Why Nerds are Unpopular (2003)
paulgraham.com
paulgraham.com
I think this stems from pg's confusion of intellect (which he notes is not scalar but discusses it as if it is anyway) with 'nerdiness'. The nerd is no better (or generally, even that much smarter - many of the non-marginalised people will grow up to be just as bright and successful), they are simply marginalised for being different. And they have not created a judgement free utopia within their own circles either; their social constructs are every bit as abusive and oppressive to those who are different as the ones that marginalise them.
Nerds were never better, or smarter. They just weren't given the same opportunities to be as cruel.
The true evidence against the 'nerd' being superior is the society that they/we have created where we are in the majority. Look at the technology industry and look at how we all are desperate to conform. Look at the people who are different to what we consider normal/cool/popular and look at how we treat them.
As pg notes, people lash out/oppress/marginalise when they are insecure in their position. Perhaps people should try to truly understand how that has shaped the technology culture we have today.
Insightful.
I'd take this comparison further. The depiction of high school in the media is that the popular kids ("jocks") bully the nerds. In reality, the jocks and the popular kids and the bullies are mostly disjoint sets. Jocks work too hard at their athletic pursuits to also work their way into the popular crowd. Popular kids aren't really interested in bullying the people at the bottom; they'd rather not associate with them at all. They're indifferent.
It's usually mid-range kids trying to become popular who are the worst bullies. It rarely actually works that way for them, but that doesn't prevent them from doing it.
In the VC-funded startup world, the VCs are the popular kids. They don't intentionally bully women or older programmers or non-conformists or non-Kool-Aid-drinkers. They just don't care. The bullies are the ex-nerds, promoted into startup middle management, who think they're going to be going to be skiing with Peter Thiel in a year (but, in the mean time, they have to beat "the team" into making this deadline). Of course, they're almost always wrong. The popular kids in the VC-funded world tacitly accept the cruelty and cultural failure, but they're not the ones actually doing it.
On male side, the jocks were respected by the popular kids (because the girls loved them), and feared by the bullies (because of their physical size).
On the female side, however, the jocks ended up creating their own little isolated world, much like the female nerds. Now that I think of it, this may have been because female athleticism doesn't bestow the same social standing — men don't prize female strength & size, and female bullies don't operate by physical strength (they're much more... psychological).
Fortunately, there isn't this same gender dynamic in the real world. Right?
In HS, I made a bit of money doing construction on the weekend (it beat waiting tables) for a year -- needlessly to say I bulked up a lot. Still couldn't play soccer worth a damn, though, and this was in Italy so soccer is a huge deal.
I went from "kid who it is safe to bully" to "kid who beat the shit out of three older kids in full view of half the school after they keyed his scooter", but it didn't make me any more popular. It did get idiots to leave me alone, though.
The principal was pretty awesome about the whole thing -- he saw the whole thing go down, had everyone involved get into his office, yelled at the other three kids for provoking me, and after sending them home and telling me to come in, actually congratulated me on my victory. Only got a disciplinary note in that trimester's report card for this, no suspension or anything.
So the more trendy a tech startup is, the more likely it is to fall into this trap.
Everyone in the tech industry is so proud of whatever nerdiness they engage in that the word has lost its prior meaning within our little bubble. And what have the nerds done once they've been given some control over the workplace? Exactly the same types of exclusionary, prejudiced bs that they supposedly suffered for in high school. Most of the offices I've worked in have had such infantile political mechanics that I often wonder if I wouldn't be better off as a dental floss tycoon.
Probably the biggest reason is that nerds don't make any attempt to fit in. While this may seem like the same as popularity, it's not. Popularity is the goal, fitting in is a prerequisite. Many nerds don't even realize this. Some realize it but value their independence over popularity.
Another reason is that nerds are simply lacking in social skills. Social skills are learned, not innate, and they take a great deal of effort, intelligence, and awareness. The essay to some extent acknowledges this but I think it makes excuses that sound a lot like sour grapes. "Sure, we're bad at social skills -- but only because we don't care so much about them!" I think if we are all honest with ourselves, most of us would love to be good at both social skills and our intellectual/scientific/engineering pursuits.
