Why Nerds Succeed‎

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/06/26/books/review/book-review-the-geeks-shall-inherit-the-earth-by-alexandra-robbins.html

by whenimgone • 15 years ago

121 92 15 years ago

xtreegold• 15 years ago

Successful nerds succeed, there are plenty of unsuccessful nerds. I, without a shred of evidence, would think there is a positive correlation between school geekiness and success, but all this "nerds will own the world" talk that is gaining traction lately is a bit foolish, in my opinion.

IvarTJ• 15 years ago

Being different and bullied is sadly not always followed by success. As someone with the diagnosis of Asperger’s, which has been called “the Geek syndrome,” I am acquianted with many with the diagnosis who have struggled for a long time to maintain stable employment.

sek• 15 years ago

These "geeks" they are talking about are just people with passion for something that was not popular at school. I mean how many pupils can relate to something like programming?

People who were defined as "nerds" who are just incapable of socializing, have a huge disadvantage in the real world.

xiaoma2• 15 years ago

The most successful CEO of my life, Bill Gates, never struck me as charismatic at all. He was a geek.

demian2• 15 years ago

The fact that a some successful people are nerds, doesn't mean that every nerd is going to be successful.

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

Locke16894• 15 years ago

This theory is targeted directly at American high schools. There is no attempt to extrapolate this to the rest of the world. If you're not from the US you can view this as a curiosity, but it is not meant to be relevant to you.

maw• 15 years ago

For the modern adult, nothing signifies self-confidence, street credibility and authenticity like one simple confession: “I was such a nerd in high school.”

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

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

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

andrewvc2• 15 years ago

High school rewards people who socialize well, it doesn't punish kids for loving science. If you socialize well, you can 'get away' with being a CS major, hell, you can even make it cool. It just so happens plenty of nerds don't socialize well.

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

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

officemonkey2• 15 years ago

It's unfortunate that people can't be successful _in high school_ without socializing well. Fortunately, high school doesn't last forever. And, there are other ways to get a functioning adult without mass incarceration at a public school.

We talk about how high school is a problem, but improperly-socialized children is a parental failure. Most parents are quick to drop the children off at day care at six weeks old and then they wonder why high school is barely more civilized than a wolfpack.

I have a three-year old, and I will support any activity he wants to do (from fly fishing to perl hacking), but I will also make sure he's polite, articulate, and compassionate. If only all parents made that a priority.

andrewvc2• 15 years ago

Well, as great as being polite, articulate, and compassionate is, those attributes don't (necessarily) add up to cool in school. I don't think that's something parents can really teach.

ionfish• 15 years ago

> [I]mproperly-socialized children is [sic] a parental failure.

This is true in part, but far from the whole story. Parents feel a pressure to "drop the children off at day care at six weeks old" not because they don't want to participate in the upbringing of their children, but because they're under immense economic pressure to return to 'productive' work. Children are extremely time-consuming, so some level of parental abandonment is an unavoidable consequence of both parents working full time (or even part time).

The situation is even worse for single parents, especially with the social stigma that usually attaches to them regardless of their choice: either they go to work, and have abandoned their children, or stay at home, and are sponging off the state.

If we arrange our society in such a way that it's not economically viable for people who have children to spend time at home raising them, then they will be shoved off to daycare of some sort. Simple as that. (People are not going to stop having children.)

If we continue to fetishise so-called economically productive work to the exclusion of all other ends, and as a result, refuse to support families in an appropriate way, then this situation is just going to get worse.

biafra• 15 years ago

Is there really a coherence between giving children to daycare and improper socialization in the US?

I am sure there is none here in Germany.

cturner• 15 years ago

    High school rewards people who socialize well, it doesn't
    punish kids for loving science

What if we admitted this, and deliberately streamed kids by the way they socialised rather than an estimate of their aptitude? You could profile their social interaction, and then try and steer the group towards goals.

forensic• 15 years ago

It's called private school, unschooling, and homeschooling.

The public school system is about a century away from making changes that benefit the students rather than the bureaucrats.

khill• 15 years ago

If a school tried that, you would have parents complaining about the process because their child was placed into a "does not socialize well" track.

edw519• 15 years ago

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

loboman3• 15 years ago

Also, now people want to be somewhat disguised as nerds, using geeky gadgets and pretending to like computers (just because they like Facebook and MSN).

demian2• 15 years ago

That's an unfortunate trend.

