Surface and substance (or why nerds are worse than jocks)

I’m a nerd.

This means, for the vast majority of my life, I have thought the good, noble, right thing to do is prioritise substance — that important, magical, hard-to-see stuff. Developing it in myself and pontificating that it is what others, too, should care about.

Like many of us who possessed a tendency to be fervent, I look back and realise how misguided I was.

Not because substance isn’t important. But part of being a nerd is that you admonish the superficial. The surface is for the vain, the shallow, or otherwise empty (and possibly morally corrupt). That’s the domain of jocks and cheerleaders — you know, the popular archetypes.

But nerds want the same thing as jocks. They just play the game covertly instead. This makes nerds even more conceited.

Egotism is the expectation that people can look past the surface — beneath what is actually visible — and be impressed with you the same way you are impressed with yourself. It’s a quiet failure of empathy: the nerd demands to be understood while refusing to do the work of understanding anyone else.

The flaw the nerd sees in the jock is that there’s nothing there. No substance, no depth — just surface. And often he’s right.

But he misses what the jock does have. The jock understands everyone else. He reads the room, plays to the audience, gives people what they want. That is the exact thing the nerd won’t do. So he sneers at the jock for lacking the one thing he has — substance — while staying blind to the thing the jock has and he doesn’t: an understanding of other people. Furthermore, the jock plays the game of popularity out in the open — which the nerd, mistaking it for a lack of subtlety, thinks is a flaw. It isn’t. The transparency signals authenticity.

Surface without substance is hollow; easy to see into, but there’s not much there. Substance without surface is incomplete; hard to comprehend fully, breeding distrust. Refusing to be legible isn’t humility — it’s a covert version of the same vanity. To succeed, in whatever game you’re playing, you need to cultivate substance and to signal it honestly.

The problem

You barely even know yourself. Others know you even less.

There’s who you are.

Then there’s your perception of who you are. But… this is muddied by your biases and errors of reasoning about yourself.

And then there’s the other person’s perceptions of who you are — which they are forming based on only the visible parts of you (they are not privy to your internal narrative or private activities)… and, just to be sure, they are also running this through their own biases.

So there’s a long way to travel, and many layers of distortion, between who you are and what anyone else gets to see.

The (working) solution

I’m calling this a working solution as I’m not considering this a solved problem. And I’m more junior than jedi.¹1 This should be considered axiomatic for my writing. My aim is to write about problems that are on the edge of my abilities, and that I’m trying to render a solution for currently. My hope is that by demonstrating the things that I’m considering, and how I’m thinking through things, it will prove more useful than someone presenting a fully developed answer and handing it to you. In my experience the hat never quite fits when that happens.

But here’s what I’ve got:

You need to know yourself. More. Better than what you do now.
You need to accurately signal what those qualities are. Or: teach people what to think about you.

Broadly, I think these are skills related to attention and empathy. Or (self-) observation and theory of mind.

The honest move isn’t to pretend you’re above signalling. It’s to openly cultivate and openly signal. The signal can be subtle — a shibboleth, or a Schelling point the right people recognise — but some signal has to occur.

Cultivating self-awareness

This is why developing deep self-awareness is so powerful. The better you know yourself, not only can you better understand your wants and needs, but the more accurately you signal your substance.

If you’ve ever been unfortunate enough to receive a tour — be it at a museum, or a house-inspection — from someone who did not know the material well, you can understand this point. You can’t make a tempting offer if you don’t understand the product; you cannot tell a good story if you don’t know the details.

So, what do you do?

Knowing yourself is not actually about endless hours of therapy and talking through your emotions. It can be useful for putting labels to feelings and having alternate points of view offered to you. But it can also be very self-indulgent and overly focused on emotions. Your emotions are only a sliver of who you are — so that’s not super effective for our purposes here. In my experience, you begin to know yourself by moving through a series of practices, starting with more general and moving towards more individual or specialised ones.

1. Meditation

First, you need awareness. In my humblest of opinions, meditation is the best practice for this. Therapy can be, but I think much of the benefits of therapy that people experience is teaching them to view thoughts as objects — and not over-identify with them, or becoming lost in them to such an extent that they’re forget they are even thinking.

Like I said, meditation is unchallenged in this regard. Go read the The Power of Now and sit in silence — no distractions — for 5 minutes every day. It’s cliché, but it’ll help.²2 Or, if the beginner’s track is too easy, The Mind Illuminated and follow the curriculum in it.

2. Shadow work

Secondly, you want to do some shadow work. Begin to look at parts of yourself you don’t like. Everywhere you fall short of a standard that you or society have set for yourself. Have some appreciation for your malevolent, destructive, and petty side.

The side of you that other people probably see much more clearly than you do. If you want don’t want to send them away instantaneously, get a grip on some of this stuff.

3. Emotional work

Thirdly, this is where emotional work comes in. I would consider this to be journaling, talk therapy, or focusing. Anything that lets you get a better sense of your emotional patterns and habits of mind. Effectively, your personality or disposition.

You can analyse your specific traumas, or the particular feelings you’ve had throughout the day and week, ask yourself how they can be addressed. All useful territory.³3 Well, kinda. Trauma is overrated. GASP! I know, how could a sensible human-being say such a thing? I’ll write about that more some other time. But shadow work should come before this because the subconscious is the cause, the conscious is only the symptom. Any cure needs to address both.

Extra: psychedelics

I can only speak to psilocybin — and this is not an endorsement and should be done only once all others have been (seriously) explored. This is useful for bringing more of your subconscious into conscious awareness. It can collapse the distance between knowing something and having lived it. A memory carries more weight than a fact you read.

