I agree completely that nerds do this. I did this. But I never did it to be "elite", or to keep the other person "below" me. Instead, I always assumed that the cheerleader (or whomever it was) was playing a very nasty practical joke on me—that if I accepted, they'd laugh in my face and wander away, or worse, I'd show up at the party to find myself a scapegoat for some random act of civil unrest previously committed that night by the partygoers. And yes, I even made friends only with other nerds—but only because I could tell, by the fear they showed toward the other groups, that they were a prey, not a predator, species, and were thus unlikely to harm me if I associated with them.
(If you can't tell, I was bullied for my entire elementary school life before entering high-school; I imagine I would have had quite a different outlook otherwise. Thankfully, by grade 11 or so, the concept of "clique" had dissolved in my high-school, so I did get to discover what a mentally-healthy high-school experience was like.)
I remember being particularly mortified about a retarded kid who kept coming and talking to me about his chances of getting into "Hahvahd." I don't know who was messing with his head, but he honestly thought that being an Eagle Scout (honorary, I'm sure) gave him a a good shot at getting into Harvard, and he wanted to talk to me about it. The retarded kid was a bit slower with the social cues. I hated him for that. And I was smart enough to know that's how normal people felt about me, which made me hate him even worse, but I never made fun of him to his face.
I was going to elaborate upon that but decided against it. Yes: nerds don't do things to be exclusive. They're not particularly snobby people. Their reactions tend to stem from alienation and paranoia: they act like that because they either don't think that other people like them at all, or because they want to maintain an image of some exclusivity on their own part.
The problem with that attitude is that it encourages people to be nasty back and to avoid your social group. And the people in a group of nerds that do notice that tend to start getting negative attitude from the rest of the group. I wasn't alone in this. One of my friends was part of the bookworm group of pretty people who studied too much, and I thought he was a twofaced backstabbing liar. That was eighth grade, and I'd like to think I've matured since then, but I certainly understand where you're coming from.
I'd also done things that might appear like this on occasion, even though I trusted that the person asking wasn't playing some sort of practical joke or simply trying to get me to do their work for them. The reason is that the questions were often things like "How do I make a web page on geocities?" or "How do I program DOS?"
In the former case, after establishing that they didn't want me to actually sit down in the computer lab after school and give an hour or two of instruction, all I could really say is that "It's really not something I can just explain in ten minutes." That comes off as a bit of a brush-off.
In the latter case, the question actually doesn't make sense. One can't "program DOS" any more than one can "perform a photograph". People became offended more than once by my genuine attempts to figure out what they were actually trying to ask. When I do get down to it, it seems they're usually asking "how do I make a game like Wolfenstein? That's kind of an old game so it should be easy!". That is just a more egregious example of the first case.
But yeah, this is the reason geeks don't accept invitations to parties. They've been burnt by requests like this before, and are worried about being burnt again.
I like to give anyone who asks me to teach them "to make games" or anything similar this test first, though: I take a pen and put it down on a page of paper, and tell them to tell me to draw a happy face on it, without expecting me to know what a happy face, or even a circle, is. I take everything they say literally, and tell them "this is how the computer would react to that." Clears up any misconceptions pretty quickly. :)
For that reason, it's hard to listen to what else he has to say, no matter how relevant or (potentially) awesome.
Obvious that he's never been the low end of the totem pole. It may be different now, but when I was in high school, geeks and nerds got shit on by every group -- the jocks, the actors and actresses. Everyone.
What I take away from this is the importance of growing up - you get through those stages and move into a more nurturing community of people that support what you create, not the details of how you created it.
Growing up is important. But early stress does have long-term consequences.
An outside perspective is almost always useful in figuring things out. I found this essay hit home. I was definitely in the nerd group, and if I had read this in high school, it would've helped.
I can agree with this to a point - by the time high school rolls around, yeah, the unpopular kids probably have adopted a set of behaviors that contributes to them being unpopular. However, those behaviors are probably defenses developed against some early damaging experiences. And who is responsible for those experiences? In my experience, it was those same jocks (or whatever) inflicting their damage all the way up.
Personally, I find it much more helpful not to worry about who to blame for unpopularity itself, and to focus more on what is _done_ to the unpopular. And the responsibility for that is much more clear.
