[转帖] Paul Graham：Why Nerds Are Unpopular

showcraft

http://www.paulgraham.com/nerds.html
February 2003

When we were in junior high school, my friend Rich and I made a map of the school lunch tables according to popularity. This was easy to do, because kids only ate lunch with others of about the same popularity. We graded them from A to E. A tables were full of football players and cheerleaders and so on. E tables contained the kids with mild cases of Down's Syndrome, what in the language of the time we called "retards."

We sat at a D table, as low as you could get without looking physically different. We were not being especially candid to grade ourselves as D. It would have taken a deliberate lie to say otherwise. Everyone in the school knew exactly how popular everyone else was, including us.

My stock gradually rose during high school. Puberty finally arrived; I became a decent soccer player; I started a scandalous underground newspaper. So I've seen a good part of the popularity landscape.

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.

Why? To someone in school now, that may seem an odd question to ask. The mere fact is so overwhelming that it may seem strange to imagine that it could be any other way. But it could. Being smart doesn't make you an outcast in elementary school. Nor does it harm you in the real world. Nor, as far as I can tell, is the problem so bad in most other countries. But in a typical American secondary school, being smart is likely to make your life difficult. Why?



The key to this mystery is to rephrase the question slightly. Why don't smart kids make themselves popular? If they're so smart, why don't they figure out how popularity works and beat the system, just as they do for standardized tests?

One argument says that this would be impossible, that the smart kids are unpopular because the other kids envy them for being smart, and nothing they could do could make them popular. I wish. If the other kids in junior high school envied me, they did a great job of concealing it. And in any case, if being smart were really an enviable quality, the girls would have broken ranks. The guys that guys envy, girls like.

In the schools I went to, being smart just didn't matter much. Kids didn't admire it or despise it. All other things being equal, they would have preferred to be on the smart side of average rather than the dumb side, but intelligence counted far less than, say, physical appearance, charisma, or athletic ability.

So if intelligence in itself is not a factor in popularity, why are smart kids so consistently unpopular? The answer, I think, is that they don't really want to be popular.

If someone had told me that at the time, I would have laughed at him. Being unpopular in school makes kids miserable, some of them so miserable that they commit suicide. Telling me that I didn't want to be popular would have seemed like telling someone dying of thirst in a desert that he didn't want a glass of water. Of course I wanted to be popular.

But in fact I didn't, not enough. There was something else I wanted more: to be smart. Not simply to do well in school, though that counted for something, but to design beautiful rockets, or to write well, or to understand how to program computers. In general, to make great things.

At the time I never tried to separate my wants and weigh them against one another. If I had, I would have seen that being smart was more important. If someone had offered me the chance to be the most popular kid in school, but only at the price of being of average intelligence (humor me here), I wouldn't have taken it.

Much as they suffer from their unpopularity, I don't think many nerds would. To them the thought of average intelligence is unbearable. But most kids would take that deal. For half of them, it would be a step up. Even for someone in the eightieth percentile (assuming, as everyone seemed to then, that intelligence is a scalar), who wouldn't drop thirty points in exchange for being loved and admired by everyone?

And that, I think, is the root of the problem. Nerds serve two masters. They want to be popular, certainly, but they want even more to be smart. And popularity is not something you can do in your spare time, not in the fiercely competitive environment of an American secondary school.



Alberti, arguably the archetype of the Renaissance Man, writes that "no art, however minor, demands less than total dedication if you want to excel in it." I wonder if anyone in the world works harder at anything than American school kids work at popularity. Navy SEALs and neurosurgery residents seem slackers by comparison. They occasionally take vacations; some even have hobbies. An American teenager may work at being popular every waking hour, 365 days a year.

I don't mean to suggest they do this consciously. Some of them truly are little Machiavellis, but what I really mean here is that teenagers are always on duty as conformists.

For example, teenage kids pay a great deal of attention to clothes. They don't consciously dress to be popular. They dress to look good. But to who? To the other kids. Other kids' opinions become their definition of right, not just for clothes, but for almost everything they do, right down to the way they walk. And so every effort they make to do things "right" is also, consciously or not, an effort to be more popular.

Nerds don't realize this. They don't realize that it takes work to be popular. In general, people outside some very demanding field don't realize the extent to which success depends on constant (though often unconscious) effort. For example, most people seem to consider the ability to draw as some kind of innate quality, like being tall. In fact, most people who "can draw" like drawing, and have spent many hours doing it; that's why they're good at it. Likewise, popular isn't just something you are or you aren't, but something you make yourself.

