>This just seems like an attack on an entire group of people that I'm guessing have annoyed or belittled the author at one time or another.

It's an attack on an entire group of attitudes/behaviors.

Unless people that exhibit them are entirely defined as personalities by those attitudes (which I don't think is the case), it's not an attack of a "group of people", and even less so, an attack on particular persons.

>For what purpose?

To help stomp out attitudes/behaviors that are not good (at least not good according to the author).

>I don't believe he is genuinely trying to advise and help here. The tone isn't right for it.

You are mistaken, or don't have a clear grasp of what it is said in that post.

All of these are common social fallacies, and associating them with “geeks” in particular seems like stereotyping, and seems to me to be reflecting the authors own poor experiences with a subset of geeks coupled with a lack of exposure to the same problematic elements in other social groups.

I believe the author meant well, and these are social fallacies, but attaching them to “geeks” seems more out of bias than fact.

>All of these are common social fallacies, and associating them with “geeks” in particular seems like stereotyping

There's no such thing as "stereotyping" geeks.

Geeks are already a stereotype -- they refer to specific category of people with specific traits (not everyone having exactly the same, but in a "family resemblance" kind of way).

If you want, you can say that invoking geeks is already stereotyping. But I don't think it's valid to say this is "stereotyping" geeks, as if geeks themselves weren't a stereotype.

So, "Geeks" already implies certain traits, and a narrow set at that.

In other words "geeks" is not like saying "programmers" (which is a much more varied group with hardly much in common). Attributing something to programmers in general would not be very successful (though, even programmers, are statistically more alike in some aspects between them than between the general population: e.g. for one, all of them use computers).

Stereotypes serve a purpose: they are ways to refer to collective traits and behavior shared by groups of people. It's expected that not everybody called an X is an X (we might mislabel someone). But it's not very logical to never make collective observations about groups. We do them all the time, in polling, in business, in politics, in medicine, in social studies, and so on. People are not exactly unique snowflakes, they also tend to have certain traits, and can be categorized into groups by the traits they have.

(And again, nobody expects the categorization to be 100% perfect. It's enough that it's close enough to be usable).

"geek" is a meaningless genericized hypervague word, like "smurf".

I disagree, and would say that was even less true in 2003 when this was written — but there’s a fair bit of variance in how the word is used, and it’s on a trend towards improved status now that, well, (some) geeks seized substantial assets and syncophants have to suck up to (some of) them now.

https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/geek

Vague, but hardly meaningless. Most people have a concept of a "geek".

A more valid criticism might be that the shared concept is harmful to the discussion of people, as it doesn't fairly communicate a reality of their personality, like the concept of "monsters".

Try reading this later post where he refers back to it, including the use of the terms 'geek' and 'fallacy' in the title.

http://www.plausiblydeniable.com/opinion/fifteen.html

Sounds like GSF2 on full display...

Sounds like you let people do your thinking for you.

It is very hard to interpret tone on the internet. I, for one, did not find the tone to be disingenuous. Perhaps it is best to cut the author some slack, since we can never know for sure what he or she intended.

What group of people do you think he's attacking?

I think he's attacking the stereotype of the 'geek', rather than individual attitudes. If he was attacking attitudes, he wouldn't need to cast aspersions on an entire group (stereotype) in the way that he is, because nothing about the attitudes he is criticising are exclusive to 'geeks'.

It's a cheap and hostile article masquerading as socially conscious self-reflection. To put it like a conservative might, it's 'virtue signalling' without any self-awareness.

I'm not a fan of stereotyping people this way. It's never helpful and is merely an attempt to elevate oneself by putting another group down.

It's hostile and crass.

I suspect it looks cheap simply because culture has changed in the 16 years since this was published. Remember that in 2003, the only way you're going to be reading an essay online is if you're devoting the time to sit down at a desktop to do so.

Do you feel your criticism would still apply with the same force if it was clear that the author was considered to be a geek by himself and others?

*Edited to add a quote from http://www.plausiblydeniable.com/opinion/fifteen.html regarding this point:

  > First up is the issue of what "geek" means. It's an ill-
  > defined subculture at the best of times, but I generally
  > see two loose and overlapping superfamilies. On the one 
  > hand, those geeks whose common denominator is a passion 
  > for technical pursuits of all sorts -- OS geeks, coding 
  > geeks, sysadmin geeks, etc.; on the other, those whose 
  > common denominator is a passion for media -- comic book 
  > geeks, film geeks, anime geeks, gaming geeks, etc. I'm a 
  > game designer with a degree in performance studies. You 
  > can probably guess where I fall. I wasn't thinking espe-
  > cially rigorously when I wrote 5GSF (or, for that matter,
  > Why Geeks Like Anime), so while I defined my terms, I
  > used the media-geek definition throughout. This caused
  > problems for some readers coming from the other side of
  > the tracks -- like, say, Metafilter.

I read it originally, and rereading it now, it still resonates, especially in the geeky communities I know of.

I just can’t find the hostility or attack in it that you’re seeing. It sounds like someone inside a group pushing the emergency button.

> It sounds like someone inside a group pushing the emergency button.

This kind of comment is a poor response, and not one you could ever prove. All it does is shit up the comments and amounts to little more than an insult.

At least post something substantial.

How would you write an article about attitudes without generalising?