(Putting aside for a moment the "This is worth a 100?!" question...)
Look. The problem of hyper-reactive teachers/school administrators is systemically inherent. If you think the problem is bad now, just wait! It will proceed to get a lot worse. There are no forces working to reduce how hyper-reactive teachers are. There are forces (teacher accountability, parental economics, political grandstanding, etc.) which drive this process, but the only faction which cares to object is the students themselves and maybe a few geeks.
So if you are a parent, and you object to your kids being treated like this, you have two choices:
Put up with it, and convince yourself that it's not all that bad.
Pull your kids from school. From all schools.
If you're a Conscientious (Schooling) Objector, you're in good company. Go read Teach Your Own by John Holt, contact Growing Without Schoolinghere, check out this portal for everything homeschooling. There's only several zillion resources for someone determined not to submit their kid to an institution they do not approve of.
Parents, stop whining about the system. If you don't like it, opt out.
P.S. If you think being schooled fscked with your head, and you've been working on getting over being institutionalized, there's an email list for people you. It's on OneList. Find it for yourself if you're interested. ----------------------------------------------
By the same token, if everyone votes, then you may find yourself with a bad candidate because a lot of people just voted for whose name they saw the most on signs around their town. I see it in Quebec regularly. The inteligencia in my area all vote Liberal, and the welfare class (50% unemployment in my hometown), all vote PQ. The result? Separatist victory, and endless complaints about how bad the government is with no thought to the fact they put them there.
But that's a criticism of democracy in all its various forms, not of increased voter turnout. The intrinsic problem(?) with letting just anybody vote, is that they just might.
Frankly, from your analysis, it looks like the intelligencia of Quebec would be better served by trying to put up more signs around town (as you put it) and otherwise trying to convince their fellow voters to agree with them than merely voting and grumbling.
More practically, are there ways that American geeks (not all of us are, remember) can influence the political process with less of a go-home-and-shower feeling?
No, actually.
American politics are pretty disgusting. I recommend the movie Primary Colors. ----------------------------------------------
Geeks make up, on a good day, some 10% of the US population (defining "geek" generously, at that).
Geeks are incredibly fractious. Getting a group of nerds to all vote in the same direction is like the probverbial herding of cats
Ergo, at the voting booth we have the political clout of fuck-all. There's not a politician alive who doesn't grok this reality deeply. That's reality, boys and girls.
Buying politicians with political donations is stupid. It's the brute-force solution. Everyone and his mom has a PAC. Our money would just compete on an even footing with everyone else's money. That's pathetic. Not an elegant way to fight, and not sufficiently reliable.
There's an elegant way to fight: we buy our politicians in kind. We pay for them in services they could not possible afford - services they wouldn't have dreamed to ask for - without us. We buy them with hours, we buy them with resources.
We host their web sites. We design their web sites. We set up the kind of informational infrastructure for coordinating volunteers which are a campaign manager's wet dream. We take over their internet presence so they don't do anything idiotic.
Whatever you may think of his politics, Ventura has proved that the net can have quite an impact on politics.
Are we wizards or aren't we? If we aren't kingmakers, we're pretty lame wizards, aren't we?
Once upon a time (turn of the last century, actually) Boston was taken over by a new political force consisting entirely of immigrants. This was done via a form of social engineering called a political machine.
We know about machines, don't we boys and girls?
A political machine is an organization which gets large number of votes out (and pointed in the same direction) when it matters, and it does so (hence the analogy to a machine) reliably and pretty much regardless of who the candidate is.
The political machines of the last century were not scalable, because - get this - networking limitations. The resource cost (mostly volunteers, time, and money) grew linearly with the size of the constituency being influenced. National elections were really beyond the serious influence of political machines.
But we could fix that, couldn't we? If there's any kind of problem we can solve, it's how to route large amounts of information correctly.
One big difference, oft lamented by geeks, between then and now is the extent to which our elections have become a media game. But that's to our favor. We control a medium! We rule in this medium, we can make it do things no one else can.
I'm not even talking about compromising the enemy's services. I'm talking about putting up web sites 1000% better than the opponents:
e-commerce for accepting donations
serious content about the candidates positions
serious content about the opponent's positions (even if no one reads it, a thorough and professional looking site makes the opposition look like cheesy amateurs!)
a/.-ish forum for the supporters to discuss strategy, tactics, news of note - and thus make the campaign fantastically responsive.
similarly a/.-ish forum for the uncommitted to discuss issues.
I'm talking about political coordinating through:
Email lists, sophisticatedly implemented
Industrial strength db for tracking regional response, w/ extranet for distributed volunteers
What if our candidate were to challenge opponents to an "on-line debate" - NOT in real-time, but in a series of posts, which the public can comment on, a la the way/. collectively interviews interesting people. "On-line" has such cache right now, we could probably pull it off. We geeks may be few, but we're hardly the only literate people. If we can get the newpapers to pick it up and report on it, we'll own that debate, simply because any candidate we advise will look about a hundred times less stupid on-line.
And once we nail them down in print, we have have fun with them. Twenty+ years of flaming on Usenet has taught us nothing if not how to discredit fools in print.
If we control the medium (and we do) we can force the campaign onto whatever rhetorical ground we want. We can make it "issues centered" if we like.
In summary: if we wielded our real power for those politicians we choose to support, we could own them. Money be damned; if we can hand them elections on a silver platter, they'd do anything for us. And our real power is finessing systems.
If we want the world run our way (for any definition of "we"), we need to bring our considerable intellectual prowess to bear on the problem. We understand FUD. We understand networking. We understand image. We understand manipulating media via manipulating the medium. We have the technology.:) ----------------------------------------------
OK, yeah, the article was cheesy and shallow. Complain all you want about the "not hippies like you expected" jist.
But the question - "Who are the people behind this social movement, and what are they like?" - is a great question to ask. The fact that it may be impossible to answer conclusively doesn't detract from the potential value of the pursuiting an answer.
History will want to know "What happened here to cause this? Who were the men and women who joined in and supported this cause? What were their motivations? How did it fit into their lifes and their livelihoods? What made them different than all the people who did not take up the cause?"
There are some trivial answers to some of these questions, but there are also richer answers. It's all well and good to say "people contribute to OS because they want to give back", but that, for instance, misses the obvious predicate "and they aren't satisfied with the available cost-ware and its affordances." Our explanations to ourselves often overlook such fundamentals, because we are like fish discussing water.
I fervently hope that more anthropologists, social commentators, and just plain clueful reporters pay close attention to what's happening in the OS movement. This is what "journalism" means: to "journal" - to chronicle - history as it is being made.
