You have a set amount of “weirdness points” – spend them wisely (2014) | Hacker News Reader

You have a set amount of “weirdness points” – spend them wisely (2014)

lesswrong.com

152 pointspostsantum86 comments

It's true that the average person has a set amount of weirdness points and needs to use them somewhat sparingly.

But there are certain cases where a person might have more weirdness points available to them than the average person and can spend them more freely:

* If you are physically attractive, you often get an extra helping of weirdness points to spend.

* If you are a celebrity or a person with lots of power, you get an extra-large extra helping.

* If you are obscenely rich, you can buy just about as many weirdness points as you want.

If you look at how crime enforcement works against the attractive/popular/wealthy, I think they get far more than an extra helping.

As an attractive, well-liked and reasonably wealthy individual, I consider it to be my moral duty to be weird as hell.

Some of that is a productive of the fact that the justice system is run by humans doing human things. But part of that is the design of our system in that it's designed to protect wealth.

In the words of Terry Pratchett:

'... he can’t be mad. I’ve been around; if a man hash lotsh of money he’sh just ecshentric.'

I think this is a very accurate depiction. Also, if you're popular for some reason, you'll get more weirdness points as well.

Weird and poor: you're labeled crazy.

Weird and rich: you're labeled eccentric.

In a way it makes sense: Someone poor who is strange is a burden on others, which someone rich who is strange isn't, since they can pay for whatever weird thing they do.

In another way it makes sense, divergent thinking is tolerated for the very purpose of evaluating how effective new ideas are, and we ourselves tolerate being weird because we believe we can prove something new.

One decides how far to push the envelope and how much they can tolerate seeming crazy. That’s how you earn trust in your judgement.

It is a side effect of the "fitness function" evaluation of humans. If a person is "successful" it is taken for granted that they are doing something right even if it is irrelevant. It isn't just wealth that benefits from this - social standing or a respected talent alone can do it.

This is one of the main reasons I've been doing the entrepreneurial race almost all my adult life. I need to prove myself enough, by accumulating professional success and wealth, to get enough weirdness points to spend so that I can just be myself! It's a sad state of things.

Or make fuck you money with which to purchase the points.

i feel like i'm in the same boat. if i don't suceed in my entrepreneurial labor to make my own (new and unique) path, there's no way i can express myself and be accepted most of the time.

until then, going with someone else means conforming in a way i simply can't, even when i desperately want to.

>When the going gets weird, the weird turn pro.

_Hunter S. Thompson

When I was poor they called me crazy, now that I am rich they call me eccentric.

You don’t even need to be exceptionally rich or attractive. Just enough of both qualities, and the ability to surf through your life. Some people have an artistic quality which enables them to be weird, because we have seen them be weird before, and we trust their ability to keep themselves afloat.

> If you are physically attractive, you often get an extra helping of weirdness points to spend

I think this shouldn't count - you've just haven't spent some points on being weird lookin'.

A few of my points:

> Recognize you only have a few "weirdness points" to spend. > Spend your weirdness points effectively.

True, but it seems to neglect the possibility that your "weirdness" is actually a coherent worldview that can be advocated for as a whole, not as a series of disparate ideas. You could therefore be very effective in advocating for more ideas than your "weirdness" budget might suggest.

> Clean up and look good.

I also tend to agree with this one. Not because I think it's good to push for conformism in manners or appearance, but because you should be non-conformist where it matters.

> Advocate for more "normal" policies that are almost as good.

It might be better to set up a roadmap that points to where you would like to get in the end, while at the same time coming up with tractable shorter-term solutions. If you simply tone down your proposals completely you might end up just compromising and not making a significant difference.

> Use the foot-in-door technique and the door-in-face technique.

These techniques do seem a bit manipulative. It might be better to just be honest and open about what you believe in.

> Many people think donating 3% of their income is a lot, let alone the 10%

Except of course for many mainstream religions https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tithe “weirdness” is very relative to your local view.

Speaking in terms of donating percentages is at odds with reality.

