I went to my 10-yr high school reunion. I had conversations with former jocks, geeks (the smartest guy IQ of 164 was now working for the government), some of the prettiest girls, others. Talked about their life now. It didn't really matter what we were in high school. The biggest surprise was a geeky girl I had known was now beautiful and helping produce records. Some of the jocks were very successful salesmen. Other than that, it was oddly reassuring to revisit old paths once tread. It was nice to talk to people at the reunion who I pretty much never talked to in high school.
It's not like we all became friends and traded numbers. In fact, we sarcastically said 'See you at the next one'.
We all grow up and change. And sometimes we don't but high school as someone wiser than me once said - high school is a geographic coincidence. Not because you want to be there.
Too much generalization. Were all of you really abused and friendless in high school?
I was(and still am) a huge geek in high school, and I pretty much loved it throughout. I made great friends I still keep in touch with(some of them from when I was captain of math team and quiz bowl), I was never physically abused or ostracized, and even managed to date a couple girls who were way out of my league.
Sure, I wasn't invited to any of the big parties and I wasn't good friends with the popular kids- I was firmly entrenched within the geek clique. But I wasn't ignored or anything, everyone was pretty much friendly or at least cordial.
By the way, just like the author, I was a skinny 120-lb kid, so if anyone wanted to bully me they easily could have.
I think it's the bitter the-world-hates-me victim mentality that contributes to bullying, not being a geek.
This article is rife with stereotype, are these really true? Is this story #1 because all of your high school experiences were similar?
Yes. The generalization is generally -- by no means always -- true. That's why pg's essay about geeks in high school is such a rallying point: pg says "oh, don't worry guys, you aren't unpopular because there's something wrong with you, you're unpopular because you're too wise to play all their little games, which of course you could master instantly if you were willing to lower yourself." It's a very comforting lens through which to view a generally traumatic experience.
Social skills are skills -- and they can be taught. I firmly believe this because I went from being a barely social-able geek to having "decent" people skills.
The first step was working at a college radio station -- being a D.J., interacting with other D.J.'s in and out of the station taught me a lot about interaction/communication.
Afterwards, I joined a frat. Right or wrong (I later left because I realize it wasn't for me) they taught me how to interact with "non-geeks". Just how to be outgoing, friendly, etc. How to start a conversation. What NOT to talk about. How to pick up cues.
I couldn't have done it in high school. Nobody was teaching me, nor did I understand the value of the skill. Looking back on high school, my entire senior year girls were throwing themselves at me. I honestly thought they just wanted homework help and rides home. Completely oblivious.
I love that essay, and wish that my junior high self could have read it. It would have given me a much better perspective on what was about to happen to me.
Not in high school, but in middle school. I was reasonably popular in high school - had a decent group of friends, even if I wasn't in the "popular kids" crowd, and I was on good terms with most of the kids who were in the "popular kids" crowd. Occasionally see some of them, even.
In middle school, I was beaten up on a daily basis.
I think that a lot of this is an information cascade based on who the dominant kids are in your year. In my elementary/middle school district, the most dominant personality was a kid who I swear was a sociopath. He started tormenting everyone else in first grade. When we were 8 years old, we went on a field trip to an old historical house, and upon being shown the herb garden, his comment was "Is this where they keep the heroin?" My 3rd grade teacher mentioned privately that he thought this kid was mostly likely to end up in prison in 10 years. And sure enough, the last I heard of him, when I was about 17 years old and had long since moved to another school, was a notice in the paper that he had been arrested for assault and battery with a caribeaner.
My sister had no such problems, coming one year behind me, because there was no such person in her year. For her grade, the "cool" kids were all smart, diligent students, and so the culture of the class followed them. In mine, everybody kowtowed to this one sociopath because we were all afraid of what he'd do to us after school if we didn't.
The unfortunate thing is that it's all too easy for one bad apple to spoil the whole bunch, and school administration will all too often look the other way. If just one person with authority stands up and says "Look, this is not acceptable, quit threatening the other kids or don't come back to school," it stops. But a lot of teachers and administrators are so afraid of lawsuits that that rarely happens.
