Why Nerds Are Unpopular

Mind you this wasnt hard when at my (australian state) school's idea of "popular" was a middle class bogan who liked Cold Chisel and thought it was cool to wear acid wash jeans and get into fights. Moyyte.

*realises this may only make sense to the Aussies/Kiwis on the bb*

From my experiences the Nerds were the losers, and they were the ones that were playing a game less similar to life than the other kids.

isn't that kinda obvious? why is there an essay to point it out?

As opposed to "smart" or "bookish" or "scientifically geeky" specifically, maybe.

An example: at my high school, in the year above me, the most popular guy (and school captain) was an absolute maths and physics wizz, excelled in his exams, was great at debating and current events, and was a spotty, unattractive beanpole that by the "image" standard, one would label "a nerd".

So was he a nerd anyway 'cause he looked like one and was smart, or not a nerd 'cause he was popular? Hmm.

this is relevant (maybe): http://www.catandgirl.com/view.cgi?94

Aw man.

Sour grapes bullshitbullshit that totally *downplays* the fact that social skills are actually an important element of human functioning, and people had better develop them sooner or later (haha like any of us interweb mentalists are ones to speak though)

Bush and Hussein do well enough without them -- more's the pity.

1) I've seen theories that suggest that there are several different types of intelligence. Nerds may be smart at math or literature or other academic subjects, but they may be lacking in emotional intelligence.

2) It's possible that the nerds don't want to be in with the in crowd. When I was growing up I knew girls who were potential catty trophy wives of the sort that the author describes, and I wasn't terribly eager to hang out with them.

Sterling points out something interesting - he calls it social skills, the article calls it being popular - either way it's worth pointing out that those who are best at it treat it as a full-time job and want it bad enuf to do so.

Saddam in Richard III shocka!

Also - being a Neo-Maxi Zoom Dweebie is ten times cooler than just being a nerd.

??? you obviously never visited my school

I am implying that a DOUBLE STANDARD exists DO YOU SEE?!?!?

Oh the horror. I dont want to remember *cries*.

But I didnt "get the dudes" more because the dickheads I went to school with preferred pamela anderson type ladeez. So I didn't really care anyway. The one cool guy who liked jesus and mary chain etc, I did end up dating in school, so there goes that idea heh.

*drools*

Also the article is fucked coz it sez teenage problems are "recent" but Shakespere ref. #2 for the thread, hello Romeo and Juliet! It only makes sense if you accept they were moody teenagers just like we have today.

1. Why are nerds unpopular?
2. Nerd = kid who is unpopular
3. Unpopular = kid who is unpopular
4. Change unpopular to "apple"
5. Why are apples apples?
6. Because they are apples.

The question is really, what creates popularity in Jr. High School?

A lot of posters are OTM: the popular kids put effort into being popular, consciously or not. Some are smart, some are not. The nerds either don't know how, don't want to, whatever. Some are smart, some are not.

But anyway, regarding the smart kids who were also prom queens etc - very rare breed (usually with a special talent for being diplomatic). Most of the kids who are able to manage being smart and popular' usually to me never seem to be really really smart. I carry this belief (with me to university. In fact, there was a bit of backwards discrimination against the pretty girls and good-looking/athletic guys at MIT. Surely, they weren't as smart as the dowdy girl, or geeky guy sitting in row 1? I only ever met 2 people in my lifetime that I thought were really really smart and really really talented and really really popular. One of these people ended up being a Rhodes scholar, the other a Marshall (sp?).

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.

but then I guess everyone knew that all along. (Shut up, Pete - Ed.)

In primary (elementary) school I was a nerd, and then as I grew up emotionally and physically, I became more social. I'm still just as smart, and I'm still interested in the same things, but I'm not a nerd. This is because I can have normal conversations with normal people, have dynamic emotional relationships with other people, etc. Nerds can't do this. Nerds don't understand human feelings. Many nerds never grow out of this. Most nerds are nerds for life, and the author of that article is still one of them.

Is ILX one of these 'worlds'?