Everyone's mileage varies. I went to a decent public school in the suburbs, and most people in my social circle belonged to a couple of others tribes as well - I was pretty active in the business competitions (as well as programming). Most other "nerd elites" were in marching band, actors, singers, swimmers, fencers, jugglers, etc. Sure, there were plain old jerks, but they were a certain a minority, and easy to ignore.
As was said by another commenter, perhaps it's different everywhere you go. I was in a place where I realized later on in high school that all of the torment and suffering towards nerds had some sort of a logical pull. And my school wasn't some sort of utopia: one dweeby kid in marching band had a bag of shaving cream smashed against his face during lunch as part of a hazing routine. What I noticed from that incident was this: while perhaps that one thing was inevitable, a lot of the sympathy I had towards that poor bullied kid dissolved away when he turned that one single incident into a sort of theater for discussing how unloved he was - particularly since that was the sort of thing I did when I was younger, too.
I wish I'd focused more on the programming aspect of this thing, though, because to be honest high school isn't worth talking about in my mind, not in this context. This was a response to an article titled "Rails is (still) a ghetto", where the author took a similarly hyperobnoxious approach to looking at a problem that didn't require anything obnoxious, and the larger problem is that the world of programming is highly inaccessible to non-programmers.
The Nerds and programmers almost always find themselves on the bottom. Things look different when you're a Dalit.
After the opening section I think the rant goes completely off the deep end with a rapid succession of wrong-headed generalizations. It reads like an 18-year-old who just finished high school and now thinks he's got it all figured out. The idea that programmers define themselves by what they are not, or by nitpicking inconsequential details is laughable. Sure programmers may be a bit more prone to nasty protracted flamewars over subtle issues, but we don't define ourselves that way. Sure our communities form around tools moreso than ideas (though not exclusively), but that's simply a matter of necessity given the detail of using any particular tool well. Personally I find the notion that "I define myself as a programmer" offensive. Programming is something I do, and I do it reasonably well, but at the end of the day it's only one of many things I do, and it's certainly not "who I am."
I agree. As I say, that's the sort of programmer I tend to like. The problem is, that's not the sort that aspiring programmers run into when they're first learning. I joined my first coding community at thirteen; for the last five years, I've seen no community that wasn't arrogant and hostile to a fault. The closest I got to nice was the Ubuntu community, who had a tendency to respond to bug reports with "You should look at the wiki page", where the wiki page was 50 pages long.
It reads like an 18-year-old who just finished high school and now thinks he's got it all figured out.
If I had it all figured out, I wouldn't write about it. As it stands, I'm aware of just how clueless I am. As I say here: I'm not a programmer. As I imply: I've been a part of this group of nerds for most of my life. I wrote this to engender a reaction amongst certain types of people, so I could get into a discussion with them about what's wrong with my statements here and what's right. The people I was expecting wasn't the Hacker News group. The fact that this post got rated this high makes me want to stop writing things with potentially ensnaring titles, because I don't want this on Hacker News.
I know I wrote it, and so I've got to own up to it here, but this wasn't the audience I wanted with this, and I regret that it's been put here.
After about five minutes I couldn't help but think of Maddox.
Hang on - there was a part without wrong-headed generalizations? The way I read it, the first two sentences tripped my generalization alarm. The guy constantly extrapolates from his tiny sample and says that the whole world is that way.
A desired group can basically set the hierarchy by what they define as attractive.
Most people don't actually want to leave the social group that they're in, as pg observed in one of his essays. The one exception is when their group is specifically a lesser version of another, usually the hangers-on.The nerds may really like programming and have no desire to play sports -- but they would love to date the attractive girls from any group.
The verbal and physical abuse in the system comes from members of a group which has attractive members of the opposite sex trying to keep down the others. For example, the jocks know that the nerds would like to date the cheerleaders, and so the jocks act to keep their supremacy.
It's high school, it's all about sex, what did you expect?
The difference between a jock and a band geek is that the jock will resort to violence to defend himself. I've pranked jocks before with groups of band geeks. It often leads to a scuffle. When band geeks are strong enough to fight back, they don't get bullied either.
