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Blazinghand
United States25551 Posts
Why Nerds are Unpopular
Investor Paul Graham writes about why nerds are unpopular.
I know a lot of people who were nerds in school, and they all tell the same story: there is a strong correlation between being smart and being a nerd, and an even stronger inverse correlation between being a nerd and being popular. Being smart seems to make you unpopular.
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The key to this mystery is to rephrase the question slightly. Why don't smart kids make themselves popular? If they're so smart, why don't they figure out how popularity works and beat the system, just as they do for standardized tests?
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So if intelligence in itself is not a factor in popularity, why are smart kids so consistently unpopular? The answer, I think, is that they don't really want to be popular.
If someone had told me that at the time, I would have laughed at him. Being unpopular in school makes kids miserable, some of them so miserable that they commit suicide. Telling me that I didn't want to be popular would have seemed like telling someone dying of thirst in a desert that he didn't want a glass of water. Of course I wanted to be popular.
But in fact I didn't, not enough. There was something else I wanted more: to be smart.
Read more.
I was lucky. I grew up in a wealthy suburb near Stanford University in the heart of California's silicon valley. My schoolmates were, for the most part, the children of engineers, doctors, and lawyers. Some of them came from old money (for California) but most of them had parents who made their way in the world by being well-educated and working in a culture of nerdiness. Our part of the world made money first by being a port, then by a gold rush, but most recently by the development of new technologies.
It happened to be cool to be nerdy at my high school. People would brag about their grades (or, in a gruesome twist of events, on how little work they did for their "A"). It got to the point where people would feel pressured to take many honors classes they couldn't deal with, and several children committed suicide due to stress. Eventually, the school administration limited the number of honors courses you could take per year.
I've always heard about what it's like going to high school in the rest of America, and that it's basically terrible. I wonder if things have changed in the years since Paul went to school and when I went to school.
  
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Are nerds unpopular? Is the average experience of a 'nerd' (Is a nerd someone who makes good grades or is socially awkward or both?) worse than any other type of child? Or do nerds just write about it in retrospectives? Or do people just retroactively identify themselves as nerds? (I hate internet arguments because I just know most of them are the C student cocksucker slackers with inflated views of their own intelligence we all knew in highschool. :p)
Second, I disagree with this notion of 'social intelligence'. People can socialize with similar personalities better. That's why children gravitate into cliques. The 'street smart' and 'social' kids often have poor skills when interacting with their superiors, like teachers, while the nerds do just fine.
Finally, allegedly our country has been on the verge of collapse for the last 50 years, so stay tuned for your next scheduled broadcast.
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Blazinghand
United States25551 Posts
Ah, I must have misunderstood the article Paul wrote. I don't remember him talking about 'social intelligence' at any point in the entire article, or him making anything close to the statements you're talking about, but I will reread and take a look. Thanks for the insight!
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United States17042 Posts
That area (around palo alto) is a very special area, like nowhere else as far as I can tell. Competitive is one thing, but the AP physics students from that area are smart enough to be (admittedly weak) graduate students at almost every large university.
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Cliques are largely hobby-based. If you are a nerd, you usually have a very particular hobby that doesn't necessarily place you in a clique that is readily available in school, however in the last 20 years, this has changed drastically with more and more people using the internet. In the next 20 years, there will be more people in the US that are familiar with computers than people who aren't familiar with computers. For example, most 40+ aged people I talk to know very little about computers, and people 50 and up don't even think computers are useful, "except for email". The point is, the more that the internet becomes mainstream (Like cars, like how you'll see older people just talking about cars and I have no idea what the fuck they're talking about) the more that people with very unique hobbies will be able to find each other. Before the 2000s, the internet itself was considered "nerdy", as were computers, and this was before internet 2.0, so times were tough.
Social media changed the way people find each other though. If you and one other kid in your school love worshiping Satan, you can find that person much easier than you could in school before the internet, where you would only have limited access to a fraction of the students to interact with. Furthermore, the notion that "internet friends" and "real life friends" are separate is rapidly changing as the internet is no longer exclusively text-based, and free audio and video interaction between individuals has dramatically increased in availability. Now it is possible to talk to someone on the other side of the world without even clicking a mouse, which makes finding people with similar interests to converse with even more viable as a means of social interaction than the limitations of being having to almost exclusively interact with schoolmates, meaning that one's circle of friends may not necessarily be confined to school.
