Being socially active is important to academic success

I had originally written the material in this post as a part of the ongoing series on the causes of my depression. I had taken this material out because it had made the high school section of my chronology far too long, and also because I didn’t think the details were that relevant to the theme of the series. However, as I was writing the next post in the series, which was to be about my experiences in graduate school, I realised that a lot of it didn’t make sense except in comparison with my high school experiences. I have therefore cobbled some of the material back together into this post.

I am not including this post in the ongoing series numbering primarily because it is out of chronological order, but also because I think its theme is important enough that the post should stand on its own. There is a widespread belief that intelligence and sociability are inversely correlated; gifted children are commonly stereotyped as being socially awkward and unpopular, especially in high school. I not only think that this stereotype is untrue, I think it is perniciously harmful. It is especially harmful in the case of gifted adolescents of Asian descent, who are basically hit with the double whammy of being stereotyped as socially awkward for two different reasons.

The essay “Why Nerds are Unpopular” by Paul Graham recounts his high school experiences, which one might infer to be typical for nerds. (While he attended high school in America and I in Canada, I think the high school cultures in the two countries are similar enough that his observations apply to Canadian high schools as well.) He wrote:

I know a lot of people who were nerds in school, and they all tell the same story: there is a strong correlation between being smart and being a nerd, and an even stronger inverse correlation between being a nerd and being popular. Being smart seems to make you unpopular.

Considering that the people he spoke to were all nerds, I’m surprised that either none of them pointed out the obvious logical fallacy here, or he did not deem it sufficiently important to address it: namely, the fallacy of the biased sample. Most people are not popular, by definition (as surely as half of all people have below-average intelligence — a very scary thought). His experiences in high school are typical not only for nerds, but for almost everyone.

Separate out a group of high school students by practically any characteristic — those who enjoy listening to country music, those who always dress all in black, those who are bilingual in English and French, etc. — and the chances are that the majority of them will not be popular. I don’t think that intelligent children innately have lower social skills, on average. In fact, my observations suggest just the opposite: that intelligent children actually tend to be more outgoing and expressive. And that is precisely why they are the ones who create the most voluminous, visible, notable, and memorable public declarations of their group’s unpopularity. So a strong correlation certainly exists — not between being intelligent and being unpopular, but rather between being intelligent and being articulate. There are plenty of unintelligent, unpopular high schoolers who suffer mostly in silence.

A moment’s thought will reveal why there do not appear to be many essays written by people who were both nerdy and popular in high school pointing out that there might not be a correlation between being intelligent and being unpopular. The situation is asymmetrical: while lonely people have the time to analyse their social isolation, popular people do not have the time to sit around analysing their popularity. Furthermore, people who are both intelligent and popular know that, most of the time, it’s not worth challenging the consensus on issues which are not really that important, even if the consensus is wrong.

But I am challenging the consensus on the relationship between intelligence and social awkwardness, because I think that the stereotype is very harmful to gifted children, especially those who have authoritarian parents. I think that there is a subset of gifted people whose talents are expressed primarily through interaction with other people, and that to expect them to be socially isolated is to deny them the full use of their potential. (In fact, I think that this subset is identical with the entire set — my observation is that even nerds who believe that they are socially awkward tend to underestimate how social they actually are and the role that other people have played in their academic success.)

I know this because I am one of these people, and throughout my life my parents have worked continuously to destroy my social relationships in order to force me to conform to what they consider success, doing enormous and irreparable harm to my scientific career in the process. The question naturally arises as to why they would do this, and the answer lies in the stereotype that academically successful people tend not to be very social, in addition to a “cargo cult” type of thinking. They apparently believed that I would become more academically successful if forced me to become socially isolated.

