The Rawness

You often hear the terms nerd, geek and dork used interchangeably, as if they mean the same thing. Let me assure you that they don’t. Let’s take a moment to explain the differences.

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?

When I say that the tendency to stereotype isn’t all bad, and in fact is often a good thing, I get a lot of grief. The first thing people think is that I’m somehow anti-minority or pro-white, but everyone from a straight WASP male to a Wiccan black butch lesbian can be a victim of stereotypes. Stereotypes are not a problem exclusive to minorities, nor are minorities exempt from doing the stereotyping as well.

Like it or not, the tendency to stereotype is a part of human nature, and my view is that if a behavior or biological response is part of our human nature, it must be because it traditionally gave people an evolutionary advantage at some point in human history. When we say that a trait gave us an evolutionary advantage, what we’re saying is that it satisfied our two fundamental biological drives: the drive for self-preservation and the drive to spread genes through reproduction.

Take gossip for example. On the surface it may seem like a petty and ugly part of our human nature with little to no redeeming qualities. But there are many plausible theories out there that convincingly suggest the opposite, that the tendency to gossip is a tool that gives humans a huge evolutionary advantage over those who never gossip. Robin Dunbar in his book Grooming, Gossip, and the Evolution of Language discusses the development of language and the evolutionary benefits of gossip, for example. According to Dunbar, in the days before credit reports and background checks, gossip traditionally benefited communities by spreading the word about dangerous and untrustworthy people. If you were unreliable, a thief or violent, word spread around about you and people avoided you. In this way gossip satisfied the self-preservation drive. Also, say a woman was a slut. As a man looking to carry your genes into the next generation, you would have avoided marrying a slut at all costs because in the days before DNA tests and reliable birth control, a slut can easily get pregnant by another man and tell you the baby is yours. Now you’re paying for another man’s child and not spreading your genes. So by telling you about someone’s sexual behavior, gossip helped a man with his drive to reproduce.  Those who didn’t engage in spreading or hearing gossip probably had their genes weeded out out of existence eventually.

It’s also human nature for people to be more critical of a woman for being promiscuous and unfaithful than for a man. As I explained in this earlier post, that’s because if a man slept around and impregnated several women, it optimized the drive to reproduce in two ways. First, one man sleeping with multiple women led to multiple pregnancies whereas one woman sleeping with multiple men still only led to one pregnancy. That’s an inefficient allocation of resources. Second, if one man slept with multiple women, you’d know who the father is and who the mother is in each pregnancy. If a woman slept with multiple men, especially in the days before DNA testing and reliable birth control, you wouldn’t know which man was the father. This is an obstacle in a man’s drive to reproduce and spread genes. It’s for these reasons (and others) that we still tend to be more critical of women for promiscuity than men.

For a man, on the other hand, it’s a worse blow to his reputation to not be a provider than it is to be promiscuous. That’s why most negative gossip about men revolves around being cheap, being a deadbeat dad, and being chronically unemployed or lazy. Traditionally, the danger to women when men slept around wasn’t a threat to the drive to reproduce and spread genes. As we’ve seen, men sleeping around actually optimizes that goal. The threat to a woman when men slept around was to the other drive, the drive for self-preservation, because that man may choose to take better care of the other women and her children and send a majority of his resources their way instead. In evolutionary terms, a hardworking and responsible polygamous man who takes care of all his women and children is preferable to a lazy and irresponsible monogamous man who doesn’t take care of his one family. So when you look at human nature in evolutionary terms and focus on the two drives, the natural tendency human beings have to gossip about women’s sluttiness and men’s ambition and finances make perfect sense.

It also works in reverse, if good gossip is spread about you, it increases your reputation which in turn increases your chances of survival and reproduction. This gives people an incentive to manage their reputations, follow the rules and conform to societal norms, hence another benefit gossip provides to a community.

