Re: Why Nerds are Unpopular
paulgraham.com
paulgraham.com
Maybe this is one part of the explaination, since nerds are more likely to enjoy solitary activities.
edit : if you just want your children to avoid the nightmare you have endured yourself, they don't need to seek popularity but only respect. All it takes to earn respect is some character. The interesting part is : how to help them develop this trait ?
edit2 : I cannot find it on Wikipedia, but the extended biography of Arthur Conan Doyle might give a hint. If I recall correctly, he interrupted his studies for one year and engaged in a journey on a fishing boat who was hunting whales in Antartic (or was it North Pole ?). While it doesn't sound very romantic, it is known that when he went back from his trip, he wasn't the same man. The former inexistant shy guy (probably a nerd) became famous on the campus because of it's popularity among female students (he was known as dating multiple girls at once).
Who knows what happened during his journey, but it was definitly very formative. He didn't do any "dumb stuff" to become popular, and didn't even seek to become popular, but he just returned as a different man.
Where I went to high school, the way people were treated was not a function of character. Think about all the people who've been maltreated at school. Are you saying it was because they all lacked character?
What was interesting about my experience was that - while I was indeed a nerd - I was at the same time considered "cool" by many (I wore my hair long and dressed in an outlandish manner) but the majority of kids there did not like or respect me.
Could you be more specific about what you mean with "character"?
One way to make nerds more popular is to make more of a big deal of that kind of activity. For those of us who were high school nerds, what about sponsoring math and science competitions for high school students? I'm remembering a conversation I had recently with a friend who teaches CS at the local university. He had organized some sort of programming competition for high school students. Even $500 to be used as prize money would go a long way to enhancing the prestige of something like that and of the kids who participate in it.
PG had some good points in his essay and follow-up. The kids he's talking about aren't just some random nobodies - they're US a few years ago.
After I graduated my (private) high school spent several million dollars in redoing the football field. They even put down artificial turf. And they stopped preping kids for the CS AP test. [sigh]
Unfortunately, as you astutely point out, football and other sports bring in "big crowds paying lots of money" -- something that academic competitions can't bring in. There isn't a National Computer Science League that gets televised each Sunday. American football exists as an American high school institution precisely because mainstream American culture heavily advertises and hypes it.
I'd love to see schools make sports subservient to academics, but I fear it'll never happen purely for financial reasons.
I found that I could think more clearly, could sleep better at night, and was more awake during the day during the swim season. In other words, while I was in shape and health my mental abilities and general well-being improved. I would not have really internalized this lesson unless I experienced it first hand.
Sports have a place in school. It helped me learn some social skills, the value of physical activity, and that there can be a life outside of a computer. I was a pretty good swimmer (won more than I lost), but I was by far the worst on the team. I didn't gain any popularity by swimming. This falls in line with what PG said; you have to be a good athlete to gain popularity from sports.
This isn't to say that I like how important sports are in school, but they have a place. So yeah, reduce the importance of sports but I wouldn't be in favor of eliminating them.
Two main reasons, from what I can tell: 1) most (if not all) quality employers require a degree; 2) parents feel (and often are) incapable of teaching advanced material.
If you're a true student of PG, you're now dying to say 'but what about being around other smart kids'? Answer (limiting our scope to high school for the moment): home schoolers are frequently around other smart kids. Home schooling doesn't mean that children are locked in their houses all day every day. Home schooling doesn't mean learning on an island. It's more like learning in a chain of islands, with frequent trips to the others. And since the parents of home schooled children are (by self-selection) those that tend to care more about their child's intellectual development (and can afford the means), the average home schooler is at least better-read (if not better 'educated') than the average high schooler.
Also, when you home school, you can accomplish things about twice as fast, which frees up the rest of your day to get your kids out into the real world (something kids locked up on a high school campus all day every day see much less often). If Johnny prefers, he could read more too (which is often the case).
So could high school if it were done right.
I'm not going to hold my breath waiting for public schools in South Florida to get it right. They're among the worst in the nation, and given our means, I feel it would be an irresponsible choice to off-load my daughter to those places. (We cannot afford private school to the tune of $12,000 / year ... although I could argue that home schooling is better than even those places [I went to one]).
