Adult success is inversely proportional to high school popularity

Great Debates
21

I agree with Dork. However, since the mid-90s, at least, Geek and Nerd are reverse from your list. When you picture “IT geek” you think of someone notably good at IT, rather than someone obsessed with it but not necessarily that good.

My definition of Nerd is one obsessively into any subject, even to the detriment of social interaction. Even if you have natural social intelligence, but are so into a subject that people go “oh no, Dave’s talking about baseball stats again”, then you’re a nerd.

Geek, to me, is someone who is naturally good at any technical subject. Again, if you pour your energy into becoming good to the detriment of everything else, you can become a nerd and a dork in the process.

I, for instance, am somewhat of a dork. I am a music nerd because I overanalyze everthing, but I’m not that good at making music or identifying it, so I am a nerd but not a geek. However, I am an IT geek but not a nerd because I am way above average at programming, but realize there are other hobbies than crunching code and so I am not an IT nerd.

22

My class seems to have been a massive failure.

We had cool kids…jocks…artsy types etc. The norm.

10 years after graduation, a friend of mine (from that class) called up as many of the 240+ members in the class as he could. He talked with the people themselves or parents or whoever he could find. He managed to get ahold of something like 180 people over a half year time.

A surprising number of them were in jail. Few had ‘professional’ careers. The Valedictorian (sp?) was dead from a drug overdose. The (whatever the second one was)…she was in jail for killing her husband.

The main artsy guy…who was damned talented I thought…was working as a farm hand.

This was a small rural community…very blue-collar.

As for the OP…the nerds and unpopular didn’t seem to fare any better than the norm.

=======

I always thought something was screwed up with the kids I went to school with.

23

The battle between jocks and nerds has tilted decisively in the nerds’ favor.

But you’d better be a charismatic, aggressive nerd.

24

A couple of pet peeves: First, what the article actually means (whether it’s true or not) is that success and popularity are negatively correlated, not that they’re inversely proportional. An inverse proportionality relationship is one kind of negative correlation, but it’s not the only one, and isn’t even meaningful without some sort of numerical measure of popularity or success.

Second, while Bill Gates has by almost any measure been very successful, and he’s certainly smart, he is not and never has been a nerd. Nerdity is more than just intelligence; it’s a certain sort of personality.

25

At my last high school reunion, the kid who was the absolute stereotype of “big, dumb jock” invited us all to his place for a barbecue. His “place” turned out to be a $2.25 million custom-built house with pool and the “barbecue” was catered with a full bar. The big, dumb jock had worked for a moving company, saw a market niche for logistics management, started his own company, became at least the second-most successful person ever to graduate from our high school and had an extremely attractive (and very nice) wife, to top it all off.

Meanwhile, of the kids who graduated in the top 10 percent of the class, a large number (male and female) had become teachers, a couple of the women had opted to be stay-at-home mothers (and, eventually, grandmothers) and the rest were basically middle-class, hoping they could stay in their jobs and not get laid off before they could retire.

Make of that what you will.

26

I once went through my high school senior yearbook and made a tally in a spreadsheet of who was popular, who was average, and who was an outcast, and how they did IRL. It was a bit difficult because I could only find information on about half of my high school class. IIRC, the outcasts and average kids did about equally well, and the jocks/cheerleaders had an insanely high fallout into failure.

However, it’s worth noting one thing:, there was not this modern Renaissance of the pretense of “the student athlete” - the popular jocks in my school, women and men, were uniformly some of the dumbest people you would ever meet. The cheerleaders/drill team/pep squad were the same - with only a couple of exceptions, these folks were the “C in algebra 1” crowd, not the “A in pre-calculus” crowd, or even the “B in trig” crowd. Moreover, cheerleading/drill team/football/basketball/track were actually classes - insane as that might sound, cheerleading+drill team was a 3 hour class each day. Skills you can take to the bank…

As a result, in my case I believe that intelligence determined success more than anything else.

27

Actually, I’m kind of confused what that word really means. Is popular the same as being well-known and well-liked? Or just being at the top of the social hiearchy by being involved in sports, being attractive, driving a nice car, smoking and throwing parties, etc. In other words, being “cool”.

Because I could see the first group being more likely to do well in life, but it being a toss-up for the latter.

Not that the two groups are mutually exclusive. But there were kids who were popular in an infamous way that I could see turning out to be failures…or at least getting their acts together only later in life. Like that stuck-up bitch that everyone knows had sex with the art teacher, or that jerk who’s always cutting up in class and bullies people, but both are considered cool by whatever metrics used at that particular school and time period. If the study in the OP only looked at that group, then yeah, big whoop.