I have written previously on how parents from non-Western cultures attempt to acquire Western symbols of prestige for their children through imitation, without a true understanding either of what those symbols actually stand for or of the real process through which they are obtained, as well as on how Chinese parents re-inforce each other’s delusions about parenting when they get together. One of the things that Chinese parents like to say about their children is that they spend a lot of time doing their homework, and correspondingly, very little time socialising, based on the stereotype that intelligent people are less social. Social isolation was deemed to be a sort of virtue, and a necessity for academic success. My parents were always livid that they could not say those things about me. (I’ve noticed that while Asian parents emphasised the amount of time their child devoted to reading their school textbooks and doing homework, Westernised parents — and also the teachers — placed the emphasis on the child’s interests and activities. My teachers and my friends’ parents were always praising me for these — and hence indirectly for how little time I spent doing what my parents wanted me to do.)

In a previous post, I mentioned how my academic success in high school was actually due to my popularity, and I would like to elaborate on that here, because the belief held by my parents that socialising and academic success are incompatible is one of the most damaging dogmas of authoritarian parenting.

Authoritarian parents try to control the social lives of their children and see their children’s peers not as their friends but as their competitors. I wrote above that I don’t think gifted children innately have lower social skills, but I think that in some cases they may develop social awkwardness because of authoritarian parents who are always exerting pressure on them not to be social.

My parents insisted that going out with my friends or chatting on the phone were a “waste of time”, a belief that they held incorrigibly over my protests. I found it very insulting and irritating, but there was nothing I could do to dissuade them from badgering me to cease my social activities. They kept up this criticism throughout high school, right through university, and even into graduate school, despite my repeated insistence that I knew best for myself how to make use of my own time and with whom I should associate. Each instance of being harassed for socialising rather than “studying” (according to their narrow definition) was a mere irritation. But, summed up over a lifetime, the result was dozens of missed opportunities which have radically derailed the trajectory of my life and devastated my career.

By the time I entered graduate school, I constantly found myself in socially awkward situations which would otherwise not have been awkward had it not been for the actions of my parents. I always had to be on guard that my parents didn’t find out about my academic activities that they didn’t approve of, and the thoughts of the routes through which I might be found out and how they would punish me were always on my mind. This meant that I was distracted all the time and could not focus all of my attention on my research. My parents had also insulted a large number of people who would be or might have been my colleagues and collaborators, and I always felt very embarrassed around them as well as unsure of how my parents would react if they knew that I was working with them. I had to limit my public exposure in ways that might appear socially awkward to those who did not know my motivations. Over time, these habits had developed into a general sense of nervousness around people with whom I would have been extremely comfortable in high school. I will relate some of these socially awkward situations in the ongoing series on the causes of my depression. But here, I will describe my parents’ criticisms of my social life in high school, which will plant the very first seeds of my inability to socialise with my colleagues later in graduate school.

The belief of authoritarian parents that the more time a child spent socialising, the less he would have to study for school, is quite simply wrong. It depends very much on how that time is spent. Almost everything I learned in high school was learned from other people or by interacting with other people. It’s not the quantity of time spent studying that is important, but the quality — which can be greatly enhanced through social interaction.

I have already written in detail about being the founder and editor-in-chief of my high school’s literary magazine. This gave me experience with running both an organisation and the latest desktop publishing software. I have also alluded to being the captain and student coach of the school’s mathematics and computer science teams and organising study sessions and holding tutorials. Clearly, these activities were academically beneficial even though I did not receive any course credit for them, though my parents did not see it that way. I had to know the subjects pretty well in order to coach others or to hold tutorials.

Because I was involved in all of these activities, was a year or two ahead in some classes, and was very socially active, I developed a reputation that I was everywhere and could do anything. I was nicknamed “Superman”, because I supposedly resembled Dean Cain, who was playing Superman on television at the time — and I wore dorky glasses.