Another big reason is physical attractiveness. If I could make the rules, being good looking wouldn't matter as much as it does. But I don't make the rules and it matters a great deal to most people. Good looks help with social skills too because good looking people get more practice. Over time that advantage builds up. This is why you don't see a lot of really good looking nerds, even though many good looking people are in fact quite intelligent.
Another reason is movies/TV. Hollywood stereotypes really affect people's perceptions of outgroups a great deal. What movies gets wrong about nerds is this: they correctly display the negatives about nerds (extreme social awkwardness) while completely glossing over the positives (brilliance). This is because most actors and screenwriters are not brilliant (other than perhaps in an artistic sense). So to the average person who learns about people from movies, nerds seem like average intelligence people who are really weird. Again, if I made the rules, people wouldn't be affected by media. Nobody thinks they are, but nobody thinks they are affected by advertising either, yet it's a half trillion dollar industry.
TL;DR: There are a lot of reasons why nerds are unpopular. And "because we don't want popularity" is not one of them.
They're a combination of both.
There's people with just born 'charisma', the entertainers, the storytellers,the comedians, the incredible sales people.
And it's a spectrum of people who have this innate social ability from the terrible to the genius socializers.
No matter how many books people read they will never be as quick witted as Robin Williams or as empathetic as Oprah.
"No matter how many books people read they will never be as quick witted as Robin Williams or as empathetic as Oprah."
Think about it: you can't get good at programming just by reading books. And programming is logic based and requires much slower reaction times etc than holding a conversation.
You can definitely improve your social skills by reading and more importantly practicing. Once you can pick up if somebody is interested and engaged with what you are saying you can try all sorts of conversation skills to try and find patterns to how they work.
And again just like programming you cannot simply expect that because you are good at writing webapps (talking to a particular social/cultural/age/gender group) that you will be good at writing embedded systems.
But you can already see that my son is a geek (well, what might "save" him socially is that he's tall and athletic), and my daughter is probably going to be popular. She simply has a better natural grasp of how people interact, and is much more interested in interactions, than say, imagination games. They are both very charming and outgoing, but you can already tell she has or will have better social skills.
There is probably also a snowball effect at play, too - if you have a tendency to be social, you might develop stronger social skills, etc.
There's a lot that can be learned by paying attention to other people and trying to understand what they're thinking. The earlier that someone who's not naturally adept at it realizes that this is important to pay attention to, the earlier they get better at social skills. Some of that can be highlighted for little kids while reading (story) books; paying attention to and asking questions about why the characters do the things in their interactions highlights the idea that other people do things for reasons, and that you can guess what they are (the guessing well is a skill).
You can tell how tall a boy who is 6.5 years old is going to be as a teenager/adult?
There are two absolutely perfect examples.
1. Most families don't celebrate Mother's Day.
2. Cross-country runners are breed, not born.
1 not only is a combination of both, but we behave very often as if it were false. We have such a trait in virtue of an innate quality, namely of having a mother. Yet we all learned not by any conscious effort to warn ourselves from the principle; it's part and parcel of our "innate" characteristic.
With 2, I often hear this expressed in terms of geological factors. Does the environment at any given time contribute to the innate material our theory describes?
There has, obviously, been a huge influx of "hipsters" into the software industry as of late. And I think they're very distinct from "nerds".
I define "nerds" as those with an interest in technology, science, mathematics, and perhaps science fiction. "Hipsters" are different, however, because they have limited interest in such things, but instead focus on design, aesthetics, fashion, trends, "obscurity", social media, and so forth.
Yet there is a lot of overlap in the areas that you mention. Take the lack of social skills, for example. In the case of "nerds", this often seems to be because they just don't relate well to other people. But in the case of "hipsters", it's more about having an inherently obnoxious attitude and personality. Just look at the severe backlash that is common when a large number of "hipsters" migrate into established neighborhoods, for example. Even dealing with them in professional workplace settings is unpleasant.
In terms of physical attractiveness and appearance, we see "hipsters" going out of their way to look as weird and "unique" as they possibly can. They wear clothing that purposefully clashes. They intentionally style their physical in ways that will make them stand out, in the oddest way possible. Even so-called "nerds" can obviously tell that something is out of place with these people's appearances.
