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Notes -
On Bullying
It's an observation of Orson Scott Card that we don't really like to think about how much of our behavior is genetic.
To what extent should it be presumed that sexless men will become rapists? Certainly we can look at some statistics proving rape exists, that some subset of men will eventually become rapists, or worse, school shooters.
It's only nerds that think of humans as rational agents. It's only nerds that think of humans as rational agents. It's only nerds that think of human ok you get it.
Within the evolutionary pressure to protect the women from harm emerges the high school jock bullying the high school nerd for leering too frequently and making the jock's woman uncomfortable. The nerds would have you believe that this cycle of violence begins when the high school jock slams the nerd up against the locker. "I wasn't doing anything" cries the nerd pitifully.
The nerd hangs out near the woman, drawn to her by the compulsion of the reproductive force. The nerd tells a story of innocence, that they're not there in proximity of the woman for any specific purpose.
For the woman, it's pretty simple: there's a nerd there so the nerd is interested in her regardless of what the nerd says he believes. When the nerd stutters out "h-hi" the nerd thinks that this is playing a script of normal human interaction in which he has maintained plausible deniability for making eye contact, when in reality, for the woman, it's pretty simple: there's a male present so the male is interested in her.
From there the leering or the comments ('maybe I should just try being forward' leads to awkward sexual advances) progress and the woman's discomfort increases past the annoyance threshold into the threat labeling, and the threat labeling occurs when she tells her boyfriend, and it becomes the boyfriend's job to subdue the poor dumbfuck.
So the nerd gets slammed into the locker.
"I wasn't doing anything!"
What's sad about this story is just this: that the nerd believes it.
This looks like "boo outgroup" spit-balling to me, except for maybe the part where posting about it here is performative evidence that you might think of yourself as nerd. It's difficult to see in your account anything but a deliberate attempt to troll, so let's start the banning at one week.
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Nerds are low value and high inhibition. (Defining "value" here as "able to get sex without rape"). THey are the ones who get bullied, but it is the low value low inhibition types who rape (and often bully).
These can be the same people at different times. In this framework nerds who are drunk or on certain drugs are low value low inhibition.
Though I'd say the nerd bit is far less important than the drink and drugs which make all types more likely to do something stupid or violent.
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Do you have anything to offer in support of this account of human interaction or did you just imagine it?
This is pretty mild for the Passionate One as far as theories of reality go.
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Some subset of men will, but not the men you're thinking of:
Your hypothesis that the jock beats up the nerd because the nerd is eyeballing his woman, the jock feels threatened by him, and therefore engages in "mate guarding" behaviour - all of this rests on the assumption that the jock sees the nerd as a credible threat, a plausible sexual rival. Even you don't seem to believe the nerd represents this, so I suggest a more parsimonious representation: the jock bullies the nerd as it's a cheap way to demonstrate where the jock sits on the totem pole, particularly relative to the nerd.
It's possible that the original point still stands even if nerds are a small minority of all rapists, if being raped by a nerd is percieved as much worse than being raped by a non-nerd.
I don't know how much this corresponds with reality, but there is definitely at least some extra 'yuck' factor associated with sexual violence when perpetrated by very-low value males.
Alternately, if 'tolerating male proximity' is a tradeoff between various social goods & risk of sexual violence, tolerating males who are low-risk but have low (or zero) social capital to trade can easily become a worse tradeoff than chumming around with high-risk high-reward men.
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Many partners =/= high quality. The lowest quality men don't have many partners but many of them are too weak to rape women. The man who has met many fat women on tinder or traded weed for favours from trashy women isn't higher quality than the man who is married and faithful.
Animals either have a fast life history strategy or a slow one. Slow life history strategy is to build long relationships, invest in the long term, invest greatly in your offspring and prioritize quality. Slow life history strategy works in a stable but harsher ecosystem. Fast life history strategy is about reproducing as much and as fast as possible. Quick high risk sex is valued. Fast life history strategy is better in a dangerous ecology with plenty of food. Species whose population is primarily limited by predators tend to have faster life history strategy.
