Against the nerds
One of the delusions of modern times is that we need a nerd clerisy to help us run things. We’re presently at the end of the post-WW-2 order (or the post-broadcasting order), sort of nervously contemplating what happens next. There has been an active clerisy of nerdoids in place since the 1930s before the war: FDR implemented this idea of a nerdoid clerisy in its current form. Herbert Hoover offered a different nerdoid clerisy -he was an excellent engineer and administrator and was more effective than what replaced him. FDRs nerds were arguably a failure from the start: FDR’s clerisy put the “Great” in “Great Depression.”
You know who didn’t have a Great Depression? Knuckle dragging anti-intellectual fascisti, that’s who: people who were sans clerisy. Literal beer hall philosophers. The US clerisy did take credit for winning WW-2. Whether or not they did anything useful is questionable: the Russians did most of the actual fighting. The US had the foresight to build nukes and ramp up military production to help the Russians kill our enemies (and themselves -an important unspoken goal of WW2) for us. Some of this plan was executed by various kinds of bureaucrat-nerd, but few to none of the important decisions were made by such people, who probably supported the communists on principle. Nukes would have been built without Oppenheimer, but probably wouldn’t have without the mostly unsung Leslie Groves who did all of the important leadership work, including hiring Oppenheimer.
I bet Groves gave Oppie noogies when out of range of the cameras: the weak should fear the strong
Groves was 0% nerd race; he was an Army engineer, a type of cultured thug who has existed since the late Stone Age. He had zero tolerance for nerdoid bullshit, and you can see how hard he mogs Oppie in the photo above. Groves is the type of man leaders have relied on for all of human history, and quite a few centuries before. Groves, to put it in American terms, was more of a Captain of the Football team than he was a nerd. The same can be said of other technical work done in Radar. Nerds had little to do with American victory in a “calling the shots” sense. They helped: but only because they were told what to do and kept under strict control by the Captain of the Football team. Subsequently, nerds and their bureaucracies flourished in the US, essentially cargo-culting what happened in WW-2, leaving out the all-important urgency and accountability to the Captain of the Football team who mercilessly bullycided them into producing results on a timeline, as is correct and proper.
After American victory, nerds proliferated like cockroaches, and to this proliferation was attributed a lot of the postwar American financial and industrial dominance. American financial and industrial dominance was more readily attributed to the fact that it held the world’s gold and the only functioning factories that hadn’t been bombed to cinders. The proliferation of nerds and nerd institutions was a result of prosperity; not a driver of it. You can make new nerds more easily than we do now should we happen to need more; the sciences did better when a Ph.D. was unnecessary or a brief apprenticeship. This compared to the present system where science nerds aren’t even paper productive almost until their 30s, and are often still kissing ass and publishing bullshit papers to get tenure in their 40s.
A historical example of astounding governmental success: the East India company (the US was modeled after it; the flag anyway). None of the men in it were nerds. All of them were Leslie Grove types. British gentlemen, while often superbly educated in the classics and in technical fields, were not nerds. The British elite were known by continentals to be anti-intellectual. Then you go look at the situation where nerds run everything: Wiemar Germany, current year, any random 1000 years of shitty Chinese history, peak Gosplan Soviet times. Nerd leadership isn’t good. Nerds belong in the laboratory. If they’re not in the laboratory they should be bullycided. Even when in the lab they need to be held accountable for producing good results; nerds will always tell you some bullshit story about their fuckups. That includes bureaucrat nerds pushing bits and paper. Do something useful with matter or GTFO. Nerds like Robert McNamera come up with failson do-everything products like the F-111, the golden dodo-bird of its time. Not-nerds who put their ass on the line like John Boyd come up with the F-16; after almost 40 years, still the backbone of Western air forces.
