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Why Nerds Are Unpopular (2003)

paulgraham.com

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Re: Why Nerds Are Unpopular (2003)

#61

Post by zeveb »

jff wrote: post #5

This article is in the same vein as that execrable Lisp article that showed up today: "Alas, poor brilliant misunderstood me, cursed by my genius and unwillingness to ~play the silly games of the lesser people who surround me~"

> This article is in the same vein as that execrable Lisp article that showed up today: "Alas, poor brilliant misunderstood me, cursed by my genius and unwillingness to ~play the silly games of the lesser people who surround me~"

Did you even read either article? The Lisp article is precisely not that, and honestly pg's article isn't either.

Re: Why Nerds Are Unpopular (2003)

#62

Post by CM30 »

jmkni wrote: post #13

It took me too long to realise that a lot of the popular kids where also smart. 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.

Yeah. As much as the typical 'cliche' seems to be a divide between the popular moron jock and the unpopular nerd, the truth is simply that's there's no correlation between popularity and intelligence one way or the other.

Some people may be unpopular but smart or popular but dumb, but there's just as many unpopular idiots and popular geniuses.

Re: Why Nerds Are Unpopular (2003)

#63

Post by CM30 »

Anderkent wrote: post #42

This is part because the smart kids are told they go to school to learn things. That's obviously not the case; school is a horrible environment for transmitting knowledge and skill. 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 d…

Sometimes I suspect this probably applies to college/university as much as it does school. Yeah, the degree is nice to have, but making connections with people in a similar field/with similar interests seems like it's a heck of a lot more useful in retrospect. Especially if your interests are in starting a business or other venture and you need cofounders.

Re: Why Nerds Are Unpopular (2003)

#64

Post by derekp7 »

gthtjtkt wrote: post #50
gavman wrote: post #10

Looking back, the thing I wish someone in middle/high school pointed out to me is how temporary it is. Day in and day out it's your entire life and you think it goes on like that forever, and then one day you graduate and poof it all disappears. I remember the day after I graduated it sunk in that I'd never be in that world again and this huge feeling of relief and excitement washed over me...and then I remember feel…

> it really did feel like it went on forever. 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 laughi…

Except there is also another dynamic at play. At least in my case, after high school I was completely transformed into another person. Part of it was that at my job, I was working around adults. So I got into the habit of acting like an adult, and having a different set of concerns. So I really came out of my shell at that time.

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.

Re: Why Nerds Are Unpopular (2003)

#65

Post by bananabill »

elastic_church wrote: post #47
bananabill wrote: post #38

http://i.imgur.com/CyFyMRL.jpg

this is satire, right? such that you know none of this is anything to brag about? 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.

Yes it's satire

Re: Why Nerds Are Unpopular (2003)

#66

Post by orangea »

otikik wrote: post #52

I was a HUGE nerd at highschool and I disagree with this article completely. I think nerds are unpopular at highschool because their intelligence is incomplete. 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…

> I can totally spot code which was written by the socially challenged.

That sounds very interesting to me. Could you elaborate?

Re: Why Nerds Are Unpopular (2003)

#68

Post by mcguire »

coldtea wrote: post #18
mcguire wrote: post #9

There's an awful lot of over-generalization here. This would be more convincing with some empirical data.

Like what? "23.478% of male nerds don't have girlfriends", "studies have shown nerds to be in the 20% percentile of popularity", etc?

Sure, that would be good.

Re: Why Nerds Are Unpopular (2003)

#69

Post by jack9 »

kazinator wrote: post #41
jff wrote: post #5

This article is in the same vein as that execrable Lisp article that showed up today: "Alas, poor brilliant misunderstood me, cursed by my genius and unwillingness to ~play the silly games of the lesser people who surround me~"

Nerds are unpopular because a big component of the definition of "nerd" is unpopularity. If you're popular, you probably don't meet the definition of "nerd" very well. 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…

> Nerds are unpopular because a big component of the definition of "nerd" is unpopularity.

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.

Re: Why Nerds Are Unpopular (2003)

#70

Post by otikik »

orangea wrote: post #66
otikik wrote: post #52

I was a HUGE nerd at highschool and I disagree with this article completely. I think nerds are unpopular at highschool because their intelligence is incomplete. 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…

> I can totally spot code which was written by the socially challenged. That sounds very interesting to me. Could you elaborate?

Hum. It is difficult without delving into specifics.

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.

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