And while parents probably aren't capable of homeschooling their kids through college, unless said kids end up at one of the few top colleges for their field in the country, they might be better off learning the material on their own and using the extra time and money to socialize with other interesting individuals.
http://us.st12.yimg.com/us.st.yimg.com/I/paulgraham_2002_296...
It probably also helped that when you're in a graduating class of 32, there are no labels. Everybody's an individual, because there aren't enough people to form useful abstractions around social groups.
My middle school years were like this, which makes me think that the natural order in a public school tends toward the social system the article describes.
One group that was notably absent was the super-smart outcast nerd group. There were a few people who looked and acted like stereotypical socially inept nerds, but they weren't actually very smart. Sadly, when I think back, the people in that group (we're talking like 3-5 people) were probably dealing with weird stuff that mostly happens in rural communities, like semi-abusive parents involved with cultish religions. Most of the smart people who went on to do interesting things were either relatively popular, and if not explicitly "popular" they still had friends and weren't really picked on.
Basically, we had our group of friends, everyone else left us alone, and that was that. Even when we did really nerdy/geeky stuff like play Magic the Gathering at lunch, haha. In our school the popular people focused on being popular, the true nerds focused on getting good grades, and nerds like me who just didn't care focused on sleeping and graduating with the worst GPA possible while self-schooling in the evenings. Everyone just kept to themselves, more or less.
The nerd gets in a good punch, and the fight eventually gets broken up, but not until the nerd has been through a nice, fat beating.
I'm going to guess that you were a pretty good fighter, because in many of the public schools around San Francisco (no, folks, it's not all peace and love here) you could get seriously pounded for that.
The movies love to push this asinine, feel good notion that bullies are really cowards at heart, and all you need to do is crack them in the nose once and they start mewing like little kittens. What crap. You punch a local badass, he'll punch your ass 100 times. You better be ready to back that shit up. I'm not kidding.
1) It was the middle of class and apparently he cared more about getting suspended than I did at that moment in time. I somehow had perfect timing because the teacher was writing something on the board right as I hit him.
2) Something I learned long before seeing Fight Club is that most normal people will do anything to avoid a fight. You're right that punching a bully once doesn't mean he's going to run away and cry, but there's a probability of it.
The key, I think, is learning who the true "badasses" are and who the guys are who just want you to think they're bad. You make examples out of them because they're not going to retaliate. So, in this case, it wasn't a fight in the classic sense. I popped him, he threatened me, then sat down and shut up. I never had an issue with him again.
In other instances I have made the mistake of thinking someone wasn't going to retaliate when in fact they had every intention. This can be problematic when the other guy is, say, a college football line-backer. In times like these, one must take advantage of the environment and use implements such as bar stools to one's advantage.
My Drill Sergeant always said, "If you find yourself in a fair fight, you've done something wrong."
I stopped being picked on by the end of middle school, and even had a neutral or positive reputation in HS, but I can still totally relate to Paul's essay. I hated high school and middle school. People think I'm joking when I describe it as a "jail". But HS wasn't so bad socially for me -- my group of friends were more "outsiders" and not "unpopular", and we did things like publishing an underground newspaper and pulling pranks. My friends and my computer were the only reason HS was bearable.
EDIT: Paul addresses your objection in the "I knew smart kids who weren't nerds" section of http://paulgraham.com/renerds.html
However, I do think that America is unique in that the rest of the world values brains, but the US seems to instinctively distrust it.
My own totally unscientific pop psychology theory is as follows:
I lived in Germany for a few years. It is easy to sense a lot of national guilt. Dark history, I'll try to avoid Godwin. So modern day Germans are not as care free flag happy as other nations.
Now consider how patriotic Americans are. Now think about American history, there have been some great high points. But what about all the low points, just of the top of my head:
- Pox blankets. Read up on the story of Ishi the last Yahi.
- Slavery.
- Vietnam.
- Etc.
So can you be both deep and happy go lucky patriotic in America? I am not saying no American should be proud of their country. In fact, I think America has done a lot good. But American pride can be complicated if you know too much. So maybe that's why there's this almost reflexive anti-intellectualism?