The same is true in tech leadership. Most of the leaders of nerds who matter are not really nerds, even if they fake it for the troops. Zuck does Brazool Jiu Jitsu and kills goats: he ain’t doing leetcode pull requests. Elon was a street fighter before he developed his interest in payment systems and rockets, and his personal life is more like Andrew Tates than that of a nerd. The nerds who founded google and kept it an engineering company in its early days hired a womanizing chad to make it a useful company, and speaking of Larry types, Larry Ellison is both a womanizing saleschad and lunatic jet pilot rather than a nerd. Look at the most prominent actual nerd entrepreneur in recent history: Sam Bankman Fiend. Archetypical nerd; he even worked at uber-nerdy Jane Street and had filthy sex orgies with other ugly nerdoids. Nerds need to be bullycided. It’s good for them, good for the organizations they work for.
Being intelligent isn’t the same as being a nerd. Though nerdism is touted as being a sort of definition of intelligence: it isn’t. Being a nerd is being a disembodied brain; a king of abstraction. Being a nerd is a lifestyle open to obvious stupidians. Even when they’re bright, nerds lack thumos; they have a hard time operating outside the nerd herd. If something is declared “stupid” the nerd won’t give it a second thought. If other nerds like a thing, or are declared “expert,” even the 200 IQ nerd will go along with it, because being a nerd is his identity. This is why the football star is superior to the nerd: his life isn’t made of abstractions -it’s made of winning, which is something that happens when you’re right, not when you do the proper nerd-correct thing to sit at the nerd table in high school. Right now there are probably a hundreds thousand nerds trying to predict the stock market with ChatGPT (aka autocomplete). That’s what a nerd does: acts on propaganda as if it is real information. Chad either exploits a bunch of ChatGPT specialists and flips it as a business to a greater fool, or invents a new branch of mathematics to beat the market the way Ed Thorp did.
Objectivity is another thing the nerd lacks. Nerds are masters of dogma. They’re good at putting dogma into their brains: that’s in one sense what “book learning” is -you have a sort of resonator in your noggin that easily latches into patterns. People who are good at tests are good at absorbing propaganda. They’re bad at noticing the thing they absorbed is propaganda; that takes another personality type. One that nerds associate with “stupid people” who bullied them in high school. You know, the ones who should be their bosses.
Nerds become in love with their ideas, even when they’re wrong. Architecture astronauts, mRNA enthusiasts, marxists and other schools of economics, diet loons, snake-oil pharmaceutical salesmen, “experts” in most fields -these are ideologies that people can’t course correct without losing face. Since being “smart” is all a nerd has, they stick with shitty ideas even unto their actual deaths. Actually intelligent people play with ideas, consider where they might be useful and where they might break down. Ideas are like wrenches; they’re not useful in every situation, and you have to pick the right one for the job. You have to put down the wrong wrench and pick a screwdriver sometimes. That’s why you need a General Groves to manage the nerds: your legions of shrieking nerd wrench-enthusiasts can be helpful in putting together a car, they need to be bullycided into not using a wrench to install rivets or screws. The other useful management technique is to pair them with machinists who will make fun of them for trying to use a wrench for everything: the China Lake approach.
It’s OK to be a nerd; nerds can serve a purpose. We can even admire the nerd if he’s actually capable of rational thought. It’s not OK to give nerds leadership positions. You need people who played sports or who killed people for a living, or otherwise interacted with matter and the real world. The cleric doesn’t order the warrior in a functioning society; it’s the other way around.
Examples of nerd failure:
https://gaiusbaltar.substack.com/p/why-is-the-west-so-weak-and-russia
https://collabfund.com/blog/the-dumber-side-of-smart-people/
Locklin on science 
I agree with every word of this.
I have been using “Expert” to describe “nerds”, and though I still see it has some uses, “nerd” is far superior in most cases. Perhaps female nerds need their own word.
Karen is pretty good name.
A female nerd, a striver, is called a “StudyC*nt”
To be fair, one good reason for using the term “expert” in public-facing discussion is that headlines are worded as “[Absurd proposition], experts say.”
Hayek echoes Lenin in capturing the unoriginality and social function of such minds in his discussions of intellectuals: conveyor belts for the transmission of ideas to the proletariat. I’m sure none of the original positivists who argued for the epistemic priority of hard science could ever have imagined that science and technology were capable of being turned into a cargo cult.
Science is science, the nerds mostly ain’t doing this any more. There needs to be accountability somehow. To make a garden you need a gardener.
