[farright]

>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.

[dragonwriter]

I 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.

[sidlls]

Othering of "nerds" isn't restricted to liberals.

[farright]

"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]

I 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]

Even 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]

I 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.

[vostok]

So first, why it's important for me that we're able to trade continuously. Suppose I'm an HFT who trades the S&P 500 ETF. I put out a buy order at 217.75 and a sell order at 217.76.

If a trader comes in an buys the ETF from me at 217.76 then I need to be able to hedge immediately in other products. Without continuous trading I would need to quote wider.

Second, HFTs make less money per dollar traded than the people who used to do this. In a sense, HFTs "won" because they were willing to do this cheaper than anyone else.

This is different from investment banking, where it's my impression that they get paid these huge fees because CEOs hire their friends and pay them with shareholders' money.

[maxerickson]

Lay 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?

[dragonwriter]

I think viewing the HFT tax propoals as being motivated by anti-nerd rather than a out accumulation of wealth that is perceived to be at the expense of people like the tax supporter where the tax supporter fails to see the social utility of the function producing the accumulation of wealth is, well, a significant case of seeing what you want to see rather than what is actually there.

[yummyfajitas]

Go read Flash Boys. It's almost literally "Revenge of the Jocks". You have a jock (Katsuyama) who is naively bro-ing down and schmoozing clients while selling button pushing services to them.

Suddenly some evil nerds come along and use computers to "pick him off"! ("Pick off" is a wonderful phrase Michael Lewis uses but never defines, but it somehow involves computers doing evil things.)

Finally, at the end, Katsuyama builds a new exchange with no nerds allowed.

[forgottenpass]

It'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]

Observe 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.