Looking back, the thing I wish someone in middle/high school pointed out to me is how temporary it is. Day in and day out it's your entire life and you think it goes on like that forever, and then one day you graduate and poof it all disappears. I remember the day after I graduated it sunk in that I'd never be in that world again and this huge feeling of relief and excitement washed over me...and then I remember feeling so stupid for being so blind to the fact that high school ends and you leave that world behind. But while you're in the middle of it--and for me even right up until I graduated--it really did feel like it went on forever.
Those first few days after mandatory education was over were a really weird and surreal moment for me @ 18 years old.
Schooling is this period of your life where the routine of going to school, homework, school holidays etc are pretty much the only thing you know, but then suddenly it slams into the buffers and it becomes irrevocably over.
In the UK system you usually spend 7 years with the same cohort of kids up to 18. It felt to me like a lot of social "baggage" gradually accrued over time - you built up this persona/reputation/expectation that defined what sort of person you were, how you acted, what sort of friends you kept, what you liked to do etc. It seemed to me that you unconsciously lived-up to this view that others had about you - people thought you were a smart kid/popular kid/sporty kid/nerdy kid, and so you acted like one.
Once school was over though those expectations from the others about who you were and how you acted just evaporated and you were free. Kids would be well-served to be reminded about this! Everything changes after school.
Two things happened for me that changed how I experienced high school.
1. I stopped being afraid of losing a fight.
I learned that if you got into a fight and and got in a few good hits, even if you lost, people would be less likely to give you crap in the future.
I might go home with a busted lip but you're going to pick up a bloody nose for your trouble.
2. I got bigger.
I grew to be 6'1" by my senior year. Bullies go for easier targets and someone who was their size or bigger wasn't usually an easy target.
I don't advocate violence as a first resort to solve anyone's problems but it's important to be able to defend yourself.
At that point in your life it is a larger fraction of your life. 25% at age 16. That's why, also just having been in school for 10 years. But one should keep the philosophy that everything in life is relatively short in general. This too shall pass.
The only difference is that the "opt out" option is unlocked after high school, but opting out has consequences. Even if we don't want to admit it, there's a lot of truth to the phrase "It's not what you know but who you know".
I hung out with plenty of nerds in high school, and most of them took solace in the belief that they'd eventually be laughing all the way to the bank while the jocks were flipping burgers. It's one of those things you keep repeating to make yourself feel better even when you suspect it's not true (kind of like people who say "I could've been popular if I wanted to").
Turns out they were wrong, and I'm guessing it's because popular people are able to use their superior social/networking skills to easily find job opportunities (and promotions), while nerds struggle to find the courage to answer the phone when the interviewer calls.
Except there is also another dynamic at play. At least in my case, after high school I was completely transformed into another person. Part of it was that at my job, I was working around adults. So I got into the habit of acting like an adult, and having a different set of concerns. So I really came out of my shell at that time.
The other dynamic, is turning 21, where you can hang out at establishments that serve alcohol. Which helped with the social anxiety -- so from my mid 20's on, I didn't have any of the issues that I had back in high school.
Adults try to explain this temporary state to children a lot, but they tend to mess it up by using some form of, "this doesn't matter" which doesn't pass the smell test for these kids who are struggling.
"If this doesn't matter, why am I in so much pain?"
The trick is that it both does matter, but also isn't permanent. So little of what happens in high school is irreversible, and certainly almost none of the things that feel permanent are, but it's hard to explain that without minimizing legitimate feelings.
It's sad that people tend to think of life as some kind of DnD character creation, where people have the same points but allocated in different ways.
Instead, some people just have more points than you, and just because they have more points in charisma, doesn't mean they also don't have more points than you in intellect.
I've heard, even on this site, people deride management and C-suite types as "dumb" or "the popular kids", and in the same breath worship "that guy in the room"[0] but the stark reality is quite different from this fantasy.
I'd go even further than that. They're not independent variables, but instead are highly correlated. High achievement in one area means you're more than likely to be above average in another.
This. The article (which admittedly stopped reading about 40% in) falls in the trap of condescension because it assumes anyone who isn't a nerd is also not smart.
> (FTA) 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?
They do. The real problem is that intelligence is hard to see or appreciate when looking upwards. That's why it's not valued, and that's why the author doesn't recognize the people that are intelligent on other planes than he is.
"This. The article (which admittedly stopped reading about 40% in) falls in the trap of condescension because it assumes anyone who isn't a nerd is also not smart."