1% of 300 USD is 3 USD, and probably a lot for that person. They're probably needing every penny they can get to maintain or increase their standard of living.

1% of 3000 USD is 30 USD, and probably not much for that person. They'd spend it on a friday night.

Never mind the very rich. For them, the difference between 1% and 10% is effectively nothing; it doesn't decrease their standards of living.

That's why it's better to define the 'tithe' as a percentage of income over and above strictly required expenditures, i.e. money you otherwise theoretically could have saved.

Right, I came to the very same conclusion when I was thinking about this in the past, but I forgot about it. Thanks for the addendum and reminder.

>“weirdness” is very relative to your local view.

I suspect it is entirely cultural, and 'weirdness' is a disgust response to foreign culture - not literally foreigners, but ways which are divergent from the norm. For instance new world explorers thought it bizarre people walked around nude - the new worlders thought it bizarre you'd cover yourself in heavy cloth and metal in the extreme heat and humidity. What makes those contexts "work" is groups of course normalizing behavior.

It could be a pure signalling behavior, or perhaps cultural 'evolution' at work, now that we have intraconnection on a global scale, people with divergent or novel cultures can link up and form meta communities that make them not a weirdo but an amabassador from a different peoples, even if the definition of "peoples" is so domain specific it encompasses, say, only those who religiously watch my little pony...

And yet, some people are able to live remarkably "weird" lives, influence and change their communities, and not feel like they have to relegate their appearance to "bland tech office drone" because they choose to be passionate about some number of topics and they used up all their "weirdness points" and have none to delegate to appearance.

Life isn't the Skyrim avatar creator--passion isn't measured in points, and passion is what begets structural change.

I think "weirdness points" is a subset of a larger idea.

For example Martin Luther King Jr. had great success when he was pushing for one idea, racial equality. Then a year before he was assassinated, he publicly turned to a wider range of causes. He came out against the Vietnam War at a time when most were supporting it. He announced his support for economic equality. History judged him right, but his timing might have been wrong.

Because of his early stance against the war, he lost many of his mainstream supporters. His fight for racial equality started to sputter.

Maybe this is an exact application of weirdness points? But it seems like something bigger is at work here, and weirdness points are a subset of this bigger idea.

A more general (and more mainstream) idea is that of political capital.

I really like this article. I don't know much about the science behind it, but anecdotally, it makes a lot of sense.

Here's the psychological concept, an interesting read: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Idiosyncrasy_credit

I remember reading about something related to perception (however unrelated to group dynamics) called "Wundt curve", an attempt to describe the relationship between the intensity/novelty of a stimulus and its perceived "hedonic value" (roughly its pleasantness) [1]. I read (in the references here [2]) that the original source for this result dates back to 1874: "Grundzüge der physiologischen Psychologie" (Main Features of Physiological Psychology) by Wilhelm Maximilian Wundt [3]. However, I could not find it in there from a quick look at the archive.org scans [4], so this might be wrong.

BTW, the first paragraph of Wundt's wikipedia entry was pretty surprising to me: 'Wilhelm Maximilian Wundt {...} was a physician, physiologist, philosopher, and professor, known today as one of the founders of modern psychology. Wundt, who distinguished psychology as a science from philosophy and biology, was the first person ever to call himself a psychologist. He is widely regarded as the "father of experimental psychology". In 1879, at University of Leipzig, Wundt founded the first formal laboratory for psychological research. This marked psychology as an independent field of study. By creating this laboratory he was able to establish psychology as a separate science from other disciplines. He also formed the first academic journal for psychological research, Philosophische Studien (from 1881 to 1902), set up to publish the Institute's research.'

[1] https://www.researchgate.net/figure/The-Wundt-Curve-1874-lef...

