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HughRistik comments on Love and Rationality: Less Wrongers on OKCupid - LessWrong
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SarahC:
That is true, for the most part. Where I come from, the electrical engineering students' club at the local university is a popular location for nightlife and rock concerts that attracts masses of people as a party hangout. Something like that is practically unimaginable in North America, but it's not at all unusual in Europe.
Whoa.
I've also heard that in China, self-effacing and conscientious students can be the most popular. For the US, that's unimaginable.
These pieces of data suggest that the polarization of men towards "geek / nice guy" and "masculine bad boy" in the US is at least partly cultural, and it could be fought by other cultural forces.
That is the argument that David Anderegg makes in Nerds. While I disagree with Anderegg in some cases (e.g. dismissing the notion of Asperger's Syndrome), he has some excellent literary analysis of some of the tropes in American literature that influence how we think about masculinity.
Anderegg argues that in the 19th century, a dichotomy developed between "men of action" and "men of reflection" in American thought. This dualism presented the man of action as positive and masculine, while the "man of reflection" was the "effete intellectual" or clergyman, associated with femininity and homosexuality. He argues that our modern concept of "nerd" is the descendant of the "man of reflection" and "effete intellectual" stereotypes. Read that entire chapter I linked to. Here are some of Anderegg's examples:
Ichabod Crane in Washington Irving's story was a classic example of "nerd vs jock," where the nerd is portrayed in many negative and stereotypical ways
Superman becoming incognito and undatable to Lois merely by being mild-mannered and wearing glasses
He argues that ancient Greeks didn't have such a dichotomy between brain vs. brawn/looks: heroes were typically intelligent, good-looking, and capable, while villains tended to be both ugly and stupid.
Ralph Waldo Emerson's notion of the American scholar
Emerson's speech is fascinating and complex, but it definitely sets up the dichotomy between men of action and men of reflection. Here are some troubling excerpts (emphases mine):
[...]
[...]
[...]
Emerson makes a lot of good points, such as about avoiding past orthodoxies. But as Anderegg points out, his attitude is very close to "throw away books from the past, and write your own," which is anti-intellectual and fails to reflect how thinkers can stand on the shoulders of giants. There is no dichotomy between studying works of the past, and original thinking.
He displays a great ambivalence towards scholars of his time. He romanticizes "Man Thinking," but links scholars to Europe, femininity, homosexuality (via the word "mincing"), religion, unoriginality, laziness, timidity, and disease (e.g. "infected with Hamlet's unhappiness"). No doubt there were and are many scholars who deserve those labels, but his dichotomy is much too stark:
That's a very interesting reference, I'll try to check it out when I find some time. Unfortunately, I'm not familiar with Emerson's work, so I can't tell if Anderegg is representing his views fairly. But in any case, I've always found the American phenomenon of equating intellectual interests with "nerdiness" alien and weird, and its exact historical origins are still a mystery to me, so I'll be interested in checking out the book and seeing if it sheds some light on it.
Another funny example of the nerd stereotype: Georges St. Pierre (aka GSP), the current UFC Welterweight Champion and one of the greatest mixed martial artists in the world, thinks of himself as a nerd because he is into paleontology.
If GSP is a nerd, does the term make any sense?
Yes, it still means that people with intellectual interests aren't quite socially acceptable.
Admittedly, there's a paradox-- he's saying something that he "doesn't tell people very much" in an ESPN interview-- we've not talking about a gigantic stigma. Still, I don't think he'd talk about a fondness for NASCAR racing in the same way.
The funny thing is that car racing is also a technical subject. As Anderegg points out in the "Nerds" book, it's strange that some intellectual and technical pursuits get a "pass" on being "nerdy" because they are associated with masculinity, such as playing fantasy football or being a car mechanic.
I wonder how much anti-intellectualism is separate motivation, and how much it's an effort to enforce gender roles.
"I'm a nerd" is a pet peeve of mine.