Take something even less obvious, like the natural urge we have to tickle people, and the built-in response we have of laughing when being tickled. It may seem like a stretch, but even tickling satisfies the two drives, as seen in this NY Times article:

Tickling and laughter are universal among humans and can even be found among chimpanzees, suggesting that they serve some serious evolutionary purpose. Researchers agree that tickling plays an important role in the bonding of infants and parents. Mother tickles baby. Baby laughs and smiles. Mother laughs and smiles. They endear themselves to each other to their mutual evolutionary advantage.

But Dr. Glenn Weisfeld, a human ethologist at Wayne State University in Detroit, suggests that tickling may do much more. Tickling, he maintains, is an educational activity.

”The structures of the body that are most vulnerable to tickling are also the ones that are most vulnerable to attack,” Dr. Weisfeld said. ”We may be responsive to tickling because it gives us practice in defending ourselves.” Children laugh, he said, to encourage adults to continue this tickle schooling, in what are typically safe, practice play attacks.

These examples reinforce the view that human nature is a collection of instinctive responses and learned behaviors that give us an evolutionary advantage by helping us either survive or reproduce. Gossip helps people avoid dangerous, unreliable and untrustworthy people. By helping us socially fit in and form bonds, laughing can help us in our drives to reproduce and spread genes. By teaching us to protect vital areas, tickling can help us with self-preservation.  And the list goes on and on.

So if stereotyping is a part of human nature, what evolutionary advantages does it give us? And how does it satisfy the two primal drives of self-preservation and spreading genes through reproduction? We’ll get into that in part 2.

Recommended Reading:

• I first encountered the two human drives in reading a book by the pickup artist Mystery, The Mystery Method: How to Get Beautiful Women Into Bed. Pickup artists and their books often get a bad rap as being manipulative or just plain bunk, but I find them to have a lot of sound theories about evolutionary psychology in general and gender relations in particular. Mystery was the subject of the recent VH-1 show The Pickup Artist. I find his social theories to be pretty sound overall.
• This book is a great resource on the evolution and advantage of language in general and gossip in particular.
• This book is an excellent starting point for learning about evolutionary psychology, and I highly recommend it. It’s written in a really easy-breezy style and is extremely readable and layperson friendly.

Click here for Part 2 of this post.

I’ve been working over a theory in my head. I call it the Mystery/Mastery Love Paradox. (I’m generally not good at giving short, catchy names to things, so if you can come up with a pithier name for it, please let me know). It basically states that when people are faced with a mystery, which is an initial challenge they dream of mastering but have no idea how, they will be motivated by a sincere love for it. But once they actually do conquer the challenge and get so good at it that they achieve mastery, they will no longer love it because they have deciphered it, realized it wasn’t as interesting, alluring or mysterious as they originally thought, and then begin to actively disdain it because it becomes utterly predictable to them. It’s basically the main reason why once we conquer that impossible challenge that at one point consumed and mystified us, we are rarely as satisfied as we expected to be. It’s the reason why happiness constantly eludes us, even after we get what we thought we wanted. We are driven to conquer things, but destined to get bored with them once we master them, leading us to want new things to conquer, causing the cycle to repeat.

Before I get in-depth with it, let’s start off with a quote (with emphasis added by me) from Neil Strauss’s book The Game: Penetrating the Secret Society of Pickup Artists. Strauss, a former chump with women, gets himself mentored by the world’s greatest pickup artists, reads a ton of books, compares notes with other pickup artists in training and field tests techniques until he reaches the point that he can not only pick up a woman using a prewritten scripts and stock techniques, but they got it down to such a science that they were able to reduce it all to a teachable routine that even a social misfit could memorize, practice and get results from almost immediately:

On our last day with Papa, we went to a club called Guvernment. I pushed him into sets and watched him repeat, like a robot, the openers, outines, and negs Mystery and I had taught him. And women were responding to him now. It was amazing how effective just a few simple lines could be?and it was also a little depressing. The first thing aspiring standup comics do is develop a tight five-minute routine that can win over any audience. But after seeing hundreds of rooms fill with laughter on cue at he exact same points, they begin to lose respect for their audience for being so easily manipulated. Being a successful pickup artist meant risking the same side effect.

