas Taleb
6d7ddc9	Chester nods all the way through this, but does not rudely interrupt Randy as a younger nerd would. Your younger nerd takes offense quickly when someone near him begins to utter declarative sentences, because he reads into it an ssertion that he, the nerd, does not already know the information being imparted. But your older nerd has more self-confidence, and besides, understands that frequently people need to think out loud. And highly advanced nerds will furthermore understand that uttering declarative sentences whose contents are already known to all present is part of the social process of making conversation and therefore should not be construed as aggression under any circumstances.	nerds	Neal Stephenson
337c8ab	"I wish it were different. I wish that we privileged knowledge in politicians, that the ones who know things didn't have to hide it behind brown pants, and that the know-not-enoughs were laughed all the way to the Maine border on their first New Hampshire meet and greet. I wish that in order to secure his party's nomination, a presidential candidate would be required to point at the sky and name all the stars; have the periodic table of the elements memorized; rattle off the kings and queens of Spain; define the significance of the Gatling gun; joke around in Latin; interpret the symbolism in seventeenth-century Dutch painting; explain photosynthesis to a six-year-old; recite Emily Dickinson; bake a perfect popover; build a shortwave radio out of a coconut; and know all the words to Hoagy Carmichael's "Two Sleepy People," Johnny Cash's "Five Feet High and Rising," and "You Got the Silver" by the Rolling Stones. After all, the United States is the greatest country on earth dealing with the most complicated problems in the history of the world--poverty, pollution, justice, Jerusalem. What we need is a president who is at least twelve kinds of nerd, a nerd messiah to come along every four years, acquire the Secret Service code name Poindexter, install a Revenge of the Nerds screen saver on the Oval Office computer, and one by one decrypt our woes."	politics patriotic nerdiness politics-of-the-united-states opinion patriotism nerds nerd	Sarah Vowell
7b7de19	We're not hunter-gatherers anymore. We're all living like patients in the intensive care unit of a hospital. What keeps us alive isn't bravery, or athleticism, or any of those other skills that were valuable in a caveman society. It's our ability to master complex technological skills. It is our ability to be nerds. We need to breed nerds.	bravery future humanity intelligence brainiac breed caveman gatherer hunter-gatherer intensive-care patients athleticism hunter complexity geeks society genius brains nerds hospital mastery technology	Neal Stephenson
2e954ba	The rationalist imagines an imbecile-free society; the empiricist and imbecile-proof one, or even better, a rationalist-proof one.	wisdom rationalism rationalists reddit white-male-privilege wisdom-vs-nerds nerdiness pitfalls-of-bad-thinking empiricism white-privilege atheism nerds nerd	Nassim Nicholas Taleb
ba398d9	...my classical values make me advocate the triplet of erudition, elegance, and courage; against modernity's phoniness, nerdiness, and philistinism...many philistines reduce my ideas to an opposition of technology when in fact I am opposing the naive blindness to it's side affects - the fragility criterion. I'd rather be unconditional about ethical and conditional about technology than the the reverse.	internet-addiction modern-values modernity-is-a-sickness robustness wisdom-vs-nerdiness nerdiness nerds fragility nerd modernity	Nassim Nicholas Taleb
f55ebb6	He wore a tiny turquoise stud earring I always associated with Dungeons and Dragons types. Men who own ferrets and think magic tricks are cool.	ferrets dungeons-and-dragons geeks nerds	Gillian Flynn
77e1da9	Abe said something interesting. He said that because everyone's so poor these days, the '90s will be a decade with no architectural legacy or style- everyone's too poor to put up new buildings. He said that code is the architecture of the '90s.	architecture computers nerds	Douglas Coupland
706046b	I attended a symposium, an event named after a fifth century (B.C.) Athenian drinking party in which nonnerds talked about love; alas, there was no drinking, and mercifully, nobody talked about love.	autism nerdiness nerds nerd modernity	Nassim Nicholas Taleb
be97c00	Turner had never met a kid like Elwood before. was the word he returned to, even though the Tallahassee boy looked soft, conducted himself like a goody-goody, and had an irritating tendency to preach. Wore eyeglasses you wanted to grind underfoot like a butterfly. He talked like a white college boy, read books when he didn't have to, and mined them for uranium to power his own personal A-bomb. Still--sturdy.	reading books intelligence softness sturdiness nerds	Colson Whitehead

Be nice to nerds. You may end up working for them. We all could.

misattributed-to-bill-gates work nerds nerd

Charles J. Sykes

419e7ac

"Star Trek?" I asked her. "Really?" "What?" she demanded, bending unnaturally black eyebrows together. "There are two kinds of people in the universe, Molly," I said. "Star Trek fans and Star Wars fans. This is shocking." She sniffed. "This is the post-nerd-closet world, Harry. It's okay to like both." "Blasphemy and lies," I said."

nerds star-wars molly-carpenter star-trek

Jim Butcher

bd7f3b5

If you want to annoy a poet, explain his poetry.

poetry wisdom details autism wisdom-vs-nerds nerdiness intuition nerds nerd

Nassim Nicholas Taleb

eef2c98

"There's not even real *popularity* at my school." "That," Coli said emphatically, "is a sentence that has only ever been spoken by popular people."

nerds

John Green

66dd6a1

Wit seduces by signaling intelligence without nerdiness.

humor intelligence wisdom autism wisdom-vs-nerdiness sense-of-humor nerds nerd wit

Nassim Nicholas Taleb

9004430

"The best way to measure the loss of intellectual sophistication - this "nerdification," to put it bluntly - is in the growing disappearance of sarcasm, as mechanic minds take insults a bit too literally."

