[arvid]

I always disagreed article with this because I did not experience this. My high school years were not painful and were a lot of fun, even though I was labelled a nerd, curve-buster, einstein, etc.... So this is my advice from my experience. Don't try to be popular. Be friendly. Help others. Volunteer. Get Respect. Get involved in a sport. Get involved in various things with different people and you will have enough friends that being popular won't matter and no one will dare pick on you. I played soccer and later ran x-country and track, I sang, I was a scout, I was in youth fellowship, I was a mathlete and I hacked a pdp-8 in the hour between school and practice. I certainly was not popular but I was friends or at least friendly with most of the school. People knew me and I had their respect.

[nostrademons]

My high school years also were not like this, but I always assumed that was because my high school made a special effort to stamp out the sort of ostracism and cliquishness that the article described. It seemed like the natural tendency was toward these, but when the school first started up, teachers made a point of making clear that these sorts of behaviors were not okay, and then as the students grew up, they propagated the culture to the younger students. Our first essential question was "What is community?", and much of the first year of the school's existence centered around that.

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.

[menloparkbum]

I always wondered about the size of PG's school. My high school was pretty bad, academic wise. The parodies of teachers as portrayed on South Park are not far off the mark. However, there were only around 60 people in any given graduating class. This seemed to dampen any rigid social hierarchies. There were lame aspects - stupid, quasi-criminal guys who were good at hockey often got a free pass. Since it was a small town, there was often collusion between school officials (the hockey coaches) and external authority figures. A couple hockey players were always drunk driving, and getting pulled over, but there never seemed to be any repercussions. Perhaps because all the law enforcement officials in the area also had kids on the team.

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.

[tdavis]

I may have been labeled a nerd (or geek or who the hell knows; I never asked) in High School, but that didn't mean I was picked on. Okay, I take that back, I was picked on twice. Both times ended with the other person bleeding. I guess when you're 5'7" 150lbs and have the audacity to punch a 6'3" gorilla in the face in the middle of class, people stop messing with you.

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.

[geebee]

Awesome. But have you ever seen the movie "dazed and confused"? Remember that scene where the geeky, brainy guy figures that he can punch the dude who belittled and threatened him, on the assumption that he just needs to survive the next 10 seconds before someone breaks it up.

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.

[tdavis]

I had a couple things working in my favor:

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."

[jey]

The essay doesn't need to hit all the points on the popularity-nerdiness curve to be true overall. A lot of people do relate to this essay, even if you didn't have that sort of experience. Maybe you just weren't "nerdy enough". There's plenty of non-nerdy smart people.

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

[biohacker42]

I find myself disagreeing as well, for much the same reasons.

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?

[mechanical_fish]

So can you be both deep and happy go lucky patriotic in America?

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.

[biohacker42]

Excellent point.

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.

[mdakin]

America is not an entity; it is a process. Processes can go awry but they are malleable and fixable. Do you resent your program because it crashes? No, you fix the bug and move on. It's the same thing with America.

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.

[xenoterracide]

slavery?! every part of the world has had slavery at some point... (Most of those countries had revolutions... we had a civil war)

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.

[biohacker42]

Good point about slavery.

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.

[mdakin]

With respect to the Indians/pox blankets/massacres you need to understand that a societal-level berserker rage ([1] [2] for definition) was happening for the better part of 250 years because back about 100 years before America existed Indians killed almost half of the English colonists in New England [3].

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.

[PieSquared]

>And yet I would not drop napalm on anyone in any effort to fight commies. It is not worth it.

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."

[menloparkbum]

"Americans are of the, if not the, most nationalistic of all the western nations."

Well, outside of Euro Cup finals week, sure...

[maw]

A nice thing about sport is that it's a safe outlet for some of the uglier aspects of human nature. Usually, anyway. Some people end up taking it way too far.

[oz]

"Being an actual American... I don't see that we are all that patriotic."

Speaking as a Jamaican, most people view Americans as very patriotic.

[wheels]

I'd second this. I hated school (and eventually dropped out and went to college a year early), but it was because it on the whole seemed a sham. Finding friends wasn't really a problem.

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".