[cbozeman]

"You're out of your depth."

That's what you do.

A lot of very smart people think because they're very smart they have some kind of exceptional insight into the inner workings of all things. They don't. And they need to be reminded of that. Intelligence allows someone to gain that insight faster than those in the middle of the bell curve of IQ, but it doesn't magically confer it. It still takes time, reading, research, and seeing it in practice.

Or put another way - what I call the "Iceberg Analogy" - every discipline in life is like an iceberg. The average person sees about 10% of what's actually happening, and is able to comprehend that without too much effort, but the other 90% that's below the surface takes a lot to fully make sense of.

[bsder]

> "You're out of your depth."

Except most of the time ... they are not. Most non-junior WNs learn to have significant respect for those doing the work. The Weird Nerd judges based upon objectively observed behavior rather than social cues or group opinions.

Mostly, the Weird Nerd gets in trouble because they simply aren't fooled. And that pisses of corporatocrats like you worse than anything else.

The WN can see that you are rewarding the politician rather than the person who actually did the work. The WN will actually calculate the full cap table and see the distortion that flags the insider backscratching. The WN can envision exactly how the sales incentives will be exploited. etc.

Effectively, the WN is a canary that detects bad managers immediately unlike normal people. And that's something that bad managers simply cannot abide.

[lazyasciiart]

I have been in a meeting where the weird nerd is saying "our company should completely ditch customer support phone lines and only use a chat service because I don't know anyone who wants to make a phone call". This company was a utility that had customers with every level of literacy and internet access. He was mindbogglingly wrong, because he had no idea there was information in the world that he hadn't come across. It's very common - so common it's called engineer syndrome.

[bsder]

And, ironically, I had the exact opposite conversation where we kept paying money to fund customer support phone lines that had one call in 6 months because the sales and marketing team couldn't conceive of the fact that nobody under 30 (our primary demographic) wanted to use voice anymore and were screaming for an app/webapp chat of some form.

Not knowing your customers isn't unique to engineers.

[randomdata]

> He was mindbogglingly wrong

How do you know?

Studies already suggest that 9 out of 10 people prefer text communication with businesses. Of the remaining 10%, we have to establish that they:

1. Prefer the phone over other alternatives. Some may want face-to-face communication, for example.

2. Want to phone a utility in the first place. Preferring phone communication over other means does not imply that they want to communicate.

3. That the person of which you speak knows of them. Someone who really does want to phone a utility, but is not known by said person, would not meet the qualifications defined.

Unless you actually compiled a list of those he knows and surveyed them in a good faith standing, you can't know. The statistics are not in your favour, though. It is quite unlikely that he does know someone who wants to make a phone call to said utility. Perhaps your weird nerdiness has clouded seeing that?

[lazyasciiart]

No, we don’t have to establish that he knows them. It doesn’t matter if he is right about the people he knows: he is wrong about the customer base and the business decision.

[TeMPOraL]

Ironically, that's what the companies have been doing for the past few years, by having people talk to voice assistant "AI"s instead of humans.

Hell, you could argue the process started much earlier: before voice assistants came DTMF phone menus with automated recordings; before that came outsourcing customer support to cheapest labor available - which is like hooking up ChatGPT to the phone line, except with protein robots paid peanuts and worked to the bone instead.

[cbozeman]

> And that pisses of corporatocrats like you worse than anything else.

Congratulations, you've shown you don't know how the world actually works. This is called "Weird Nerd" but it really means, "Someone who can't operate within society and thus is forced to suffer because they'll do the hard work of building or designing something, but won't do the hard work of understanding human beings."

First, go learn how the world actually works. Not the way you clearly - and incorrectly - believe it to work - the way it actually works. Then once you figure out how to operate within the system, you might actually get something worthwhile done.

> The Weird Nerd judges based upon objectively observed behavior rather than social cues or group opinions.

This is why they so consistently fail.

> Mostly, the Weird Nerd gets in trouble because they simply aren't fooled.

They get in trouble because they have an incorrect mental model of the world and are instead stuck in how they think the world "ought" to work, instead of how it "actually" works.

[senordevnyc]

“The reasonable man adapts himself to the world: the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man.” -George Bernard Shaw

The pragmatist in me is sympathetic to your viewpoint here. But the article in question is making the point that when Weird Nerds have to "figure out how to operate within the system", they actually lose their ability to get something worthwhile done. That still might be the optimal path for them to take as individuals, given the incentives they face, but maybe as a society, we'd be better off trying to design the system so that it could better tolerate the "downsides" of the Weird Nerd so they can maximize their ability to get something worthwhile done.

Obviously this is a balancing act (as the article points out), but the author is making the point that some environments (like academia) have swung too far in the direction of conformity, which seems to me to usually be presented using the exact language you're using here.

[antisthenes]

> A lot of very smart people think because they're very smart they have some kind of exceptional insight into the inner workings of all things. They don't. And they need to be reminded of that.

When you talk to people, you have no idea how much time they've spent before that conversation gaining insight. Maybe their simple phrase is a culmination of several years of research and insight, whereas for you, you just thought about this topic yesterday.

Seems like normies need to be reminded of that way more frequently than nerds.

[mmcgaha]

A better response would be to tell them you are done trying to convince them because you own the responsibility and consequences of the decision. "You're out of your depth" is an insult and is intended to be one.

[cbozeman]

"You're out of your depth" is an insult to someone with an excessive ego.

If you're not actually out of your depth, you won't be insulted by it.

I don't get insulted when someone says I'm stupid. Because that is not true, and I know it isn't true. It isn't the things we know to be untrue that insults us - it's the things that we know to be true, that we can't accept - or even worse - can't see about ourselves that insult us.

[xenocratus]

> or even worse - can't see about ourselves that insult us

Isn't this the point of the previous comment? That the WN thinks they're not out of their depth and can't see that about themselves. So it is an insult from that perspective.

[bruce343434]

Is saying that someone has no expertise in a subject necessarily an insult?

To me, your proposal sounds more like a band-aid, instead of treating the core ailment: someone who won't recognize their own fallibility.

Perhaps it can't be "treated", and we just have to make do with such "band aids". But wouldn't it be more productive if we could just get to the root of it?