Nerds and women
The past year and most likely the next fews have been full of news stories on how the IT industry has declared a War on Women or something. And while the nerds in the IT industry actually have a lot of reasons to declare a war on women, the fact is they haven't. What they do is get together in reddit or other places on the internet to loudly proclaim how Feminist they are and how true these news stories are. We need more women!
I guess it's their math skills which are telling them that bringing more women in their companies will shift the gender ratio and make it more likely to get a girlfriend. Hey, women say they want to work in tech! That's good, right??
No, kids. It doesn't work like that. The Women in Tech propaganda campaign has only got stared because women hate nerds. With a passion. It's one of the few things where most women can agree on. And why do women hate hate hate nerds? "Why, oh why do they hate us?" some might be thinking. It's not that hard really. See this:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2jz0ugqghys
To put it mildly, nerds are generally not the smoothest men around. To put it less mildly, nerds are generally very much disgusting. They are all that women find unattractive. Many a nerd has a story about coming up with the courage to ask a pretty girl out only to have her puke or laugh or run away. Well I'm sorry but nerds are (on average, of course) icky. Which is why women like to blame everything on nerds. Nerds are icky so no women will be caught dead defending them. So any attack on nerds triggers a signalling spiral in where all girls end up competing to see who hates nerds more, because no women wants to be thought as being nice to nerds. Cree-pyyyy. Remember that much of women's mechanism of attraction depends on pre-selection. A man walking in with a hot girl to his side automatically becomes more attractive to women. By extension, a women who is nice to a nerd automatically becomes lower-status in the eyes of other women.
And that's all there is to it. It's not hard. But notwithstanding that nerds tend to be smarter than average, their high-ish g doesn't compensate their tendency to take everything at face value. Feminism today teaches boys at school that women are holy so they must not be displeased. Mere attention by a nerd makes a women seriously displeased. But nerds are animals too and want to mate. So you have one ancient instinct telling you to do whatever it takes to put your dick inside a woman. But there's another part of your brain telling you that you must obey the state religion.
This was a conundrum that Scott Aaronson, the guy from the video above, took very seriously. And the conclusion he reached was if anything completely logical. I want to have sex. But my mere expression of that biological drive makes me go against the state religion. What to do? Go to a psychiatrist and ask to be castrated. Kill the instinct, so that I can respect the state religion, i.e. Feminism. Fortunately for him castrating unattractive men is not yet public policy of USG, so he could keep his testicles. Eventually he achieved professional status, making him just attractive enough to get a wife and beget children. Yet this still didn't make him doubt the state religion. Well to some extent it did, and he tried to be a smartass and make a public announcement about how much he keeps the faith in the state religion in spite of almost sacrificing his genetic fitness for it. He thought he'd be praised for his faith; but women aren't stupid. No, it wasn't hard to notice the not-so-subtle displays of doubt against Feminism, and if anything he was publicly shamed for not going through and actually castrating himself. This guy actually had the nerve to marry and have sex with a woman? Eww, cree-pyyyy.
Nobody came to his rescue, because women just won't defend unattractive men, and non-nerds were naturally found his displays of feminist-faith-despite-all-odds to be revolting. He Aaronson did find one defender, namely Scott Alexander, the patron saint of feminist nerds.
Now Alexander may dispute this epithet as he has been very vocal about his opposition to feminists. But of course he doesn't have a clue: see how his article was an almost comical example of Godwins law: feminists are bad to Jews! They're like Hitler!
Leaving that sad attempt at out-victimizing women, the interesting part (the only interesting part) is how SA defined himself:
I’m an asexual heteroromantic guy
Aaronson must have thought: "damn, why didn't I think of that one!". Scott Aaronson actually went to a psychiatrist to attempt to physically alter his body to castrate him so he wouldn't approach women. Scott Alexander though has achieved it all by himself by sheer autosuggestion. He got his brain to stop seeking sex with women, so he wouldn't be at fault with the state religion. After all women aren't against nerds per se; they are against being objects of nerds sexual desire, which affects their sexual market value. If all nerds were asexual, women would be most willing to be friends with them and let them carry their shopping bags. Which is why he makes it a public statement: oh please holy women, let me talk. I do not want to have sex with you. Talking with me will not affect your SMV. I am not cree-pyyyy. Please let me talk.
26 comments
[…] Nerds and women […]
An alien reading this post, and taking it at face value, might conclude that there are three types of human being, "women", "nerds", and "non-nerds", the last two categories both being male. What I'm getting at, is that it reeks of generalization carried to the point of falsehood. I'm not sure what truer generalizations to put forward in its place, that would also acknowledge the degree to which what you write is true... My masculine intuition just tells me that this is an essay where a takedown a la Marcotte could actually be valid.
Your "masculine intuition". OK.
It's just that this essay is so narrow, but turns it into a worldview... A woman can reject a man kindly. A woman can be attracted by a man who is shy or boyish in some way. A woman can be never approached by men. And those aren't outliers, they're everyday phenomena.
