An interesting essay I would like your commentary on

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ubernoob
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An interesting essay I would like your commentary on

Post by ubernoob »

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Post by OgreBattle »

"The main reason nerds are unpopular is that they have other things to think about. Their attention is drawn to books or the natural world, not fashions and parties. They're like someone trying to play soccer while balancing a glass of water on his head."

I just disagree with that. From what I remember of Middle and High school all the kids that read Lord of the Rings, attented advanced classes, and smoked weed also played varsity sports. One of the smartest kids was also the one who grew shrooms to sell at parties and was a well liked guy. Being smelly, being too quiet in social events were what made people unpopular, and even the quiet people were left alone instead of picked on.

"Few smart kids can spare the attention that popularity requires."

Social awkwardness is social awkwardness no matter how smart you (or society) thinks you are. Heck, lots of people are unpopular because they're percieved as stupid. I remember lots of times when we made fun of someone 'cause they weren't as witty or consistently said 'stupid' things, and those were pretty girls and guys in sports that were the butt of jokes.

I do agree that the 'most popular' kids are nice to everyone. The prom King n' Queen were the most liked people in the school, they were pretty ideal in terms of looks, athleticism, and grades.

I grew up in Northern Virginia though near Washington DC. We have America's best public schools, highest ethnic diversity, high scores on nationwide standardized tests and so on. It was a pretty ideal environment (well, other than that crazy sniper killing people around the neighborhood, and those severed fingers found near the school related to Latino gangs, and that mysterious molester who may have never been caught, I forget)

Maybe my experience isn't typical of America, at Uni I met folks whose high school experience felt like a sit com to me or an after school special about race issues.
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Post by Starmaker »

Correlation, causation, and all that stuff. Unpopular kids might have interests no one* shares. For some of those interests, intelligence is a requirement; they are the "nerds" and thus noticeable in a school environment due to being singled out by the teachers. For others, it isn't, and they just go through life unnoticed making My Little Ponies out of pubes in the privacy of their bedrooms.

*Fuck, I only made one "IRL" friend during my adult life, because the quantum language barrier ensures people don't read things in English "just because".
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Post by fectin »

I think it's much more likely that the kids who are antisocial and see themselves as smarter than everyone around them end up unpopular (quel shock!). Because they are focused on how much smarter than everyone else they are, they assume that's also the cause.
In reality, patronizing assholes are often unpopular.
Vebyast wrote:Here's a fun target for Major Creation: hydrazine. One casting every six seconds at CL9 gives you a bit more than 40 liters per second, which is comparable to the flow rates of some small, but serious, rocket engines. Six items running at full blast through a well-engineered engine will put you, and something like 50 tons of cargo, into space. Alternatively, if you thrust sideways, you will briefly be a fireball screaming across the sky at mach 14 before you melt from atmospheric friction.
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Post by Kaelik »

Yeah, I really think that article is mostly shit. Lots of popular people are smart and care about being smart more than being popular, lots of unpopular people are stupid or just don't care about being smart. Nerds in middle school are by definition (this guys definition) people who are unpopular and smart, so by that definition, yeah, you might think it is the cause. But of course, that is because he first ignored all the smart people who are popular and all the dumb people who are unpopular and set himself in opposition to stupid jocks. I don't know how old he is, but I very seriously doubt that was the case during "our" generation.

Experientially, I was one of the most popular people in the school at 15, but felt excluded and hated from 7-12. If I was this asshole I'd say it was because I was such a genius that I was clearly smarter earlier, and then I learned how to make everyone like me with my big brain of thinking.

But I'm not, so I can say with some pretty solid certainty that I felt I was excluded from 7-12 because I moved every year so I was constantly new and didn't have friends for most of the year, only to leave all my friends behind so that I had something better to compare the next year to and feel excluded all over again. And then I learned how to make friends really well from having to do it over and over for years from scratch, and so it was really easy when I did settle in one location. My big brain was neither at fault for my problems or the solution to the problems of popularity, and I imagine the same is the case for most people.
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Post by Maj »

Wow. This was... so not my experience at all. At my middle/high school, nerds were nerds because they were the people who didn't socialize, not because they were smart. Smart kids ruled our school - they were charismatic, outgoing, played sports, and competed state-wide, if not nation-wide, in Knowledge Bowl.