I also recall Michelle Bachmann describing herself as a "nerd" because she watches science programs on TV. Look -- occasionally going to museums or reading books or watching educational TV shows should be normal. It's not a distinguishing characteristic.
I don't describe myself as a "nerd" on OkCupid because it just seems like a meaningless term by now. If you're looking for someone who's interested in ideas, well, I'm in academia, so that should tell you all you need to know. If you're looking for someone a little shy and silly, that'll come across too.
It is not normal for humans to occasionally go to musea or watch education TV shows, so it is indeed non-trivially informative to learn this about a human. It also clusters with other dispositional characteristics and therefore is useful for low-cost classifiers.
Because humans don't know much about the natural sciences, and certainly not in terms of predictive models, I have difficulty communicating with most of them about paperclip engineering topics. For example, when I start talking about endurance limits, I lose over 99% of the audience. It would be understandable if they could grasp the concept but weren't familiar with that particular term (it just means the stress -- load per unit area -- that a mechanical component could endure in tension for an arbitrary long period when applied cyclically i.e. on/off).
But that's not the situtation here. Their only knowledge of metallurgy and materials science is brief regurgitation of text that doesn't even map to a prediction as far as they're aware. So stuff is made out of atoms? Great, what predictions can you make with that? (That's on the better end of the human clippiness spectrum!!!)
If we simply recognize that it has two meanings which are often assumed to overlap but in fact do not always overlap, the puzzle is resolved. One meaning concerns a person's interests. The other meaning concerns a person's social skills. GSP calls himself a nerd because of his interests. After calling himself a nerd, he makes a half-baked attempt at presenting himself as socially inept ("I have a hard time finding a girlfriend"), but we don't have to believe him.
As you imply by your rhetorical question, GSP in fact is not socially inept. And he applied the word "nerd" to himself. What this means, assuming he was speaking current American English and assuming he is not deluded, is that the two meanings of the word "nerd" have in fact started to separate in English.
If "nerd" once meant something like: a socially inept person with a keen interest in an unusual topic, now it evidently can mean either "socially inept person" or "person with a keen interest in an unusual topic", without necessarily meaning both. Want proof? Here's proof: GSP is a nerd. He is keenly interested in an unusual topic, and he is not socially inept. QED (at least for one half of the claim).
If all this is correct, then the word "nerd" is in fact evolving away from the concept that rolled the two ideas into one, i.e., the idea of keen interest in an unusual topic and the idea of social ineptness.
Constant:
The real puzzle is not about the current meaning of the term, but why the former is normally taken to imply the latter. The existence of a widely used term that covers both meanings is just evidence that this connection is widely made, not an explanation of why it exists.
[Edit: the rest of this comment is based on an incorrect reading. See the replies below.]
I think your analysis is wrong. GSP (or at least the public persona he's presenting) is clearly an example that defies the stereotype. Yet because he fulfills one element of the stereotype, GSP seems unable to conceive of the possibility that he might be an exception to the other ones (or, alternatively, believes that claiming to be such would be absurd), and feels obliged to present himself as someone who indeed conforms to it wholly.
This is evidence of the tremendous strength of the stereotype: since GSP displays "nerdy" intellectual interests, then despite the extreme appearance to the contrary, somehow he still must have a nerdy essence that makes him unattractive to women and ostracized by the cool and popular social circles.
(I should add that the word "stereotype" is nowadays often used with strong moralistic meaning, but I'm using it as a neutral technical term for heuristics for categorizing people based on statistical discrimination.)
Actually, he doesn't believe that being a nerd means his social skills are so poor he can't attract a woman. He believes (perhaps accurately) that he's only interested in the relatively rare women who share his nerd interests.
What's interesting is that he associates being a nerd with having difficulty finding partners, even though the connection isn't by way of poor social skills.
