Cool Kids Lose, Though It May Take A Few Years | Hacker News Reader

Cool Kids Lose, Though It May Take A Few Years

npr.org

80 pointssizzle69 comments

I'm getting tired of this "nerds" vs "cool kids" narrative. It is a false dichotomy. Kids fall all over the map in terms of behavior and social groups as they grow up.

Case in point: I was a quiet "nerd" all the way through high school, but really found my element and became a social butterfly in college. Some other people have the opposite trajectory, or zig zag all over the place.

Kids are kids. All of them do stupid things at some point, and all of them have potential to grow and change their personalities to a large extent.

But, it seems to be popular in various circles these days to set up these labels of "cool" and "nerd" and it leads to pointless tribalism.

You just labeled yourself as a "nerd" in high school and demonstrated that it didn't forever cast you into a life of loneliness and despair. You excelled! Likewise, the cool kids won't be cool forever. That's the point. Who you are in high school doesn't define you.

Who you are in high school doesn't define you.

But it does for a lot of people. I know people who have the same friends from HS, listen to the same music and generally act the same way. They graduated HS, but never really left the mentality.

Maybe not to a lot of people. All you know is that some people were affected. But you are not accounting for all the people who were not affected. Yours is a common bias.

Actually, didn't we just see somewhere that your first name affected the possibility of getting an interview?

Something along the lines of identical resumes, where names were stereotypical African names vs. stereotypical "American" names, and the latter would get more interviews, in statistically significantly higher numbers.

It was in the Freakonomics documentary. They also referenced another study where they cataloged over 100 unique spellings of the name "Unique" (e.g. "Uneek").

They also appear to have covered it in a podcast...

http://freakonomics.com/2013/04/08/how-much-does-your-name-m...

Agreed. I know many of the same. But I would also say that many of them fell into the "cool kids" camp in high school. Not so cool anymore. Likewise, a "nerd" may have the same friends, same hobbies, etc., but this may have led to greater success and recognition as an adult than being the star quarterback or drummer in a band in high school.

Perhaps I should have said status among peers in high school does not future status within society (ie. cool now does not equal cool later).

I entirely agree with you -- it is far too trivial to place adolescents into distinct subpopulations. However, I think this study did a pretty good job defining the traits of youth they tracked, see the abstract:

>Pseudomature behavior—ranging from minor delinquency to precocious romantic involvement—is widely viewed as a nearly normative feature of adolescence. When such behavior occurs early in adolescence, however, it was hypothesized to reflect a misguided overemphasis upon impressing peers and was considered likely to predict long-term adjustment problems.

The authors used these criteria to determine whether a specific set of early life behaviors are predictive of later life decisions. In this case, the statistics say that this is the case. While that may not be true in every sense (the "nerd" can get into drugs, the "cool" kid can also get a 1600 on the SAT), it is more common than not based on these data.

The "cool"/"nerd" labels themselves seem mainly to be injected by the media atop the findings of this particular study.

Yes, that is a great point, I should have been more clear. I am tired of this narrative in the mainstream media. From a brief glance at the study, it looked like it took a more nuanced and scientific view.

The study that this NPR piece reports about is focused on the outcomes of kids who were, as middle schoolers, pseudomature, which I suppose could be described as having mature interests but not mature behavior. (So, interested in drugs but lacking the ability to regulate themselves, or interested in sex but lacking the ability to engage in healthy relationships.)

The study found that pseudomaturity was associated with "short-term success with peers." That stands to reason. You know how kids look up to their older siblings? Well, in a way, pseudomature kids are acting the way older siblings act, and I can see how that might lead to peer approval.

But what I think bears mentioning is that in addition to kids who are pseudomature, you have kids who are genuinely mature and kids who are immature.

The kids who are genuinely mature are those who (unlike pseudomature kids) have mature behavior, and either have interests that are appropriate for their age or, if they have mature interests, are smart enough to know that they shouldn't act on those interests.