While I wasn't ever one of the sports peeps, my family hosted about half of the extracurricular clubs at school. I even organized some of the special events (like the biggest food drive in the history of the school) and did weird stuff like sing in the talent show. So everyone knew me, and my reputation for being smart was unquestioned. But I wasn't "popular" because I gave no fucks about playing the game, and I wasn't a "nerd" because I was really outgoing, and participated in crap-tons of stuff.
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Post by fectin »

This encapsulates, incidentally, why I liked Angel better than Buffy.
Vebyast wrote:Here's a fun target for Major Creation: hydrazine. One casting every six seconds at CL9 gives you a bit more than 40 liters per second, which is comparable to the flow rates of some small, but serious, rocket engines. Six items running at full blast through a well-engineered engine will put you, and something like 50 tons of cargo, into space. Alternatively, if you thrust sideways, you will briefly be a fireball screaming across the sky at mach 14 before you melt from atmospheric friction.
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Post by DSMatticus »

The vast majority of your highschool's academic success stories were also popular and attractive and probably even athletic. My AP classes were a who's who of the popular kids + three nerds. My school, in an effort to pad as many college applications as possible, did weird rounding hijinks in order to handout the titles of valedictorian and salutatorian to something like the top dozen students, and that was also the popular kids + the same three nerds. I had AP calc with the prom king. I was almost prom king, but that had less to do with being popular and more to do with everyone thinking my girlfriend and I were some idyllic, mascot-ish couple for True Love in Highschool!!1!(tm) because we'd been dating for two-three years.

"Unpopular kids are smart, popular kids are dumb" is basically no one's experience. It's just a self-promoting rationalization unpopular kids use that is sufficiently memetic that you can repeat it and people will accept it as true. There is no such line. Honestly, even the line between nerdy interests and popularity is pretty fuggin' weak. Nearly half of the people I played D&D with through highschool were on the peripheral of popularity or whatever. The only Dr. Who fans I know of were.
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Post by name_here »

I grew up in the same area as OgreBattle. I'm honestly not sure who was/wasn't popular on a school-wide basis, because I didn't really interact with people much. Plus, the smart people were all in lots of AP classes together.

I can't say how well they were liked at parties because I never went to parties.
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Post by fectin »

I went to college with a guy from somewhere in Oregon, where apparently all the cool kids and jocks played D&D. Atypical, but not shocking.
Vebyast wrote:Here's a fun target for Major Creation: hydrazine. One casting every six seconds at CL9 gives you a bit more than 40 liters per second, which is comparable to the flow rates of some small, but serious, rocket engines. Six items running at full blast through a well-engineered engine will put you, and something like 50 tons of cargo, into space. Alternatively, if you thrust sideways, you will briefly be a fireball screaming across the sky at mach 14 before you melt from atmospheric friction.
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Post by Maj »

Parties for me and my cohorts (and my brother, eight years younger) were largely not anything like what's portrayed on TV. We did stuff like laser tag and go kart racing. We had trivia wars, movie nights, water balloon fights, trampoline stunt competitions... My brother was into video games, so his friends would bring over their TVs and game consoles and set up like a LAN party in our living room. Every single time any of us had a school project, we threw a party to get it done. Filming a short video? Let's invite half the class over and light the backyard on fire! Got a science assignment? Let's invite everyone over and have a competition building and testing various devices so we can submit the best one.

We didn't just get together - we had shit to do.

My sister - two years behind my brother - was not so lucky. She hung out with a group of friends who were seriously deficient in the brain department. She thought that if people knew she was smart, they wouldn't like her. Eventually, when her friends (she wasn't with them at the time) decided to get drunk one night, then abandoned one of their own in a grocery store where she almost died from alcohol poisoning, my sister started thinking maybe they weren't very good friends after all. It wasn't until college that she learned to give no fucks about being popular - and amazingly, that's when she was. Go fig.
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Post by Grek »

Kaelik wrote:I don't know how old he is, but I very seriously doubt that was the case during "our" generation.
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This essay was written over a decade ago by someone who graduated high school nearly half a century ago. Even if your high school experience sounds nothing like Graham's high school experience, that doesn't mean he's full of shit. He's talking about high schools from three generations ago, which, unsurprisingly, look very different from high schools today.

Modern high schools are about figuring out whether you get to be employed later in life, not about teaching you conformity and patriotism. Viewed in that light, you really do need to skim through the "Being smart means you don't have time to focus on being popular" bits of the essay. And there are some good points left that are totally true today.

