Slashdot Mirror
Ask Slashdot: Rectifying Nerd Arrogance?
An anonymous reader writes "Like some Slashdot users, I began attending university last month for computer science. The experience represents my first time away from home and I'm almost constantly with my peers, many of whom are also computer science students. Recently, I have become cognizant of the many negative opinions associated with a 'normal' person's perspective of what a nerd is like. Conversing with my college computer science peers (many of whom are quite nerdy), I have noticed that many of them are extremely arrogant. Upon introspection, I have come to the realization that I am also very similar to them and am very curious, but worried. I have noticed similar personality characteristics on Slashdot. Where does this nerd arrogance come from? How can it be rectified? I am concerned that, if I do not abolish these annoying tendencies, I may have trouble later on in life with my career and relationships. Has anybody run into problems in life with the arrogance that seems to be so prevalent with nerds? If so, how did you handle the situation?"
I'm pretty sure that's not unique to CS students. If you think arrogance is a trait only CS majors have, head over to a 500-level philosophy class sometime and talk to some of those majors. Hell, go to pretty much *any* high level class in *any* major.
The problem isn't the major, the problem is the combination of youth and a little knowledge. Most 21-year-olds are just knowledgeable enough to be cocky, but not knowledgeable enough to appreciate the fact that they really don't know shit. I believe Socrates observed this phenomenon even in his time, and commented on it. "Stop being such cocky pricks! You don't even appreciate how dumb a bunch of shits you are yet, you little fuckers!" he would tell his students (I paraphrase the Greek).
No worries, though. Ultimately, life will fix the problem.
What political party do you join when you don't like Bible-thumpers *or* hippies?
Shut up, N00b.
After living for many years in Cambridge, I have become accustomed to this attitude. I want to make a T-shirt "I act like I am smarter than you because I am. I go to MIT".
Has anybody run into problems in life with the arrogance that seems to be so prevalent with nerds? If so, how did you handle the situation?
Easy, I just stopped hanging out with so many people who were wrong all the time.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Step 1: Use smaller, more popular words when speaking. Be happy that you can communicate with the largest number of people that way instead of just an elite group. I'm just too lazy to look up "cognizant". :P
Step 2: Don't give advice to people in a slightly insulting way.
Step 3: .... oops.
Rectifying nerd arrogance: Yer gonna need a nerd diode for that.
But watch out. Indiscriminate use of a bridge style rectifier will get ya 1.414 x the nerdiness. That can blow out yer nerd capacitors if you don't spec' 'em right.
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
Jane, are you sure you want to use that criterion? Let's reminisce...
Nonlinear crystals can change a laser's color by absorbing photons and then emitting others of a different frequency because photons are mediators of the electromagnetic force, so they interact with comparatively large (~10^(-10) m) electron clouds. But neutrinos only interact via gravity (irrelevant here) and the weak force which has a comparable range of ~10^(-18) m. Since the cross section determines how likely interactions are, neutrinos are roughly ten thousand trillion times less likely to interact with matter than photons. This is just an approximation, but experiments yield similarly tiny cross sections.
If neutrinos have to interact with intervening matter before hitting the detector, an extra interaction is involved. That's why Chris Burke pointed out that detecting neutrino flavor change due to an interaction with intervening matter would depend on the square of the interaction probability. Detection in the conventional flavor oscillation theory just depends on the interaction probability because it only involves a single interaction, so it's trillions of times more likely to explain the observed electron neutrino events.
In fact, that T2K paper acknowledged a much bigger source of noise on page 8: the muon neutrino beam was slightly contaminated by electron neutrinos. This contamination doesn't invalidate their results because it only explains ~1.5 out of 6 observed electron neutrino events.
Anyway, the processes that change a laser's color are given names like "second-harmonic generation" (where a crystal combines two photons into one, commonly used in green laser pointers) and