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I enjoy reading Paul Graham's musings on nerds / nerdiness, but I can't help but have difficulty relating. Maybe it's a generational thing (born in '92), but G

I enjoy reading Paul Graham's musings on nerds / nerdiness, but I can't help but have difficulty relating. Maybe it's a generational thing (born in '92), but Graham often seems to paint a picture of nerds similar to what you might see in movies and TV shows depicting the 80s, like the kids in Stranger Things. Even this article, while I can certainly conjure which of my friends growing up were the "fierce nerd", it still feels a little disconnected from my reality. For example, Graham begins by explaining that the concept of a fierce nerd is one unknown to the general public. But I'm not sure I agree. In the era I grew up, there was not so much social distinction between who is a nerd, but there was a lot of social distinction for those who were argumentative, or "fierce". In my experience, everyone knew who the "fierce nerds" were (although not by that name), because they were known for their awkwardness and combativeness - not for their nerdiness. Indeed, my own nerdy friend circle in high school spanned a wide range of popularities and I would say "fierceness" (or rather, lack thereof) was probably the best indicator of popularity. I see these themes spanning Graham's other musings on nerds, typically trying to characterize a class of kids who are hated for their interests and passions, but that's just never been my experience. I think it's a generational thing.

HeyImAlex 5y ago
Same, born in 92 and his characterization of being nerdy and young seems super antiquated. “Nerdy” interests don’t make you a social pariah, they transcend groupings all together; the star quarterback plays dnd, the head cheerleader builds robots in her basement, the stigma on having unique or “nerdy” hobbies and interests is mostly gone. When I think of what PG is describing, it’s characterized by poor social skills and bad hygiene.
- dugmartin 5y ago
  I can tell you as someone that graduated college in 92 that being nerdy as a kid in the 70s/80s it was very different from that, at least in my area of the world (Midwest USA). If you want a not very distorted glimpse of what it was like watch the movie, "Revenge of the Nerds".
  - watwut 5y ago
    In that movie, nerds publicly sexually harass and worst their enemies girlfriend. Yes, girlfriend mocks him at one moment, but the response is ridiculous. Are you sure you want to claim that is how things actually were? Edit: in the movie nerds sell secretly taken naked pictures of said girlfriend to earn money. The movie is old and ridiculous, but when you start to claim this is how things were, I want to know wtf was going on in your school.
    - leetcrew 5y ago
      stuff like that happened at my high school, and not that long ago. do you not believe that kind of thing happens/happened, or do you just not believe that "nerds" can be the perpetrators? these kinds of events can fly under the radar if you aren't involved. I only know of the situation I'm thinking of because the girl found out and complained to the school, which ended up expelling the others involved.
      - watwut 5y ago
        I do not think the movie is "a not very distorted glimpse of what it was like". More importantly, if movie is accurate, then nerds are no better then evil jocks. They are just two groups of bullies and assholes locked in a fight where everybody who avoids them is doing something smart. In your school, did the girl that got her nudes public got together with the dude that took them and sold them? You can peel levels of that movie how much you want, you won't get meaningfull image of reality.
- marvin 5y ago