[2] https://www.acrwebsite.org/volumes/6575/volumes/v13/NA-13

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wilhelm_Wundt

[3] https://archive.org/details/grundzgederphys15wundgoog/page/n...

also somewhat related: https://link.springer.com/content/pdf/10.3758/BF03212593.pdf

Wundt's name pops up constantly in William James' extremely readable Principles of Psychology (1890). Most of it's what we'd think of as physiology - how our minds and bodies work together; reflexes, the senses etc. Stuff that can be measured and tested. A couple of quotes from it:

Consciousness, then, does not appear to itself chopped up in bits. Such words as “chain” or “train” do not describe it fitly as it presents itself in the first instance. It is nothing jointed; it flows. A “river” or a “stream” are the metaphors by which it is most naturally described. In talking of it hereafter, let us call it the stream of thought, of consciousness, or of subjective life. (Vol. 1, p.239, coining of stream of consciousness)

Our natural way of thinking about these coarser emotions is that the mental perception of some fact excites the mental affection called the emotion, and that this latter state of mind gives rise to the bodily expression. My theory, on the contrary, is that the bodily changes follow directly the perception of the exciting fact, and that our feeling of the same changes as they occur IS the emotion. Common-sense says, we lose our fortune, are sorry and weep; we meet a bear, are frightened and run; we are insulted by a rival, are angry and strike. The hypothesis here to be defended says that this order of sequence is incorrect, that the one mental state is not immediately induced by the other, that the bodily manifestations must first be interposed between, and that the more rational statement is that we feel sorry because we cry, angry because we strike, afraid because we tremble, and not that we cry, strike, or tremble, because we are sorry, angry, or fearful, as the case may be. Without the bodily states following on the perception, the latter would be purely cognitive in form, pale, colorless, destitute of emotional warmth. We might then see the bear, and judge it best to run, receive the insult and deem it right to strike, but we should not actually feel afraid or angry. (Vol2 p449, this is now called the James-Lange theory of emotion)

The article applies and probably makes some very good points if your goals include "persuade others to join my cause".

There is a counterpoint to be made for being the person you want to be regardless how seriously people take you.

Yes, it has a lot to do with leadership. That‘s why new leaders who try to change everything at once so rarely succeed. They first need to build up credibility (a.k.a. idiosyncracy credit) by fitting in and conforming to group expectations, before the group trusts them enough to allow them to change individual aspects of said expectations.

I think you underestimate the effects of observed weirdness on the psyche. I believe most people react to weirdness with caution and suspicion, and sometimes they get intimidated. I believe that being weird makes it harder to connect with people in general, and that is a problem unless you're totally uninterested in socializing with other people.

You're not wrong but that's an incomplete model.

Weirdness can open doors to connections people might not have been comfortable with otherwise. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jim_Henson

I guess my own weirdness is reacting strongly to the conformist message in this thread.

Know who you are and be comfortable as that person. Using camouflage, or just keeping your opinions to yourself, are useful skills for getting along with others. But there is also great value in being true to yourself.

A masquerade doesn't help with connecting with people though even if it makes interactions easier. If "you" aren't out there then you can't really connect. Even putting aside the Uncanny Valley aspects of them realizing on some level that you are holding back or faking.

Although inappropriateness can make it worse by scaring people off. Like say persistently introducing yourself by describing what underwear you are wearing in detail.

this article just is giving me the hives. Unfortunately it's night time, my son has pneumonia and I have things to accomplish in the next couple hours so a couple of points:

1. "Clean up and look good." There is a well known stereotype of programmers that the ones who are the most scruffy, unhygienic, weird etc. are the better ones, a popular enough stereotype that Scott Adams made a Dilbert cartoon of it (which I cannot find right now), there is also a stereotype of artists and visionaries that they dress weird and look like freaks, thus drawing an inclination from people to think people who look weird might be real geniuses worth listening to. I'm not saying look weird in every situation because it will help you, I'm saying there are lots of situations in which looking weird enhances your credibility. Personally I hate looking weird (because I think it smacks of being a poser), although I do have a certain level of scruffy programmer looks.

At any rate I think we can all name famous programmers who do not seem to have given a damn about their appearance.

