Article about Nerds

[Minerva]

I read some of this guy articles and I thought I would share this one, it was interesting for me. It is long though, and contains some harsh comments.

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

[K PhaNTOM]

NERDS RULE!!!!

[Rand{CLR}]

I am a dork, not a nerd or a geek.

Though I was bested last night. I saw a dude at the R.E.M. concert wearing a shirt that said "Roslin/Airlock 08."

If you get the reference, you are a dork. If you both own and wear such a shirt, you are El Dorko Supremo.

-Rand

[Thrashdragon]

An interesting perspective.

When I was in high school (late 80s), I was in the gifted program (which basically meant I had a couple of classes each semester with the other "smart kids" with teachers that actually were good at what they did). There were always one or two stereotypical "nerds", and a couple of outcasts in leather and long hair , but the vast majority of the "smart kids" were normal, popular kids (what we called "preppies" back then).

Being intelligent wasn't a bad thing, in fact the "nerds" in those gifted classes were the ones that got invited to all the parties, since they had formed a bond with the kids throwing the parties. And I certainly didn't go to any sort of progressive school, it was a public school in Orlando that had everything from rich kids to ghetto kids. We had the usual cliches, plenty of drugs and fights, and even two full scale riots.

We did have a subculture of socially inept kids that were routinely picked on, but they weren't the smart kids.