Why Are Nerds Unpopular, An Alternative To PG's Essay

http://skepticblog.org/2010/04/26/why-are-nerds-unpopular/

by semmons • 16 years ago

58 77 16 years ago

skepticblog.org

zackattack2• 16 years ago

Lots of bizarre rationalizing. "Nerds" tend to be unpopular because they lack emotional and social intelligence.

Semiapies• 16 years ago

Reading TFA might be useful.

trominos2• 16 years ago

What? I mean, of course, if you define "nerds" to be "people without social intelligence" you're gonna see that nerds are unpopular. The premise beneath PG's essay (and this one, I think) is that if you instead define "nerds" to be "people with a lot of interest in some academic subject, and/or people who are quantifiably 'smart'" you still (seem to) find that nerds are unpopular.

So are you saying that that's not actually the case, that smart people aren't disproportionately unpopular? Interesting if true. Definitely needs some kind of justification, since it flies in the face of most people's intuition.

I'm not sure what the answer is, but I'm leaning more towards the position that intelligence is negatively correlated with popularity. Smart people aren't necessarily outcasts, but IMX you'll tend to see fewer of them at the top of the popularity curve and more at the bottom than you'd expect from a random distribution. And I imagine that there are a lot of reasons for why this is.

PG's argument in particular is closer to the truth than it seems at face value, I think. He says that smart people's problem is that they don't spend enough time on socializing; I'm not sure if this is really the prime cause of smart people's ostensible unpopularity, but it applies to my experience in middle and high school. My parents were rich enough to send me to good private schools that valued intellectualism (which probably more closely parallel schools outside the US) so I was never really unpopular, but I was definitely less popular than I wanted to be. In retrospect it's pretty clear that I could've been way more popular if I'd doubled or tripled the amount of time I spent on it; instead, I spent my free time programming and doing math.

The only place that I disagree is with PG's rationalization of why nerds don't socialize more. In my case, it wasn't that I wanted to build great things (although to some extent I did). I'm pretty sure it was just that solving math problems was a much more reliable and straightforward endorphin trigger than socializing.

Anyway, all this is to say that a) I disagree with you and b) you should be less pithy and more explanatory.

nearestneighbor2• 16 years ago

> if you instead define "nerds" to be "people with a lot of interest in some academic subject, and/or people who are quantifiably 'smart'"

So, the Comic Book Guy is not a nerd? Even Wikipedia calls him that.

j-g-faustus• 16 years ago

> So are you saying that that's not actually the case, that smart people aren't disproportionately unpopular?

I think they aren't. As an example, we could hypothesize that people have a few simple attributes - say IQ (math), physical skills (sports), looks (hot or not), empathy (good at getting along with others) and political skills (good at influencing others).

I imagine that looks and physical skills are the most important factors for popularity, with empathy and political skill next, while IQ is basically irrelevant - unlike good looks, high IQ in and of itself does not cause popularity.

So let's say that popularity is a function of a weighted average score of looks, physical skills, empathy and political skills.

When we say that someone is "popular" or "smart", we don't mean "average" but more something like "top 10%".

Obviously 10% of the population will be among the 10% most popular, and 10% among the 10% smartest. But if popularity and IQ is statistically independent, only 1% will be among the top 10% in both.

So people that are both smart and popular can indeed be rare even when IQ and popularity are independent, we don't need more than a random distribution to explain that.

If we add the fact that people tend to focus on (and thereby improving) things they are good at and ignore (and thereby fall behind in) areas where they suck, it will only strengthen the trend.

I think nerds and jocks both follow the path of least resistance by putting most of their efforts into areas where they have a natural advantage. But doing so is rational behavior, it's hard to argue against it.

Avshalom2• 16 years ago

>So are you saying that that's not actually the case, that smart people aren't disproportionately unpopular?

That's been my experience.

Not to say there were no unpopular smart kids, but I never noticed a higher percentage than dumb kids. Though even then most of the smart people I knew who were unpopular globally were popular locally (that is within what ever group they ran with).

thribbler5• 16 years ago

They lack social skills because they lack emotional intelligence.

To take it further: nerds lack emotional intelligence because they have learnt to ignore the relevant emotions. That is why bullies are able to bait nerds; they both feel that the nerds' denial of group emotions makes them culpable.

zackattack2• 16 years ago

"They lack social skills because they lack emotional intelligence." --> I agree

"nerds lack emotional intelligence because they have learnt to ignore the relevant emotions." --> Maybe.