Regardless of how much I benefitted from my extracurricular activities with my friends, they were never welcomed in my parents’ house, unless we were working on a school project together — and even then we could do nothing but work while we were there if I wanted to avoid being criticised later. My parents never spoke to my visitors or, for the most part, even acknowledged their presence. They would never ask me any questions about my classmates except for one: what their marks were, so that mine could be compared with theirs. They would also always find something to criticise about them — people to whom they had never even spoken. If someone’s marks were too low, my parents would call him a bad influence and tell me to stop associating with him. They were always telling me that my classmates were just trying to take advantage of me because I had the highest marks in the class. My mother would especially say this about the girls, on which I will comment below.

In contrast, when I visited the homes of some of my friends and classmates, their parents would greet me by name, offer me food and drinks, and talk to me about school as well as other things. Even if I were to take my parents’ uncharitable interpretation of their actions that they were only seeking to take advantage of me, I have to ask: so what? If my classmates and their parents thought that they had something to gain by talking to me, it was because they valued my opinions. When my own parents were continually criticising my conduct and my interests, why shouldn’t I associate with people who expressed admiration for them? Who doesn’t prefer the company of people who appreciate his ideas over people who are always dismissive of them?

Everything that an authoritarian parent does results in the opposite effect of whatever was intended. The more my parents criticised me for spending too much time helping other people, the more I enjoyed being in the company of my classmates’ parents who appreciated that I was a positive influence on their child and told me so. Furthermore, the fact that my parents appeared to dislike someone in proportion to how much lower his or her marks were compared to mine gave me a reason not to put any effort into raising my marks once I was ahead by even a small margin. Finally, repeatedly telling a teenager that his friends are a bad influence on him, regardless of whether they are or not, pretty much ensures that he will seek out people who will actually be a bad influence. I think that I had a pretty good influence on my friends, as they also had on me, but I knew people who rebeled against their authoritarian parents by deliberately associating with people whom their parents did not like. Pre-emptively punishing someone for something he hasn’t done (and might not even have planned on doing) just gives him a reason to go do that very thing.

The most annoying aspect of my parents’ criticisms of my social life came from my mother, who continually complained about the fact that most of my friends were girls. Now this I really could not stand. What kind of a mother is displeased that her son is too popular with girls? But this appeared to be a common complaint amongst Chinese mothers of sons, and probably partially explains why Chinese guys are stereotyped as being too shy to talk to girls (and especially non-Chinese girls) — because they would have to put up with their mothers’ torturous complaints and interrogations afterwards, even if their mother only witnessed them having a brief conversation with a platonic female friend. It’s rather like how some police officers are reluctant to fire their weapons, because then they would have to file hundreds of pages of reports. I think this is yet another very damaging aspect of traditional Chinese culture, in terms of stunting the social development of children who are raised in it.

The majority of the phone calls I received came from girls, which was how my mother knew I had so many female friends. There are actually very good reasons why I spent so much more time with girls than with guys in high school (I mean, other than the obvious fact that I was a red-blooded heterosexual teenaged male). Girls are simply more social than guys. They spend more time on the phone; when a guy called, it was to quickly compare answers or to arrange a meeting, but when a girl called, she might keep me on the phone for hours (which no guy would ever do). They are more likely to work in groups and discuss homework problems with other people. Whenever my friends and I used to organise tutorials and study sessions, inevitably almost everyone who showed up would be a girl. Guys are generally loath to ask for help from another guy, and especially when there are girls around. This meant that I was often in situations where I was the only guy surrounded by half a dozen to a dozen girls.

Besides being, on average, more interested in school than their male counterparts, my female schoolmates were also more likely to participate in extracurricular school activities outside of sports. Other than my brother and myself, most of the members of the editorial committee for the literary magazine were girls. The editors of the yearbook were girls (though I made only a minor contribution, I spent a lot of time on the phone with one of them because she was a close friend). Most of the members of the math team in my year were also girls, but that was partially my doing, because I had asked them to join. Unfortunately, I was unable to get any girls to join our computer science programming team — but I tried.

