Why Are Nerds Unpopular, An Alternative To PG's Essay

Which is fine. Maybe you don't care about other people enough to invest. Maybe you've decided to spend time elsewhere. Just stop trying to be so holy that you can't overcome the challenge of learning about and appreciating others.

[citation needed]

There is no confusion at all on my part. I knew what subset of the population I was writing about (perhaps an even narrower subset than the original Paul Graham article, the first of his I ever read, was about) when I started typing. I specifically disagree with "as to make relating to normal people difficult." If high-IQ people have a social problem, as perhaps they especially do in certain parts of American culture, I invite them to use their high IQ to engage in problem-solving.

I've met people from both categories.

The smartest geeks I know have no trouble fitting into society, one of them is leading a startup that has received over a million dollars in VC funding. They work on serious, possibly disruptive and hard project. (double emphasis on hard)

On the other hand, the rather large group of geeks I know who have trouble fitting into society work on not-so-important projects, usually things like flash games, simple web apps, etc. Some of these geeks (the ones who outwardly call themselves smart) suffer from illusory superiority (some even intentionally complicate their code so that others find it hard to understand, as a show of intellectual superiority; see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Illusory_superiority)

The fact, is these socially-challenged geeks aren't so smart after all; they don't put much effort socializing with people, and then they whine and complain how they don't fit it.

The reason why this doesn't happen in Asia as often, is because the culture doesn't permit it. In America, you can sort of get away by denoting yourself as a geek and refraining from social activity. In Asia, since that is seen very badly (much worse than the comical portrayal of geeks we have here); these kids are forced to go out and socialize.

That said, I think there's hope for love too :) - only not always the kind you see in the movies.

So, the Comic Book Guy is not a nerd? Even Wikipedia calls him that.

I think they aren't. As an example, we could hypothesize that people have a few simple attributes - say IQ (math), physical skills (sports), looks (hot or not), empathy (good at getting along with others) and political skills (good at influencing others).

I imagine that looks and physical skills are the most important factors for popularity, with empathy and political skill next, while IQ is basically irrelevant - unlike good looks, high IQ in and of itself does not cause popularity.

So let's say that popularity is a function of a weighted average score of looks, physical skills, empathy and political skills.

When we say that someone is "popular" or "smart", we don't mean "average" but more something like "top 10%".

Obviously 10% of the population will be among the 10% most popular, and 10% among the 10% smartest. But if popularity and IQ is statistically independent, only 1% will be among the top 10% in both.

So people that are both smart and popular can indeed be rare even when IQ and popularity are independent, we don't need more than a random distribution to explain that.

If we add the fact that people tend to focus on (and thereby improving) things they are good at and ignore (and thereby fall behind in) areas where they suck, it will only strengthen the trend.

I think nerds and jocks both follow the path of least resistance by putting most of their efforts into areas where they have a natural advantage. But doing so is rational behavior, it's hard to argue against it.

That's been my experience.

Not to say there were no unpopular smart kids, but I never noticed a higher percentage than dumb kids. Though even then most of the smart people I knew who were unpopular globally were popular locally (that is within what ever group they ran with).

"nerds lack emotional intelligence because they have learnt to ignore the relevant emotions." --> Maybe.

"That is why bullies are able to bait nerds; they both feel that the nerds' denial of group emotions makes them culpable." --> I would love to hear you expand on this, and I loved that you invoked a concept of "group emotions", which I had never before heard formulated as such.

But honestly, all of this pointing at other people is kind of annoying. We are just as culpable in our social ostracism as everyone else.

Nerds lack emotional intelligence because they have categorized it as pointless - at least seemed to have convinced themselves of that point. I disagree that they've learned to ignore the relevant emotions, it's more like they've convinced themselves that fitting in and being part of society is unimportant, and that the world is simply out to get them with their dumb social expectations.

Of course, many nerds never truly believe this deep inside, which causes all kinds of angst for them, but that's another topic entirely.

IMHO nerds on the whole have developed this giant victim complex. It's not us refusing to fit in with the group that causes our ostracism - it's clearly because we're smart and they fear our intelligence. Yeah, that's it.

People don't like us because a large portion of our community are quite simply arrogant jackasses. They pride themselves in being nerds, see themselves as smarter than the rest, and generally just lord their intelligence over everyone else. No wonder people hit us at our weak point: our lack of social skills.

This isn't meant to be a complete diatribe against nerds - I love being one, but honestly, a lot of the responsibility for the anti-nerd thing is our fault.

I disagree. I never learned to ignore specific emotions - I was simply unaware of them. It took me a long time to learn to understand emotions.