>After American victory, nerds proliferated like cockroaches, and this proliferation was attributed a lot of the postwar American financial and industrial dominance. […] The proliferation of nerds and nerd institutions was a result of prosperity; not a driver of it. You can make new nerds more easily than we do now should we happen to need more; the sciences did better when a Ph.D.
Yes – this is how they are proliferated. But how exactly, is the nerd created ? The same for his nemesis.
Clerisies seem to spring up like mushrooms in times of prosperity. Maybe it’s better to understand how to get rid of them short of civilizational collapse.
Some nerds just demonstrated that memory is molecular, and “shockingly” is intimately tied to immune function.
If only the entire field had been looking for that during the past 50 years instead of mapping noise and naming it.
https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-024-00930-y
Yep, I feel vindicated for remembering people thought this in the past:
Probably still room for exactly this down stream.
They have a bunch of things pointing to small nuclear RNA immediately after learning, but nothing about long term stuff and modifications.
Amazing how quickly “experts” dismissed the more correct ideas.
I thought that idea was pretty interesting myself.
If it’s true, then neurons are doing a *lot* more than some simple connectome model suggests. Also, we then have a lot more to learn about how to quantify the capacity of brains. (Things like bees being able to learn through conditioning are less shocking if the neurons in a brain the size of a pinhead are in and of themselves computing things.)
You can bound it with Landauer entropy. Unless it’s actually reversible I guess.
I do like the idea that neurons are doing something more interesting than acting like transistors. I think at this point it’s abundantly clear that they don’t function in digital terms.
Ok, but if you’re smart and have $10 you can buy coffee at starbucks.
If you have 10 dollars and use it to buy *a* coffee you ain’t smart.
Nerd response: 2000 word manifesto on time-value of money in various situations and the coffee production system.
Normal person: Yup, fucking idiots.
Regarding PhDs, there’s no shortage of people who’ve disproved the idea that scientists can’t produce original results before their formal education is complete or without one at all: Galois, Moseley, Josephson, Green, Tesla, Heaviside, Faraday, and so on. Einstein produced the work he’s most well-known for at age 26. What scientists really need to produce original, useful results is autonomy–a lot more could be said about this, looking to Bell Labs as a more recent model for producing useful research.
The modern system is vastly more formalized, rigidly structured, and dogmatic than the systems that came before it, and still hasn’t figured out the distinction between rote memorization vs general understanding by way of principles, something the Greeks worked out thousands of years ago. The modern system genuinely believes that there’s no real distinction between rote memorization and general intelligence (which might explain a lot of the hype around chatGPT), and prefers to promote students who are the best memorizers rather than people capable of synthesizing and applying new ideas.
It’s no surprise that sports and philosophy is a better base for leadership than “studying” or whatever you call sitting around alone memorizing tables of crystal structures.
What they also need to produce original results is to know what is original, and what has come before. Knowing what is pure bunkum will also help.
Perfectly articulated my personal instinct
My whole family (including the women) got into street fights as children and you can see how anti-nerd they are, even as they’ve turned out to be incredibly intelligent. Just a different way of seeing the world.
This definitely resonates with me. Most technodorks are pink haired, D&D enjoying* idiot losers.
The question that puzzles me, as a high T fella with an interest in shit that actually works instead of endless mental masturbation, is how exactly is it these people wind up controlling the government departments which control science funding? Why do they dominate management and HR at big “tech” (and sadly now real tech) companies? How is it they came to create an insidious, perfectly totalitarian set of control freak agencies like the NSF or various DoD research subsidiaries? Why didn’t we stop them?
Something is amiss.
*I have met a few people who are not total losers who enjoy D&D, but they are terribly rare.
As far as I can tell, they don’t I’m not sure I buy nerds and bureaucrats being quite the same thing. If you’re going to contrast the European physicists to Groves, (sort of Greeks vs Romans) there was more than a bit of insane security bureaucracy that groves imposed on the “nerds”. Insane in that it doesn’t work, and was the seed of a terrible malfunction in American culture,society, ang governance. Not that there was nothing to protect, but the barbed wire, safes, guards, and compartmentalization did not protect it.