This is it. This is history. Come'n get it. ----------------------------------------------
FYI, (IANAL,B) I understand that the term for a contract which is illegal - a contract in which one party signs away rights which the law says they cannot sign away - is a "contract of adhesion".
I presume what people are saying is that in places like CA, a non-compete is a contract of adhesion.
The problems with contracts of adhesion are
While the judge should throw them out if it goes to court, you may get hauled into court because of one (with concommitant lawyers fees) and you may get a flakey or confused judge. It happens.
The other party can threaten you with hauling you into court - since you signed the damn thing - which may be punitive enough (time, money spent defending yourself) that you capitulate to their control.
Often, one or both of the signers don't know it's a contract of adhesion, and forfit rights which they needn't or shouldn't. When used as a tool to trick one party into forfitting rights they don't know they can't be deprived of, it's egregiously unethical. ----------------------------------------------
Whatever happened to reading for comprehension, people?? The C|NET story ISN'T proporting to list the "10 Best Hacks of all Time" . It's listing the 10 "MOST SUBVERSIVE" hacks (in their NSHO). That's why those inelegant - but politically interesting - hacks are there. ----------------------------------------------
If it one is "misled to believe the net is an alternative to school and a degree" then I am misled -- and happily degree-free. It don't seem to be hurting me none.;)
In all seriousness, the Net is the best thing to have ever happened to the School of Hard Knocks, of which I am an enthusiastic alum. Schools and degrees aren't the only way -- and those who think so are the ones who are misled. (Heck, there are lots of teachers and professors who stand to lose out if they fail to convince everyone that their services are irreplacable.)
Don't get me wrong: I'm not arguing one can do a global-search-n-replace on one's life, substituting the Net for schooling, and get the same result. One has to use the Net very differently than one uses a school to extract its educational benefit. But self-study, in all its glorious forms, including via the Net, is always an alternative to hiring someone else to teach you. And the acclaim and testamony of other learned people as to one's level of skill/knowledge/expertise will always be an alternative to a degree. ----------------------------------------------
Mr. Carter has constructed a theory of anthroplogy based about the premise that some large percentage of people are diseased. He has done this based on his observation of white-collar workers, primarily in technical fields.
Earlier in this century Katherine C. Briggs cast her net wider. She observed some of the same phenomena, but in a much bigger context. She came up with a different interpretation.
The sub-branch of psychology she founded has the following paradigm:
A certain sub-population can be characterized as particularly change- and risk- adverse, very traditionalist and conservative, very methodical and habitual - among other traits. Testing indicates these people comprise about one third of the US population. Testing in workplaces, the military, and college programs which specialize in business training indicates that this change-adverse population is disproportionately represented among executives and business people. Let's call these people group A.
A different sub-population (group B) can be characterized as particularly risk- and change- embracing; more dare-devil and capricious. They, too, account for about one third of the US population. This population has disproportionately high school drop-out rates, and a much lower tolerance of the routine of the office; they are less common in the white-collar world, and tend to work in "interupt-driven" jobs such as "business development".
Group C, the remaining third-to-a-quarter (depending on which study you use) is the lump which has several familiar factions in it. It is not characterized (as a whole) as being particularly change-adverse or change-embracing (though individual members maybe on either end of that scale.) Instead, they are characterized by a facility with (and reliance on) abstract thought, which the other two populations don't share. In is in this population that you find the Poets, the Activists, the Mystics - and the Scientists, Architects, and yes, Hackers.
One of the foundations of this paradigm is that all these trait-clusters (which define these populations) are equally "normal", healthful, viable and valid. They have pathologies, but they aren't themselves pathologies.
What it looks like, from the perspective of this paradigm, is that Mr. Carter generalized from the interactions of his Group C friends, students and collegues with a largely Group A -rich population, to wit, The Suits. And perceiving the very palpable difference between these kinds of people, he then made an presumption as old as humankind: If They are different from Us, either They or Us must be broken/wrong/bad/defective/sick/disordered.
It is these Suits, these (usually) Group A people, who are Packers. They are not Packers because they are defective or diseased. They are Packers because Packing is an amazingly useful and viable memetic strategy - ask Mr. Ford about his factories. I agree: Packing is an abysmal strategy for making software. But it is kick ass for making cars, running a farm, or, yes, packing boxes.
In fact, it's they very success of Packing that's at the root of this problem. All those Packers have had such success with it so far, they have trouble imagining it could fail them. They have a hammer, and have seen many nails; if they are skeptical about the concept of certain nail-like objects being "screws", that is only to be expected.
And give them some credit: If someone working for you insisted that the methodology which has worked for you your entire life was wrong, you'd probably be rather skeptical.
Packers live in a world in which Packing, by and large, works. Mappers, unfortunately, have to live in a society filled with Packers (the Group B, the swing vote, usually effectively supports Group A for reasons to complicated to go into here). So natural Mappers to learn to Pack. Since Packers can get through life without learning much to Map, they often slack off and don't bother.
Briggs wrote about the phenomenon of "Protective Coloration", whereby people of a minority type learn to behave in the way of a majority (or socially sanctioned) type. This is a major life stressor, and trying to keep up the charade generally makes one awfully miserable. This applies precisely to the problem of our native Mappers, people from Group C, who learned to put aside the strategy of Mapping for the more approved strategy of Packing.
It is this which causes the Ghost Not, and from there, the rest of Mr. Carter's theory can proceed.
But I must take issue with the presumption that someone has to be pathological. The problem is not that Packers are defective or diseased Mappers languishing for a cure. The problem is that Packers can impose Packing on software projects.
The solution in some combination of
"Mapping Appreciation" for Packers - the training of Packers to accept and respect the Mapping strategy, so they keep out of the hair of the Mappers while they do their work, and
Preventing those Packers without that clue-attitude combination from having anything to do with development, except possibly the Q&A.
People interested in learning more about this paradigm of psychology/anthropology should turn to:
The classic system is: students are assigned letter grades for their performance in classes, A high, D low, and F=Fail. The GPA is an average of all grades using the A=4/F=0 conversion. Someone getting 4.0 is a perfect student.
However: There is no standarized system, just people pretending there is, so an ever-increasing number of schools have started doing cunning things with their "GPAs".
For example, my second high school decided that "APs" (Advanced Placement exam prep classes) would count an extra point. A=5/F=1. Thus the highest GPA in the school was a 4.5. This also did wonderous things to my GPA when I transferred to my third high school, and applied to college. It didn't hurt to make the school look good, and it's paying clientel feel they were getting good education for their money.
