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.
