His argument boils down to nerd kids being exceptionally smart, and caring much more about being smart than being popular, hence failing at the latter.
I think this argument is overly general, as it can be applied to any kind of excellence: jock kids are exceptionally athletic, and they care much more about being athletic than being popular, hence, according to Graham's argument, they should be failing at being popular, while in the American school system they succed.
I wonder whether this "popular jock, unpopular nerd" phenomenon is specific to the American, and perhaps to a lesser extent Western, culture. AFAIK, in East Asian cultures such as Japan and South Korea, school popularity is positively correlated with scholastic performance, probably with good reason, since in these countries scholastic performance is highly correlated with future income and social status.
The closest Japanese equivalent to the Western 'nerd' or 'geek' is the 'otaku'. The word otaku typically refers to social ineptitude, an excessive fixation on pop culture items such as manga, anime, videogames and associated paraphernalia, and general tendency to withdraw from normal social interactions and escape to a fantasy world.
While perhaps many Western nerds can be considered otaku or near-otaku, Japanese otaku are not, in general, nerds, in the Western meaning of "socially awkward smart person". I don't know about IQ scores, but AFAIK, otaku usually have lower-than-average scholastic performance.
I suppose that escapism is the result of social isolation, which results from being underperforming in whatever measure of success your local society values. Different societies value different things.
I wonder whether this "popular jock, unpopular nerd" phenomenon is specific to the American, and perhaps to a lesser extent Western, culture.
FWIW, it did not exist at the schools I went to in Edinburgh, Scotland, in the 1960s, nor at university (Edinburgh and Oxford) in the 70s. There were sports; some excelled in them and some didn't, like anything else. In my later years at school, one of the options for sports (a compulsory subject for all) was chess. From over here, the jock/nerd thing looks like an exclusively American phenomenon that onl...
What do you believe that most people on this site don't?
I'm especially looking for things that you wouldn't even mention if someone wasn't explicitly asking for them. Stuff you're not even comfortable writing under your own name. Making a one-shot account here is very easy, go ahead and do that if you don't want to tarnish your image.
I think a big problem with a "community" dedicated to being less wrong is that it will make people more concerned about APPEARING less wrong. The biggest part of my intellectual journey so far has been the acquisition of new and startling knowledge, and that knowledge doesn't seem likely to turn up here in the conditions that currently exist.
So please, tell me the crazy things you're otherwise afraid to say. I want to know them, because they might be true.