But maybe there is a positive side to it. Maybe it's the beginning of a process that could end up making computer-related activities more mainstream. More accepted. More respected.

dstein2• 15 years ago

A lot of people are buying Macbook Pro's these days, and all I see them ever do is use them to read Facebook.

scott_s2• 15 years ago

How do you know they're pretending? Why can they not "like computers" in a different way than you do?

adamdecaf• 15 years ago

Many of the traits that correlate with “outsider” status among high school students — originality, self-awareness, courage, resilience, integrity and passion — reveal themselves as assets later in life.

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

jkuria2• 15 years ago

Indeed! That line also struck me as nothing but feel good platitude! Most nerds in high school lack self awareness, perhaps the reason they are social awkward. Integrity and passion are unrelated to being socially well adjusted and I'm not sure about courage and resilience!

elptacek• 15 years ago

"None of this, however, dampens the urgency of her broader message. “Adults tell students that it gets better, that the world changes after school, that being ‘different’ will pay off sometime after graduation,” she writes. “But no one explains to them why.” Beyond the bromides, she’s dead on: teenagers need to hear that adolescence ends. And more than that, they need to believe it."

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

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

j_baker2• 15 years ago

I think you should tell this to the bullies. That way they can tell their victims "Remember, I'm teaching you a valuable life lesson" after they're done beating them up and taking their lunch money.

Seriously though, being a social outcast isn't a valuable experience, nor is it healthy. It sucks, and it teaches you that your only options are to avoid the shitty people or suck it up as you put it. The reality is that you have a third option: being assertive. Believe it or not, you can make a shitty situation tolerable with a bit of honesty and frankness.

After all, there are going to be shitty people you can't avoid, and you'll explode if you just suck it up. But school doesn't teach geeks to do that. It teaches them to be docile and accept their shitty situation.

clintjhill• 15 years ago

Reading this made me think about the punk movement in music. In the beginning it was about being different. Real punk was anything that your parents and friends didn't like. It wasn't about the kind of music you were playing per se, rather about your attitude. Commercially and socially it didn't really take off. You can argue however that the attitude did. Some musicians started to adapt to the attitude in order to take advantage of the small "movement". Rebellion and individuality were what some went after.

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

localhost30002• 15 years ago

this "us against them" mentality seems to really be picking up steam these days. it doesn't make sense to me. for every "successful" computer geek there is a successful banker, lawyer, politician or any other traditionally mainstream-sexy profession. CEOs tend to be extremely charismatic...not exactly a trait associated with "revenge of the nerds."

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

Locke16894• 15 years ago

Actually, most of the people in those positions tend to be well educated and studious. This tends to not be popular in high school.

localhost30002• 15 years ago

you haven't spent much time with wall street types, have you? It's a lot of alpha-male, machismo, 'let's drink beers and tell dirty jokes' - which, in my experience, is pretty much in line with being "cool" as an adolescent. Your implication that being well-educated and popular are mutually exclusive is just plain false, at least where I grew up...

j_baker2• 15 years ago

I think the "us against them" mentality has always had steam, and will always have steam. Romans against Christians, Christians against Muslims, the US against Britain, the North against the South, democracy against communism...

I could go on and on...

WalterBright• 15 years ago

CroMagnons vs Neanderthals ... http://www.themandus.org/

meow• 15 years ago

Funny how the treatment varies across cultures. At least where I'm from, if some one is getting good grades/considered to be geeky, there will be a lot of "why can't you be more like him" comments from other parents.

billswift• 15 years ago

"From other parents" sure. It's the other kids that shut the geeks out. I always got along with adults better than my "peers".

sanswork• 15 years ago

The author spoken about in the article that wrote the book about "quirk theory" did an AMA on reddit not too long ago that you can find here http://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/h2ajd/i_invented_quirk...

keeptrying3• 15 years ago

What's amazing is that this kind of article is purely due to societal labeling.

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

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

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

marshray• 15 years ago

Maybe it's the mindset of the kinds of authors who write about such things, but it's interesting that this author seems to conflate kids with computer skills and homosexuals.

csomar3• 15 years ago

In India you would never have this kind of article because the students with the highest grades

There is something wrong here. Someone with high grades is not necessarily a geek. A geek will probably rank well and get good grades. I actually think, geeks will have not so good grades. That's because they are busy doing other things: like programming, or free-thinking.