I'm not sure that's the intended interpretation. What I do know is there seems to be a dampening effect on people in group situations where you shut up, fit in and assume group norms. Fit in, don't stand out, don't act smart as you are. Take a look at this follow-up article as well. [0]
Here's one idea that isn't shown that you might not immediately recognise. Look at this shot. [1] There is a big difference b/w the sneering pg and the pg that dealt with VC's other founders, customers in his viaweb days.
Not the same pg you see when ycombinator started. Why?
"If you want to learn what people want, read Dale Carnegie's How to Win Friends and Influence People. When a friend recommended this book, I couldn't believe he was serious. But he insisted it was good, so I read it, and he was right. It deals with the most difficult problem in human experience: how to see things from other people's point of view, instead of thinking only of yourself."
Hidden away in "Why Smart People Have Bad Ideas" is the above gem and the answer to your "trap of condescension". I don't think the idea is, not Nerd, not smart. I think it's more, not Nerd, don't care what peers think and do what really matters, instead of what appears to matter.
This is a favourite essay of mine.
Similar dynamics occurred in my school around the same time, though for myself, a Mathlete, I did't have the same problem with tough guys. A criticism I would make of the essay is what about the female Nerds? How did they go? Of the group of people I went to HS with, of those who are female, I count 5 Phd/MDs between them.
> I think it's more, not Nerd, don't care what peers think and do what really matters, instead of what appears to matter.
Hmm, no this shows the same kind of condescension (which I totally agree isn't intended) as in the article, characterized by the quote While the nerds were being trained to get the right answers, the popular kids were being trained to please.
Do you think teenage nerds do what they do because they think it's the thing that really matters?
Or perhaps just because it satisfies their urges? Is there much difference from the motivation of those who work to become popular? For me the only difference is the particular urge: For nerds it's maybe curiosity and intellectual stimulation, for others it may instead be social acceptance/validation, wanting to be influential, perfectionism in craft or sport, etc. The fact that curiosity doesn't breed social aptitude is coincidental.
> .. the answer to your "trap of condescension"
I admit I didn't fully follow you here. Although I'm not a fan of Carnegie, I agree the ability to see other's point of view is important, and think that it comes late to must people. Often long after the insecurity of teenage fades away. But it's not a very difficult problem, let alone the most.
For someone to be so condescending and arrogant, how does a person convince others to work with them, invest with them, buy their online service and ultimately sell the company? The ^be nice to influence people filter^ is turned off for writing.
This means in writing pg says what he wants (a sign of original ideas and though) without the filters of what ^others^ think.
Ah, thanks. Perhaps I misused the word "condescending" then. Maybe I meant "patronizing"? English isn't my strong hand. I didn't mean he wasn't being as nice as he should (I agree with you that turning off that filter makes a clearer message).
What I meant is that I think he's wrong, in particular the assumption about non-nerds and their intelligence. It's his limitation not to see that intelligence can be applied to different goal functions than his, not theirs.
"What I meant is that I think he's wrong, in particular the assumption about non-nerds and their intelligence."
Totally agree here. Remember the title is "Why Nerds Are Unpopular" and patronising, condescending is an apt description if you look at it from point of view. If you studied the brain of a nerd as described in this article, I'd characterise the nerd brain in the following way. A brain is high in acetylcholine (high level of focused learning), lower in serotonin (lower level of socialisation and dominance) and possibly higher levels of dopamine (reward learning system) for learning abstract things as opposed to a stylised non-nerd.
If you look at this neural level, I'd imagine nerd brains are highly geared to chasing focused learning of technical subjects at the expense of people.
Yeah. As much as the typical 'cliche' seems to be a divide between the popular moron jock and the unpopular nerd, the truth is simply that's there's no correlation between popularity and intelligence one way or the other.
Some people may be unpopular but smart or popular but dumb, but there's just as many unpopular idiots and popular geniuses.
Yep. Plenty of folks much more popular than me in school were also fairly smart. As has been mentioned, a lot of it had more to do with social skills but also with "luck of the draw" type things like being more attractive, being more athletic (which often went along with being more attractive), and having parents with more money to buy them fashionable clothes, and better toys (actual toys at a younger age, stuff like cars when older).