(One of the adults who supervised the mathematics competitions — I think it was a school superintendent — noticed the unusual gender composition of our team, and asked me how our school had gotten so many girls interested in competitive mathematics when most of the other teams were all-male. I was very tempted to answer that it was due to my sex appeal, but I replied that it was probably because nobody in the other schools had bothered to ask any girls to join their math teams. I think this is true; while guys sought out competitive situations on their own, girls had to be invited to participate in them. A social stigma is attached to any girl who appeared too eager to compete, while no such hindrance existed for guys. The mathematics competitions had both individual and collaborative components, and I actually think that our team did better on the collaborative components than the all-male teams because of our composition.)

My participation in these activities guaranteed that I received a lot of phone calls, mostly from girls, on a regular basis. In addition, I had the highest marks in many of my classes, and my classmates — again, mostly the girls — would often phone me to discuss the day’s lessons or homework. So I have a great deal of difficulty understanding the stereotype that intelligent guys don’t get a lot of attention from girls in high school, because my experience had been the complete opposite. My observation is that most guys didn’t get a lot of attention from girls, and the ones who did got it because of their confidence, their personality, and their behaviour, pretty much independently of whether they did well in school or not. But on the other hand, the guys who did well in school were usually pretty confident (although for some reason their confidence always seemed to disappear when it came to girls), and girls had a ready excuse to talk to them. Girls would ask me for my number all the time, ostensibly so they could call me about schoolwork, and I would give it to them, tell them that they’re welcome to share it with their friends, and get their numbers in return. I couldn’t understand why apparently none of the other guys who had high marks thought to do this, and hypothesised that it must have been because their parents had brainwashed them into believing that girls would distract them from school and lower their grades. (It obviously couldn’t have been that they didn’t want to be surounded by girls, assuming that they were heterosexual.)

I had a reputation for being a social hub. Whenever one of my male friends expressed puzzlement over how I managed to get so many girls’ phone numbers (or, more usually, a particular girl’s phone number), I would ask him whether he had offered his number to her — and the answer would inevitably be “No”. Perhaps I have a sort of Forrest Gump-like naïveté when it came to getting girls’ phone numbers (and later, their e-mails), but I would always just ask for them and get them. I have never understood why other guys seemed to believe that this was either very difficult or impossible.

But since so many (otherwise) intelligent guys have asked me this, I’ll record my answer here for posterity. To get a girl’s phone number, wait until she talks to you, or make conversation with her. End the conversation by saying, “I’d love to continue talking about so-and-so, but I have to go.” Get out a pen and a small piece of paper, make a fold back-and-forth midway in the latter, and hand both to her. Tell her, “Write this down: five-five-five, blah-blah-blah-blah — that’s my number, call me tonight between eight and nine.” And while she’s writing on one half of the paper, point to the other side of the fold and say, “While you’re at it, why don’t you write me yours.” After she’s returned the half with her number on it, remind her, “Don’t forget to call me — what time?” I don’t ever recall an instance when this failed to get me a girl’s number, although there were probably a few times when she didn’t call. In high school, girls were giving me their numbers so frequently that I started to carry a small pen and pieces of paper already cut to size in my wallet all the time.

I honestly believe that a large part of the reason that I was so successful in high school was that I was a social hub. I really want to clear up a misconception that many parents, and especially authoritarian parents of gifted children, seem to have, and that is that having a lot of friends — and especially those of the opposite sex — is a distraction from school. The exact opposite may be the case for some people, and that was indeed the case for me.

My parents had always assumed that, because I had the highest marks in school, whenever I spoke on the phone the information flow could only be one-way — that I was giving out information but not getting anything in return. Now, there is absolutely nothing wrong with this. I would have gladly helped anyone who asked, in exchange for nothing, because I believe in the promotion of science, and I enjoyed teaching.