Meanwhile, the assignment of grades is completely arbitrary. There is no standardized test. There is a pressure on teachers to map grades to a bell-curve, but they can be as subjective or objectively rigourous as they'd like. (Why, yes, I have taught in a high-school.) ----------------------------------------------
Disclaimer: I have no experience of the SAT test and make no claims to knowledge as to how it is used. However, there`s a possibility that it`s being used wrongly.
The possibility? Let me erase all doubt from your mind: the use of the SAT is a scandal.
In these slightly more enlightened times, the SAT is increasingly widely regarded as a crock. One oft cited statistic is that the only thing of which SAT scores have been shown to be an accurate predictor is parental income.
Universities (especially the big name private schools) have been playing down the use of SATs for quite some time. State schools evidently still use them. ----------------------------------------------
I hate to see the mentality of fungible goods being applied to the pursuit of learning. I'd like to think college students are not just bodies filling chairs, but helping advance the sum of human knowledge. It's easy to see why colleges might look at this as a tool, though. Education isn't its own end anymore.
This is about "education" being treated as a commodity. Education -- or more precisely the experience of attending college, whether or not that results in an education -- has always been a commodity.
Frankly, I don't see what's wrong with that. I find it fascinating that people get so upset confronting that reality. People have idealized this nebulous conception of "education" as something pure and unbesmirched by the necessities of real life, such as money. "Education" has become a sacred cow. It has become a vehicle for a fantasy about higher, nobler goals for a deeply cynical society.
If your neighborhood fiddler can put up his shingle and offer violin lessions for $N/hr, if your neighborhood yogi can charge $M at the door to attend his yoga class, then teaching can be a commodity. If Club Med, and Outward Bound can charge you for their services, then experiences can be a commodity. Attending college is not morally different, whether you consider tuition to be buying you an education or buying you the experience of being at college.
What is changing here is that instead of colleges setting a price which customers can either pay or not, the customer can haggle. Objections that the (presumed) resultant change in the distribution of college educations will have an undesirable impact on society are at least reasonable. Objections that amount to "colleges should be above the worldliness of commerce" are irrational.
What has been noticably missing from this discussion so far is the admission that would-be students (and their parents) have always comparison shopped. This is not new. Remeber Overlap. Yes, the money matters. ----------------------------------------------
Which lie would that be? The lie that money can buy happiness? Or the lie that the root of American unhappiness is its shallow consumerism?
I'm getting a little weary of people complaining about "rampant consumerism". If you don't want stuff, don't buy it. Is there any more to this kind of thread than sour grapes?
Yes, I agree money isn't everything; yes, I agree that anyone who thinks having enough money will make them happy is a fool; yes, I agree that it often seems the money (and concommitant power) of the world is not distributed justly. But do we have so to go on about it?
After all, that rampant consumerism is putting paychecks in most of our pockets! How many of us work directly in pure research or in vital services such as agriculture? Most of the products manufactured, most of the services rendered on which geeks work these days are modern toys. If the American consumer were not so willing to fork over (for home computers on which to look at our blinkenlichten web sites, via our ISPs, etc.) were would we be?
But back to the question of the "emptiness of our society" -- it makes more sense to me to see consumerism, if it must be freighted with negative value, as a symptom, not a cause. There are so many more logical places to point fingers: our culture's abdication of the custody of spiritual technologies to religion(s), which has since failed to lead; the dramatic rise in status value of corporate fealty (the life-time employee), and the resultant dominance of corporate obedience over familial fidelity (e.g. millions of families uprooted on their employers' say-so); two world wars, a depression, and the threat of nuclear annihilation; the continuing financial desperation of an ever growing class of Americans; etc.
Somehow in the face of those things, the cry of "If only we didn't spend so much money on toys, then we'd be happy" seems (to me at least) silly.
Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs gives a particularly good framework for considerations of the value of money in the scheme of things. In a nutshell, the items of maximum value to you as an individual are determined by what you need to satisfy your immediate requirements. Good hifi speakers are not relevant when you don't have a roof over your head, and shelter is meaningless when you are dying from starvation.
If that were actually true, then there wouldn't be poor people buying stereos, TVs, etc. -- but there are.
Maslow's efforts to classify and heirarchicize human behavior and development have always struck me as being more perscriptive than descriptive, more laden with value judgements than valuable judgement.
Simply put, real human priorities aren't as simplistic as he would have them. As the Sufis have it, Nazradin reaches for the strawberry even as he dangles over the cliff.
Try coming up with a real article if you want readers to click those "hits" your editors want.
Oh! D'uh. I get it now.
If you were a journalist writing for the web, and you weren't actually a techie, but you needed to get your editor those hits, what better way to ensure the most connected of demographics (i.e. us) flocks to your article?
Why, write about technology, of course. Say anything at all, allege that the net will make your toenails green, anything, just so long as it's about technology.
And it worked, too. We all trooped over there to read that nonsense. We just gave them a slashdotting for free, which they can turn around and show their advertisers: look how many hits we got!
It doesn't matter to the advertisers who rent space on that page whether or not we like what we read there. They're as happy to pay for ad space on an incendiary piece of crap as on insightful exposition. Just so long as they get their several seconds of our eyeball time.
Days like this, I wish that when a pointer to a web article is posted as a story here on/. that we could moderate the story. Heck, then Rob could sell a service to advertisers: "find out the/. karma of the stories on which your ads are running".
The hubris of being exempt from natural selection? Most of civilization is an attempt to evade natural selection. Do you favor no one having eyeglasses, since that would help weed out the poor sighted? Is it a "disgusting way of thinking" to come up with allergy medication, or to treat possibly fatal congenital diseases, helping them spread to later generations? Like it or not, most of civilization interferes with natural selection.
Incorrect. Natural selection is a process by which an environment changes a species over multiple generations. Civilization is merely a different environment.
The process proceeds regardless. We are merely being selected for different traits.
The question is: What are the morals and ethics of deliberate human manipulation of this natural process? To what extent should we attempt to influence our species' genetic destiny? Do we have a right to? Do we have an obligation to?
Now, back to your regularly scheduled flame war, already in progress. --------------------------------------- -------
I think one of the wrongest things in our society is that if a man is interested in being supportive to girls and isn't a father or school teacher, he's looked at funny.
Seriously, if you're looking for a way to contribute to this specific social agenda (more women in technical fields), don't bother with tutoring -- look for an opportunity to mentor. Tutoring provides specific academic help to kids having trouble, which while being noble and good, is not the demographic you're looking for. You want to connect the the smart girls who need general support and guidance, so they don't get derailed from the high road to Geekdom.