Think about this for a sec. That comedian, the one that you admire so much for being able to make you and everyone else in the room laugh, the one you feel a special connection to, has done this time and time before and in his mind probably finds your reaction predictable and banal. The same probably goes for directors like Steven Spielberg or Alfred Hitchcock who mastered pushing audiences’ different emotion buttons at will with the same tricks repeatedly. They learned how to make an audience cheer, cry or hang on the edge of its seat on cue, and once they got their craft down audiences weren’t even a challenge for them to manipulate anymore. And like the comedian, once they mastered their particular audience, they lost respect for them. Sure they enjoy the quick ego boost gained by the public adulation and easy successes they achieve, but the lack of challenge also makes them discontent to a degree.

That’s why successful people have to reframe challenges in order to stay interested and motivated. Once they realize that making people laugh is now easy, they switch to the challenge of trying to get more money and fame than their rival comedians. Or maybe they compete to be funnier than their top competitors. Or for the movie director that’s mastered crowd pleasing, he may turn his attention to the still-unconquered challenge of winning the love and respect of his peers by getting an Academy Award. Similarly, in The Game: Penetrating the Secret Society of Pickup Artists, for Strauss and his fellow pickup artists the hookups and sex start becoming almost mundane in comparison to competing with other pickup artists to be the best and innovate the most techniques.

Yet all these people at one point were in absolute awe of the very thing they are now bored by. The stand up comedian, at the point he was just starting out and unsure of himself, probably believed that just figuring out how to make people laugh consistently would be his ultimate dream. He basically put audiences on a pedestal and craved their approval.  Likewise, the film director probably got a rush the first time he screened a movie for an audience and managed to push the right emotional buttons with one of his films and get the reactions he wanted, even if that audience was just his film school class or his family. Similarly in The Game, when Neil Strauss was totally clueless about women he was craving their approval and making them into mysterious goddesses in his mind. I wouldn’t be surprised if the Mystery/Mastery Love Paradox is what drove Michael Jordan to try baseball for a while.

And the Michael Jordan example is fitting because it leads into another aspect of the love paradox: as unchallenging and boring as mastery of something is, the easy rewards and ego boosts that come from mastery can make you become too comfortable to give it up and try something new. So even though the mystery is gone and you don’t have the same fire for the former challenge as you once did, it’s become an easily accessible source of instant validation and ego boost, and that’s hard to give up. That’s why people get comfortable in jobs that don’t challenge them. They may crave a challenge and may no longer love and respect the area they mastered, but the thought of risking the comfort and security they have to chase another challenge that they might fail at scares them into staying where they are.

I think this is probably what made Michael Jordan come back to basketball eventually. He mastered the game. He mastered the money aspect of the NBA. He beat all his competitors and easily outshone them. He mastered winning championships and All-Star Games. He was probably bored stiff and wanted that rush of conquering something else, of mastering another mystery. But when his new challenge wasn’t going the way he planned, he went back to the safe bet: basketball.

The Mystery/Mastery Love Paradox applies to human relationships too. When someone we date is new and mysterious to us, we have dopamine and a bunch of other hormones flooding our brains, the attraction is peak, we’re trying to unravel who the other person is; they are mysterious, new and exciting to us and we’re turned on like crazy. When someone or something is mysterious to us, it allows us to fill in the blanks by projecting our fantasies and desires onto them. Our grasp on them is tenuous and we fear that we may lose them at any moment if we do anything wrong. They’re too new to take for granted. Yet the more intimately we get to know them, the more the mystery wears off and those former blanks that we filled with wild, exciting fantasies get replaced by mundane, disappointing realities, and eventually people get taken for granted. Some people look for new mysteries to unravel and master, while some are happier with the comfort and security of their current situation, even if the mystery is now gone.

I was telling a friend about this theory to get some feedback on it, and he asked a good question: “I see what you’re saying and there’s some truth to it. But at the end of the day, is it a good thing or a bad thing?” Strangely enough, that question actually never crossed my mind. I never considered if it was a good or bad thing, and I’m not even sure I entirely care. It’s just human nature. It just is what it is, and it’s up to us to deal with it.

Recommended Reading: