7 stages of being nerdsniped

inevitable stages of learning something new / getting nerdsniped

Just like the 7 stages of grief, there are several stages to getting nerd sniped (or rather more generally, diving into a rabbithole). ¹

nerdsniping was coined by XKCD in 2007.

1. Wow what is this word? haven’t seen this before

   1. googling definitions

   2. clicking around wikis and hopping into multiple links

   3. searching for mutuals who you’ve seen and following them on socials

2. start to notice the topic more casually in passing

   1. you start seeing the topic or mutuals populate your feed

   2. you start paying attention to random blog links or posts (e.g. frequency illusion)

   3. you spend hours on someone random’s blog post on the topic from 2014 and come out a different person

   4. you start wayback archiving links

3. *nerd sniped*

   1. you spent hours going through the default social format of the topic (e.g. Github repos for software, papers for academia, books / blog posts for social sciences, Instagram or socials for designs, old youtube or twitch videos for gaming )

   2. you start trying to play around with the topic and making variations of existing formats on something obscure (and likely utterly useless but fun)

   3. one night you will stay up way past a human acceptable bedtime because you spent too long trying to get something to work / make sense of it and decidedly realize you’re too far gone to not get sniped

   4. actively start posting / creating on the topic

4. becoming a nerd sniper / shill

   1. you start proposing “FuN thought experiments” at dinner tables to people who haven’t been nerd sniped yet to lure others in

   2. you send other sniped nerds links and become active in chats

   3. your friends start making fun of you for needing to touch grass

   4. you enforce rules for yourself to not bring up the topic at casual gatherings but monologue once the topic comes up

   5. e.g. you become a disciple of the thing.“redpilling” for crypto nerd sniping, “longtermist” for nerdier tech people, “techno-optimist/builder” for startup sigset grinders, “contrarian/based” for people who like to stir the pot

   6. you are dissatisfied about some specific thing and you try to convince other people to change it. once you start to feel unhappiness with the state of the field you’re properly nerd sniped. no one voluntarily wants to feel dissatisfied, and it’s a measurement of buy in. this is why every EA person wants to talk to someone else about nuclear risk or paperclip AI risk, every crypto person wants to talk about the ethereum merge or recent lending implosion, and every fintwit person wants to bring up the latest matt levine article.

5. proposing a religion or cultural cult around the nerdsnipe to strengthen your power base around the nerd snipe

   1. e.g. “tpot” for memeposter nerdsniping

   2. e.g. “St IGNUcius/OSS/rustacean” for open source nerd sniping

   3. e.g. “EA/rationalism” for people on lesswrong

   4. e.g. “fintwit” for people who like to mask their pain in red with likes on twitter

   5. status games. you attend or convince other people to start attending in person events that likely have very little substance beyond spreading the culture to reinforce status tiers among those who have been nerdsniped. the more you can convince sniped nerds there are more “Boss level” tiers they haven’t attained by showing them people with higher nerd status the deeper you will snipe.

      1. crypto conferences

      2. academic conferences

      3. political party conventions

      4. social conferences (hereticon, vibe camp)

      5. gated online chats (e.g. roonchat)

6. realizing everyone / most people around you are giving inaccurate or vague statements

   1. starts correcting people habitually and becoming an “Ackchyually” asshole on Twitter

   2. starts thread posting (this is when it starts to fall apart) where even the people with the deepest understanding may not get what you’re talking about

   3. losing satisfaction on reading most posts or new content

7. you start looking around for other nerd snipes, repeat 1

   1. you start looking for other nerdsnipers, and let yourself consider getting nerd sniped by something new

   2. you will still pay attention to content from this topic but significantly less active

   3. eventually you repeat 1

1. most of the below are for online rabbitholes. there are also other ways of getting into rabbitholes but they are windier paths.