[harrall]

I don’t know about everyone else but “nerds” have never had a positive image to the general population.

Nerds as honest or incorruptible? In popular media, from Revenge of the Nerds to The Simpsons to Big Bang Theory, the defining feature of “nerds” is that they have poor social skills and less regard for their fellow humans.

Now people like Jeff Bezos or Elon Musk look like the nerds that now have money and power! Ah ha! “It doesn’t matter what others think of me now! This is revenge for looking down on me before!”

[watwut]

I always interpreted terms geek and nerd as: geek is someone knowledgeable extremely into a some tech or scifi or some such".

Nerd is geek plus low social skills. He may be just awkward and once you get used to it he is actually nice. Or, he may be as asshole. But always weird.

[SenHeng]

You may be right. Ut that’s just pointless bike-shedding.

harrall is right that to the general populace, nerds/geeks are interchangeable terms for people who prefer to study/play with computers rather than socialise with the rest of us.

That doesn’t necessarily mean they have a better moral compass and will always do the right thing. Those are images that nerds put onto themselves.

[watwut]

I agree with more compass.

But I genuinely find it weird that Musk and CEOs in general are called geeks or nerds. Their whole thing is that they made a choice to spend less time doing actual tech work and a lot more time doing business, managing, dealing, etc. Whole their success is predicated on their ability to make people do what they want. They are not spending time tinkering with computers, they are spending time schmoozing for investment contacts. That is literal opposite of a nerd or a geek.

In the "revenge of the nerds" drama, they would be ultrasocial jocks bullies with cool computer game at home.