High schools are still basically the same thing as prisons. You're still being sent there by the government and forced to remain in an assigned room for eight hours a day, you're still being watched over by suspicious but disinterested wardens and guards (often literally in my area - the school has rental cops patrolling the halls with actual sidearms) and you're still not allowed to leave until society says you've spend enough years there. High school students still respond just like prisoners do, by disrespecting their teachers, forming gangs, establishing hierarchies, and being horrible to the other inmates. The best way to get high school students to behave is still the same as the best way to get prisoners to behave: give them shit to do that feels like it's actually meaningful and not just hammering rocks for the sake of busy work.
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Post by hyzmarca »

Grek wrote:You're still being sent there by the government and forced to remain in an assigned room for eight hours a day,
That's elementary school. By middle school the teachers start becoming more specialized in their skills, requiring you to move from room to room. High School has even more specialization and more flexibility in the class schedule.
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Post by ubernoob »

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Post by Grek »

hyzmarca wrote:That's elementary school. By middle school the teachers start becoming more specialized in their skills, requiring you to move from room to room. High School has even more specialization and more flexibility in the class schedule.
Just because they have you change cells every two hours doesn't make it any less of a prison.
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Post by Chamomile »

Yeah, my takeaway from the first half of that essay is "I know high school popularity doesn't work like that now, I wonder if it ever did?"
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Post by Maj »

School was never a prison for me. Yeah, I was in advanced classes with kids two or three years older than I was. Yeah, sometimes I knew all the answers and got a little bored. But if there was a class that bored me, I'd sit in the front and ask questions to stay awake. If I didn't like a class project, I'd ask for a new one. Hell, I asked for an extracurricular class to be taught and had a teacher volunteer to teach it. I headed service projects, and fought for controversial curricula in front of the school board and at public meetings.

And because teachers saw my interest, respect, and responsibility, it wasn't a thing. I was entrusted with keys to some of the campus buildings. And if I really had to get other shit done - I went home.

The best part was, this worked for all my siblings, and it worked for anyone we dragged into our inner circle. And it worked regardless of school. It's more like school is a prison for the adults who have to be there and teach to piles of students who give less than zero fucks, so when a student shows a glimmer of interest, the adults are willing to move mountains to give them what they want.
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Post by Kaelik »

Grek wrote:
hyzmarca wrote:That's elementary school. By middle school the teachers start becoming more specialized in their skills, requiring you to move from room to room. High School has even more specialization and more flexibility in the class schedule.
Just because they have you change cells every two hours doesn't make it any less of a prison.
No, but the whole making the rest of your life better and not worse thing is kinda of difference.

I mean cribs designed to keep you from falling out and breaking your next also confine you, but I wouldn't call them prisons.
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Post by erik »

ubernoob wrote:
Grek wrote:High schools are still basically the same thing as prisons. You're still being sent there by the government and forced to remain in an assigned room for eight hours a day, you're still being watched over by suspicious but disinterested wardens and guards (often literally in my area - the school has rental cops patrolling the halls with actual sidearms) and you're still not allowed to leave until society says you've spend enough years there. High school students still respond just like prisoners do, by disrespecting their teachers, forming gangs, establishing hierarchies, and being horrible to the other inmates. The best way to get high school students to behave is still the same as the best way to get prisoners to behave: give them shit to do that feels like it's actually meaningful and not just hammering rocks for the sake of busy work.
I was more getting at this than any "You were unpopular because you were smart" statements.
Sounds like shitty schools. Not my experience, but my parents put me in nice private schools despite not being super wealthy.
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Post by Kaelik »

erik wrote:Sounds like shitty schools. Not my experience, but my parents put me in nice private schools despite not being super wealthy.
This sort of thing is regional. Apparently everyone in Penn who is anyone goes to private schools, but in Texas, for the most part, you go to public school unless you are a crazy hardcore religious weirdo. And the private schools are not better than public schools, since they teach the science of God.
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Post by PhoneLobster »

You guys have some weird experiences from my perspective.

Personally any correlation I've observed in schools I attended involving popularity and intelligence was not down to "smart kids being too cool for society".

Where I grew up it was very much that society was too cool for smart kids.

Being smart was itself seen as a bad thing and in it self is justification for being ostracized.

Yes that is fucked up, but some communities/regions are like that and this is in a particularly bad part of Australia and we elected the fucking "suppository of all knowledge" guy Prime minister.

