Preaching to choir. Hacker News is like the nerdiest of nerds.
Seriously, I came from Ukraine when I was 12 and being an out-of-shape immigrant and a nerd made my life in American school a living hell.
The problem I remember having the most was isolation. It's interesting because people did make fun of me in Ukraine all the time, but we made fun of everyone and were pretty much all friends, we conversed a lot, even when we were fighting.
In U.S. it's just different, people ignore you. Spending 8 hours in a place where no one talks to you except for teacher (and several accidental buddies) is pretty miserable. I often thought it'd be easier if I was bullied, at least someone would fucking notice me. Took me a around 4-5 years before I became a misantrophist and just started hating everyone by default and that's sort of how I managed living here.
Dungeons and Dragons players, Star Trek geeks, anime fans, weapons geeks, LARPers, fantasy enthusiasts. Wanting to make money instantly boots you a step or two above the absolute dregs.
Please let's not argue terminology. Article opening:
Growing up without any noticeable athletic skills, the nerd-jock duality was a pretty important part of my childhood. Nerds were the kids who carried calculators, wore glasses, dressed poorly, read books for fun, liked to be right in class, and had few friends. Jocks were athletic, well dressed, and popular, but probably stupid as well. Every person in my class could have listed, by name, the “nerds” and the “jocks” among our classmates, and if we’d transferred to a different school, we could have identified them on sight. It was, for me, and I suspect for many other kids like me, the primary sorting system for my peers
He's talking "cool kid" versus "uncool kid." End of discussion.
I've never found a use for the word "dweeb". I always refer to the people that zimbabwe describes as "geeks", nerds with no particular interest or skills in an area of academics (but they still like to engage in nerdy activities).
My "startup" - http://www.obsidianportal.com - caters directly to several of your targets. By combining my entrepreneur bent w/ my shameful D&D playing, I've made a pretty penny.
By attempting to identify the true 'nerdiest', as people distinct from present company, you've fed into the very same stigmatizing separate-and-point primary-school behavior highlighted by the original article.
The willingness of those excluded to try to redirect the labels/taunts/stigma to someone else of even lower status helps keep the whole sordid enterprise going.
I trust that wasn't your conscious intent, but it can just as easily be a reflex. "At least we're a step or two above those people."
My comment was joking. I actually don't believe in the labels, and I find that labels generally only apply to the people who worry about them.
I've known some very cool people who LARPed, some of the biggest jocks I've met play WoW, D&D and MtG are huge among the drama cliques in the Northeast, and the NYC hipster crowd has made stuff like web design a social boon. YCombinator's own OMGPOP is probably the ultimate example of that.
But I've gotten into some fairly heated arguments on HN about just how accurate labels are, and I'd rather not get into that again.
"This is what happens when you don’t stigmatize engineers: you get a country full of engineers, self-identifying as engineers, growing up dreaming of being engineers."
Er, no, this is what happens when the rest of the world won't allow you to have an army because of what you did when you had one.
Your engineers have nowhere else to go but into the private sector where they are much more visible.
In the U.S., many of the best and brightest end up in the military or government service. We don't know what many of them do. I guess that's the price we're still paying for winning World War II.
I actually think it goes back to the War of 1812, when a handful of mechanized British troops very nearly retook the US capitol. It really put the lie to Thomas Jefferson's ideal agricultural society (the pirates at Trinidad didn't seem to wake people up the same way).
"In the U.S., many of the best and brightest end up in the military or government service."
Would you please care to provide examples?
If you said that the best and the brightest are funded by military and government, I'd agree. After all, that's what DARPA and NSF are for. But I have never met one bright person who enjoyed working for the U.S. military or government. Not one. They all quit their jobs after a while, and came back to academia, or the private sector.
I'm sure there are plenty of intelligent, power-hungry people working for our government in either a martial or administrative capacity. Dick Cheney is an example of such a person.
Your certainty that there are intelligent people working for the U.S. government stems from 1st hand experience, or does it stem from wishful thinking?
I thought Cheney was no longer in the government. And if he's so smart, why didn't he anticipate the Iraq quagmire? Maybe he desired one?
That makes sense. A quagmire would provide the U.S. Military an excuse to stay in Iraq for years and control the Middle East's oil fields.
With NATO in Afghanistan and closer ties with the former Soviet republics in Eurasia, the U.S. could deny China land access to energy resources. The icing on the cake would be a major war against Iran. That would allow the U.S. to effectively control the world's energy resources.
It's relatively easy to measure how smart a mathematician is. How do you measure how smart a politician is?
Then there's another problem: in certain organizations, it does not matter if you're very smart because you can't act on it. There's no better career suicide than making your superior look dumb in the corporate world. Your co-workers may feel threatened and conspire against you.