The main reason nerds are unpopular is that they have other things to think about. Their attention is drawn to books or the natural world, not fashions and parties. They're like someone trying to play soccer while balancing a glass of water on his head. Other players who can focus their whole attention on the game beat them effortlessly, and wonder why they seem so incapable.

Even if nerds cared as much as other kids about popularity, being popular would be more work for them. The popular kids learned to be popular, and to want to be popular, the same way the nerds learned to be smart, and to want to be smart: from their parents. While the nerds were being trained to get the right answers, the popular kids were being trained to please.



So far I've been finessing the relationship between smart and nerd, using them as if they were interchangeable. In fact it's only the context that makes them so. A nerd is someone who isn't socially adept enough. But "enough" depends on where you are. In a typical American school, standards for coolness are so high (or at least, so specific) that you don't have to be especially awkward to look awkward by comparison.

Few smart kids can spare the attention that popularity requires. Unless they also happen to be good-looking, natural athletes, or siblings of popular kids, they'll tend to become nerds. And that's why smart people's lives are worst between, say, the ages of eleven and seventeen. Life at that age revolves far more around popularity than before or after.

Before that, kids' lives are dominated by their parents, not by other kids. Kids do care what their peers think in elementary school, but this isn't their whole life, as it later becomes.

Around the age of eleven, though, kids seem to start treating their family as a day job. They create a new world among themselves, and standing in this world is what matters, not standing in their family. Indeed, being in trouble in their family can win them points in the world they care about.

The problem is, the world these kids create for themselves is at first a very crude one. If you leave a bunch of eleven-year-olds to their own devices, what you get is Lord of the Flies. Like a lot of American kids, I read this book in school. Presumably it was not a coincidence. Presumably someone wanted to point out to us that we were savages, and that we had made ourselves a cruel and stupid world. This was too subtle for me. While the book seemed entirely believable, I didn't get the additional message. I wish they had just told us outright that we were savages and our world was stupid.



Nerds would find their unpopularity more bearable if it merely caused them to be ignored. Unfortunately, to be unpopular in school is to be actively persecuted.

Why? Once again, anyone currently in school might think this a strange question to ask. How could things be any other way? But they could be. Adults don't normally persecute nerds. Why do teenage kids do it?

Partly because teenagers are still half children, and many children are just intrinsically cruel. Some torture nerds for the same reason they pull the legs off spiders. Before you develop a conscience, torture is amusing.

Another reason kids persecute nerds is to make themselves feel better. When you tread water, you lift yourself up by pushing water down. Likewise, in any social hierarchy, people unsure of their own position will try to emphasize it by maltreating those they think rank below. I've read that this is why poor whites in the United States are the group most hostile to blacks.

But I think the main reason other kids persecute nerds is that it's part of the mechanism of popularity. Popularity is only partially about individual attractiveness. It's much more about alliances. To become more popular, you need to be constantly doing things that bring you close to other popular people, and nothing brings people closer than a common enemy.

Like a politician who wants to distract voters from bad times at home, you can create an enemy if there isn't a real one. By singling out and persecuting a nerd, a group of kids from higher in the hierarchy create bonds between themselves. Attacking an outsider makes them all insiders. This is why the worst cases of bullying happen with groups. Ask any nerd: you get much worse treatment from a group of kids than from any individual bully, however sadistic.

If it's any consolation to the nerds, it's nothing personal. The group of kids who band together to pick on you are doing the same thing, and for the same reason, as a bunch of guys who get together to go hunting. They don't actually hate you. They just need something to chase.

Because they're at the bottom of the scale, nerds are a safe target for the entire school. If I remember correctly, the most popular kids don't persecute nerds; they don't need to stoop to such things. Most of the persecution comes from kids lower down, the nervous middle classes.

The trouble is, there are a lot of them. The distribution of popularity is not a pyramid, but tapers at the bottom like a pear. The least popular group is quite small. (I believe we were the only D table in our cafeteria map.) So there are more people who want to pick on nerds than there are nerds.

As well as gaining points by distancing oneself from unpopular kids, one loses points by being close to them. A woman I know says that in high school she liked nerds, but was afraid to be seen talking to them because the other girls would make fun of her. Unpopularity is a communicable disease; kids too nice to pick on nerds will still ostracize them in self-defense.

It's no wonder, then, that smart kids tend to be unhappy in middle school and high school. Their other interests leave them little attention to spare for popularity, and since popularity resembles a zero-sum game, this in turn makes them targets for the whole school. And the strange thing is, this nightmare scenario happens without any conscious malice, merely because of the shape of the situation.