In Tunisia, high school encourage stupidity. I can't imply the same for India, but I'm almost sure that it is the same case. With little intelligence, lot of hard (repetitive) work and sometimes private courses, you can get incredibly good results.

If someone has the highest grades in a high school that encourages stupidity, he is probably not a geek. There are more than Maths and Physics in high school. I doubt geeks will be interested in subjects that focus on dumb-memorization of a few sentences. This will decrease their rank.

I would like that you comment more about this subject, because I have been there (High School) and lived it.

shadowfox• 15 years ago

> In Tunisia, high school encourage stupidity

Can you elaborate on this? In what way does these high schools encourage stupidity. (I am also curious as to how these places encourage stupidity as opposed to, say, not encouraging creativity or something like that)

true_religion• 15 years ago

I disagree. When it comes to highschools in the United States, things are so viciously easy outside of the AP/IB track that you can sleep through class and still get a high B or low A.

It's anecdotal but its confirmed by foreign students that I know who came from abroad to begin schooling in the US.

keeptrying3• 15 years ago

First lets define nerds. I think there are basically 2 different sub categories but I think both still qualify as "nerds": 1. Students who care a lot about their academic achievements in school. 2. Students who fall in love with a subject: science, programming etc and spend time outside of school with these subjects. (May not have good grades)

In India, both these types would be thought of as "ahead of the pack". In both cases, in the US, these guys would be looked down upon in High School - "nerds".

You also talk about "memorisation". Well I've been around the top "memorisers" there are in India - ie the topmost ranking student of an education system which is solely memorisation based (the Tamil Nadu State Board). And one thing you wont understand until you meet these guys is that they are very very very hardworking. Memorisation is HARD WORK. Imagine having to memorise a whole book.

I've seen these guys do well in college too. Ie, they dont memorize everything.

jkuria2• 15 years ago

I also grew up in the third world and can attest to what you are saying. Kids who do well in school have status. They are generally not cool but they have status--no one persecutes them. It therefore surprises me to read an article like this one:

http://www.law.wisc.edu/blogs/wisblawg/2009/10/judge_olly_ne...

Thank god I didn't go to high school in the states! If I had gone to high school in the states and grown up 'african american' (I'm african) then I'd probably have had to diminish myself to fit in and not truly pursue the things I was interested in.

Now the kids who are good at sports, outgoing and confident (the cool kids) and who get the girls also have status, but if they are poor academically they also tend to have a chip on their shoulder. Here is one such kid blogging about it years later...

http://ngethustar.blogspot.com/2006/06/mangu-high-school.htm...

loboman3• 15 years ago

I'm from Argentina, and high school is (or used to be) a nightmare for nerds here. At least it was for me.

ilamont• 15 years ago

"Cafeteria fringe". I think a lot of us can identify.

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

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

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

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

mhooks2• 15 years ago

I think it's important to tell nerds "it gets better." Better still, tell them to get a GED, form a company, and sell a product. Go to college if you really want to. Just get the hell out of HS.

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

zavulon• 15 years ago

> I think it's important to tell nerds "it gets better." Better still, tell them to get a GED, form a company, and sell a product. Go to college if you really want to. Just get the hell out of HS.

If you're implying nerds should be home-schooled before college, I disagree. As unfortunate situation as it is with high school being a big popularity contest, if you acknowledge it and work hard on social skills, you can succeed. Just have to spend time on sports and socializing, and not 100% behind the computer. And if you enter college without any real-life social skills, that's going to be a disaster.

The earlier in life you learn social skills, the better. When I have kids, I'm definitely going to spend a lot of time teaching them that.

bdunbar• 15 years ago

I have five kids. Three went to public schools, the two youngest were home schooled from an early age. One of that latter set elected to attend the local high school - he wanted to wrestle and they offer the engineering focused curriculum he wants.

The idea that home-schooled kids aren't socialized properly is a myth.

All of my kids have friends, attend church, tear around the neighborhood. Are there stereotyped 'home school' kids? Sure. In my experience they are a very small minority.

mhooks2• 15 years ago

That's not what I was suggesting. Send them to public school, or private, or home school them. The socialization argument is a bunch of horse shit though. There are plenty of ways to meet people.

What I'm saying is that if the four years of high school is pain, get the GED and go to college, or if you're a geek join the work force as a consultant, or both. High school is only useful for people who really want to be there. College (community or state) will accept a GED, has plenty of social opportunities, and you can control your education more granularly.

