One thing I dislike about this model is that it seems to compress varying negative judgments into “this person is weird”. A few examples from this post:
Unprofessional / unserious : If you’re a punk rocker vegan advocate, people may judge you to be unserious, as you have not compromised your self-expression in order to appear professional.
Untrustworthy: If someone hears you advocating for [cryonics / open borders / other radical ideas], they may conclude that you are not forming your beliefs in a normal way, and then choose to generally trust you less. If you only advocate for one of those ideas, among a portfolio of relatively normal beliefs, the average person is probably correctly judging you to be more trustworthy, at least by their epistemic standards.
Unrealistic: If you are advocating for universal basic income instead of relaxed zoning laws, people may conclude that you are not a good political ally because you are making unrealistic demands.
You can try to respond to all of those by “don’t be weird”, but it seems better to figure out whether you need to send signals of seriousness, trustworthiness, or pragmatism.
What’s more, as EmeryCooper mentioned, this doesn’t apply nearly as well to domains like physical appearance as it does to policies and opinions. I’ve also seen this extended to types of weirdness that seem more difficult to change, like being visibly LGBT+ or having a non-standard accent.
This sounds like a reasonable analysis that is worth replacing my analysis worth. Worth flagging that I wrote this ~7 years ago and my thinking has changed a lot on the issue.
Fair, yeah― this piece is still getting referenced (a testament to its impact!) so I figured it’s open for criticism, but I wasn’t imagining I was criticizing your current views.
One thing I dislike about this model is that it seems to compress varying negative judgments into “this person is weird”. A few examples from this post:
Unprofessional / unserious : If you’re a punk rocker vegan advocate, people may judge you to be unserious, as you have not compromised your self-expression in order to appear professional.
Untrustworthy: If someone hears you advocating for [cryonics / open borders / other radical ideas], they may conclude that you are not forming your beliefs in a normal way, and then choose to generally trust you less. If you only advocate for one of those ideas, among a portfolio of relatively normal beliefs, the average person is probably correctly judging you to be more trustworthy, at least by their epistemic standards.
Unrealistic: If you are advocating for universal basic income instead of relaxed zoning laws, people may conclude that you are not a good political ally because you are making unrealistic demands.
You can try to respond to all of those by “don’t be weird”, but it seems better to figure out whether you need to send signals of seriousness, trustworthiness, or pragmatism.
What’s more, as EmeryCooper mentioned, this doesn’t apply nearly as well to domains like physical appearance as it does to policies and opinions. I’ve also seen this extended to types of weirdness that seem more difficult to change, like being visibly LGBT+ or having a non-standard accent.
This sounds like a reasonable analysis that is worth replacing my analysis worth. Worth flagging that I wrote this ~7 years ago and my thinking has changed a lot on the issue.
Fair, yeah― this piece is still getting referenced (a testament to its impact!) so I figured it’s open for criticism, but I wasn’t imagining I was criticizing your current views.
Thanks! I definitely think it is open to criticism. I appreciate your more nuanced perspective.