For me the worst stretch was junior high, when kid culture was new and harsh, and the specialization that would later gradually separate the smarter kids had barely begun. Nearly everyone I've talked to agrees: the nadir is somewhere between eleven and fourteen.

In our school it was eighth grade, which was ages twelve and thirteen for me. There was a brief sensation that year when one of our teachers overheard a group of girls waiting for the school bus, and was so shocked that the next day she devoted the whole class to an eloquent plea not to be so cruel to one another.

It didn't have any noticeable effect. What struck me at the time was that she was surprised. You mean she doesn't know the kind of things they say to one another? You mean this isn't normal?

It's important to realize that, no, the adults don't know what the kids are doing to one another. They know, in the abstract, that kids are monstrously cruel to one another, just as we know in the abstract that people get tortured in poorer countries. But, like us, they don't like to dwell on this depressing fact, and they don't see evidence of specific abuses unless they go looking for it.

Public school teachers are in much the same position as prison wardens. Wardens' main concern is to keep the prisoners on the premises. They also need to keep them fed, and as far as possible prevent them from killing one another. Beyond that, they want to have as little to do with the prisoners as possible, so they leave them to create whatever social organization they want. From what I've read, the society that the prisoners create is warped, savage, and pervasive, and it is no fun to be at the bottom of it.

In outline, it was the same at the schools I went to. The most important thing was to stay on the premises. While there, the authorities fed you, prevented overt violence, and made some effort to teach you something. But beyond that they didn't want to have too much to do with the kids. Like prison wardens, the teachers mostly left us to ourselves. And, like prisoners, the culture we created was barbaric.



Why is the real world more hospitable to nerds? It might seem that the answer is simply that it's populated by adults, who are too mature to pick on one another. But I don't think this is true. Adults in prison certainly pick on one another. And so, apparently, do society wives; in some parts of Manhattan, life for women sounds like a continuation of high school, with all the same petty intrigues.

I think the important thing about the real world is not that it's populated by adults, but that it's very large, and the things you do have real effects. That's what school, prison, and ladies-who-lunch all lack. The inhabitants of all those worlds are trapped in little bubbles where nothing they do can have more than a local effect. Naturally these societies degenerate into savagery. They have no function for their form to follow.

When the things you do have real effects, it's no longer enough just to be pleasing. It starts to be important to get the right answers, and that's where nerds show to advantage. Bill Gates will of course come to mind. Though notoriously lacking in social skills, he gets the right answers, at least as measured in revenue.

The other thing that's different about the real world is that it's much larger. In a large enough pool, even the smallest minorities can achieve a critical mass if they clump together. Out in the real world, nerds collect in certain places and form their own societies where intelligence is the most important thing. Sometimes the current even starts to flow in the other direction: sometimes, particularly in university math and science departments, nerds deliberately exaggerate their awkwardness in order to seem smarter. John Nash so admired Norbert Wiener that he adopted his habit of touching the wall as he walked down a corridor.



As a thirteen-year-old kid, I didn't have much more experience of the world than what I saw immediately around me. The warped little world we lived in was, I thought, the world. The world seemed cruel and boring, and I'm not sure which was worse.

Because I didn't fit into this world, I thought that something must be wrong with me. I didn't realize that the reason we nerds didn't fit in was that in some ways we were a step ahead. We were already thinking about the kind of things that matter in the real world, instead of spending all our time playing an exacting but mostly pointless game like the others.

We were a bit like an adult would be if he were thrust back into middle school. He wouldn't know the right clothes to wear, the right music to like, the right slang to use. He'd seem to the kids a complete alien. The thing is, he'd know enough not to care what they thought. We had no such confidence.

A lot of people seem to think it's good for smart kids to be thrown together with "normal" kids at this stage of their lives. Perhaps. But in at least some cases the reason the nerds don't fit in really is that everyone else is crazy. I remember sitting in the audience at a "pep rally" at my high school, watching as the cheerleaders threw an effigy of an opposing player into the audience to be torn to pieces. I felt like an explorer witnessing some bizarre tribal ritual.



If I could go back and give my thirteen year old self some advice, the main thing I'd tell him would be to stick his head up and look around. I didn't really grasp it at the time, but the whole world we lived in was as fake as a Twinkie. Not just school, but the entire town. Why do people move to suburbia? To have kids! So no wonder it seemed boring and sterile. The whole place was a giant nursery, an artificial town created explicitly for the purpose of breeding children.

Where I grew up, it felt as if there was nowhere to go, and nothing to do. This was no accident. Suburbs are deliberately designed to exclude the outside world, because it contains things that could endanger children.

