The video appears to be broadly interpreting nerds as “non-apathetic people”. But by this analysis, jocks are also nerds. This is a poor definition that doesn’t capture the group being referred to by “nerds” in ordinary usage. It’s as though someone defined “fire” to mean reddish-orange moving things and claiming that his bicycle was made of fire.
Another problem – the video uses “religious people” to mean approximately “Christians”. Numerous religions aren’t evangelizing. Some don’t even accept converts. Nor do all religions have a sacred scripture to hold proof-texting arguments over.
The video makes an exemption, too, for “not all religious people, like not this guy”.
Any one of these could have been understandable, since a lot of humor involves squinting to see how something looks like something else. But with all three objections together, “Religious people are nerds” has turned into “A subset of Christians are passionate”, which isn’t funny to me. The joke just falls flat.
Bruce: Yes, the class struggle of 2026 is between financial oligarchs and pork barrel oligarchs.
Isegoria: If you haven’t seen Harlan Ellison interviewed, he’s definitely a character. “I’m a professional liar.”
Isegoria: I’m honestly surprised UFC can sustain the pace that’s apparently working for them — but running events a bit too often probably saturates demand and keeps out competitors.
Bob Sykes: The last 20 years have not been kind to Schelling. His book is silly. We are closer today to nuclear war than any time since 1945, including the Cuban Missile Crisis, and with the worst leadership in the West since 1914, worse even than them. Hostility between the West and Russia has erupted into open warfare in Europe, with major wars on tap in West and East Asia.
Adept: I just finished reading “Space Ships! Ray Guns! Martian Octopods!: Interviews with Science Fiction Legends” — an account, through interviews, of the pulp science fiction golden age. It was a time when many authors, including Ellison, were living hand-to-mouth in New York boarding houses. Anyway, there are a lot of great Ellison stories in there. Here’s one of them in his own words: “In 1959, Fantastic Universe was sold to a man named Henry Scharf, who had a publishing...
Isegoria: Yes, I had many of the same concerns about non-representative samples and range restriction. (It’s good to see you back, Dr. Charlton. I hope this means you find this a blog worth reading.)
T. Beholder: And eventually, you run out of new players. Why? It worked for a while. Until it didn’t. Three years later—1997—TSR collapsed. Well, that, and crappy editors, and crappy management (thus lack of playtesting or in some cases even review by someone numerate). I was the Gen Con coordinator. Oooh. Why wouldn’t he tell us about Gen Con, then? Including its $CURRENT_YEAR state, and so on. Spanked us. Hard. Because Wizards figured out what TSR never did: You don’t win by flooding the market for 7...
Bruce G. Charlton: It all depends on the population that was studied; because simple reaction times correlate with “g” – general intelligence (measured by IQ testing). If the population studied was, for example, college students from a particular university; then this is essentially selecting a relatively narrow band of IQ – and therefore narrowing the range of reaction times to Much less than the IQ range across the world. i.e. IQ of student subjects would be high enough to get...
Mike in Boston: Why do we hear so much about companies like UFC and TSR that, let’s be honest, the world could do without? Maybe it’s because they were created by entrepreneurs with a real creative spark and clear vision. What discourages entrepreneurs like that from creating companies that would actually improve people’s material welfare, instead of distracting them from their sorry circumstances with creative new forms for entertainment? It’s overregulation. The kind of creative...
Phileas Frogg: Pacing and quality matter for sustainability. It’s why the UFC doesn’t push it’s events too far in terms of numbers per year. 46 events in 2014 was the company’s all time high, and since then it’s settled into a sustainable 41-42 events/year, with about 1 marquee event/month. The lesson is clear: Don’t oversaturate your own market, or you’ll get diminishing returns.
T. Beholder: That reality stands in sharp contrast to what the US military demonstrated in Operation Absolute Resolve. [...] The mission concluded with zero American casualties and zero loss of equipment. It was a near-flawless demonstration of a capability that takes decades to build and years to sustain. So, sneaking works well at night, especially when one is allowed to ride in and ride out? Sure. Why would it not be different? That success is even more striking when viewed against earlier US...
McChuck: Night actions are great for raids, but they are not sustainable in a prolonged war, except for specialized troops. Everybody has to sleep sometime.
Bruce: There was a huge sex slave trade for most of human history. That’s bound to affect the last few thousand years of evolution. Where Worthy says ‘hunting’ maybe try ‘sex’? Stalking, Skulking, and Speed/Power.
Jacob G.: The interesting question in my mind is what has been driving the proliferation of blue eye genes in Northern Europe these last few thousand years. Poor reaction time is probably not it. Some theories: 1. The hit to reaction time comes with a better sense of timing as per Morgan Worthy. Based on his positions/eye color correlations I would guess this would select to some percentage of the population and then we would have an equilibrium. His correlations generally show the few having blue eyes...
Bob Sykes: P.S. The Venezuelan operation failed. The Maduro regime is still in power, Maduro is a national hero, and US oil companies want nothing to do with Venezuela oil. There may be some behind the scene payoffs and agreements, but that possibility remains to be seen. The naval blockade is already past its use-by date, and random piracy of oil tankers will achieve nothing other than a world wide tanker war, all against all.
Bob Sykes: Col. Macgregor refers to SOCOM as boutique forces, and rightly so. They can only be used for small actions that have a high probability of success, and low casualties, and under conditions of full spectrum US supremacy. They are tiny, and usually deploy as squad size units. They are on the ground only momentarily, and any actual fighting is at least a partial mission failure. As soon as you want to seize and hold land, you start at the battalion level, and move on up to the army group level.
James James: The Venezuela operation had 7 American casualties.
Isegoria: I’m glad you’re enjoying Morgan Worthy’s eye-color hypothesis, Bruce and Handle — and I’ll definitely keep my eyes peeled for any red-eyed skulkers.
Bruce: Maybe the little soundproofed padded room for listening to rock and roll from ‘Dream Makers’ was safe.
The video appears to be broadly interpreting nerds as “non-apathetic people”. But by this analysis, jocks are also nerds. This is a poor definition that doesn’t capture the group being referred to by “nerds” in ordinary usage. It’s as though someone defined “fire” to mean reddish-orange moving things and claiming that his bicycle was made of fire.
Another problem – the video uses “religious people” to mean approximately “Christians”. Numerous religions aren’t evangelizing. Some don’t even accept converts. Nor do all religions have a sacred scripture to hold proof-texting arguments over.
The video makes an exemption, too, for “not all religious people, like not this guy”.
Any one of these could have been understandable, since a lot of humor involves squinting to see how something looks like something else. But with all three objections together, “Religious people are nerds” has turned into “A subset of Christians are passionate”, which isn’t funny to me. The joke just falls flat.