I would expect detrimental effects if nerding out became even more of a paid-attention-to signal. It’s something you can do endlessly without ever helping a person. But maybe you just mean “successfully making valuable intellectual contributions”, in which case I agree.
Agreed. There seems to be what I can best call an intellectual aesthetic that drives about 1⁄2 instances of “nerding out” that I observe in the [East] Bay Area. The contrast between the Bay Area attitude and the Oxford attitude, the latter of which I guess applies to Ben Todd, has continually surprised me, and this variable of location may be dispositive over whether “nerding out” is evidence of desirable character.
I would expect detrimental effects if nerding out became even more of a paid-attention-to signal. It’s something you can do endlessly without ever helping a person. But maybe you just mean “successfully making valuable intellectual contributions”, in which case I agree.
Agreed. There seems to be what I can best call an intellectual aesthetic that drives about 1⁄2 instances of “nerding out” that I observe in the [East] Bay Area. The contrast between the Bay Area attitude and the Oxford attitude, the latter of which I guess applies to Ben Todd, has continually surprised me, and this variable of location may be dispositive over whether “nerding out” is evidence of desirable character.