And as for the schools, they were just holding pens within this fake world. 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. And I have no problem with this: in a specialized industrial society, it would be a disaster to have kids running around loose.

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.



Life in this twisted world is stressful for the kids. And not just for the nerds. Like any war, it's damaging even to the winners.

Adults can't avoid seeing that teenage kids are tormented. So why don't they do something about it? Because they blame it on puberty. The reason kids are so unhappy, adults tell themselves, is that monstrous new chemicals, hormones, are now coursing through their bloodstream and messing up everything. There's nothing wrong with the system; it's just inevitable that kids will be miserable at that age.

This idea is so pervasive that even the kids believe it, which probably doesn't help. Someone who thinks his feet naturally hurt is not going to stop to consider the possibility that he is wearing the wrong size shoes.

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.

As far as I can tell, the concept of the hormone-crazed teenager is coeval with suburbia. I don't think this is a coincidence. I think teenagers are driven crazy by the life they're made to lead. Teenage apprentices in the Renaissance were working dogs. Teenagers now are neurotic lapdogs. Their craziness is the craziness of the idle everywhere.



When I was in school, suicide was a constant topic among the smarter kids. No one I knew did it, but several planned to, and some may have tried. Mostly this was just a pose. Like other teenagers, we loved the dramatic, and suicide seemed very dramatic. But partly it was because our lives were at times genuinely miserable.

Bullying was only part of the problem. Another problem, and possibly an even worse one, was that we never had anything real to work on. Humans like to work; in most of the world, your work is your identity. And all the work we did was pointless, or seemed so at the time.

At best it was practice for real work we might do far in the future, so far that we didn't even know at the time what we were practicing for. More often it was just an arbitrary series of hoops to jump through, words without content designed mainly for testability. (The three main causes of the Civil War were.... Test: List the three main causes of the Civil War.)

And there was no way to opt out. The adults had agreed among themselves that this was to be the route to college. The only way to escape this empty life was to submit to it.



Teenage kids used to have a more active role in society. In pre-industrial times, they were all apprentices of one sort or another, whether in shops or on farms or even on warships. They weren't left to create their own societies. They were junior members of adult societies.

Teenagers seem to have respected adults more then, because the adults were the visible experts in the skills they were trying to learn. Now most kids have little idea what their parents do in their distant offices, and see no connection (indeed, there is precious little) between schoolwork and the work they'll do as adults.

And if teenagers respected adults more, adults also had more use for teenagers. After a couple years' training, an apprentice could be a real help. Even the newest apprentice could be made to carry messages or sweep the workshop.

Now adults have no immediate use for teenagers. They would be in the way in an office. So they drop them off at school on their way to work, much as they might drop the dog off at a kennel if they were going away for the weekend.

What happened? We're up against a hard one here. The cause of this problem is the same as the cause of so many present ills: specialization. As jobs become more specialized, we have to train longer for them. Kids in pre-industrial times started working at about 14 at the latest; kids on farms, where most people lived, began far earlier. Now kids who go to college don't start working full-time till 21 or 22. With some degrees, like MDs and PhDs, you may not finish your training till 30.

Teenagers now are useless, except as cheap labor in industries like fast food, which evolved to exploit precisely this fact. In almost any other kind of work, they'd be a net loss. But they're also too young to be left unsupervised. Someone has to watch over them, and the most efficient way to do this is to collect them together in one place. Then a few adults can watch all of them.

If you stop there, what you're describing is literally a prison, albeit a part-time one. The problem is, many schools practically do stop there. The stated purpose of schools is to educate the kids. But there is no external pressure to do this well. And so most schools do such a bad job of teaching that the kids don't really take it seriously-- not even the smart kids. Much of the time we were all, students and teachers both, just going through the motions.

In my high school French class we were supposed to read Hugo's Les Miserables. I don't think any of us knew French well enough to make our way through this enormous book. Like the rest of the class, I just skimmed the Cliff's Notes. When we were given a test on the book, I noticed that the questions sounded odd. They were full of long words that our teacher wouldn't have used. Where had these questions come from? From the Cliff's Notes, it turned out. The teacher was using them too. We were all just pretending.

There are certainly great public school teachers. The energy and imagination of my fourth grade teacher, Mr. Mihalko, made that year something his students still talk about, thirty years later. But teachers like him were individuals swimming upstream. They couldn't fix the system.



In almost any group of people you'll find hierarchy. When groups of adults form in the real world, it's generally for some common purpose, and the leaders end up being those who are best at it. The problem with most schools is, they have no purpose. But hierarchy there must be. And so the kids make one out of nothing.

