Comments on: Why No Science Of Nerds?

By: Lesser Bull

Lesser Bull — Wed, 01 Oct 2014 17:27:25 +0000

Alternate hypothesis: nerds end up excluded from popular groups in highschool and junior high, where popularity is correlated with and even defined by ‘adult’ behavior such as drinking, drugs, sex, and swearing. And either stick with the exclusion or overreact to it by going in for the “adult” behavior in big ways.

Alternate, alternate hypothesis: drugs, sex, and swearing are attractive and dangerous/offputting for all sorts of reasons to all sorts of people and there’s lots of variance in approaches among nerds and non-nerds alike

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By: Lightning Round – 2014/10/01 | Free Northerner

Lightning Round – 2014/10/01 | Free Northerner — Wed, 01 Oct 2014 05:03:56 +0000

[…] Nerds, science, and testosterone. […]

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By: Matthew

Matthew — Wed, 01 Oct 2014 01:01:29 +0000

This is wrong. Like, seriously, seriously wrong. Escapism is not necessarily a sign of self-hatred; I certainly never hated myself. It was more about finding the mundane things that interested other people boring.

Also nerd != STEM type. Plenty of us (including our blog-host) have stronger verbal skills than math skills.

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By: no one special

no one special — Tue, 30 Sep 2014 20:55:23 +0000

Midwestern programmer: brogrammers are missing here too. Also, no unicorns.

I think the brogrammer is a rhetorical device used to transfer hatred of the older archetype of the successful socialite onto the newer archetype of the successful tech entrepreneur.

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By: Shenpen

Shenpen — Tue, 30 Sep 2014 15:44:31 +0000

I think to be a nerd is to a large extent to hate yourself, and make an imagined self in the form of RPG (like AD&D) heroes, computer game heroes, fantasy heroes, anime heroes…

I will expand upon it later, but to a large extent it explains things like how nerds tend to have robotic movements, poor perception skills – they try to distance themselves from their actual sense, “I am not here guys, this sack of shit is not me, I am in my dreams being a super handsome 20th level paladin”.

Self-hatred can have many reasons, but your low-T hypothesis is good: low-T boys are perceived as weak and cowardly (they often are) and thus perfect targets for sadistic bullying. This bullying creates the self-hatred.

This is a quick summary only, obviously this topic would deserve a book.

Begbie gets one aspect of it right: http://thesoulisnotasmithy.blogspot.com/2014/02/nerds-are-arseholes-and-failures-part-1.html

Basically for a normal STEM guy, who accepts himself and is genuinely interested in it, if you correct a mistake of him, you will be glad: he learned something and got better. But the nerd basically wants to die as his own self and REBORN as a new identity, such as The Programmer or The Engineer. If you criticize anything about his knowledge, if you point out a mistake, you just challenged his whole identity and he will be obsessive about proving you wrong. Also, he can hardly talk about anything is than his subject. He is not John anymore, he is The Engineer and as such he can only talk about engineering.

This is why nerds tend to obssess.

And so on it is really a good topic.

Homework: what aspect of the self-hatred of nerds do various Dragonlance Chronicles characters represent?

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By: John

John — Tue, 30 Sep 2014 10:29:09 +0000

One flavor of this is perhaps the tech “brogrammer” type guy, who was a computer nerd when young but decided to trade his big software engineer salary for some kind of hyper-frat-boy lifestyle. (I’m personally not very fond of this personality type.)

I’ve worked in tech in Silicon Valley for several years and I still have yet to meet any “brogrammers”, FWIW. I think stories make them out to be more than they seem.

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By: Mike Johnson

Mike Johnson — Tue, 30 Sep 2014 06:17:59 +0000

I think were largely arguing past each other. It might be useful to ground any discussion of ‘domestication’ in terms of a specific mechanism– e.g., delayed maturation of the neural crest (which should vary both within and between populations?). At any rate, cheers, and thanks for the kind reply.

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By: Elissa

Elissa — Mon, 29 Sep 2014 22:38:17 +0000

No but this is totally the only reason for Counselor Troi to exist.

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By: ADifferentAnonymous

ADifferentAnonymous — Mon, 29 Sep 2014 22:22:01 +0000

I think the pattern may be that nerds don’t experience mainstream status and thus never acquire a taste for it, except when puberty hits they notice that people with mainstream status sure seem a lot more successful at dating. This leads to the “weird-imposition-entrance-fee” view of mainstream status/normal social skills.

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By: Nita

Nita — Mon, 29 Sep 2014 19:43:31 +0000

Thanks for the research! I do have two objections to the applicability of these findings:

1) There seem to be a lot of nerds / geeks / weird smart kids. There are very few children with IQ over 160.

2) As far as I can tell, “mental age” here means a certain level of performance on IQ tests. So, by itself it does not indicate anything about the child’s experience or interests (although the researchers seem to imply that it does, for some reason).

And generally, the writings on “giftedness” I’ve seen so far tend to have a certain undercurrent of zealous adoration, which renders me unfortunately skeptical :/

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