CW sexual assault, physical assault Growing up, I've been repeatedly assaulted and harassed by know it all's. That's how upsettingly nerdy they were about gatekeeping the autonomy of thinking for myself. Because they wanted to violate the most intimate of boundaries, and not have me fight back. They wanted control and power over me in every way. To play pretend that they were all powerful and intelligent wizards.

I see a lot of communists on here saying things that might lead to them being stigmatized, and I want to be able to do that more. You guys shut down nerdiness. I've been conditioned to have controlling nerd voices in my head, and automatically let them convince me out of setting boundaries and speaking up for what I believe in. Now I'm my own controlling nerd, and I don't want to be. I want to walk the right path regardless of how stigmatized it may be.

How do you shut down nerds? Especially when their opinions are antihuman? If you don't care about piggypoopballs opinions, what are your reasons for not caring?

  • a_blanqui_slate [none/use name, any]
    ·
    edit-2
    7 months ago

    Intelligence is a poorly defined concept, epistemology makes any notion of objective knowledge seem hallucinatory, and it's much more likely that self-declared intelligence has a psychological origin than an objective one so that they're entire personality is built on foundations of sand.

    I interacted with a lot of intelligent assholes in my schooling in physics, and I was on track to be one of them until I realizing that leaning into that role was trying to exempt myself from the basic social requirements of humanity. The end result of that didn't seem like a good place to end up so I ran the opposite way with it.

    So if you find yourself interacting with one who seems intent on beating you down, try lampshading what they're doing and what they hope to accomplish and why they think this strategy is the best way of getting there and just keep asking them why they think that and if they have evidence and if it perhaps can be attributed to their own pyschological factors and so on. Because these types also typically eschew the social sciences they'll quickly end up on the backfoot.

    • a_blanqui_slate [none/use name, any]
      ·
      edit-2
      7 months ago

      Example: "someone smart like you knows that education and psychology studies show that treating people like an id*ot alienates them, makes them less agreeable to your ideas and your person, and makes accomplishing shared goals that much more difficult. Are you trying to make things more difficult intentionally or are you trying to accomplish something else and if so could you explain why you think that might be helpful or useful?"

      • HexaSnoot [none/use name]
        hexagon
        ·
        edit-2
        7 months ago

        I'm a slow thinker and that length of text is hard to remember. The few times I speak from the heart, it's been conclusions about understandings I've been thinking about for years rooted in deeply personal experiences. Epiphanies I came up with on my own.

        I guess I'll try to use what you said by letting it build into epiphanies. You do make points I vaguely thought about many times.

        I'm glad to hear you chose saving yourself from being a full blown nerd. You sound like a nice and supportive person.

    • spectre [he/him]
      ·
      7 months ago

      Intelligence is a poorly defined concept

      Not exactly on topic [OP disregard this], but a definition that works fairly well for me is that "intelligence is the general ability of someone to quickly uptake, mentally organize, and synthesize new information".

      There is something to the concept of "intelligence" as a trait, but as you mentioned it is often measured by others as a quantity of knowledge that someone has, or tested against specific knowledge (IQ tests) that may be an expression of intelligence, but are incredibly flawed interpretations. Someone can be very intelligent and still end up sort of a "dummy" if the information they are processing so well is garbage.

      I would say that when someone has the intuition to identify false information, that's a part of having "wisdom".