To be clear, this really is only the beginning of the work. These steps mostly serve to reveal your self to yourself. They do not actively cultivate admirable parts of you — which is important, assuming you don’t just want to show people who you are, but have something actually good to show them.

Instructing others on the subject of you

This one is more difficult to turn into a set of instructions. You’ll have to pick up the concept and work the rest out for yourself.

The general shape of this is: show, don’t tell. In a similar vein to what I’ve said about excuses, telling someone to respect you or like you or trust you almost certainly decreases the degree to which they feel those things for you.

You show someone what to think about you through these two (rough) steps:

Demonstrate awareness of what they care about
Exhibit progressively harder-to-fake signals related to that thing

1. Demonstrate awareness of what they care about

The world works in strange, self-reinforcing ways. Want someone to look at you? Look at them. Want someone to care about you? Care about them.⁴4 This probably has something to do with the recursive structure of brains that give rise to self-awareness.

Say you like someone who’s really into art. If you start wearing black turtle-necks and berets (or whatever artsy people wear these days) then there’s a chance they’ll notice you. It’s not the best move… but it is infinitely better than doing nothing.

Why does this work?

Mechanistically, this probably works because it demonstrates theory of mind as well as broader intelligence.

Theory of mind — the ability to mentally simulate the mind of someone else; think about what they might be thinking — because how else could you recognise the things they were interested in? This is an attractive quality in relationships — of all kinds — because it is the basis of empathy. Solid theory of mind makes you a more trustworthy cooperation candidate.

It also signals intelligence because you were able to infer the unwritten rules or structure of the game, and then adopt them. There’s no book that says: people interested in abstract expressions of the human condition will henceforth always protect the tops of their heads with strange looking hats adopted from police and military uniforms, and the space between their jaw and their shoulders with a snug-fitting extension of their regular shirt or sweater.

No, you just have to look around, see what people are doing and learn for yourself. This occurs everywhere. Social cliques have their own values; industries have their own nomenclature; even employees of different levels of status, from within the same company, where there is no standardised dress code, end up differentiating themselves via how they’re dressing.

The ability to perceive and then adopt — notice and integrate — is a strong marker of intelligence. Another valuable quality in a potential cooperation candidate.

Teaching people what to think of you is a process of breadcrumbing: leading them from signals that are high-visibility but easy-to-fake, toward signals that are low-visibility but hard-to-fake.

One of the things that deeply interests me is human behaviour.

So if I was at a social event, and overheard a group having a conversation about it, I might start paying a bit of attention. How invested I became in this conversation would depend on how hard to fake the signals coming from it were.

If after a few rounds of conversations all I’d heard were responses like:

“Humans are animals"
"Yes, but we are social animals"
"Social animals who are hungry for power"
"And you know what they say about power…"
"It corrupts"
"No wonder we are such animals”

… I probably wouldn’t go over and introduce myself.

Firstly, because the conversation hadn’t deepened much. It stayed very surface level. In essence, it is small talk. It sounds lofty and cultured and informed because the topic is human nature — how profound — but it is not that dissimilar to discussing the weather. The gift, and the curse, of small talk is that anyone can partake in it.

Almost everyone alive has heard several platitudes about human nature that they could repeat and make use of in this conversation. Saying just enough to keep the conversation going, but no more.

Fewer, however, could say something like:

“Humans are animals"
"Yes, but complex animals! Have you read Robert Sapolsky’s Behave by any chance?”

That’s a harder to fake signal. That person was able to reference a book and author — correctly — that links to the subject matter of the conversation.

“No, I haven’t. What’s the thesis?"
"He walks through, in a multidimensional way, the causes of a particular instance of behaviour."
"What do you mean?"
"The book starts at seconds prior to the behaviour, at the level of the nervous system, and discusses all the factors within that domain that may push someone towards or away from a particular behaviour. He then walks back through minutes, days, months, years, prenatal, and intergenerational factors. All have different causes and influences on the shape of the resulting behaviour.”

Harder to fake again. This person has demonstrated the ability to summarise a lengthy book — which takes ample time, patience, and concentration to read — and responded to a question successfully.

“Wow! Sounds fascinating. Do you have a copy?"
"I do. You can borrow it. It overlaps a fair bit with Pinker’s The Blank Slate, so if I ever need to look something up while you have it I can use that.”

Again, even harder to fake. Another (correct) reference to a related book.

I would find it fairly convincing that this person is genuinely interested in human nature, and I would be very curious to have a conversation with them.

So what’s the key point here? The key point is this: the harder a piece of evidence is to fake, the more strongly it points to that thing being true. And when people can easily verify that the things we are saying are true, we appear more trustworthy. And, in particular, when they are true things that the other person tends to pay attention to, we become interesting to them.

Hard-to-fake signals are how substance is brought to the surface and made visible. They’re the evidence that you are who you say you are — that your job performance matches your resume; your bank account matches your lifestyle.

A lot of times in life, you’ll need to start at the surface. It’ll be cold outreach. You’ll walk up to someone at a bar (or swipe them on a dating app), you’ll send them a message on LinkedIn, you’ll tell them that you’re there for them. But to earn someone’s trust, and benefit from cooperation with this person, you’ll want to quickly show them that you mean business. You didn’t fake the easy to fake thing, and you’ve got evidence — substance — to prove it.

Conclusion

The nerd’s mistake was thinking the surface was beneath him. Both matter — but the nerd’s sin isn’t valuing substance, it’s pretending he’s above the surface. That pretence is exactly what makes him worse than the jock he looks down on.

Surface isn’t the opposite of substance — it’s the front door. No one is obligated to guess at your depths and see through walls.