However, there is a distinct difference between being "unpopular" and a "nerd". Also, being a nerd may not necessarily mean someone is smart; they might spend 10 hours a day playing League of Legends, but they could easily be very stupid. Also, how is "popular" defined? Well, rather than putting a number or percentile on it, I would start with a very basic premise: That school is a controlled social environment, which means there is a limit to how many people can participate in social activities. So, since the average American high school has about 752 kids, then the limit to the percentile of students who participate in similar hobbies must stay within the max population's limit. Additionally, high schools are generally divided into a caste system where freshmen and sophomore students generally do not interact with junior and senior students. Often, each caste is largely separate from the others, so you have to start there. 750 divided by 4 is 187.5, but since you can't have the lower half of a student walking around as just legs bleeding all over the place, we'll say 188 people in your caste. If 3 out of 5 students participate in sports, and you don't play sports, then you have 75 kids to pick from. If half of the other students participate in an extracurricular school project, like Chess club, and you're into something different, then you have 37 students left to talk to. Not a bad pool, mind you, but that's around 5% of the school's population to find. But since they don't participate in anything other than their designated classes, and then go home, the only way you will ever find them is by getting them as a study partner and then asking about their personal lives, and a bunch of them will just say that their hobby is to do drugs and smoke weed 24/7. You can also scan the lunch room at your school for people who seem to be isolated from other groups, and then going up to them and asking "Hey, do you like playing Eve Online? Wanna join my alliance?"
Therefore, a popular kid will be able to do the following: be part of a large group in the school, like having a lot of basketball friends. Then, to have a higher tier position within the group, they have to be good-looking, talented, funny, charming, smart, strong, and friendly. Then they will have more friends than they will know what to do with. The notion of popular kids being stupid and mean is often not as exaggerated as movies and television would have some people believe. However, they can be mean and/or stupid as long as they can make up for it with some other attribute, however, being combative within your social circle is generally a no-no unless you want to get into some real Mean Girls shit. Being attractive and good-looking, of course, is always a bonus, no matter what. Being unattractive just makes things more difficult, but since most kids fall into the lower or medium-tier of attractiveness, it can be difficult to interact with other kids within your social circle, and impossible if you are part of the ugly-tier, which basically means your face looks so weird that people are physically disgusted by looking at you, and make the mistake of thinking your hobby is the act of being ugly, and that you actively practice being ugly. They ask "Why not be attractive instead? Why not try?" and to be honest, it is a very unfair question, but if you are ugly naturally, you would need to increase your other stats immensely to make up for it. That takes a ton of work, though, and if you're busy with school and are stressed out from not having friends, then it can be crushingly depressing, and you won't have the motivation to engage in any sort of stat-boosting/farming, and will naturally gravitate away from more mainstream hobbies if sufficiently disgusted by the individuals who are involved with those activities.
I think I did a really bad pronoun shift in there, but it's 5 a.m., so that's my excuse.
Anyhow, the good news is that there are exceptions to every rule. Any student can be social with anyone else, regardless of hobbies, but it can be difficult. You can also join up with a clique and adopt their hobby. You could talk to people below your caste. However, there is one factor that you have to consider when we talk about a student doing these things: high school is a life-draining, dismal, dark pit of shittiness that is designed to weed out the weak from the strong for when you go to work for THE MAN.
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Are nerds an American something? When I was in high school we didn't have cliques.
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On March 17 2014 17:20 Blazinghand wrote:
I was lucky. I grew up in a wealthy suburb near Stanford University in the heart of California's silicon valley.
Hmm...just out of curiosity, which high school did you attend? I went to Paly.
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Because being popular is something you should aim for???
No wonder the clever kids kill themselves.
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It also depends on your age. Where I live, in primary school (for 8 years) you have the same classmates that usually don't change. And since it's the first serious form of education (I don't count kindergarten), there were all kinds of people because no real selection was made. It was like choosing 25 random people, there are chances for smart people, but also complete idiots. This was a complete hell period for me, as I was the nerdy one. The last 2-3 years were the worst.
