Nerd sniping

Nerd sniping is slang term for the action of giving an interesting problem to a person (usually a nerd).

It was coined by xkcd author Randall Munroe in the 356th comic of the series on 12 December 2007.[1]

Techopedia on November 12, 2020 said:

Nerd sniping is a slang term that describes a particularly interesting problem that is presented to a nerd, often a physicist, tech geek or mathematician.

The nerd stops all activity to devote attention to solving the problem, often at his or her own peril.[2]

Beyond science, tech and math, the media agency Colle McVoy published 21 episodes of podcast between 2019 and 2021 called "Nerd Sniped" - "A podcast dedicated to chasing down the curious questions and challenges brands face today"[3][4]

It's also been used in the context of employers understanding neurodiverse employees with ADHD:

[ADHD] often produces the ability to 'hyperfocus', a kind of Godzilla attention laser beam that you can train on a complex task, which you won't let go of until it's done to an absurdly high standard. A legit superpower. But moving between tasks when you're in a hyperfocused state? Very hard. The nerd sniping risk is real.[5]

Real-life instances

During World War II, the Multi-armed Bandit problem proved so intractable to Allied scientists that, according to Peter Whittle, the problem was proposed to be dropped over Germany so that German scientists could also waste their time on it.[6]

References
  1. "Nerd Sniping". Xkcd.com. Retrieved 2022-01-04.
  2. "What is Nerd Sniping? - Definition from Techopedia". Techopedia.com. Retrieved 2022-01-04.
  3. "NerdSniped". Nerdsniped.fm. Retrieved 2022-01-04.
  4. "‎NerdSniped on Apple Podcasts". Apple Podcasts. Retrieved 2022-01-04.
  5. "Neurodivergent employees: Don't let employers take you for granted". Money Marketing. 2021-09-28. Retrieved 2022-01-04.
  6. Aleksandrs Slivkins (2014). Nicolo Cesa-Bianchi (ed.). "Contextual Bandits with Similarity Information" (PDF). Journal of Machine Learning Research. 15: 2533–2568. Retrieved 2022-04-10.
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