Are smart kids brains different?
A couple people have said that there might be something neurologically different about smart people, i.e. that the reason smart kids spend their time reading books instead of talking to friends is not so much that they like books as that they don’t like people. In the essay I deliberately avoided taking any stand on this; I merely said that they liked the one more than the other, without attempting to explain why. From my experience, I’d say that while some smart kids may be borderline autistic, this can’t by itself explain the smart/nerd correlation, because there are also plenty of nerds who are very talkative. Indeed, one of the most characteristic nerd flaws is an addiction to newsgroup posting. Nerds deserve it. Another thing several people have said is that nerds deserve to be unpopular because they’re so unpleasant. This is often true. The essay wasn’t about whether or not nerds deserve to be unpopular, just why they are. Certainly, some of the social skills that nerds avoid lea