But yes, the starting question is about 90% tautology. Lack of popularity is the major defining factor, as long as it derives from social skills and attractiveness. If you are unpopular from bullying or smelling terrible, that is a little different.

http://www.usinternet.com/users/kyledrake/nerds/oger1.gif
NERRRRRRRRRRRDSS!

seems obvious to me that if you stand out as overly smart (intentionally or no) you'll make someone feel inferior, who will try to tear you down. i think that's part of the nerd phenomenon. what is it about being ugly that makes you want to play computer games, read novels and draw anime characters? nothing. show me the droves of smart people who weren't nerds at one point.

i'm not going to say anything about a nairn's high school or him, i don't know enough specifics to go into that.

but i will say that theres a huge difference between getting good grades and being smart. i was friends with a valedictorian and he told me that he never read a book in his life outside of a school assignment. so that tells you something.

also, stupid popular people don't think of themselves as being stupid. nobody does, except for me, fatlip, kanye west and biggie smalls.

awesome

If anything, I think smart kids often take refuge in their smartness because they can't seem to get the popularity thing down.

a partisan sentiment if i ever heard one. social skills are relative. if a nerd doesn't seem to have good social skills in regards to you, maybe it's because they're equally partisan and despise you with a passion?

true. the question is this: is their inability to "get the popularity thing down" a serious lack or detriment? or is "the popularity thing" MUCH less relevant outside of stratified adolescent society?

No, "nerds" get beat down cause they are physically weak (can't stick up for themselves) and socially weak (no one else will stick up for them).

Of course no one has come up with a standard definition of a nerd in this thread yet. I have my own.

re: a-ron
your anecdote seems to support the idea that what your mother always said when you were shat on by your peers was RIGHT... "it's their loss, not yours."

I don't know, probably too complicated a question for a simple answer. I mean someone like G.W. Bush has obviously rode his "people skills" an awful long way in life, but he has a certain likable kind of charm, as it were, combined with probably just enough intelligence to get by (though nowhere near enough to be president). It's not the same thing as being the mouth-breather jock who stuffs kids in lockers. OTOH, there are certainly "smart" people who maybe get great programming or engineering jobs but struggle with social relationships all their lives.

How's that, exactly?

Not as much as you'd think. The dumb jocks that don't make it pro (99.999%) usually fail at life, but the smart and popular kids usually do better than nerds.

Nerds have this saying "nerds are the people who will be your boss in the future", but anyone who suceeds in a management position will have to learn some social skills, that is, become unnerdy, at some point.

Yeah I agree. And some nerds will continue to have chips on their shoulders for much of their adult life, and may even continue to suffer from their ongoing self-esteem shortage.

Having experienced even worse versions of the high school social heirarchy in various workplaces, I very much beg to differ on this point.

When we were in junior high school, my friend Rich and I made a map of the school lunch tables according to popularity.

It was the A students who talked through their nose, wore bad clothes and awful hairdos, watched Dr. Who, read the Chronicles of Narnia, acted shy and weak who were unpopular.

I had the distinct luxury of being popular and leaving to hang out with the kids who were taking acid, instead. When they graduated, I went back to sitting with the popular crowd, who at this time, had finally started to take drugs and listen to music that I thought was cool back in 8th grade, so they were more tolerable.

Give him some slack. Can't you see he's Hurting?

That he didn't read books.

Aside from that, what does it really prove? That he isn't smart?

sheyah right.

oh wait lol

(i should mention that in the huge public hs i went to before transferring to hippie private school there weren't really popular kids, just a bunch of tribes. and the nerds - the nerds were getting some, it was gross.)

I noticed that in my evening course you immediately have that divide again. It's really sad to see. So yeah I fell back into my old routine: not caring much about popularity, sort of floating with everyone but definitely making sure that the *outcasts* were not totally left on their own.

you're right, but perhaps not in the way you meant. if you mean that you can read a lot of trashy lightweight books and not be smart, yes you're right. if you mean you can read NO books and be smart, well, i suppose it's possible, in isolated cases. certainly not the norm.

