Why nerds are unpopular?

Even now this is probably the single worst essay PG has ever published, and he's written some stinkers.<p>Nerds weren't unpopular in school because <i>they were actually even cooler than everyone else</i>, and didn't want to waste their time stooping to everyone else's debased level of communication and friendship. That's an absurd fantasy.<p>Nerds are unpopular in forced social settings like secondary schools <i>because they're huge assholes</i>, the kind of people that even 25 years later write essays about how really it was everybody else's fault that nobody got along with them.<p>Very few nerds come to understand this, the only media I've seen that gets it right was this: <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reunion_(30_Rock)" rel="nofollow">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reunion_(30_Rock)</a>

People who self identify as nerds never nerded out on being likable and sociable. They're skills that are easy to learn as anything is.

I'd wager it also has much to do with nerds not knowing how to be 'dumb', and thus, not being able to forge meaningful connections with people of lesser mental capacity.<p>Having interests and vocabularies that are alienating to people who struggle to keep up can often do just that.

Repost of an old essay; Yahoo Answers style title. We can do better than this.