What's in a Nerd?

• IQ and height correlate at about .1 to .2.

• Attractiveness and IQ correlate at .07 (p < .001) in the largest and highest quality sample (WLS).

• People in the Terman’s study of the gifted were more likely to be tall, broad-shouldered, have matured earlier sexually, have a stronger hand grip, and have a strong lung capacity relative to other children.

• There is little to no correlation between risk aversion and IQ.

• People who play video games have about the same IQs as those who don’t.

• Popular students tend to be more intelligent than unpopular ones (d = .26), and unpopular students tend to be less intelligent (d = -.41).

Intelligence and a lot of nerd stereotypes don’t correlate. There are exceptions, of course, like high openness and educational attainment. That said, the stereotype accuracy of traits associated with high IQ is disappointingly low. That doesn’t mean you can’t find the odd nerd in the wild: just that intelligent people don’t display the typical noncognitive traits you would find in a nerd.

While people agree on what nerds are like, they differ on what they are on a fundamental level — I’ll walk through some theories briefly.

Graham Theory

Paul Graham argues that nerds tend to be unpopular because they are intelligent, and intelligent people don’t want to be popular. This is half-right — nerds are unpopular, but they are unpopular despite being intelligent, not because they are intelligent. As I noted before, intelligence correlates positively with popularity in school, so this theory is false.

Interest-based theories

Sam Kriss thinks that nerds are defined by having low quality interests that are popular — a clumsy theory, which Scott Alexander responds to by saying that nerds have interests that are competed over, in contrast to hipsters who have interests that are not competed over. Competitive interests don’t have that much to do with being a nerd either, though. Consider human biodiversity or neoreaction — very nerdy fields that are nonetheless not that competitive, and when they were even less competitive 20 years ago, they were still considered nerdy.

Bureaucracy-based theories

Scott Loklin believes that nerdery is rooted in bureaucracy:

Being intelligent isn’t the same as being a nerd. Though nerdism is touted as being a sort of definition of intelligence: it isn’t. Being a nerd is being a disembodied brain; a king of abstraction. Being a nerd is a lifestyle open to obvious stupidians. Even when they’re bright, nerds lack thumos; they have a hard time operating outside the nerd herd. If something is declared “stupid” the nerd won’t give it a second thought. If other nerds like a thing, or are declared “expert,” even the 200 IQ nerd will go along with it, because being a nerd is his identity. This is why the football star is superior to the nerd: his life isn’t made of abstractions -it’s made of winning, which is something that happens when you’re right, not when you do the proper nerd-correct thing to sit at the nerd table in high school.  Right now there are probably a hundreds thousand nerds trying to predict the stock market with ChatGPT (aka autocomplete). That’s what a nerd does: acts on propaganda as if it is real information. Chad either exploits a bunch of ChatGPT specialists and flips it as a business to a greater fool, or invents a new branch of mathematics to beat the market the way Ed Thorp did.

Objectivity is another thing the nerd lacks. Nerds are masters of dogma. They’re good at putting dogma into their brains: that’s in one sense what “book learning” is -you have a sort of resonator in your noggin that easily latches into patterns. People who are good at tests are good at absorbing propaganda. They’re bad at noticing the thing they absorbed is propaganda; that takes another personality type. One that nerds associate with “stupid people” who bullied them in high school. You know, the ones who should be their bosses.

This is the best theory of “nerdery” I’ve seen anybody post yet, but it’s still incomplete; being a nerd is only weakly related to conformity. A guy who spends 100 hours researching climate change and finds out it’s propagnada isn’t a jock because he’s based — he’s still a nerd of course.

The better nerd theory

People seem to be missing the obvious - that the concept of a “nerd” is modern, and therefore, must be tied to a modern phenomenon. And that phenomenon is obviously the education system and the bureaucratization of society. “Nerds” aren’t real the way men, Black people, or even geniuses are; they’re not a set of correlated or even interacting traits. They’re the set of traits that allow people to acquire status in bureaucracies and educational institutions. People don’t like nerds because they feel like the status that nerds have in modern society is inflated beyond what is expected from an organic social environment or even what would be utilitarian. Consider the following vectors:

I labelled how much I thought each trait correlated with being a nerd, being popular, and being educated. Then, I subtracted the popularity vector from the education vector, which measures the degree to which a trait correlates with education more than popularity. The correlation between the degree to which a trait correlates with education more than popularity and the degree to which a trait correlates with being a nerd is .90 (p = .000012).

Admittedly, this chart doesn’t prove much, just that the traits that I think relate to being a nerd also relate to being more successful in the education system over the organic social environment. But I doubt these ratings would differ much from those taken from academic literature or a Kenyesian beauty contest.

Political/moral implications

A lot of people easily fall into the trap of hating nerds, liking nerds, or even identifying as one of them. Instead, appreciate greatness. The obsession and intelligence of the nerd are valuable, as are the social efficacy and physical supremacy of the jock.

Part of the resentment against nerds isn’t just about aesthetics or power, it’s about heredity, as the traits that enable success in education are hereditary or at least unmalleable. On the other hand, the traits that jocks have are more malleable —particularly social understanding, physical strength, and grooming. Because of this I think that culture should be dominated by jocks, as people will try harder to improve their social skills and physical abilities. Cultures dominated by nerds (like ours) will be dominated by bureaucracies and education systems which purport to improve cognitive ability or well-being but do nothing in practice.

Ideally, formal education would stop at about fifteen years of age and only teach relevant mathematics/literacy and maybe some elective. Then, students would take two tests: an SAT style test which measures innate ability and another test which measures knowledge about the elective they took. Then, in employment they would be selected based on how they performed on the SAT style test, the elective test, and in school in general.

Some people say that standardized testing would enable nerds or that it is for the Chinese. Really, all that matters is that standardized testing works. The bugman way is not actually standardized testing: it’s an education systems that take more than 20 years to leave, teach you a bunch of random stuff, and has no final test at the end. “Nerds” wouldn’t really prosper in this system I am proposing, they would get high status jobs in finance and tech, but it would be a different type who would be selected as the managers and the leaders.

On a semi-related note, looking back at my teenage years, I miss my nerd-like obsession with obscure anime and stuff like that — I read and wrote fanfiction and was a terminal lurker. Now, I spend my time researching more “important” things like mutational load, in terms of value this is better of course, but there is a joy in senseless behaviour that cannot be achieved through productive means.

I came to this realization after I saw somebody say that RE-TAKE was a classic doujin of Evangelion, and I didn’t know what it was. This sounds a bit silly to mention, but the 16 year old me would have known about this — I realized that my hobbies and activities had become optimized for productive ends, whether it’s towards becoming healthier, stronger, or more knowledgeable.

There is a place in the world for silly hedonism. Hopefully I will not forget this lesson.