I think so. It wasn't always, but geekiness has gotten ridiculously commercialized. In the early 70s geekiness may have been more authentic, but now it's more about companies convincing homely looking girls and guys with BMIs below 20 or over 27 to buy Star Wars t-shirts and WoW subscriptions. Basically geekiness today is about buying products designed to make you feel smart, even if you're not.
Agreed, when I was growing up there was a clear and obvious distinction between geek and non-geek. I'd learnt computers with DOS, I remember getting a bonded modem (two 56k) was the best thing in the world and made the internet lightning fast. I remember having a science kit with glassware, a burner, fuel and even a pack of matches to light the thing, I saw one recently that didn't have a single piece of glass in it.
Geek is now the kid who can get 100% on a song on Rock Band and fail a literacy test. It's no longer the kids getting A's who play board games and video games with all their free time.
The difference I think is that geekiness is now socially acceptable, even popular. See the glut of TV shows featuring geeks in endearing, funny roles instead of their normal "loser" position.
Even in my social circles, we now have a bunch of wannabe geeks. People who buy iPhones, read reddit, use "FAIL" a lot, but never played D&D, wrote code, nor done anything genuinely geeky, ever.
And Bill Hicks was wrong. Saying you hate people who make their living marketing is like saying you hate people who make their living using telephones.
Marketing is basically what separates humans from animals. It's the reason why we have language. Think about it, why do we have a word 'fire' that represents some underlying idea? It's to make that underlying idea possible to talk about with others; in other words the reason we have language is so we can market ideas.
Furthermore, all of the world's most intractable problems are basically marketing problems. For global warming, world hunger, malaria, water shortages, fisheries depletion, etc., we already have the solutions. It's just a matter of getting really talented marketers to create buy-in from others. Marketers are the heroes of the future, and without marketing we all die, just like the Easter Islanders or the Mayans.
Marketing is fundamentally different from the normal exchange of ideas. Using language to explain to your fellow tribesmen where the herd you're tracking is located is not "marketing."
If you don't want to go hungry, you won't try to "sell your friends" on where to hunt. You'll tell them what you know, you'll listen to what they know, and if their idea of where to hunt is better than yours, you say so, and then you go hunt there instead of where you originally thought you should hunt. You get just as much meat regardless of who initially suggested the hunt location. This is a situation that calls for honest debate, not marketing.
Contrast this with marketing. If you're marketing Nike, you don't get just as much meat regardless of whether people buy Reeboks, Nikes, or Birkenstocks. Your incentive structure is totally different. If you're really good at winning in the incentive structure of a marketing director, Nike's sales will go up, regardless of whether they're better or worse for the customers.
It's probably futile trying to argue with you since you started the conversation by, essentially, saying that you don't believe in honest debate. Marketing is the opposite of honest debate.
One of the more annoying traits of marketing is that it gives new meanings to words that already have a perfectly good and accepted meaning.
Your example of the word 'sell' is one of those.
It takes the word and stretches it to a plausible but wrong new meaning. You're putting it somewhere between 'convince' and 'argue' whereas to sell means to exchange some item in return for some currency.
"One of the more annoying traits of marketing is that it gives new meanings to words that already have a perfectly good and accepted meaning. Sell means to exchange some item in return for some currency."
According to merriam-websters: "sell: to persuade or influence to a course of action or to the acceptance of something <sell children on reading>"
When I did the same thing with "marketing," it was clear to me you were abusing the term. You tried to redefine all human communication as marketing, which strips the word of its intended meaning.
Furthermore, all of the world's most intractable problems are basically marketing problems. For global warming, world hunger, malaria, water shortages, fisheries depletion, etc., we already have the solutions.
I agree, those are basically marketing problems — they are created by marketing. The problem is that marketing, which is where you try to persuade someone of something because it will benefit you personally, regardless of its truth, is fundamentally corrosive to the kind of disinterested investigation of the truth that we need in order to collectively solve these problems.
