I'm not sure how much I agree with the essay, but you really need to give it more than 4 years. By 10 years out, most people from my high school had leveled out to a degree--the weird kids were mostly married and starting to have kids, the popular kids were married and starting to have kids. Things like hot girlfriends/boyfriends didn't really matter--they'd all pretty much matured. One other thing I'll point out, the most attractive girl from my graduating class definitely wasn't the most attractive girl when we graduated.

That being said, we had 2 distinct cliques of popular/smart kids, both of these groups were in honors/AP classes. Group A was more popular. Group B less popular (but still more popular than the other various groups), but smarter. These groups started in 8th grade when the school separated the gifted program into 2 groups (I was in Group B btw).

Group A (with very few exceptions) partied through college and then married young. They ended up doing about as well as all the non-popular kids from high school.

Group B partied less, studied harder, married later, and is making much more money than Group A.

I think popularity predicts success to a point, i.e., popularity has diminishing returns. Group A cared too much about the rewards that came with being popular in high school, so they spent too much time maintaining their status. The kids in group B were popular enough to get by, but they worked harder on other things.

Yea I definitely agree with you there.

I think it's two camps, the socially aware people, and the socially inept people.

The socially inept people basically have some behavioral flaw that they themselves cannot see or understand. Usually it takes until way after high school to figure it out, like being in a dysfunctional household, or autism, or cerebral palsy, or something.

Then there's the normal kids. AKA group A and B in your comment.

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Anyway my conspiracy-theory-of-the-day, and why I posted that comment in the first place, is that homeschooling usually puts them into the socially inept camp.

Reason being, these kids are basically being 100% controlled by their parents. They only have exposure to two sets of ideals and beliefs (their parent's) for their entire upbringing. It'd only work if the parents were perfect and somehow treated their child as a true equal (or if they have like 10+ siblings or something). School mitigates that risk by having another "ground base", out of control of their parents, to turn to.

I think the whole "everything changes" thing happens because you move out of your parents house, not because HS ended.

You didn't read the article.

The central point is that nerds don't become popular because they don't put the time in to be popular. They'd rather spend it on other things.

None of that is different to your comment. In fact you're agreeing by saying that it comes down to social awareness, which is essentially putting in the time to be popular.

> You didn't read the article.

I did.

> The central point is that nerds don't become popular because they don't put the time in to be popular. They'd rather spend it on other things.

I read the article. I disagree with his argument. Graham even admits his fallacy near the middle of the article, when he admits to desperately wanting to be popular. The "wanting to be smart more" deal is nothing more than pride, I'd say.

> In fact you're agreeing by saying that it comes down to social awareness, which is essentially putting in the time to be popular.

Nope. You don't get more social awareness from something like "putting in the time to be popular". It might work for something like programming but this is nothing like that. You get it from having a healthy, normal-ish mind and from constantly surrounding yourself with people who have social awareness. Some people simply don't have access to that.