To that end, look into volunteering with a school math, science, computer, or chess club; or volunteer to a local Girl Scouts branch. Or find a local homeschooling organization and get word out you're willing to mentor in whichever field. I think there is an opportunity for scientists (if you're an academic) to volunteer through the Boston Museum of Science, which has Science-by-mail, a scientist-pen-pal service for kids. Surely other opportunities abound.
It worked for me.:) I'm terribly competitive, but haven't an athletic bone in my body (or muscle as the case may be). As a kid, technical fields were my venue for beating other people.
It would take a while -- we're talking 2 human generations -- but it very well could work out that way. If the current girls being raised expect to be allowed to play sports, they might well grow up to demand that their daughters play sports (the same way we geeks might demand our daughter use computers:). Those second generation girls might well retreat to the intellectually competitive arena of technology. One can hope.
I find it interesting the original topic was "women in Linux/Open Source". It's managed to drift to "women geeks". I am a she-geek, but I'm not (yet) into Linux.
Which of course begs the question of "Why not?" The short answer is insufficient round tuits and funds. I have my copy of mkLinux waiting for me, and as soon as I catch up on paying the rent, I'll upgrade my hardware (don't laugh) to something that can handle it.
A slightly deeper answer is this: were it not for the fact I am a geek -- and am firmly emmeshed in both virtual and real geek communities -- it would not have occured to me to want to get involved in Linux. As it is, I have thoroughly picked up on the vibe that I am missing the party of the century, and am motivated to get my act in gear.
Any bright young proto-geek woman who is not so fortunate as to be part of a geek community might very well not realize the import and potential fun of being involved in the open source movement. A number of people have already discussed here the difficulties of socializing in the meat world where you cannot disguise your gender easily.
Unlike a lot of the women who have posted thus far, I'm not unconnected from other she-geeks -- or he-geeks. But then, I live and work in Cambridge, MA, which, Silicon Valley be damned, is Geek Heaven. I exist in an honest-to-gosh geek getto, in which are plenty of women, and in which the men don't seem to have any problem dealing with them. I have found that guys here take me quite seriously on the job and in recreational computing.
So I really don't think the problem lies so much in the current gender disparity in college and in the work place. I see it coming from the way little girls were (and probably are still) being socialized.
I will throw my own testamony in, as to the sexism and discouragement experienced by girls in our culture. I managed to show up as a frosh at MIT quite literally not knowing what an "engineer" was beyond "someone who ran a train". (I thought I was going to grow up to be a scientist.:) Despite having two agressively bleeding-heart liberal, gender-egalitarian, high-IQ parents; despite having always excelled in science, math, and drafting; despite having spent a year at a technical high-school; despite all this I didn't even know what the profession "engineer" was when I went to college. Not one person in 13 years said to me "you gonna be an engineer when you grow up?" In my entire life, I had never met a single engineer until I got to MIT (in 1989).
This is all still faintly embarassing to relate. I thought I was just oblivious. But then I started talking to the other women in my dorm. I noticed that many entered, like me, intending to pursue a science -- only to ultimately declare an engineering major. I was evidently not the only one underexposed to this world. And a world it is: geeks are, to everyone else, a mostly invisible minority, existing in their own underground.
And then I met a pre-frosh who told me that her guidance counselor said, when she expressed her intention to apply to MIT, "But MIT doesn't admit girls!" (She survived, got her degree in aero/astro and is a test pilot for the USAF.) We're not talking 1940, here; this was 1990.
In case that weren't all bad enough, there was another counter-geek influence. First let me say that I am a feminist, and this does not delight me to report it. When I was a frosh, my mother, as a gift to me, got me my own subscription to Ms. magazine; I had been reading her subscription since I was 8yo. The very first issue to hit my dorm mailbox had a big article which expressed the attitude that women scientists were sell-outs to the military-industrial complex (merely for being scientists). In the late 80s and early 90s, there was an incredible luddite, anti-science attitude coming from the same sources which had, in the 60s and 70s, been advocating that women try to compete with men for traditionally male careers. It was a big slap in the face to those of us who had taken up the torch of Rosie the Rivetter and carried it into the lab.
My mother confessed to me, shortly before I left for college, that she had hoped I would choose Wellesley over MIT, because she feared that if I went to MIT, I might become a -- and this is a precise quote -- "souless technocrat". This from the woman who had been cheerleading me through grade school that I could "grow up to be anything".
It is my sneeking suspicion that to this day, very young girls are still being socialized to priorize "being acceptible to others" very highly. No one socialized that way is terribly likely to buck the trend of absolutely every influence in her life, to choose a career/life-path at odds with her entire background's values. If teachers, parents, TV and random strangers are all in accord that growing up to be an engineer is not appropriate to her, she probably won't.
It is also my sneeking suspicion that part of why there are so many more men in geekdom is an unfairness to boys. There's immense pressure on males of all ages to pursue only "worthwhile" activities, those careers which manifest the tokens of success in our society and convey status. As it happens, engineering and computer programming fall into that heap. Thus (goes my hypothesis) many more young boys are exposed to geekdom, and encouraged, even pressured, to participate in it.
I'm proposing the hypothesis that if you took a boy and a girl indentical in all other things, and both told their parents they were choosing between majoring in computer programming, philosophy, and literature, the boy would probably be pressured very hard to go into computers, while the girl would be given more latitude in her choice. If this is the case, if girls have more career choices then boys, then by sheer statistics there will be fewer girls in any one field. There may be many women who would be happily Linux geeks, but are now being music geeks or theology geeks, because they could, and never got in touch with their computer-geek side.
I would suggest that if any/. denizens are moved to concern by the lack of she-geeks and female contributors to the open source movement, that you raise your daughters to geekiness. Or someone else's daughter. Encourage geekiness, agressively. She's getting feedback that her worth is a function of her obedience and docility; give her praise when she's clever. Act to her like you expect her to want to do geek things, and be interested in geek topics. Act shocked when she expresses concern over stupid things like her appearance or her grades. Let her know we're out there. Bring her up in the geek world.
I must question at what point to intelligence and introspection/introversion meet. I am quite computer literate and generally clumsy, victimized, and inconsiderate of my surroundings, yet I am quite able to pick up emotional cues from others, and I have done very poorly in math and science classes. How do you explain that?
Myers-Briggs' theory. Jungian Typing. Keirseyan Temperments. People are not so simple as a simple continuum; the paradigm of geeks-on-one-end-and-normals-on-the-other is too simple.
What most people mean by "geek" or "nerd" boils down to Myers-Briggs NT (no, not the OS) Types. The overlap is almost perfect.
MB theory describes people in a 4-space, which considers Extroversion vs. Introversion to be orthagonal and independent to facility with abstractions vs. the concrete, both of which are orthagonal and independent to rational/emotional decision making tendencies, all of which are orthagonal and independent from a trait which incidentally can map to single-mindedness.
