Paul Graham - Why Nerds Are Unpopular

Thoughts about Why Nerds Are Unpopular by Paul Graham.

Before we dive into this, this was written in 2003. This was when Paul Graham was 38, when he was not married or have kids.

This is also a rather long essay…

Thoughts along the way

We sat at a D table, as low as you could get without looking physically different. We were not being especially candid to grade ourselves as D. It would have taken a deliberate lie to say otherwise. Everyone in the school knew exactly how popular everyone else was, including us.

Seems relatable.

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. Being smart seems to make you unpopular.

Interesting – time investment is into becoming good at grades rather than appearance/people

Why? 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. But it could. Being smart doesn’t make you an outcast in elementary school. Nor does it harm you in the real world. 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. Why?

Interesting… observation. Still true as you get older, not just in school

In the schools I went to, being smart just didn’t matter much. Kids didn’t admire it or despise it. All other things being equal, they would have preferred to be on the smart side of average rather than the dumb side, but intelligence counted far less than, say, physical appearance, charisma, or athletic ability.

Yes. That does not matter much to kids as it’s harder to read.

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.

Interesting, huh, people need attention in some way.

But in fact I didn’t, not enough. There was something else I wanted more: to be smart. 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. In general, to make great things.

I guess so, but generally people want attention in some way, not so much to be popular…

At the time I never tried to separate my wants and weigh them against one another. If I had, I would have seen that being smart was 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.

I agree. But slightly. Being popular and knowing how to utilize it can benefit (sometimes more than) being smart

And that, I think, is the root of the problem. Nerds serve two masters. 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.

Haha, yeah – time investment.

Nerds don’t realize this. They don’t realize that it takes work to be 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; that’s why they’re good at it. Likewise, popular isn’t just something you are or you aren’t, but something you make yourself.

Agreed. Did not realize this until very late. It takes a lot of time and thought and honestly, experimentation (+ failures) to become popular…

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.

Haha, suprised I reached the same reasoning. Paul’s writing is good.

So far I’ve been finessing the relationship between smart and nerd, using them as if they were interchangeable. In fact it’s only the context that makes them so. A nerd is someone who isn’t socially adept enough. But “enough” depends on where you are. 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.

Oh god. Yes. It’s so very easy to seem awkward to someone, even becoming older. People tend to judge quickly, especially in the US.

Partly 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. Before you develop a conscience, torture is amusing.

Haha… yes, people don’t accept differences (from their own view of the world), especially if they’re children

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.

Yes… Definitely when I was a teenager. I see this to some extent, even now.

Because they’re at the bottom of the scale, nerds are a safe target for the entire school. If I remember correctly, the most popular kids don’t persecute nerds; they don’t need to stoop to such things. Most of the persecution comes from kids lower down, the nervous middle classes.

Oh interesting – good observation. Happens when you’re older too, or maybe I just interpret some events like that.

As well as gaining points by distancing oneself from unpopular kids, one loses points by being close to them. A woman I know says that in high school she liked nerds, but was afraid to be seen talking to them because the other girls would make fun of her. Unpopularity is a communicable disease; kids too nice to pick on nerds will still ostracize them in self-defense.

Haha…

It’s important to realize that, no, the adults don’t know what the kids are doing to one another. They know, in the abstract, that kids are monstrously cruel to one another, just as we know in the abstract that people get tortured in poorer countries. But, like us, they don’t like to dwell on this depressing fact, and they don’t see evidence of specific abuses unless they go looking for it.

I don’t think I understand it to that extent. Maybe I’ve forgotten.

Public school teachers are in much the same position as prison wardens. Wardens’ main concern is to keep the prisoners on the premises. They also need to keep them fed, and as far as possible prevent them from killing one another. Beyond that, they want to have as little to do with the prisoners as possible, so they leave them to create whatever social organization they want. From what I’ve read, the society that the prisoners create is warped, savage, and pervasive, and it is no fun to be at the bottom of it.

Wow what a conclusion. I do agree with this. Again this is not PRIVATE school teachers – public school teachers have like 30-40 students to take care of per class. There’s easily not that much time devoted to each kid’s problems.

When the things you do have real effects, it’s no longer enough just to be pleasing. It starts to be important to get the right answers, and that’s where nerds show to advantage. Bill Gates will of course come to mind. Though notoriously lacking in social skills, he gets the right answers, at least as measured in revenue.

Huh, yes. School is much more restricted in that sense.