This is an impossible question to answer. It depends too much on the definitions of "deep" and "patriotic"... words which are fuzzy enough to span continents. "Patriot", in particular, is almost impossible to define objectively... you start out with some reasonable definition, and ten minutes later you discover -- possibly to your horror -- that the word has shifted to mean "someone who supports my position on Issue X". Everyone agrees that George Washington was, objectively, a patriot -- except for his Tory contemporaries.
But, if we insist on trying to answer this unanswerable question, my answer would have to be "yes". Give me one or another popularly-accepted definition of "happy-go-lucky patriot" and "intellectual" and I'll bet you we can find plenty of people who fit both categories.
However, I still think that if you're a bit of an airhead and someone drops a knowledge bomb about the darkest parts of US history on you. It will take some time before you can reason out why the ideals of America are absolutely still worth fighting for. That or you go into cognitive dissonance.
American culture values action and results more than intellect. But it's hardly an anti-intellectual country. Such focus on action and results implies it's anti-navel-gazing/anti-analysis-paralysis which are things that often go hand-in-hand with intellectualism. But intellectualism which gets results always has respect in America.
Vietnam? at least we have the guts to go to war. Europe didn't and they got their asses handed to them, we then bailed them out.
Pox blankets? stupid or asinine (I'm not looking it up. Your probably referring to us infecting the 'Native Americans') but I'm sure we aren't the first to do something like that.
Being an actual American... I don't see that we are all that patriotic.
Vietnam? No Europe first. Europe didn't go to war. The Germans went to war. Most of the German war machine was on the Eastern front, you didn't bail the soviets out. And while you helped the Brits a lot, I dare you to say you bailed them out to their face.
Now on to Vietnam, who or what exactly were you fighting there? International communism? As someone who was born behind the iron curtain, I HATE commies more then any American ever will. And yet I would not drop napalm on anyone in any effort to fight commies. It is not worth it me. Obviously we disagree on that.
Pox blankets true fact. Massacres, countless. If at some point you do bother to look deep into that part of US history, you may just never look at your country the same way again.
Having been around the world and currently living in America, Americans are of the, if not the, most nationalistic of all the western nations.
Not that is necessarily a bad thing. My point is, you can and should be proud of America. But it is more complicated if you are fully cognizant of the fine details of US history.
Berserker rage is not specifically an American problem; it is a human problem. So an American will not feel bad about being an American because of things like this; he will feel bad about being a human. He will tend to work to prevent America from engaging in this sort of behavior again but the past is the past.
[1] Listen from 22:22 onward through "Act 3": http://thisamericanlife.org/Radio_Episode.aspx?episode=195
[2] and/or read this: http://www.chicagoreader.com/features/stories/archive/losing...
[3] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/King_Philips_War
EDIT: Such berserker rages and violence are not justified but they do happen and it's worth understanding the pattern if you want to make the world a better place.
That reminds me of a brilliant quote from the Vietnam-era fighter pilots, who were at the time dropping Agent Orange on the country-side.
Original: "Remember, kids, only you can prevent forest fires."
Pilot: "Remember, boys, only you can prevent forests."Well, outside of Euro Cup finals week, sure...
Speaking as a Jamaican, most people view Americans as very patriotic.
There are hacks to the process -- there are activities that take a lot of time and brains, but tend to make you "cooler" within the HS world. For me it was creating a rock band with friends.
That experience was huge -- that's where I learned the basics of audio engineering and recording, learned to work effectively in a group, wrote software to organize my collection of guitar music, started learning the basics of music theory and so on. Until I quit my job to work full-time on my startup those experiences were still driving me -- I was working in a company writing pro-audio software.
The thing was, that still made it possible to be "cool" without "wasting time".
My advice: just pretend that you're cool. First impressions and body language matter a lot. It works for my friend, too. She's a small girl, but big, loud, obnoxious Wall St. traders are intimidated by her when she walks into a meeting. She exudes a self-confidence that makes them shut up and listen. If it works for a skinny nerd and a 5ft girl, it's gotta work for you dweebs, too.
High school sucks. But then you graduate. High school is a geographic coincidence.