The kids who are immature are an interesting bunch. There are some (like I was in middle school) who do not have mature interests, but have mature behavior. There are others who neither have mature interests nor mature behavior.

The more you think about maturity as having to do with two spectrums -- one for interests and one for behavior -- the more the results of this study make sense, and the less it makes sense to use the "cool kids vs. nerds" narrative.

The results make sense because kids who get into adult situations but aren't able to handle them in grown-up ways are likely to end up in various forms of trouble, and it doesn't surprise me that the effects of that early trouble may persist into adulthood. You can also infer that kids who have mature interests are probably more likely to be exposed to mature themes at home, perhaps because of a troubled home life, which probably influences them as adults as well.

The reason the "cool kids vs. nerds" narrative doesn't make sense is because, really, what we're talking about is not popularity influencing outcomes but behavior influencing outcomes. Kids (whether they're cool or not) who aren't good at regulating their behavior in middle school are more likely to be bad at regulating their behavior in adulthood; kids (whether they're cool or not) who are good at regulating their behavior in middle school are more likely to be good at regulating their behavior in adulthood.

But these labels mean something to teenagers, and it doesn't matter if it's society's fault for creating these labels. Kids know who the "popular," "cool" kids are, and they know who the "nerds" are. Likewise, they know where they stand. And it matters to them, and it has an impact on them. The result will vary, of course, and there will always be exceptions. So the study is asking "what happened to the kids who their peers considered 'cool' or a 'nerd'?"

How universal are those categories? Can you generalize the results of this study to other times and places?

It's very similar in Northern Europe. Don't know about Africa, Asia or South America, but that's one data point for you.

When I go visit my in-laws who have two daughters in high school, I'm amazed at how the things that were nerdy when I was in high school 10 years ago are cool now. These girls who watch Dr Who and make honor band are extremely popular. What's more, I hear from them that there is very little of the petty popularity war going on. I know that this is a very special school and things aren't happening this way everywhere, but it's encouraging nonetheless.

I think you may need to intervene and call out the nerds, otherwise they may start missing crucial developmental milestones.

> So the study is asking "what happened to the kids who their peers considered 'cool' or a 'nerd'?"

Our 'coolness' meters collapse metrics, for example: inhibition may make you cooler in one case (not quoting sci-fi) and total nerd in another (not being rebellious.)

Therefore the question doesn't necessarily work given that the ability to inhibit behavior is strongly correlated to success.

I think level of inhibition is too reductive to have explanatory power. My guess is that the nerds are the children who listen to adults and follow rules. The cool kids are the kids that rebel very early, probably because the adults in their lives were not trustworthy. Following the rules and doing what you're supposed to is pretty much a recipe for later life success, as defined by a stable job, stable household, etc. So there's really no upside to being the rebellious child. It might be a source of coolness for a year or two as a teenager.

The famous experiment, where they promised a child two pieces of candy if he or she didn't take the piece of candy in front of her, and found that not taking the candy predicted success, can be interpreted in different ways. Supposedly it measures inhibition, which is taken to be an independent variable, and it showed that children with higher levels of inhibition experience greater levels of success. I imagine the experiment from the perspective of the child. An adult promises to give you extra candy if you do what they say. Should you trust this adult? I suspect that if dad is an alcoholic and makes a lot of promises, and then passes out and doesn't remember, you will not take the adult seriously and try to have some candy while you still can.

Right. It is generally considered un-cool for a teenager to do things that don't necessarily set you up for real-world success, such as doing homework, getting good grades, staying home on the weekends, etc. And partaking in risky behavior or rebelling may briefly help with popularity but not do much for getting into college or establishing a career.

That could be, though I certainly have met outliers who thrive from a childhood of rebellion. Many of them seemed uninhibited but really had a sadistic ability to wait for their opportunities to maximally affect their surroundings.

But I'm not really saying behavior inhibition has an adequate explanatory power, just that it is confounding. Just one quantitative measure like gratification delay is enough to make a qualitative measure like coolness a worthless subject.