IIRC, what studies have been done comparing IQ measures with Myers-Briggs Type Indicator results, show that "intelligence" as classically measured does not vary with introversion nearly so much as with a preference for abstraction over the concrete thought.
The "nerd" Types in MB theory are those indicating a preference for abstraction in thought and a preference for rational (as opposed to emotional) decision making. However, this encompasses both the introvert and extrovert varieties, and both those which prefer organization and those which prefer improvisation.
Those people who have a preference for abstract thought but who prefer emotional over rational decision making (NFs) still score similarly highly on intelligence metrics. They however, tend to gravitate towards the humanities more than the NTs. However, they are surprizingly well represented in technical fields.
Wrenching this back to the main topic: years ago I was on a list for Myers-Briggs INTJ types, and this discussion came up then, cast in those terms, i.e. does Aspergers' map to the non-pathological classificaiton "INTJ". Those people on the list who knew others with Aspergers' related that, no, they weren't as much like us as we might imagine. They observed that those with Aspergers' Syndrome seemed to be more accurately classified as ISTJs.
Translation: People with Aspergers' tend to have excellent facility with fact and data, but are weak on the pure abstraction, synthetic logic, sensitivity to implication, and multi-threaded imaginations which are the hallmark of being a geek. (This is what I understand, and welcome correction.) I gather they do by brute force mental manipulation of data (they just remember) what geeks do by intellectual finesse (we just understand); the results can be similar, but the internal experience is quite different.
Slashdot Mirror
(Putting aside for a moment the "This is worth a 100?!" question...)
Look. The problem of hyper-reactive teachers/school administrators is systemically inherent . If you think the problem is bad now, just wait! It will proceed to get a lot worse. There are no forces working to reduce how hyper-reactive teachers are. There are forces (teacher accountability, parental economics, political grandstanding, etc.) which drive this process, but the only faction which cares to object is the students themselves and maybe a few geeks.
So if you are a parent, and you object to your kids being treated like this, you have two choices:
If you're a Conscientious (Schooling) Objector, you're in good company. Go read Teach Your Own by John Holt, contact Growing Without Schooling here, check out this portal for everything homeschooling. There's only several zillion resources for someone determined not to submit their kid to an institution they do not approve of.
Parents, stop whining about the system. If you don't like it, opt out.
P.S. If you think being schooled fscked with your head, and you've been working on getting over being institutionalized, there's an email list for people you. It's on OneList. Find it for yourself if you're interested.
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But that's a criticism of democracy in all its various forms, not of increased voter turnout. The intrinsic problem(?) with letting just anybody vote, is that they just might.
Frankly, from your analysis, it looks like the intelligencia of Quebec would be better served by trying to put up more signs around town (as you put it) and otherwise trying to convince their fellow voters to agree with them than merely voting and grumbling.
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No, actually.
American politics are pretty disgusting. I recommend the movie Primary Colors.
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("...Say ya want a rev-o-luu-uu-tion....")
Consider:
Ergo, at the voting booth we have the political clout of fuck-all. There's not a politician alive who doesn't grok this reality deeply. That's reality, boys and girls.
Buying politicians with political donations is stupid. It's the brute-force solution. Everyone and his mom has a PAC. Our money would just compete on an even footing with everyone else's money. That's pathetic. Not an elegant way to fight, and not sufficiently reliable.
There's an elegant way to fight: we buy our politicians in kind. We pay for them in services they could not possible afford - services they wouldn't have dreamed to ask for - without us. We buy them with hours, we buy them with resources.
We host their web sites. We design their web sites. We set up the kind of informational infrastructure for coordinating volunteers which are a campaign manager's wet dream. We take over their internet presence so they don't do anything idiotic.
Whatever you may think of his politics, Ventura has proved that the net can have quite an impact on politics.
Are we wizards or aren't we? If we aren't kingmakers, we're pretty lame wizards, aren't we?
Once upon a time (turn of the last century, actually) Boston was taken over by a new political force consisting entirely of immigrants. This was done via a form of social engineering called a political machine.
We know about machines, don't we boys and girls?
A political machine is an organization which gets large number of votes out (and pointed in the same direction) when it matters, and it does so (hence the analogy to a machine) reliably and pretty much regardless of who the candidate is.
The political machines of the last century were not scalable, because - get this - networking limitations. The resource cost (mostly volunteers, time, and money) grew linearly with the size of the constituency being influenced. National elections were really beyond the serious influence of political machines.
But we could fix that, couldn't we? If there's any kind of problem we can solve, it's how to route large amounts of information correctly.
One big difference, oft lamented by geeks, between then and now is the extent to which our elections have become a media game. But that's to our favor . We control a medium! We rule in this medium, we can make it do things no one else can.
I'm not even talking about compromising the enemy's services. I'm talking about putting up web sites 1000% better than the opponents:
I'm talking about political coordinating through:
What if our candidate were to challenge opponents to an "on-line debate" - NOT in real-time, but in a series of posts, which the public can comment on, a la the way /. collectively interviews interesting people. "On-line" has such cache right now, we could probably pull it off. We geeks may be few, but we're hardly the only literate people. If we can get the newpapers to pick it up and report on it, we'll own that debate, simply because any candidate we advise will look about a hundred times less stupid on-line.
And once we nail them down in print, we have have fun with them. Twenty+ years of flaming on Usenet has taught us nothing if not how to discredit fools in print.
If we control the medium (and we do) we can force the campaign onto whatever rhetorical ground we want. We can make it "issues centered" if we like.
In summary: if we wielded our real power for those politicians we choose to support, we could own them. Money be damned; if we can hand them elections on a silver platter, they'd do anything for us. And our real power is finessing systems.
If we want the world run our way (for any definition of "we"), we need to bring our considerable intellectual prowess to bear on the problem. We understand FUD. We understand networking. We understand image. We understand manipulating media via manipulating the medium. We have the technology. :)
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OK, yeah, the article was cheesy and shallow. Complain all you want about the "not hippies like you expected" jist.
But the question - "Who are the people behind this social movement, and what are they like?" - is a great question to ask. The fact that it may be impossible to answer conclusively doesn't detract from the potential value of the pursuiting an answer.
History will want to know "What happened here to cause this? Who were the men and women who joined in and supported this cause? What were their motivations? How did it fit into their lifes and their livelihoods? What made them different than all the people who did not take up the cause?"
There are some trivial answers to some of these questions, but there are also richer answers. It's all well and good to say "people contribute to OS because they want to give back", but that, for instance, misses the obvious predicate "and they aren't satisfied with the available cost-ware and its affordances." Our explanations to ourselves often overlook such fundamentals, because we are like fish discussing water.