The television/movie representation of these people is perhaps the most interesting. We've seen people who are clearly "hipsters" being mislabeled as "nerds" in sitcoms and other media, for example. That Sheldon character from that American sitcom is a good example of this. His social obnoxiousness is far closer to what we typically see from "hipsters" than from "nerds". And the so-called "Reddit culture", for example, may have involved "nerds" at the very beginning, but they were very, very quickly overwhelmed by "hipsters". "Hipsters" have defined Reddit's culture for years now.
It will be interesting to see how the dynamics of this plays out over time. Even if they've co-existed so far, I expect to see more hostility towards "hipsters" from "nerds". As odd as it may sound, I think that "nerds" tend to have more in common with society at large than "hipsters" do. And I think that society at large is starting to strongly see "hipsters" as greater outcasts than "nerds" are.
As such, I think you're tilting at windmills here and have proven not to be above the kind of people PG is railing against. He uses the example of poor whites being racist against blacks. Are "hipsters" the only people you feel you can demonstrate superiority over? That's the only reason I can come up with for your post.
I'm merely making observations about the situation we have today. I think there is, indisputably, a rather distinct "nerd" culture. I think there's also a distinct "hipster" culture. Recently, we've seen more interaction between them within the software industry, and more interaction between both of those groups with society at large as software has become more widespread and integral to everyday life.
I'm not sure why you're apparently taking this so personally, or why you think my personal opinion of "hipsters" and "nerds" is relevant. This is all about looking at the big picture that currently exists, basically all of which me and my opinions have absolutely no influence or control over.
If you consistently have a problem interacting with certain people in the workplace, might I suggest looking inward for both the cause and the solution to that problem?
As a professional, I work with whomever I have to in order to complete the tasks at hand. But given how many of my fellow colleagues with all sorts of jobs and all sorts of background have similar problems with "hipsters", I'm quite sure the problem is not with me, and it is not with my colleagues, either.
Obnoxiousness and ego just happen to be two of the traits inherently associated with "hipsters". I can't help that, my colleagues can't help that, and even the "hipsters" themselves can't help that. It's just who they are; it's a big part of what makes them "hipsters".
If you wish to discuss this further, please return to the topic at hand.
I believe nerds became 'cool' right around when computers became 'normal'.
In my youth, around the time where social issues started becoming important (teenager), computers were commonplace enough that most people knew how to use them, but they were by no means cool. Most of my peers had MSN messenger and a hotmail address, but gaming on a pc was uncool, spending significant time on the thing other than aimless chatting was uncool, and programming was extremely uncool.
Now, I get to help my younger siblings and their friends 'coding their site'. They're on reddit or 9gag, and grew up with Digg, Diggnation ('cool' boozing skater-ish dudes podcasts). They have phones with apps and chat throughout the day. They game a lot and might even try D&D. Computers are normal and almost cool now (although oddly there is a limit to that that I mistakenly cross in conversation regularly).
There was a time where this angered me a bit, because I felt like the thing everyone judged me as a 'nerd' for is now suddenly cool and they took it from me.
Now I realize that it's pretty awesome that something I'm REALLY good with has become so succesfull that cool people want in on it. I can, and do, use that to my benefit.
2) Lack of common conversation topics: I wanted to talk about military history and politics and physics. Very few people in elementary and high school were interested in that. So I got very little practice in conversation skills.
3) Not just of social skills, but knowledge of how to learn social skills: I had been painfully aware since 3rd grade that I lacked "social skills", but I really didn't know what these were or how to learn them. I did read How to Win Friends and Influence People in Jr. High, but it taught me little about how to hold a conversation. Even to this day, I don't actually know how to go about gaining social skills or what those skills actually are. Just one month ago, I learned that there was a skill to conversing so as to make sure everyone present had the context to understand the conversation and wouldn't feel excluded. If I'm now 24 and only just now realized this, what other things have I missed?
Why might nerds in general have the problems I had? #1 takes money, which kids don't have until starting age 16. #2 sort of defines nerdiness: if you have this set of interests you're a nerd. If other people have these interests, you're lucky. #3 is hard because it must be learned by a means that are different from academic knowledge or a fandom's canon. You can't really read things[1] and tinker with things and work through problem sets to figure out. Near as I can tell, you just have to have a lot of social interaction and be very aware and attentive to people as you do so.
