Why Nerds Are Unpopular (2003)
paulgraham.com
paulgraham.com
"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 does go on forever.
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.
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.
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.
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.
They just had social skills as well.
It's much easier to tell yourself that other people don't like you because you are smarter than them than it is to work on yourself.
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.
> (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.
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.
[0] Gateway HS ~ http://www.paulgraham.com/gateway.html
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.
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.
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.
Some people may be unpopular but smart or popular but dumb, but there's just as many unpopular idiots and popular geniuses.
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.
> Few smart kids can spare the attention that popularity requires.
Just like all those quarterbacks who were too busy with football practice to waste any time honing their social skills. Oh wait...
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.)
> 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.
> 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.
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.
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.
Did you even read either article? The Lisp article is precisely not that, and honestly pg's article isn't either.
Maybe it's time us nerds to look at ourselves and take a little blame instead of shifting it off to everyone else.
There's definitely a subset of nerds that are like this. Don't waste your time with that subset.
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.
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.
That sounds very interesting to me. Could you elaborate?
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.
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.
In fact, I know people who do the same thing. It's great. We respect each other.
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?"
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?
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.
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.
[1] http://mit81.com/baker/sites/default/files/technodarlings.pd...
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 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.