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Quinn Norton (quinn@social.circl.lu)'s status on Tuesday, 08-Oct-2024 23:34:52 JST Quinn Norton

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

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  Mike Masnick ✅ (mmasnick@mastodon.social)'s status on Tuesday, 08-Oct-2024 23:34:24 JST Mike Masnick ✅
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  @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."
  
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  Quinn Norton (quinn@social.circl.lu)'s status on Tuesday, 08-Oct-2024 23:34:25 JST Quinn Norton
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  @riana @danmcd @alecm @mmasnick I checked masnick first, but didn't find an explainer per se.
  
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  riana (riana@mastodon.lawprofs.org)'s status on Tuesday, 08-Oct-2024 23:34:49 JST riana
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  - Mike Masnick ✅
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  @danmcd @quinn @alecm Or @mmasnick might've.
  
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  Dan McDonald (danmcd@hostux.social)'s status on Tuesday, 08-Oct-2024 23:34:51 JST Dan McDonald
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  @quinn
  If anyone has this, it's @alecm , who introduced me to that phrase.
  
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  Mike Masnick ✅ (mmasnick@mastodon.social)'s status on Tuesday, 08-Oct-2024 23:36:45 JST Mike Masnick ✅
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  @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.
  
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  Mike Masnick ✅ (mmasnick@mastodon.social)'s status on Wednesday, 09-Oct-2024 00:05:11 JST Mike Masnick ✅
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  @quinn @riana @danmcd @alecm @normative @mattblaze well... now i feel like maybe i need to write something. :)
  
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  Quinn Norton (quinn@social.circl.lu)'s status on Wednesday, 09-Oct-2024 00:05:12 JST Quinn Norton
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  @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.
  
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  Quinn Norton (quinn@social.circl.lu)'s status on Wednesday, 09-Oct-2024 00:05:13 JST Quinn Norton
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  @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.
  
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  Quinn Norton (quinn@social.circl.lu)'s status on Wednesday, 09-Oct-2024 00:05:14 JST Quinn Norton
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  @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.
  
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  Matt Blaze (mattblaze@federate.social)'s status on Wednesday, 09-Oct-2024 01:28:15 JST Matt Blaze
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  @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.
  
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  Quinn Norton (quinn@social.circl.lu)'s status on Wednesday, 09-Oct-2024 01:28:16 JST Quinn Norton
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  @mmasnick @riana @danmcd @normative @mattblaze
  I think I'm the on that stuck "fallacy" on it but we should keep that going 😀
  
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  Robert Thau (rst@mastodon.social)'s status on Wednesday, 09-Oct-2024 01:38:22 JST Robert Thau
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  @mmasnick @quinn @riana @danmcd @alecm @normative @mattblaze One other thing about the moon landing -- at peak, Apollo was, I think, something like 3% of the *entire* Federal budget. (IIRC, NASA as a whole was 5% -- and a lot of the non-Apollo expense was other Space Race stuff.)
  Kinda misses the point, I know -- secure backdoors aren't possible at *any* price -- but it might at least get people advancing the "we went to the moon!" argument to see that there's something fishy about it.
  
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  Kevin Marks (kevinmarks@xoxo.zone)'s status on Wednesday, 09-Oct-2024 02:43:21 JST Kevin Marks
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  @mmasnick @quinn @riana @danmcd @alecm @normative I read this as "nerd herder" in the first post and thought it was a very different concept, and it also made me think of Carrie Fisher
  
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