We have a phrase to describe what happens when rankings have to be created without any meaningful criteria. We say that the situation degenerates into a popularity contest. And that's exactly what happens in most American schools. Instead of depending on some real test, one's rank depends mostly on one's ability to increase one's rank. It's like the court of Louis XIV. There is no external opponent, so the kids become one another's opponents.

When there is some real external test of skill, it isn't painful to be at the bottom of the hierarchy. A rookie on a football team doesn't resent the skill of the veteran; he hopes to be like him one day and is happy to have the chance to learn from him. The veteran may in turn feel a sense of noblesse oblige. And most importantly, their status depends on how well they do against opponents, not on whether they can push the other down.

Court hierarchies are another thing entirely. This type of society debases anyone who enters it. There is neither admiration at the bottom, nor noblesse oblige at the top. It's kill or be killed.

This is the sort of society that gets created in American secondary schools. And it happens because these schools have no real purpose beyond keeping the kids all in one place for a certain number of hours each day. What I didn't realize at the time, and in fact didn't realize till very recently, is that the twin horrors of school life, the cruelty and the boredom, both have the same cause.



The mediocrity of American public schools has worse consequences than just making kids unhappy for six years. It breeds a rebelliousness that actively drives kids away from the things they're supposed to be learning.

Like many nerds, probably, it was years after high school before I could bring myself to read anything we'd been assigned then. And I lost more than books. I mistrusted words like "character" and "integrity" because they had been so debased by adults. As they were used then, these words all seemed to mean the same thing: obedience. The kids who got praised for these qualities tended to be at best dull-witted prize bulls, and at worst facile schmoozers. If that was what character and integrity were, I wanted no part of them.

The word I most misunderstood was "tact." As used by adults, it seemed to mean keeping your mouth shut. I assumed it was derived from the same root as "tacit" and "taciturn," and that it literally meant being quiet. I vowed that I would never be tactful; they were never going to shut me up. In fact, it's derived from the same root as "tactile," and what it means is to have a deft touch. Tactful is the opposite of clumsy. I don't think I learned this until college.



Nerds aren't the only losers in the popularity rat race. Nerds are unpopular because they're distracted. There are other kids who deliberately opt out because they're so disgusted with the whole process.

Teenage kids, even rebels, don't like to be alone, so when kids opt out of the system, they tend to do it as a group. At the schools I went to, the focus of rebellion was drug use, specifically marijuana. The kids in this tribe wore black concert t-shirts and were called "freaks."

Freaks and nerds were allies, and there was a good deal of overlap between them. Freaks were on the whole smarter than other kids, though never studying (or at least never appearing to) was an important tribal value. I was more in the nerd camp, but I was friends with a lot of freaks.

They used drugs, at least at first, for the social bonds they created. It was something to do together, and because the drugs were illegal, it was a shared badge of rebellion.

I'm not claiming that bad schools are the whole reason kids get into trouble with drugs. After a while, drugs have their own momentum. No doubt some of the freaks ultimately used drugs to escape from other problems-- trouble at home, for example. But, in my school at least, the reason most kids started using drugs was rebellion. Fourteen-year-olds didn't start smoking pot because they'd heard it would help them forget their problems. They started because they wanted to join a different tribe.

Misrule breeds rebellion; this is not a new idea. And yet the authorities still for the most part act as if drugs were themselves the cause of the problem.



The real problem is the emptiness of school life. We won't see solutions till adults realize that. The adults who may realize it first are the ones who were themselves nerds in school. Do you want your kids to be as unhappy in eighth grade as you were? I wouldn't. Well, then, is there anything we can do to fix things? Almost certainly. There is nothing inevitable about the current system. It has come about mostly by default.

Adults, though, are busy. Showing up for school plays is one thing. Taking on the educational bureaucracy is another. Perhaps a few will have the energy to try to change things. I suspect the hardest part is realizing that you can.

Nerds still in school should not hold their breath. Maybe one day a heavily armed force of adults will show up in helicopters to rescue you, but they probably won't be coming this month. Any immediate improvement in nerds' lives is probably going to have to come from the nerds themselves.

Merely understanding the situation they're in should make it less painful. 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.

It's important for nerds to realize, too, that school is not life. School is a strange, artificial thing, half sterile and half feral. It's all-encompassing, like life, but it isn't the real thing. It's only temporary, and if you look, you can see beyond it even while you're still in it.

If life seems awful to kids, it's neither because hormones are turning you all into monsters (as your parents believe), nor because life actually is awful (as you believe). It's because the adults, who no longer have any economic use for you, have abandoned you to spend years cooped up together with nothing real to do. Any society of that type is awful to live in. You don't have to look any further to explain why teenage kids are unhappy.

