I'd like to request that when the date and time of a meetup is finalized, that somebody post as much on LW. I don't have a facebook and would prefer to keep it that way, but I also don't want to miss the London party. Please and thank you.

Quirrel was his fiance, not his parent.

The first truly excellent reply.

Not all fiction is a good way to escape, but you need to look at what kind of fiction I am talking about. I would call it heroic fiction. LOTR, SW and so on. This suggests being unhappy with one's self.

The math and machines and even software and Linux part: this is IMHO only partially true. I know many non-STEM nerds. Most STEM nerds have some interest in fantasy but not the other way around and IQ may be one of the factors.

I know more people who read and fantasize about D&D rulebooks than people who gather the courage to play it socially.

Having said that, a "social alliance of social outcasts" is a non-typical kind of socializing.

STEM-nerdy interests correlate with IQ, escapist-nerdy ones not. Have you ever read the Dragonlance Chronicles, the No. 1 fantasy of my youth? Point is, it is not actually difficult or complicated. Watching Game of Thrones is leaps and bounds harder, so many names and faces.

Further confounding: indeed children from poor broken families are less likely to do this. What escapist-nerdiness perhaps correlates with is not IQ as such but more like family background where reading books and related activities are respected and pushed by parents. Intellectualism, in a way, bookwormery, but not necessarily IQ as far as escapist-nerdiness goes. STEM-nerdiness is indeed IQ.

Interesting: in Europe, families with a more or less secular Jewish background went from worshipping The Book to worshipping "books". Literature, reading, intellectualism. Kids of this background were over-represented in this in my experience, because of the family being very approving of bookish stuff. This is intellectual, but yet not necessarily high-IQ. It is closer to liberal arts than hard-sciences, and indeed the most typical career here is historian - a certainly lower-IQ-requirement one than math.

In my youth it correlated with being rail thin. But today neckbeard is a fattish stereotype. (Hiding chin.) I would say obesity is not a key factor here, head and facial hair alone, or clothes, or hygiene are better predictors.

But the point is, today the world has changed. Today it seems to be almost everybody who does not consciously work hard against it are obese. Today basically obesity is the default shape for all who do not have it in their to-do list things like exercise 3 times a week, pay attention to food and drink etc.

So it is neither a predictive nor a typical trait. Almost everybody is obese today who does not give it high priority to not be one.

The reason is the current social normality to derive hedons from snacks and when adult, booze. I know this - at 36 I do care, do pay attention, and am still borderline obese, because of too much free time being bored, especially socially. Uncle comes over. What do? Oh, lets have vodka or two. Beer. Eat something. Etc. time gets passed. Even if you pay attention, the "bored, no idea what to do" -> snack up, pig out or get drunk gets you fat. Because today it became normal.

I think it takes a special sort of discipline to not be fat today. Or, like, really, really being good at being the opposite of depressed, like, always-having-fun: so much time to fill out and so little challenge.

Nope. He has four parents only two of whom happen to be dead.

So the Sunshine Regiment gets a Super-Hermione after all.

You keep mentioning overweight/obesity as evidence that "neckbeards" don't care about their bodies or see themselves as worth improving. Given the current state of our knowledge on obesity, eg this I think there are much better explanations for why some nerds are fat. It's possible to love yourself and think you deserve to look great and still have a slow metabolism. Also, do we even know that being nerdy correlates with being fat?

I need to write clearer. That is not my main thesis. My main thesis is my OMFG-level striking, shocking relevation that surprised by out of my mind, namely that e.g. obsessing over D&D is not merely a hobby or interest, but a desire to escape from a life and self you hate. This filled up with compassion and made me remember my former self who was not far from that. That hobbies and interests, in this case nerdy ones, predict problems. You can diagnose certain issues by looking at people's hobbies and interests. This is my main thesis.

The rest is digging deeper trying to figure out the reasons, and less important.

I think you misunderstood the group-hate thing. The kids are talking about were not yet groups at the ages of 8 or 10 when this happened to them, and actually I think it is a dangerous bias today to see every social dynamic as group relation, ignoring individual relations.

It seems after it was discovered that racism is a thing and a bad one, now everybody who was individually oppressed wants to invent their own "race". So for example gays went from just being individuals who like gay sex and get hated by other individuals for it to inventing their own group and identity, essentially inventing a "race" and thus re-casting the hatred they get from individual hatred to group hatred. I am quite puzzled by this. Is there a rational reason for this? Are humans hardwired to hate groups more than individuals? At any rate I think your point is adult nerds being another "race", which is a problem itself, but my real problem is that these kids were not yet nerds.

Seeing this as a group level oppression dynamic is very wrong at this 8-10-12 year old age. It was individuals, who were perceived as weak, and thus got oppressed for it. There was no identity of a weak-boy-group, it was not invented as a "race", although later on they became adult nerds and then yes they some extent invented themselves as a "race".

So it is not that nerds were hated as kids. Weak kids as individuals here tortured for being weak, and this made them hate themselves as they grew up, and self-hate turned them into fantasy escapists, and fantasy escapists are commonly called nerds or neckbeards or omega males.

I do not see nerds being jerks, where did you get this idea from? Or your own experience? Lack of empathy is not jerkishness. Lack of empathy with courage is jerkishness. Nerds don't dare to be jerky in my experience, too afraid of a beating. To the contrary, they will be generally submissive and meek. But very very closed up, not initiating contact with others. I really don't understand your point. I am constantly talking about the lack of courage as a self-hatred cause, and you are saying cowardish people can be jerks? I think they are too afraid to. We are talking about people who are even afraid to look in the eyes of others! Sorry, this does not make sense to me.

So yes, that is a real problem, fearful people are not actually jerks, lack of empathy and interest is not jerkishness in itself. It is a "please leave me alone, you scare me" behavior which is not jerky.

As for the third, there are already solutions, as I outlined above. I think confidence need to be earned, not just hacked it, or else mispredicts your abilities. It is deadly to give people more courage than ability.

I love how close we collectively got. Both that we came up with a solution close to the canon one, and that the canon one was just that bit more polished and elegant thanks to longer prep time.

I'm so disappointed that the Partial Transfiguration faction turned out to be correct.

Thank Merlin they didn't listen to us and continued submitting PT solutions. :)