Okay, you didn't try to use it to explain anything. I guess what I meant to say was that I think inhibition is a bogus thing to measure. By purporting to measure it, you implicitly make the assumption that inhibition is an independent input into behavior and can be isolated.

Children don't have much insight into their own decision-making or the words to explain themselves, so, seeing only behavioral outcomes, you could convince yourself that perhaps it's simple, like an electric circuit with a relay. The relay is inhibition; impulses send current; when the current flows, behavior happens. The merit of this model is that it's simple and has quantities that are measurable. You can do the candy experiment, and derive numbers that, you claim, measure inhibition. You find a correlation with a variable later in life, and it makes a neat graph.

The problem is that it's pretty obvious that human behavior is many orders of magnitude more complex than a circuit, and it's probably pretty easy to invent fictitious quantities that are measurable and take supposed measurements that look quite convincing.

You are hung up on my example over my point which is not that I believe the explanation of the gratification delay tests..

I like your hypothesis, but I also don't care if the gratification test was flawed due to alien possession. They still point to something earlier in development that probably isn't equally distributed among 'cool' and 'nerd' kids nor fully segregated. If there is a socioeconomic component then the relation to this hidden variable would be similar for eye color too.

So the point of the study verse another study using eye color is questionable to me.

I think your point was that cool kids and nerds are heterogenous groups, i.e. kids could end up in the same category for vastly different reasons. I agree. Practically all social science research suffers from the problem that it can't define the thing it's trying to study. They don't even try to solve problems like defining happiness or coolness. They hope that the numbers the experiments generate will look persuasive and make the exercise look like it was worth doing.

However, they isolated two groups according to some criteria, and they found that it correlated with something objective later in life. So you can speculate on other explanations, and my opinion is that the kids they called cool were troubled and rebelled because the adults in their lives were not dependable. The kids they called nerds were nerds because they followed rules and didn't rebel. They followed rules because the adults in their lives came through on promises and made it seem worth it to work and have faith that you'll get rewarded eventually.

I'll never forget a peer of mine slapping me on the back and saying "nice guys don't win." This was as we were leaving class our senior year after the homecoming court was announced. He made it. I didn't. Fifteen years later, we are both doing well. But he definitely took a nose dive after high school; drugs, alcohol, legal trouble, dead-end jobs, etc. And I went to college, started a career and consider it the best time of my life. But, it was not a death sentence for him, and I'm not a millionaire or anything ;)

We both still live in the same town and are married with kids and have good jobs. And there are many more examples of both of us, but some "cool kids" continue their downward spiral or continue to ascend to great things as they shed their earlier un-coolness. It definitely didn't take a study to see this.

In my opinion, many "cool kids" find that doors get closed through their riskier behavior or poorer results in school and are no longer able to get by solely on good looks and athletic prowess. While hard work and education open up more opportunities for others, particularly as popularity is taken out of the equation.

EDIT: I should note that the king and queen of homecoming were very attractive, but not necessarily "cool kids." It was very refreshing, and perhaps an indication of things to come.

"Nice guys don't win." -- He sounds like a Jeffrey Skilling type character. The guys that say things like that in high school probably are the ones that go to Wall Street and become white collar criminals.

I am sure that is true in some cases. Had he pursued higher education, that may have happened. In this case, he was athletic, good looking and charming; in a word, popular. But he was also very good at being an asshole. I think there was the thought that "if this is working for me now, then it will always work for me."

We were friends in that we hung out with the same group of people. I made a point to hang out with this group of people and do the things they did so I could try to be popular. Luckily, I realized at some point that being myself was preferable.

Tangential but for peeps who're in their late 20's and early 30's in tech, do you feel like we have peaked and now are in the decline?

When I first got out of school, was feeling like a shiny new penny as most of my other peeps were going for law school or doing their gap year in life sciences or other prep for graduate school. Basically leading life as struggling students. So relatively, I had relative high spending power, living in the city with discretionary income and splurging it on un-necessary latte /gastro-pub/trendy lounges and going to feel-good rock-climbing/hiking trips on weekends (posted on FB obviously) and believing in the mission of the startup/corporation same as mine.

