mastodon.social is one of the many independent Mastodon servers you can use to participate in the fediverse.
The original server operated by the Mastodon gGmbH non-profit

Administered by:

Server stats:

373K
active users

I cannot find anyone who has defined the Nerd Harder Fallacy, am I missing something or do I need to write this?

@quinn

If anyone has this, it's @alecm , who introduced me to that phrase.

@riana @danmcd @alecm @mmasnick I checked masnick first, but didn't find an explainer per se.

@quinn @riana @danmcd @alecm i don't know that i ever wrote a full explainer. The term was coined by @normative on Twitter in 2016 in discussing the debate over encryption backdoors. He noted that when pro-backdoors people would demand backdoors, experts would respond, pointing out that this was a technological impossibility to do well, and then the pro-backdoors people would respond with a version of "just nerd harder and solve the technical problems."

@quinn @riana @danmcd @alecm @normative i think that the other variation of this that is great is @mattblaze's phrase that "it's like saying 'well, surely if you can land a man on the moon, you can also land a man on the sun'"

Non-tech people think of tech as magical and have less of an understanding what's difficult vs. what's impossible. So "nerd harder" is just a "well, surely you can solve this challenge" even if it's impossible.

@mmasnick @riana @danmcd @alecm @normative @mattblaze

Thanks! And yeah this is why I think the concept needs a lot of explainers for a lot of audiences these days.

@mmasnick @riana @danmcd @alecm @normative @mattblaze

...it feels especially tiring in the EU, because boy do these people just demand nerd harder answers to impossible question all the damn time.

@mmasnick @riana @danmcd @alecm @normative @mattblaze Though I think there's a subtle cultural difference to the European Nerd Harder fallacy; they don't think tech people can and must do everything, they think bureaucracies and laws can and will do anything.

They get really mad if they don't get what they want out of that process, but then just do it again. Not just tech tho, this is how immigration law has been working recently.

@mmasnick @riana @danmcd @normative @mattblaze

I think I'm the on that stuck "fallacy" on it but we should keep that going 😀

@quinn @mmasnick @riana @danmcd @normative The logical fallacy is concluding that because technology has accomplished much, it can accomplish all. People believe this fallacy when convenient.