Interesting. So it looks more like it's a new meaning all the way down the line, as he uses the term. He has even supplied a new explanation (pickiness) for the old phenomenon (having a limited set of friends), which was previously explained by ineptness. It was easy to be confused because he is describing the familiar outward pattern of the nerd, even though he has a new explanation for it. Genuine linguistic evolution here?
You're right. On a more careful reading, my interpretation was incorrect.
You may be right but let me add to my argument.
The evidence I see is of two competing meanings, an old one and a new one. The new one (obscure interest only) motivated the initial labeling, and the old one (obscure interest plus social ineptitude) motivated the subsequent rationalization.
People have limited self knowledge and are constantly rationalizing what they just did or just said. Their self explanations are not definitive.
I believe your argument requires that he has in fact mislabeled himself on the basis of an imperfect match between himself and the word. "nerd", and that he followed up by confabulating to make himself a better fit for the definition.
In contrast, I argue that the word is in flux (as is the related stereotype), that he is correctly applying a new meaning, but that he misunderstands his own statement. I think self-misunderstanding is commonplace, so I find thus to be a natural, unforced possibility, rather than a contrivance. I think that the meaning of the word "nerd" has in fact changed due to the mind-boggling success of the likes of Bill Gates among others.
Added: I propose ostensive definition as the key mechanism of change.
Step 1: "a nerd is a socially inept person with special interests...".
Step 2: ..."like Bill Gates."
Step 3: "a nerd is a person like Bill Gates..."
Step 4: "...who is famous for becoming fantastically wealthy through his special interests."
From Step 1 to step 2, examples are generated. From step 3 to step 4, the examples yield a changed definition because what was most conspicuous about the examples has changed.
Constant:
I agree that my comment was incorrect, and based on an inaccurate reading of what GSP said. Taking that into account, you're probably right that he is applying only the "obscure interests" meaning to himself.
That said, I don't think the general use of the word has lost much, if any of its negative connotations, nor that the underlying stereotypes are becoming any weaker. You say:
But notice that the public perception of Bill Gates is still in accordance with the full "nerd" stereotype. Watch the joke video that he made when he retired. What it clearly shows is that within the ranks of the rich, powerful, and famous, his position is very much like the position of a nerd kid among his more popular school peers: he is proud just because they're giving him some attention, and views this as a boost to his status. (Consider how unimaginable the opposite would be!) Certainly, despite all the money, power, and fame, nobody ever considered Gates as someone to admire and emulate in terms of style or social behavior, and not to even mention his complete lack of sex-symbol status.
Moreover, even if the nerd stereotype acquired some positive connotations in terms of good career prospects during the eighties and nineties, this trend could only have been downward for the last decade or so, considering that both the economic and general social status of tech professions has been going down ever since the dot-com crash. The ongoing deindustrialization is increasingly catching up even with white-collar technical work.
I think language changes from generation to generation. Each generation retains its own language, its own meanings. Bill Gates was born in 1955. GSP was born in 1981.
The year 1984 saw Revenge of the Nerds, the movie. The nerds in that movie were intellectually accomplished and social lepers. What intellectually accomplished fictional characters have we seen portrayed more recently, and let us see whether they were social lepers. Hermione Granger stood out for her intellectual accomplishments, but was not a social leper. UK of course, but an important character to her American fans. Americans have had cyberpunk heroes since Neuromancer, with Keanu Reeves playing two, William Gibson's own Johnny Mnemonic, and much more successfully, Neo of The Matrix, the superhacker. Not a social leper. A lot of other association of computer wizardry with more punk/goth outcast-ness than nerd outcast-ness, such as Kate Libby/Acid Burn/Angelina Jolie in Hackers (Jolie is genetically incapable of being a social leper) and the girl with the dragon tattoo, Lisbeth Salander, aka "Wasp", the last Swedish to be sure but very much embraced by American readers, and anyway I think she's obviously inspired by earlier incarnations of the similar type such as Kate Libby of the American movie Hackers. Granted, Lisbeth Salander is socially disconnected, but it's a very different kind of disconnect from the "nerd" disconnect.
