You’re focusing on the wrong thing here. The problem for bad behavior isn’t “weirdness” itself, it’s that people are using “weirdness” as an excuse for unprofessional and toxic behavior, and that other people are going along with it. Whether people are weirdly into trains, or in a polyamorous relationship at home, has nothing to do with it.
The norms for an organisation where you are responsible for hundreds of millions of dollars should be different from those of some rationalist hobby group, but it looks like far too many people are jumping from one to the other with no change.
I generally agree but I think it might also be interesting to take a memetic perspective and look at the incentives and consequences that some of the ideas might cause as a product of their information content interacting with a dynamic environment. Sometimes we tend to think of ourselves as the masters of our own behaviors (e.g., we have „free“ will) but underneath it all, we may just be carriers for the information and rules encoded in genes and memes. In this view, „weirdness“ relating to the distribution of memes may actually be an informative perspective because it highlights novel dynamics that might be at play here.
I think that the call for more self-awareness regarding weirdness and how this might be viewed by other people is quite important. However, I also think it has been discussed before and quite a few people are aware of it. The recent situations have highlighted that we should maybe aim for clearer guidelines and rules how to handle this in practice. But it’s not really easy to find appropriate tradeoffs between the different interests here (weird vs. non-weird).
You’re focusing on the wrong thing here. The problem for bad behavior isn’t “weirdness” itself, it’s that people are using “weirdness” as an excuse for unprofessional and toxic behavior, and that other people are going along with it. Whether people are weirdly into trains, or in a polyamorous relationship at home, has nothing to do with it.
The norms for an organisation where you are responsible for hundreds of millions of dollars should be different from those of some rationalist hobby group, but it looks like far too many people are jumping from one to the other with no change.
I generally agree but I think it might also be interesting to take a memetic perspective and look at the incentives and consequences that some of the ideas might cause as a product of their information content interacting with a dynamic environment. Sometimes we tend to think of ourselves as the masters of our own behaviors (e.g., we have „free“ will) but underneath it all, we may just be carriers for the information and rules encoded in genes and memes. In this view, „weirdness“ relating to the distribution of memes may actually be an informative perspective because it highlights novel dynamics that might be at play here.
I think that the call for more self-awareness regarding weirdness and how this might be viewed by other people is quite important. However, I also think it has been discussed before and quite a few people are aware of it. The recent situations have highlighted that we should maybe aim for clearer guidelines and rules how to handle this in practice. But it’s not really easy to find appropriate tradeoffs between the different interests here (weird vs. non-weird).