Can you elaborate? It seems to me that a lot of nerdy interests also “don’t generalize” in the sense that different problems are quite different from one another (a puzzle game would be boring if all the puzzles had similar solutions, and part of the game designer’s job is to make puzzles feel impossible in different ways; a mathematical theorem that was unnecessarily particular would be eaten up by a more general theorem, so major theorems in math necessarily require unique insights, so you can’t prove most theorems by using the same old tricks; etc.). So this does not seem to be a distinguishing property to me.
Puzzle games and real math are pretty non central examples of nerdy interests in my ontology. I think of nerdy interests as fake compression, they provide a simpler world with a working memory number of variables to optimize instead of the mess of the real world. Results can be knowably optimal etc.
Hmm, but don’t puzzle games and math fit those criteria pretty well?(I guess if you’re really trying hard at either there’s more legitimate contact with reality?) What would you consider a central example of a nerdy interest?
Imaginal worlds, escapism. Video games, tabletop gaming, fantasy movies and books, comics and anime, collecting things, model building or mechanically intricate things.
Due to diagnostic ambiguity, a lot of the solutions don’t generalize, which is anathema to the nerdy interest tick in my experience.
Can you elaborate? It seems to me that a lot of nerdy interests also “don’t generalize” in the sense that different problems are quite different from one another (a puzzle game would be boring if all the puzzles had similar solutions, and part of the game designer’s job is to make puzzles feel impossible in different ways; a mathematical theorem that was unnecessarily particular would be eaten up by a more general theorem, so major theorems in math necessarily require unique insights, so you can’t prove most theorems by using the same old tricks; etc.). So this does not seem to be a distinguishing property to me.
Puzzle games and real math are pretty non central examples of nerdy interests in my ontology. I think of nerdy interests as fake compression, they provide a simpler world with a working memory number of variables to optimize instead of the mess of the real world. Results can be knowably optimal etc.
Hmm, but don’t puzzle games and math fit those criteria pretty well?(I guess if you’re really trying hard at either there’s more legitimate contact with reality?) What would you consider a central example of a nerdy interest?
Imaginal worlds, escapism. Video games, tabletop gaming, fantasy movies and books, comics and anime, collecting things, model building or mechanically intricate things.
Makes sense. But I think the OP is using the term to mean something different than you(centrally math and puzzle solving)