I attended a performing arts high school, and your “major” was kind of all-encompassing. My orchestra was a trip, and freshman year for me was a blast. Looking back on it, it was clear who were the popular kids (both in a likeability way and infamous way) and who weren’t cool. I remember two people who stood out. One was the concert master. Oh man, almost all the girls had a crush on Derek. He was suave, intelligent, funny as hell, and he had mad violin skills. And the conductor loved him too, even letting him wear funky clothes during concerts while the rest of us had to stick to uniform.

The other was a girl who used to annoy everyone by playing (quite loudly and attention-whorishly) Led Zepplin riffs on her violin (I appreciate the coolness in that now, but back then everyone was like WTF?) She was the “candy girl”–selling candy and soft drinks out of her red duffle bag during class. That should have made her popular, but it didn’t for some reason. Being the candy girl was just her niche in our strange world, and we only patronized her business because she had cornered the market and where else were you going to get a Butterfinger and an orange soda in the middle of the school day!? Everyone, even the conductor, loved getting a rise out of poor Lawanda, the chubby, misunderstood (and kinda annoying) girl who just wanted to be in a metal band when she grew up.

Both are doing well for themselves now, though. I googled up Lawanda a few years ago and now she’s a personal trainer and looks very good (and way too conforming to societal norms, dammit). And you or your kids may be familiar with Derek. Second to Ru Paul, he’s probably the most famous alumnus of my school.

I think the people at the very very bottom of the totem pole probably stay there. The people at the very top are probably going to stay that way too. Everyone else in the middle could go either way, with their chances of success hinging on how close they are to the extremes. And I think the “kind” of popular (or unpopular, for that matter) you are is another variable. Lawanda, as inept as she was, had a lot going on. She was creative, talented, entreprenuniel (sp), and wasn’t afraid to whip her neck around if someone gave her shit. She had the traits of a winner even if she wasn’t one in the microcosm of a high school orchestra. If you took away those impressive traits, maybe she would have turned out to be a loser.

28

I don’t know if I was ‘cool’ in high school or not, but I wasn’t at the bottom for sure. I did really well, was in a variety of activities, was quite athletic without really being a jock (not cool sports + interest in music + math +art + job), etc. I hardly got laid, mainly because I was too busy, and also too awkward about it I suppose. I got a terrific academic scholarship but got shipped off by my family to the last goddamn college I never wanted to attend.

I was hugely popular at first, and it was a killer. The evangelicals sniffed me out and put some kind of ‘join or die’ curse on me. The musicians thought I was a narc. The nerds thought I was a druggie. I mean, after the first flush wore off. What a fucking mess!

Things went poorly for me for awhile. However, my personal life now is at an all-time high. I don’t know exactly how that relates to the OP. My life kind of was shattered, and I put it back together again better than it was before. But I certainly don’t socialize overmuch these days, and not at all with any of those people.

29

The problem with the thesis stated in the link by the o.p. is that it suffers from survivorship bias; that is, it highlights the exceptional and unpredictable success of a few prominent nerds, and attempts to establish a statistical trend based upon potential data outliers. Casting a distribution from data extremes gives a very wide range of possible distribution parameters, and assuming that the few extremes are significant in terms of the overall distribution biases the selection of those parameters toward an interpretation that the extreme is representative of a trend, rather than being exceptional.

In order to establish this trend in a rigorous or useful fashion, a correlation between “nerdiness” (in some measurable fashion) and success (also somewhat ambiguous measure, although conventional measures of success are related to fiduciary valuation) would need to be established. The author has made no attempt to do that kind of analysis, and instead has just spun a plausible -sounding theory based upon errant speculation.

Stranger

30

Me and you? In aloha shirts?

31

:confused:
Success isn’t a function of how good you get at yoga?

32

This makes me think of the Springsteen song: Glory Days.

Anyway, I was super-popular in HS, and now am very successful adult. Everyone loves me. I have tons of money and sexy girls all over the place.

Would you like buy my book on how to buy and sell Real Estate? You could be making $10k per week!

33

Actually, I get the impression that many 'dopers were the skinny kid who got sand kicked in their face by the bully on the beach, while all the babes (or hunks) looked on. Perhaps what many 'dopers really need is a book on how to buff up and work out so they can go back and beat that bully up…metaphorically speaking, that is. :stuck_out_tongue:

Possibly that would be a better marketing opportunity on a book aimed at 'dopers, John.

-XT

34

What’s the evidence that Bill Gates has or hasn’t ever been a nerd? His youth certainly sounds nerdy enough from everything I’ve heard.

