Hypothesis of the Geek Population Constant

Most of the time, I’m a bit of a geek. It’s okay to say that after 30. Geeks are cool now, or something. Anyway, it’s been that way all my life, but (ever since college) not quite all the time.

In fact, some groups I find myself in these days actually think I’m kind of a cool guy. Don’t laugh. It’s true though. Sorta cool. Sometimes. I only bring it up, because, as a pretty socially mobile guy, I am acutely aware of the fact that in a lot of other circles I am just as uncool as I was back in Middle School.

Go figure.

In fact, I did go-figure, and here’s what I came up with…

I’m going to take you through a chain of logical conjecture on my part, but here’s where I’m going to end up. I call it the Hypothesis of the Geek Population Constant. The Geek Population Constant is a number, expressed as a percentage, that can be found in any group of non-voluntarily organized people of a certain threshold number. That is, any group of people organized into any non-voluntary regular contact will self-organize a certain number of them into a sub-group identified as geeks.

In other words, if you made a school of all the most popular kids from like 20 other schools, a certain percentage of them would find themselves relegated to the geek camp. In fact, the percentage of them that would become geeks would be equal to the weighted average percentage of geeks at each of the schools tapped to create the new school.

Crazy? Yes. Feels truthy? Definitely. Let’s talk about how I came up with it, and then I will propose a method by which one of you anthropology grad students out there on the Interwebs (looking for a thesis idea) can use it to find a way to make yourselves useful and write a PhD that will get you in The New York Times Magazine.

The thought process started off on a nice note. I asked myself, why is it that in some groups, as an adult, I usually find myself treated as if I were sorta cool, sometimes as I am outright cool, but, usually, like I’m still the little dweeb I know myself to be.

That last part is crucial.

Because it alone is enough to suggest that it’s not a change in myself nor a change in the general maturity and acceptingness of adults (please).

Could it be my relative position of success in life? It’s true that I’m doing fair to middlin’, which would put me past some while yet way behind others, but that doesn’t quite explain it. No, that doesn’t cut it.

My idea is that in adult life, we tend to self-organize. So, people start to find people that they feel comfortable, which tends to create a certain social levelling. There is, of course, an alpha in every group, even it’s so imperceptible that they work more as a bellwether than a straight up leader. Bear with me, I know I’m not breaking any new ground yet.

I thought to myself, I wish I could go out and talk to all the struggling geeky kids out there and tell them that when they get a little older they won’t be forced to come to a school every day, that as long as they work hard enough to pull a half-assed career together they will probably find themselves to have at least a marginal amount in common with those they go to work with. That it will get better.

You won’t, most of you, feel quite so alone or quite so helpless as you do right now, I would say. You’ll be given the space to find others like you, if you can just get out of here. So I’d say they should stick with it, buck up and tell some stories of my own inept past.

Then I’d say, “But some of you are just fucked no matter what happens, and you know who you are. Sorreez.”

That feel good idea wasn’t enough, though. I have always marvelled at the natural human tendency to divide itself up. To create a couple of groups to shit on no matter how much the group overall has in common.

Growing up, we learned about slavery in my pretty-much-all-white-at-the-time Kansas town first, and that sorta made sense. After all, white people and black people look very different. It’s easy to see how that could be conflated into an important distinction.

Later, though, we studied the conflict between the Bosnians and the Serbs and the Croats and I thought: crikey, here’s a few shades of Eastern Europeans and they have to get all kill-crazy on each other? It really isn’t any different, other than the fact that if you introduced a group into the mix (say, Muslims) into the group, the other warring factions would most likely unite at least temporarily against the more other, other.

Then we learned about New York in the days before it had lots and lots of freed slaves to give it a real black population for the whites to unify against. Without a black population, the Irish were the cities Other. “Irish Need Not Apply” signs went up about the city and Irish were treated as if they had a meaningful difference between other Europeans.

I know. Seriously. There was once racism against the freaking Irish. Can you imagine?