I've said some harsh things in this essay, but really the thesis is an optimistic one-- that several problems we take for granted are in fact not insoluble after all. Teenage kids are not inherently unhappy monsters. That should be encouraging news to kids and adults both.



Thanks to Sarah Harlin, Trevor Blackwell, Robert Morris, Eric Raymond, and Jackie Weicker for reading drafts of this essay, and Maria Daniels for scanning photos.

showcraft

http://dongxi.net/b01kB
书呆子为什么不合群？
当我还是初中生的时候，我和我的朋友Rich根据用餐人受欢迎的程度，做了一张学校餐桌的地图。这种工作其实很容易，因为孩子们在吃午饭的时候只和自己的同类坐在一起。我们将餐桌从A到E划分成了不同类型。A类餐桌上都是些足球运动员和啦啦队长之类的。E类餐桌上都是些患有轻微唐氏综合症的孩子，我们当时管他们叫“残疾”。

我们坐的是D类餐桌，在这类餐桌上吃饭的虽然看上去没有大碍，但却是健全孩子里面最不招人待见的。我们其实并不情愿把自己划分到D类，但不这样做却又是自欺欺人。因为学校里的所有人都知道每个人有多受欢迎，包括我们自己。

到高中以后，我的“股价”就开始逐渐上升了——我变成了一个像样的足球与动员，还创办了一份名声在外的地下报纸——青春期终于来了，我也因此见识过受人追捧是怎样的一番光景。

不过，我还认识许多学校里的书呆子，他们的故事却如出一辙：聪明和呆子之间的联系很紧密，而呆子和不合群之间的关系也很紧密。所以，聪明人看上去不合群。

为什么？对于还在上学的人来说，这个问题看上去古怪至极。人们不喜欢呆子的事实太过普遍，问出这种问题就好象是让人们去想象还有别的情况没有。不过，别的情况确实存在。 比方说在小学，聪明孩子就不会被人唾弃。而聪明人更不会在真实世界里受到伤害。在其他国家里面，就我所知，聪明学生的处境也没有这么糟糕。但在美国的中学里面，聪明却能害得人没好日子过，这是为什么？




想要解开这一谜团，我们就要用另一种方法来问：为什么聪明孩子不受欢迎？如果他们这么聪明的话，为什么他们就不会像考试时那样，找到让人喜欢的办法，去寻求突破呢？

有一种观点认为，这种可能性并不存在。聪明孩子不受欢迎是因为其他孩子对他们天资聪颖的嫉妒，因此，想要让他们变得受人追捧，是不可能的。我觉得，要是初中时侯我真的遭人嫉妒的话，那他们就帮了我大忙了。如果聪明确实是一种令人羡慕的品质的话，女孩子们早就把隔阂甩到一边了。让别的男生嫉妒的男生，女生们喜欢还来不及呢。

在我学习过的学校里，聪明与否无关紧要，它既不会招来羡慕，也不会遭人鄙视。其他的事情也是一样，相比愚蠢，孩子们可能会更喜欢聪明些的学生。但智商在受欢迎否因素里的地位，却比不过外表、魅力和运动天赋。

所以，如果智商本身并不是不受欢迎的原因的话，为什么聪明的孩子却显得那么不合群呢？我觉得，答案就是他们不想变得那么受欢迎。

如果有人当时告诉我这点的话，那我可能就要忍不住冲他大笑出来了。对于孩子们来说，在学校里面不合群是件难过的事。他们中有些因为过于难过，选择了自杀。如果有人告诉我说，我不受欢迎的原因是我不想受欢迎，那就无异于在说某个渴死在沙漠里的人其实不想喝水一样。我当然想变得受欢迎。

不过事实上，我没那么想。我还有别的梦想：变得聪明。而且不仅仅是在学校里表现得好，还要设计出漂亮的火箭，写出一手好文章，弄明白怎么操作电脑。总之，我的目标是成就一番事业。

我从来没有将自己的梦想分割开来，掂量一下孰轻孰重。但如果非要我这么做，那我就会将变得聪明看得更加重要。如果有人给我个机会，让我成为学校里最受追捧的孩子，但唯一的代价却是让我的智力保持在平均水平（开玩笑），那我是不会接受的。

尽管忍受着不合群的痛楚，但我觉得大部分书呆子都会做出和我一样的选择。对于他们来说，智力只有平均水平是无法接受的。但大部分孩子还是会选择成交。对于他们来说，这意味着向前迈出了一大步。如果我们把智力水平百分化，一个80分的孩子只需扔掉30分就能换来别人的羡慕嫉妒恨，何乐而不为呢？