Who knows? Maybe a lot of their confidence and social skills were a result of those physical and material advantages. I can imagine that I might have been a more confident and outgoing teen/adult if I'd spent my life as a good-looking kid who wore the latest kid-fashion, was good at sports, and had things other kids wanted to play with. Instead I was scrawny with thick glasses, hand-me-down clothes, a lack of strength and coordination, and very few cool "things". So it didn't matter how smart I was when kids brushed me off as a "nerd" and talked shit instead of wanting to hang out. Either way I was gonna end up socially uncomfortable.
But that's just me and not the same for anyone else per se. And it leads to the fact that it's made me an adult who understands how big an impact the "hand you're dealt" has on the outcome of your life. I think it's helped me to develop a good sense of empathy and I've always tried to put myself in other people's shoes when I have a disagreement or conflict. So much of who we are is shaped by things out of our control and there's a certain strength and clarity that comes from recognizing this and accepting that you can't change some things but you can work toward others.
I thought 21 Jump Street hit the nail on the head w.r.t. (modern?) high schools, a lot of the most popular kids in that movie were also the smart, "nerdy" types. Could be a regional thing though, who knows.
Sure sure. The smartest kid at my high school was also one of the funniest people I've known; he didn't hang out with the "popular" cliques or anything, but everyone knew and liked him. You can be a nerd and not horribly awkward.
IMO social skills aren't really skills that are learned, they are personality traits. Intelligence is also a personality trait. If you have personality traits that cause social problems then you will have to work on controlling those traits, that itself is a skill. Some people are born will personality traits that make them more likable. People also tend to like people who are like themselves.
This article is in the same vein as that execrable Lisp article that showed up today: "Alas, poor brilliant misunderstood me, cursed by my genius and unwillingness to ~play the silly games of the lesser people who surround me~"
There is a lot more overlap between "smart kids" and sports than a lot of tech folks want to admit, too. In the (small) town in which I grew up, the honors students were the smart kids were the popular kids were mostly playing sports.
There were a lot of self-anointed "computer nerds" and others who were bookish and not popular, but not necessarily smart. (Most never left that town, while the football-playing honors kids are almost all at least bachelor's graduates and never go back.)
You don't really need social skills if you're in good physical form - even the original article admits that:
> Unless they also happen to be good-looking, natural athletes, or siblings of popular kids, they'll tend to become nerds.
Being good at sports or good looking is just viscerally impressive, and makes you more popular. Being book-smart has no such effect, unless you're particularly witty.
Did you finish the article?? It starts as a "poor me" article, but it analyzes the systems that generate the experience.
> As far as I can tell, the concept of the hormone-crazed teenager is coeval with suburbia. I don't think this is a coincidence. I think teenagers are driven crazy by the life they're made to lead. Teenage apprentices in the Renaissance were working dogs. Teenagers now are neurotic lapdogs. Their craziness is the craziness of the idle everywhere.
Nerds are unpopular because a big component of the definition of "nerd" is unpopularity. If you're popular, you probably don't meet the definition of "nerd" very well.
Also, not every person can be popular, regardless of whether he or she has any of the other nerd attributes. Popularity, by definition, requires a minority of the people to be identified as "popular", plus a large number of others who recognize them as popular (which is what gives rise to popularity).
Popularity tends to be associated with certain personality attributes related to socialization. Those who don't have these outward personality attributes tend not to be popular. Not having those attributes is, again, part of the definition of nerd.
"Why is a group of people unpopular, whose defining characteristic is unpopularity and the lack of personality traits that lead to popularity?" Gee, I don't know.
> Nerds are unpopular because a big component of the definition of "nerd" is unpopularity.
It's embraced, but it's not a component. Humans communicate nonverbally more than verbally. Nerds are betas in the classical animal hierarchy and it's outwardly obvious to most other people without a need for interaction. In addition to the physical betrayal, they (or we since I include myself) focus on obsess about problems as a virtue. This is viewed as neurosis and beta behavior by many. Who wants to socially interact with someone who gets caught up on details or problems that don't relate to social relationships? Not high school girls which forge the the self-perpetuating social circles in high school. Nerds are also withdrawn, which does not help the image and puts most of them farther behind over time. There's more, but this article is quite...juvenile. It's from the perspective of someone who still doesn't grasp the basics of what goes wrong for kids in school, in regards to social status.
The PUA communities are agnostic about this stuff and really have broken it down in a methodical manner that the author would benefit from.
> This article is in the same vein as that execrable Lisp article that showed up today: "Alas, poor brilliant misunderstood me, cursed by my genius and unwillingness to ~play the silly games of the lesser people who surround me~"
Did you even read either article? The Lisp article is precisely not that, and honestly pg's article isn't either.