"That is why bullies are able to bait nerds; they both feel that the nerds' denial of group emotions makes them culpable." --> I would love to hear you expand on this, and I loved that you invoked a concept of "group emotions", which I had never before heard formulated as such.

potatolicious2• 16 years ago

Note: I consider myself a nerd.

But honestly, all of this pointing at other people is kind of annoying. We are just as culpable in our social ostracism as everyone else.

Nerds lack emotional intelligence because they have categorized it as pointless - at least seemed to have convinced themselves of that point. I disagree that they've learned to ignore the relevant emotions, it's more like they've convinced themselves that fitting in and being part of society is unimportant, and that the world is simply out to get them with their dumb social expectations.

Of course, many nerds never truly believe this deep inside, which causes all kinds of angst for them, but that's another topic entirely.

IMHO nerds on the whole have developed this giant victim complex. It's not us refusing to fit in with the group that causes our ostracism - it's clearly because we're smart and they fear our intelligence. Yeah, that's it.

People don't like us because a large portion of our community are quite simply arrogant jackasses. They pride themselves in being nerds, see themselves as smarter than the rest, and generally just lord their intelligence over everyone else. No wonder people hit us at our weak point: our lack of social skills.

This isn't meant to be a complete diatribe against nerds - I love being one, but honestly, a lot of the responsibility for the anti-nerd thing is our fault.

AndrewDucker4• 16 years ago

nerds lack emotional intelligence because they have learnt to ignore the relevant emotions.

I disagree. I never learned to ignore specific emotions - I was simply unaware of them. It took me a long time to learn to understand emotions.

njharman2• 16 years ago

Is the common perception of "nerds" (as in socially awkward/inept unpopular people) is that they are universally smart?

Cause that's not been my experience at all. Some nerdly hobbies require (at least some) intelligence, programming, building robots, etc. Other nerdly activities that I'm part of don't require nearly as much, RPGs(pen and paper), and fandom as in trekkies, browncoats etc. And boy am I here to tell you there are some dumb "nerds".

In my experience "nerds" have the same ranges of intelligence as non-nerds and intelligent people range from popular jocks to social handicapped nerds.

In other words, over my 35 years I've not seen a significant correlation between "intelligence" and popularity, or "intelligence" and social grace/ineptitude.

Qz2• 16 years ago

Don't confuse 'nerds' with 'geeks'.

scott_s3• 16 years ago

I find the quibbling over nerds versus geeks or whatever other term one wants to use silly. You may subscribe to that distinction, but most people don't - which makes it hard to communicate meaningfully with those terms.

shadowsun72• 16 years ago

I find this Venn diagram useful, as a rough definition: http://azahar.files.wordpress.com/2009/09/nerd-venn-diagram....

Avshalom2• 16 years ago

This has pretty much been my experience too. My high school wasn't enormous, but it was ~2000 kids, big enough for subcultures to form and as many (if not more honestly) of the outcast were dumb as the popular kids.

Heck actually in that school most of the really intelligent ones, the AP/Dual enrollment kids and the like, while not necessarily popular, were treated very well by everyone because a smart peer was always a better resource than a teacher if you needed help, regardless of how much of a social outcast they were.

redeyeglasses• 16 years ago

That's what I have observed. The smart kids weren't popular in the sit-com or movie way, but people came to them with questions or to settle some debates.

douglasputnam• 16 years ago

Considering we're gossiping on PG's dime, are we allowed to describe his Nerd's manifesto as "a steaming pile of stereotypes"?

timwiseman2• 16 years ago

You are certainly allowed to, but I for one would respectfully disagree.

He certainly discusses stereotypes, but that was the point. Moreover, many stereotypes exist because they reflect a facet of the truth (this is definitely not always true, but it sometimes is). His essay explores why the truth behind a couple of specific stereotypes is there.

petercooper• 16 years ago

The populist definition of "nerd" has shifted significantly with the times.

In the 1980s, saying you had a computer at home could have you cast as a "nerd." In the 1990s, saying you used the Internet could automatically make you a nerd. In the 2000s, saying you met your girlfriend (or had a girlfriend you'd never met) online could automatically make you a nerd. A similar shifting of definitions over time even occurred earlier.. consider the reputations of "sci-fi" between 1950 and 1980 (Star Wars, anyone?)