Australia is pretty well known for having some serious... issues regarding achievement and have this whole "Tall Poppy Syndrome" thing where "uppity" achievers are to be derided and put in their place and the ideal social individual is Joe average who never sticks his head up among the crowd. And it is considered a good thing, it is part of Australian nationalist pride and such. And well, nationalist pride bogans are not exactly known for restraint when it comes to social behaviour, and violence.

In the old days the "Tall Poppy" terminology was used mostly in regard to wealth inequality and genuine "upper class" types, but with Australia adopting the crazier capitalist worship of the US it has largely been adapted as a way of attacking "posh" academic achievement.

In all seriousness when I was in high school every time I came top of the year in math I would have complete strangers I'd never met approach me, declare that clearly my recent academic success meant that I thought I was better than them, and they were there to put me in my place and a fight ensued.

Between that and other factors for me, and all the other smart kids in my year (except the one who was a freakishly tall giant) basically lived out some sort of weird fight club scenario where we literally had to fight, very violently, for because of our academic achievements.

Records at the school covering the most violent "trouble" students in the school covered the rather odd ground of some of the dumbest assholes in school... and basically all the top achieving males. When the entire uppermost school administration positions were swapped out to "deal" with the school's out of control violence issues, the incoming "crack down" principle knew me and others in my position by name, on sight without ever having met us.


And on the smart kids and sport side... well I was pretty poor at sports, significantly smaller, had asthma all through primary school etc... But, I was freakishly good at some sports, and, inexplicably incredibly good at the High Jump. As in, no other kid in my school at the time, or EVER could jump as high as I inexplicably could. As in I jumped higher than the actual high jump equipment we had could even be set to.

I by all rights was supposed to represent my school at the regular athletics carnivals, which, quiet frankly I would have won. Damned if I know how, I was some sort of freaky little jumping monkey I guess.

However the teachers at the school explicitly arranged things so as to prevent me from attending the high jump events and later justified it with "You aren't sporty like the other kids and you are already smart so you shouldn't go taking their thing away from them by completely trouncing everyone at high jump".

Mind you there were other factors at that primary school so I can't say for certain that it was part of the distinct academic/sports divide in the local community, a genuine "stop winning all the fucking awards and let someone else have a go" thing, OR the incredibly likely factor that there was some family favoritism going on through a weird and corrupt PNC and it was by no means a coincidence that the children from our school that always got to compete in sport events were the children of some very particular parents that were especially chummy with the worst of the teachers involved.

And by the time I was in high school I was outright feared on the Soccer field, and regularly out performed the (dumb ass) kids who actually played the sport at an extracurricular level. Hell, I have related soccer stories I could tell. But probably won't.
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Post by Blasted »

Meh, that's not my experience of an Australian education,
where whether or not you were cool was entirely based on how social you were, if you also happened to be smart, then that's great too.
But not being an asshole is the first step to being one of the cool kids.

I did meet once principle who hated selective schools on the basis that everyone should have the same education, but that's the closest I got to seeing actual 'tall poppy syndrome'. I suspect if I went to a high school outside the city I may have seen more.
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Post by Stahlseele »

may be because i grew up in what's considered one of the worse parts of town and went later on to what was then considered one of the worst schools in the part of town i had moved into then . . but yes, at my school cool was popular and cool meant asshole in about 90% of the cases . .


also, i probably would have loved school if it wasn't so god damn early -.-
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Post by radthemad4 »

Yeah, IME, the popular kids were the most social ones who could get along with anyone. Many were smart, some weren't, but what mattered was their charisma.

However I am completely in agreement about school being like a prison. I hated school with a vengeance. I hated having to sit still and do absolutely nothing for several hours a day. If I needed to learn something I could do it more efficiently at home using textbooks, which I had to do anyway. I found some solace in doodling, playing with the calculator (and discovering some nifty tricks using memory, the list of useful stored values like electron mass and whatnot, the quadratic equation solver, matrix mode, vector mode, etc. (in retrospect I realize the teachers didn't realize how advanced the calculators we were using were, and neither did most of the other students despite my attempts to show them)) or reading the textbooks like you would a storybook (except when the teacher insisted that I 'pay attention' to the class, in which case I would have to settle for daydreaming). I'm really glad that pointless part of my life is over.
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Post by AndreiChekov »

In my experience, I don't remember how anything worked at my highschool, because I kept to myself, and read books all the time. Must mean I'm really smart. I will now share this article with my cat.
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