The economy of weirdness
meteuphoric.wordpress.com
meteuphoric.wordpress.com
Having grown up, I've moved past some of it. I still recognize that I've got an essential core of weirdness. In college I learned about the myers-briggs and, while you can criticize the test all you want, the iNtuitive / Sensing divide is real thing. I'm just an iNtuitive living in a sensor world.
I definitely budget my weirdness. I don't care about my clothes, but I recognize that it's good social engineering to look good. I try to be open and friendly to all types of people, especially people who remind me of being an outcast in grade school.
But at times I see people who just seem to be... pointlessly wasting their weirdness. They're talented, bright, energetic, and you're spending time praying to crystals? There's so much more you could be doing!
I'm really worried about becoming the society that ostracized my past self.
To some extent it would be weird if that didn't happen. So, maybe that means you have a chance?
In "Transparenzgesellschaft", he argues that too much positivity makes people transparent and controllable, their actions operational.
"Agonie des Eros" is about the contradiction of positivity and love. It's the weird, unexplainable things (atopos) that make people interesting. Desire itself is negative.
"Müdigkeitsgesellschaft" explains how the positivity of meritocratic societies, vs. the negativity of disciplinary societies in the past, leads to depression and fatigue.
Weirdness is 'different', and as such requires a certain level of cognitive load to process. Too much weirdness can be overwhelming bordering on abrasive.
Looking at it from another point of view, if you have an action movie where it is 2 hours of explosions, you will eventually get bored of all of the explosions. 'weirdness' works similarly. There needs to be some pacing to your weirdness.
So on this basis, weirdness is always potentially rude and anti-social, unless it becomes so common that it's no longer weirdness, but just natural variation. It's impossible to be "weird" anymore by simply having tattoos for example (at least where I live) because so many people have them that the presence or absence of ink is recognized as a completely ordinary variation, well within accepted social norms.
To be weird, something has to be outside of local social norms, and by definition such things call attention to themselves, each one using up 10 - 20% of other people's extremely limited attentional resources (because we can only pay attention to 5 - 10 things at once.)
As such, budgeting your weirdness wisely is simply polite and pro-social. We should be weird in ways that matter to us enough that they warrant the attention they will use up. People will differ on both the kind and amount of weirdness that exceeds this threshold, but the general principle that we should be weird wisely still holds.
If you're weird + (strongly positive basket of traits), then your weirdness might actually be seen as a positive qualifier on your other traits. If I'm a rockstar engineer, heads and tails above anyone else at my company, and I smoke an antique meerschaum pipe on my lunch break, people might find me charmingly idiosyncratic, and possibly some sort of genius. The pipe might actually add to people's perceptions of my competence. But if I'm of average or mediocre competence at work and I smoke the same pipe, I'll be seen as strange and possibly unstable. In this case it's not the weirdness that has changed; it's the way people have processed my weirdness, in light of their other assumptions about me. Vint Cerf gets social credit for wearing a three-piece suit to work everyday; an entry-level Googler would get socially docked for it.
The pipe, or the suit, in this case, is an example of what we might call socially neutral weirdness -- the kind of eccentricity whose social value depends on other variables. On the other hand, you have types of weirdness with fixed and/or independent social values, such as political stances. If I'm a staunch libertarian, that's going to strike some people as offputting and some people as attractive, regardless of how people think of me in other respects.
I think it is probably wise to budget the former type of weirdness very sparingly, and to signal the latter type of weirdness only in pursuit of specific social goals. In absence of any other known quantities about me, or hard and fast opinions about me, the pipe has very little social upside at work. And the politics probably have no upside at work, plus a lot of potential downside, unless I happen to work among a group of fellow travelers. You're allowed to impose a larger cognitive load on your peers in proportion to the degree to which they hold you in high esteem. Conversely, when your social perception is neutral or unknown, or trending on negative, your weirdness budget drops significantly.
I'd also argue that weird is not necessarily synonymous with unusual. You can achieve unusual by traveling a little farther along any metric you want, including conventional cool values like athletic prowess or symmetric beauty.
Weird is more than unusual. It is the irruption of some aspect of life that gives us an eery feeling. It's Blue Velvet.
It seemed a bit awkward to read in terms of "weirdness economics" rather than social groups, but I failed to see where the difference was going.
http://www.meltingasphalt.com/personhood-a-game-for-two-or-m...
Weird at gencon, weird at hope conference, weird at work, and weird in the bedroom either have nothing in common or possibly you're living a totally awesome life.
Another point entirely missed in this essay is the fact that in general, rare is valuable, not bad. Even if you think the world is made of faceless corporations with insatiable appetite for people who snap together like Lego, there are always a few odd, special-purpose pieces in a Lego set. No, they don't fit in everywhere and you can't make a kit with just them, but they are badly needed.