In government, you can't do certain things because the powerful interest groups or public opinion just won't let you. Hence, I ask again: how do you measure the performance or the smarts of a politician?
BTW, Cheney himself said in the early 1990s that going to Baghdad in 1991 would have resulted in a Vietnam-like quagmire. How ironic.
Let's keep things in perspective. America is 10 million square kilometers, 4 million square miles, so there are lots of communities that value smarts.
My freshman year college roommate was on his HS football team, captain of the math team, and knew the difference between synecdoche and metonymy.
That said, it's appalling how freely people joke that they're bad at arithmetic, when they wouldn't joke so freely that they're bad at, say, being able to read.
Agreed. Some of the smartest people I've met were actually quite athletic. The one does not exclude the other - most of our top students in high school (in Germany) were great athletes and are pursuing anything from theoretical physics to medicine.
I personally don't like hanging with a nerdy crowd, like sports and sports channels. However, intellectual pursuits are interesting as well. I kinda like the positive spirit that athletes quite often bring to the table.
synecdoche ("take a share of") means to use a part to represent the whole (or vice versa), or to use a subset to represent a superset (or vice versa).
Pronunciation soundfile:
http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/synecdoche
metonymy ("meta-word") strictly means to use a thing associated with something to represent it, rather than a part/subset. However it is often used more loosely, to mean both.
Pronunciation soundfile:
http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/metonymy
The distinction can be slippery when you examine examples closely, because it depends on what you take to be the concepts involved.
I agree; probably the article is excessively polemicized. I do think the author has a point, but he oversimplifies in making it a black and white, us vs germany thing.
I think the biggest difference is that it seems that in US schools, due to the high risks teachers face from litigation and the various incentive structures, the situation has degenerated to an "inmates running the asylum" scenario. The teachers, simply put, lack the ability to impose some minimum level of order and discipline, and the worst are allowed to run amok to the detriment of all of those remaining in the class. The focus in education in the last twenty years has always been "not leaving someone behind", and of course that sounds at worst anodyne if not downright saintly. Sadly, "not leaving someone behind" is in practical terms often paid for by the good students not being able to pay attention during class or being harrassed by the bad kids.
I think it is probably along this dimension where there is the greatest disparity between the US and Europe. In Europe, at least to my mind, there seems to be more deference to authority, in particular to the teacher. Just as a silly example: in the US, there was a recent supreme court case where some kid had a banner that said "Bong Hits For Jesus" at a school event. The kid was ordered to remove the banner and IIRC was suspended or the like; nothing huge. So he took the school all the way to the supreme court! Aside from the absurd legal waste here, and despite the fact that he lost his appeal, what strikes me is the sense of entitlement. I don't think it would even cross a French or German high school student's mind to try to pull a stunt like that.
On the other hand, US universities are the envy of the world --- and the concentration of US universities in the FT top universities ranking is evidence of that -- and there is no shortage of nerd glorification at these institutions. Also one need look no further than Silicon Valley to conclude that the situation for the US is far from lost.
Finally, I would add that, in respect of high school education, it does seem that in more than a few places Europe is regressing in performance, and for much the same reason as the US and indeed many other countries: we've relaxed the system, made it easier for students, in particular the bad and disruptive ones, with predictable results. Not that I'm advocating a return to harsh punishment, sadistic teachers, militant drills, etc., but I think we need to think carefully about the overall incentives for students and teachers and ask if, in the current constellation, society is best served.
"it's appalling how freely people joke that they're bad at arithmetic, when they wouldn't joke so freely that they're bad at, say, being able to read."
When most people say they're horrible at math they mean they're horrible at the analytical mindset it requires. People don't say they're horrible at reading, neither do they say they're horrible at basic arithmetic.
What people do say is that they don't read for fun on their own. I know people like that. They simply don't have the mindset needed to sit and read through a book just because they like doing it.
Question: does the nerd vs. jock divide seriously exist?
I live in India, and back here being a nerd means you're a sort of minor celebrity. Doing well in school? You're the talk of the neighborhood. Doing well in school and captain of the school Cricket/Football/Foo team? You're a minor god. Doing all this and not aspiring to be an engineer? O NOES THE WORLD IZ ENDING!!1! U HAZ TO B ENGINEER!!1!
Of course, being a hacker does not count for much. People understand a perfect marksheet. Nobody understands elegant Python. One of the reasons I'm "good at computers, but needs to work harder on academics".
Well, most of us, when answering that question, end up generalizing from one example. Either: "at my school, everyone was either a nerd or a jock; therefore, at all American schools, everyone is either a nerd or a jock." Or: "at my school, there was no divide between nerds and jocks; therefore, at all American schools, there is no divide between nerds and jocks."
Are you saying if Sachin Tendulkar had been smart - then he would have been pressured into becoming an engineer? Good news for future Aussie Cricket teams.