Or you can see this from existentialism like Martin Heidegger's idea about a carpenter himself can't distinguish himself from his tools. He just can perform carpentry effortlessly.
To be truly smart, you need to develop both sides, both skill sets. You should be able to dress well and yet know the Earth's distance from the Sun. The true smart is a round thing.
There is something in what you say, but I think this goes too far. Think about some of the people you're claiming aren't truly smart.
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I—
I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference.
- Robert Frost
You'd still be unpopular, but you'd care a lot less.
It is popularly interpreted literally, as inspirational and individualist, but critics universally interpret it as ironic
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Road_Not_Taken
Repeatedly Thomas would choose a route which might enable him to show his American friend a rare plant or a special vista; but it often happened that before the end of such a walk Thomas would regret the choice he had made and would sigh over what he might have shown Frost if they had taken a "better" direction. More than once, on such occasions, the New Englander had teased his Welsh-English friend for those wasted regrets. . . . Frost found something quaintly romantic in sighing over what might have been. Such a course of action was a road never taken by Frost, a road he had been taught to avoid.
"Though as for that the passing there
Had worn them really about the same,"
I guess this explains it.
"and having perhaps the better claim/ because it was grassy and wanted wear"
to me that means that like every person wants to go were many haven't...
with the addition of "though as for that, the passing there/had worn them really about the same"
i make the conclusion that because ppl want to go were many havent, the paths have worn the same because as soon as one path appears less worn, people travel on it. on that basis the two paths have worn the same.
i have no experience with poems and im just writing a paper on this one and saw this post. hopefully my insight is helpful. take care.!
I'm curious how you found that out initially. I'm more focused on quantitative fields and would love to learn more about the liberal arts.
I prefer the popular interpretation.
I also prefer the opinions of civilians over "critics".
(Perhaps with a poem.) :)
through thickets through traveled thought,
without wisdom wearily won
we trip, we tumble, we flop
Missing Meaning Men Meander
Wanting Wonder Where Wonder Wanes
Musical Mirrors Mussing Meaningless Means
I read that poem by high school. I knew what it meant, and took the road less traveled by. Of course, it wasn't that this poem was guiding me all along, but the metaphor applied. And I'm proud of what I accomplished in high school.
However, I still had a shitty time. High school was a metric ass-ton of shit...being the only dude trying to get into a good college was a very unpleasant high-school experience, rationalizations notwithstanding. You can't escape those four years when you're going through them, and self-talk is not very helpful.
Your mileage may vary, and I hope it does.
I have a 15 month old: http://flickr.com/photos/abbyalexandra/2617520542/in/photost...
I think I can teach him everything he needs to know about math, science and computer science. It would make sense to do this with others, because learning is a collaborative beast.
I have more education than the majority of science and math teachers (except coursework in education itself - though I tutored for 10 years).
Why don't more adults get together in loose organizations to teach their kids? I'm talking about the technorati here, not the average person who is less capable than the teachers I've had.
Do people avoid this because of the time it would take? Do they think the socialization process of schooling is too important to miss?
Practically speaking, how do you sort through the parents? Background checks? Live video feeds?
I have some time to worry about this, but I'd be very interested in the possibilities.
There would certainly be a large time requirement.
Having such a resourceful/talented bunch of people with common concerns, one could expect to see us grow something to adress this concerns, at least a forum kinda place where we could replicate HN news to parenting related stuff, what do you think? (all concerned)
You do not have to do dumb stuff to become popular. Also being an athlete or better looking than the average person does not make you dumb. That is simply a stereotype.
As for the rest of the article I agree with it.
EDIT: Smart kids are unpopular simply because they spend as much time as any other kid focused on what they love, and what they love IS unpopular.
And this related to what their society values. It happens that the western society largely values sports and beauty. This is reflected in models' salaries, as well as athletes' compared to the earnings of a physics' professor .
If you are from a society that values education more than entertainment, then smart kids are the popular ones.
He does say it automatically makes you popular, and I'm not sure I agree with that. Better make sure you're a good athlete in football if you're south of the Mason-Dixon line.
This implies that people who are popular spend their time doing dumb stuff.
ANd who are those popular ones? If you're good looking, a natural athlete, or the sibling of a popular kid, you'll automatically be popular .
