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Comment by bsurmanski | Hacker News Reader

I would say that the 'economy of weirdness' is closer to simple supply and demand. Too much weirdness lowers the demand of more weirdness, and thus the 'value' in a given scenario.

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.

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The cognitive load point is extremely important. It isn't that "weirdness is bad" but "your weirdness puts my brain in the position of having to do more work, using up precious fractions of my most limited resource: attention." People radically under-estimate the amount of attention we have available (and are then shocked and surprised when they miss the guy in the gorilla suit.)

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.

This is a great comment. The attention microeconomy explains so much of our social / coordination issues. On a completely separate track, this is sort of the fatal flaw of modern outrage culture -- it refuses to count the cognitive-time-value of being non-offensive to the world's 7 billion population.

This is a very good point, and it also bears a corollary: that weirdness (to the extent we're defining it as a social signal outside of a local set of norms) can and will be used to qualify your other characteristics. In some cases, it wholly depends on your other characteristics.

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.

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