Laziness, buying into the idea nerd=smart, and prosperity.
“Even when they’re bright, nerds lack thumos“
This captures the essence of the nerdoid type. It’s not a surprise that in the current year, their lack of thumos manifests in the most exaggerated way i.e. anti-social tendencies, lack of physicality, tendency for passive-aggressiveness etc.
If your reference point for the highest human capability is mere “intelligence” than you won’t apply yourself through the higher ones like will, enthusiasm, and virility.
Sir, I just wanted to say that I am glad you exist and that you wrote this post, as well as many others, all of which are excellent and resonate with me. I am in my 30s now, but I remember thinking there was something off about me, that it is difficult to form a good vibe with my engineering colleagues – only with time I realized the problem is that they are fuckin mentalcel nerds, most of whom should be crushed.
Reading your blog helped with that, I understood that there were many based engineers in the past which built cool shit with a slide rule and their hands and didn’t wank to computer screens.
You are my spiritual engineering dad I never had.
I used to have a similar opinion, but after 2020 why would you think you can beat the nerds?Suburban wine moms wrecked the Trump campaign in 2020 and will do so again in 2024. Meanwhile, the siloviki in Russia completely screwed up the invasion and the nerds in the Central Bank are who ended up saving the day there.
What’s the last government since WW2 not ruled by nerds that is worthwhile emulating and studying for any decent size country?
Singapore, Park era South Korea, Dubai, Putl0r era Russia, Pinochet era Chile, Bukele era El Salvador; pretty much all the effective ones were nerd free. Total nerd genocide would usher in a new era of human prosperity, exploration of space and scientific achievement.
You think Russia, the country whose GDP grew last year and who successfully annexed territory it wanted, screwed up the invasion?
>You think Russia, the country whose GDP grew last year and who successfully annexed territory it wanted, screwed up the invasion?
This is nice (and only happened because of the nerds at the Russian Ministry of Finance and the well-known liberal woman head of the Central Bank who also attended the same American Yale grooming camp like Navalny), but Russia is failing to achieve the strategic goal of establishing total hegemony over Ukraine.
CIA bases still operate freely east of Kharkov 2 years post-invasion and dozens of Ukrainian agents trained by the CIA are roaming throughout Russia now. If the siloviki actually planned the initial invasion well, then Russia could’ve received a new 30 million Slavs, a releatively undamaged infrastructure, a Black Sea lake, and strongly refocus on domestic reforms. Instead, it’s stuck in a costly quagmire where the biggest territorial gains now are dilapidated, abandoned rust belt villages. What’s even worse is that Russia risks Kiev, Odessa falling permanently out of its orbit if this anemic rate does not change. Letting another potential pole for Orthodox Eastern Slavs emerge is a terrible strategic blow to your monopoly on this type of civilization.
>Singapore, Park era South Korea, Dubai, Putl0r era Russia, Pinochet era Chile, Bukele era El Salvador
I specifically mentioned “decent size country” to avoid discussion of city-states like Dubai (yes I know Dubai is part of UAE and not a city state alone) and Singapore. Park era South Korea, Pinochet era Chile were transitory phenomenons that proved lacking in having permanence just like nerd free Francoist Spain and Salazar Portugal. They proved unable to buck the nerd world order and folded into joining it. Bukele is early and has only faced bad press from Nerd Inc. and need to wait for more significant challenges are posed to see how robust his system is. Putin would’ve been okay but like I outlined above he really bungled the invasion and the Nerds are freely operating east of Kharkov now. Time will tell, but siloviki messing up something so important as the invasion is a big testament against the “non-sense” culture they are suppose to bring while the nerds in the economic ministry were blindsided by the actual invasion and still pulled it off.
I don’t think the Russian central bankers are nerds; they’re too effective.
I also don’t think the Russians fucked up the invasion, though I know nerds would like us to think Putl0r will be gone in two more weeks. They’ve been saying that since 2004 or so. The Russian playbook has been the same for 500 years. They expand a little, assimilate, and eventually expand a little more. Most recent example is Georgia. Of course Americanski nerdoids are incapable of cracking a book to notice this, and think they’re playing a game of risk. Kiev might still be American spook base in 20 years, but it will be Russian in 50 or 100.
