Is Being A Geek A Defect?

NumbersNotFound · May 2005

<div class="IPBDescription">And would you want to die for it?</div> <a href='http://science.slashdot.org/science/05/05/31/202207.shtml?tid=191&tid=14' target='_blank'>blatant repost from slashdot</a>

But I thought this was a very interesting question, mostly due to the high concentration of geeks on this board. Are supreme geeks just very mild birth defects?

Would the geek population die out if these things were tested for in the womb and then terminated?

Breakthrough · May 2005

Today in math class, I had a lot of caffiene. Everyone said I looked stoned off my ****, so I figured out patterns in binary numbers, and powers of 2. I filled like 5 sheets with numbers, explaining how to do them to people. Blank stares awated me, followed by nerd-name-calling.

Nerd!

Gwahir · May 2005

Well, if that's the case, then the world would kill to its own deficit and result in a loss of technological gain. 3rd world countries would become the dominant ones as the aborting 1st world loses its edge.

Depot · May 2005

</div><table border='0' align='center' width='95%' cellpadding='3' cellspacing='1'><tr><td><b>QUOTE</b> </td></tr><tr><td id='QUOTE'>And there is some reason to believe that "geekiness" in general is actually the place where autism shades into 'normal'.</td></tr></table><div class='postcolor'>Now THAT'S interesting!

pieceofsoap · May 2005

I am a geek. A nerd.

And I am proud of it.
If its a defect, its the kind of defect that wins out in the long run of Natural-Selection.
Geekiness for the win.

Gwahir · May 2005

nerd or geek, I conside them different things. Nerds learn to learn, geeks learn to apply.

Caboose · May 2005

Yea, I'm pretty sure I have Aspergers...

Sometimes, I like being a nerd, but most of the time, It's depressing...

Dessidious_Confuzor · May 2005

Miscellaneous items that may or may not benefit this discussion.

</div><table border='0' align='center' width='95%' cellpadding='3' cellspacing='1'><tr><td><b>QUOTE</b> </td></tr><tr><td id='QUOTE'><b>Adaptive Systems came out of the closet to say:</b>

Eventually, the considerable time you spend alone in miserable solitude will grant you oppertunity for detached observation of humanity, something people who run around giggling with their lovers never get. You will find it depraved and bestial. You will turn your hatred outwards to all of humankind and loath both women and men; You will become purified by your hatred, morally invincible and free from the bonds imposed by human companionship, free to wage the unwinnable, glorious war of reprisal on an intrinsicly twisted and brutile ethnos ever-sodomized by the universal order of eternal injustice.
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</div><table border='0' align='center' width='95%' cellpadding='3' cellspacing='1'><tr><td><b>QUOTE</b> </td></tr><tr><td id='QUOTE'><b>Adaptive Systems came out of the closet to say: </b>

Some of us are destined to never find companionship, never find lasting solace in the arms of another, and the sooner we accept this, the sooner a new world of previously unimagined dangers opens up to us.

In the exploration of these dangers, we become living testaments to the virtues of struggle, and gain a stamina that others shall never have the privilege to know.

Rather than drift into slumber in the bed of an eternal stranger, we seek a bed of flames, and with no partner, no pair, no twin, we attain a singular uniqueness and inflict upon ourselves a solitude that is the unhealing wound from which all our strength flows.

We alone know that all flesh is grass, that all promises are fantasies, that all dreams are narcotics.

We alone live without lies, without the need to enslave or to be enslaved.

We write the stories of our lives patiently, and from the other side of death. The realm of eternity is ours alone.
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</div><table border='0' align='center' width='95%' cellpadding='3' cellspacing='1'><tr><td><b>QUOTE</b> </td></tr><tr><td id='QUOTE'><b>Adaptive Systems came out of the closet to say: </b>

By all means, spend your one brief moment above the dirt toiling for the satisfaction of your imaginary biological teleology, as an earlier generation toiled for its imaginary god.