I like in Melbourne/Vic/Australia so the ranking is AFL(Aussie Rules) > Cricket > God
Sports are something that require initial talent followed by hard work and dedication to reach the point where you can earn a sensible living. However, some sports can be spectacles. People can watch and appreciate the skill and excitement. Getting large numbers of people watching can generate money, which can support the teams and players, and so talent/work/skill gets converted into money.
Engineering, math, science, etc., are something that require initial talent followed by hard work and dedication to reach the point where you can earn a sensible living. Turning them into a spectacle seems unlikely. Hence they will never generate mass appeal, or money from popularisation. People will never watch a scientist at work and appreciate the skill, and so will never, by that route, aspire to be a scientist (mathematician, engineer, hacker, physicist, etc).
All people know of science, and math in particular, is that it's hard, and they can't see the point. With sports they can see the potential for adulation, and enormous sums of money. Hence the "youth of today" aspire to be sports stars. Or celebrities.
Where are the celebrity geeks?
I have, and on occasion wear with pride, a "Nerd Pride" badge given to me by Gerald Jay Sussman. Maybe we should all be proud to say we're geeks/nerds/hackers/engineers and wear such labels with confidence.
For reference, Ron Graham worked his way through graduate school by performing in a circus with a trampoline troupe. Bela Bollobas represented Oxford University at modern pentathlon, and Cambridge University at fencing. Paul erdos was astonishingly good at table tennis, and these are not isolated examples. Many distinguished scientists and mathematicians are extremely good at sports.
John Hodgman talked about the jock/nerd thing recently at the White House Correspondent's dinner. Most of the video is off-topic, but the conclusion has a similar theme to this post.
What a load of bull. This comment is slander against the article because there's no substance there to even refute. Just nonsensical social and economic claims.
You should be better than to vote up any article which has "nerds" in the title, YC.
That's one of the best things about being in Silicon Valley. Nerds have won the battle, and we rule here. It's actually a good thing to be a nerd here. "Coolness" tends to be based on what new technologies you're playing with and what you're building.
When I lived in Chicago, it was clear that the jocks ruled. Walking down Rush and Division (Sports Bar Mecca) on a Friday or Saturday night immediately gave me flashbacks of ninth grade. That was the year that I got 65 wedgies at boarding school.
I might have a unique insight here, as a CS Major/Software Engineering Minor, but if there's a personality difference between the average high school athlete and the C-level executives that actually run this town, I haven't seen or heard about it yet.
The "jock personality" is doing very well here.
The good news: jocks don't actually hate or even dislike nerds. Teammates of mine played World of Warcraft, loved gaming, and participated in numerous nerd pursuits. Throughout my football career I was deeply interested in Computer Science.
Nerds just need to figure out that the jock personality is actually useful, and figure out how to use it.
>Nerds just need to figure out that the jock personality is actually useful, and figure out how to use it.
I think that some people with tons of booksmarts don't see the value of streetsmarts. It is almost ironic, as one would think that all those booksmarts would lead to such a realization.
My streetsmarts are mainly the result of a deduction that the cultivation of such smarts is efficient and rational. Happy to go into this further, over email (zackster=gmail).
This observation has finally stopped making me wonder why the Super Bowl is such an important event here in America. I'm not a foreigner either, I just have never understood (let alone bothered to understand) what motivates your average sports fan to tune into ESPN on day-to-day basis as if it were news. . .
I think given the condition one can not adopt or subscribe to this cultural profile of sports then one will inevitably pursue alternative cultural networks (enter the nerd) HN is just one of my many cultural outlets I tune into on a daily basis, thus I consider it part of my cultural profile.
This is why being a nerd, for me at least, is so appealing since you (the nerd) not only subscribe to more than one cultural network as a viewer (reader) or fan, but you can participate in your culture's network as a player by simply knowing a language, picking a project, using the project, knowing the project, checking out the project's source, and committing your changes accordingly.
As explained by one of my always-been-popular friends, sports in America is more about getting the guys over and hanging out. Yes, women watch sports but for many guys who aren't hackers - watching sports and having beers may be the male gender equivalent of shopping for women. Socially-accepted ways to bond.
Seriously, I came from Ukraine when I was 12 and being an out-of-shape immigrant and a nerd made my life in American school a living hell.
The problem I remember having the most was isolation. It's interesting because people did make fun of me in Ukraine all the time, but we made fun of everyone and were pretty much all friends, we conversed a lot, even when we were fighting.
In U.S. it's just different, people ignore you. Spending 8 hours in a place where no one talks to you except for teacher (and several accidental buddies) is pretty miserable. I often thought it'd be easier if I was bullied, at least someone would fucking notice me. Took me a around 4-5 years before I became a misantrophist and just started hating everyone by default and that's sort of how I managed living here.