I greatly enjoyed this article by Kevin D. Williamson about Thomas Sowell. Sowell is now in his eighties. When somewhat younger, he looked like this:

Here is what is probably the key paragraph in Williamson's Sowell piece:

Because he is black, his opinions about race are controversial. If he were white, they probably would be unpublishable. This is a rare case in which we are all beneficiaries of American racial hypocrisy. That he works in the special bubble of permissiveness extended by the liberal establishment to some conservatives who are black (in exchange for their being regarded as inauthentic, self-loathing, soulless race traitors) must be maddening to Sowell, even more so than it is for other notable black conservatives. It is plain that the core of his identity, his heart of hearts, is not that of a man who is black. It is that of a man who knows a whole lot more about things than you do and is intent on setting you straight, at length if necessary, if you’d only listen. Take a look at those glasses, that awkward grin, those sweater-vests, and consider his deep interest in Albert Einstein and other geniuses: Thomas Sowell is less an African American than a Nerd American.

My strong is Williamson's italics.

I'd never thought of Sowell as being anything like this guy …

But yes, I guess maybe there is a resemblance. Here is link to a brief snatch of video of Moss saying something very Sowellish, about the importance of getting a good education.

By the way, I am not calling the actor and director Richard Ayoade a nerd. I don't know about that. But I do know, as do all who enjoy The IT Crowd, that Ayoade's TV creation, Moss, most definitely is a nerd, and a nerd first and a black man way down the list, just as Williamson says of Sowell.

Although, as a commenter said of this bit of video: "Richard has a bit of Moss in him." A bit, yes. But what has really happened is, surely, that Ayoade was a nerdy kid, and has kept hold of it for comic purposes.

I suspect Sowell did something similar, and, as Williamson suggests in his article, in a more courageous and significant way. He too was a genuinely nerdy kid, who could understand truth better than he understood the demands of fashion. Then, when he got older and started to tune into the zeitgeist, he had to decide if he was going to shape up and get with the liberal (in the American sense) fashions of his time or stick with that truth stuff he had got to like so much. He stuck with the truth.

Also, I don't believe Sowell would ever remove a water tank (see the second of the two video links above) and then be surprised that his plumbing no longer worked properly.