By all means, cradle your woman in bed, and do not think about the treachery that beats in her heart, so close to your own.

Do not think about the way she will forsake you, after the many years you spend drying her tears, for a perfect stranger whose smell she finds more enticing, or whose clothing peaks her curiosity, or who has nothing whatsoever to offer her other than the simple fact that he is not you.

Do not think about the truth that the mother of your children, the woman who pledged before her god to die with you, will find reasons to blame you for her unhappiness the moment she has her chance to make a life with a man of greater material means. Do not think about the fact that she will be happier in her new and larger home, and that she will not think of you alone, nor will she feel remorse.

Do not think about the way your children, to whom you gave the gift of life, for whose education you expended the best years of your only life in soul-killing drudgery, will institutionalize you without regret the moment you become any sort of emotional or financial burden, just as you did to your own.

You spend the balance of your life tending to the pain of a stranger, to whom you are a stranger. You believe that this will make your pain bearable, that your acts of mercy towards another will be returned in kind.

They will not.

You rebel against this truth, because you are too young, and too naive, and too untested by life to understand it.

Say whatever you wish about those of us who see the folly of this agony, for we are not concerned by your fear of us, and understand your need to pretend that it is you who have found that better end of this bargain.

Resist the fact that you are not loved, as an earlier generation resisted the fact that it must die.
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</div><table border='0' align='center' width='95%' cellpadding='3' cellspacing='1'><tr><td><b>QUOTE</b> </td></tr><tr><td id='QUOTE'><b>Adaptive Systems came out of the closet to say: </b>

I’m not going to kid you. I have the answer to your problems. Three words:

Stop fighting yourself.

Your unhappiness is a symptom; a symptom of your insisting that you pursue things that you are not only not meant to have, but which would actively damage you if you were to obtain them. You are not meant to find an easy, shallow happiness like the less talented and less complicated do. You are not meant to waste your time listening to John Boring Heterosexual and his ****. You were meant to focus your attention on more esoteric and rewarding matters. Perhaps you are meant to take up fencing, and escrima, and discover the lost, five-hundred year old link between those modern arts that was lost when the Spaniards and their Galleons drove it underground. Perhaps you are meant to discover the connection between the revolutionary poetry of Mayakovsky and his knowledge of a librarian lost to history who set forth a pure, complete, sound philosophy proving that all human labor builds inexorably to a day that all our dead fathers shall be bodily resurrected on this earth, through human technology. Perhaps you will discover the link between information theory and molecular biology, lying unsuspiciously in view of mankind, waiting for you to show the world that microarray data illustrates that the NP-complex problem of modeling all the tens of thousands of human proteins and their virtually infinite reactions can be adequately modeled through the use of overlapping Bayesian networks, and dream of genetically engineering human life for this and potentially endless alien worlds will become not just a possibility, but an inevitably. Perhaps you are meant to become a graphitii artist, and cover the alleys of ghettos with words from your dreams, evocative polyvalent phrases such as: "KILL THE KING" and unnumbered kindred souls you shall never meet shall see your words and feel solidarity, and their heads shall hit their pillows with plans for freedom they would otherwise not have chanced.

Any one of those possibilities and uncountable billions more beckon to you from the unconquered nothing of the future. But none of them shall be possible for you if you insist on smashing yourself upon the never-loving jagged rocks that are hearts of others. For you are presently living your life like a watchmaker who works painstakingly all day on impossibly tiny gears and then rises from his desk at every twilight to smash his half-finished creations underfoot. Every day he returns to his desk and wonders why he is making no progress in his labor, and pulls out his hair in frustration. Do you understand the folly of that? Stop pouring out your blood into ancient porcelain vases that you can not help but see destroyed before your eyes.

Seek out something more enduring, some part of yourself as yet undiscovered, and your suffering shall cease, and you will no longer be slowly dieing in a world of spoken words, aloft in the air for an instant and eternally gone without appeal, and instead make your home in the endlessly expanding sphere of electromagnetic radiation that takes alight through our thought and emanates outwards into eternity.