“I don’t think the Russian central bankers are nerds; they’re too effective.”
I see, your definition of “nerd” is nothing else than “people I do not like”.
“I also don’t think the Russians fucked up the invasion”
Everyone predicted that “special operation” will be over in few days/weeks, because everyone saw Ukraine as giga corrupt shithole it really is, but everyone believed Russian hype that it is “world’s second super power.”
The discourse before Feb 2022 was:
1/ Russia will attack and overrun Ukraine in few days, and this will be a/ awesome b/ terrible
2/ Russia will not attack, but if it attacked, it would overrun Ukraine in few days, and this will be a/ awesome b/ terrible
Show us someone, whether military professional or armchair analyst, who predicted the shitshow we all saw.
I know this is fucking with your self conception, but ineffectiveness is a defining characteristic of nerds. I had a nice second row seat to the actions of the Rooskie central bankers; they were absurdly decisive, effective and had zero interest in adhering to some theoretical “this is what smarties do” bullshit, which is what a nerd would do. By contrast the nerds in the State Department have been trying the same thing since 2014 and it has basically done nothing but make the Russian economy stronger and the US dollar more precarious. My Russian stonks have behaved better than the shitcoins I own over the last two years. Perhaps they are nerds; they must have some Leslie Groves pointing a gun at them and making the actual decisions.
As for the invasion I had this argument with a bunch of people and predicted exactly what happened: the russians would walk in, take what they wanted, sit there, stubbornly refusing to adhere to the dipshit western narrative that Putl0r is stupid Hitler: exactly like they did in Georgia a few years previously. I also predicted the Western media would basically make shit up about the war the same way they did about the Wuhan lung butter. Didn’t predict everyone would actually believe it; I guess I have more faith in humanity than I should.
I don’t know anybody who thought Putl0r was going to do a blitzkreig to Poland, but I know a lot of nerd fools who thought the Ukranian counter-offensive would be in Moscow last September, just like they thought the mRNA clot shot would make their cock 8″ long.
When he says “everyone” and “the discourse” he really means the narrow set of opinions held by his nerd friends. You already covered this with “they have a hard time operating outside the nerd herd”.
A proxy war between NATO and Russia was unlikely to be over within a few days or weeks. How many proxy wars have been over so soon?
The Myanmar junta seems pretty nerd-free currently, though it’s debatable whether it’s “worth emulating.”
Being nerd free isn’t a sufficient condition for good governance, but it does seem it is necessary.
>successfully annexed territory it wanted
Let’s even assume this is the only territory they want (which speak poorly of Kremlin’s strategic vision). They lost the one provincial capital they gained in 2022 during Ukraine’s 2022 counter offensive (Kherson), are nowhere near to controlling the capital of Zaporozhie (~800k city), and have another ~40% of territory to grind through to fully control Donetsk Oblast.
Singapore and South Korea have high rates of myopia and the best rhythm game players. Can’t think of many countries nerdier than that.
Every man in those countries joins the army.
Suburban wine aunts aren’t having children and their toxic ideology is slowly dying with them.
They can cause havoc for another 15-20 years and will then fade into oblivion.
Suburban wine moms allowed record breaking illegal immigration into the USA and these “children” that they “birthed” will likely stay in the USA for the coming decades. There’s little precedent in American history to think this will reverse. Knownothings are historically losers in the long run.
Suburban wine moms have no control over illegal immigration.
And Trump did better with white woman in 2020 than he did in 2016.
Imagine feeling despair now – you are gay.
I was worried in the early 2000s when it looked like the end of history. Now it’s clear the nerd world is rapidly collapsing.
Is Boeing better now that it’s not run by engineers?
This guy seem like a nerd to you?
https://prospect.org/infrastructure/transportation/2024-03-28-suicide-mission-boeing/
To summarize? Pardon me if I’m stepping out of line.