(in the context of our western culture; obv. if you're in a culture with no books, the smart people would be the one's who would read if they could)

:(

neither of these is really what i meant. i don't read a lot of books these days, esp. not fiction. i don't know how smart people think i am - it depends on their own smartness of course. i suspect it may sometimes show with certain people that i don't read a lot because i spend a lot of time with those certain people who DO read a lot, but i find i can understand and relate to things they say easily enough and also hold my own in arguments, even if i just end up playing devil's advocate much of the time. at the same time i encounter a lot of people who got good grades at school and college or read a lot of books (fiction and non-fiction) but don't seem to be particularly smart in any noticeable way - it all seems to be sitting in their head not being used in any constructive way or has escaped somehow.

my first proper boss, when i was 17 and working for the DSS, was the archetypal nerd: thick specs, bumfluff moustache, tank top, nasal voice, paperclip collection etc. however, he was only one grade above me - and i was the lowest of the fucking low - and i was his only member of staff. read into that what you will.

what happened to the paperclip collection ...

re: nath/latin ... by that token, why bother with history? who needs to know about all that old stuff? :(

Do you actually think that the act of reading makes a person smart?

i was half-joking. at the time i really did think it was useless. and in a way it is. unless of course you want to study roman languages and/or medicine (and other subjects?) but you might as well study french/spanish and other roman languages (for example).

history is a whole different thing: you can definitely learn from the past.

ah heck, what am i doing in this thread anyway? i am not a nerd, nor a smart kid.

-- Squirrel_Police (goblinatri...), September 27th, 2006.

btw, ally, you're very pretty.

-- Squirrel_Police (goblinatri...), September 27th, 2006.

Sorry, I couldn't resist.

?????

thank you Ally. I often get too tired of this board to even bother weighing in on things.

Girls to some extent got a free pass on this one, it was generally OK for a girl to be high-achieving (though it undermined her sexual cachet a bit, probably).

Asperger's kids, yeah, for sure. But I still think people underestimate how much the hierarchy in middle/high school turns people into what it needs them to be.

xpost Yeah, but to some extent rewarding "confidence" is like heaping praise upon a rich man for being rich -- I feel very troubled about the idea of saying "there lies the difference". Confidence is at least partly a product of the way a situation treats you, and if someone gets the shit beaten out of them twice a week, I'm not so sure that I want to smile at them and say, "Well, you see, if you were only more confident..."

xxpost Exactly! "Tall poppy" syndrome is so much a part of this. Part of it plays into American anti-intellectualism, an easy phrase to toss out but one that's no less true for its ubiquity.

About confidence, I'm not talking anything prescriptive, just descriptive -- the way it is. Not laying any blame. Some people just have an unshakeable confidence. It may often be connected with physique. In Scott's case, he was tall, so that kept a lot of kids from trying to beat the shit out of him.

I know someone who was kind of enraged/outraged the first time he walked into a pub and saw two average blokes talking about the most recent Buffy episode. A lot of the nerdy things that got him beat up and mocked when he was a kid had been embraced (or co-opted) by the mainstream. He told the story jokingly, but there was some real bitterness there.

any nerdiness i displayed as a kid - and there were some points where there was quite a bit - was entirely my own fault. eg it was ME who chose to start playing dungeons and dragons when i was 13; fuck me, that lost me two years' worth of cool points in an instant. as some sensible people here have already pointed out: each school/social milieu has its own rules and characteristics and so on; there's no universal law of nerdism that can be applied.

part of me wishes i'd woken up a little earlier in life to what was cool and fun, but hey: then i wouldn't be the person i am today. so hey.

never happen unless you figure out how to make kids into adults. currently still working on helping adults act like adults.

Obviously some nerdy kids are just obnoxious twats, but I think everyone's way underestimating the extent to which, again, the social structure turns these kids into what their peers want them to be. For every Asperger's type or momma's boy, there are five kids who would otherwise bloom and be totally open, friendly, confident kids, if they didn't have to worry that someone was going to beat the shit out of them (or follow them down the hall calling them names, etc.) for getting all A's, or being into the wrong books, or not pretending to care (or not care) about the right things, etc.

I also think that it's almost impossible to overestimate how important physical strength, aptitude for sport(s), and general "dangerousness" are for males in grade school. If you can't fight -- or are perceived as being unable or unwilling to do so -- you're automatically low on the totem pole. I think it's borderline-disingenuous to have a conversation about grade school social hierarchies, and where people fit into it, without acknowledging how much of a role the physical/violent element plays, even if it's often indirect.