Rape is the ultimate fast life history strategy. Extremely high risk, negative bonding, zero paternal investment and high time preference. The people attracted to that lifestyle will also be more into other forms of fast low quality sex.
A better measurement than number of partners would be attractiveness.
I don't think you're really responding to the point I made. I was arguing that the evidence suggests sexless men are less likely to rape than men who have many sexual partners, and you're making an unrelated point about men who pursue a fast or slow life strategy.
Jocks may pursue a fast life strategy (the stereotypical frat boy rapist who waits for sorority girls to pass out before taking advantage of them) or slow (the high-status MBA who's extremely selective in his choice of wife). Nerds, in this framing, are the low-T noodle-armed dudes who lack the nerve to either talk to girls or rape them. Like, if you hear "nerd" and think of a guy who fucks tons of unattractive girls and is callous about the whole "consent" thing, that's about as far removed from my understanding of the term as it's possible to be.
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It is a genetic thing, but I don’t think it’s about women. Humans, especially at the ages where bullying happens are keenly aware of, and eager to enforce, their place in the dominance hierarchy. The nerd is a nerd less for hobbies and interests than for being weak and pathetic and socially awkward than anything he’s specifically doing. The other kids find the presence of said weak and pathetic creature offensive and frankly a potential hit to their own place in the hierarchy. A person who eats with sinners is a sinner, and a boy who tolerates the presence of nerds is a nerd.
The only thing worse (which is forbidden by the schools) is to be beaten up by the nerd. This is why so many bullies stop when the nerd fights back. They see that they could lose a lot of standing among their peers if word gets around that they lost a fight to a nerd. That puts their place in severe jeopardy as it means they themselves are weak and pathetic.
I'd say (based on my own experiences, as both a bullying victim and a bully) that this contempt is not even a necessary element. It's perfectly possible for a kid to gladly participate in tormenting the class's punching bag - not because the kid feels any malice towards them, but simply because it's one of the many fun things to do with your in-group, akin to sharing an inside joke. The notion that the punching bag is actually suffering doesn't really... cross the kid's mind; the kid might not even realize he's being a bully.
In fact: Bizarre as it sounds, it is possible for a bully to torment the nerd mercilessly... and, simultaneously, want to be friends with him, wondering why the nerd remains withdrawn.
Let me share a personal anecdote: For some years, I attended a school in which I was mercilessly bullied, by pretty much every boy in my class. We're talking things like tossing my clothes into the trash - things that might not warrant calling the police, but definitely cross the line of casually teasing your friends. Shortly after graduating, I found a social media site where my former classmates were commingling and chatting with each other. Out of morbid curiosity, I looked at what they were saying about me, and what I saw was this:
"A" and "B" were two of the people who had bullied me the hardest. Apparently, what I regarded as merciless torment, they regarded as harmless roughhousing! It was hard for me to believe, actually; it seemed remarkably clueless of them. However... upon reflection, I had to admit: at other times in my life, I had been involved in bullying other people, and somehow hadn't realized what I was doing until much later. I guess the bottom line is: kids can be really, really oblivious sometimes.
By the way, although ImpassionaTwo's argument is largely weak and hardly worth debating, there is one valid point they make:
The nerd's limited social awareness renders him more susceptible to bullying, not just because his awkward behavior makes him a prime target for becoming the class punching bag, but also because he's unable to truly understand what is going on. The things I said above - that bullies aren't necessarily sociopathic sadists; that otherwise friendly and well-adjusted people may still bully others, and may even feel amicable towards the very same people they're tormenting - are unfathomable to a nerd who operates under a simplistic, strictly rational model of human behavior. And so, the nerd suffers under what he sees as inexplicable malice - unaware that his tormentors may be simply clueless, socially awkward in their own way, and not merely implacably evil.
