A nerd is someone with a high aptitude for intellectual endeavors, usually in areas that useful and challenging, but has little to no social skills. They are often good at math, sciences or programming. They often go on to high status jobs and become successful because their skill sets are so unique. They can work for NASA as rocket scientists, do groundbreaking work in academia developing astounding original mathematical proofs or have a career in finance creating really complicated and innovative financial instruments or become high-level engineers. Bill Gates is a nerd. Not only are they scary smart, they’re often always trying to push the envelope conceptually. They’re also capable of producing astoundingly original and technically astounding works of art and music.

Geeks can range in intelligence to average to very bright, but they rarely hit the genius levels of nerds. On the bright side, they are usually nowhere near as socially inept as a nerd either. They are usually good at one or two things, but it’s rarely something useful. Their expertise is more likely to be along the lines of an encyclopedic knowledge of something like film, music, television, comic books, sports or history, but from the consumer’s side. A geek is more like a high level hobbyist than an expert genius. Since his area of expertise can often be of little real world use, it’s not uncommon to find geeks toiling away in obscurity or sometimes even mediocrity. However when the geek is lucky enough to combine his hobby with his career he can end up becoming quite successful, and even attain a level of minor celebrity. His level of knowledge comes more from a monomaniacal dedication to a subject more than high intellectual aptitude, even though geeks can often be fairly bright. Policy wonks, the pickup artist community and bloggers are geeks. Fantasy football addicts are geeks. They will dedicatedly digest every piece of knowledge out there about a topic, but aren’t likely to synthesize it into anything new, innovative and groundbreaking. They mostly tend to memorize and regurgitate, although the best of them are often capable of some very novel insights. Making this primer differentiating between nerds, geeks and dorks is something a geek would do. Analyzing the differences in physiology and brain structure and environment between them and coming up with a plausible hypothesis as to the source of those differences, however? That’s something a nerd would do.

Socially, geeks are much better than nerds. They can make friends, hold conversations, generally fit in, and usually just come off as just quirky or slightly off-beat rather than a total social disaster like a nerd. Some geeks are no visible social deficiencies at all and are actually closet, undercover geeks, but even these social skills they acquired the way they acquire everything else: by monomanical observation, dissection and memorization. They obsess over how to be social the same way they used to obsess over Star Wars, rock and roll or movies, and immerse themselves in it until they learn it inside out. That’s how the pickup artist community works. They take the monomaniacal drive they once had for other interests, that same mania that made them socially awkward to begin with, and now apply it to picking up women, using many of the same trappings as their former geek hobbies: clubs, newsletters, message boards, meetups, books and websites.

Many fields have a mix of nerds and geeks coexisting. In music, the nerd is composing complex masterpieces and the geek is a music critic or blogger. In computers the nerd is programming a new type of software that will have a huge impact on the world or coming up with brand new hacking and cracking techniques that can beat all existing security measures, while the geek is designing video games, works in the computer repair department of Best Buy, is selling PCs on the floor of Comp USA or is a consumer happy to buy cutting edge gadgets and new hardware. The math nerd publishes papers in academic journals, while the math geek is crunching numbers as an insurance actuary or accountant. Many of the very bright geeks in medicine become physicians, while the nerds are locked away in labs doing cutting edge research and publishing findings and winning grants. In writing, Stephen Hawking is a nerd while Malcolm Gladwell and Chuck Klosterman are geeks.

Now you may be reading this far and thinking that I’m disparaging geeks or implying them to be inferior. Not at all. Geeks serve a very valuable function in society. They bridge the intellectual gap between the nerds and the layman in the general populace. They write the pop psychology, pop physics and pop economic books that clarify the complex issues facing our lives for the everyman out there. They’re not as smart as the nerd, but they are smart enough to grasp what it is the nerd does, at least in broad strokes. And since they’re better socially than nerds, they do a better job of communicating it to the public in the form of consumers, investors and journalists.

Now what about the aforementioned dorks? They’re the worst of the worst: all the social awkwardness of geeks and nerds, minus any of the smarts. Napoleon Dynamite, for example, was a dork. But even they have a purpose. Without them who would nerds and geeks be able to make fun of?

First is one from the blog The Situationist. It uses baseball players as a specific example.

The other is an older, but related piece from the New Yorker by Malcolm Gladwell called “The Physical Genius.”

Not much commentary from me on this. Both links are pretty self-explanatory.