[1] There are some books and blogs that are useful:
- How to Win Friends and Influence People (general; a classic)
- What Every Body is Saying (Body language)
- Dr. Nerdlove (dating)
- Cpt. Awkward (dating & other relationships)
- Getting to Yes (negotiation)
- Difficult Conversations (understanding emotional impact of words)
A few years ago I cracked it open again after having it read it very carefully many years before that. I was shocked how many techniques I had internalized to the point that I thought they were my own ideas, but paging through the book reminded me how much I learned. Thanks Leil!
http://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/d/007141858X?pc_redir=1400207054...
Here's a few things I picked up along the way:
1) Regarding small talk, don't be afraid to talk BS inconsequential stuff. Not every conversation has to be productive or have a deeper meaning.
2) As you say, everybody in a conversation has to feel included. If someone from in your company is not familiar with a subject, narrow it down and provide context, or drop it.
3) Avoid being too preachy and teacher-like. It's OK they don't know X fact, even if you feel everybody should know about it (e.g someone not knowing who Bob Dylan is or that the web is not the same as the internet). Also, unless they look deeply interested in you explaining it, they probabky are not.
4) Laugh at other people's jokes, even if they are not that good. Put in a few jokes yourself, especially some that don't require special knowledge. Not all jokes have to be inside jokes (something we nerds usually are guilty of).
5) Empathy trumps everything. Try to feel the other's pain. Discussing thermodynamics or Haskell is good, but if the other guy is currently concerned about his health problem or just had a spouse abandon them, talk about that too. That includes conversations between nerds too.
In High-School, my friend and I were amongst the most popular: We spent our days missing classes and playing basket ball and football, we got used to our "fandom". We were known to the Administration by first names. And of course, when you were seen around a lot, people knew who we were (even years after).
But to come back to the point: I have been blessed and lucky in my life. I did sports (Judo (since age 6 or so to 17, competitions with lots of people, trained with many boys and girls in my club, both my age and older), football (many, many people cheering at your feats helps), basket ball, running, working out (body weight only)).
But I was also pretty cute, dressed nice, and was clean. These points lack to a lot of nerds (Cuteness isn't something you can change, but you can take showers and dress respectably).
I was also blessed in the sense that I hang around girls since I could remember, like since I could talk. And I hang with a clique of older girls and guys who had me, and few other girls and boys my age with them, so I had a lot of socializing way before I got to high-school. Having girls have a crush on you wasn't a big deal, it was all part of normal.
So it's not the same thing, when you already had thousands upon thousands of interactions with people, and if you only talked with one friend or something.
There are things they can do, though, and it's not to be popular per se, but if I were like those kids who had it hard growing up (like being mocked or stuff like that), I would ask myself questions and hack it. It's not even to fit in or something, but taking showers and dressing okay doesn't make you less smart.
Nerdy makes your life miserable. Nerd doesn't.
Anyone who's good at something is a nerd, there's no way around it. But you can be a nerd and be cool, which makes you even more frigging cool.
Maybe you can read what I wrote and try not to put the image of the faces of the douchebags you hated in high-school and college imagining me. Maybe you'll read it another way.
I'm a decent guy, and have shown no hostility, have I.
Popular, boastful, not bullied, dressed sharply, pursued by popular women, played popular sports, social butterfly, good looking, many friends. Yet you attribute your "fellow nerds" lack of such to their lack of effort and claim you would "ask yourself questions" and "hack it". Nerds have a name for such a type: douchebag.
Countless guys shredded their shyness and got a social life by me doing this, not because I pitied "the poor guy", but because I felt nobody had to live like this, or go through life this way. But I'm probably a douchebag, anyway.
And it wasn't a lot of meaningless bullshit about how awesome I was, I said that I was who I was because I was lucky to hang around people from whom I learned how to navigate in society, but here I am, getting vitriol for sharing something, someone who might not have had this chance might find useful.
You keep using that word...I do not think it means what you think it means.
I don't need to tell you that you must be able to power on a computer to do that, which is on a whole other level.
That must count for something. No?
