www.paulgraham.com/nerds.html
This was easy to do, because kids only ate lunch with others of about the same popularity. A tables were full of football players and cheerleaders and so on. We were not being especially candid to grade ourselves as D. Everyone in the school knew exactly how popular everyone else was, including us. By the end of high school I was sufficiently acceptable that one of the recognized class beauties agreed to go on a date with me. I know a lot of people who were nerds in school, and they all tell the same story: there is a strong correlation between being smart and being a nerd, and an even stronger inverse correlation between being a nerd and being popular. To someone in school now, that may seem an odd question to ask. The mere fact is so overwhelming that it may seem strange to imagine that it could be any other way. Being smart doesn't make you an outcast in elementary school. Nor, as far as I can tell, is the problem so bad in most other countries. But in a typical American secondary school, being smart is likely to make your life difficult. The key to this mystery is to rephrase the question slightly. If they're so smart, why don't they figure out how popularity works and beat the system, just as they do for standardized tests? One argument says that this would be impossible, that the smart kids are unpopular because the other kids envy them for being smart, and nothing they could do could make them popular. If the other kids in junior high school envied me, they did a great job of concealing it. And in any case, if being smart were really an enviable quality, the girls would have broken ranks. In the schools I went to, being smart just didn't matter much. All other things being equal, they would have preferred to be on smart side of average rather than the dumb side, but intelligence counted far less than, say, physical appearance, charisma, or athletic ability. So if intelligence in itself is not a factor in popularity, why are smart kids so consistently unpopular? The answer, I think, is that they don't really want to be popular. If someone had told me that at the time, I would have laughed at them. Being unpopular in school makes kids miserable, some of them so miserable that they commit suicide. Telling me that I didn't want to be popular would have seemed like telling someone dying of thirst in a desert that he didn't want a glass of water. Not simply to do well in school, though that counted for something, but to design beautiful rockets, or to write well, or to understand how to program computers. At the time I never tried to separate out my wants and weigh them against one another. If I had, I would have seen that being smart was the more important. If someone had offered me the chance to be the most popular kid in school, but only at the price of being of average intelligence (humor me here), I wouldn't have taken it. Much as they suffer from their unpopularity, I don't think many nerds would. To them the thought of average intelligence is unbearable. Even for someone in the eightieth percentile (assuming, as everyone seemed to then, that intelligence is a scalar), who wouldn't drop thirty points in exchange for being loved and admired by everyone? They want to be popular, certainly, but they want even more to be smart. And popularity is not something you can do in your spare time, not in the fiercely competitive environment of an American secondary school. Navy SEALs and neurosurgery residents seem slackers by comparison. An American teenager may work at being popular every waking hour, 365 days a year. Some of them truly are little Machiavellis, but what I really mean here is that teenagers are always on duty as conformists. For example, teenage kids pay a great deal of attention to clothes. Other kids' opinions become their definition of right, not just for clothes, but for almost everything they do, right down to the way they walk. And so every effort they make to do things right'' is also, consciously or not, an effort to be more popular. In general, people outside some very demanding field don't realize the extent to which success depends on constant (though often unconscious) effort. For example, most people seem to consider the ability to draw as some kind of innate quality, like being tall. In fact, most people who "can draw" like drawing, and have spent many hours doing it; Likewise, popular isn't just something you are or you aren't, but something you make yourself. The main reason nerds are unpopular is that they have other things to think about. Their attention is drawn to books, or the natural world, not fashions and parties. They're like someone trying to play soccer while balancing a glass of water on his head. Other players who can focus their whole attention on the game beat them effortlessly, and wonder why they seem so incapable. Even if nerds cared as much as other kids about popularity, being popular would be more work for them. The popular kids learned to be popular, and to want to be popular, the same way the nerds learned to be smart, and to want to be smart: from their parents. While the nerds were being trained to get the right answers, the popular kids were being trained to please. So far I've been finessing the relationship between smart and nerd, using them as if they were interchangeable. In a typical American school, standards for coolness are so high (or at least, so specific) that you don't have to be especially awkward to look awkward by comparison. Few smart kids can spare the attention that popularity requires. Unless they also happen to be good looking, natural athletes, or siblings of popular kids, they'll tend to become nerds. And that's why smart people's lives are worst between, say, the ages of eleven and seventeen. Life at that age revolves far more around popularity than before or after. Before that, kids' lives are dominated by their parents, not by other kids. Kids do care what their peers think in elementary school, but this isn't their whole life, as it later becomes. Around the age of eleven, though, kids seem to start treating their family as a day job. They create a new world among themselves, and standing in this world is what matters, not standing in their family. Indeed, being in trouble in their family can win them points in the world they care about. The problem is, the world these kids create for themselves is at first a very crude one. If you leave a bunch of eleven year olds to their own devices, what you get is The Lord of the Flies. Like a lot of American kids, I read this book in school. Presumably someone wanted to point out to us that we were savages, and that we had made ourselves a cruel and stupid world. While the book seemed entirely believable, I didn't get the additional message. I wish they had just told us outright that we were savages and our world was stupid. Nerds would find their unpopularity more bearable if it merely caused them to be ignored. Unfortunately, to be unpopular in school is to be actively persecuted. Once again, anyone currently in school might think this a strange question to ask. Partly it's because teenagers are still half children, and many children are just intrinsically cruel. Some torture nerds for the same reason they pull the legs off spiders. Another reason kids persecute nerds is to make themselves feel better. When you tread water, you lift yourself up by pushing water down. Likewise, in any social hierarchy, people unsure of their own position will try to emphasize it by maltreating those they think rank below. I've read that this is why poor whites in the United States are the group most hostile to blacks. But I think the main reason other kids persecute nerds is that it's part of the mechanism of popularity. Popularity is only partially about individual attractiveness. To become more popular, you need to be constantly doing things that bring you close to other popular people, and nothing brings people closer than a common enemy. Like a politician who wants to distract voters from bad times at home, you can create an enemy if there isn't a real one. By singling out and persecuting a nerd, a group of kids from higher in...
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