We are only brought into this world as seeds, knowing only what it is to be subject to cast about on a frothing sea of never-willed forces, and only some of us shall have the good fortune to be washed far enough ashore to know what it is to bloom, and discover our original purposes unfathomable to those that are endlessly adrift.

It is a blessing. A gift. Do not make the mistake of taking it lightly.
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<a href='http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Why_Nerds_are_Unpopular' target='_blank'>Paul Graham - Why Nerds Are Unpopular</a>

Finally, <a href='http://www3.telus.net/confuzor/gamespeech.mp3' target='_blank'>a gamer geared speech</a> expressing the pros of a gamer's life over a "playa"'s - contains swearing

RaVe · May 2005

Being nerdy isn't a bad thing. Just look at the MP3 player and all the nifty gadgets we make <img src='http://www.unknownworlds.com/forums/html/emoticons/nerd-fix.gif' border='0' style='vertical-align:middle' alt='nerd-fix.gif' />

Yet it's ALWAYS those people who get all the glory. Well, not that I really care about being popular....
It's sometimes depressing though....

Mantrid · May 2005

</div><table border='0' align='center' width='95%' cellpadding='3' cellspacing='1'><tr><td><b>QUOTE</b> (Breakthrough @ May 31 2005, 05:17 PM)</td></tr><tr><td id='QUOTE'> Today in math class, I had a lot of caffiene. Everyone said I looked stoned off my ****, so I figured out patterns in binary numbers, and powers of 2. I filled like 5 sheets with numbers, explaining how to do them to people. Blank stares awated me, followed by nerd-name-calling.

Nerd!  </td></tr></table><div class='postcolor'> 
Care to share your findings? I love playing with numbers. And thanks to the wonders of binary, I can count to 1023 on my hands!

As for geekiness, I don't think its a birth defect. In fact, its a benefit.

We, as geeks, or nerds, or what-have-you, are the most well adapted to the current climate of technological fervor. Therefore we become the most appealing mates, in a sort of Darwinian way.

Thus, if Scott Adams is to be believed, nerds are the new sex symbol.

Win. Very, very win.

Surge · May 2005

I haven't heard the word "nerd" in a long time. The whole nerd genre, as it were, is gone, in my opinion. I see plenty of nerds with friends (mostly other nerds, but yes, hot chicks); then again, they aren't really considered nerds. They're just called "smart." And most of them don't believe strongly in something geeky. They just do well in school because they are expected to. Good families, probably; advantaged as far as friends go. I don't think any of them have a passion for science or math, any "geeky" stuff like that.

Mantrid · May 2005

That doesn't necessarily mean there are no nerds. It could just mean that the definition of "nerd" has changed.

How do you define someone as a nerd? Are there special requirments? Do I need to get certain feats? Make sure my INT bonus is high enough? And what, if any, is the difference between (modern) geeks and nerds?

Surge · May 2005

I kind of edited my post above for that. I think nerdy constitutes a passion for science, etc., things that aren't considered important or fun by the majority. AKA, a person who actually enjoys things lots of people hate doing in school (physics, science, stuff like that). A few years ago it used to be video games; until Halo and console gaming became big. In which case, gaming isn't as nerdy as it used to be. Lots of people play video games.

loofbote · May 2005

</div><table border='0' align='center' width='95%' cellpadding='3' cellspacing='1'><tr><td><b>QUOTE</b> (Surge @ May 31 2005, 08:57 PM)</td></tr><tr><td id='QUOTE'> I kind of edited my post above for that. I think nerdy constitutes a passion for science, etc., things that aren't considered important or fun by the majority. AKA, a person who actually enjoys things lots of people hate doing in school (physics, science, stuff like that). A few years ago it used to be video games; until <b>Counter-Strike</b> became big. In which case, gaming isn't as nerdy as it used to be. Lots of people play video games.  </td></tr></table><div class='postcolor'> 
Fixed.