35

The “popular” kids probably have money and parents with connections. Not a bad start. The “unpopular” kids seem to have a more uphill battle. My anecdata tends to agree. At my last high school reunion, the popular kids appeared to be successful and happy (generally speaking, of course). I remember one unpopular guy in particular telling everyone who would listen that he was making over $20/hour at a lumber yard or something. I guess he thought he was doing pretty well, but it leads me to wonder if the unpopular kids feel more of a need to announce their success.

36

Here’s an interesting thought about development. My grandmother told me once that who we are at 12 is who we end up becoming again in our 25’s to 30’s. Now this sounds kinda stupid, right, but think of all that peer pressure, hormones, competition and chaos of the teens and challenges and shifts of the early twenties. What she was saying is that once we have time to chill out and be ourselves, having adjusted to life’s strange demands Ker plunk–we’re somewhere in our mid twenties and being who we want to be again.

For the record I was a very popular Geek in a huge high school and still have a zillion friends (although I’ve collected them after high school and kept in touch with old friends).

As for success–I have to cite class structure as being the main factor for the people I knew. You can grow up on welfare in a shack and eventually get a Ph.D----however the education does NOT teach you the social norms of interfacing and succeeding with intellectuals and professionals, some people can make this jump and others just struggle, not learning to nuances to dealing with other social classes.

I think of the angry intellegenicia discussed above—Out of work programmers—Isn’t versitility a big factor in success?

Is success having a life you can live with with people, activities and pastimes you love? Money can’t buy that!

37

If Bill Gates isn’t a nerd then Marino and Elway were not athletes.

38

Absolutely. I have heard of some research that tracked the success of three groups during high school–popular kids, popular kid wannabes and those who just didn’t care–and found that the third group was much more successful on average, but Google is not my friend today. I believe they were respectively referred to as alphas, betas and gammas, if anyone thinks they can search better.

39

What we need is a kick-ass longitudinal study.

A bunch of researchers go into your average middle school and observe students in a certain grade. Let’s pick seventh grade. 12 and 13-year-olds. Watch them in class, in the cafeteria, during PE, hanging out in the schoolyard, etc. We identify them with numbers and switch out researchers to minimize bias as we take notes. There may also be some video taping. The kids know we are watching them, but they don’t know why.

We randomly select a broad group of kids. Pull them out of class and rate their social performance using the Monstro Coolness Test. In this test, there would be questions about friendship (How many friends do you have? Do you have a best friend? Do you hang out with a specific crowd?), the perception of themselves in the school’s social hiearchy (Would you rate yourself as having no popularity, average popularity, or high popularity? Compared to the most popular kids in class, do you think you are in that group, almost in that group, or nowhere near that group? Do you even like this school?) Score them with a “zero” if they respond with “I don’t know” to any question. Also give scores on measures such as conformity/nonconformity in terms of dress and stereotypical gender behavior, verbal fluency, demeanor (pleasant or morose), and other variables. Then ask their homeroom teacher a couple of questions. Would you rate this student as being popular, somewhat/minimally popular, or unpopular? Then we rate several dimensions that we noted during the observation period (like, how often is the kid teased, if at all? How often does he tease others, if at all? How disruptive is the kid in class? How congruent is his perception of his own popularity with that of his friends? How frequently does the kid socialize between classes?) You’d have an overall coolness score for the kids, but then each component could be analyzed separately, since we recognize that popularity and coolness are multiple-dimensional and subjective.

With these scores, we can break out the kids into three cohorts. Popular, somewhat popular, and unpopular. We look them up twenty years later.

The advantage of this test is that we actually get to see how truly popular or unpopular someone was rather than relying on their hindsight, which can become distorted through one’s personality. I know when I think about myself in middle school, I see myself as a hot mess. And I was one. But I also know I wasn’t quite the poor waif as I sometimes make myself out to be. I was in student council sixth through eight grades (unpopular kids don’t get elected to things like that). I didn’t have loads of friends, but I did have a couple. The boys actually did give me a very hard time with teasing and name-calling, but there was one boy who I was cool with, who was also ridiculed (I don’t know why either, other than the fact he was quiet and his name rhymed with “gay”. Turns out he WAS gay, but it came to a shock to everyone once it was revealed in high school).

We would also get to pick a part that nebulous concept of “popularity”. Is someone who rates themselves as popular someone who has a lot of friends? Or is it more that they have one or two close friends and a whole bunch of associates? Are the popular kids the ones who are the most likeable and out-going, or do they have some other personality feature that makes them popular (like being atheletic or physically attractive). And are these features stable through time. Does the quiet, non-assuming student stay that way into adulthood? Inquiring minds want to know.

Someone should do a study like this.

40

I think for popularity, you’d be better off asking everyone else in a school who’s popular, rather than going for self-assessment. Someone like Charlie Brown is actually very popular among his peers, but doesn’t realize it himself.