This smacks of post-hoc rationization.
That may be!
However, that one social media posting isn't the only evidence I have. Let me provide some additional context.
During my time in school, when I confided in my homeroom teacher about the bullying, she offered the same perspective that I am presenting now: "Perhaps they just want to be your friends."
At that time, as a socially clueless kid, I couldn't comprehend what I was hearing. My model for human relations was simple: All human relations can be neatly separated into "friends" and "enemies". If someone wants to be your friend, they are kind to you and do fun things with you. If someone is picking on you, they are your enemy who wants you to suffer. Viewed within this framework, my teacher's words were blatantly absurd. I had no idea how to understand that, so I concluded that she was my enemy as well, trying to gaslight me into silence to avoid having to deal with me; this was the only explanation that fit into my model.
She wasn't the only one who told me that, though. My father had an anecdote to share: "there was this one guy who always picked on me, but when one day someone else tried to hurt me, he was my fiercest defender, and in the end he became my friend." This too didn't fit into my model, so... well, I couldn't exactly accuse my father of gaslighting me, so I just kinda... ignored it.
In retrospect, though, I think it's likely that both my teacher and my father were right.
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Is it actually true that sexless men are more likely to be rapists? I don't have statistics, but that's not obvious to me.
What do you mean by rational agent?
In any case, I really don't think this is a fair description of social dynamics (nor do I think it was meant to be—it's probably meant to be attacking the people on this site, since I'd imagine a good deal of us would self-identify as nerds). I've hung out around plenty of nerds, and I can only think of one who I knew had issues with unwanted attention towards women (and in those cases, he generally was able to be made aware that he was in the wrong, per my recollection). For some of Scott's thoughts, this seemed a nice collation, which seemed to generally be pushing back against some of what you've been saying.
Can't say that I've really run across bullying either, though, so maybe I'm in unusual environments.
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This is a bad impression of Impassionata, because it's too obvious about pushing the right buttons to piss people off rather than incoherent Portland antifa ranting. Are you the guy who was talking about imitating him on rdrama?
You think it's an impersonator? I admit, it's very low-heat for an Impassionata piece. But he was able to start off relatively cool, and only got heated when well into his stride. So I'm still leaning towards it being the real deal.
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I am, along with others it seems, confused by this post.
I think anti-bullying campaigns have gone too far and now are a net negative over the 1950s system. But it makes little sense to talk about nerds/jocks in this context. That is, mostly, a false artifact of Hollywood culture. Almost all the best jocks are also super smart. The CEO of Goldman played Rugby in college. Zuckerberg was the captain of his fencing team, and now has apparently taken a keen interest in training in Jiu-jitsu.
There's a lot of jocks who aren't the best.
They also tend to fare poorly with the ladies. No one was itching to go on dates with backup left guard "Stumper" at my high school.
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Agreed on the general point, but in no way is Zuckerberg a jock.
Agreed regarding Zuck, but I think he highlights something that seems true from personal experience - discrete categories of teens, to the extent that they exist, aren't anything like the 80s movie tropes. I don't know if they ever were, but by the time I was a teenager a couple decades ago, quite a few athletes were also smart kids that played Halo and had no real qualms about playing with the stereotypical nerds. Sure, there were cliques and I assume that's a permanent part of human social structure, but the overlap between jocks and nerds was sufficiently significant that those weren't really the fault lines. The outgroup were the actual losers - the guys that seemed like they wouldn't even get out of high school and definitely weren't going to have real careers and successful lives.