Back in the days of Feynman and Werner von Braun, no one thought nerds were repulsive to women. I think two factors have changed. One is that the state religion simply dislikes and despises smart people more and more. The other, probably more important factor is that smart people tend to be more heavily exposed to the blue pill, and find ideas communicated in words easier to understand and believe. The reason Shinblade has an entirely accurate view of women is not because he is smart, but because he is too stupid to understand state religion teachings on women.
Come on. Feynmann wasn't a nerd. He was the smoothest guy ever. Look at the video. Nerds are yucky and that's all there is to it. Newton wasn't very popular with the ladies, was he?
Feynman was the smoothest guy around because people taught him the truth about women, rather than lies, and he absorbed his lessons well. If they had instead taught him lies about women, he would have absorbed those lessons well also.
Newton is said to have died a virgin at 85, and that he regarded this as one of his life's greatest accomplishments. He was very religious though, and religious people back then tended to see sexuality as impure and sinful. He spent a lot of his time on his family farm doing scientific research and study in private, and he did become quite famous and held a prestigious government post. In Newton's case, it might be that he was just too absorbed in his work and religious to be into women much. Henry Cavendish was a very accomplished scientist who discovered hydrogen and was also extremely shy and fearful of women: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henry\_Cavendish#Personality\_and\_legacy
The reason everybody has heard of Feynman and why he was a celebrity scientist is because he wasn't a nerd. He was quite egocentric and a good speaker and showman who was good at promoting himself. This same reason is also why he pissed off some serious scientists he worked with like Murray Gell-Mann: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rnMsgxIIQEE
Heh, good stuff.
Gell-Mann wasn't a nerd - he was an asshole, at least according to Feynman and a lot of other people. A brilliant asshole, but still...
Nobody is saying that Gell-Mann is a nerd. The point is that Feynman wasn't a nerd, as Gell-Mann shows. Gell-Mann obviously isn't a nerd. He's too confident and arrogant to be a nerd.
[…] Source: Bloody Shovel […]
Sailer dates the advent of the nerd to the early 70's which would square with what Jim is saying. I grew up around men who would have been considered nerds today, scientists and engineers, but they were a lot more like Feynman than Aaronson. But they had been educated in the 50's.
Can someone please link the posts where Sailer talks about this?
Women in the 50s also had different incentives - a somewhat nerdy guy who had good career prospects was seen as a much better marriage prospect then than now.
[…] Spandrell’s latest is excellent. From my own experience working with nerds, it is uncannily accurate, even to the use of the word “creepy.” Female tech workers with a social justice bent do in fact denigrate men who make unwelcome advances as “creepers.” […]
I think you're attributing Scott's asexuality too much to auto-hypnosis and too little to SSRIs
So he's actually chemically castrating himself.
If women hate nerds so much (and they do), then why do women pretend to like nerds? Is it to be polite? Or is it just beta bait? Another possibility is that having non-dominant (loser, creepy, etc) males in control of a big, juicy pile of rents (eg. Silicon Valley) trips the alarms in women's lizard brains.
See Thales above. And even that, most women don't even pretend to like nerds. It's generally low SMV women who really should be mating with nerds, but can't get themselves to tingle.
[…] On nerds and women. […]
[…] To put it mildly, nerds are generally not the smoothest men around. To put it less mildly, nerds are generally very much disgusting. They are all that women find unattractive. Many a nerd has a story about coming up with the courage to ask a pretty girl out only to have her puke or laugh or run away. Well I’m sorry but nerds are (on average, of course) icky. Which is why women like to blame everything on nerds. Nerds are icky so no women will be caught dead defending them. So any attack on nerds triggers a signalling spiral in where all girls end up competing to see who hates nerds more, because no women wants to be thought as being nice to nerds. Cree-pyyyy. Remember that much of women’s mechanism of attraction depends on pre-selection. A man walking in with a hot girl to his side automatically becomes more attractive to women. By extension, a women who is nice to a nerd automatically becomes lower-status in the eyes of other women. […]
What you do not get is that Scott Ax.asexuality statement is just P.R. courtesy of his conscious mind. It has been found in numerous experiments that the conscious mind often espouses erroneous beliefs which are however strategically useful. Robert Kurzban has a good book on that, and more. For example, how almost everyone thinks they are better / hotter / more liked than average, and so on. True asexuals are very rare(1%?) though porn addiction can cause a similar condition. Recent survey found out 50% of Japs claimed to not have had any sex in the previous month.. So, it's either just PR or porn, but I think it's the latter, as Scott is quite active online, whereas porn addicts generally struggle with doing anything beyond their day job. I also note that you engage in Roissy-level generalizations. That guy thinks everyone likes what he likes , those who claim they don't are lying losers and all women are the same. Seems incapable of understanding that individual preferences might vary. His vitriol is quite entertaining, he's like a clown of venom. Not all nerds are plain or socially awkward, though the second is probably more common. Maybe US nerds are often fat, but here in Europe its not the case.
[…] quote, but I guess it’s better if you don’t have to read the whole thing at his blog. I did write about him before after all. Anyway, this is what Aaronson just published, in an hilariously misdirected […]