| What? I mean, of course, if you define "nerds" to be "people without social intelligence" you're gonna see that nerds are unpopular. The premise beneath PG's essay (and this one, I think) is that if you instead define "nerds" to be "people with a lot of interest in some academic subject, and/or people who are quantifiably 'smart'" you still (seem to) find that nerds are unpopular. So are you saying that that's not actually the case, that smart people aren't disproportionately unpopular? Interesting if true. Definitely needs some kind of justification, since it flies in the face of most people's intuition. I'm not sure what the answer is, but I'm leaning more towards the position that intelligence is negatively correlated with popularity. Smart people aren't necessarily outcasts, but IMX you'll tend to see fewer of them at the top of the popularity curve and more at the bottom than you'd expect from a random distribution. And I imagine that there are a lot of reasons for why this is. PG's argument in particular is closer to the truth than it seems at face value, I think. He says that smart people's problem is that they don't spend enough time on socializing; I'm not sure if this is really the prime cause of smart people's ostensible unpopularity, but it applies to my experience in middle and high school. My parents were rich enough to send me to good private schools that valued intellectualism (which probably more closely parallel schools outside the US) so I was never really unpopular, but I was definitely less popular than I wanted to be. In retrospect it's pretty clear that I could've been way more popular if I'd doubled or tripled the amount of time I spent on it; instead, I spent my free time programming and doing math. The only place that I disagree is with PG's rationalization of why nerds don't socialize more. In my case, it wasn't that I wanted to build great things (although to some extent I did). I'm pretty sure it was just that solving math problems was a much more reliable and straightforward endorphin trigger than socializing. Anyway, all this is to say that a) I disagree with you and b) you should be less pithy and more explanatory. |
I think they aren't. As an example, we could hypothesize that people have a few simple attributes - say IQ (math), physical skills (sports), looks (hot or not), empathy (good at getting along with others) and political skills (good at influencing others).
I imagine that looks and physical skills are the most important factors for popularity, with empathy and political skill next, while IQ is basically irrelevant - unlike good looks, high IQ in and of itself does not cause popularity.
So let's say that popularity is a function of a weighted average score of looks, physical skills, empathy and political skills.
When we say that someone is "popular" or "smart", we don't mean "average" but more something like "top 10%".
Obviously 10% of the population will be among the 10% most popular, and 10% among the 10% smartest. But if popularity and IQ is statistically independent, only 1% will be among the top 10% in both.
So people that are both smart and popular can indeed be rare even when IQ and popularity are independent, we don't need more than a random distribution to explain that.
If we add the fact that people tend to focus on (and thereby improving) things they are good at and ignore (and thereby fall behind in) areas where they suck, it will only strengthen the trend.
I think nerds and jocks both follow the path of least resistance by putting most of their efforts into areas where they have a natural advantage. But doing so is rational behavior, it's hard to argue against it.