I fervently hope that more anthropologists, social commentators, and just plain clueful reporters pay close attention to what's happening in the OS movement. This is what "journalism" means : to "journal" - to chronicle - history as it is being made.
This is it. This is history. Come'n get it.
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FYI, (IANAL,B) I understand that the term for a contract which is illegal - a contract in which one party signs away rights which the law says they cannot sign away - is a "contract of adhesion".
I presume what people are saying is that in places like CA, a non-compete is a contract of adhesion.
The problems with contracts of adhesion are
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Whatever happened to reading for comprehension, people?? The C|NET story ISN'T proporting to list the "10 Best Hacks of all Time" . It's listing the 10 "MOST SUBVERSIVE" hacks (in their NSHO). That's why those inelegant - but politically interesting - hacks are there.
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If it one is "misled to believe the net is an alternative to school and a degree" then I am misled -- and happily degree-free. It don't seem to be hurting me none. ;)
In all seriousness, the Net is the best thing to have ever happened to the School of Hard Knocks, of which I am an enthusiastic alum. Schools and degrees aren't the only way -- and those who think so are the ones who are misled. (Heck, there are lots of teachers and professors who stand to lose out if they fail to convince everyone that their services are irreplacable.)
Don't get me wrong: I'm not arguing one can do a global-search-n-replace on one's life, substituting the Net for schooling, and get the same result. One has to use the Net very differently than one uses a school to extract its educational benefit. But self-study, in all its glorious forms, including via the Net, is always an alternative to hiring someone else to teach you. And the acclaim and testamony of other learned people as to one's level of skill/knowledge/expertise will always be an alternative to a degree.
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Mr. Carter has constructed a theory of anthroplogy based about the premise that some large percentage of people are diseased. He has done this based on his observation of white-collar workers, primarily in technical fields.
Earlier in this century Katherine C. Briggs cast her net wider. She observed some of the same phenomena, but in a much bigger context. She came up with a different interpretation.
The sub-branch of psychology she founded has the following paradigm:
A certain sub-population can be characterized as particularly change- and risk- adverse, very traditionalist and conservative, very methodical and habitual - among other traits. Testing indicates these people comprise about one third of the US population. Testing in workplaces, the military, and college programs which specialize in business training indicates that this change-adverse population is disproportionately represented among executives and business people. Let's call these people group A.
A different sub-population (group B) can be characterized as particularly risk- and change- embracing; more dare-devil and capricious. They, too, account for about one third of the US population. This population has disproportionately high school drop-out rates, and a much lower tolerance of the routine of the office; they are less common in the white-collar world, and tend to work in "interupt-driven" jobs such as "business development".
Group C, the remaining third-to-a-quarter (depending on which study you use) is the lump which has several familiar factions in it. It is not characterized (as a whole) as being particularly change-adverse or change-embracing (though individual members maybe on either end of that scale.) Instead, they are characterized by a facility with (and reliance on) abstract thought, which the other two populations don't share. In is in this population that you find the Poets, the Activists, the Mystics - and the Scientists, Architects, and yes, Hackers.
One of the foundations of this paradigm is that all these trait-clusters (which define these populations) are equally "normal", healthful, viable and valid. They have pathologies, but they aren't themselves pathologies.
What it looks like, from the perspective of this paradigm, is that Mr. Carter generalized from the interactions of his Group C friends, students and collegues with a largely Group A -rich population, to wit, The Suits. And perceiving the very palpable difference between these kinds of people, he then made an presumption as old as humankind: If They are different from Us, either They or Us must be broken/wrong/bad/defective/sick/disordered.
It is these Suits, these (usually) Group A people, who are Packers. They are not Packers because they are defective or diseased. They are Packers because Packing is an amazingly useful and viable memetic strategy - ask Mr. Ford about his factories. I agree: Packing is an abysmal strategy for making software. But it is kick ass for making cars, running a farm, or, yes, packing boxes.
In fact, it's they very success of Packing that's at the root of this problem. All those Packers have had such success with it so far, they have trouble imagining it could fail them. They have a hammer, and have seen many nails; if they are skeptical about the concept of certain nail-like objects being "screws", that is only to be expected.
And give them some credit: If someone working for you insisted that the methodology which has worked for you your entire life was wrong, you'd probably be rather skeptical.
Packers live in a world in which Packing, by and large, works. Mappers, unfortunately, have to live in a society filled with Packers (the Group B, the swing vote, usually effectively supports Group A for reasons to complicated to go into here). So natural Mappers to learn to Pack. Since Packers can get through life without learning much to Map, they often slack off and don't bother.
Briggs wrote about the phenomenon of "Protective Coloration", whereby people of a minority type learn to behave in the way of a majority (or socially sanctioned) type. This is a major life stressor, and trying to keep up the charade generally makes one awfully miserable. This applies precisely to the problem of our native Mappers, people from Group C, who learned to put aside the strategy of Mapping for the more approved strategy of Packing.
It is this which causes the Ghost Not, and from there, the rest of Mr. Carter's theory can proceed.
But I must take issue with the presumption that someone has to be pathological. The problem is not that Packers are defective or diseased Mappers languishing for a cure. The problem is that Packers can impose Packing on software projects.
The solution in some combination of
People interested in learning more about this paradigm of psychology/anthropology should turn to:
and should ignore just about everything on the www about the MBTI.
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The classic system is: students are assigned letter grades for their performance in classes, A high, D low, and F=Fail. The GPA is an average of all grades using the A=4/F=0 conversion. Someone getting 4.0 is a perfect student.
However: There is no standarized system, just people pretending there is, so an ever-increasing number of schools have started doing cunning things with their "GPAs".
For example, my second high school decided that "APs" (Advanced Placement exam prep classes) would count an extra point. A=5/F=1. Thus the highest GPA in the school was a 4.5. This also did wonderous things to my GPA when I transferred to my third high school, and applied to college. It didn't hurt to make the school look good, and it's paying clientel feel they were getting good education for their money.
Meanwhile, the assignment of grades is completely arbitrary. There is no standardized test. There is a pressure on teachers to map grades to a bell-curve, but they can be as subjective or objectively rigourous as they'd like. (Why, yes, I have taught in a high-school.)
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The possibility? Let me erase all doubt from your mind: the use of the SAT is a scandal.
In these slightly more enlightened times, the SAT is increasingly widely regarded as a crock. One oft cited statistic is that the only thing of which SAT scores have been shown to be an accurate predictor is parental income.
