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Comment by rpiguy | Hacker News Reader

There are a few BIG differences.

* Today you can be smart and popular. There will always be smart kids that get picked on, but there used to be pure, outright hostility toward the smart kids as recently as thirty years ago. This is especially true for women. My grandmother never told us she was valedictorian until we found her diploma cleaning out her house, women just couldn't talk about their intelligence. Even when I went to high school I remember a girl who would lie about her test scores (she would say she did worse than she did so she could fit in with the other girls).

* Today you can be openly gay. You will take shit for it, but at least you are out. People used to give you shit for it and you had to keep yourself in the closet or else. Situation is still shitty, but improved from a low bar.

* Weirdness can be cool now. Showing an interest in anything other than the mainstream interests used to result in terrible teasing.

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Weirdness is still not cool. The goalposts just shifted.

It just so happens that right now what's cool is a charicature of actual weird people in the past. See girls claiming to be 'quirky' or 10 years ago 'random'. Also see people being self proclaimed 'nerds' because they like to read a lot.

It's basically there as an illusion of depth and mystery.

Actual weird people like that dude who makes low production quality lightsaber fight videos in his garden (can't remember his name) are still considered weird. Though I think the word they use these days is 'cringe'. Alternatively what people will do is put these super weird people on a pedestal in conversation while not actually respecting them or wanting to be directly associated with them.

I'm not saying we've made no progress but it's a lot less than it appears on the surface.

> that dude who makes low production quality lightsaber fight videos in his garden (can't remember his name)

His online handle is Airsoftfatty, and his story is actually kinda tragic. iDubbz visited him and made a "documentary" of sorts about him, it's a fascinating watch [1].

[1] Full Force: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HfwPL-bd_mk

Exactly, it's counter-signaling. It would be analogous to conclude that being poor is cool now because of torn up jeans being in fashion or hipster minimalism being cool.

As long as you are surely not mistaken for a real weirdo or a poor person, you can play around with the superficialities.

Underrated comment, you're the only one in this thread that gets it.

> Weirdness can be cool now. Showing an interest in anything other than the mainstream interests used to result in terrible teasing.

Weirdness almost by definition can't be cool. Or at least not actual weirdness. In the 50's a leather jacket and a motorbike made you 'weird' to the old folks, but incredibly cool to teenagers. Same goes nowadays, only the details differ.

Just a random example: I personally consider obsession with anime weird, but kind of cool at the same time. Are you sure that you cannot name anything you would consider both weird and cool?

Do you still think it kind of cool when there's people out there that take their anime body pillow or sex doll out in public and proclaim they are a real person / their girlfriend? That crosses a line of weird in my head.

I think from a societal point of view there are patterns that are considered weird and patterns that are acceptable. There is of course a gray area, but it's not as wide as we might think (at least not in my experience).

If you consider an obsession with anime kind of cool then you probably don't consider it weird, at least not in the sense the concept is presented in the original article.

Let's assume that you're genuinely interested in having a conversation, not just shifting the definition to fit your argument, and I will give it another go: Most subcultures regardless of the generation (e.g. punk, metal, emo) use "weirdness" to distinguish themselves (with music, fashion, looks) in order to distance themselves from the mainstream and are often considered cool as a result of that.

Ok, my definition of "weird" is: something that will get you marginalized under the prevailing norms of the society you live in. Something that is unusual, but doesn't get you marginalized, might be cool, but not weird.

Something that doesn't get you marginalized simply isn't weird.

In my experience, people who adopt a subculture do so partly to cope with being excluded from the mainstream. This is not always the case, of course, but I do think it's common.

The members of the subculture may be weird in my sense of the word (i.e. for the general population), but they won't be weird within their respective subculture. Within the subculture they will probably just be cool.

Cool is what cool people does.

What is the leather jacket of today's teenagers? I thought about it for a moment, but nothing comes to my mind.

I wasn't alive back then, so this might just be a product of the movies I've watched, but I get the impression that the "leather jacket" was almost universally considered cool by the youth of that era (whether or not they were willing to risk presenting that "deviant" image themselves). compared to that time (or at least my impression of it), culture is much more fragmented today. I don't think anything exists that is universally considered cool by today's youth. although being in my late twenties, I am rapidly approaching the point where I don't know what's "cool" anyway.

I think nihilistic 10 levels of irony stuff is pretty much what's mainstream-cool today, but I say that as someone also around 30. Seems the big diversity causes people to hedge their bets and never stand behind something with conviction, rather to ironize away any possible associations.

Maybe slightly younger than teenagers, but brightly colored neon hair (like the youtubers), flashy Minecraft merchandise, and things like Fortnite dances and dabbing.

Of course, me and my girlfriend are still well enough in touch with those things (also thanks to social media) that we can annoy our son by flossing and dabbing, :p.

Also, being a literal nazi.

I'm not in touch with teenage culture anymore, but things like Billie Eilish and TikTok come to mind.

Ok that's classic "No True Scotsman" right there.