Then I went to High School Church camp, and that’s where I saw a sea of largely middle social Christian kids create a whole new hierarchy in less than 24 hours, watched kids sure to be social non-starters and also-rans at home rise to the central clique of church camp and realized: we can’t help it. Humans have to create hieararchies. Especially if we find ourselves sitting at tables with lots of people that we didn’t necessarily choose to sit with.

Huh?

What I figured out is that any group of people, especially people who didn’t choose to be together, are going to find a way to split themselves up into recognizeable categories. They’ll use obvious differences to do it first, but, failing that, they’ll find less obvious ones and roll with those. They will find something, though. If you think inter-marriage is going to end racism because one day we’re all going to have a roughly even tawny shade…

well…

you’re not paying attention.

In other words, if all the Black folks in the U.S. did get fed up and did move to Liberia, it wouldn’t end racism. We’d just start kicking the crap out of the Irish again.

And that’s when I made a huge intuitive leap, but it’s one that I think is worth testing. I guessed that in any given culture or region, there’s a natural percentage it prefers of people within that population who fall into cool category (as an aside, I think you’ll find that if you look back on your high school, you’ll realize that the cool kids were simply the largest clique in your class — its always true — if the band geeks would have just united with the theater rats and the Math Team, you too could have been cool).

In other words, if you’re studying high schools in Kansas City and you find that about 15% of the kids at Blue Valley North are the cool kids, then you’re probably going to find that 15% of the kids at Blue Valley East and West are cool kids too. But, were you to study Seattle schools, they might have a slightly higher percentage. Say, 20%, and it would probably trend pretty naturally in the lands between the two cities (with maybe some other forces at work, like rural schools versus urban ones).

Schools in India might have much higher percentages of cool kids and Britain much lower (or vice versa), but the numbers would follow cultural borders of some kind.

In other words, the Geek Population Constant is modified by the Regional Variance Quotient, but, it’s still a constant. A few local variables would modify the way the Constant expresses itself in a given region I’m guessing, but there’s a fundamental number out there.

Or maybe the number would be constant everywhere, i.e. no quotient? Maybe that’s the way we are all the same? See how easy it would be to make The Times with this shit? It writes itself.

Anyway, so let’s say you divide kids up into roughly these categories:

Elite: The very, very cool kids that all the other cool kids looked up to (I’d say we had about 9 of these in my graduating class of 180).

Cool: The rest of the smart set, including jocks, preppies, pretty girls of most varieties and your older sister (always).

Middle: The kids that are socially non-bothersome. No one picks on them, but no one invites them to the big parties either.

Drop-outs: the kids who try their best to reject the whole institution and its social conventions.

Geeks: The ones that don’t reject the norms or the institution, precisely, but aren’t accepted within it, either. They trial and fail so they try to succeed somewhere else (like Math or Band or Debate).

Invisibles: the kids other kids don’t know. They break my heart.

Here’s how you would test it: you’d get a group of kids from a graduating class of a pretty decent size, take their year book, black out all the names and ask kids to go through and tell you the names of kids in the year book and assign them to a group above. You would only score people into a group if the person putting them there were actually able to correctly give you their name.

This is how you would find the Invisibles. There would be a few kids in every school that hardly anyone will be able to name. They are the Invisibles. They are the kids to worry about.

So, here’s what I suggest: conduct this study in a bunch of schools in a few big cities. I bet you’d find that the percentages matched up pretty well within each city, but that they would vary a bit from city to city. If the results were consistent enough, I think you could take it a step further and try it in a few cities in other countries and see if the ratios really varied from American percentages. They might, but I bet the same basic categories and rules would still apply.

That’s how you’d find an actual figure for the Geek Population Constant.

And that’s why I’m ‘cool’ in some circles. Cool is all relative. Our DNA demands some cool kids in any group and some losers too. In some groups, the criteria by which they naturally decide who gets to fit into which categorie will change, but the ratio of categories won’t. That’s the insight. In some circles, the criteria work in my favor and I get to have some cake for once, but as long as I keep moving around I’ll find plenty of circles willing to remind me that I will always be the person I always was: the boy who didn’t get to kiss his prom dates.