(Or to ask the question differently: do we want to have schools where kids who can't/won't fight are made to feel worthless?)

xpost:

any nerdiness i displayed as a kid - and there were some points where there was quite a bit - was entirely my own fault. eg it was ME who chose to start playing dungeons and dragons when i was 13; fuck me, that lost me two years' worth of cool points in an instant.

There's something deeply troubling about what you wrote, as if it were your "fault" for enjoying something. You didn't write that you were snippy and superior to your classmates, or that you were terrified of girls (though you might've done either of those things) -- you wrote that you were into the wrong pastime, and so it was your "fault". Do you not see how fucked-up that is, and how needless?

This tangentially reminds me of a good anti-Ayn Rand rant I heard a bit back at http://fromthearchives.blogspot.com.

I believe the essence of it was, take a smart, somewhat hurt kid,and give him anything by Ayn Rand, and he is ruined for life, condemned to become a smug, loathable, holier-than thou libertarian type. Strikes me as a plausible recipe for ruining someone...

ah, sorry: i should have explained this further. i can see how it looks weird. thing is, i realised within a few minutes that i fucking HATED D&D. i started playing it because some of my friends did (christ, i make it sound like heroin addiction) and i thought, okay, i'll give that a go. my gut instinct was originally to run for the hills, and i should have gone with it.

but instead i spent six months hanging about the maths block at lunchtime/this guy dave's house on saturdays thinking: "okay, when does the fun start?" and then i looked around and realised lots of other people were having a lot more fun and i looked like a twat.

if i think about it and try to work out my reasoning ... i suppose it was out of a desire to belong to some kind of social group. i was 13, and up till then i'd been a bit of a loner - i had plenty of loose friendships, and got on reasonably enough with pretty much everybody, but was conscious that i didn't have a GANG. looking back, i wish i'd stayed that way ... the people with whom i ended up being firm friends at school were totally different to the AD&D set, and i see no reason things wouldn't have worked out the same in the end. but no: instead i decided i had to "belong" to something ... and i chose very, very badly. whoops.

still, like i say: all these things are formative experiences. and i suppose the experience of having to overcome the stigma attached to role-playing in the maths block at lunchtime taught me some valuable life skills :)

I think everyone's way underestimating the extent to which, again, the social structure turns these kids into what their peers want them to be

but i suppose i've just tacitly agreed with you on this, haven't i? after all: why else would i have felt the need to "belong" to a group? although i remember being pretty happy just drifting around and getting on with whoever and whenever, i must have also felt something important was missing from my life. so yes, this is probably a good point.

HOWEVER, my question still stands: what do we do about it? tombot absolutely OTM.

I also think that it's almost impossible to overestimate how important physical strength, aptitude for sport(s), and general "dangerousness" are for males in grade school

yessss ... although some of the most respected/"hard" kids at my school were total wets and weeds (as i discovered when i chinned one of them, aged 16). it's not about how hard you actually are; it's the vibe you give off. but then again ... how the fuck do you explain that to a 13-year-old?

i don't have a cogent argument here; i'm just thinking out loud ...

well, i guess we know what side YOUR bread is buttered on.

Never found RPGs to be a mecca of hot women, but I was never that deeply into them.

yessss ... although some of the most respected/"hard" kids at my school were total wets and weeds (as i discovered when i chinned one of them, aged 16). it's not about how hard you actually are; it's the vibe you give off. but then again ... how the fuck do you explain that to a 13-year-old?

And even if you could, it's kind of a zero-sum game: not everyone can be "hard", and if things head in that direction that's when you start getting switchblades and nines.

Maybe the problem is that violence and aggression can so easily seem like the truth, even though they're not -- people instinctively see in them something real, a la Hemingway. How to stem that, how to make violence seem as stupid and needless as it really is...that's a tough one.

Hey, I take issue with that! Although it probably makes a difference that I really looked at her as just another novelist, and spent a much larger amount of energy on theology. Now I'm a good liberal.

(All those problems, including lack of formal education, are behind me though, and I'm as happy as I've ever been.)

https://vine.co/v/MdJmb9IEmzv

that match should ideally end with Black moving his fist to A1

^ true nerd retort