Are programmers congenitally stupid
Specifically, are programmers, on account of some intrinsic aspect of being programmers, inherently tending to be absolutely fucking morons when it comes to political philosophy?
Like, I am CONSTANTLY having this problem: I see a programmer who seems fairly smart and interesting, so I listen to their political philosophy stuff. After a while, I realize that the programmer is an idiot who appears to live in a different reality.
And there seems to be a pattern to this. My current theory is that becoming absorbed in a world of 1. No geographic boundaries and very very low geographic costs 2. A world where everything is no/low cost instantly clonable 3. A world where they can control absolutely everything if they are clever enough (just off of the top of the head) has warped their perceptions and made them fucking useless at political philosophy.
OK, serious question: have you found a sizeable, well-defined group of people who do not tend to be absolute fucking morons when it comes to political philosophy?
If you have: is it your group?
Programmers, particularly Programmer Culture programmers (who of course are not all of them), do kind of live in their own world. And, yeah, it influences both their political priorities and their methodological instincts. The same goes for Small-Town White Shopkeepers, and Theory-Immersed Humanities Students, and Bostonian Irish-American Gangsters, and Upwardly-Mobile Black Suburban Professionals, and and and and…
When you’re outside the bubble, whichever bubble it is, bubble thinking looks and sounds absurd.
Which it isn’t, always. Bubbles generate some damn good ideas. But most of the time, if you’re trying to take an outside view to any extent, you’ve got to account for “much of the world doesn’t actually match the patterns that are intuitive to the person trying to explain How Things Work.” And that’s true pretty much regardless of who the speaker is, particularly once you’re looking at Cultural Dogma rather than One Weird Guy’s Weird Ideas.
Taking in all the ideas from all the places, and then refining them so they’re not stupid or blinkered, is really hard work. Nonetheless I prefer it to the alternatives, which mostly involve staying inside bubbles.