Nerds are weak men, who in such time of prosperity don’t need to seek the protection of stronger men, but still feel vulnerable, and thus seek ‘ideas’ as a shield. But since nothing good can be born from cowardice, all their fruits are poisonous. That’s also why they are so useful when lead by a strong man, they can finally be free from their fear-imposed neuroticism.
I believe societies that shamed cowardice did so as anti-nerd mechanism.
I’d summarize it as: nerds remain childish far too long (indefinitely).
There is interesting development in the internet security. Some very resourceful actor, perhaps a state, almost managed to backdoor critical infrastructure of internet by subverting a small project run by few nerds.
https://www.redhat.com/en/blog/urgent-security-alert-fedora-41-and-rawhide-users
We definitely more of Groves.
have you read Paul Graham essay
Why Nerds are Unpopular
https://paulgraham.com/nerds.html
published on 2003
It seem nerds are a phenomena of an Education system designed and run by bureaucrats.
there is no similar phenomenon in the past.
Funny I recognize what PG describes as a sort of stereotype, but it was not my experience at all. Smart people tended to be quite popular in my very working class high school. I think the kid that went to MIT was one of the most popular.
Unpopular kids, by my recollection tended to mostly be people who sexually matured later, ugly girls (women are merciless to each other), or those who didn’t fit in with any of the various cliques (listened to unpopular music or were super effete dudes or whatever). Basically the “nerds” were the kind of people you’d expect to be non-socially dominant.
I’m not sure any of this social dynamic he describes, which must have existed somewhere, actually exists anywhere any more. There was some little commented on anti-bullying campaign in Obama years which longhoused the high schools.
Serious athletes smell weakness in their competition by watching how they handle success. A weak competitor acts like he hasn’t been in a pressure situation before. Same with a nerd gaining success or power and not knowing how to handle. They keynote at AI summit, wear gay hat and step out on wife at first chance. Modern Donald Gibb needs to reset these nerds’ clocks.
But nothing can be done. Nerd culture will only grow in popularity. Grade-getters hire grade-getters to replace themselves. Jock is fkd.
I love reading you, Scott , even when you are throwing around tech acronyms I don’t know. This one I could follow.
China’s nerdoid government may suck, but it is wayyy better than our government of the lawyers, by the lawyers, and for the lawyers and their banker etc. friends. Lawyers truly know nothing about the physical reality. OK, nerds don’t know much either, but as you suggest, what they do know can be harnessed to good purpose.
A good point – just because nerds suck, doesn’t mean that lawyers and politicians (on average) don’t suck worse…
One other area where nerds fail heavily is Networking, one of my main gigs. The problem with nerds, besides the lack of spirit/soul, is that they’re mostly reductionists, even when some of them claim to be total thinkers. That’s why they screwed up the Internet addressing architecture with this disgusting abomination called IPv6. This monstrosity was introduced by ivory-tower nerds who thought the solution to the problem of IP address depletion was making the address space infinitely bigger, and to hell with everything else. Reductionist thinking at its ugliest.
Needless to say, people who deal with real things, on the ground, opposed this madness and put up a great, heroic struggle for 30 years. But the ruling nerds persisted, and tried all possible methods under the sun to slam their insufferable love-child down everyone’s throats, including the use of technical threats and blatant lies about IPv6’s capabilities. Recently, with the help of Big Techs who own the Cloud, they’re trying a new gimmick: charging people for the use of IPv4, in an attempt to coerce IPv6 adoption. They think going after people’s pocket will be the much-needed final solution to enforce compliance. The hi-tech version of naked terrorism.
Indeed, looks like as a social force, the nerds have been getting stronger over the years (probably by design), and they’re ruling just about all mainstream aspects of Western societies now. So what we can expect, is for the social downturn to continue from here on out.
