I saw this memorable strip come up somewhere tonight, and I suddenly figured out why it has always irked me, which it has

(It’s a continuation of this strip and this one, but that doesn’t really matter)

I don’t think the attitude expressed here is not some sort of unspeakable nerd heresy.  It’s a pretty commonly heard idea, and one that I very distinctly remember having halfway through high school.  I realized that I was putting a lot of energy into stuff like playing through video games – sometimes even video games I didn’t like all that much, but which I wanted to play so I could keep thinking of myself as a guy who kept up with video games.  It hit me all of a sudden that if I let go of the presumption that “a guy who keeps up with video games” was a natural thing for me to aspire to be, it actually seemed like a completely arbitrary choice.  Instead of expending effort figuring out a frustrating game puzzle, why not expend effort on reading or school?  It’d be less expensive, more lucrative in the long run, more likely to confer social prestige upon me, and at least not clearly less fun.  (Perhaps ultimately more so!)  All of a sudden, the world seemed wide open.

But although I had mostly given up video games, I hadn’t given up an essentially game-inspired way of looking at the world.  I conceived of “effort” as a clearly defined quantity that you could “spend” on different tasks like a game player choosing their base stats.  There didn’t seem to be any fundamental difference between the “puzzles” in a game and the “puzzles” on a problem set; I could straightforwardly transfer my energies from one to the other.  (This was part of why I gravitated to math and physics, the most game-like subjects, at least at the high school and college levels: stylized puzzles with clearly defined rules, “objective” numerical feedback on your performance after each task, clever rule-exploits that work better than common sense, etc.)

The problem with this style of thinking is that it makes it easy to assume that your character starts as a blank slate, that you can min/max however you want.  Obviously, this isn’t true.  Your genetics and your early upbringing limit you.  No matter how much I “grind” at physics, I’m never going to be Richard Feynman.  And while it’s possible to deliberately alter one’s social presentation to some extent, how many people are capable of pulling off James Gatz-style self-reinventions?  I’ve never tried and can’t imagine I would succeed.  I know I’m never going to be President of the U.S., not just because I don’t particularly want to, but because there are certain qualities – like, let’s say, “political charisma” – that I lack and will never get no matter how many Ability Points I choose to spend on them.

“President of the United States” is not just another job class, one that happens to be the most difficult to master.  It is qualitatively different – in its prerequisites, and as an experience – from “beating a video game very quickly” or “drawing a cartoon.”  Different vocations are fundamentally different.  "Being good at being the President of the U.S.“ is a whole different thing, a different way of being in the world, than being good at science, or activism, or Super Mario Bros.  These tasks require different pre-requisites and select for different personality types.  It’s possible to simply never be good enough no matter how much you grind.

The idea that any passionately pursued pursuit is as good as any other is easy to dismiss.  I think fairly few people really believe that, though sometimes one slips into thinking that way.  A nerd misconception that’s much harder to dispel is the one that’s actually advocated by this strip: the idea that being good at something, for nerds, is a matter of choosing a task and then applying something called "obsession” to it.  The notion that you could be spending your ability points on just about anything, even if you aren’t.  "Yes, I’m spending my afternoon reading about sectarian disputes among furries on LiveJournal, but if I were to simply apply that same obsessive focus to reading about ‘alternative energy’ instead, why, I’d become some sort of level 80 alternative energy master.  That’s what it means to be a nerd: you just select a task and then grind to the level cap.“

When you put it this way, it sounds narcissistic: "I could have world-class talent in anything, if only I were to use this vast potential that I’ve been mysteriously hiding from the world.”  That’s not wrong – this does involve over-rating oneself.  But it’s hard to see that clearly because, confusingly, this line of thought is most often used for self-deprecation.  "I could be world-class, but I'm not.“  If the comic strip resonates for you, as it did for me, it’s probably because you’re already used to chastising yourself in this way.

There’s something that irks me about the use of the phrase "research alternative energy” in the strip.  It’s not that it’s any less well-fitted to that particular concept slot than anything else would have been.  The problem is with the slot itself.  I doubt that either John Campbell or his target audience have any concrete notion of what “researching alternative energy” actually entails; it’s simply being used as an agreeable example of something that requires intense focus and benefits society – an example of “something you could be doing if you weren’t sitting on your ass and reading webcomics right now, you piece of shit.”  Those of us who read webcomics have an instant emotional response to this concept, so there’s no need to actually take the proposition seriously, as an actual thing a person might do rather than a boogeyman for the guilty.

What would it really mean for the people reading this comic to up and decide they’re going to “research alternative energy”?  After all, that’s a task that requires a very specific set of fairly esoteric competencies.  What if you weren’t that great at physical science in school?  It’s possible that was because you weren’t putting enough Ability Points into it at the time.  But it’s also possible that you simply aren’t very good at physical science.  Which is nothing to be ashamed of!  But it means that any AP you spend on that stuff will work inefficiently; other people will be learning more and having better ideas per unit of time and effort than you.  (This goes for interest in a given subject, too.  It may feel pleasantly virtuous to force yourself to learn things you have no curiosity about.  But you have to remember that your competition includes people who just naturally find those things endlessly fascinating.)

I’m emphasizing competition here because that’s another quality that distinguishes science/tech research.  Elsewhere in life you can do a lot of good simply by being in the right place at the right time, even if your skill isn’t world-class.  But in cutting-edge science, if you and your team aren’t the very first people in the world to reach your goal, you’ve wasted your effort.  The existence of the world’s most efficient soup kitchen does not somehow render all other soup kitchens worthless, but in science the winner takes all.  (That’s a vast oversimplification, but the difference I’m pointing to is real.)  What makes you sure you can be the best, when after all you’re up against every nerd in the world who’s ever decided, just like you, to stop “wasting adulthood”?

Isn’t this beginning to sound like just as big a pointless AP sink as sitting on your ass and reading webcomics, but with a lot more suffering attached?  I mean, do you actually want to expend your efforts in the way most likely to improve the world?  Do you want to seriously and mercilessly assess your options in the context of your own flaws, or to you just want to throw yourself into “researching alternative energy” (or whatever) because, hey, that sounds worthwhile, and you feel like you’re just kinda good at stuff in general, so why not?

Of these two approaches, the latter is far more typical of “nerds.”  It is also gravely wrong.  And this comic strip is an inspirational marching tune exhorting you to take it.