Now in my late 20's, I feel like both my programmer peers' buying power and personal power are waning. Financially, most of my friends who're going for medicine and law are now in residency/associate training and will soon over take me in earnings. For my friends in finance/ management/accounting, there is a well-defined path to promotion where I feel like I have capped out and they're gonna start making more and having more power in comapnies. Applying to accelerators and doing hackathons and making business cards for startup's seem awfully empty to me now.

In terms of personal agency, my friends who have pursued graduate research are wrapping their degrees and are either going for post-doc's or joining industry as Associate Scientists doing much more self-directed research than the off-the-shelf web CRUD and "Big Data" that I'm doing. My friends who are musicians or artists or film-makers, albeit still poor are pushing out their albums and films in festivals and galleries; not so much critical success but having something they made by themselves and persevered to show for. I just made a bunch of cogs tick in a number of corporations and a few vanity project that I call "startup's."

I feel like I followed the cult of PG kinda of like the cool kids in high school have followed the cult of "cheerleaders and football QB" and bought in the hype. When I don't really care about consumer web, whether Angular.js or Macaw or whatever is next is better than Backbone.js, or the next message queue performance metric's or the next startup mantra about "pivoting" and "increasing your luck surface area" so all I was doing was looking for personal validation or trying to get rich without a cause. Oh well, youth is wasted on the young and I hope to learn and from this experience to recoup my loss.

Not really, but I guess depends on where you live.

I'm from Portugal. Programmers here are seen as normal white collar jobs and paid not much more than other white collar jobs, and probably peaking (earning wise) at about the same as them. If you go for a normal company and not a startup, the path to management is usually quite clear as well.

Doctors make more (2x-10x depending on experience/specialty) and lawyers is so so. But here it is still probably one of the professions that have less unemployment (and salaries are almost always higher than the average)

But in other areas, London, NY, SF, you can probably see programmers being much higher in the pay scale compared to doctors and most lawyers (remember, most don't go to the top firms, only very few).

But the advantage you as a programmer have compared to your peers is that it is much easier to supplement your income or find another job.

>I just made a bunch of cogs tick in a number of corporations and a few vanity project that I call "startup's."

Considered contributing to open source?

I teach and write libraries. Gives me that nice "I made this" feeling. Career-boosting too.

How did you get into teaching?

I'm interested - although I will have to work on my exposition / pedagogic skills (that's why they say the teacher learns the most in classes :) ).

https://twitter.com/bitemyapp

I offer to teach people online and I have an IRC channel called #haskell-beginners on Freenode.

People go through my course: https://github.com/bitemyapp/learnhaskell

And when they get stuck, they ask questions.

I'll begin giving local classes soon. I'm giving a talk the 19th in Austin.

I think possibly you are lacking imagination :)

There are many career paths, some very lucrative, and it's not just the awful "be a sharepoint consultant" BS.

For starters, if you look at Glassdoor, an engineer with experience can get a job w/ a wealthy tech company making $175k+/yr, with your base salary at $130k+. And it goes up from there. This essentially matches my own experience hiring in this market and talking to others that hire.

And if you hold some of that $45k+/yr RSU grant, you are likely to see appreciation.

There is a lot of misconception. Just last night I was at a popular pizza place in a popular SF neighborhood and beside me sat a table full of guys, mid 20s or so. One guy said, basically, "companies aren't paying more than the low 100s for engineers" and everybody seemed to agree with that. My first instinct is, let me make you a job offer! The truth is, there is a lot of money to be made in tech. People always focus on early stage, lotto-ticket equity. It's easy to overlook that there are MANY publicly traded (or pre-ipo) companies that are hiring engineers, paying handsome base salaries and generous RSU grants.

All that said, it's not all about the money. I don't mean to suggest it is.