irony intellectual-sophistication post-ironic sophistication post-modern post-modernism nerdery reddit wisdom-vs-nerds nerdiness nerds nerd internet wit

Nassim Nicholas Taleb

9d63e13

"You don't understand!' Foaly objected. Trouble cut him off with a chop of his hand through the air. 'I never understand. That's why we pay you and your dork posse." Foaly objected again. 'They are not dorks!' Trouble found space for yet another holster. 'Really? That guy brings a Beanie Baby to work every day. And your nephew, Mayne, speaks fluent Unicorn.' 'They're not dorks,' said Foaly, correcting himself."

nerds

Eoin Colfer

71c60e3

The imagination of the genius vastly surpasses his intellect; the intellect of the academic vastly surpasses his imagination

criticism imagination genius-stupidity nerdery critics art genius nerds nerd artist

Nassim Nicholas Taleb

b7baf78

I suspect the I.Q., SAT, and school grades are tests designed by nerds so they can get high scores in order to call each other intelligent...Smart and wise people who score low on IQ tests, or patently intellectually defective ones, like the former U.S. president George W. Bush, who score high on them (130), are testing the test and not the reverse.

intelligence wisdom iq wisdom-vs-nerds nerdiness nerds nerd

Nassim Nicholas Taleb

6d7ddc9

Chester nods all the way through this, but does not rudely interrupt Randy as a younger nerd would. Your younger nerd takes offense quickly when someone near him begins to utter declarative sentences, because he reads into it an ssertion that he, the nerd, does not already know the information being imparted. But your older nerd has more self-confidence, and besides, understands that frequently people need to think out loud. And highly advanced nerds will furthermore understand that uttering declarative sentences whose contents are already known to all present is part of the social process of making conversation and therefore should not be construed as aggression under any circumstances.

nerds

Neal Stephenson

337c8ab

"I wish it were different. I wish that we privileged knowledge in politicians, that the ones who know things didn't have to hide it behind brown pants, and that the know-not-enoughs were laughed all the way to the Maine border on their first New Hampshire meet and greet. I wish that in order to secure his party's nomination, a presidential candidate would be required to point at the sky and name all the stars; have the periodic table of the elements memorized; rattle off the kings and queens of Spain; define the significance of the Gatling gun; joke around in Latin; interpret the symbolism in seventeenth-century Dutch painting; explain photosynthesis to a six-year-old; recite Emily Dickinson; bake a perfect popover; build a shortwave radio out of a coconut; and know all the words to Hoagy Carmichael's "Two Sleepy People," Johnny Cash's "Five Feet High and Rising," and "You Got the Silver" by the Rolling Stones. After all, the United States is the greatest country on earth dealing with the most complicated problems in the history of the world--poverty, pollution, justice, Jerusalem. What we need is a president who is at least twelve kinds of nerd, a nerd messiah to come along every four years, acquire the Secret Service code name Poindexter, install a Revenge of the Nerds screen saver on the Oval Office computer, and one by one decrypt our woes."

politics patriotic nerdiness politics-of-the-united-states opinion patriotism nerds nerd

Sarah Vowell

7b7de19

We're not hunter-gatherers anymore. We're all living like patients in the intensive care unit of a hospital. What keeps us alive isn't bravery, or athleticism, or any of those other skills that were valuable in a caveman society. It's our ability to master complex technological skills. It is our ability to be nerds. We need to breed nerds.

bravery future humanity intelligence brainiac breed caveman gatherer hunter-gatherer intensive-care patients athleticism hunter complexity geeks society genius brains nerds hospital mastery technology

Neal Stephenson

2e954ba

The rationalist imagines an imbecile-free society; the empiricist and imbecile-proof one, or even better, a rationalist-proof one.

wisdom rationalism rationalists reddit white-male-privilege wisdom-vs-nerds nerdiness pitfalls-of-bad-thinking empiricism white-privilege atheism nerds nerd

Nassim Nicholas Taleb

ba398d9

...my classical values make me advocate the triplet of erudition, elegance, and courage; against modernity's phoniness, nerdiness, and philistinism...many philistines reduce my ideas to an opposition of technology when in fact I am opposing the naive blindness to it's side affects - the fragility criterion. I'd rather be unconditional about ethical and conditional about technology than the the reverse.

internet-addiction modern-values modernity-is-a-sickness robustness wisdom-vs-nerdiness nerdiness nerds fragility nerd modernity

Nassim Nicholas Taleb

f55ebb6

He wore a tiny turquoise stud earring I always associated with Dungeons and Dragons types. Men who own ferrets and think magic tricks are cool.

ferrets dungeons-and-dragons geeks nerds

Gillian Flynn

77e1da9

Abe said something interesting. He said that because everyone's so poor these days, the '90s will be a decade with no architectural legacy or style- everyone's too poor to put up new buildings. He said that code is the architecture of the '90s.

architecture computers nerds

Douglas Coupland

706046b

I attended a symposium, an event named after a fifth century (B.C.) Athenian drinking party in which nonnerds talked about love; alas, there was no drinking, and mercifully, nobody talked about love.

autism nerdiness nerds nerd modernity

Nassim Nicholas Taleb

be97c00

Turner had never met a kid like Elwood before. was the word he returned to, even though the Tallahassee boy looked soft, conducted himself like a goody-goody, and had an irritating tendency to preach. Wore eyeglasses you wanted to grind underfoot like a butterfly. He talked like a white college boy, read books when he didn't have to, and mined them for uranium to power his own personal A-bomb. Still--sturdy.

reading books intelligence softness sturdiness nerds

Colson Whitehead