Why Nerds Are Unpopular - Paul Graham  ## Metadata - Author: **Paul Graham** - Full Title: Why Nerds Are Unpopular - Category: #articles - URL: http://www.paulgraham.com/nerds.html ## Highlights - 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 ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01hj06hc5800hhq6rp5g0zhhjc)) - popular isn't just something you are or you aren't, but something you make yourself. ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01hj074570t8q4kgmzysx96fd9)) - Officially the purpose of schools is to teach kids. In fact their primary purpose is to keep kids locked up in one place for a big chunk of the day so adults can get things done ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01hj2ye3c9a4w8aa5m0sx985g9)) - What bothers me is not that the kids are kept in prisons, but that (a) they aren't told about it, and (b) the prisons are run mostly by the inmates. Kids are sent off to spend six years memorizing meaningless facts in a world ruled by a caste of giants who run after an oblong brown ball, as if this were the most natural thing in the world. And if they balk at this surreal cocktail, they're called misfits ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01hj2yg11erfgqsp92g3azw58n)) - I'm suspicious of this theory that thirteen-year-old kids are intrinsically messed up. If it's physiological, it should be universal. Are Mongol nomads all nihilists at thirteen? I've read a lot of history, and I have not seen a single reference to this supposedly universal fact before the twentieth century. Teenage apprentices in the Renaissance seem to have been cheerful and eager. They got in fights and played tricks on one another of course (Michelangelo had his nose broken by a bully), but they weren't crazy ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01hj2yk963r3bsb3wf6kwfck9s)) - Nerds aren't losers. They're just playing a different game, and a game much closer to the one played in the real world. Adults know this. It's hard to find successful adults now who don't claim to have been nerds in high school. ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01hj30cafpf91vr8yxd2m8b70s))