My problem with the ‘weirdness as social-rhetorical calculus cost’ theory is that I think it’s more valuable to see social weirdness in a different way, which is as the measure of variance between your and another person’s beliefs.
Weirdness, in many ways, is very very very good. We create better ideas when we a) have access to new ideas, and b) access to lots of different kinds of ideas. People with access to new ideas are often seen as weird, and you need to be weird yourself to search for or find a profusion of different perspectives, so people with better ideas are practically inevitably weird, despite all of the weird people with terrible ideas.
So, rhetorically, if you have a weird idea, it’s helpful to find what is integral, universal, and generic about it, such that when you try to explain it to people they don’t explode over how weird it is. An example: a friend was telling his partner about creating a house built around the tree, but planting the tree as a sapling in a container above, and then training its roots as they grew through the house so that they were effectively living inside of, or underneath and within, a treehouse, but the partner thought this was very very strange until my friend mentioned that people train vines along trellises all the time, and it’s the same idea.
My problem with the ‘weirdness as social-rhetorical calculus cost’ theory is that I think it’s more valuable to see social weirdness in a different way, which is as the measure of variance between your and another person’s beliefs.
Weirdness, in many ways, is very very very good. We create better ideas when we a) have access to new ideas, and b) access to lots of different kinds of ideas. People with access to new ideas are often seen as weird, and you need to be weird yourself to search for or find a profusion of different perspectives, so people with better ideas are practically inevitably weird, despite all of the weird people with terrible ideas.
So, rhetorically, if you have a weird idea, it’s helpful to find what is integral, universal, and generic about it, such that when you try to explain it to people they don’t explode over how weird it is. An example: a friend was telling his partner about creating a house built around the tree, but planting the tree as a sapling in a container above, and then training its roots as they grew through the house so that they were effectively living inside of, or underneath and within, a treehouse, but the partner thought this was very very strange until my friend mentioned that people train vines along trellises all the time, and it’s the same idea.