the solution will involve fixing things that made one a “tempting” bullying target
So a nerd, according to the OP, is someone who:
lacks empathy and interest in other people
lacks self confidence
has unconventional interests, ideas, and appearance
But even if take for granted that this is a correct description of a nerd, these are very different issues and require very different solutions.
The last problem is simple to fix at the level of society and ought to be fixed there. A hate against specific social groups should not be acceptable, not matter how intuitive it feels, and how deep its biologically basis is. The current situation in which hate towards different races, nationalities, genders etc. is not politically acceptable, but the hate towards nerds is does not make sense. Overall, people have learned and mostly agree that tolerance is a good idea—but it is still applied very selectively. For example, if parents and schools are capable of avoiding race-hate in the classrooms (less or more), then they should be capable of censoring nerd-hate to an equal extent.
The problem of nerds being jerks and suffering as a consequence is not a real social problem at all. For a society as whole, it is giving negative feedback to someone being a jerk. It’s a regulatory mechanism. Here I agree with the OP that self-improvement is the action to take,
The problem of self-confidence is a real problem, as in this case it easily leads to a negative feedback loop. If the usual ways of increasing self-confidence do not help, I see no moral arguments against e.g. using personality-altering confidence-boosting drugs, if such were easily available and had no side effects.
So we have (1) a social solution, (2) a “not a real problem” solution, and (3) “wait for scientific and technological progress to fix broken biology/psychology” solution”.
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.
My main thesis is … 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.
I know a few people who obsessed over heroic fantasy (D&D, Dragonlance, Warcraft, etc.). None of them hated themselves, suffered much, or felt a great need to escape real life (except that when it was boring). They all grew out of it after a few years—still play, but do not obsess any more.
So your thesis is that kids who get hated on by other kids become interested in SF and DnD for escapist reasons, rather than already being predisposed to those hobbies. This is testable/falsifiable and potentially interesting.
Observations that support your theory:
fiction is a really excellent way to escape and lots of people do use it for that.
all the stuff you say in your post: nerdier, more outcast people like weirder and more magical fictional worlds
Observations that don’t support your theory:
escapist-nerdy interests correlate with other interests that aren’t useful for escapism, like math and taking machines apart. What these sets of interests do have in common is that they use the same abilities.
Dungeons and Dragons is actually a highly social activity. You need at least four people, one of whom is confident enough to extemporize an interactive story.
Other questions that would be good evidence:
Do children whose lives really suck (poor kids, kids from abusive families, kids with disfiguring illnesses) become bookish/gamers/nerds more often? If so, evidence for escapism. If not, evidence for predisposition. I would bet on no, but don’t have a source.
Do nerdy interests correlate more with IQ, or with what you call courage? Again, I would bet on IQ.
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.
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.
This sounds plausible and I’ll take your word for it. I know primarily (exclusively?) STEM nerds, so my typical mind fallacy may be inflating the percentage of Star Wars and LOTR fans who also like STEM.
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.
To whatever extent escapist-literature-fandom is caused by either high IQ or intellectual parents, it’s not caused by self-hatred, bullying, or lack of manly courage.
Funny, I thought escaping in their own private world was not something exclusive to nerds. In fact most people do that. Schoolgirls escape in fantasies about romance. Boys in fantasies about porn. Gamers in virtual reality. Athletes in fantasies about becoming famous in sport. Mathletes—about being famous and successful scientists. Goths—musicians or artists. And so on.
True, not everyone likes to escape in sci-fi or fantasy, but that’s because different minds are attracted by different kinds of things. D&D is a relatively harmless fantasy. I’m not that familiar with it, so I’m not even sure whether it can be used to diagnose “nerds”, but that’s not the point. Correlation is not causation.
Regarding “jerks”, we apparently have disagreement on definitions, so this is an issue not worth pursuing.
My point is that your self-styled definition of a “nerd” is bit ridiculous, as in fact you’re talking about three different groups of people that just happen to be overlapping.
Excellent point. The defining characteristic is here escaping into heroic fantasy. LOTR, Star Wars, Dragonlance Chronicles (in my youth), superhero comics. What does that suggest? A person fantasizing about superpowers does feel disempowered, don’t you think?
Yes, the overlap is an issue, nerds don’t fully self-identify as a group, the Linux guy will not high-five the anime guy saying “we are bros”. It is not really a clearly defined one group. And I am thinking of the second guy.
So a nerd, according to the OP, is someone who:
lacks empathy and interest in other people
lacks self confidence
has unconventional interests, ideas, and appearance
But even if take for granted that this is a correct description of a nerd, these are very different issues and require very different solutions.