I'm not quite sure what you mean by 'peaked' (in popularity? learning trajectory? potential?) but as a long-time expat getting by in a few different countries, I took a different path than everyone else I know and I feel that my best is yet to come (being a life-long learner helps). I had friends in my early-mid 20s who pretended they were 'on the up-and-up, doing big things', but that was mostly because they came from wealthy families. I never compared myself with them, though, nor with anyone (something I think everyone should learn how to do).

All I can say is I've heard several times from middle-aged people that one's 30s and 40s are way better than one's 20s. Being in my early 30s, I feel more comfortable in my own skin, making decisions and being totally okay with the choices I make in the day-to-day.

I think the problem here is that you were spending too much time comparing yourself to your peers. Instead of being happy for their success, you're seeing it as devaluing your own worth. Is the point of having a high paying 9-5 making more money than your friends, or is it about having the the ability to dictate what you can do in your spare time? And is the point of pursuing things in your spare time and time (like rock-climbing/hiking/taveling/doing cocaine off hookers) to show off on Facebook or for personal enjoyment and betterment? I recently saw an interview with Dave Chappelle where he said that "money is the fuel of choices" and I think he nailed it.

I've heard it said "money doesn't buy happiness, but it does buy options."

"Now in my late 20's, I feel like both my programmer peers' buying power and personal power are waning. Financially, most of my friends who're going for medicine and law are now in residency/associate training and will soon over take me in earnings."

I think you are being too hard on yourself. What I don't understand in the start-up/programming is the insistence on hiring youth. Personally, I feel some companies need a little more maturity on the payroll?

> What I don't understand in the start-up/programming is the insistence on hiring youth. Personally, I feel some companies need a little more maturity on the payroll?

It's easier to convince a dev in their early 20s that suicide overtime is a good idea. You can also call them a "junior developer" and pay them less. And they often don't have pesky things like families to go home to, kids that need braces, or medical ailments that raise insurance premiums.

"in tech" is a very large spectrum of industries, positions and earning power.

A programmer at the age of 30 is probably not on a decline, but will definitely not see any major pay bump in the future; A consultant is probably just at the beginning of a consulting career; A mid-level manager has probably just established a foothold in the corporate pyramid, and there is a long way up; A founder is probably hoping for (more)success in the future; The CEO of Facebook may be at his peak now, but he probably doesn't care.

I just turned 31 last week. Life has been getting better every year. Work is more fulfilling, my skills are improving, my social life is good, and I'm finding new hobbies and pursuits to explore and learn.

What I notice in what you write is that you're always comparing yourself to others. Yes, I have friends and acquaintances who are more successful, in terms of money, responsibility, and prestige. I'm happy for them. After the initial envious thought passes, it doesn't make me feel worse-off.

A quote I like: "If you define your self-worth in comparison to other people, you're building your house on sand."

  "Tangential but for peeps who're in their late 20's and early 30's in tech, 
  do you feel like we have peaked and now are in the decline?"

I'm 32 and don't feel I've peaked yet, but there's still much I'd like to achieve and also I enjoy keep learning myself new things.

Every year I watch the QuakeCon keynote of John Carmack and to me he's a reminder that I don't have to reach my peak until I choose to :)

Huh. I think you were probably a victim of the 90's tech boom. I probably would have majored in computer science anyway, but I turned 20 in 2000, and things certainly looked more promising up until the crash.

I can see that you have talented friends. Being, say, an artist can be a hard life. There are plenty of scientists that regret taking that path. So, who can say if you made the right choice, but those other paths were far from a sure thing.

Most people lose, whether they're nerds or cool kids. They end up in unhappy jobs or unhappy marriages for the rest of their lives, which is a kind of prison that can be hard to escape.

True. You can always eschew the nerd/cool argument and choose realism.

The definition of "cool" defined as "Pseudomature behavior—ranging from minor delinquency to precocious romantic involvement" seems designed to detect poor kids and kids from dysfunctional and abusive homes. It's only the word 'cool' that's getting this into the media rotation. If the headline was "Poor kids and kids from dysfunctional and abusive homes lose," I'm not sure that anybody would be interested in reading the story.

