Flash of insight: why nerds seem obnoxious

I'm writing a last minute cover letter to a postdoc, and I found myself talking about following "more correct" methods can influence results greatly. This letter is of course speaking tangentially to the open secret that most research in most fields is done poorly. As just about every study that takes hundreds of papers in a given field and reviewed their methods and inferences has ever shown, substantial numbers of papers in every field, and sometimes a majority, have big errors; sometimes the errors are big enough that we really do have to worry whether the wrong drugs are getting approved.

Of course I can't use judgmental words like "correct" because they sound obnoxious, even if they are correct.

A nerd, in the fully pejorative sense, is someone for whom being correct is more important than being pleasant. You have to be an extremely charismatic, yet sweet, personality to really be taken seriously when sticking to the point of telling someone that they are incorrect. Most people can't do that, of course, which is why they get labeled nerds. Or geeks. Depending on your language.

That is all very obvious, but perhaps a good reminder of the importance of charisma in these fields where there are such right and wrong. You can be factually right, but you also have to be persuasive, and it's ironic and sad that all undergraduate and even most graduate training in these factual fields selects for people who are correct, but doesn't until the end start looking at whether they are persuasive.

One person who is an enormous model for me (though never my advisor --- long story!) was just such a person: quietly charismatic who speaks extremely bluntly yet in the most pleasant way, as if Barack Obama were a researcher.