Are you an intellectually sexy geek?
Okay, so, to introduce/frame this concept, two of my favorite IT/engineering jokes: Q: What's the difference between an introverted engineer and an extroverted engineer?
A: The extrovert looks at your shoes when he talks to you.1
A fellow is ballooning cross country and gets hopelessly lost. Being a decisive sort, he brings the balloon down to within shouting range of a man he spots standing out in a meadow. Their shouted conversation goes like this:
Balloonist: "EXCUSE ME, CAN YOU TELL ME WHERE I AM?!?!?"
Ground: "YOU'RE IN A BALLOON, ABOUT FIFTY FEET OFF THE GROUND!!!"
The balloonist pauses, then resumes:
Balloonist: "YOU MUST BE AN ENGINEER!!!"
Ground: "ACTUALLY, YES, I AM--HOW DID YOU KNOW?!?"
Balloonist: "BECAUSE YOUR ANSWER WAS SIMULTANEOUSLY TECHNICALLY CORRECT YET TOTALLY USELESS!!!"
The man on the ground pauses, then resumes:
Ground: "YOU MUST WORK IN MARKETING, THEN!!!"
Balloonist: "YES I DO--HOW DID YOU KNOW?!?"
Ground: "BECAUSE YOU'RE IN THE SAME PLACE YOU WERE FIVE MINUTES AGO, BEFORE YOU ASKED, BUT NOW IT'S MY FAULT!!!"
Okay, so, the point here is, that geeks are known for, sometimes even defined as, lacking social skills (along with knowing stuff most people don't). But what I think of sometimes as an "intellectually sexy" geek, sometimes as an "alpha geek," or sometimes as "a geek who realizes that Charisma is not a dump stat," is a geek who can explain what he or she does for a living (provided that he or she works in a geeky field) at a cocktail party while receiving more than just desperately polite nods from someone who doesn't understand it while simultaneously NOT causing an eavesdropping co-worker's head to explode from the gross inaccuracy or outright lies.
This is connected to Mr. Braden's thesis about the difference between gnosis and epignosis. Mr. Braden, of course, being my high school calculus teacher, the one who was a former Marine drill sergeant, who still had the buzzcut, and who had an undergraduate degree in Classics from Harvard and a graduate degree in Mathematics from U.C. Berkeley. You know, the one who once persuaded me to stick my finger into molten lead in a bullet press he'd brought in from home. Anyway, "gnosis" and "epignosis," according to the classically-educated Braden's view, differed in that "gnosis" meant you understood something, while "epignosis" meant you understood it well enough to explain it to someone else.
So--do you fit the definition? Are you charismatic, socially ept, and intellectually well-grounded to explain esoteric subjects to the uninformed without causing them to gnaw their own limbs off to escape? Because if you're not, you should be. Consider this homework. Why do I have the authority to assign you homework? Because I'm smarter than you, because I have a degree--in SCIENCE!!! No, not really. I mean the smarter part, not the degree in science. Although technically, due to U.C. Berkeley's arcane degree system, I actually have a degree in the arts--of molecular biology, emphasis in human neuroanatomy. Although I can't paint.
An article about Mr. Braden is linked here. He's apparently now on a national board addressing teaching standards. He is made of awesome.
1 When performing the portion of the "new user orientation" which pertained to the IT group at my old e-commerce firm, I used this joke to explain why I, the purchase monkey, was the one standing before the 'cruits, as I could A) understand the humor and B) translate from Engineer to English and back.