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?"
In literature, this type of arrogance is attributed to bureaucrats and technicians.
The reason is that they are masters of the machine, whether a political/paperwork machine or the literal machine.
This gives a lot of power to someone, but it's all negative power. They have the power to say no, or to wreck things, but don't yet (or perhaps never will) have the power to create.
I think you will find that, on Slashdot and in the world, those who have actual power (more than negation) tend to be confident, proud and perhaps "arrogant," but not in the way a lot of internet users are.
The people who are most arrogant in the way you describe are the frustrated ones who have a lack of options, and to compensate, create an inflated sense of self-importance which they refresh by imposing their will on others.
It's no different than any other kind of power abuse. Some fields (law enforcement, computing, bureaucracy) tend to attract more of these people than other fields do.
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.
The major has a lot to do with it. CS (and IT) give rapid feedback on being right or wrong: those who tend to be right all the time often get cocky. This is fine until they think that because they are right about CS/IT, they are right about everything. Being in the top 1% of tech wizards doesn't make you an expert in politics or telling jokes, etc: this is where people get a reputation for arrogance or cringe-worthy ineptness.
Wall Street used to joke about "dentists from New Jersey:" a class of intelligent technical people who would confuse their specialist knowledge and track records of accruing money with general expertise in investing. They were the dumping ground for the worst financial toxic waste that banks needed to get off their books.
The Latin term for this is Pons Asinorum. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pons_asinorum
Essentially, there is a weed-out mark in most higher abstract thought processes where people are either capable of getting it, or not. It inherently develops a us/them dichotomy.
I will recount my experience.
I didn't overachieve in High School because I realized how pointless an effort that was. There were only 2 things I cared about in High School, and that was Computer Science and Math. I realized this by about grade 5.. At that time, there was a little orange book called "Games in Basic" on my teacher's bookshelf. I picked it up and started reading it one day and was fascinated (we had a PC with Windows 3.1 and I could easily boot into DOS and code up basic games). She saw me reading it and said "I bought that thinking kids might like it but nobody but you has ever read it, so you can have it if you want." So I took it home and went through all of the exercises in it (just basic word games, input a number/word, output a response, etc). At that point I was hooked. When we finally upgraded to Windows 95/98, I started playing around in VB, eventually installing my father's copy of VC and learning C. This is where my time not in school was spent (split between that and playing games). I quickly realized I enjoyed this more than just about anything else, and so I did it. I taught myself VB then C then x86. By the time I could actually take a CS course in High School I was a junior, and it was an entry-level Java course. I still learned things -- data structures and some algorithms, but the majority of the syntax and other things I was quite familiar with already. Of those two categories I cared about, I maintained a 95%+ average. I didn't apply myself in History, English, other sciences, or any of the nonsensical electives we had to take. I saw no reason to, and I didn't care that I was just outside the top 10% mark in my school, nobody I knew was as good at Math or CS as me, so as far as I was concerned, I was the valedictorian. When I later spoke with people in the top 1% including the actual valedictorian, the arrogance they exuded was astonishing, as if they had accomplished something worthwhile.
I didn't work hard to get in a great college, but I still managed to, even with my crappy GPA (something like 3.4 in HS), get a scholarship to a local university. I really wanted to go to Stanford or MIT, but the money just wasn't there, and a huge student loan wasn't something I could justify. So I majored in CS, an obvious choice, and figured that this 4-year degree would do nicely in the real world, where experience is more important anyway. I realized pretty quickly that the CS curriculum there wasn't challenging. I could read through the texts and learn what a course would teach me in a few days, and would end up bored sitting in a course going at a snail's pace for the rest of the semester. On the other hand, math courses were actually quite challenging. So 3 semesters in I switched from CS major to Math major and still took the interesting CS courses in my electives (compilers, AI, operating systems, etc). The math courses were a fair bit more difficult, especially more abstract courses, but the only time I actually had to really try to get a decent grade was when I finally started taking graduate courses. There's just too much information to keep in one's head to fully understand why a proof is valid (it doesn't just span that chapter in that book, nor even that entire book, but rather the past 3 years of courses of abstraction). Needless to say, in my spare time, I was still hacking around in CS and my brain was already prioritizing CS-useful math (including things like Abstract Algebra, Number Theory, Probability, etc), but the rest was reserved for actual CS work, so I wasn't to interested in pursuing an M.S. in math. No CS c