You don't torment people because of your own psychological past. Usually it's done out of irritation. The meek, quiet type usually gets ignored in favor of the one who talks too much in class, not because people hate smart people, but because there are certain sorts who are really jerks about it and that irritates people. That's also why bullies tend to be on the smarter side of the spectrum. I knew kids in the studies (low-level) courses and kids in the advanced courses, and the ones who were more likely to mock a kid was all in the advanced courses. I've been in the mocking situation before, so it all works.
Okay, wait a second. First off, I have a hard time picturing how someone can be that much of a "jerk" by answering a teacher's question. And secondly, are you honestly siding with a bully who beats on a kid for that kind of behavior? I mean, I understand that it can be irritating to hear from the same kid all the time, but frankly, the onus is on the bully to deal with this incredibly minor irritation in a less destructive way. Your implication that those being tormented are more at fault than the tormentors sickens me.
Somehow it seems that all these stories tie into that theme: the expectations, the sense that one must live their High School role thenceforth, the contemporary judgments made based on factors from High School and so on.
[1] Adolescence is obviously formative just like anything else; I trust you can make the distinction.
Hell, programmers argue over web browsers. There is an elitist and closed-off system among hardcore coders that says certain things are better than others, usually for no reason, often for bad reasons.
Or in other words, so-called nerds have different interests than the rest of the population, and they act completely normal about those interests within their peer group.
Reading the comments, I guess I don't care and aren't missing much.
Finding flaws is valuable if you're doing a startup or figuring out a good design, but if you're in any sort of social situation, it will instantly turn people off to you 100%.
I wrote out a thoughtful little thing explaining why it was currently redirecting, then got a complaint from an IE6 tester that that page wasn't displaying, and decided "Fuck it, I'll wait until later to make my blog respectable." I'm in the middle of a big redesign/name change/shebang, and since this isn't the blog that'll be the center of that redesign, I'm not focusing very much on it until the other pieces are more ready.
The real problem seems to be school violence and bullying, and it seems that in the U.S., at least, this is a non-trivial problem.
Dicks you can just ignore are one thing. Dicks who beat up kids smaller than them or pick out kids to ambush with their buddies, cannot be ignored. Sounds like this was not the case at your school, which is great. But it changes everything when violence is involved, and explains why unpopular "nerds" could display exclusion and paranoia, literally as a survival mechanism.
In schools where violence is not widespread, I think Rory's comments have more validity.
I want to read it, so far I've just used the audio book and enjoyed it, but didn't really focus on it as much as I would have if I had read it.
When I developed the attitude I've got now, the one that accepts my faults and doesn't immediately get nasty, the change in people was almost immediate. Most people really would rather like you than dislike you, and the instant you start accepting them, they start liking you back. The people who are real jerks and tormentors drop it after it stops affecting you - and that doesn't mean your responding harshly or ignoring it, it means your ignoring the fact that they're attempting to be tormentors. If you ask a bullying jock a question about his sports team, and start just talking to him about the stuff he does, they're completely nonplussed, and after just a little bit, they start treating you like a normal human being.
There is an imaginary risk, and I agree with you that it's terrifying as hell to think that people are against you. I've been there. But it's not a real risk, and once you overcome that nonexistent worry - and that's absolutely not an easy thing to do - you realize that nobody is any more at risk than anybody else.
The risk, of course, is that they'll screw something up and the tormentors will continue to torment. These are generally socially awkward people we're talking about. You're being rather silly to suggest that someone who isn't at home in social situations to begin with and has been ostracized for pretty much their entire life is not at risk of real failure in a social environment.
I'm glad that you were successful in your social ladder climb. But you are pretending that _everyone_ will be successful. It's simply not a foregone conclusion - there are losers in this game, even among those who try their hardest not to be.
> you realize that nobody is any more at risk than anybody else
This is so very false that I don't even know where to begin. Are you saying that there are not real advantages and disadvantages in social situations? Can you not see that the captain of the football team is way less likely to be harassed than the math dweeb?
I generally found many of my peers boring as hell.
I tried going to a "get hammered in the middle of the woods" party (yes, it was that kind of high school), but I didn't drink, and no one was doing anything especially interesting, or saying anything especially interesting, and it was boring as hell, but everyone else being inebriated were oblivious to the dumbfounding level of boredom surrounding them, making it all the more frustrating.