Supernorn · May 2005

</div><table border='0' align='center' width='95%' cellpadding='3' cellspacing='1'><tr><td><b>QUOTE</b> (Surge @ Jun 1 2005, 03:51 AM)</td></tr><tr><td id='QUOTE'> I haven't heard the word "knees" in a long time. The whole knee genre, as it were, is gone, in my opinion. I see plenty of knees with friends (mostly other knees, but yes, hot chicks); then again, they aren't really considered knees. They're just called "legs."  </td></tr></table><div class='postcolor'> 
Fixed

goAnimosity · May 2005

Fixed.

<a href='http://evo.gameover.com/sniper/surge.mp3' target='_blank'>http://evo.gameover.com/sniper/surge.mp3</a>

Har_Har_the_Pirate · May 2005

</div><table border='0' align='center' width='95%' cellpadding='3' cellspacing='1'><tr><td><b>QUOTE</b> (Depot @ May 31 2005, 06:18 PM)</td></tr><tr><td id='QUOTE'> </div><table border='0' align='center' width='95%' cellpadding='3' cellspacing='1'><tr><td><b>QUOTE</b> </td></tr><tr><td id='QUOTE'>And there is some reason to believe that "geekiness" in general is actually the place where autism shades into 'normal'.</td></tr></table><div class='postcolor'>Now THAT'S interesting!  </td></tr></table><div class='postcolor'> 
i had the nick name Autistic Rich back in highschool...

im_lost · May 2005

</div><table border='0' align='center' width='95%' cellpadding='3' cellspacing='1'><tr><td><b>QUOTE</b> (Supernorn @ May 31 2005, 08:10 PM)</td></tr><tr><td id='QUOTE'> </div><table border='0' align='center' width='95%' cellpadding='3' cellspacing='1'><tr><td><b>QUOTE</b> (Surge @ Jun 1 2005, 03:51 AM)</td></tr><tr><td id='QUOTE'> I haven't heard the word "knees" in a long time. The whole knee genre, as it were, is gone, in my opinion. I see plenty of knees with friends (mostly other knees, but yes, hot chicks); then again, they aren't really considered knees. They're just called "legs." </td></tr></table><div class='postcolor'>
Fixed  </td></tr></table><div class='postcolor'> 
I would suggest a custom title for that, except that you already have one.

CommunistWithAGun · May 2005

When people say my geek ego is huge I always think theyre referring to my moobs

Supernorn · May 2005

</div><table border='0' align='center' width='95%' cellpadding='3' cellspacing='1'><tr><td><b>QUOTE</b> (CommunistWithAGun @ Jun 1 2005, 04:29 AM)</td></tr><tr><td id='QUOTE'> When people say my geek ego is huge I always think theyre referring to my moobs  </td></tr></table><div class='postcolor'> 
All three of them?

Gliss · May 2005

</div><table border='0' align='center' width='95%' cellpadding='3' cellspacing='1'><tr><td><b>QUOTE</b> (Supernorn @ May 31 2005, 07:30 PM)</td></tr><tr><td id='QUOTE'> </div><table border='0' align='center' width='95%' cellpadding='3' cellspacing='1'><tr><td><b>QUOTE</b> (CommunistWithAGun @ Jun 1 2005, 04:29 AM)</td></tr><tr><td id='QUOTE'> When people say my geek ego is huge I always think theyre referring to my moobs </td></tr></table><div class='postcolor'>
All three of them?  </td></tr></table><div class='postcolor'> 
your mom is a moob

Supernorn · May 2005

Lol i was just listening to NS RADIO right now and ... rofl

StormLiong · June 2005

</div><table border='0' align='center' width='95%' cellpadding='3' cellspacing='1'><tr><td><b>QUOTE</b> (RaVe @ May 31 2005, 08:59 PM)</td></tr><tr><td id='QUOTE'> Being nerdy isn't a bad thing. Just look at the MP3 player and all the nifty gadgets we make <img src='http://www.unknownworlds.com/forums/html/emoticons/nerd-fix.gif' border='0' style='vertical-align:middle' alt='nerd-fix.gif' />  </td></tr></table><div class='postcolor'> 
Yeh just like Mp3 Players we geeks were the first people to first embrace it as our portable audio player of choice. People thought it would never catch on and now look at iPod.