While I don't mean to say your post is arrogant, because I don't feel it is, I want to leave this here:
"Early in life I had to choose between honest arrogance and hypocritical humility. I chose honest arrogance and have seen no occasion to change." -- Frank Lloyd Wright
However, I assure you it's not hypocritical humility. I'd go with honest arrogance.
The things I say serve to give context. I wonder if I must give the info then give the context, or give the context before the info. I chose the latter. Unfortunately, the context triggers such strong reactions from people who have suffered as children, that they read the context with biased eyes: This guy's an asshole, let me own him on HN.
It's funny too to see ad hominem attacks by people on the very topic about nerds not being popular and bullied. Kind of ironic and makes me think: If these guys were so rough with their finger muscles on a keyboard, I wonder what they'd do if they had strong biceps if I were to be in front of them.
Anyway, thanks for having a cool head.
PS: I upvoted every single one of the posts attacking me before I replied to it. I figured they voiced their opinions on me, which deserved an upvote.
It actually doesn't. And you probably look better than you think you do, because if you were unpopular in high school you were not "groomed" to be beautiful. So you may not realize how beautiful you actually are.
From what I've seen, here's what seems to matter most (in no particular order): Money, self-confidence, and doing something interesting with your life.
If you're rich, confident enough to ask girls out on dates (comes with practice, "fake it till you make it" is the name of the game here), and you're doing interesting things that you can talk about passionately, some beautiful person is going to be with you at some point. It's inevitable. Being "good looking" is less about actual physical traits and more about how you carry yourself.
Being "good looking" is more about actually having physically "good looking" features than anything else you mentioned. What you mentioned are things the rest of us can do to try to compensate for a lack of physical attractiveness.
As is always pertinent to this discussion:
Do we worship the Gods because they are beautiful, or are the Gods beautiful because we worship them?
Unfortunately, we don't choose our image.
I know I've seen an interesting study that shows that at least part of the height income gap disappears if you account for teenage height. I.e. a man who was 5'4" as a teen and 5'10" as an adult is more similar in income to someone who was 5'4" all their life than someone who was 5'10" all their life. That's hard to explain in a model where beauty at the present moment is a larger determinant of income.
It doesn't matter if it's causal or not, the fact that the correlation exists is enough to show "good looking people have it better".
Your genes are only maybe 25% of the picture. Having good hygiene, being well-dressed, having a nice haircut, and carrying yourself confidently ("swagger") can get you pretty far toward the attractive end of the spectrum. These things take time, money, and practice, but they really affect the way people perceive you.
edit: also, how you dress.
The main reason nerds are unpopular is that they have other things to think about. Their attention is drawn to books or the natural world, not fashions and parties. They're like someone trying to play soccer while balancing a glass of water on his head. Other players who can focus their whole attention on the game beat them effortlessly, and wonder why they seem so incapable.
Even if nerds cared as much as other kids about popularity, being popular would be more work for them. The popular kids learned to be popular, and to want to be popular, the same way the nerds learned to be smart, and to want to be smart: from their parents. While the nerds were being trained to get the right answers, the popular kids were being trained to please.
Or are we? I noticed this immediately, before even reading the pg article (OP), I saw this post and knew that it was instigating a counterpoint, only to re-brand the point in a different set of words.
"So if intelligence in itself is not a factor in popularity, why are smart kids so consistently unpopular? The answer, I think, is that they don't really want to be popular."
What about the athlete that wants to dedicate themselves to their craft? The beautiful actress that practices acting and singing all day? They are (usually) effortlessly popular. Not to mention that there are generally some popular kids who are really freakin' smart.
Sociobiology is a big part of this. For zillions of generations, human beings were stack-ranked by specific qualities-- strength, external signals for health/viability, social dominance/leadership, etc. Young kids grow up and start this ritual-- unpredictably, they are probably less sophisticated and more driven by instinct than adults. And they're meaner.
I also wonder if kids latch onto and develop the parts of themselves that they can be good at. Everyone plays soccer for the first time. Some kids excel and get more interested. Others look around, realize that they suck compared to their peers and lose interest. Nerds realize very early that their path to praise and recognition might not be the one that the "tribe" broadly rewards, but it's better than nothing.