Another thing I find irritating about them nerds, is they tend to “trust the science”, to the point of total blindness. These easy-going folks, always with a gentle smile on their face, were among the most vocal in advocating for the Covid jab 3 yrs ago. They also think Bill Gates is generally a nice guy who works for the betterment of humanity, the Rockefellers and the WEF standing behind the scamdemic, the clot-shot and the Great Reset, are just conspiracy theory, the soul doesn’t exist — it’s all just biochemistry — and fundamental physics, you know, mathematical trash the likes of Quantum Gravity and Standard Model, amount to something grand that will enlarge our understanding of the world and the universe, rather than just a form of worthless bread and circus. Oh, and some of them think Quantum Computing poses a real threat to our cyber security so it’s good to have regulations in place to combat this all too tangible threat.
Worse than trying to predict the stock market, it seems that the automatic nerd (ChatGPT) is being used to write scientific papers https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oT0jNiPrOEc
What’s the problem: Our publication rate will go to the moon. Infinite science! >:)
I was reading something darkly hilarious a few days ago on Rodney Brooks’ blog. Apparently the “self-driving” car company Cruise, whose vehicles were recently shut down from operating in San Francisco after a bunch of safety incidents, weren’t actually self-driving. They apparently had on average 1.5 attendees per car to intervene whenever the AI did something unsafe, making them more or less remotely human operated.
At some point last year, Cruise was lobbying Congress to ban human operated vehicles as “inherently unsafe”. It’s the chutzpah icing on the cake.
Kevin and I realized that autonomous vehicles were bullshit back in 2015 or so and made this patent. Cruze had a competing one:
https://patents.google.com/patent/US10775783B2/en
Can you elaborate on what exactly Leslie Groves did that contributed at least somewhat decisively to the success of the Manhattan Project?
yes
Then, I request that you do so in the comments. I’m honestly quite interested. And yes, I’ve also observed lots of high IQ, academically/technically smart people are surprisingly lacking in common sense. For instance, I’ve seen at least one person visibly significantly smarter than me in academic science who strongly disagrees that science and technology talent, due to lack of technological progress as well as a glut of demand relative to supply, has much depreciated in value. He also disagrees that there hasn’t really been zero to one advance in science/technology the past 50 years.
Groves provided the actual leadership for the bomb program, made the economic things happen, and as I said, he hired Oppenheimer, who was not his first choice, but was an adequate hire. He made all the important decisions, supervised all the construction, got it paid for, hired and fired. FWIIW he was way more right about security issues than Oppenheimer was; the latter figure deserved to be stripped of his security clearance as it was basically his fault the Russians got the bomb as quickly as they did. Oppenheimer made sure we were on track in some of the science gaps; that’s it. Any of 100 men could have done this, and probably would have been better on the security/political reliability front, to say nothing of being less of a whiney self-dramatizing bitch. Nobody else I can think of could have filled Groves shoes. He was a hero, Oppie was a drama queen bureaucrat.
Send your imbecile academic friend this: https://www.takimag.com/article/the_myth_of_technological_progress/
If he thinks we live in a time of great technological change; compare to 100 years ago. No comparison. The marketing/brainwashing is way better than it was; back then you didn’t need a propaganda technology to convince people that things were changing because they were.
How much do you think espionage made a different for Soviets, in terms of time? Some say that their access to the bomb designs made large difference; others will say that the bottleneck was not the design of the bomb but the production of the fissionable material, for which the information made thru espionage made a negligible difference. What are your thoughts on how despite the much later start, Soviets managed to for most part get weaponized hydrogen bomb sooner?
We know what the Soviets did could have largely been prevented by doing what Groves wanted to do. That’s enough.
And what was it that Groves wanted to do?
Can you elaborate on the Groves with respect to security issues aspect? And yes, scientists tend to be quite insensitive in terms of “political reliability”. They often harbor delusions of meritocracy, unaware that more often than not political factors make a much larger difference.
the Soviets, particularly Comrade Beria were pros at bully coding nerds. They built special containment units for nerds wherein the nerds could focus on important things like developing combat aircraft and centrifuges for enriching Uranium. They captured German nerds and had them develop the turboprop for the Tu-95 bomber. Of course, Tupolev himself spent time in such a unit. Here’s a Russian comedy sketch about exactly this: https://youtu.be/MKhgpf_94Uk?si=kGGtDeoKIcFxm8y8
you don’t need to speak Russian to see the bullying of nerds in action there