  I'm just five years older than you and strongly relate to these descriptions of being a nerd, having academic interests not shared by young peers and consequently caring very little for social games. Even in adulthood, unless I carefully choose who I hang out with. And I'm from Europe, not the US, so it's not a thing local to the US either. If it's truly a generational change, that would be a very interesting development. Especially if it happened in just the five years between when we were teenagers - I had no impression that people a few years younger than me had a wildly different experience than me. But I could certainly be mistaken. Do you find no familiarity at all in these descriptions? Meaning some of the following - Being more interested in reading than gossiping, liking technical projects more than team sports, being uninterested in popularity contests and social status games to such a degree that you barely care about losing them, prioritizing learning over number of superficial acquaintances, having ideas and thoughts that you assume to be true but for which you experience lashback for stating out loud. Potentially experiencing some loneliness or hostility over this, not necessarily making that part of your identity, eventually seeking a small number of like-minded folks... Has the world really changed this much? From my perspective, it seems likely that you're just not the target demographic for this essay.
  - HeyImAlex 5y ago
    I knew many people who fit that description, but with even a little social intelligence it seemed to me their experiences in highschool were pretty great; they weren’t nerds, they were just smart and studious and many were very well liked. Our homecoming king was on the academic decathalon team. Im not saying that smart, introverted folks with underdeveloped social skills don’t exist, just that they don’t exist opposite to bros and jocks and cool kids (and weren’t mercilessly bullied for being themselves). On the other end, nerd-culture had permeated all levels of the social strata, and my very popular friends who partied every weekend were also semi-pro halo players and avid anime fans and didn’t hide either of those facts. It’s only six years, but it could have been wide exposure to the internet? Also very possible I’m seeing the past through rose colored glasses.
    - nitrogen 5y ago
      There is a pretty wide variance from school to school, town to town, and state to state/country to country. Maybe you were in a particularly well-adjusted school, and other schools and communities are still more judgmental of non-blessed interests? Or maybe the nerds remain, but they had different interests from the new main-stream. I'd hardly call Halo a nerd thing, for example.
- pnathan 5y ago
  You're a bit young then. I'm a decade older, and see very clear similarities in my age cohort to what he's describing, particularly when I was in my early 20s and teens. Which is interesting, because a good theory of behavior is not limited that tightly in time.
- riversflow 5y ago
  Where are you (or GP) from? Im also ‘92. I grew up in California, but in a rural part of the state. Nerdy interests absolutely had a stigma. My high school didn’t even have a CS class, no academic decathlon team, and certainly no robotics club. It was the “best” school in my district, too. In challenging or AP classes you had essentially two groups, the jocks, who were trying to follow a college track, for which sports were essentially requisite in our district, and the nerds who just liked learning stuff. The jocks(male and female) did their homework as a group, complained loudly about difficult tests/assignments and consistently used their relative influence to affect their grades. The nerds brought in their own lessons, asked questions that lead the class off topic, consistently read the textbook and stayed late to ask questions rather than negotiate. Anyway, thought I’d throw this anecdote out there for variety.
  - HeyImAlex 5y ago
    I was in a semi-rural suburb of San Antonio, Texas. We had a CS class, our academic decathalon team team placed 6th in state (I was a C but placed 3rd in individual), and I took a lot of AP science and math so I spent a lot of time with the top people in our class. It was… a great time. Non-AP classes were hit or miss, but AP physics C, calculus B/C, and art history were some of my all time favorite school experiences. I feel very lucky to have had the time I did.
  - SyzygistSix 5y ago
    Things have changed a lot since then though. In a positive way.
- sharker8 5y ago
  If there are star QBs that play DND (somehow I doubt there actually are that many) this is just proof that DND has gone mainstream and is therefore being commercialized as nerdy while actually not nerdy any more. This is known in some parlances as 'nerd-chic'.
moolcool 5y ago
There's definitely some eccentric people in the field, but a vast majority people I've met working in tech were hardly the Poindexter type characterized in these articles
- nzmsv 5y ago
