We’re pretentiously writing off social interactions with people who don’t share our nerdy interests

There are a couple of problems with this, one of which is that plenty of normal people do this, too, just for broader interests: there’s a difference of kind, not degree, between someone who only wants to talk about weather, sports, and national politics on the one hand, and someone who only wants to talk about computational biology.

But a side effect of the writing-as-networking strategy is that writing about your other interests gets other people interested.