I get where you are coming from, but I believe the above poster is suggesting that the colloquial _definitions_ of “weird” and “cool”* make them antonyms. That is, “cool” kind of means “conforming to the current zeitgeist” where “weird” invokes connotations of “not fitting in”. When understood in this way it makes being both “weird” and “cool” a bit oxymoronic.

Now of course there is spectrum, and I agree with the GP that a big part of this moment is “being yourself” so eccentricity and uniqueness _are_ factors that can make somebody “cool”, but with that the bar for truly being “weird” has also shifted.

To be clear, I’m not value-judging anything here. Back in high school I definitely rode the line between “cool” and “weird” myself! Was called “weird” to my face semi-often. Looking back I can see that I was fortunate to be a weird kid that was both athletic and rather good looking, so I was still allowed to hang out with the “cool” kids and date “popular” girls.

* the dictionary defines neither in the terms we are using here

Weirdness, in the context of the original article, is something that leads to ostracism. Something considered cool does not lead to ostracism. It can be _different_ and cool, but it cannot, by definition, be weird in the sense the blog post describes. If beards or interracial marriage had simply been considered different but cool, the characters described wouldn't have had to invent coping strategies.

Good point!

^ this :D

"Scotsman" is absolute. One either is, or is not, a Scotsman, and either always was and forever will be, or never was and never will be. (I know this isn't true with regard to modern Scottish citizenship, but in the context of the saying "Scotsmanness" is an immutable characteristic).

Weirdness isn't like this. What was once weird now isn't, though we can't be sure it will stay that way. Conversely, what was once normal is now weird, though this might change too. This process will continue.

GP is saying that if something is widely accepted then it can't really be described as weird in the present moment. This fits the examples given in the thread, of how it _used to be_ weird to have certain characteristics, and now it isn't.

This might mean that we haven't actually become more tolerant of weirdness per se, we've just changed the definition of what counts as weird, and are just as judgemental towards 2020-era weirdness as the previous generations were toward 1990-weirdness or 1960-weirdness.

Incidentally I do think we're a bit more tolerant of weirdness now, just not as much as we think we are.

Being completely tolerant to weirdness would mean, to my mind, to essentially not think in terms of weird/mainstream/cool anymore.

No it isn't. A "No True Scotsman" involves retreating to a weaker version of the statement upon being challenged. This is just a weak statement.

How so?

# Weirdness almost by definition can't be cool. Or at least not actual weirdness.

"Actual weirdness" being refined to mean the set the author chose, instead of an independent rule. Circular reasoning, designed to compel the (weak) conclusion you'd been arguing toward.

The independent rule is: weird is something that gets you marginalized in the society you live in, without being illegal/detrimental/an infringement on others' rights.

Being unusual is not the same as being weird. Being unusual can in certain circumstances make you "cool".

There is no circularity, and you have yet to make a pertinent counter-argument.

Hey, I didn't qualify it as 'actual weirdness'. That was somebody else. There's the nub of it.

Try being a kid raised only on classical music. Trust me, it was anything but cool or accepted (even by teachers). I was terrified about not knowing popular music - we even used to have a weekly time in class where a student talked about their favorite band. I didn't know any (and had to find out what were the cool bands to avoid being a complete social outcast).

Yeah, that's something I had anxiety with growing up in middle school and high school. The way I solved it was to download a Top 100 mp3 collection, then I branched out to different music tastes from there.

But you have to keep in mind that a LOT of people still have to mask in order to fit in; change their accents, what they wear, etc. You could consider them social contracts, like don't wear a three-piece suit to a 24-hour hackathon, but they can also be oppressive.

You mention that you can be openly gay today, but this is not true; SOME areas MAY be safe, but in others you may get sucker punched or worse.

Black parents have to tell their kids to change how they speak in order to fit in, to have a better chance at getting a job.

And kids will still get bullied for being outliers, it's just that what you get bullied for and how that expresses itself has changed; "nerdy" subjects like gaming have become more accepted, so the outliers now are those that don't like Fortnite. And the bullying is moving to the internet.

That is a different debate entirely. To what degree people need to alter behavior to "fit in" varies widely.

To be an executive in corporate America, you need to learn corporate speak and use it, for example. No one running a Fortune 500 company speaks like they are from the Ozarks.

Society needs some conformity to function, there will never be a utopia where this doesn't happen.

> Today you can be smart and popular. There will always be smart kids that get picked on, but there used to be pure, outright hostility toward the smart kids as recently as thirty years ago.

30 years ago, I was in middle school. Never saw this. I was very smart and certainly never received any hostility because of it. I never saw any of my fellow "smart kids" receive any either. I know it's only anecdotal but the quote doesn't even have anecdotal support. It's just a baseless claim.

>Showing an interest in anything other than the mainstream interests used to result in terrible teasing.

As a Gen-Xer, I disagree.

probably a case of YMMV depending on your area, school, etc. I'm a bit younger than you (millennial), and I don't remember any outright hostility towards the smart kids. in general, being smart and getting good grades was simply orthogonal to what really mattered. you had to be competent in at least one sport to get any respect. my interest in computers was specifically uncool however, and it placed me below even the theater kids in the social hierarchy.

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