So, I guess it really comes down to my not wanting to drink that resulted in my anti-social nerdiness. It was not until college that I found actually interesting people doing actually interesting and fun activities, without benefit of mind altering substances.
The posters here generally are taking some kind of offense to this, and feel the need to shoot it full of holes. In the meantime, this behavior is only reinforcing the point to anyone who happens to not be a programmer.
It's actually quite striking.
Or would it mean that he just may be wrong.
Show me the person who makes an active attempt to stop being hated - not by being "cool" but by starting to act friendly towards people - and fails after a few weeks' effort and I'll consider your experiment a potential refutation.
Would the multitudes of people coming to refute his points confirm his point that there is a conspiracy to hide the truth?
I said "Nerds are in denial" and a lot of people jumped on board to deny it. I'm not saying that proves it either way, because I don't presume to judge people by their comments online, but it's not exactly evidence of my wrongdoing.
Mark Zuckerberg is the CEO of Facebook. His coding abilities cannot be judged unless it is known how much of the Facebook code he actually wrote. I assume the majority of it was not written by him.
I think Facebook is one of the best-looking sites that's ever been, though the last two redesigns haven't been too tight. The original layout, with the links on the side and the two-column profile, was one of those things that vastly inspired me when I was younger. The level of order it forced on its users was stunning, especially compared to MySpace. Now it's been tuning down some of the things I liked - especially the "How do you know this person" syntax - but it's still more usable than any other site that huge. The fact that people can intuitively figure out how to post photos, videos, events, groups, notes, friend people, fan pages, add applications, all without any advice - my grandfather figured it all out without help - is one of those things that's so impressive that it's easy to ignore because you take it for granted. Meanwhile, a lot of the things that have become common in sites - the thing that stands out to me is the resizing textfields - were first popularly used in Facebook. When I wrote for AllFacebook my main interest was scouring the site, clicking everything I could, looking for those finesses. So it's beautiful in terms of dedication to usability if nothing else.
Edit: Not to seem too negative, but I have just run into this attitude in most people that aren't introverts. There are advantages and disadvantages to both sides of that coin, but I feel like the introvert side gets labeled as the bad one.
In places like the US, extroversion is accepted and liked. However, in places like Germany, introversion is well respected and as an equal to extroversion.
I asked why and he said that he really didn't know. It's just the difference in culture.
The Introvert: introversion => social isolation => perceived snobbery => social challenges
The Nerd: socially challenged => social isolation => pretense of snobbery or introversion
There are introvert athletes and actors and musicians, but they're more popular in society. One of the quote-unquote coolest kids I know is a drummer who just never talks. He's incredibly shy. He smiles when people talk to him and says nothing, and for whatever reason people just absolutely love him. So introversion in and of itself isn't the issue.
Off topic, but please fix.
Agree with you about the leading. This is the first thing I've written where the title has dropped to two lines, and it looks icky compared to with one. This theme is very much a work in progress - just started coding it in early last week - so I'll tidy those things up.
This isn't my writing about a dislike of nerds. This is my writing to certain nerds explaining why their situation is what it is.
This is a wrong assumption, because there are people who are smart but are not (computer) nerds.
"Cheerleader come over and ask about programming? Shot down. Invitation to a study group? Rejected. The most bitingly ironic comes when a person in a group of nerds gets an invitation to a party. If you’re one of the more social people in your scene, try it. Invite an anime person or a programmer - one of those people - out to an event. Chances are you’ll be declined. There’s every possibility you’ll be rejected impolitely. The whole concept of the nerd clique is based on elitism: you need to be smart in order to be a part of the group."
I've read once about a cheerleader who became a rocket scientist.
The article is based on wrong assumptions. People don't reject you because you belong to a "smart" group but rather because "computer nerds" tend to lack social skills (at some point in their early life at least), that make seem akward. or themselves reject specific attitude/people who they don't feel combatible, so it's a human behaviour thing that you should expect that those you reject they will reject you.
Now that you've insulted me and called me both angry and sad, I'd like you to explain yourself further so I can respond in kind.