I think nerds are, perhaps, just "edge cases." The activities aren't nerdy, per se, but it's just that the mass public hasn't caught up with the ideas yet. What's nerdy right now might be the next big craze.

orangecat2• 16 years ago

What's nerdy right now might be the next big craze.

Heck, it's now less nerdy to be on Facebook than not.

lukev• 16 years ago

I wonder why people spend so much time deconstructing and perpetuating a classification that has absolutely no meaning outside of highschool.

demallien• 16 years ago

If I had to guess, it's because a lot of us here found highschool to be a highly traumatising experience, and it comforts us to know that there were others that went through that hell.

Personally speaking, it took me more than 5 years after graduating before I could even start to believe that people actually liked me. Even today I can still see little emotional tics, learned behaviours, that I developed during that period, that I actively have to work against, as they will lead me into unsuitable responses today.

moultano2• 16 years ago

Many people never escape the conception of themselves they developed in childhood. As banal as it is, this stuff is important.

orangecat2• 16 years ago

This. See http://economix.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/09/23/this-ones-for-a... . Salaries for men are positively correlated with height, and even more strongly correlated with height in high school.

psyklic• 16 years ago

I disagree that it has no meaning outside of high school. In any big city, there are still many scenes which play on the old stereotypes -- the club/bar scene, rock n roll scene, bohemian scene, gay scene, etc.

For example, if you bring up that you work with computers or have a desk job in a club, it is very noticeable that you are stereotyped as "boring" and "geeky" (at least in LA). It's all part of the popularity contest that we're familiar with from high school.

jrockway• 16 years ago

So true. Having written one book, I can refer to myself as a "writer", which is somehow more relatable. What I really need to do is learn a few chords on the guitar, come up with a name for a band, and call myself a musician. That, I think, is the only hope for a future generation of jrockways ;)

timwiseman2• 16 years ago

Its effects are highly concentrated and emphasized in high school do the fact that is a fairly closed off environment with a limited population.

But it remains true outside of high school. At work, I have nothing to contribute when the lunch conversation turns to sports. Our nontechnical people often stare at me glassy eyed if I bring up recent developments in computers(and I don't even think about talking aobut the work on my masters in math). But since we all have social lives outside the office and that we are all mature adults with a real mission to focus on, we get along just fine and get the mission done. But the effect is still there, and it is easy to see how it could be magnified in a more claustrophobic environment.

shadowsun72• 16 years ago

It sometimes matters to think things through. If, for instance, you want to help students get better - it would do to take some time to understand the social dynamics of the world they're in.

Articles like this are potentially useful for teachers, or student counselors. Besides, even if the article's off-base, it's still helpful to search for truth, even in topics as mundane-seeming as this.

yason• 16 years ago

I'm a nerd and I wasn't popular in school because I simply wasn't very interested in what the others talked about. Thus, I had nothing to say really, which makes a great ground for having nothing much in common between me and other students.

stcredzero2• 16 years ago

Reminds of a an account I read about a kid whose hippy-throwback parents didn't own a TV. He did ok socially, however, because he had access to their old music collection and played Jimi Hendrix tunes on the electric guitar.

Shorel• 16 years ago

Cool. I plan to be one of those parents that don't own a TV.

moultano2• 16 years ago

We've created popular culture that doesn't value intelligence. This has an intergenerational compounding effect. When smart people aren't socially valued for their intelligence, they mate with less attractive people, and the effect is reinforced in the next generation.

The opposite is happening in India. Intelligence is a high ideal, and seen as insurance against abject poverty. Men with prestigious degrees and good careers regardless of their attractiveness generally have their pick of wives through arranged marriage. This ends up resulting in a lot of people that are both intelligent and beautiful, and the preference for intelligence is reinforced.

angelbob• 16 years ago

Interestingly, that "arranged marriage" thing may also compound it.

Dating/marrying intelligent, hardworking unattractive people is something that almost all of us approve of -- for other people to do.

luckystrike• 16 years ago

  Men with prestigious degrees and good careers regardless of their attractiveness 
  generally have their pick of wives through arranged marriage.

I would say its more about 'good careers' than prestigious degrees or intelligence here in India. I am pretty sure even a guy with a 'prestigious' degree but an 'unsettled' career (Startup? NGO Worker?) would have a lot of trouble going through the arranged marriage routine. (Most of the gal's families would reject him even before they get a chance to meet each other.)

But doesn't a guy with a career that is perceived to be good, have an advantage everywhere else in the world as well, when it comes to selecting a mate?