  But do they think of themselves as such?
  - moolcool 5y ago
    I don't think so. I saw a lot of that kind of mentality in university among CS students, but it faded away immediately once I entered the workforce.
zozbot234 5y ago
Paul Graham himself muses in this post that the main contrast is between people who are "good at making deals" and those who are actually competent in some relevant domain. We can see this shift happening in politics as well.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- woeIsPG 5y ago
  A year ago he was musing how categorizing people into two groups was too basic. Xist versus Yist, and he showed us with some pretty basic math. Now two groups is all we need to understand the world?
  - dimitrios1 5y ago
    The two group categorization is a rhetorical device commonly used everywhere, throughout the world, to help drive a point, worldview, or allegory home. In it's correct form, it is never intended to be a dichotomy (as this would make it fallacious). So perhaps the way to understand it is PG believes people fit in these two groups, but those are not the only two groups you fit in, and they are by no means all-encompassing. It's kind of like, you are either a member of team red, or team blue. You may be a blue type of person, another is a red, but that by no means defines the entirety of your being. Let's try to have a little more good faith here, when trying to understand people's musings. The reality is, most of us here wouldn't have the courage to put our thoughts and opinions out there on the internet for the whole world to see, at least not to the extent PG does.
  - _jal 5y ago
    Well, we could certainly speak to the difference between those whose emotional needs are served by sharing their advice with the world, and those for whom they aren't.
    - woeIsPG 5y ago
      I’d take PG more seriously if he actually had to work to maintain his flock. Folks who struck it rich in the lottery talk about how suddenly everyone wanted to be their friend. I’ve been rummaging around the human experience for 41 years, applying technology to problems at public uni and big corp, building houses, growing food, hunting, earned degrees in electrical engineering and math. To me that’s all there is, to go do directly. All this feels like is someone who is riding off that lottery ticket. That is, I’m not seeing an information advantage. Just a political capital advantage. I thought we did away with allegiance to unelected political agents?
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
spamizbad 5y ago
I think after the dotcom craze, it stopped being "edgy" or "different" to be passionate/ambitious about technology. If anything, it's the most straightforward thing to pursue ideas or business interests with these days, especially if you have a "fierce" personality.
- helen___keller 5y ago
  To be fair, there's a lot more to the "nerd" archetype than just technology. But, from my experience, it was not particularly edgy or differentiating to be passionate about video games, board games, card games, literature, obscure TV, fanfics, internet culture, etc.
  - spamizbad 5y ago
    Yeah... if anything that seems normal these days? Many young adults are passionate about at least one of those things, whereas for Gen-X (Paul's generational cohort) those were far more underground interests.
  - shard 5y ago
    Is the word "geek" no longer used for what you are describing? Although there a lot of overlap, I thought nerd referred to strong interests in academic subjects and geek referred to niche cultural subjects.
    - helen___keller 5y ago
      True, I've been conflating the two in all of my posts. As far as how they were used when I was growing up, the distinction tended to be moot because they were most commonly used ironically or jokingly.
    - SyzygistSix 5y ago
      That is the problem with using labels rather than talking about what people are doing or what specific actions they are taking.
  - 5y ago
heavyset_go 5y ago
> Maybe it's a generational thing (born in '92), but Graham often seems to paint a picture of nerds similar to what you might see in movies and TV shows depicting the 80s, like the kids in Stranger Things. Graham's characterizations of nerds reminds me of the "They don't know" meme[1] guy. [1] https://www.buzzfeed.com/kristatorres/they-dont-know-twitter https://www.buzzfeed.com/kristatorres/they-dont-know-twitter

