My Response to "Why Nerds Are Unpopular" by Paul Graham
Here's the link to my blog post: http://blog.myadversity.com/2014/04/my-personal-response-and-continuation.html
The link to the essay by Paul Graham is at: http://www.paulgraham.com/nerds.html
It's a lot to read, so here's the tl;dr version of my blog post: In his essay, "Why Nerds Are Unpopular," Paul Graham explains that the hierarchy of popularity in high school works well for jocks, but not for nerds. Nerds choose to be intelligent rather than popular. He offers some relief to young nerds by informing them that, in the real life hierarchy of success, nerds have the advantage and jocks don't.
In my response, I argue that a nerd who deviates from the status quo still meets relentless opposition to real world success; perhaps even more so than a nerdy jock who deviates from the status quo path to popularity.
I think you would have done better to have linked directly to your blog, rather than making this a self post. If you really feel that a tl;dr is necessary, that's what a comment is for.
Anyway, here's my own brief response to both PG and your response:
1) "Nerd" and "Jock" are stereotypes. Given a large enough sample size, of course there will be popular nerds and intelligent jocks, and every shade of gray in between.
2) What about a "jock" who deviates from the accepted wisdom and take chances? For every high school football star who goes on to become an NFL star as an adult, I'm sure there will be a dozen has-been football stars who end up giving up football and find a boring job. I'd argue that there's not much difference between nerds and jocks when it comes to the probability of success.
3) In my interpretation, PG's central insight is not that the real world places a higher value on intelligence than American schools do. The central idea of the essay, which PG repeats several times throughout the piece, is that school is a prison. When you graduate from that prison, you are finally free to find like-minded nerds and do interesting things together with them. Of course, as you said, the whole world might be just another prison that demands compliance with the status quo. But since this prison is several orders of magnitude larger than a typical high school, there are many more opportunities to do interesting things inside of it.
Here's my response: nerds focus on long-term optimization whereas jocks focus on premature optimization (in computer science speak, think "Big O" values for 10,000n vs 2^n).
As a result, nerds are seen as low value at the present and subconsciously remind jocks that their maximum values are relatively low in the long term.