Gizmodo, of all sites, published a piece today written by Alyssa Bereznak, a woman who ventured into online dating, specifically OkCupid, and came out with a story¹ about a date with a man who is really good at Magic: The Gathering.

I’m divided on this whole thing. This woman is clearly not interested in nerdy pursuits, but the actual substance of her piece isn’t really about hating nerds, it’s more about the sort of information that gets put in dating profiles. Now, in her particular case, the information she wished was there was about a nerdy pursuit. And it could be argued that the sort of deep passion for any subject that is required to become a World Champion of it can be considered nerdy — car nerds, fitness nerds, politics nerds, et. al. — but you don’t need to unless you are intent on casting this woman as a hater of passionate interests.

Common interests build relationships, and discordant interests contribute to strife, that’s true whether it’s you not liking their interests or vice versa. There are countless shortcuts in the modern world of dating, all of them mildly distasteful when discussed openly and plainly, and if the worst one this woman is guilty of is too hastily deciding that she has nothing in common with this man, then she is hardly outside the norm.

Now, that doesn’t mean she isn’t at least a little deserving of the scorn she’s received today, just not really for the supposed nerd bashing. She published this piece. She “outed” this person, when it would’ve been fairly simple to alter some details and leave certain points vague enough that his particular identity didn’t matter, simply that she felt she had nothing in common with him and felt he should have made his level of involvement with Magic clear in his profile; it would have been a dubious point, and fairly demeaning to “nerdy” pursuits, but it would have been presented with a degree of tact. She chose not to do that, and she should bear the consequences of the very public way in which she disclosed and presented this story, but let’s not turn this into a war on nerds.

It’s perfectly fine not liking someone because you don’t think you have anything in common; it’s marginally acceptable to write a piece about it on an incredibly popular blog; it’s decidedly not OK to include the sort of specific details that she includes. That’s just being a bitch.

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Footnotes

1. You can google it if you like, but I don’t see the need to contribute to its search rank by linking to it. [↩]

I don’t think anyone would ever call John Gruber a critic of Apple¹, but his bashing of Gizmodo with regards to their scoop on the next generation of iPhone is getting pretty ridiculous.

A recent post on his blog, Daring Fireball, asserts that what Gizmodo did was theft because the person who found the lost prototype didn’t contact the bar, where the Apple engineer who lost the phone inquired a few times as to its whereabouts, but that seems like a pretty arbitrary standard to follow. The person who found the phone — and in turn Gizmodo, who purchased the phone from them, because of the laws in California — is only guilty of theft if they don’t try to return the lost item to its owner, and the wording of the law seems intentionally vague, stating that the efforts undertaken to return it should be deemed “reasonable.” Were the phone calls with Apple employees informing them that he had a prototype phone — phone calls which were completely ignored by Apple, at least in part because Apple’s overly tight-lipped procedures left no-one aware a phone had been lost or that a new iPhone existed in any form at all — not reasonable? They seem quite reasonable to me.

Granted, maybe he should have contacted the bar, but not contacting the bar is not an inherently malicious act, it’s not the subtle machinations of someone hoping to feign ‘reasonableness’ when asked later while still scoring a payday from their discovery. It’s human error. Hindsight is 20/20.

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Footnotes

1. I personally don’t consider him a fanboy for Apple, but rather an apologist, a distinction worth making and perhaps worth clarifying in a later post. [↩]