If I could go back and give my thirteen year old self some advice, the main thing I’d tell him would be to stick his head up and look around. I didn’t really grasp it at the time, but the whole world we lived in was as fake as a Twinkie. Not just school, but the entire town. Why do people move to suburbia? To have kids! So no wonder it seemed boring and sterile. The whole place was a giant nursery, an artificial town created explicitly for the purpose of breeding children.

Good advice – I’m going to take this advice.

What bothers me is not that the kids are kept in prisons, but that (a) they aren’t told about it, and (b) the prisons are run mostly by the inmates. Kids are sent off to spend six years memorizing meaningless facts in a world ruled by a caste of giants who run after an oblong brown ball, as if this were the most natural thing in the world. And if they balk at this surreal cocktail, they’re called misfits.

Glad I reached this conclusion when I was in school.

Adults can’t avoid seeing that teenage kids are tormented. So why don’t they do something about it? Because they blame it on puberty. The reason kids are so unhappy, adults tell themselves, is that monstrous new chemicals, hormones, are now coursing through their bloodstream and messing up everything. There’s nothing wrong with the system; it’s just inevitable that kids will be miserable at that age.

Blaming on something that can’t be fully explained – Typical. Also, sometimes I fall into this habit, but I’ve stopped it mostly.

When I was in school, suicide was a constant topic among the smarter kids. No one I knew did it, but several planned to, and some may have tried. Mostly this was just a pose. Like other teenagers, we loved the dramatic, and suicide seemed very dramatic. But partly it was because our lives were at times genuinely miserable.

True true true

At best it was practice for real work we might do far in the future, so far that we didn’t even know at the time what we were practicing for. More often it was just an arbitrary series of hoops to jump through, words without content designed mainly for testability. (The three main causes of the Civil War were…. Test: List the three main causes of the Civil War.)

And there was no way to opt out. The adults had agreed among themselves that this was to be the route to college. The only way to escape this empty life was to submit to it.

Even in adult life, with a “job”, you get these structured instances too…

Teenage kids used to have a more active role in society. In pre-industrial times, they were all apprentices of one sort or another, whether in shops or on farms or even on warships. They weren’t left to create their own societies. They were junior members of adult societies.

That’s a good observation – most of the useful stuff I learned was outside of school – working with my father, exploring/navigating the city

What happened? We’re up against a hard one here. The cause of this problem is the same as the cause of so many present ills: specialization. As jobs become more specialized, we have to train longer for them. Kids in pre-industrial times started working at about 14 at the latest; kids on farms, where most people lived, began far earlier. Now kids who go to college don’t start working full-time till 21 or 22. With some degrees, like MDs and PhDs, you may not finish your training till 30.

Interesting thought. Yes, and it REQUIRES schooling again…

The real problem is the emptiness of school life. We won’t see solutions till adults realize that. The adults who may realize it first are the ones who were themselves nerds in school. Do you want your kids to be as unhappy in eighth grade as you were? I wouldn’t. Well, then, is there anything we can do to fix things? Almost certainly. There is nothing inevitable about the current system. It has come about mostly by default.

Yes. Man, I was dumb for not realizing this soon…

Final thoughts

This is one of Paul’s older essays. He rambles quite a bit. Each paragraph after the like 5th one repeats what he says, but with a different story or tone. I like the point of the essay. Nerds are UNPOPULAR, and the time of that unpopularity actually does drag on these days (to even past college) due to the internet and having these traits be embedded with culture beyond school.

One thing I do disagree with Paul is that popularity does matter, just in a different sense. To be popular is something that most people are not well adjusted to, say being attractive for the first time, or being more well known on the internet and being able to respond in a social setting well. I believe that these early years in life builds that and allows one to experience that type of feeling – to build “confidence” in some way. Because this matters after the teenager years, and is a useful skill to have. However, to be popular, it’s hard, and most kids are just thrown into the battle grounds to figure it out. No one really teaches them.

I do agree with most of paul’s points on school. It’s a rigid structure that is basically a battleground for kids to bully another and place themselves into groups. Then you can pretend for the most part to pass classes if you put some effort and learn how to do so (I guess this is what is “smart”?). I wish kids did more apprentice-esque classes or etc, so that someone can show them some view of the adult world. I didn’t understand some until after college and am still learning.

But why is Paul seem so harsh – angry almost? Does he regret going to such schools? Bitter? I can relate if so. I can’t really describe good things about school. Just hung out with the nerds, and that was fun, I think?