No one in the real world cares about your high school grades or what letter was on your jacket.

sid0• 15 years ago

What do you consider as poor social skills, if I may ask? I spent most of my time in high school behind the computer, and never played sports (I find sports not mentally stimulating enough relative to the effort). I'm pretty introverted, don't like associating with a large number of people, would rather write code half the time and play video games half the time on a Friday night than going out to a club, hate socializing, and simply cannot make small talk.

However I'd be willing to talk about computers, maths, and philosophy and logic all day long, and I also seem to be good at finding people who're somewhat like me. Maybe it's just my luck, but through high school and college, I've never not been able to find at least a few people who're interested in most of the same stuff I'm interested in, even as my interests have changed.

In other words, I'm a typical nerd with what would I suspect traditionally be called poor social skills -- yet I'm pretty happy with whatever social skills I have, and it's overall been far from a disaster.

edit: note that this wasn't an American high school, and I remember others just letting me be.

lhnz• 15 years ago

Socializing too deeply early on at school is often a disadvantage in later life; the best successes are those with raw talents that learnt to socialise out of school.

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

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

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

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

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

conradev2• 15 years ago

I like how 'nerd' is always associated with 'anti-social'. Doesn't a nerd's success hinge on their ability to create social networks for themselves?

cstavish2• 15 years ago

I was a "closeted" geek in my high school until people found out I had made $15k in a few months off my Cydia Store iOS tweaks. My classmates responded positively, which is understandable. However, most of my classmates don't care that I'm a passionate programmer, or was one long before I started to make money. Most of my classmates simply view me a success from a monetary standpoint. I don't think geeks are necessarily becoming respected in droves by their peers; if anything, people are now recognizing that geeks have the potential for great success. For example, most of my classmates (again, most), would probably not respond positively to another, hypothetical geek student who is a brilliant programmer and prolific free software contributor. They would likely ridicule him or her for not trying to make money.

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

conradev2• 15 years ago

My exact story.

Before I started making things for profit everyone just saw me as extremely good with computers. After people found out I made XX dollars, everyone started calling me the overly clichéd "next [Steve Jobs|Mark Zuckerberg]".

Because of this, I prefer not to give out sales figures anymore. When classmates ask how many people have bought my products, I respond "A good amount." and leave it at that. Being called the next Steve Jobs by someone is being alienated by that person.

cstavish2• 15 years ago

Merely by becoming a programmer, you have alienated yourself in a sense. The most successful people in the world have alienated themselves. They are outliers. Superlative compliments can be alienating in a positive sense. Comments like "Dude, wtf? How do you find the time to do that s---? Are trying to be the next [famous technology-related individual]?" are alienating in a negative sense and convey disapproval. Some environments reward individuality; others ridicule it. Unfortunately, it seems that you have experienced more of the latter than I have.

georgieporgie3• 15 years ago

When students buckle under that weight, tragedies happen (the Columbine shootings; the recent spate of suicides among gay teenagers).

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

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

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

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

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

xiaoma2• 15 years ago

Did you know any of the people involved or live in Littleton at the time? What's your source of expertise on this subject?

I find it very reasonable that even people with a predisposition towards violence are strongly affected by how they're treated. How would having coins thrown at you by the popular kids and regularly taunted not have an effect?

georgieporgie3• 15 years ago

See the NPR link and the associated book.

nitrogen• 15 years ago

Do you intend to suggest that anyone having an interest in explosives is predisposed to shooting up a school? All the pyrotechnics and rocketry nerds could do without this stigma. You also seem to willing to impugn the fundamental nature of these kids instead of considering how they became that way. One approach would lead to a witchhunt to root out all the "born bad seeds," harming innocent outcasts in the process. The other approach leads to attempts to understand and prevent kids from reaching the mental state where they would be willing to commit such heinous acts.

georgieporgie3• 15 years ago

You should try reading what I wrote without projecting ridiculous assertions onto it.

snikolov• 15 years ago

I consider myself very lucky that 1) I've always been big and athletic since elementary school and 2) that I went to a high school with other really smart people where people were known and respected for being smart. Hence, I don't really remember being picked on, except for a couple of minor instances in elementary and middle school. I'm glad I could never relate to the stereotypical midwestern US high school culture that's always on TV and in the movies.

Why Nerds Succeed‎

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