如此看来，问题的根源就在于此了。书呆子都是师从两家。他们当然想变得合群，但他们更想变得聪明。受欢迎程度并不是你能从业余时间里争取到手的，特别是在美国中学激烈的竞争环境中。


文艺复兴运动先驱阿尔伯蒂曾经写道：“无论多么微小的艺术，也需要全身心的投入，才能有所超越。”我在想，世界上是否会有人付出的努力，会比美国学生花在吸引人缘上的功夫还要多。海豹部队和神经外科医生相对来说似乎还要懒散一些。起码他们不时会有休假，其中一些人甚至还有各式各样的兴趣爱好。但只要醒着，美国的青少年就无时不刻地努力去让别人喜欢自己，而且全年无休。

我可没有在说他们是有意为之。确实，有些青少年的确有些马基雅维利主义[注1]，但我的意思是，青少年在盲从方面，总是全力以赴的。

打个比方，青少年会在着装上花费掉大量的精力。他们并不会为了受到欢迎而刻意地去挑选衣服。但好像女为知己者容一样，知己是谁？是其他孩子。别人的观点能够左右他们的对错评判。不仅仅是着装，就连走路的方式，和青少年其他一切的所作所为几乎都会受到他人看法的影响。因此，他们努力去选择“正确”的做法，其实也是在努力提升自己的人缘。

但书呆子们就不会注意到这点。他们意识不到，想要受人欢迎，是要下一番功夫的。通常来说，一个生活在要求十分苛刻领域外的人，是不会意识到，成功是需要不断努力才能达成的（尽管这种努力通常是无意识的）。例如，大部分人似乎将绘画视作是一种天生能力，就像身材挺拔一样。但实际上，那些能“画出”像样画的人早已付出了大量的时间——这也是他们善于此道的原因。人缘跟绘画相似，它不只是你有没有的问题，而是做没做的事情。

书呆子们人缘差的主要原因，就在于他们还要思考其他事情。他们将精力放在了书本和自然世界，对时尚和玩乐视而不见。假设有一支足球队，队员们除了踢球之外，还要想方设法不让放在头顶上的水杯掉下来。那么，任何一支集中注意力的球队都能轻松击败他们，而且还会奇怪对手为什么这么弱不禁风。书呆子跟这种情况相似。

就算书呆子也像其他孩子一样在乎自己的人缘，那他们付出的努力也要高出许多。万人迷的目标自然是成为万人迷，而他们向父母所学习的，也是如何成为万人迷。书呆子也一样，他们想变得聪明，学习的也是如何变得聪明。书呆子的教育，是得到正确答案；万人迷的教育，是怎么讨人欢心。




到目前为止，我都在不停地改善聪明和呆子之间的关系，在我的手里，它们就好象能够互换一样。而我到底是聪明还是呆子，完全取决于当时的情况。书呆子虽然算不上涉世不深，但“涉”的是什么“世”，还是需要区别对待的。在典型的美国学校里，酷的标准是如此之高（或者说是特别），以至于你都不用比较一番，才会知道自己看上去有多尴尬。

少数的聪明孩子能多出一些精力用在梳妆打扮上。如果聪明孩子不是恰巧生的漂亮，天生也不是块运动员的料，兄弟里面没有个万人迷的话，那就会慢慢地向书呆子发展了。这也是为什么11岁到17岁之间，是聪明人最难熬的日子。这段年纪里的生活所需要的人缘，远比人生中其他时段所需要的多得多。

在这个年纪之前，孩子们的生活通常被家长所占据，基本不会同其他孩子产生关系。小学生确实在意同学们的想法，但这还不像几年之后那样，会占到生活的全部。

但是，到11岁左右时，孩子们就会开始觉得跟家人相处是在例行公事。他们为自己创造了一个新的世界，而想要在自己的世界里立足，就需要远离自己的家庭。事实上，在家里面闯祸，反而能为这个年纪的孩子在自己所在意世界里的地位加分。

问题是，这些孩子创造出的世界却非常残忍。如果离开一群11岁的孩子，让他们自顾自地在一起呆着，那他们之间便会产生出《苍蝇王》（Lord of the Flies）[注2]那般弱肉强食的景象。和其他美国的孩子一样，我在上学时便读过了那本书。或许书中的描写并非偶然；或许有人想要向我们指出我们是一群野蛮人，而我们自己的世界也充满了愚蠢和残忍。而我的看法则十分微妙。虽然书中的描写看起来十分可信，但我却没有从字里行间看出其他的东西。相反，我倒是希望他们能直接告诉我们，我们的世界有多么的野蛮和愚蠢。