Actually, I get the impression that top athletes and singers can be really weird and even socially lacking (on account of having spent insane amounts of time getting good at what they do).
They might be popular not because they're socially skilled, but rather because they're good-looking and/or fit, and because their skill is considered cool.
The fact that we're seeing more and more 'cool nerd' stereotypes just as nerdy stuff is becoming more mainstream would support that.
Weirdly, a lot of people don't seem to read it closely. I pointed out an example of that here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7760388 .
When I taught a couple of PG's essays ("What You'll Wish You'd Known," "Lies We Tell Kids") I saw a lot of cursory readings that were not compatible with the text—and those misreadings are similar to the ones in this thread. There were also a fair number who called him "arrogant," though when I'd ask for textual examples of arrogance I would rarely get anything. The arrogance comment always baffled me, because he seems no more (or less) arrogant than anyone who writes anything and images that someone else would want to read it.
If you elevate dumb activities to such esteem that you even tend overlook such thing as rape of school kids by school kids ... It can't result in healthy subculture.
Around the age of eleven, though, kids seem to start treating their family as a day job. They create a new world among themselves, and standing in this world is what matters, not standing in their family. Indeed, being in trouble in their family can win them points in the world they care about.
The problem is, the world these kids create for themselves is at first a very crude one. If you leave a bunch of eleven-year-olds to their own devices, what you get is Lord of the Flies. Like a lot of American kids, I read this book in school. Presumably it was not a coincidence. Presumably someone wanted to point out to us that we were savages, and that we had made ourselves a cruel and stupid world. This was too subtle for me. While the book seemed entirely believable, I didn't get the additional message. I wish they had just told us outright that we were savages and our world was stupid.
There are many schools spread across a huge region. Lumping them into together is asinine.
> choosing king&queen couples
Lots of kids don't care about that, and it isn't that big of a deal.
> sports activities are worshiped mindlessly
This isn't exactly a high school specific thing, sports are 'worshipped mindlessly' all over the globe.
Every school is different. At ours the football team blew, the band kids were cheerleaders, decathletes, stoners and bros, cliques didn't exist in the classical sense of the word, and the school spirit was pretty rockin'. All in a public school in one of the poorest, most unemployed areas of California. Trying to bring them all in under one banner of 'US High Schools' is pretty odd
But usually not in schools, because schools are actually for education.
I don't think being a nerd in anyway correlates with intelligence. Introverts tend to spend more time in solitary pursuits such as reading, programming and watching movies. For this reason they tend to become highly skilled or knowledgeable in niche areas. Extroverts tend to spend more time socialising and hence develop and excel when it comes to social skills. I've met plenty of stupid nerds in my time, and some stunningly intelligent 'popular' people.
When it comes to sports, I know plenty of introverts who are amazingly skilled. They tend to stay clear of activities such as football or other team sports simply because they are introverts. I have black-belts in Karate and Tae-kwon-do. My brother likes to run marathons (not competitively, he just runs 26 miles when ever he feels like it). Other introverts I know are amazing climbers or paddlers. These activities are all solitary, or rely on one's own skill rather than that of team-mates. They don't tend to attract the attention of others as much.
Introverts don't really want to be popular. Introverts also don't want to be bullied. Introverts would like some attention from the opposite sex. Introverts would like to be respected for their accomplishments. To gain those things, however, would require socialising on a grander scale than they feel capable of and hence they are branded as nerds.
Once that happened, I solved most my issues with 'socially capability' by seeking out specific kinds of socializing that I did like.
Turns out there are plenty of people just like me, but they either never bothered to enter the 'normal' social circles I desperately tried to enjoy being part of, or they came to know themselves quicker.
I think the biggest takeaway and what teenagers most need to understand is school isn't the real world. So many teenagers have a rough time in high school because they take it so seriously and believe it's how the rest of their life is going to go.
Like other nerds I was bullied and teased about being a nerd but having that perspective and knowing that all I had to do was ignore the others and focus on my friends and my work and in a few years it would all be over helped me tremendously.
If your only abilities are to be a mean, stupid asshole... then well, you'll be lucky to get a job flipping burger patties. Everything other requires intelligence and knowledge, which most of those bullies just had left behind.