2. Recognize you only have a few "weirdness points" to spend: so there is apparently no way to get more weirdness points to spend elsewhere by, for example, advocating for something weird, pushing it through, having it be a great success. This is why people who make weird movies that earn lots of money are never called up by Hollywood again. In conclusion of this point - David Lynch does not exist and has never had an effect on cinema whatsoever.

3. Advocate for more "normal" policies that are almost as good: As a general rule weird things that get accepted and mainstreamed have all sorts of proponents some of which are weird extremists some of whom are less weird. In pushing against racism, the more moderate policies were accepted not because everyone had switched from pushing more extremist views but because the extremist views existed to make the moderate look good (I believe this is part of the generally accepted narrative). If everyone pushing for something currently considered weird moderated their views then the moderated view would become the new weird. Maybe being the extremist is the best use of your weirdness points.

This article is just driving me up the wall.

I can't find it, but when David Bowie died, there was a quote that went around. The gist was that in the late 60s, Bowie was a weird red headed kid in a dress. 5 years later, he was a weird red headed kid in a dress and the whole world was amazed by him.

I think the article is probably directionally accurate about average human behavior. I'm less convinced it's good advice, or describes an inescapable trap.

Change your first to "Clean up and look appropriate" then. You don't have to look flashy but I think if you are unhygienic you need to overcome more than if you are not. If you work in finance there are certain expectations on dressing in a certain way and if you are working as an engineer at a hip start up there are others.

But if you decide to deviate too much you are spending weirdness points.

I realized that when I was a software developer when I met client I dressed differently than when I put on a more relaxed hoodie at our casual office. I never put on a suit but at least some business casual as that was how everyone else was dressed.

One thing though is that I have always looked kinda nerdy and I believe just like some women have complained that they are not taken seriously as software developers I think I've been taken more seriously at times just due to my nerdy looks (beard, way I dressed) despite my experience might not have warranted it.

"Clean up and look good" relative to expectations for the social role you are playing. Being a buttoned up artist is ... being weird.

An article on Less Wrong being castigated on HN for being too conformist! Never thought I'd see the day.

The most reliable way I get traction for my ideas is by presenting personally as over the top fusty and conservative, whereas people come to me when they need iconoclastic ideas.

I would also say that "looking weird," used to signal you were so good at something you didn't have to conform, and it imposed the cost on rivals where they couldn't succeed if they imitated you (the actual definition of a counter-signal). Weirdness has changed into a survival strategy to avoid personal accountability. Either because they are so conscientious as to want to make other people feel comfortable by seeming harmless and incapable of coercion - or it means what bright colours and displays mean elsewhere in nature: poison, avoid. Great article, but also surprised how quickly something from 2014 could date.

Today I would say, the smart money doesn't spend weirdness points, it leverages them.

Something something "blue hair"...

It's not about being weird, it's about being weird relative to the group. If I'm hanging out with folks at Burning Man, I'm going to look weird if I'm too "default". If I'm interviewing in Silicon Valley, I'm going to need a shower and a change of clothes from my Burning Man attire, at minimum -- but a carefully chosen hint of my Burner affiliation can still work as a conversation piece.

The only normal people are the ones you don't know very well. - Joe Ancis

... via https://github.com/globalcitizen/taoup

There is no scale of weirdness, and the idea alone is toxic. If you contribute in a positive way, people accept you, because you have made yourself useful. Beyond providing value, and not destroying it, 'weirdness' only incurs the occasional wrath of red tape.

Be weird, or don't. There is no fucking quota.

Interesting concept but I am sceptical when it comes towards operationalizing social interactions. From my perspective these operationalizations come from positions of weakness of charisma and self-criticism.

If someone has very little self-reflection and does not care about others perception, all those interaction mechanics fall apart. In the end the reality of weirdness is not about getting 50%+ votes in an hypothetical election from a randomized crowd but finding those people that are the most attracted to that weirdness.

This article makes me think of the engineer at one of my past jobs that not only subsided on the free office poptarts, but also would butter them. I like to think I am a very open minded person but I had a hard time taking that guy seriously with anything.

