[jimbokun]

"Paul Graham does that in his essays."

Paul writes brilliant essays, but I find that if he has a weakness as an essayist, it is probably in over generalization. Many of his essays have pretty sweeping generalizations, but a dearth of data justifying them. His brilliance is that he usually overcomes this by appealing to his reader's intuitions, and it usually works. But there are times when I find myself wondering if he is just extrapolating from his own experience to a larger scale than is warranted.

[rorymarinich]

In his Why Nerds Are Unpopular essay, I think he absolutely is extrapolating. I've read that essay many times. I guess in some ways this could be called a response, but it wasn't directly inspired by his writing.

[dasil003]

I don't necessarily think Why Nerds are Unpopular is correct in general. Many of Graham's essays are convincing but ultimately specious. However one thing Graham does very well is to pick a thesis and then support it rigorously through a series of straight-to-the-point examples and cogent reasoning. In the end he may be wrong due to omission or bad axioms, but the argument is always convincing at a superficial level.

Your thesis is probably just as defensible as Graham's, but the way you supported it was scattershot and just plain unconvincing to anyone who's been out of high school a few years. I'm not saying it shouldn't have been written or even that the style is bad (it was quite readable), just that the argument could be better made if you cut it down by half and built up the thesis with more solid (or solid-sounding) claims.