You could as easily say that these are violence problems: it's just a matter of getting really talented soldiers to kill the people who are opposing the solutions. The trouble is that there's no correlation between the correctness of a person's point of view on how to solve world hunger and their skill at violence, so generally speaking, increasing the level of violence doesn't improve the level of competence in social, economic, and agricultural policy. (I guess it might solve the water shortage problem in a different way, though, sort of like you can lower the rate of heart disease by administering carcinogens.)
Similarly, there's no positive correlation between the correctness of one's opinion and one's skill at marketing. I think you can make the argument that there's a negative correlation: people whose opinions are tentative and based on evidence are not nearly as confident as a good marketer needs to be.
I don't know who downvoted you - you're absolutely right regarding the human ability to influence others. You didn't word it well, but the core of what you're saying is completely correct.
I've never been able to watch any Bill Hicks routine because that's the first one I saw, and it shocked me with how needlessly ugly it was. I can't find that stuff funny. Suggesting people kill themselves for their profession... That's fucked up.
I think that you should take a comedians word with a grain of salt.
What Bill Hicks was literally getting at was that to use your talent as a wordsmith to create wants where there are none and to pursue money without any consideration for ethics by trying to translate each and every human emotion into the dollar equivalent and a 'hook' by which to gain acess to peoples wallets is a very wrong thing.
Comedians will exaggerate grossly in order to make their point. See Carlin, Connolly and many others for more examples of such behaviour.
It's up to us to separate out the core facts from the poetic license.
The kind of marketing that the great-grandfather post of this comment referred to is exactly the wrong way to use marketing.
There is a book by some guy called 'how to win friends and influence people', it is a great example of how not to use skills with words, it is simple manipulations and there is a world of a difference between manipulation and reasonable discourse between consenting parties.
The latter is what sets us - amongst many other things - apart from the animals, not our ability to 'market' or to 'sell' where no need exists.
Marketeers now routinely employ psychologists in order to learn better which of our buttons they should push in order to get access to our innermost feelings so that we go and do what they want, consume their product.
Now I would like to see the statistics of sizes of Star Wars T-Shirts sold. In fact statistics broken down for all geek themes, please (are Linux users fatter than OS X users? and so on...).
That definition more accurately fits the typical usage of the term 'dork'. The word 'geek' is usually used to indicate someone with a great deal of specialized knowledge (such as a computer geek, or a math geek, but also sometimes less technical topics, like a literature geek or a band geek), and typically a lack of social prowess. A 'nerd', on the other hand, is more typically one who displays heightened scholastic ability in all (or at least most) areas, but a significant lack of social skill.
I'm not trying to say that any other use of these (or any other) words is, in any sense, wrong. But these are their current, common, usage.
EDIT (since the urban dictionary link wasn't there when I wrote the above): Remember that different people use words differently. An urban dictionary definition is just what the people who use and vote on urban dictionary definitions (in particular, the urban dictionary definition in question) agree that a word means. This is why lexicography isn't trivial; there is significant sample bias in, for example, the set of people who care enough about how urban dictionary defines 'geek' in order to change it.
It was for me. In high school and most of college, I refused to make myself pretty. It was a symbolic rejection of that whole social strategy, and I did think it was a dichotomy. I was going to be smart, and that was all.
It wasn't until I had been a professional for a few years that I changed my mind. I noticed that the women who I really respected as programmers were also all stunningly beautiful. I read up on it a bit and realized that it's just another skill, and not a particularly difficult one. Overnight I blossomed and became pretty.
But it didn't happen until I was twenty-six. And it's one thing to look beautiful for yourself and your husband; I'm not sure I'd have put in the time to compete with sixteen-year-olds.
I imagine he means that she was geeky, in the sense that she wasn't popular (and not in the sense that we all consider ourselves geeks). Girls who are beautiful in high school don't usually have this problem.
It's not like we all became friends and traded numbers. In fact, we sarcastically said 'See you at the next one'.
We all grow up and change. And sometimes we don't but high school as someone wiser than me once said - high school is a geographic coincidence. Not because you want to be there.