Did you ask for an explanation? maybe he was just adjusting the sugar / fat ratio so he didn't have a diabetic shock later or something.

Does a diet of only pop-tarts make sense if you're worried about a diabetic shock?

If they're free and you're really cheap or lazy then maybe? I was just curious if you asked what his motivation was.

I had a friend show me this when I was a kid and I did it for a while. That engineer was probably raised that way and thought it was as normal as buttering toast.

Wait, you had free office pop tarts?!!

I will add this to my HN "who's hiring" post

Have you ever put butter on a Pop Tart?

It's so frickin' good

Have you ever put butter on a Pop Tart?

If you haven't then I think you should

Have to try this now!

That just makes me think you haven't been exposed to enough weird people. Also, uh, you're not very open minded.

Weirdness is relative, so its a not-simple problem of figuring out what you're spending them on

Exactly. My cluster of beliefs and opinions is very boring and non-weird for my group of friends. If you picked me up and transported me to the middle of a small town in rural America, I'd be an extreme outlier.

I use the weirdness relativity principle to my advantage:

Almost everything that comes out of my mouth/fingers is weird. Usually radically weird.

When I say something that is less weird than my usual utterances, people sit up and listen, because I’ve moved their weirdness window so far off into the wilds that my merely abnormal ideas sound positively sane.

Some people, who's very existence apparently fits into "radical" for some reason, do not get to pick their weirdness points.

Grammar aside, I don't know why this was downvoted so quickly. A lot of hackers were "weird" not that long ago. And we still are.

I overheard a conversation at my local barbershop last week, a technical recruiter lamenting about how "strange" software developers are.... I completely understand it, his target demographic being kids fresh out of University and probably need to exercise their social skills a bit, but the lack of empathy is what irked me the most.

I could've mentioned I'm trans in the parent post.

But I know there is a downvote reflex on this website for merely implying you might be part of a somewhat disadvantaged minority.

Glad to see it somehow ended up at +3.

I should really note that while I initially thought of myself definitely being too weird by default to have any leeway to pick my weirdness, other less distinct people have that too, depending on the field you work in.

Just being a woman in a technical role comes with a lot of people assuming you have no idea what you're doing, and pushing back against that is some of your "weirdness" spent.

(also, it's really weird to slowly male-fail and get put into that bucket too with people you haven't previously worked with, having the means to compare)

Not sure why this would get downvoted, I think it makes sense. From what I've read about transgendered people, they either suffer through the stress of gender dysphoria and appear outwardly "normal" or they choose to let their outward appearance match their inner identity and would be thus spending all of their points. Not a great choice.

Concrete example: if your office is a bunch of boys who regularly game together, you can still fit in if you don't. Unless you're female. A woman that games with the boys would fit in, but a woman that doesn't would likely end up an outsider.

This is a really important point. Some people are marginalized by default due to the fact that they‘re different than “normal”, because that’s how they were born.

That’s a reality for a lot of people: “You shouldn’t assert yourself so much, no one likes that coming from an X.” ”Don’t show so much anger. You’re a Y — it’ll scare people.”

This is a great point. This is why being an "ally" is so important. If you lucked into fitting in to society by virtue of birth, you have more weirdness points you can spend to help move society in the direction of accepting those people whose existence means they are already short on points.

“Here’s to the crazy ones, the misfits, the rebels, the troublemakers, the round pegs in the square holes… the ones who see things differently — they’re not fond of rules… You can quote them, disagree with them, glorify or vilify them, but the only thing you can’t do is ignore them because they change things… they push the human race forward, and while some may see them as the crazy ones, we see genius, because the ones who are crazy enough to think that they can change the world, are the ones who do.”

— Steve Jobs, 1997

Particularly in a thread about generating creativity, I think it's important to attribute sources of creativity correctly. This was not written by Steve Jobs, it was written by the 'Chief Creative Officer' of Siltanen & Partners, Rob Siltanen.