So if people who are popular do dumb things then they are dumb , since smart people do not waste time doing dumb things.
^ The sentence immediately after the one you quoted. Being good looking, a natural athlete, or a sibling of a popular kid is a way to be popular WITHOUT doing anything, that is, without doing all the dumb stuff that all the other people have to do to be popular. Hence he's not implying that good-looking or athletic people are automatically doing dumb stuff, but rather, they get out of doing it based on their looks or athletic ability. The ugly, nonathletic people are presumably the ones who would have to do a lot of dumb things to work their way to being popular.
In many european countries universities are a kind of extension of public school with all its flaws, only more chaotic. So those PhDs who go on to become civil servants in the ministry of education are people who, in a sense, never left school.
Their entire system of reference is shaped by entrenched ideologies, 18th century philosophy and political party loyalties. They are not researchers competent to design a modern education system.
The real difference is that most European and Asian countries use tracking ( http://www.vdare.com/Sailer/080622_paradox.htm ). Forcing all students onto the same curriculum makes no one better off. Less apt kids don't learn the skills that would actually be useful to them. The nerds have their courses dumbed down, and earn the hatred of the kids who receive poor grades.
Local school boards do not actually have that much control. Have you noticed how schools have nearly the same basic structure everywhere? Education PHD's have an enormous influence because they control the education schools. That influence has been almost entirely pernicious. Plus they have a lot of control over curriculum requirements that come down from the state and federal boards of education. Teachers unions have an enormous amount of power and are also a national organization.
One more under-reported factor is the Supreme Court decision in the 1970's that made school discipline much, much harder to enforce. Read "The World We Created at Hamiliton High" ( http://www.amazon.com/World-We-Created-Hamilton-High/dp/0674... ) to see the chaos that ensued as a result this "student rights" decision.
~70% of kids quit sports entirely before entering HS, and the vast majority of HS teams aren't even remotely good. Even on the best teams in the country, the ones that consistently get athletes recruited by top colleges and send guys to the jr. national team, the majority of the guys on the roster will still be mediocre at best.
All of the evidence (c.f. Alfie Kohn) seems to suggest that competition would only make education worse. But even if you wanted to reinterpret the data, looking to athletics as a model of success would be a mistake.
I have fond memories of high school, but perhaps because I took just one class there while attending college classes and the local math and science center. Still, I "felt" popular at high school: people knew my name, said hi, were nice. Contrasted with my experiences at the math and science center: there folks weren't as friendly and bitter rivalries seemed to run amok.
My high school was uber-immigrant (I'd estimate about 5-10% of the kids were born in Canada, everyone else being a first-gen immigrant), and groups were divided primarily by grade, then by ethnicity, religion and regionality, then by activity (drama, music, sport, math etc) so it was almost impossible to form cliques, judge cross-group popularity etc. But it wasn't that bad either, it was actually pretty easy to move within groups - got to know people through playing music, through volleyball, hanging out with the other eastern europeans etc.
You know what those PhDs look like Paul? They remind people of the "Nerds" that had trouble settling in. They remind people of misfits. They also remind people of the "guy who know it all but can't make a good decision".
My Business professor told me once: "The Business school taught students how to make decisions". That is something that separates business students and science students. Science students argue (too much) based on science in which sometime not applicable or whatnot while Business students make a decision.
PS: I'm from CS background.
PS I bet most of the science faculty at your school had written loads of journal articles etc. How many of the business faculty were self-made millionaires?
- Does it matter if one is a self-made or paid-by as long as you're a millionaires?
- Does money matter much for you? Once you get 10 millions, does 100 millions matter a lot?
For concerned fathers, I would recommend finding some side activity, preferably sports, that help socializing. Yes, you have to put time and effort. Children responde well if it's not imposed but chosen, parents play with them and it's presented not only as a physical challenge, but also as a mind game. Sports can also be "hacked". Also there's music.
Charter schools (privately run, publicly funded) seem to be even worse than normal public schools. I think I'd sooner have all free schooling be federally controlled than have it all be charter schools.
The other option is to abolish publicly funded schooling altogether.