Growing up, I've always associated the bully with the fat, loud guy who sucks at sports and has a bad social etiquette and rep with the teachers, not really desired by his female classmates. He thinks he can assert his dominance by picking on the weaker guy. But the jocks who are already desirable don't have to assert their dominance, they already know their worth and so does everyone. This happened a lot with this particular nerdy kid in my class who was sometimes chatty but was seen as scum by most girls in our class. The bullying he'd faced was pretty standard, being shoved and kicked around, not the extreme stuff like being stripped or getting shitty swirlys. He had a very bad temper though. Inevitably, the day came when he was truly pushed off the edge and went completely feral with no care in the world for the consequences, but fortunately he was tamed before he could get that far. Interestingly enough, this didn't raise his status. He was still seen as scum who (ironically) starts trouble, but worse: he was a feral scum who's tasted blood now, and therefore shouldn't be given the reason to do so again (read: can't be messed with without a bloody nose in return anymore). Can't say he wasn't eager to embrace this new reputation though.
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I think the difference is less the interests (although they tend to cluster) and more as a social status. You’re not a nerd just because you collect things or watch anime or whatever. You’re a nerd because you are weak, unaccomplished, socially awkward, and clearly unable to fix those problems. In other words, a loser. Jocks aren’t really jocks because they like sports, it’s simply that they are stronger, more accomplished, sociable, and generally able to handle their lives.
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I am also confused by the post, but feel compelled to point out that fencing is ultra-nerdy since at least the 90s IME -- probably since they stopped using real swords, but IDKAT.
They don’t use swords?
Not ones that can cut you
I get that. I still assumes it was real swords but dull.
Not a given, historically...
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They use what are essentially bendy metal poles. The blades aren't rigid, and they're not even blades, since they don't have a cutting edge. Instead, there's a sensor at the tip that sends an electrical signal when it hits an opponent.
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I in no way am a fencing expert. But I watched the Olympic event in 2020 and they seemed pretty athletic.
Sure, but if you talk to any of them (again IME, I'm sure some fencers are total chads) you will find that they are super-nerds.
If a nerd can beat you up, is he still a nerd?
Scott's classical definition of a nerd (which you may not endorse) was "high intelligence + poor social skills". There's no reason you couldn't have those two traits and also be physically strong or handy in a fight. I think a lot of /fit/izens meet this description.
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If this "nerd leer -> possible rape" behavior set is genetic, and if we shut down the rape with bullying early in the line, then how does the gene continue to propagate? Certainly bullying is now a much lesser force, but there were several decades with prominent bullying and yet the nerd behavior set remained ever present, if not growing.
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This doesn't make a lot of sense to me. What are you trying to say?
I'm sure the case of "nerd" is perceived as (whether or not he actually did) making a pass at "jock"'s girl so jock beats up nerd, has happened. I am also sure that this couldn't possibly explain more than a small percentage of bullying. So what exactly is the point here?
Being charitable, let's consider this post in the context of (pseudo-?)Impassionata's previous top-level post post-return to TheMotte:
To me, the argument seems to be as follows. "Only nerds think of humans as rational agents", so they are blind to their own irrational or unjust impulses. Thus, when they follow the proper script for interacting with girls, they think that they ought be rewarded for acting in accordance with this rational system of "rules". As such, when they are justly pushed into a locker instead, they have no clue why. The hero jock, on the other hand, is able to cut through the bullshit, understand the nerd's diabolical motives for what they are (motives that the nerd has successfully wordcel'd himself into not even understanding himself), and intuitively punish him for this, stepping outside the bounds of reason.
Now, Control-F nerds with heterodox high-decouplers, who coolly and rationally debate the viability of ethnostates or the lack of consciousness in women. Any convincing arguments put forth are nothing but mere post-hoc rationalizations of preexisting evil beliefs, just as the nerd's talking-to-women script is merely a means of covering up impure desires. It's similar to the whole "Elephant in the Brain" thesis: any debate is not meant to arrive at the truth, but rather, to persuade others and even oneself that their own cause is the truth. As such, it is the role of the just person to ignore all of this reasoned argumentation and use whatever tools are necessary in order to silence hateful views.
...