At one point Jobs even rejected something very similar to the final ad, saying "It sucks! I hate it! It’s advertising agency shit! I thought you were going to write something like 'Dead Poets Society!' This is crap!".

While Jobs shares responsibility for greenlighting this and allowing his brand to stand on it, he certainly didn't write it and I think it's wrong to attribute it to him solely. At the very least he should get a group attribution with many asterisks.

Siltanen article: https://www.forbes.com/sites/onmarketing/2011/12/14/the-real...

Counterpoint: http://www.hartford-hwp.com/archives/45a/060.html

There are some cases where more weird is better. I have a relative who dresses very oddly. She is praised as a fashionista and trend setter, and has a sizable following on IG. But for me, it's like the Emperor's New Clothes.

I cannot discern any particular design ethos aside from: the brighter/louder/more garish, the better. For whatever reason, being super weird works for her, and I assume if she were less weird in this regard she would be less interesting to her followers.

Sounds like she's spending her "points" on her style brand.

> I cannot discern any particular design ethos

Sometimes fashion is simply being confident in the outfit you put on. I like seeing folks in striking outfits choices. I wouldn't wear the same things, but the boldness I love

Confidence mixed with indifference can go a long way.

Interesting theory. I'd like to add that the higher success rate that occurs when you focus on one point may not be connected to weirdness.

People have limited headspace and attention spans. Whether your ideas are "weird" or not, if you try to push too many, you lower the success rate of all of them.

That's why many brands / marketers choose one or two key characteristics or selling points. More, and the brand is diluted / the audience gets confused.

Weird compared to what? Christianity is radically "weird" as is Mormonism or Judaism. None of what you are proposing to me seems weird at all. It seems like run-of-the-mill technocratic political policies by people who believe everything would work fine if they were put in power.

I wonder if the Libertarian party would be more successful if they chose just one issue to push?

this is a good question. I've always wondered why libertarianism wasn't more popular. Democrats wants freedom in personal lives. and Rebuplicans favor free business. Libertarianism combines both of those nicely.

When I debate libertarians I've always felt that it has never been really realistic and I think a lot of people feel that way.

I'm not American but as far as I understand Democrats type of freedom is very different from libertarians.

I have observed a strong comorbidity between “describing oneself as a Libertarian” and “being kind of a jerk who refuses to believe that any of their ability to pull themselves up by their own bootstraps comes from their unacknowledged privilege”. Perhaps this is why it is not popular.

They always seem to stumble on purity-test questions. Extreme libertarianism would mean tons of completely absurd things being legal. Since it's kind of a pointless "party" in todays political climate, you mostly get people who are on the extreme end as a part of it without any moderation that real-life parties have to have (to some degree).

The problem is they would have to agree on that one issue. The philosophy does not lend itself well to any kind of organization.

Be yourself, man.

too strange to die, too weird to live

(2014)

> But if you're a guy wearing a dress in public, ... recognize that you're spending your weirdness points fighting lookism, which means less weirdness points to spend promoting veganism or something else.

Being trans is antithetical to improving the world? Yikes, that's a bad take.

I think the article's claim is that bigotry against appearances is so strong that it uses up people's ability to keep an open mind on any other topic of discussion. Which is to say, we live in a world at the moment where when someone meets a transgender person, much of the time the only challenging topics they can think about are transgender related: for example they will have trouble concentrating on arguments concerning cryogenics.

Not to say this is a good or fair thing. But if true, it is a data point to keep in mind and maybe even fix.

So the suggested remedy concerning appearances, has to be re-thought in some cases.

Hm, I think that’s a good observation. Likely rooted in how a lot of our opinions are consensus based rather than reason based. If a weird person says something you’ll write it off as them being them. If a normal (or god forbid a popular person) says it, you’ll probably assimilate it into your beliefs. No particular bigotry required.

I kind of hate this about human behavior. It’s not easy to suppress. We’re very eager to parrot opinions on whether things are good or bad based on who gave the opinion.

I think you might have accidentally typed news.ycombinator.com instead of twitter.com

Reply on news.ycombinator.com