The last problem is simple to fix at the level of society and ought to be fixed there. A hate against specific social groups should not be acceptable, not matter how intuitive it feels, and how deep its biologically basis is. The current situation in which hate towards different races, nationalities, genders etc. is not politically acceptable, but the hate towards nerds is does not make sense. Overall, people have learned and mostly agree that tolerance is a good idea—but it is still applied very selectively. For example, if parents and schools are capable of avoiding race-hate in the classrooms (less or more), then they should be capable of censoring nerd-hate to an equal extent.
The problem of nerds being jerks and suffering as a consequence is not a real social problem at all. For a society as whole, it is giving negative feedback to someone being a jerk. It’s a regulatory mechanism. Here I agree with the OP that self-improvement is the action to take,
The problem of self-confidence is a real problem, as in this case it easily leads to a negative feedback loop. If the usual ways of increasing self-confidence do not help, I see no moral arguments against e.g. using personality-altering confidence-boosting drugs, if such were easily available and had no side effects.
So we have (1) a social solution, (2) a “not a real problem” solution, and (3) “wait for scientific and technological progress to fix broken biology/psychology” solution”.
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 know a few people who obsessed over heroic fantasy (D&D, Dragonlance, Warcraft, etc.). None of them hated themselves, suffered much, or felt a great need to escape real life (except that when it was boring). They all grew out of it after a few years—still play, but do not obsess any more.
I don’t think your thesis is empirically correct.
So your thesis is that kids who get hated on by other kids become interested in SF and DnD for escapist reasons, rather than already being predisposed to those hobbies. This is testable/falsifiable and potentially interesting.
Observations that support your theory:
fiction is a really excellent way to escape and lots of people do use it for that.
all the stuff you say in your post: nerdier, more outcast people like weirder and more magical fictional worlds
Observations that don’t support your theory:
escapist-nerdy interests correlate with other interests that aren’t useful for escapism, like math and taking machines apart. What these sets of interests do have in common is that they use the same abilities.
Dungeons and Dragons is actually a highly social activity. You need at least four people, one of whom is confident enough to extemporize an interactive story.
Other questions that would be good evidence:
Do children whose lives really suck (poor kids, kids from abusive families, kids with disfiguring illnesses) become bookish/gamers/nerds more often? If so, evidence for escapism. If not, evidence for predisposition. I would bet on no, but don’t have a source.
Do nerdy interests correlate more with IQ, or with what you call courage? Again, I would bet on IQ.
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.
This sounds plausible and I’ll take your word for it. I know primarily (exclusively?) STEM nerds, so my typical mind fallacy may be inflating the percentage of Star Wars and LOTR fans who also like STEM.
To whatever extent escapist-literature-fandom is caused by either high IQ or intellectual parents, it’s not caused by self-hatred, bullying, or lack of manly courage.
Good point—it is the subset of specifically using heroic fantasy is what caused by it. And some other things… like heroes who are socially excluded or self-excluded. The books summarized by this painting were the biggest deal when I was young. Spot the character nerds assoicated with the most :) http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/9/99/Dragonlance_Characters_around_a_campfire_by_Larry_Elmore.jpg
Funny, I thought escaping in their own private world was not something exclusive to nerds. In fact most people do that. Schoolgirls escape in fantasies about romance. Boys in fantasies about porn. Gamers in virtual reality. Athletes in fantasies about becoming famous in sport. Mathletes—about being famous and successful scientists. Goths—musicians or artists. And so on.
True, not everyone likes to escape in sci-fi or fantasy, but that’s because different minds are attracted by different kinds of things. D&D is a relatively harmless fantasy. I’m not that familiar with it, so I’m not even sure whether it can be used to diagnose “nerds”, but that’s not the point. Correlation is not causation.
Regarding “jerks”, we apparently have disagreement on definitions, so this is an issue not worth pursuing. My point is that your self-styled definition of a “nerd” is bit ridiculous, as in fact you’re talking about three different groups of people that just happen to be overlapping.
Excellent point. The defining characteristic is here escaping into heroic fantasy. LOTR, Star Wars, Dragonlance Chronicles (in my youth), superhero comics. What does that suggest? A person fantasizing about superpowers does feel disempowered, don’t you think?
Yes, the overlap is an issue, nerds don’t fully self-identify as a group, the Linux guy will not high-five the anime guy saying “we are bros”. It is not really a clearly defined one group. And I am thinking of the second guy.
However nerds who suffer are clearer. See: http://www.reddit.com/r/justneckbeardthings/
Focus on the suffering subgroup and you get it clearer.