GFischer• 16 years ago

Hmmm... as a single 29-year old here in Uruguay... I'd say that the advantage starts to show only when you're older than, say, 25 - the older girls realize their looks aren't going to last forever, or want to have a baby and start to worry about having a husband able to provide. It's a bit cynical but I believe it's mostly true.

That said, I think there's hope for love too :) - only not always the kind you see in the movies.

Jun8• 16 years ago

I think one of the more interesting points in the article was: "The bottom line is this : don’t assume that an American public school experience is universal and broadly applicable social lessons can be derived from it."

In European countries, AFAIK, there's very little "Jock worship" in junior-high and hing schools, definitely nowhere near the levels I have seen here. My high school also had sports teams but the people who were in the teams were not necessarily popular. So, my simplistic answer to this social problem: downgrade the sports teams and cheer leading squads in high schools and colleges :-)

stcredzero2• 16 years ago

We must also consider that popularity is also complex

I thought that was a premise of PG's essay. To be fair, the point being made is that there may be many specific tradeoffs with many nuances.

tokenadult2• 16 years ago

I learned a lot about my cultural assumptions on the meaning of high intelligence when I traveled from the United States to Taiwan to study the Chinese language twenty-eight years ago. Here in the United States, I had imbued the idea that high-IQ people are disliked because they are smart, and that above a certain IQ, a person has no hope of having a friendship relationship with a person of average IQ. (I especially got that idea from a short story by Philip K. Dick

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philip_K._Dick

I read when I was in ninth grade, but in fact this idea that high IQ causes an inherent social gulf is commonplace in Western literature on education of gifted children.)

I got a big surprise when I arrived in Taiwan. I found out that in east Asia, the cultural assumption is that there are few finer uses for intelligence than getting along with other people. It is expected that anyone who is generally smart will be able to make friends with lots of people. (This emphasis comes straight from the writings of Confucius and the successor Confucian philosopher Mencius, which I studied in the original literary Chinese as part of my language studies.) It helps, of course, that Chinese-influenced culture in general also honors literacy and intellect in a way that is not quite as direct or pervasive as in Western culture, but the main point is that the 知識分子 ("intellectual") is a person who has his own responsibility to get along with other people and lead society (by EXAMPLE) so that all of society is harmonious. Once I learned not to whine to myself so much about how people don't appreciate me because I'm so smart (doesn't it sound gauche to hear me say that?), I learned to appreciate my fellow human beings a lot more, and succeeded in making more friends. I'm glad I went overseas to learn a new perspective, a perspective that helps me now that I am back in the United States. Confucius had a great saying about how to appreciate other people and learn from all of them: 三人行，必有我師焉 ("wherever three persons are walking, my teacher is surely among them"). I can learn from anyone in my environment, and I can make friends with more people than I realized at first.

apsec1125• 16 years ago

I think there's a bit of confusion here. People up to roughly 90th percentile or so intelligence will be able to use their smarts to make more friends, get along better with others, etc. The problem that Paul Graham is talking about is the 10% above the 90th percentile, who are sufficiently different from the average as to make relating to normal people difficult. Not coincidentally, the intelligence of Congressmen averages around 90th percentile.

tel• 16 years ago

And if anything, that argument might suggest the upper 10% should almost have the lower 90 enthralled. Society is a fundamentally mental event. To claim you're more skilled than 90% of it and still fail to succeed is to not really be telling the whole s story.

Which is fine. Maybe you don't care about other people enough to invest. Maybe you've decided to spend time elsewhere. Just stop trying to be so holy that you can't overcome the challenge of learning about and appreciating others.

tokenadult2• 16 years ago

10% above the 90th percentile, who are sufficiently different from the average as to make relating to normal people difficult.

[citation needed]

There is no confusion at all on my part. I knew what subset of the population I was writing about (perhaps an even narrower subset than the original Paul Graham article, the first of his I ever read, was about) when I started typing. I specifically disagree with "as to make relating to normal people difficult." If high-IQ people have a social problem, as perhaps they especially do in certain parts of American culture, I invite them to use their high IQ to engage in problem-solving.

winter_blue• 16 years ago

Actually the people between the 90th and 95th percentile are the ones who have difficulty getting along. Those above the 95th percentile understand how society works and are as Confucius described, "the ones that lead society (by example) so that all of society is harmonious."

I've met people from both categories.