Perhaps the solution is not to abolish public schooling altogether, but to work on actually improving it. Perhaps improving the quality of teachers would do the job better.
I know it's a popular talking point by teachers unions angling for more money, but I don't think it's really a solution.
Improving the process also matters, and we even know how to do it (Direct Instruction). It is effective even when used by low quality teachers. Unfortunately, it's also dead in the water since teachers unions don't like it.
Keep in mind that the labor pool is controlled by a cartel. Remove the certificate (and other) requirements and you have a very large pool. Allow people with specialties to teach part time, and you could get some very good people.
One of the suggestions from that article was that to improve teaching quality, it might be worth offering a flat (higher than the current 1st-year and lower than the current 10th-year) salary to encourage people to try teaching for a couple of years after uni (since the salary would then be decent right away). This would also discourage people from clinging on to the job unless they really like it.
This is certainly not a solution that teachers' unions would advocate, but I suspect it could produce some positive effects, assuming the study I mentioned was correct, and assuming part of the problem is indeed the fact that many people who could be great teachers don't bother because they pay is very bad at the beginning and they can go and be bankers instead.
Of course I'm not an expert on this, so my theories may be wide off the mark, but I don't accept the idea that the pool of existing teachers can't be improved. I suspect that one of the reasons why private schools are indeed better than public schools is precisely that they can afford better teachers.
As for teachers' unions... I have little respect for a professional organisation that works against its own professional aim. I'm sure they can be taken care of in some way or another.
I remember reading an article in Time magazine "Why Teachers Hate Parents" (2005). I was fairly shocked back then to read why teachers hate their job: Parents. The article was helpfully blog-copied; it is a good read, even though it probably uses more extreme examples of "helicopter parents"
"Ask teachers about the best part of their job, and most will say how much they love working with kids. Ask them about the most demanding part, and they will say dealing with parents. In fact, a new study finds that of all the challenges they face, new teachers rank handling parents at the top. According to preliminary results from the MetLife Survey of the American Teacher, made available exclusively to TIME, parent management was a bigger struggle than finding enough funding or maintaining discipline or enduring the toils of testing. It's one reason, say the Consortium for Policy Research in Education and the Center for the Study of Teaching and Policy, that 40% to 50% of new teachers leave the profession within five years. Even master teachers who love their work, says Harvard education professor Sara Lawrence-Lightfoot, call this "the most treacherous part of their jobs."
"At the most disturbing extreme are the parents who like to talk about values but routinely undermine them. "You get savvier children who know how to get out of things," says a second-grade teacher in Murfreesboro, Tenn. "Their parents actually teach them to lie to dodge their responsibilities." Didn't get your homework done? That's O.K. Mom will take the fall. Late for class? Blame it on Dad."
http://forums.atozteacherstuff.com/showthread.php?t=8834&...
My main objection to the idea of "hire better teachers" is that I don't think the people who would "go and be bankers" would necessarily be good teachers. It's a completely different skill set. I'm a good programmer and researcher, but I'm an adequate teacher at best. There isn't much benefit in attracting me to teaching.
Also, teacher pay is actually quite good when include benefits, tenure, multiply by (12 months per year/9 months of work) and add in the value of 3 months vacation.
Really? Anecdotally, the one's I know of seem to be better. There are some like Kipp or Amistad Academy that have worked miracles in the inner city. From articles I've read that look at test scores at all charter schools, they do about the same as their public counterparts.
I'd say the US is pretty good. Generally ppl are left to be who they are. Its very homogeneous societies like Japan and Korea that have the worst problems. The pressure to conform is high and everyone gangs up on victims.
Its considered a huge issue that can drive kids to commit suicide.
Traditional knowledge has its place, but so does criticism and reasoned judgment and new ideas, and schools are not designed to facilitate the rationalist, liberal approach.
If the role of a teacher was seen as helping the student in ways the student prefers, as if the student were a customer, it would drastically improve the classroom aspect of schools.
There are also a wide variety of smaller problems. For example, many lessons focus on solutions to old problems without enough explanation of what the problem was or why it was important to people. For someone who doesn't understand the problem situation a solution attempts to address, that solution is uninteresting.
Edit: Unless you are joking.