If you've ever spent 5 minutes talking to a programming (most likely a nerd), you don't need an article to tell you why they're unpopular. From my experience, most nerds are completely condescending and complete assholes.
Maybe it's time us nerds to look at ourselves and take a little blame instead of shifting it off to everyone else.
true but some of that is a reaction to how they were treated when they were younger. My cousin once remarked to me, that when I was younger I used my sense of humor as a way to reject people before they could reject me. Sounds like a self defeating behavior that arose randomly. Then I lost 130 pounds and discovered some people are treated better on the average and far less often rejected.
I suspect a lot of unpopular kids internalized the lessons of their unpopularity, became bitter, and began to engage in behaviors which made them more so and rationalized it for them. On some level it changed to a choice they had made.
I was a HUGE nerd at highschool and I disagree with this article completely. I think nerds are unpopular at highschool because their intelligence is incomplete.
You see, Abstract thinking is only one of intelligence's dimensions. It will make you good at things like Math or Science. But there are other aspects. The one which is relevant to the article could be called social skills, or empathy. Successfully navigating human interactions takes a non-trivial amount of mental processing.
Some kids become popular "by default" (the rich guy. The prettiest girl). Others are naturals at social skills, just like some are naturals at Math. For the rest of us, the only option is getting better at it via practice.
In my case, I actually remember using the scientific method to improve my social skills. I formulated hypotheses, and tested them on my (extremely limited) social circle. Small talk was really difficult at first, until I discovered that teenagers love talking about themselves (I felt like I had discovered the fifth platonic solid with that one.). So I just asked them things about themselves and assumed the easier role of a listener instead of a "real speaker".
Gosh, I was such a nerd.
These days, I find that social skills complements my abstract-thinking intelligence in my job. I think empathy makes me a better programmer. I can totally spot code which was written by the socially challenged.
Hum. It is difficult without delving into specifics.
When I write code I'm always asking myself questions about future code readers. "Is this understandable enough? Are the identifiers concise? Is the intent of this method clear?". If I must spend 15 minutes on a dictionary looking for the exact name for an abstraction, I do so.
Code written by someone without empathy reads to me like its author has mostly asking himself questions related with functionality: "Does this work? Is this fast enough? Am I using an up-to-date API?". You get lots of names with 'info' or 'data' or 'manager'. Several things named the same way. The same thing named different ways in different places. Long methods, with tangled dependencies. Classes hiding inside other classes' methods. "Clever" code which uses obscure language features in non-standard ways. Etc.
Mind you - I also think about functionality, speed, etc. But most of my mental processing is dedicated to thinking about future maintainers.
This is part because the smart kids are told they go to school to learn things. That's obviously not the case; school is a horrible environment for transmitting knowledge and skill.
I for one never figured out that school was there to learn to socialise until far too late. My parents obviously meant well, and I hold no grudge, but if I was told when I was 10 or 12 to focus on the subjects I liked rather than try to do well in everything, and spend the rest of the time making friends and having fun and paying attention to other people, I'd probably be just as well off in terms what I actually retained, and much better off in social skills.
Sometimes I suspect this probably applies to college/university as much as it does school. Yeah, the degree is nice to have, but making connections with people in a similar field/with similar interests seems like it's a heck of a lot more useful in retrospect. Especially if your interests are in starting a business or other venture and you need cofounders.
Oh yeah, thanks for the reminder. I'm glad I'm not in high school any more. After high school I found there's a bigger pool of people, and I can read a math book for fun (as an example) without people looking down on me for it.
In fact, I know people who do the same thing. It's great. We respect each other.
One of the things that is pretty apparent but is not discussed much is maturation. "Nerds" are typically slow to hit puberty, get at the bottom of the pecking order since essentially it's like kids competing with the grown ups and then by the time they graduate it's too late to "make up" for it.
Reunions are actually quite entertaining to observe from that perspective - you'd see things like a tall and athletic "nerd" standing next to a short skinny-fat "jock" and wonder "what happened?"
All social animals have the concept of social rank.
Rather than popularity I would rather translate that to: "why nerds are ranked lower in the human social structure". Now, to answer that, you need to standardize in a definition for nerd.
Nerd for some is about superficial traits, whereas for others it is only a descriptor for personality traits, for others it is about intellectual traits, whereas for others it is about interests.
I think the answer lies on how humans, or generalizing, greater apes, rank each other. For example: if you went hunting, who would you take with you in descending order?