We all wern't made fun of in high school. Some of us even had plenty of jock friends and stayed away from the "introvert hate everybody clueless programmers group".
And there's one really cool thing about being a "nerd": You learn a lot about a multitude of subjects. Because of that, you can learn of the interconnectedness between subjects. It's what I did, and I was able to help, say, a few cheerleaders on their advanced chemistry course, or watch a film while "critiquing" it.
I also taught a few of these students biology... no no no, not sex (no, that would be a bit later). Winemaking. I mean, if you want to be popular, you stand out. Even if it is a 'little bit', you make yourself memorable. People of all sorts will look past general quirkiness if you're a cool guy.
The toughest group to join was that nerd group, at least in my HS. I assume it was a mixture of not trusting or they thought I was too stupid. My SO however had a completely difference experience, in which there was really no real cliques (there were, in name usually).
In what planet did you grow up?
No no no. That's me, but it's not because of anything to do with spotting "a sign of weakness".
Let me try to use a non-car analogy: Imagine I'm a carpenter (I'm not) and you come up to me and ask "how do I build a staircase?". The kinds of thoughts going through my head might be:
1) A staircase is obviously wood, cut to shape, then fixed together. It's also obviously quite a big thing. There's no need to answer with the low level "obvious" things like "you will need a large workshop", if you want to build a staircase you probably already have woodworking tools and experience and now want a bigger project, so an answer telling you basic outline steps would be insultingly patronising and unhelpful.
Also, an answer covering enough steps from scratch would take far too long for a forum post or discussion reply, so if I make the judgement that you don't have any of the experience and haven't considered it at all then you might get a dismissive "with a lot of work" reply.
(OK, maybe if we met informally and you asked, you might be just making conversation, but nobody goes to a technical forum and asks how to build a website just to make friends, do they, so that doesn't apply).
2) On the other hand, if you have spotted the obvious then you're asking one question but meaning another - maybe what kind of wood can I use to make it look nice, what building regs must it comply to, how can I reinforce it, what fireproofing treatments work well? What styles of bannister were popular in Victorian times?
There could be a lot of fun stuff, but again too many directions to go in all in one answer - this is where you get the "it depends what style you want" answer. It's not bullshit, it's better than that, it's skipping straight to acknowledgement, acceptance and directed at whichever obstacle or major design consideration comes to mind first.
So, "how do you build a website that people can join" leads me to think something like:
A website people can join means giving them a form to fill in, keeping their details, and providing a login prompt later. This is obvious to anyone who has used a couple of websites with signup forms.
So either you understand the steps of a site you can signup to and would have Googled until you found out more about those steps and asked a more specific question (What's HTML? What's a webhost? What happens to information in a form once I click submit? How can I keep it around?), or you're really asking for design and obstacle avoidance suggestions, e.g. scaling, security, server load, etc.
Hence the replies: You haven't Googled for the basics, that suggests you aren't ready for the amount of work involved, or you aren't really asking such a basic question so you don't get a basic answer.
I wouldn't go to an exotic plant center and ask how to grow a sequoia tree and when they ask if I have any gardening experience, say no. Have any tools? No. Have anywhere to grow one? No. Do I want to read a book on them? No. I don't want to go through all this growing a tree bullshit, I just want to grow a sequoia tree! It'll need a lot of space. Don't give me this scaling crap. It'll need a tropical soil makeup. I don't care about soil chemistry you nerd, I just want to grow a big tree!
If I wanted to jump into a big project, why not? I'd research to find out where they normally grow, where seeds for unusual plants can be obtained, how to germinate and care for similar (tree, tropical, whatever) seeds and what kinds of soils and watering they might require, and arrange a big space to grow it in - then I'd contact someone appropriate and describe my plan, make it clear I was determined and ask for their advice.
I'm having trouble putting my finger on what's annoying me, it's not the request for free code - you can have it. It's not the asking for help - I'll help when I can (if I'm interested).
There's something about the questioner being unwilling to help themselves. Not a lack of understanding about a topic, but a lack of understanding about understanding in general. A kind of feeling that some people think things are literally magic, not just a chain of connections that anyone learn about and manipulate.
It's probably because I'm a nerd who likes details (in areas I'm interested in, at least), but it's puzzling.