Too bad the public isn't allowed to read the study, so I can't actually see all of their metrics for defining cool other than petty crime and early sexual behavior - things that plenty of clearly not-cool kids get into.

From personal experience the path-of-least-grief is to assume that attractiveness, intelligence, personality, and diligence are all uncorrelated.

Very good.

However, I also remember that some things do affect the outcome. For example, there are studies that being tall or attractive provides some advantages, or that being short or bald provide some disadvantages in controlled experiments.

Since people value attractiveness for its own sake I think it makes more sense as outcome itself.

This doesn't address whether psuedomature behavior is the cause of these problems. It could simply be a effect of problematic life circumstances: parental divorce, child abuse, neglect, etc. that are pervasive across economic classes.

This is much more likely correlative than causative.

Seems a little biased, considering he actually says "I would say I was part of the not-so-cool kids."

Which is why the scientific method was invented and is taught in grade school.

I wish they continued to teach it through out High School too, since there seems to be a significant misunderstanding of how science actually works.

You nailed it. This would be a good title: "It's better to be un-cool, finds study by former un-cool children."

I'm pretty sure there's no accepted definition of cool. They seem to have chosen early signs of delinquency as their definition.

If you pried, you could probably find out the names of the children from these researchers' own pasts who the study participants were based on.

From Abstract:

Early adolescent pseudomature behavior predicted long-term difficulties in close relationships, as well as significant problems with alcohol and substance use, and elevated levels of criminal behavior.

"Look everyone, I've proven mathematically that I am now the cool one. Told you."

Pathetic.

Some sociologists have decided to tackle studying the concept of "cool" and how it affects peoples' lives. They clearly stated that their definition of "coolness" is based on pseudomaturity, for which they also defined criteria.

The paper and study are published, and may provide interesting insights, but are unlikely to be accepted as canon without sufficient followup study and peer review, which by publishing the study these sociologists are clearly inviting.

Now, are you saying it's pathetic for people whose fundamental focus of life is to try to better everyone's understanding of the human psyche and in this case psychological development in early years? Are you saying it's a subject not worth studying at all? Are you saying that it's impossible to conduct an unbiased study on the subject? Are you saying that it would be better for the study to be performed by someone who would identify themselves as falling within the "cool" group in their childhood?

Or are you saying you'd rather just dismiss the study and disparage the scientists on the basis that you do not agree with the results of what appears to be a properly documented scientific study?

Skepticism is encouraged in science, dismissiveness is not.

As a study on pseudomaturity it's fine (I assume). But defining coolness as pseudomaturity is problematic. The most cool/popular people at my school were mature and did well academically and athletically.

I'm saying that this is a thinly veiled revenge of the nerds. And I'm not a scientist, so my discouragement shouldn't harm anyone. It's called an opinion and it doesn't require a peer review.

If anything here is thinly veiled, it's your opinion.

Well I got good news for you. I'm not doing any science.

The little secret is that nobody really thinks they are the cool kids.

There's a little imposter syndrome in everyone?

What do you mean? Deep down no one actually thinks they are cool? In both my high school and grammar school there were kids who were self proclaimed 'cool'. They were seen as such too. I don't think this was out of the ordinary.

In a fishbowl like a high school, people are really driven by their insecurity.

Some people do. Hell, I did at times.

Talk about burying the lede - the most important sentence in the whole article is the final one.

Also known as "peaking in high school."

Moral of today's story - sit down, shut up, and do as you are told by authority figures who are morally and socially superior to you.

Random statements alert:

- "Cool" fuzzy term, no specific definition given.

- "Lose" fuzzy term, no specific definition given.

From the abstract of the actual study:

- "Cool" => "Pseudomature behavior—ranging from minor delinquency to precocious romantic involvement"

- "Lose" => "Early adolescent pseudomature behavior predicted long-term difficulties in close relationships, as well as significant problems with alcohol and substance use, and elevated levels of criminal behavior."

Nerd is the new cool...

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