HeyImAlex 5y ago

Same, born in 92 and his characterization of being nerdy and young seems super antiquated. “Nerdy” interests don’t make you a social pariah, they transcend groupings all together; the star quarterback plays dnd, the head cheerleader builds robots in her basement, the stigma on having unique or “nerdy” hobbies and interests is mostly gone. When I think of what PG is describing, it’s characterized by poor social skills and bad hygiene.

dugmartin 5y ago
I can tell you as someone that graduated college in 92 that being nerdy as a kid in the 70s/80s it was very different from that, at least in my area of the world (Midwest USA). If you want a not very distorted glimpse of what it was like watch the movie, "Revenge of the Nerds".
- watwut 5y ago
  In that movie, nerds publicly sexually harass and worst their enemies girlfriend. Yes, girlfriend mocks him at one moment, but the response is ridiculous. Are you sure you want to claim that is how things actually were? Edit: in the movie nerds sell secretly taken naked pictures of said girlfriend to earn money. The movie is old and ridiculous, but when you start to claim this is how things were, I want to know wtf was going on in your school.
  - leetcrew 5y ago
    stuff like that happened at my high school, and not that long ago. do you not believe that kind of thing happens/happened, or do you just not believe that "nerds" can be the perpetrators? these kinds of events can fly under the radar if you aren't involved. I only know of the situation I'm thinking of because the girl found out and complained to the school, which ended up expelling the others involved.
    - watwut 5y ago
      I do not think the movie is "a not very distorted glimpse of what it was like". More importantly, if movie is accurate, then nerds are no better then evil jocks. They are just two groups of bullies and assholes locked in a fight where everybody who avoids them is doing something smart. In your school, did the girl that got her nudes public got together with the dude that took them and sold them? You can peel levels of that movie how much you want, you won't get meaningfull image of reality.
marvin 5y ago
I'm just five years older than you and strongly relate to these descriptions of being a nerd, having academic interests not shared by young peers and consequently caring very little for social games. Even in adulthood, unless I carefully choose who I hang out with. And I'm from Europe, not the US, so it's not a thing local to the US either. If it's truly a generational change, that would be a very interesting development. Especially if it happened in just the five years between when we were teenagers - I had no impression that people a few years younger than me had a wildly different experience than me. But I could certainly be mistaken. Do you find no familiarity at all in these descriptions? Meaning some of the following - Being more interested in reading than gossiping, liking technical projects more than team sports, being uninterested in popularity contests and social status games to such a degree that you barely care about losing them, prioritizing learning over number of superficial acquaintances, having ideas and thoughts that you assume to be true but for which you experience lashback for stating out loud. Potentially experiencing some loneliness or hostility over this, not necessarily making that part of your identity, eventually seeking a small number of like-minded folks... Has the world really changed this much? From my perspective, it seems likely that you're just not the target demographic for this essay.
- HeyImAlex 5y ago
  I knew many people who fit that description, but with even a little social intelligence it seemed to me their experiences in highschool were pretty great; they weren’t nerds, they were just smart and studious and many were very well liked. Our homecoming king was on the academic decathalon team. Im not saying that smart, introverted folks with underdeveloped social skills don’t exist, just that they don’t exist opposite to bros and jocks and cool kids (and weren’t mercilessly bullied for being themselves). On the other end, nerd-culture had permeated all levels of the social strata, and my very popular friends who partied every weekend were also semi-pro halo players and avid anime fans and didn’t hide either of those facts. It’s only six years, but it could have been wide exposure to the internet? Also very possible I’m seeing the past through rose colored glasses.
  - nitrogen 5y ago
    There is a pretty wide variance from school to school, town to town, and state to state/country to country. Maybe you were in a particularly well-adjusted school, and other schools and communities are still more judgmental of non-blessed interests? Or maybe the nerds remain, but they had different interests from the new main-stream. I'd hardly call Halo a nerd thing, for example.
pnathan 5y ago
You're a bit young then. I'm a decade older, and see very clear similarities in my age cohort to what he's describing, particularly when I was in my early 20s and teens. Which is interesting, because a good theory of behavior is not limited that tightly in time.
riversflow 5y ago
Where are you (or GP) from? Im also ‘92. I grew up in California, but in a rural part of the state. Nerdy interests absolutely had a stigma. My high school didn’t even have a CS class, no academic decathlon team, and certainly no robotics club. It was the “best” school in my district, too. In challenging or AP classes you had essentially two groups, the jocks, who were trying to follow a college track, for which sports were essentially requisite in our district, and the nerds who just liked learning stuff. The jocks(male and female) did their homework as a group, complained loudly about difficult tests/assignments and consistently used their relative influence to affect their grades. The nerds brought in their own lessons, asked questions that lead the class off topic, consistently read the textbook and stayed late to ask questions rather than negotiate. Anyway, thought I’d throw this anecdote out there for variety.
- HeyImAlex 5y ago
  I was in a semi-rural suburb of San Antonio, Texas. We had a CS class, our academic decathalon team team placed 6th in state (I was a C but placed 3rd in individual), and I took a lot of AP science and math so I spent a lot of time with the top people in our class. It was… a great time. Non-AP classes were hit or miss, but AP physics C, calculus B/C, and art history were some of my all time favorite school experiences. I feel very lucky to have had the time I did.
- SyzygistSix 5y ago
  Things have changed a lot since then though. In a positive way.
sharker8 5y ago
If there are star QBs that play DND (somehow I doubt there actually are that many) this is just proof that DND has gone mainstream and is therefore being commercialized as nerdy while actually not nerdy any more. This is known in some parlances as 'nerd-chic'.

