Hey, welcome to the nerd party! But here was a rather upsetting finding by Robbins: the teachers might be making the high school social environment worse. Robbins believes that pop culture plays a significant role in popularity I know: duh in that being popular does not necessarily mean being well-liked. There seems to be a parallel to reality television, in which the most popular characters are not well-behaved, do the most controversial things, and have a lot of influence and camera time.
Our culture is unusually and increasingly concerned with popularity. Part of the reason is our obsessive celebrity culture, and there also seems to be a trend to define young people as either smashingly successful or not, which comes into play in academics and in the social world.
The number of outsider labels in schools is increasing, while the ideal image of a mainstream popular kid is narrowing. For example, most of my classmates again, most , would probably not respond positively to another, hypothetical geek student who is a brilliant programmer and prolific free software contributor. They would likely ridicule him or her for not trying to make money. My exact story. Before I started making things for profit everyone just saw me as extremely good with computers.
Because of this, I prefer not to give out sales figures anymore. When classmates ask how many people have bought my products, I respond "A good amount. Being called the next Steve Jobs by someone is being alienated by that person. Merely by becoming a programmer, you have alienated yourself in a sense.
The most successful people in the world have alienated themselves. They are outliers. Superlative compliments can be alienating in a positive sense. Comments like "Dude, wtf? How do you find the time to do that s? Are trying to be the next [famous technology-related individual]?
Some environments reward individuality; others ridicule it. Unfortunately, it seems that you have experienced more of the latter than I have.
I think a lot of us can identify. But not everyone finds a friend or their own group geeks, goths, whatever and are pretty much completely alienated. Socializing too deeply early on at school is often a disadvantage in later life; the best successes are those with raw talents that learnt to socialise out of school.
The reason for this disadvantage is institutional and would be difficult to decouple from a mainstream education. Basically, the social hierarchy at a school promotes the social status of people that a are older or part of the educational bureaucracy, b demonstrate superficial interest in manufactured culture, c belong to mainstream cliques with lowest common denominator values, and most of all d are non-disruptive and therefore willing to follow the rules and authorities of the institution.
This is as opposed to later life where in a less rigid social structure freethinkers move ahead from others depending on their ability to be e disruptive and on their human merit: f intellectual and g social. It should be quite clear that, while a school may attempt to educate pupils which it often achieves to a high degree of success, the actual social structure is counter to the abilities eventually self-learned by a freethinker [e, f, g].
When a person that does not feel part of an institution and does not socialise as readily with it, they are not as easily influenced by the institution they: h criticise it and i differentiate themselves from it — often this means the band geek buries themselves in music and the nerd starts to read science text books in their spare time.
While later on they are not handed the opportunities that would have arisen from a high social status at school they are: j less impeded by new hierarchies that they join, k now promoted based on the merits that they fostered while on the fringes of the educational institution. On the contrary, the person that felt one with the institution and was celebrated for conforming to the values of its social structure has now learned behaviour that: l either brings no benefit to their existence in the new hierarchies or m actually counts against them.
As a closing point, of course there are exceptions, for instance: there are those with q leadership qualities and r high emotional intelligence that were successul at school while also able to control their school experience to their own long-term advantage.
There are also many unsuccessful geeks and nerds whom only gain s intellectual skills, t simply belonged to a much worse-off social clique with the same problems, and most importantly u never learn to socialise and take risks. Those are also useful, for well, anyone who is successful That line also struck me as nothing but feel good platitude! Most nerds in high school lack self awareness, perhaps the reason they are social awkward.
Integrity and passion are unrelated to being socially well adjusted and I'm not sure about courage and resilience! The fact that a some successful people are nerds, doesn't mean that every nerd is going to be successful. Not only this theory is not backed even by a simple correlation, but it hastily extrapolate the USAs case to the world.
Locke on June 25, parent next [—]. This theory is targeted directly at American high schools. There is no attempt to extrapolate this to the rest of the world. If you're not from the US you can view this as a curiosity, but it is not meant to be relevant to you.
I like how 'nerd' is always associated with 'anti-social'. Doesn't a nerd's success hinge on their ability to create social networks for themselves? CEOs tend to be extremely charismatic Actually, most of the people in those positions tend to be well educated and studious. This tends to not be popular in high school. It's a lot of alpha-male, machismo, 'let's drink beers and tell dirty jokes' - which, in my experience, is pretty much in line with being "cool" as an adolescent.
Your implication that being well-educated and popular are mutually exclusive is just plain false, at least where I grew up I have spent a lot of time with them, actually, given that Northwestern's most popular major is economics. I'm also in a frat and enjoy drinking beer and telling dirty jokes with many of my finance-oriented brothers. Of course, when the rubber meets the road and they have a statistics test the next day, they're not out partying, they're studying all night with a big cup of coffee.
I would say that this kind of popularity is less common in high school, though. Simply the fact that you care about school and study is likely to put you into a separate group. College, however, is a different story. I think the "us against them" mentality has always had steam, and will always have steam. I could go on and on WalterBright on June 26, root parent next [—]. CroMagnons vs Neanderthals Reading this made me think about the punk movement in music. In the beginning it was about being different.
