Why Nerds Succeed‎

Reaching out to teens and asking them to reach out to their dorky classmates because they might be their bosses one day just doesn't take. They lack the foresight, control, and interest.

The reality of the situation is that teens can and will be immature, annoying, shits. People have known this for centuries.

  1960's: Eddie's so gifted! Send him to a special school.
  1970's: What a nerd! How will he ever meet a girl?
  1980's: What? You want to go out with me? What a nerd!
  1990's: Look at that's nerd's car. His father must have bought it.
  2000's: With all this computer stuff, good thing he was always a nerd.
  2010's: No longer a nerd. Just an "outlier".

Our kids have been told that they will learn more about living in the world from school than they will of the Three Rs. And that it is an important skill, being able to cope with the stress. It just seems to be the best way to frame it for them: people are sometimes shitty. No sense in trying to figure out why or change them. Better spend your energies finding ways to avoid them when possible and suck it up the rest of the time. And I don't exclude teachers. I tell them that these are skills they'll need for the rest of their lives, because there will always be a boss, a cop, a teacher or some other person in a position of authority who may not be inclined to act to your advantage.

Then you move on. Build stuff. Learn to play an instrument. Write stuff. Anything that makes you feel good that doesn't rely on someone else's approval. Next thing you know, you're interesting and everybody wants to know you. It's a better use of your resources than whining, for sure.

In India you would never have this kind of article because the students with the highest grades are revered by everyone else while the jocks are looked down as guys who will , in the future, only be able to get menial jobs!

I'm always surprised at how much pain and suffering a "geek" has to go through in the US whereas he would be the center of attention in India.

Same situation but with different labeling applied ... Amazing.

Really? Credibility, of the street variety or otherwise, and authenticity? I think Bruder should review what those words mean before using them again.

It depends on the person, but, for the most part, when I hear people say that, I know they're making shit up.

Of course, since the opening premise is based on lies, there's basically nowhere that Bruder can go with this. Some nerds are successful, yes. Yet so are many gorillas.

The Social Network has contributed to this new stance towards geeks, which, save for the cringe-inducing "I know HTML so I'm gonna make the next FB!", is generally a good thing.

But not everyone finds a friend or their own group (geeks, goths, whatever) and are pretty much completely alienated. Of course it leaves bitterness, as this story (I recall it was linked from HN some years ago) attests:

http://scienceblogs.com/goodmath/2009/07/very_off_topic_why_...

Also worth reading: pg's "Why Nerds Are Unpopular"

http://www.paulgraham.com/nerds.html

The reason for this disadvantage is institutional and would be difficult to decouple from a mainstream education. Basically, the social hierarchy at a school promotes the social status of people that (a) are older or part of the educational bureaucracy, (b) demonstrate superficial interest in manufactured culture, (c) belong to mainstream cliques with lowest common denominator values, and most of all (d) are non-disruptive and therefore willing to follow the rules and authorities of the institution. This is as opposed to later life where in a less rigid social structure freethinkers move ahead from others depending on their ability to be (e) disruptive and on their human merit: (f) intellectual and (g) social.

It should be quite clear that, while a school may attempt to educate pupils which it often achieves to a high degree of success, the actual social structure is counter to the abilities eventually self-learned by a freethinker [e, f, g].

When a person that does not feel part of an institution and does not socialise as readily with it, they are not as easily influenced by the institution they: (h) criticise it and (i) differentiate themselves from it — often this means the band geek buries themselves in music and the nerd starts to read science text books in their spare time. While later on they are not handed the opportunities that would have arisen from a high social status at school they are: (j) less impeded by new hierarchies that they join, (k) now promoted based on the merits that they fostered while on the fringes of the educational institution.

On the contrary, the person that felt one with the institution and was celebrated for conforming to the values of its social structure has now learned behaviour that: (l) either brings no benefit to their existence in the new hierarchies or (m) actually counts against them. Worst of all, since they never learnt how to exist apart from a hierarchy (n) they prefer the security of groups over the risk of trying to do things their own way, (o) are likely to lack technical skills, (p) and might still be friends with the people they grew up with in school which would create “stickyness”.

As a closing point, of course there are exceptions, for instance: there are those with (q) leadership qualities and (r) high emotional intelligence that were successul at school while also able to control their school experience to their own long-term advantage. There are also many unsuccessful geeks and nerds whom only gain (s) intellectual skills, (t) simply belonged to a much worse-off social clique with the same problems, and most importantly (u) never learn to socialise and take risks.

Those are also useful, for well, anyone who is successful...

Not only this theory is not backed even by a simple correlation, but it hastily extrapolate the USAs case to the world.

this fixation on popularity seems to exist as strongly in the tech world as it did in my high school. I mean, christ, our two biggest web services right now (fb & tw) are entirely, "look at me! pay attention to me!"

Then punk became accepted. Then it even became commercial. Now you can't recognize punk.

High school is so jacked. I even went to the science/math/tech school. I never got picked on, but forcing me into mandatory standardized classes made me hate it. Unless you want the ivy league it's just not worth the time/risk. Since no one there gives a shit about you or your future, why leave it in their hands?

B.S. The Columbine shootings weren't the work of bullied nerds. It was the work of two utter assholes. One guy was a cruel psychopath with a history of violence (pipe bombs, known but not followed up on), the other guy was a severely depressed loser who stupidly did whatever his 'friend' suggested.

They weren't lashing out at anything. They intended to commit the largest act of domestic terrorism in U.S. history, and the only thing that stopped them was their own incompetence.

Whoever wrote this article just perpetuated myths which reflect the standard views of society: that bullied outcasts are the types who become murderous assholes. If you have ever been been bullied, considered "weird," or an outcast, you owe it to your younger counterparts to help dispel this myth.

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=1032342...

There was hardly any real information following Columbine. Instead, noise was bounced around between journalists and bloggers. It was like a giant game of telephone. Soon, there was noise about bullying, about outcast kids, and even the dangers of first-person shooters. The scary thing is that none of this was based on facts, it was just social bias revealing itself in an echo chamber! Instead of following up on known violent tendencies (which would have prevented Columbine in the first place), misinformed school administrators across the country began targeting kids who were already the target of mistreatment by their peers. It's bad enough to have the stigma of the weird, nerdy kid, but to add arbitrary suspicions that you may be a murderer is unconscionable.