Our geekiness tends to move to mainstream and we get forgettin <img src='http://www.unknownworlds.com/forums/html/emoticons/biggrin-fix.gif' border='0' style='vertical-align:middle' alt='biggrin-fix.gif' />

Look at gaming for instance like game consoles as another example.

Quaunaut · June 2005

Geekiness is as much a birth defect as being homosexual is a Social Disorder.

aka: Bwahahahahahahaha

Drfuzzy · June 2005

Heh I use to be hardcore geek, but I kinda 'cleaned' myself up over the last 2 years, I could see it was getting kinda bad. Now I think I'm just as normal as anyone else, besides my sometimes my spaced out attitude/speech. Seems as smart as I am, I feel rather dumb compaired to other people. But yet, how many people can do just about anything they want with electronics and cars? I dunno, guess you would have to know me to find out.

To say, I went from <img src='http://www.unknownworlds.com/forums/html/emoticons/nerd-fix.gif' border='0' style='vertical-align:middle' alt='nerd-fix.gif' /> to <img src='http://www.unknownworlds.com/forums/html/emoticons/fade.gif' border='0' style='vertical-align:middle' alt='fade.gif' /> lol

I think its more emotional problems to me. Ive grown up in every kind of situation you can think of, since I basicly live with my friends. Redneck abusive parents, crazy divorced people, yada yada. Over the years, I just dont have feelings for family deaths, weird things that would freak other people out. So my conversations can get weird, and I'll never notice, since I have a more open mind compaired to alot of the bible huggers that I live around. Kinda why I keep quiet so much now, my mouth gets me in more trouble than anything. Meh, enough ranting <img src='http://www.unknownworlds.com/forums/html/emoticons/tounge.gif' border='0' style='vertical-align:middle' alt='tounge.gif' />

Swiftspear · June 2005

Christ... they are acctually considering giving people to option of aborting children based on autism? TBH that is frigging sick.

AlienCow · June 2005

I'm not a geek, but if I was I wouldn't like to die because of it <img src='http://www.unknownworlds.com/forums/html/emoticons/tounge.gif' border='0' style='vertical-align:middle' alt='tounge.gif' />

EDIT: HOLY APPLE STRUDEL I MISSED BY 1337TH POST OMG!!!11111

Drfuzzy · June 2005

</div><table border='0' align='center' width='95%' cellpadding='3' cellspacing='1'><tr><td><b>QUOTE</b> (Swiftspear @ Jun 1 2005, 03:39 AM)</td></tr><tr><td id='QUOTE'> Christ... they are acctually considering giving people to option of aborting children based on autism? TBH that is frigging sick.  </td></tr></table><div class='postcolor'> 
Why? Because some people cant afford the $60,000 a month for the kids? Or have the rest of their life devoted to someone who cant take care of themselfs? I dont think I'd like to live in that kind of state the rest of my life, to tell the truth its a better idea. Less problems in the future for everyone.

SoulSkorpion · June 2005

I like how you jump right from "detectable before birth" to "defect" :/

Nil_IQ · June 2005

Oh noes! I am defective!

Steel_Troll · June 2005

</div><table border='0' align='center' width='95%' cellpadding='3' cellspacing='1'><tr><td><b>QUOTE</b> (goAnimosity @ May 31 2005, 10:14 PM)</td></tr><tr><td id='QUOTE'> Fixed.

<a href='http://evo.gameover.com/sniper/surge.mp3' target='_blank'>http://evo.gameover.com/sniper/surge.mp3</a>  </td></tr></table><div class='postcolor'> 
So win!

Is Being A Geek A Defect?

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