书呆子们或许会发现，如果自己总被人忽视的话，人缘不好也不会带来多大困难。但不幸的是，在学校里没有人缘，那就意味着要当受气包了。

为什么？还在上学的孩子们可能又会觉得我在问一个奇怪的问题了：难道还有别的情况存在么？但别的情况确实存在。成年人就不会欺负那些书呆子。那为什么青少年就会呢？

有一部分原因，是青少年还是还没完全长大的孩子，而许多孩子在本质上就是残忍的。欺负书呆子的原因，就和肢解一只蜘蛛是一样的。在建立起善良观念之前，折磨是件很有乐趣的事情。

而孩子们欺负书呆子的另一个原因，便是让自己感到好受些。游泳时，人们会不停地蹬踏让自己保持在水面上。同样，无论是哪种社会阶层，人们在对自己位置感到不明时，都会通过虐待那些他们认为阶层较低的人来巩固地位。我觉得这便是为什么美国的贫穷白人，是最仇视黑人的团体的原因。

但我认为，其他孩子欺负书呆子的主要原因，还是来源于人缘的机制。在这个机制里，个人的魅力仅仅占到一部分，而与其相关更多的，则是同他人联盟。想要变得人缘更好，你就得做一些赢得他人好感的事情。而想要赢得他人好感，没有比共同敌人再合适的目标了。

如同那些想在困难时期动员人们走出家门的政客一样，你也可以在没有敌人的情况下，树立一个假想敌。通过排斥和欺负书呆子，阶层较高的孩子们便会在他们之间建立纽带。攻击“局外人”便会令他们成为“自己人”。这便是为什么最恶劣的虐待事件都会同团体相关。随便找一个书呆子问问，你就会发现：来自团体的虐待往往要比来自个人的行为严重的多。

团体的施暴同个人恩怨无关，不知道者能否为那些书呆子们带来些许安慰。一群孩子聚在一起欺负别人，就好象一群人一同前去打猎一样。他们不一定是出于仇恨，他们只是需要找点东西来追赶。

因为处在最底层，所以书呆子们就是整个学校里，最安全的目标。如果我记得没错的话，人缘最好的孩子不会欺负书呆子，因为他们没有必要。大部分的欺负还是来自稍低一些的阶层，来自那些神经质的中间阶层。

问题是，中间阶层的人数太多了。虽然人缘好坏的结构不是金字塔型，但底层的分布却是个倒金字塔形状。不受欢迎的人其实很少（我觉得，D类餐桌上吃饭的也就我们几个了）。所以想要通过欺负书呆子来证明自己不是书呆子的人就海了去了。

同疏远不受欢迎的孩子能够加分一样，接近那些人缘不好的也会在别人的心目里减分。我认识一个女生，她说她在高中里还是很喜欢书呆子的，但是她害怕让别人看到自己和书呆子说话，免得其他女生因此嘲笑自己。人缘不好是一种交流疾病，那些优越到不会欺负别人的孩子也会出于自卫远离那些书呆子们。

这么说来，聪明孩子在初中和高中过得不开心就不是奇怪事了。他们对于其他兴趣的关注，使得他们很少将精力放在建立人缘上。但既然人缘机制是一场零和游戏，他们也难免成为整个学校的目标。奇怪的是，书呆子的噩梦却并非来自他人的恶意。而他们受到欺负的原因，还要取决于情况的不同。

（未完待续）




注1：马基雅维利（Niccolò Machiavelli，1469年5月3日—1527年6月22日）是意大利的政治哲学家、音乐家、诗人、和浪漫喜剧剧作家。他是意大利文艺复兴中的重要人物，尤其是他所写下的《君主论》一书提出了现实主义的政治理论、以及《论李维》一书中的共和主义理论。

注2：《苍蝇王》是威廉·高丁发表于1954年的寓言体小说。小说讲述了一群被困在荒岛上的儿童在完全没有成人的引导下如何建立起一个脆弱的文明体系。最终由于人类内心的黑暗面导致这个文明体系无可避免地被野蛮与暴力所代替。

本文为美国知名天使投资人Paul Graham所著的《Hackers and Painters》一书第一章。《H&P》一书于2004年首次出版，内容多为Paul Graham在计算机时代来临的背景下，对于社会和IT行业的思考。本文从聪明学生在美国中学中不受欢迎的现象入手，深入探讨了学校在当今人类社会中的作用。