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[wispfox]

I think I've seen this before, but... Why Nerds Are Unpopular, from nex0s. (I note that I _started_ going to school - rather than continuing to be home-schooled - in 5th grade. I was 9, everyone else was 11-ish. Ok, technically, I started in 4th, but it was a year I wasn't even there as often as half-time implied. I was at least actually half-time in 5th grade)

dglenn has a quote of the day today about scholarship and geekery.

Comments

[moosemonster.livejournal.com]

The answer, I think, is that they don't really want to be popular.

Interesting, but I would take it further and say that they don't need to be popular.

[wispfox.livejournal.com]

don't need to be popular.

I... don't know.

I'm unconvinced that anyone _needs_ to be popular.

[bridgetester.livejournal.com]

Some people think they do though, particularly for High School.

"Keep up with the Joneses!"

[starphire.livejournal.com]

Wow, that's cool. I didn't know you were homeschooled . I've actually thought that it would be near-ideal for kids to start out homeschooling and then transition to a place where they can interact with more & different people, have more resources at hand, and such. It's nice to know some people are allowed to do half-time while making a transition, too.

[wispfox.livejournal.com]

It's nice to know some people are allowed to do half-time while making a transition, too.

My mom appears to have had lots of contacts and such, because she managed to make _lots_ of things happen that I'm not sure most people have happen. That, or she's just very persistant. ;)

[bridgetester.livejournal.com]

You will probably like Paul Graham's What The Bubble Got Right (http://www.paulgraham.com/bubble.html).

I thought the section on Informality and Dress Clothing was very interesting, as it echoes a lot of my recent thoughts over "business dress being stupid and unnecessary".

In New York, the Bubble had dramatic consequences: suits went out of fashion. They made one seem old. So in 1998 powerful New York types were suddenly wearing open-necked shirts and khakis and oval wire-rimmed glasses, just like guys in Santa Clara.

The pendulum has swung back a bit, driven in part by a panicked reaction by the clothing industry. But I'm betting on the open-necked shirts. And this is not as frivolous a question as it might seem. Clothes are important, as all nerds can sense, though they may not realize it consciously.

If you're a nerd, you can understand how important clothes are by asking yourself how you'd feel about a company that made you wear a suit and tie to work. The idea sounds horrible, doesn't it? In fact, horrible far out of proportion to the mere discomfort of wearing such clothes. A company that made programmers wear suits would have something deeply wrong with it.

And what would be wrong would be that how one presented oneself counted more than the quality of one's ideas. That's the problem with formality. Dressing up is not so much bad in itself. The problem is the receptor it binds to: dressing up is inevitably a substitute for good ideas. It is no coincidence that technically inept business types are known as "suits."

Nerds don't just happen to dress informally. They do it too consistently. Consciously or not, they dress informally as a prophylactic measure against stupidity.