Universities (especially the big name private schools) have been playing down the use of SATs for quite some time. State schools evidently still use them.
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This is about "education" being treated as a commodity. Education -- or more precisely the experience of attending college, whether or not that results in an education -- has always been a commodity.
Frankly, I don't see what's wrong with that. I find it fascinating that people get so upset confronting that reality. People have idealized this nebulous conception of "education" as something pure and unbesmirched by the necessities of real life, such as money. "Education" has become a sacred cow. It has become a vehicle for a fantasy about higher, nobler goals for a deeply cynical society.
If your neighborhood fiddler can put up his shingle and offer violin lessions for $N/hr, if your neighborhood yogi can charge $M at the door to attend his yoga class, then teaching can be a commodity. If Club Med, and Outward Bound can charge you for their services, then experiences can be a commodity. Attending college is not morally different, whether you consider tuition to be buying you an education or buying you the experience of being at college.
What is changing here is that instead of colleges setting a price which customers can either pay or not, the customer can haggle. Objections that the (presumed) resultant change in the distribution of college educations will have an undesirable impact on society are at least reasonable. Objections that amount to "colleges should be above the worldliness of commerce" are irrational.
What has been noticably missing from this discussion so far is the admission that would-be students (and their parents) have always comparison shopped. This is not new. Remeber Overlap. Yes, the money matters.
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Which lie would that be? The lie that money can buy happiness? Or the lie that the root of American unhappiness is its shallow consumerism?
I'm getting a little weary of people complaining about "rampant consumerism". If you don't want stuff, don't buy it. Is there any more to this kind of thread than sour grapes?
Yes, I agree money isn't everything; yes, I agree that anyone who thinks having enough money will make them happy is a fool; yes, I agree that it often seems the money (and concommitant power) of the world is not distributed justly. But do we have so to go on about it?
After all, that rampant consumerism is putting paychecks in most of our pockets! How many of us work directly in pure research or in vital services such as agriculture? Most of the products manufactured, most of the services rendered on which geeks work these days are modern toys. If the American consumer were not so willing to fork over (for home computers on which to look at our blinkenlichten web sites, via our ISPs, etc.) were would we be?
But back to the question of the "emptiness of our society" -- it makes more sense to me to see consumerism, if it must be freighted with negative value, as a symptom, not a cause. There are so many more logical places to point fingers: our culture's abdication of the custody of spiritual technologies to religion(s), which has since failed to lead; the dramatic rise in status value of corporate fealty (the life-time employee), and the resultant dominance of corporate obedience over familial fidelity (e.g. millions of families uprooted on their employers' say-so); two world wars, a depression, and the threat of nuclear annihilation; the continuing financial desperation of an ever growing class of Americans; etc.
Somehow in the face of those things, the cry of "If only we didn't spend so much money on toys, then we'd be happy" seems (to me at least) silly.
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If that were actually true, then there wouldn't be poor people buying stereos, TVs, etc. -- but there are.
Maslow's efforts to classify and heirarchicize human behavior and development have always struck me as being more perscriptive than descriptive, more laden with value judgements than valuable judgement.
Simply put, real human priorities aren't as simplistic as he would have them. As the Sufis have it, Nazradin reaches for the strawberry even as he dangles over the cliff.
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Oh! D'uh. I get it now.
If you were a journalist writing for the web, and you weren't actually a techie, but you needed to get your editor those hits, what better way to ensure the most connected of demographics (i.e. us) flocks to your article?
Why, write about technology, of course. Say anything at all, allege that the net will make your toenails green, anything, just so long as it's about technology.
And it worked, too. We all trooped over there to read that nonsense. We just gave them a slashdotting for free, which they can turn around and show their advertisers: look how many hits we got!
It doesn't matter to the advertisers who rent space on that page whether or not we like what we read there. They're as happy to pay for ad space on an incendiary piece of crap as on insightful exposition. Just so long as they get their several seconds of our eyeball time.
Days like this, I wish that when a pointer to a web article is posted as a story here on /. that we could moderate the story. Heck, then Rob could sell a service to advertisers: "find out the /. karma of the stories on which your ads are running".
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Incorrect. Natural selection is a process by which an environment changes a species over multiple generations. Civilization is merely a different environment.
The process proceeds regardless. We are merely being selected for different traits.
The question is: What are the morals and ethics of deliberate human manipulation of this natural process? To what extent should we attempt to influence our species' genetic destiny? Do we have a right to? Do we have an obligation to?
Now, back to your regularly scheduled flame war, already in progress.- -------
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I think one of the wrongest things in our society is that if a man is interested in being supportive to girls and isn't a father or school teacher, he's looked at funny.
Seriously, if you're looking for a way to contribute to this specific social agenda (more women in technical fields), don't bother with tutoring -- look for an opportunity to mentor. Tutoring provides specific academic help to kids having trouble, which while being noble and good, is not the demographic you're looking for. You want to connect the the smart girls who need general support and guidance, so they don't get derailed from the high road to Geekdom.
To that end, look into volunteering with a school math, science, computer, or chess club; or volunteer to a local Girl Scouts branch. Or find a local homeschooling organization and get word out you're willing to mentor in whichever field. I think there is an opportunity for scientists (if you're an academic) to volunteer through the Boston Museum of Science, which has Science-by-mail, a scientist-pen-pal service for kids. Surely other opportunities abound.
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It worked for me. :) I'm terribly competitive, but haven't an athletic bone in my body (or muscle as the case may be). As a kid, technical fields were my venue for beating other people.
It would take a while -- we're talking 2 human generations -- but it very well could work out that way. If the current girls being raised expect to be allowed to play sports, they might well grow up to demand that their daughters play sports (the same way we geeks might demand our daughter use computers :). Those second generation girls might well retreat to the intellectually competitive arena of technology. One can hope.
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I find it interesting the original topic was "women in Linux/Open Source". It's managed to drift to "women geeks". I am a she-geek, but I'm not (yet) into Linux.
Which of course begs the question of "Why not?" The short answer is insufficient round tuits and funds. I have my copy of mkLinux waiting for me, and as soon as I catch up on paying the rent, I'll upgrade my hardware (don't laugh) to something that can handle it.
A slightly deeper answer is this: were it not for the fact I am a geek -- and am firmly emmeshed in both virtual and real geek communities -- it would not have occured to me to want to get involved in Linux. As it is, I have thoroughly picked up on the vibe that I am missing the party of the century, and am motivated to get my act in gear.
Any bright young proto-geek woman who is not so fortunate as to be part of a geek community might very well not realize the import and potential fun of being involved in the open source movement. A number of people have already discussed here the difficulties of socializing in the meat world where you cannot disguise your gender easily.