Smart kids usually get the payback for their sufferings later on. Or, to rephrase, karma's a bitch.
i also disagree with the writer's premises on why it happens in school and not in the adult world. i dont think its because the world is so large, but the opposite: social connections became so small. this is why today with facebook, you see people resorting back to high school popularity behaviors.
I saved myself a lot of trouble in high school by never explicitly saying I was smart (even though it was obvious). If someone started shoving me and saying "You think you're smarter than everyone else", I'd say something like "No, not really. I just do well in school", and they would happily go on their way. (I'm sure this wouldn't work for everyone, and I don't mean to generalize too much. Also, this was my actual view, not just something I said.)
I hypothesize based on this and other articles that Paul Graham went out of his way to make sure people knew how smart he was, which would explain why he ended up at the "D" table. This seems more likely than the article's hypothesis that nerds spend all their time on being smart and just didn't have time to be popular. (Seriously, look at athletes who are practicing at 6am - they are the ones who are spending all their time on their craft.)
In particular there is
T. Berry Brazelton, M.D., What Every Baby Knows.
The author is a pediatrician in Boston and has been popular in shows on child care on PBS. He looks phenomenally insightful with babies and children, e.g., easily knows more in a few minutes about a baby than its mother knows. I got the book wondering what the heck I knew as a baby but no longer do (remember, people do not remember what they knew as babies).
Well, in the book, from memory, he says,
"When a child is rejected by its peers, the reason is always that the child has anxieties, these show and make the peers feel uncomfortable, and then the peer reject the child."
That's it "always". So, nerds? They have anxieties. Why? Maybe the anxieties are part of their drive to pay special attention to nerd interests.
Also, from my experience, now that I understand more, I was more popular than I knew: Girls were reluctant to show any interest for various reasons including fear of being rejected. To make it with girls, have to be a little like a salesman, that is, be willing to put up with some rejection. Then the boy looks more confident, less 'needy', and that is attractive to girls. Also for girls, don't expect them to be as 'active' as might want and, instead, just ask them for things. E.g., basically just ask them, say, to bake you a batch of oatmeal cookies. ASK for some little thing: Then there is a good chance that they will rush to do that little thing in hopes of getting back some praise, approval, affection, security, etc. Besides, might get some good cookies and maybe more!
Actually had this point made to me by some frat boy who wanted to basically hire me to do his part of a graduation project (we were both CE majors, you had to come up with something patentable to graduate, basically).
The rest of the story sounds unrealistic, so I won't relate it here lest I be modded down.
I think there's some effort now being put into trying to reach kids who are trapped and miserable in the school hierarchy, and letting them know that this little world is not the real world. This, in essence, is what the It Gets Better Project is aiming for, and I think it's the gist of a lot of anti-bullying efforts. I think there's only so much you can do to stop bullies themselves -- their behavior seems largely sociopathic. But maybe you can stop other kids from being complicit, including the ones who are targets of bullying. If the victim understands that the bully is only king of an anthill, that robs them of some of their power.
To digress kids in China won't hang out with you if you have bad grades.
While I usually hate to skim, I decided at that point to skim a handful of paragraphs, and near the end, he tied the beginning in very well to what he was really trying to say at the finish.
Smart kids usually get the payback for their sufferings later on. Or, to rephrase, karma's a bitch.
But I've had a lot of time to think about it since. And one thing PG never really defines is what makes a nerd. The definition I've settled on is:
1)smart 2)working 3)provides no immediate value (usually this is because they are working on something too "smart" for most people to understand)
These hacker schools are looking for knowledge workers. The higher ranks will be more associated with the centers of codebases/workflows/builds/systems. Some of us manage way more information than even the common person is willing to talk about. Nerds can withstand complexity, and [that] is what people know.
The culture becomes, regardless of intelligence, [that person who manages such-and-such complex thing]. If the person is smart, it helps.
Now that they're the popular ones, I imagine many nerds find the taste of victory to be surprisingly bitter. Raging against the jock machine is a lot more fun than being the machine.
Well, you'd be surprised. Even if the majority cared about "tech startup founder-programmers" (which remains to be proven), it would be for the money and prestige involved, not the nerd factor. It's just this decades version of the Gold Rush, not some cultural shift.
