Dr. Free-Ride is trying to goad us into proclaiming our nerdliness. Various science bloggers are having a friendly competition to see who is the nerdliest of them all, and she wants to know why CV isn’t represented.
Regrettably, I’m going to pass on this one. (Not that I couldn’t put up a respectable showing, since past indiscretions are apparently fair game; I loved my old RPN Hewlett-Packard calculator, and I’ll put the glasses I wore in high school up against anyone’s.) It’s just that I’m not entirely on board with the program of reclaiming “nerdliness” as a badge of honor, as gays have managed to reclaim queer and so forth.
Words like “nerd” or “geek” have two very different sets of connotations, and it’s hard to evoke one without the other. One has to do with technical mastery and know-how, or even a more broadly-based appreciation for things academic and intellectual. The other has to do with social awkwardness, the inability to comfortably converse with strangers at cocktail parties, and a tendency to dress in the least attractive way possible.
Roughly speaking, the first of these connotations is “good,” and the second is “bad.” But they’re both problematic. Nobody would be happier than me if we could somehow increase society’s appreciation for people with technical skills, and eliminate the defensive dismissal that so many people fall back on when confronted with math or science or computers. (There are only so many times you can tell people what you do for a living, only to hear “That was my worst subject in high school.”) So in that very particular sense, I’m all in favor of celebrating nerdliness. But for me it’s very much a part of what should be a general appreciation for intellectual endeavor, whether technically oriented or not. And as a matter of personal experience, I’ve found science and engineering types to be at least as anti-intellectual as the average person on the street, when it comes to non-technical kinds of scholarship. Naturally, there are plenty of pro-intellectual types, among people with and without technical backgrounds. That geek cred, however, lends a special kind of bite to know-nothingness when it rears its ugly head; someone with a Ph.D. in physics can not only dismiss philosophy or art or literature as airy nonsense, they can compare it directly and unfavorably to their own sphere of competence. And they do.
But it’s the social-backwardness aspect of being a nerd that is the biggest problem. You can protest all you want that you’re really talking about technical competence, not lack of social fluency, but the latter comes immediately to mind whenever anyone hears talk about nerds and geeks. Wikipedia spells it out:
Nerd, as a stereotypical or archetypal designation, refers to somebody who pursues academic and intellectual interests at the expense of social skills such as: interpersonal communication, fashion, and physical fitness.
What is worse, there’s a certain point of view (I won’t name names … some of my best friends are nerds) that actually celebrates social awkwardness for its own sake. (Trust me about this, I’ve been employed by both MIT and Caltech.) And that’s just wrong. I’m not talking about principled eccentricity, letting your freak flag fly — nothing wrong with that, in fact it’s admirable in its own way. Nor am I saying that everyone should be scouring the latest issues of GQ and Vogue for fashion tips; superficiality is just as bad as nerdliness. And laughing at our high-school (and college) selves is always fun and healthy. All I’m saying is that there is much to be valued in an ability to relate to other kinds of people in a disparate set of circumstances, take care of your appearance, and function effectively in a wider social context. These are skills we should try to cultivate, not disparage.
The point is that these two aspects of nerdliness operate against each other. If we want the rest of the world to appreciate technical skills, then we should work to eradicate the notion that they are necessarily associated with a lack of social skills. And that’s the connotation of “nerd,” like it or not. Celebrating knowledge and competence and intellectual curiosity is good, but celebrating nerdliness sends the wrong message, I would argue. There’s no reason why someone who programs in assembly and is deft with a contour integral can’t also be a well-rounded and engaging conversationalist who is at all the gallery openings and whom everyone wants at their parties — that’s the message we want to send.
What a killjoy, huh? In my defense, if you’d been sleeping on a concrete floor for the last several days, waiting for your furniture to arrive, you’d be grumpy too.
Nice post Poindexter!
Don’t give me none of that. I’ve seen the giggles when you bring your Urkel lunch box to cosmology meetings.
Shouldn’t this blog post automatically qualify you for the nerd-off?
I think they we should get a YouTube of each of them dancing before we decide.
I think that Jorge Cham of Phd comics has said the last word on the differentiation between nerds, gees and dorks in his comics. Follow the
links .
i’ve always wondered what “poindexter” has to do with being nerdy… who the hell (or what the hell) is poindexter?
Enjoy:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poindexter
You know, as a soon-to-be-15 female who reads and loves this blog, I have to say that I can out-nerd at least 79.3% of my demographic. I mean, really, I don’t know anyone else my age who makes Martini jokes when talking about the Uncertainty Principle in Physics class.
At school I hear other people giving us free showings of The Great Tragedie of My Mathe Class and My Inablitie to Understand Exponentiale Functions or I Cannot Comprehend Conservation of Momentum or Titration. It really is a great tragedy, because I fear for their budgeting skills/401Ks/ability to understand half the news.
Then again, most of them live in constant terror of the comma and semicolon too, so I guess wanton stupidity doesn’t always discriminate.
I get the feeling that limes missed the point of the blog entry.
Sean, thank you for this ‘essay’ of sorts. I entirely agree, having spent time as you have at various Institutes of Technology.
Unfortunately even such mascots as Stephen Hawking have reputations for utterly dismissing the contributions of other intellectual fields in the arts and humanities. It’s very common for me to encounter fresh new grad students who subscribe to the same point of view, that there is nothing to be gained from history, literature, or music.
It interests me that often the same people who spend much time focusing on their superior social identities as outcast, or nerd, or technical master, are sorely lacking in the actual knowledge or technical ability that would characterize them as future leaders in their fields. Sometimes it is because they are young and do not know better, it is a novelty (just look at the undergraduates at some of these Insts. of Tech.), but it is grievable when they do not grow out of it later as real scientists or authors or what have you.