Being unpopular in school often means being bullied or ostracized, so we should be especially wary of victim blaming, which I sadly see in many comments here.
I was bullied for a while in school, though it wasn't in the US, and by the end of school I was quite well-liked. The advice I'd give to my younger self would be a) to get serious about some explosive sport like boxing or sprinting, b) to get fast and on point with words. I could've easily spared a few of my endless videogame hours for that, I just didn't know it would help at the time.
This article is a memoir dressed up as sociology. I don't doubt that it's a true statement of the way Paul Graham felt about his high school, but a great deal of it seems like arrant nonsense when applied more broadly.
The other thing that rubs me the wrong way about this article is the rather sanctimonious tone about nerd behavior, as if every nerd's "smartness" is a beautiful quality ("I want to make computers and rockets!") rather than, well, a pretty normal desire for a certain type of achievement wrapped up in a desire to impress in a different social hierarchy. I went to a school with a lot of nerdy types and there was a hierarchy among the nerds too, with people spending a lot of time putting on displays about how much smarter or funnier or hipper they were than the other nerds and reaping Nerd Popularity. I think the sanctimonious attitude is actively mischievous; I met many nerds in university who seemed to feel that they could do no wrong as they were clearly One Of The Oppressed Class and went on to do ugly things to weaker, lower status people whenever they could.
Part of the reasons that nerds are 'unpopular' is that they often can't resist trying to ensure that everyone around them knows just how much smarter the nerd is, regardless of whether they are. We started hitting this phenomenon in the mid-90s, where the ability to program a computer or some minor knowledge of science led to nerds proclaiming themselves experts on Every Damn Thing (art, politics, philosophy, urban planning, ...).
Alberti, arguably the archetype of the Renaissance Man,
writes that "no art, however minor, demands less than
total dedication if you want to excel in it." I wonder
if anyone in the world works harder at anything than
American school kids work at popularity. Navy SEALs and
neurosurgery residents seem slackers by comparison.
They occasionally take vacations; some even have
hobbies. An American teenager may work at being popular
every waking hour, 365 days a year.
This almost seems hyperbolic for the time, but I wonder if it isn't more true today with the way social media is omnipresent. Extending the popularity game from just rumors and who's sitting with who, to who you're taking selfies with and posting photos from the hot party this weekend. Not just playing the popularity game while around others, but even at home in your own private spaces, arranging things for photos and making videos and posts.
I always pinned this on being introverted and nothing to do with smarts. I could be popular with effort and actually being outgoing but it was exhausting and I would quickly find myself getting annoyed at popular people. What they did and talked about just wasn't stimulating.
I also came to see the latter years of grade school as a kind of petty game. At the time it fed into a bit of subconscious nihilism but I was always optimistic about the future and getting on with my life.
If I could tell myself anything though it wouldn't be what PG recommends here. It'd be,
"Good for you; you figured it out. It's a petty game that has no real consequences. You have more time and ability to shape yourself into whoever you want to be than you're ever going to have again. Make the most of it. Live it up."
I think it's an optimization in the world to enable its further progress. If you want to achieve something great, you need to go through adversity that will test you to your utmost capabilities. High school, as it is largely irrelevant, is a great place/time to do it. Treat it as a testing ground so that you can get used to these obstacles on your way to greatness. Then please don't fall into the trap of taking satisfaction in the misery of others that had fun during high school but hell afterwards.
The problem I had when I first read this article and still do today is the terminology. I am probably being overly picky, but I remember reading a categorization that differentiated between geeks, nerds, and dweebs. I still think it is possible to be a geek and be popular, or at least, "above" (more socially acceptable) the social circle of nerds or dweebs.
this is satire, right? such that you know none of this is anything to brag about?
I know bottle service girls that would get kicked out of every tech convention solely for making some boring accountant-that-learned-ruby uncomfortable, who are more experienced in "the blockchain" than the introverted asperger folks.
Fast forward fourteen years from when this was posted, and now everyone is a self proclaimed "nerd" of something. Half naked women on Instagram, holding video game controllers, while attending a sold out ComicCon.
Meanwhile, the actual nerds are still as unpopular as ever. It's just that the niche comic book culture spun off blockbuster action movies -- and everybody plays videogames. But the actual over-studying, learning minutiae, having isolating hobbies, being introverted, etc, part is not shared.
It depends on whether "nerd" is defined by personality or hobbies. If it's the latter, you're right, but so are they. If it's the former, what are the new nerds doing?