As for comic books and Reddit, those are, as you say "completely mainstream", so they are not a differentiating factor between nerd and not nerd anymore. (Plus, the former are mostly mainstream due to Hollywood -- sales of comics have not really skyrocketed, and even events like Comic-Con are 80% Hollywood and TV these days).
Plus, nerds are not just startup founding hackers. Millions of programming nerds will never start their own startup. And there are tons of other kinds of nerds besides: book nerds, chemistry nerds, physics nerds, etc. And I can assure you they are as far from "rock stars and professional athletes" as ever.
And that's just for society in general. In high school it's same as ever, and one's ambition to "create the next Facebook" does not make him popular or get him laid at all.
Suggestive evidence of this cultural shift? Have a look at the sitcoms/shows that are airing as of late. For the most part, the nerd/engineer/scientist is almost always highly revered, rarely ever viewed as 'sub-par' in any way.
Contrast this with the 90's, (anecdotally) where nerds were often portrayed as the loser that no one wants to hang out with.
An example that comes to mind, is Fresh Princes Carlton Banks character, to say Sheldon Cooper of the BBT. Very different portrayals, almost symbolic of the nerd image in each respective era.
I'll think scientists and engineers are highly revered when films about them start winning Oscars regularly (forget 'Gravity', that fell into the 'cool astronaut' category). In that sense, we've actually come backward since 'A Beautiful Mind', a film about an eccentric mathematician won four Oscars.
And the Sheldon Cooper character was much more a portrayal of a contemporary obnoxious and vane "hipster" than a "nerd". The two male friend supporting characters were much closer to the "nerd" stereotype.
The nerds that (rarely) make it to the cultural spotlight are not the stereotypical nerds. More someone like DHH or some similar guy with charisma.
Treating those that made it (and are older too) as special in some dedicated articles, profiles etc, is not unique to our age. It happened with Einstein, Feynman, etc, heck even back to Edison, but it didn't mean nerds had a better time back then.
We don't ever see the equivalent of 18-yo Linus Torvalds or Woz, or some awkward introverted nerd as any kind of hero or role model. And I know from experience that most nerdy types had defficient social skills in high school / uni, and most still do outside of it.
Do popular people in real life hang around with "Sheldon Cooper" types?
This is just a sign that you're trapped in the adult nerd bubble. Spend some time with the normals, and you'll see that mainstream culture in 2014 is no less vapid than it was in 2004, 1994, or 1984.
Millions and more millions of cash, more than your average rock band...
Look at the people the VCs are funding right now: frat boys and bullies (and sell-out ex-nerds who became bullies in adulthood, once one no longer needed to risk physical pain and harm in order to be a bully). Not nerds who actually love technology.
Instead of taking the nerds' lunch money, the bullies are now using MBA-school tricks, under the new banner of startup "culture" (stigniness), to work the nerds 90 hours per week for 0.03% of something. They've become better at what they do, but they haven't changed.
I attacked this here: http://michaelochurch.wordpress.com/2013/05/17/corporate-wor... . The institutional hell that, PG asserts, forms in organizations that have lost a sense of purpose (but still require a hierarchy) is, in fact, as prevalent in most corporations (even tech companies) as it is in high schools.
Raging against the jock machine is a lot more fun than being the machine.
What? That is patently untrue. People on the inside may humble-brag about how much simpler life was on the outside, but they never give up what they have.
Also, minor nit: in reality, "jocks" are rarely the same people as bullies. Athletes work too hard for that shit. Moreover, it's not the popular kids (yet another set) who pick on the nerds, geeks, and freaks. It's usually mid-range kids trying to push themselves up by knocking someone down. The worst bullies are other outsiders trying to get in to the popular crowd, but who tend to fail at it.
As a graduate student in mathematics, I have been told to dress down and make my talks more difficult to follow (particularly for job talks; they say it's a bad sign if anyone in the room is still following by the end).
"If life seems awful to kids, it's neither because hormones are turning you all into monsters (as your parents believe), nor because life actually is awful (as you believe)."
"If life was half as good as we are led to believe, newborn babies would be laughing when they enter this world." --no idea who said this
I confess. I am a cynic to the bone.