We must have done with elitism of all kinds except that which emphasizes the pursuit of excellence in one’s chosen arena. (And I make no mistake, social skills and literary abilities are important for conveying one’s ideas in the sciences and to the general public.) I do not think that emphasizing “identity” as nerd is very productive.
I think that limes got the basic idea. More importantly, I fear that Anshul (#3) has seen through my dastardly strategy! And here I thought I was being so tricky.
my bad, Sean, nothin but love for you :o(
I understand. Just stick to the high road here.
Not that I want to enter the contest but I think you mean nerdiest. Nerd is a noun.
I like reading about philosophy, literature, politics, criminology,… but none of them pose the intellectual challenge of physics and math and that’s why I pursue them. If thats someone’s opinion, how can that someone erase it without ever having experience to the contrary? Of course, that doesn’t mean they can’t be open to possibilities. As for social awkwardness, one can call it ‘nerdiness’, ‘dorkiness’, ‘geekiness’, ‘elitism’ or whatever one thinks is accurate. But there is no advantage to be gained from social awkwardness, so it probably has a biological origin. People who seem to be happy with their social awkwardness are, for the most part, probably just making the best of it.
Sean, you were already on the block to be scored due to the technical proficiency of your comments here and here.
But I have to say, as a life long nerd, I’ve never bought into the socially inept/dismissive of other spheres angle. Sure, the jocks and the beautiful people didn’t *want* to hang out with the math team, but that was their issue, not ours. (Circa 1983, we were the ones listening to the New Music Show on NYU’s radio station, rather than the standard-issue hair metal. And we were a fun bunch to hang with.) The important thing wasn’t so much whether you knew pi to 100 decimal places (as some of my friends did), but that you felt the joy that came from pursuing knowledge in one of its many forms.
A tribe that glories in learning is a tribe of which I’m proud to be a part — and we really can throw a mean party, given half a chance.
Sean, doesn’t that same argument more or less hold true for reclaiming “queer”, “black”, or what have you?
Hey, I’ve been sleeping on the floor for the past week and a half, too, waiting for at least my new mattress to arrive,,,
The habit of dismissing philosophy and literature, etc., as “Airy nonsense” has got to be blamed at least in part on Feynman. Certainly almost all physics PhDs of the past twenty years have read his popular books while still young and impressionable. Feynman’s writing resonated strongly with young nerds like me. But Feynman almost systematically goes through other academic disciplines–chemistry, biology, philosophy, mathematics, foreign languages, and painting are a few that come to mind–and comes up with a clever anecdote that demonstrates how trivial each discipline must be if you’re a brilliant physicist like Feynman.
A good friend of my family was a nerdly science teacher and one of the most dedicated scientists, photographers, fathers, and citizens we ever knew. I remember the day when his little boy walked up to him and asked, “Dad, are we nerds?”
“Yes, son, we are”
“Okay!”
From that day on, I only had respect for ‘nerds’.
Nerds aren’t in such a bad situation. And who cares what other people think about us?
As for Feynman and philosophy, my lack of enthusiasm for much of philosophy came from studying it at college, although it’s more a lack of enthusiasm for philosophers than philosophy. Some of it is very interesting; some of it may even be useful. But for self-important tools, alongside physicists, medical doctors and teachers, count philosophers*.
*I note that I am only a medical qualification short of being all four. Shurely shome coincidence.
Thank you for this, Sean. It’s what I’ve been yelling to my colleagues about for 4 years running.
What makes me crazy is that physicists don’t even know that they’re using sophomoric philosopical arguments to dismiss philosophy–if you want to stake out a realist position, at least know what that is, and what the counterarguments about it, rather than just dismissing the whole discussion as ‘airy’ and ‘ephemeral,’ as a solid state experimentalist would dismiss, say, string theory.
Are there any recommendations on how to obtain these social skills? Or is it too late once one is pushing 40…
I hope to not cause a big ball of fury, but some of the geek/nerd lack of social skills could likely be attributed to Asperger’s, yeah?
Wow.
I think this post qualifies as a serious entry.
I mean, Sean can intellectually nerd-out about the idea of being a nerd. That has to be worth something!
Re: lack of social skills, I do agree that one should not celebrate a lack of social skills. On the other hand, sometimes “not being interested in the right things” or “being interested in the wrong things” is mis-interpreted as a lack of social skills. I certainly have met plenty a nerd who has a genuine lack of socials skills. But I have also (at least in years past when I was in high school and college) felt ostracized because I was interested in something that I wasn’t supposed to be… and had that interest trotted out as evidence of a lack of social skills. (Here’s a great commentary on this: http://ars.userfriendly.org/cartoons/?id=19990516.)
“He’s so good with math and numbers he doesn’t know how to talk to people.” It’s a fallacy that is unfortunately not recognized universally as a fallacy.
What we need is for nerds to celebrate and be open about their nerdiness… because sometimes there are nerds among us that non-nerds don’t recognize as nerds, simply because they have reasonable social skills!
-Rob
Also re: dismissal of all non-science as not worthy endeavors for human creativity : that is indeed one of my pet peeves.
However, I think that is part of a larger phenomenon. “Anybody not working in my area of expertise is, ultimately, wasting their time.” Think of the various humanist types who think that scientists are wasting their time because they are so concerned about cold facts that have no “human” connection, or because all of scientific knowledge is just a social construction of patriarchal, Western civilization anyway and thus there isn’t anything real to study.
The “humanities are fluffy” idea is distressingly common among scientists, and it does make me sad.
-Rob