Then for highschool, we had to take an exam and I got into a really good highschool. Now since my classmates were no longer "random", but had to get good grades to enter this highschool, they were more mature, smarter etc. I was still kinda geeky, but this time I had people that would not torment me for this.
Then I dot to the top engineering university in my country, and again the "level of smartness" increased. Here I managed to create really strong friendships had the best times.
I think that my point is the farther you are from the "average" of the group, the worse it is. 10 years after finishing primary school, we had a class reunion. I found out, that I live in a completely different world than most of my former colleagues. I think I got used to being around smart people and kinda forgot the "average", but some of their world views baffled me.
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the environment you described is the same I experienced in the International Baccalaureatte program
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On March 17 2014 19:18 Grumbels wrote:
Are nerds an American something? When I was in high school we didn't have cliques.
Ever read the novel Lord of the Flies? That's public school in America.
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On March 17 2014 19:18 Grumbels wrote:
Are nerds an American something? When I was in high school we didn't have cliques.
All These Topics about "nerds", "bullying", "popularity" do only one thing for me.
Make me thankfull i grew up in Switzerland (would be similar in most western european countries i guess)... The US seems to be an absolutely horrible place to grow up...
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United States10774 Posts
On March 18 2014 00:57 Velr wrote:Show nested quote +On March 17 2014 19:18 Grumbels wrote:
Are nerds an American something? When I was in high school we didn't have cliques. All These Topics about "nerds", "bullying", "popularity" do only one thing for me. Make me thankfull i grew up in Switzerland (would be similar in most western european countries i guess)... The US seems to be an absolutely horrible place to grow up...
No, it's fine lol. Those things are not an American phenemenon
EDIT: nerdy and smart are not the same thing. There are miserable nerds (who may or may not be smart) with bad hygenie and disastrous social kills. At the same time there are cool smart people.
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United States17042 Posts
On March 17 2014 20:12 don_kyuhote wrote:Show nested quote +On March 17 2014 17:20 Blazinghand wrote:
I was lucky. I grew up in a wealthy suburb near Stanford University in the heart of California's silicon valley. Hmm...just out of curiosity, which high school did you attend? I went to Paly.
sounds like gunn tbh, i went to paly as well
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Blazinghand
United States25551 Posts
I went to Gunn though I am under the impression that the two schools are basically the same, except Paly has better sports and a nicer campus.
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My school is weird in this regard. I go to a private day school that is almost open to everyone (I think we take like the top 90% of people on some entrance exam) and has a special ed program for people with pretty low (not bottom 10% low) IQ, high functioning autism, some other LDs, etc, but due to the status effect/educational benefits also has a lot of people on the far, far right end of the distribution of intelligence that typically come from wealthy and educated families.
At my school it is possible to be popular and be smart; in fact I'd say some of the most popular and social people at my school are among the smartest. However, it is equally possible to be smart and not so popular. The two are kind of independent of each other, though I will say that typically popularity is easier to acquire as a smart person since people tend to like other people that are good at things, and since popularity is tied in part to wealth, which correlates with intelligence in my experience.
On March 17 2014 19:18 Grumbels wrote:
Are nerds an American something? When I was in high school we didn't have cliques.
Yes, the main source of this is that we tie local sports teams to schools, whereas in Europe and much of the world sports are only available as club teams. So you get an easy social circle from your sport, which then causes other things. If you are a nerd that does not play a sport, it is harder to make friends: you probably either have to somehow work yourself into a group of sports players, or need to find friends among the other people that don't play sports (many of which, to be honest, just go home and smoke weed or something).
On March 17 2014 23:51 WikidSik wrote:
the environment you described is the same I experienced in the International Baccalaureatte program
I eagerly await the day that IB kids learn to stop circlejerking over the program. IB isn't that much different except for stupid things like TOK or that service requirement from just taking lots of AP classes. In fact, it's easier since you can get good grades just from being able to write well, which is fucking easy.
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I'm one of the biggest nerds I know...and I was one of the most popular people at my school. But maybe Torrance culture is just weird
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EPT
