печально быть антисоциальным - how to conversate with geeks (kā sarunāties)

02:41 pm - how to conversate with geeks (kā sarunāties)

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[geek - a person who may be very smart yet lacks the social graces of those who are considered cool , a "computer geek" is someone who spends too much time on the computer and has no social life.]

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I dunno about your experience, but *many* geeks are like that. They can't accept somebody else being a little different than them or having different viewpoints.

Allow me to correct your inaccuracy... :-)

While it's possible that many geeks can't accept different viewpoints, that's not my experience at all. My experience is that hard-core geeks tend to be fairly accomodating of different viewpoints, but they tend to correct *inaccurate* or, even more baffling to many people, *imprecise* statements relentlessly.

I think that much of this focus on precision and accuracy stems from spending great slabs of time with stupid machines that don't have the ability to determine what you meant and instead do only what you said. The habits of precision thus developed are reinforced when geeks spend time with other geeks and I think geeks soon realize that highly precise communication is very efficient, or at least can be.

The problem with this, of course, is that the vast majority of the human race does not value precision to the same degree and is perfectly content with any communication that gets the point across with a modicum of accuracy. This causes no end of problems when serious geeks talk to others. On the one hand, the geek expects his listener to understand all of the nuances and shadings of his precisely chosen words, and their logical implications, whereas the non-geek expects it to be spelled out. This problem even afflicts "junior" geeks in many cases, such as, for example, the Unix man pages, which are generally well-written and almost always densely packed with all of the needed information -- if only you understand the precise meaning of the terminology used.

On the other hand, when the geek listens to a non-geek (or lesser geek), he expects the speaker to be similarly precise and is occasionally baffled momentarily by apparent contradictions that are caused by "loose" language. The instinctive geek response (and one that would be appreciated by a fellow geek) is to provide a corrected version of the erroneous sentence. To another geek, steeped in the terminology and thought processes, this correction would either encourage greater precision or, even better, provide clarification of an error in the speaker's understanding of the subject. Correcting errors is good. To a non-geek, the correction seems to be a pointlessly nitpicky restatement of what was just said! Even worse, the nitpicking is clearly unnecessary, since the listener did, in fact, understand.

This dichotomy of precision levels gets to be especially apparent when the subject of discussion is the geek's area of expertise, because the geek tends to have a very broad and subtly nuanced vocabulary, encompassing a thousand fine distinctions which are critical to the expert but silly hairsplitting to anyone else. It's also important to realize that this phenomenon isn't restricted to *computer* geeks, although as I mentioned, I think the machines reinforce it. By way of example, my wife has a degree in Zoology and she occasionally corrects my misapplication of the terms "insect" and "bug". Not because she's trying to be annoying but because the distinctions are as clear to her as, say, the difference between a just-in-time compiler and an interpreter are to me.