But the fact was that being a social hub was extraordinarily beneficial to me academically. It meant that I always knew what was going on, and it allowed me to gauge the relative difficulty of the things I had to learn based on what my classmates had trouble with, so that I could adjust my efforts and allocate my time more efficiently. A group of people is always better at picking out important information from the surrounding noise than any single member of the group, and as the hub I would always be one of the first to receive this information. People expected me to know everything, and this became a sort of self-fulfilling prophecy — they would tell me things they thought I ought to know.

My parents never liked it that I spent so much time on the phone, but they would especially turn up the heat on the evenings before an assignment due date or a test, when I would be receiving the most number of phone calls. They insisted that I should tell anyone who called that “I’m busy” and not talk to them further, an order that I persistently ignored. They kept telling me that I would not do well if I didn’t stop “wasting time” talking on the phone — and I repeatedly proved them wrong.

It was, in fact, precisely on the evenings before an assignment due date or a test when being a social hub was the most advantageous. The situation was never like what my parents had imagined. What would happen was that one of my friends would call me and ask about A; and I’d tell her, “This is what I think for now, but call me later and I’ll tell you some more.” Then another friend would call and ask about B; and I’d say to her, “I’ll call you back on B, but first tell me what you think of A.” And then a third friend might call and ask about C, and then the first friend might call back, and so on. By the end of the evening, I could explain everything thoroughly from A to Z to everyone and look like a total genius! And not only was doing things this way not a lot of work, but it was actually great fun!

I truly, honestly, cannot think of very many things that would motivate a teenaged boy to do the very best that he could possibly do on an assignment or a test than to spend the entire previous evening on the phone with half a dozen girls telling him what a smart guy and incredible teacher he is, and often with the last words he hears before going to bed being “Goodnight, Superman.”

A lot of my classmates would sleep poorly on the night before a test and arrive very stressed, but I would always sleep very soundly and show up completely relaxed. Naturally, I always did much better than anyone else, and especially the Chinese kids whom I knew had spent the previous evening in social isolation (and completely miserable). And yet my parents would continue to insist that I should be more like them, and that my friends were a distraction. Clearly, there was no way I would give up such an incredibly advantageous academic resource, and obviously it was my parents rather than my friends who distracted me.

So I think that this idea that members of the opposite sex are a distraction from school is very, very wrong, and very, very damaging to children whose parents believe it. It’s even worse — much worse, in fact — than the belief that being socially isolated leads to academic success, which is wrong enough as it is. It’s not like relationships in high school between guys and girls aren’t complicated enough as they are, without adding parental disapproval into the mix. My parents were a large part of the reason I never had a girlfriend in high school, because I never met anyone whom I thought had the intestinal fortitude to put up with them, and especially with my mother.

I have noticed that the best people in many fields, and certainly in science, are those who have a lot of collaborators, and not those who work alone. The myth of the lonely genius who single-handedly comes up with brilliant ideas which have somehow eluded everyone else’s notice is exactly that — a myth. I mean really, who in history has had ideas that changed the world but were not socially well-connected? And yet the myth persists. But I was very fortunate in elementary and high school to have been surrounded by peers and teachers who were interested in learning about a broad range of subjects, and who encouraged me to do the same.

Popularity is very much like money; the more connections you have with people, the more you’re likely to make. When people believe that you’re an expert and come to you for help, you can later turn to them for help when you need it, or you can direct one person who needs help to another who can provide it. An interesting phenomenon which I have observed on numerous occasions is that when a person asked me for information which I didn’t have, and I directed him to a third party who had it, he would often later remember the information as having come from me. So I could see how a person’s reputation as an all-knowing genius could develop very quickly if he was well-connected, which was in fact what happened to me throughout high school.

