Ist leider in Englisch aber vielleicht erbarmt sich ja jemand und übersetzt für alle diejenigen welche in Englisch durchfallen würden.
When we were in junior high school, my friend Rich and I made a map of the school lunch tables according to popularity. This was easy to do because kids only ate lunch with others of about the same popularity. We graded them from A to E. The A tables contained football players and cheerleaders and so on. The E tables contained the kids with Down syndrome.
We sat at a D table, as low as you could get without looking physically different. We were not being especially candid to give ourselves a D. Everyone in the school knew exactly how popular everyone else was.
I know a lot of people who were nerds in school, and they all tell the same story: There is a strong correlation between being smart and being a nerd, and an even stronger inverse correlation between being a nerd and being popular. Being smart seems to make you unpopular.
Why? The answer, I think, is that most smart kids don't really want to be popular.
If someone had told me that at the time, I would have laughed at him. Being unpopular in school makes kids miserable, some so miserable that they commit suicide. Telling me that I didn't want to be popular would have seemed like telling someone dying of thirst in a desert that he didn't want a glass of water. Of course I wanted to be popular.
But, in fact, I didn't - not enough. There was something else I wanted more: to be smart. Not simply to do well in school, though that counted for something, but to design beautiful rockets, or to write well, or to understand how to program computers. In general, to make great things.
At the time, I didn't try to separate my wants and weigh them against one another. If I had, I would have seen that being smart was more important. If someone had offered me the chance to be the most popular kid in school, but only at the price of being of average intelligence (humor me here), I wouldn't have taken it.
And that, I think, is the root of the problem. Nerds serve two masters. They want to be popular, certainly, but they want even more to be smart. And popularity is not something you can do in your spare time, not in the fiercely competitive environment of an American secondary school.
Leon Battista Alberti, arguably the archetype of the Renaissance man, writes that "no art, however minor, demands less than total dedication if you want to excel in it." I wonder if anyone in the world works harder at anything than American school kids work at popularity. Navy SEALs and neurosurgery residents seem like slackers by comparison. They occasionally take vacations; some even have hobbies. A teenager may work at being popular every waking hour, 365 days a year.
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. Other players who can focus their whole attention on the game beat them effortlessly and wonder why they seem so incapable.
Nerds would find their unpopularity more bearable if it merely caused them to be ignored. Unfortunately, to be unpopular in school is to be actively persecuted.
Why? It's part of the mechanism of popularity. Popularity is only partially about individual attractiveness. It's more about alliances. To become more popular, you need to do things that bring you close to other popular people, and nothing brings people closer than a common enemy. Attacking an outsider makes them all insiders.
If it's any consolation to the nerds, it's nothing personal. The group of kids who band together to pick on you are doing the same thing, and for the same reason, as a bunch of guys who get together and go hunting. They don't actually hate you. They just need something to chase.
It's no wonder, then, that smart kids tend to be unhappy in middle school and high school. Their other interests leave them little attention to spare for popularity, and since popularity is a zero-sum game, this in turn makes them targets for the whole school. And the strange thing is, this nightmare scenario happens without any conscious malice, merely because of the shape of the situation.
Excerpted from Hackers & Painters, a new book of essays on computers by Paul Graham (pg@archub.org).