I didn’t fully grok how tone deaf I was being though. WTF does this mean???

“Grok” was briefly a real(ish) word back in the 60’s, after Robert Heinlein’s Stranger in a Strange Land first came out. It faded into obscurity over the last few decades until Elon ressurected it, and now writers are unironically utilizing it again for some reason.

People using the word “grok” has always been a red flag. The people who read stranger in a strange land and identified with it so much they started using the word are fucking weirdos. The book is about a child adopted by Martians who inherited their reality-bending mind powers, comes back to earth as an adult and creates a nudist sex cult. Basically Jared Leto. I’m not joking, that’s the book. It was always elder developers who didn’t wear shoes and had trouble with personal space.

hackersdictionary.com/html/entry/grok.html I read it in my early twenties, almost twenty years ago. I am not a developer but am in the same area. I always wear some form of shoes when I leave my house unless I enter someone else’s house. I don’t think I have trouble with personal space but I don’t really see anyone other than my wife and kid. I remember liking some of the themes of the book but, reflecting on it now, yes, Heinlein can be problematic.

There is no problem with having read the book, there’s no problem with liking it. I did both, the first time i read it I thought it was cool. I’m more taking about people who made the nude sex cult book part of their personality enough to use the word grok unironically.

It’s a useful word with no direct equivalent in English. You don’t need to integrate the cult aspect of the book into your identity to understand that.

Sure, I might even give those people some grace over the people who use it cause they want to be Jared Leto, or one of Jared Leto’s sex cult friends in the book. It’s actually still a red flag, unfortunately. The only people why use Grok have terrible understanding other people, like the dude in this article. That’s part of the problem. Either you’re jumping off the same bridge as your weirdo colleagues, you identify with the nudist-cult Martian, or you have such trouble being understood, or understanding neurotypical people, you think you need a new word. It’s like people who is Na’vi, you can make up anything and say it’s anything and people who have trouble with reality will identify themselves by using that nonsense in normal conversation. You’re never gonna make fetch happen, it’s just tedious.

or you have such trouble being understood, or understanding neurotypical people, you think you need a new word. My background pretty heavily leans toward comp-sci and hacker culture, and “grok” in those circles is almost never used in the context of people, so I find it a bit odd that this is what you seem to be focusing on. It had very little to do with the difficulty of understanding other people, and much more to do with the understanding of a language, or nuanced hardware interactions, or programming techniques. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grok#In_computer_programmer… For what it’s worth, I agree on your specifics, and if someone is frequently making statements about being unable to grok others, or others not being able to grok them, than it’s at the very least off-putting.