What else. Sandra Bullock, Keanu's Speed costar, in The Net, portrays the socially disconnected computer expert in 1995, and she's no goth, doesn't go around in black leather, but she's still a much, much softer portrayal of the conservatively-dressed nerd, nothing like the taped-glasses nerd of 1984. And it's Sandra Bullock.
What else? Having trouble thinking of major characters. There's Gene Hackman in Enemy of the State, another super-hacker of sorts, but while completely isolated, is so for perfectly legitimate reasons. Then there's the latest Die Hard movie, hacker played by Justin Long, the Mac guy. Not played by John Hodgman, the PC guy. John Hodgman is typecast as the nerd. Justin Long is typecast as not the nerd - and he was the one picked for the hacker role.
I'm out. Can't think of anything else at the moment.
Edit: The Breakfast Club, 1985, Anthony Michael Hall as the nerd. I'm starting to wonder if 1984/1985 was the high point of the stereotype.
I've only seen a couple of the HP movies-- is Hermione's character presented much differently there than in the books? In the books, she's presented sympathetically, but she also has to navigate being disliked for knowing so much.
Also in the movies, it seemed to me that she was very pretty, while in the books, she seems to have average looks.
Three nerds on one of the later seasons of Buffy the Vampire Slayer (early 2000s) were socially inept (e.g. completely defenseless against bullying by Spike) and evil though less so than most of the bad guys.
As others have already pointed out, it seems like your set of examples is not representative.
I'm not very familiar with the popular culture from the last decade or so, and what I see of it usually evaporates from my memory quickly. However, one recent major Hollywood movie that I clearly remember promoting extreme negative nerd stereotypes was the 2007 Live Free or Die Hard, which features a "computer genius" character having just about every stereotypical "nerdy" characteristic imaginable. He is even shown as incapable of doing anything productive or profitable with his "nerdy" computer knowledge (he's depicted as living in his parents' basement in his thirties).
Interesting examples. I gotta cite the TVTropes article on Hollywood Nerds:
I think some of your examples are Type 2 Hollywood nerds: hot people with glasses stuck on. That type does defy the general nerd stereotype, but it doesn't do so in a believable way, so I'm not sure how much these portrayals actually dent the "nerd" stereotype.
The "hacker" archetype is a bit different. "Hacker" incorporates rebelliousness and creativity which is attractive and high-status, in addition to being emotionally relatable.
Goth and punk aesthetics also relate nerds to rebelliousness and Romanticism.
Justin Long is an interesting character. Why did he become the hacker for Die Hard, other than having good looks? There actually are a bunch of qualities that both Justin Long's Mac character have, and Hollywood hackers have. Justin Long's character also exemplifies creativity (Macs are associated with media, and his clothes and hairstyle look artsy) and rebelliousness (against the authority of the PC in the workplace).
The end result is that I only find Long semi-believable as a hacker. It's much easier to imagine him working in Final Cut Pro than doing scripting. My suspicions were confirmed when I looked up an interview of Long and found he does not have a technical mind: he says that he isn't good at math and his mind "doesn't work that way." Justin Long's Mac character is a textbook "Hollywood Nerd."
Technical interests are cool to have as long as you mask them in rebelliousness or artsiness.
The nerd stereotype is alive and thriving in the big bang theory.
Yes, it's things like these that I find bizarre.
In the meantime, I read the chapters of Anderegg's book you cited above. I find his thesis very interesting, but as always in the history of ideas, it's hard to estimate the relative significance of particular cultural tropes, especially since I know little about all the other factors that could have influenced the development of this characteristic modern American stereotype. I've put his book on my reading list, so I'll probably have more comments when I get to reading it.
The link to Emerson's speech is in my post.
You can read the relevant chapter in Google Books. The link I gave should take you to the history chapter starting with Ichabod Crane.
In general it's a good book, but it has some wrong assumptions and moralizing.