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Comment by Aurornis | Hacker News Reader

The key point in his change was that he started looking like someone who cared enough to put some minimal effort into dressing himself.

It’s not about being uniform or bland. He went from old worn-out clothes he didn’t care about to wearing clothes that were appropriate for a business casual environment or a casual date. When you start dressing like you care, regardless of how unique and individualized, others notice.

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It goes a little deeper than "does not care" though: worn out can also be a symptom of caring a lot. Caring in the way of having a strong desire to identify with the stuff worn, and newly bought stuff just not checking that box. Then any newly procured garb, no matter how carefully selected, perhaps even customized, will feel like being dressed up as someone else. It's like a trap, just not being wired for new clothes. I wonder if there's a connection to childhood dress-up play, as in kids who had good times masquerading as some archetype are less likely later in life to fall into that "that's-not-me" trap regarding new clothes.

I wonder how clean the clothes looked, however. Clothes can be well worn but still appear clean and taken care of. There is a difference between "this is my favorite shirt" and "these are my grubbies I use while cleaning the house".

It's caring about the wrong thing if you're looking to improve your life though. You need to logically reason through norms and expectations and realize you gotta put on the correct costume for the setting, even if you don't identify with it.

Otherwise "Thats not me" will be describing things like "successful career" and "romantic relationships".

I think many men look at clothes like the wrapping paper of a gift. They absolutely don't care what a gift comes wrapped in, it's the content that matters. Choosing wrapping paper or even thinking about it is boring as hell.

So they then project themselves onto women, and are then surprised that expectations are different.

They think they believe that but are probably simultaneously attracted to women in part because of how they dress and style themselves.

A man still strongly emotionally attached to faded, worn out logos from many years ago is probably not an appealing signal to most women looking for a man to date.

Part of what you signal with your wardrobe isn’t just that you care for yourself. You’re signaling to others that you care about how you appear to them. We can’t expect other people to ignore that signal because showing that you care about how other people see you is a proxy signal for caring about other people.

I was going to comment something similar to this. To an extent, dressing and grooming well is a sign of respect you show to other people as well as to yourself. If you can't clear that relatively low bar, don't be surprised when people aren't super excited about what you might add to their lives.

> If you can't clear that relatively low bar, don't be surprised when people aren't super excited about what you might add to their lives.

You mean like that guy giving keynote presentations in a turtleneck and jeans?

Yes, Jobs is kind of an exception to my general point, but I think it's a bad idea to live your life assuming you can be the exception.

I'm also not talking about having a great fashion sense though, and it's okay to prefer a more casual look. Just pay a little attention to how you dress and care for yourself.

Jobs looked put together.

> showing that you care about how other people see you is a proxy signal for caring about other people

How so?

> showing that you care about how other people see you is a proxy signal for caring about other people.

It's a very bad proxy for that—its somewhere between uncorrelated and anti-correlated to thing it is taken as a signal for (at least, if “caring about” is meant as having a positive concern for the feelings of rather than a desire to manipulate to extract value)—though (which makes caring about that signal itself a kind of signal.)

I wish the people who thought that was true would give me money instead of buying a suit.

By the way, in academia dressing like a salesman is often considered a no-no.

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