moolcool 5y ago

There's definitely some eccentric people in the field, but a vast majority people I've met working in tech were hardly the Poindexter type characterized in these articles

nzmsv 5y ago
But do they think of themselves as such?
- moolcool 5y ago
  I don't think so. I saw a lot of that kind of mentality in university among CS students, but it faded away immediately once I entered the workforce.

zozbot234 5y ago

Paul Graham himself muses in this post that the main contrast is between people who are "good at making deals" and those who are actually competent in some relevant domain. We can see this shift happening in politics as well.

deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
woeIsPG 5y ago
A year ago he was musing how categorizing people into two groups was too basic. Xist versus Yist, and he showed us with some pretty basic math. Now two groups is all we need to understand the world?
- dimitrios1 5y ago
  The two group categorization is a rhetorical device commonly used everywhere, throughout the world, to help drive a point, worldview, or allegory home. In it's correct form, it is never intended to be a dichotomy (as this would make it fallacious). So perhaps the way to understand it is PG believes people fit in these two groups, but those are not the only two groups you fit in, and they are by no means all-encompassing. It's kind of like, you are either a member of team red, or team blue. You may be a blue type of person, another is a red, but that by no means defines the entirety of your being. Let's try to have a little more good faith here, when trying to understand people's musings. The reality is, most of us here wouldn't have the courage to put our thoughts and opinions out there on the internet for the whole world to see, at least not to the extent PG does.
- _jal 5y ago
  Well, we could certainly speak to the difference between those whose emotional needs are served by sharing their advice with the world, and those for whom they aren't.
  - woeIsPG 5y ago
    I’d take PG more seriously if he actually had to work to maintain his flock. Folks who struck it rich in the lottery talk about how suddenly everyone wanted to be their friend. I’ve been rummaging around the human experience for 41 years, applying technology to problems at public uni and big corp, building houses, growing food, hunting, earned degrees in electrical engineering and math. To me that’s all there is, to go do directly. All this feels like is someone who is riding off that lottery ticket. That is, I’m not seeing an information advantage. Just a political capital advantage. I thought we did away with allegiance to unelected political agents?

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

spamizbad 5y ago

I think after the dotcom craze, it stopped being "edgy" or "different" to be passionate/ambitious about technology. If anything, it's the most straightforward thing to pursue ideas or business interests with these days, especially if you have a "fierce" personality.

helen___keller 5y ago
To be fair, there's a lot more to the "nerd" archetype than just technology. But, from my experience, it was not particularly edgy or differentiating to be passionate about video games, board games, card games, literature, obscure TV, fanfics, internet culture, etc.
- spamizbad 5y ago
  Yeah... if anything that seems normal these days? Many young adults are passionate about at least one of those things, whereas for Gen-X (Paul's generational cohort) those were far more underground interests.
- shard 5y ago
  Is the word "geek" no longer used for what you are describing? Although there a lot of overlap, I thought nerd referred to strong interests in academic subjects and geek referred to niche cultural subjects.
  - helen___keller 5y ago
    True, I've been conflating the two in all of my posts. As far as how they were used when I was growing up, the distinction tended to be moot because they were most commonly used ironically or jokingly.
  - SyzygistSix 5y ago
    That is the problem with using labels rather than talking about what people are doing or what specific actions they are taking.
- 5y ago

heavyset_go 5y ago

> Maybe it's a generational thing (born in '92), but Graham often seems to paint a picture of nerds similar to what you might see in movies and TV shows depicting the 80s, like the kids in Stranger Things. Graham's characterizations of nerds reminds me of the "They don't know" meme[1] guy. [1] https://www.buzzfeed.com/kristatorres/they-dont-know-twitter https://www.buzzfeed.com/kristatorres/they-dont-know-twitter