From simont:
But there’s another reason for disliking geeks which I find a lot harder to forgive: as closely as I can tell, some people dislike geeks (of all stripes) not because of any specific attitude to their field, but essentially because they dislike the fact that geeks think about things for fun. You hear words like ‘sad’ bandied about with great abandon; you hear a veiled, and sometimes not so veiled, disapproval of anyone spending time sitting at a computer – or whatever – which they ‘ought’ to be spending drinking beer and watching TV.
And it really makes me cross when people do this, or when they demonise the use of thought and reasoning in any other context. We have more than enough trouble in the world already due to people not thinking, so encouraging further failure or refusal to think seems to me to be at least misguided, and at worst culpable.
+1 to the post.