Unlike a lot of the women who have posted thus far, I'm not unconnected from other she-geeks -- or he-geeks. But then, I live and work in Cambridge, MA, which, Silicon Valley be damned, is Geek Heaven. I exist in an honest-to-gosh geek getto, in which are plenty of women, and in which the men don't seem to have any problem dealing with them. I have found that guys here take me quite seriously on the job and in recreational computing.
So I really don't think the problem lies so much in the current gender disparity in college and in the work place. I see it coming from the way little girls were (and probably are still) being socialized.
I will throw my own testamony in, as to the sexism and discouragement experienced by girls in our culture. I managed to show up as a frosh at MIT quite literally not knowing what an "engineer" was beyond "someone who ran a train". (I thought I was going to grow up to be a scientist. :) Despite having two agressively bleeding-heart liberal, gender-egalitarian, high-IQ parents; despite having always excelled in science, math, and drafting; despite having spent a year at a technical high-school; despite all this I didn't even know what the profession "engineer" was when I went to college. Not one person in 13 years said to me "you gonna be an engineer when you grow up?" In my entire life, I had never met a single engineer until I got to MIT (in 1989).
This is all still faintly embarassing to relate. I thought I was just oblivious. But then I started talking to the other women in my dorm. I noticed that many entered, like me, intending to pursue a science -- only to ultimately declare an engineering major. I was evidently not the only one underexposed to this world. And a world it is: geeks are, to everyone else, a mostly invisible minority, existing in their own underground.
And then I met a pre-frosh who told me that her guidance counselor said, when she expressed her intention to apply to MIT, "But MIT doesn't admit girls!" (She survived, got her degree in aero/astro and is a test pilot for the USAF.) We're not talking 1940, here; this was 1990.
In case that weren't all bad enough, there was another counter-geek influence. First let me say that I am a feminist, and this does not delight me to report it. When I was a frosh, my mother, as a gift to me, got me my own subscription to Ms. magazine; I had been reading her subscription since I was 8yo. The very first issue to hit my dorm mailbox had a big article which expressed the attitude that women scientists were sell-outs to the military-industrial complex (merely for being scientists). In the late 80s and early 90s, there was an incredible luddite, anti-science attitude coming from the same sources which had, in the 60s and 70s, been advocating that women try to compete with men for traditionally male careers. It was a big slap in the face to those of us who had taken up the torch of Rosie the Rivetter and carried it into the lab.
My mother confessed to me, shortly before I left for college, that she had hoped I would choose Wellesley over MIT, because she feared that if I went to MIT, I might become a -- and this is a precise quote -- "souless technocrat". This from the woman who had been cheerleading me through grade school that I could "grow up to be anything".
It is my sneeking suspicion that to this day, very young girls are still being socialized to priorize "being acceptible to others" very highly. No one socialized that way is terribly likely to buck the trend of absolutely every influence in her life, to choose a career/life-path at odds with her entire background's values. If teachers, parents, TV and random strangers are all in accord that growing up to be an engineer is not appropriate to her, she probably won't.
It is also my sneeking suspicion that part of why there are so many more men in geekdom is an unfairness to boys. There's immense pressure on males of all ages to pursue only "worthwhile" activities, those careers which manifest the tokens of success in our society and convey status. As it happens, engineering and computer programming fall into that heap. Thus (goes my hypothesis) many more young boys are exposed to geekdom, and encouraged, even pressured, to participate in it.
I'm proposing the hypothesis that if you took a boy and a girl indentical in all other things, and both told their parents they were choosing between majoring in computer programming, philosophy, and literature, the boy would probably be pressured very hard to go into computers, while the girl would be given more latitude in her choice. If this is the case, if girls have more career choices then boys, then by sheer statistics there will be fewer girls in any one field. There may be many women who would be happily Linux geeks, but are now being music geeks or theology geeks, because they could, and never got in touch with their computer-geek side.
I would suggest that if any /. denizens are moved to concern by the lack of she-geeks and female contributors to the open source movement, that you raise your daughters to geekiness. Or someone else's daughter. Encourage geekiness, agressively. She's getting feedback that her worth is a function of her obedience and docility; give her praise when she's clever. Act to her like you expect her to want to do geek things, and be interested in geek topics. Act shocked when she expresses concern over stupid things like her appearance or her grades. Let her know we're out there. Bring her up in the geek world.
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I must question at what point to intelligence and introspection/introversion meet. I am quite computer literate and generally clumsy, victimized, and inconsiderate of my surroundings, yet I am quite able to pick up emotional cues from others, and I have done very poorly in math and science classes. How do you explain that?
Myers-Briggs' theory. Jungian Typing. Keirseyan Temperments. People are not so simple as a simple continuum; the paradigm of geeks-on-one-end-and-normals-on-the-other is too simple.
What most people mean by "geek" or "nerd" boils down to Myers-Briggs NT (no, not the OS) Types. The overlap is almost perfect.
MB theory describes people in a 4-space, which considers Extroversion vs. Introversion to be orthagonal and independent to facility with abstractions vs. the concrete, both of which are orthagonal and independent to rational/emotional decision making tendencies, all of which are orthagonal and independent from a trait which incidentally can map to single-mindedness.
IIRC, what studies have been done comparing IQ measures with Myers-Briggs Type Indicator results, show that "intelligence" as classically measured does not vary with introversion nearly so much as with a preference for abstraction over the concrete thought.
The "nerd" Types in MB theory are those indicating a preference for abstraction in thought and a preference for rational (as opposed to emotional) decision making. However, this encompasses both the introvert and extrovert varieties, and both those which prefer organization and those which prefer improvisation.
Those people who have a preference for abstract thought but who prefer emotional over rational decision making (NFs) still score similarly highly on intelligence metrics. They however, tend to gravitate towards the humanities more than the NTs. However, they are surprizingly well represented in technical fields.
Wrenching this back to the main topic: years ago I was on a list for Myers-Briggs INTJ types, and this discussion came up then, cast in those terms, i.e. does Aspergers' map to the non-pathological classificaiton "INTJ". Those people on the list who knew others with Aspergers' related that, no, they weren't as much like us as we might imagine. They observed that those with Aspergers' Syndrome seemed to be more accurately classified as ISTJs.
Translation: People with Aspergers' tend to have excellent facility with fact and data, but are weak on the pure abstraction, synthetic logic, sensitivity to implication, and multi-threaded imaginations which are the hallmark of being a geek. (This is what I understand, and welcome correction.) I gather they do by brute force mental manipulation of data (they just remember) what geeks do by intellectual finesse (we just understand); the results can be similar, but the internal experience is quite different.
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