Real punk was anything that your parents and friends didn't like. It wasn't about the kind of music you were playing per se, rather about your attitude. Commercially and socially it didn't really take off.
You can argue however that the attitude did. Some musicians started to adapt to the attitude in order to take advantage of the small "movement". Rebellion and individuality were what some went after. Then punk became accepted.
Then it even became commercial. Now you can't recognize punk. Funny how the treatment varies across cultures. It's the other kids that shut the geeks out. I always got along with adults better than my "peers". I think it's important to tell nerds "it gets better.
Go to college if you really want to. Just get the hell out of HS. High school is so jacked. I never got picked on, but forcing me into mandatory standardized classes made me hate it. Since no one there gives a shit about you or your future, why leave it in their hands?
If you're implying nerds should be home-schooled before college, I disagree. As unfortunate situation as it is with high school being a big popularity contest, if you acknowledge it and work hard on social skills, you can succeed. And if you enter college without any real-life social skills, that's going to be a disaster. The earlier in life you learn social skills, the better.
When I have kids, I'm definitely going to spend a lot of time teaching them that. I have five kids. Three went to public schools, the two youngest were home schooled from an early age. One of that latter set elected to attend the local high school - he wanted to wrestle and they offer the engineering focused curriculum he wants.
The idea that home-schooled kids aren't socialized properly is a myth. All of my kids have friends, attend church, tear around the neighborhood. Are there stereotyped 'home school' kids? In my experience they are a very small minority.
That's not what I was suggesting. Send them to public school, or private, or home school them. The socialization argument is a bunch of horse shit though.
There are plenty of ways to meet people. What I'm saying is that if the four years of high school is pain, get the GED and go to college, or if you're a geek join the work force as a consultant, or both. High school is only useful for people who really want to be there. College community or state will accept a GED, has plenty of social opportunities, and you can control your education more granularly. No one in the real world cares about your high school grades or what letter was on your jacket.
What do you consider as poor social skills, if I may ask? I spent most of my time in high school behind the computer, and never played sports I find sports not mentally stimulating enough relative to the effort. I'm pretty introverted, don't like associating with a large number of people, would rather write code half the time and play video games half the time on a Friday night than going out to a club, hate socializing, and simply cannot make small talk.
However I'd be willing to talk about computers, maths, and philosophy and logic all day long, and I also seem to be good at finding people who're somewhat like me.
Maybe it's just my luck, but through high school and college, I've never not been able to find at least a few people who're interested in most of the same stuff I'm interested in, even as my interests have changed. In other words, I'm a typical nerd with what would I suspect traditionally be called poor social skills -- yet I'm pretty happy with whatever social skills I have, and it's overall been far from a disaster. And why do you hack Pokemon homepages, POK3??? I consider myself very lucky that 1 I've always been big and athletic since elementary school and 2 that I went to a high school with other really smart people where people were known and respected for being smart.
Hence, I don't really remember being picked on, except for a couple of minor instances in elementary and middle school. I'm glad I could never relate to the stereotypical midwestern US high school culture that's always on TV and in the movies. When students buckle under that weight, tragedies happen the Columbine shootings; the recent spate of suicides among gay teenagers.
The Columbine shootings weren't the work of bullied nerds. It was the work of two utter assholes. One guy was a cruel psychopath with a history of violence pipe bombs, known but not followed up on , the other guy was a severely depressed loser who stupidly did whatever his 'friend' suggested.
They weren't lashing out at anything. They intended to commit the largest act of domestic terrorism in U.
Whoever wrote this article just perpetuated myths which reflect the standard views of society: that bullied outcasts are the types who become murderous assholes. If you have ever been been bullied, considered "weird," or an outcast, you owe it to your younger counterparts to help dispel this myth.
There was hardly any real information following Columbine. Instead, noise was bounced around between journalists and bloggers. It was like a giant game of telephone. Soon, there was noise about bullying, about outcast kids, and even the dangers of first-person shooters. In the end, the authors suggested that the social skills required to make a friends at age 18 might simply have been useful in the adult workplace.
Not inconceivable, but certainly discouraging for those who had trouble finding a lunch table. Enter Fletcher. Instead of looking at Silent Generation men from the Midwest, he pulled data from a year study that began tracking thousands of male and female adolescents from across the country in The survey asked students to name up to ten friends instead of three, which gave a somewhat more complete set of data to work with.
It turned out there were similarities between the findings. Just like the Wisconsin study, each friendship nomination translated into 2 percent higher wages come age But here was the big difference: the new data set not only allowed Fletcher to compare the effects of popularity between peers over time, but also between thousands of siblings.
Social scientists like to compare siblings when possible, because by tracking people from the exact same family background, it lets them to try figure out what other factors might be influencing their life trajectories. And in this case, it led to an interesting result.
Even if one sibling was better liked at school, they weren't any more likely to out-earn their brother or sister.
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