I personally am skeptical of this thesis. Is conversation and debate really that futile? If so, then pseudo-Impassionata is wasting his time by engaging in conversation and debate here. Even he must recognize then, assuming that he's not just trolling or motivated by a primal desire to win online arguments, that there is utility in debate. At the very least, it can cut away the cruft that accumulates on top of an issue, revealing the fundamental loci of disagreement beneath. But I won't waste time on this, because more has been better written on this subject.
Instead, I'll indulge in a bit of armchair psychoanalysis: what's with this common theme of bullying nerds? Indeed, a while back, either here or in one of our previous venues, there was a post noticing a tendency for masculine posturing among a certain subset of progressives, a fixation on positioning themselves in apposition to loser dork hateful nerds. I believe that the post was written in the context of reproductively viable worker ants, which makes the fixation ironic: anyone involved in that has to be blind to not see that they're a nerd. So what gives? One hypothesis is that it's an attempt by Theater Kids (I would be grateful to anyone who knows where the comment introducing that framing is) to gain some amount of status by putting down the other group that seems to inhabit the same rung of the social ladder, Math Geeks. This would explain both the odd posturing and the focus on the "Hollywood" (as anti_dan put it above) narrative of jocks versus nerds. Maybe throw in that one "high school is the last time in your life that you can be someone" comment as well? (Again, I'd be grateful to anyone with a link.)
I don't know how much this hypothesis is actually worth anything. But in an effort to avoid merely sneering, I'll flesh it out a bit: I do think that an underrated determinant of which side Very Online people take in the Culture War is the degree to which they enjoy playing social games. Anecdotal evidence:
In my own experience, one of the factors that repelled me from Team Progress was noticing that the rules offered by progressives for dating as a man do not align with the actions of the most successful men.
A post (again, I don't have the link) on morlock-holmes.tumblr.com that I remember reading talked about a play, which was to star a white male lead, in which the playwright queried a diverse group of progressives on how to write this straight white male; the answers were all things like "Make him a good listener", "Make sure he stays in his lane", "Make him active in ceding to women's insights". The kicker is that when the play was finished, all the same members of the group hated the lead for his annoying lack of backbone.
That one comment here on TheMotte saying that when whites move into a neighborhood, it's gentrification; when whites move out, it's white flight; when whites live among PoC, it's colonization; when whites live apart, it's segregation: so where are whites supposed to live?
The frequent thesis that the constant "firmware updates" for progressive terminology are important from a status signaling perspective.
The "self-hating" whites from "I Can Tolerate Anything Except the Outgroup" who don't actually hate all whites.
The idea tying together these scattered examples is that progressive orthodoxy rewards people who are able to read between the lines, take things seriously but not literally, navigate complex social environments. If you're the kind of guy who can recite a litany of rules for dating without slipping up, but then know exactly when to break them in practice, then you're rewarded by progressivism: your less-adept competition is filtered out. If you're able to tolerate and write screeds against whites despite being white yourself, then you're rewarded: you draw suspicion towards less-progressive whites, while proving that you are "one of the good ones". If you can orate against the evil of toxic masculinity while still being able to take charge when it counts, then you're rewarded by progressivism.
Hence why Theater Kids are more progressive and why Math Geeks, who axiomatize and theorem-prove, are more likely to fall into heterodoxy. It's no surprise, then, that the progressive is arguing via indirect social shaming ("you all are nerds who deserve to be shoved into lockers by Cool Jocks like me") against rational debate.
Does this idea make sense? Does it accord with your own experiences?
I believe this is the original Theater Kid post by @Hoffmeister25 https://www.themotte.org/post/381/culture-war-roundup-for-the-week/68537?context=8#context
Yep, that’s the one; thank you.
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Being charitable to attackers is being uncharitable to their targets.
Don't "be charitable to" trolls.
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You should read Nietzsche. It would give you a more nuanced way of thinking about these sorts of issues.
Start with Twilight of the Idols:
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