But my parents started really attacking me for my social activities in high school, and they would continue to do so through university and graduate school. They would criticise my friends incessantly and, later, also my professors and colleagues, and I was repeatedly harrassed for associating with people who wanted to help me advance in my scientific career. There were many instances when I had opportunities to work with some really great people that most others would have envied, but which I didn’t take because of my parents. I felt very guilty about this, but I basically had no choice. It would have been impossible to work with certain people because I would have had to do so while being constantly attacked by my parents. And I just could not concentrate while collaborating with anyone whom I knew my parents would either insult or interrogate me about if they found out I was working with them.

My parents’ criticisms also indirectly prevented me from making a much more effective use of technology, as I have alluded to previously. If it had not been for my father’s negative comments about my writings which I had put online, I would have maintained a blog since the very early days of blogging. I have also had to avoid social networking sites for the most part, because I did not want my parents to discover my social connections. While other people were trying to increase their Google PageRank, I was trying to minimize my Internet exposure to better hide my activities from my parents. So, ironically, despite the fact that I had been writing since high school about how communications technologies would change the way science is conducted, when the technologies finally became widespread, I did not make use of them myself because of my parents’ dogmatic beliefs about what one had to do to become successful.

(I imagine that the next generation of Chinese parents will be pressuring their children to write blogs and join social networking sites, because they will have noticed that these activities are popular among members of this generation; but by then these technologies will be passé, and they will be discouraging or preventing their children from using the next generation of communications technology.)

In Paul Graham’s essay, he observed that “smart people’s lives are worst between, say, the ages of eleven and seventeen”, because in that age range life “revolves far more around popularity than before or after”. I’m a pretty smart guy and those were some of the best years of my life, and in large part because I was so popular. But I suppose that I’m an exceptional case, because those years coincided largely with when my abusive parents were absent from my life. When I was fifteen years old, I was at the top of the world. Everything only started to go downhill after my parents arrived in Canada and decreed that they knew better than I did what was best for me and began to interfere with my social and academic decisions.

My parents have done an enormous amount of damage to my scientific career by continually trying to destroy my social life. The primary reasons I did so well in high school was that I interacted with a lot of people: my schoolmates, their parents, my teachers, university professors, university students, and people I met outside of school. When my parents forced me into an undergraduate program in which I had nothing in common with my classmates, I compensated by finding people who shared my interests and supported me. The situation was not ideal — of course I would have preferred to be in an academic environment which was also socially conducive to what I had wanted to study, rather than leading a double life. But it got me into graduate school in control systems engineering, where, because there were so many Iranians, my schooling and my interests became somewhat re-integrated once again. But of course, my parents would continue to try to disrupt this harmony — and eventually, they would succeed.

I have always learned the most by interacting with a lot of people. I do not know any other way. My parents, in poisoning my interactions with my colleagues by continually criticising and insulting them, were undermining the very basis of my academic success. But nothing that I did or said could convince them that they were wrong, and I have tried everything. One of the major causes of my depression is my social isolation, the feeling that I am an outcast, or a ghost, among my colleagues. I can’t imagine that any of them got to be where they are today other than by studying what they wanted to study, whereas I was not only specifically forbidden to do so, but my parents actually made an active effort to prevent me from doing so. Who else has had to cope with parents with such a visceral hatred of science?

Now, one might raise the objection that it is not science to which they have an aversion, but my disobedience and defiance of their orders. But what is science if not the freedom to question authority, the formulation of hypotheses and the drawing of conclusions based on observation rather than the blind submission to tradition or authority, the courage to think for oneself and to act on those thoughts? Or, one might object that hatred is the wrong word to describe their antagonism towards science, but what else except for the hatred of a thing could possibly cause a parent to disown his or her child for being associated with it?

My parents did everything possible to ensure that I would have nothing in common with my colleagues in academia, firstly by taking away the training and background that I would have shared with them if I had the freedom to carry out my own plans, and secondly by doing everything they could to remove me from their social circles. I have had the experience both of being at the centre of the social network of my academic peers and of drifting along on the outer fringes, and believe me when I say that being socially active and well-connected is important to academic success.

– davinci