The smartest geeks I know have no trouble fitting into society, one of them is leading a startup that has received over a million dollars in VC funding. They work on serious, possibly disruptive and hard project. (double emphasis on hard)

On the other hand, the rather large group of geeks I know who have trouble fitting into society work on not-so-important projects, usually things like flash games, simple web apps, etc. Some of these geeks (the ones who outwardly call themselves smart) suffer from illusory superiority (some even intentionally complicate their code so that others find it hard to understand, as a show of intellectual superiority; see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Illusory_superiority)

The fact, is these socially-challenged geeks aren't so smart after all; they don't put much effort socializing with people, and then they whine and complain how they don't fit it.

The reason why this doesn't happen in Asia as often, is because the culture doesn't permit it. In America, you can sort of get away by denoting yourself as a geek and refraining from social activity. In Asia, since that is seen very badly (much worse than the comical portrayal of geeks we have here); these kids are forced to go out and socialize.

pauldirac137• 16 years ago

Nerds are unpopular because people don't like to hang out with anyone who is much more intelligent than they are. This transcends any arguments about social ineptness or pursuing popularity. If you're 30+ IQ points above your peers, you would need an awful lot of social skills to make them feel comfortable being around you. Let's say you're a theoretical physicist and you meet someone who has an average intellect. The first thing they ask you is "What do you do?" If you say (truthfully) "I work on supersymmetric string theories in order to unify all the fundamental forces of the universe" (or whatever; I'm not a physicist). You want the other person to say "Wow, that's cool!" What actually goes through their head is "Oh my God! This person's main interest in life is something that I not only do not understand, but _could not_ understand no matter how hard I try!" Then they just want to get away from you as fast as they can, because being around you makes them feel diminished. This is why nerds are unpopular in high school. If you're a nerd in high school, and you're lucky, you'll get shunned. If you're unlucky, you'll get beaten up.

toby• 16 years ago

I'm pretty sure answering the question "what do you do?" in that manner indicates social ineptness.

A physicist could instead say "I do physics research" and potentially entertain an "average" person with stories about departmental feuds or something else he might relate to.

dagw2• 16 years ago

You don't need a lot of social skills to know that when people ask you what you do, they probably don't want to hear the abstract from your latest paper, but will be quite content with "oh I work at the university". The only reason any one will feel diminished around you is because you go out of your way to make them feel that way.

I know several very smart people with PhDs in very complicated things, working on very hard cutting edge research problems, and they don't have a problem hanging out with people from a wide variety of backgrounds.

The whole "no one likes me because I'm too smart" smacks of lies mothers make up to make their anti-social kids feel better about being bullied at school

apsec1125• 16 years ago

This seems to basically be:

Paul Graham: X, Y and Z are generally true, except under conditions A and B.

These guys: But X, Y, and Z aren't true all the time! And they aren't even true most of the time, given conditions A and B!

The only substantial part of this appears to be "nerdiness is becoming cooler", and I find that highly questionable.

araneae• 16 years ago

Why do we believe that intelligence and nerdiness go hand in hand? Not to be all anecdotal or anything, but the top 6 GPA ranked people in my high school class were normal. They weren't popular, but they certainly weren't nerds. I was 7th, and I didn't really count as a "nerd" until college, when I started going to anime club. In high school, I was so socially awkward that even the nerds wouldn't let me play DnD with them. The nerds were all kind of middle-of-the-pack intelligence.

I suspect that we believe this because there are some powerfully intelligent and powerfully nerdy folks out there. But if you just look at academic performance, I bet the reality isn't so strong. There are a lot of dumb nerds out there.

akkartik• 16 years ago

Adds detail, but misses the main thrust. PG's essay illuminated, for me, the social dynamic common to prisons, schools, and Victorian England: when you take away consequence, people build a 'cruel and stupid world' for themselves.

bootload• 16 years ago

"... I went to a prep school, and I can tell you that the culture was somewhat flipped – the academically successful kids tended to be more generally popular. There were still subcultures and different groups with different interests and characters – but generally, being smart was considered a virtue. The culture of the school generally respected hard work, integrity, and achievement. ..."

The author might have benefited from reading the redux of of pg's article, "Gateway High School, 1981" ~ http://paulgraham.com/gateway.html to get some context. In the social graph of the described school pg went to I can imagine the half life of the author would be a tenth of Cobolt 56. Try "hard work, integrity, and achievement" on these chums ~ http://ep.yimg.com/ca/I/paulgraham_2102_11802106 Look at the clenched fists and how close they are standing together.

Why Are Nerds Unpopular, An Alternative To PG's Essay

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