[Link] How Signaling Ossifies Behavior
Here is a new post at EconLog in which Bryan Caplan discusses how signalling contributes to the status quo bias.
The lesson: In the real world, signaling naturally tends to ossify behavior—to lock in whatever the status quo happens to be. If you’re an optimist, you can protest, “It’s only a tendency.” But even an optimist should admit that this tendency leads to atypically slow and unreliable progress.
What does he mean by “atypically slow”? What’s the typical rate of progress and how is it slowed down by this phenomenon? It seems that, whether real or not, this ossification is a part of what one would consider “typical”.
I think what Bryan meant was that if it weren’t for our tendency to conform, and to punish nonconformists, then progress would be faster. I agree.
Most people should conform, and most nonconformity should be punished. To me, the most likely outcome of reducing the overall human tendency to conform and to punish nonconformists is that more people join cults, refuse to pay their taxes, become terrorists… I think nerd culture has a tendency to fetishize nonconformity that isn’t criticized often enough. Edit: Although it is criticized in Why Our Kind Can’t Cooperate, which is good.
Hm. I see conformity as a factor that causes cults, not the other way around.
If lots of people stopped paying their taxes, we’d develop effective enforcement mechanisms.
I could see this. Related.
It’s a good point overall, in some cases conformity could be good. Probably for high-IQ “nerds”, conformity is more frequently bad, because we’re often smarter than the people we’re considering whether to conform with, and therefore better equipped to make decisions.
Most people don’t join cults because their friends, family, etc. would look at them funny (assuming their friends, family, etc. are not currently in cults). Conformity keeps people in cults, but I don’t think it causes people to join them. We might see people bouncing between a larger number of smaller cults.
Well, or so we tell ourselves. (It seems healthy to be generally suspicious of stories that make my tribe look good.) A more realistic story might be that “nerds” have atypical needs and so might need to manage their lives differently from what’s dictated by cultural norms.
That’s not obvious to me at all… my rough (highly uninformed) model of how cult initiations work is that you get sucked in to a situation (e.g. Scientology “stress testing” or similar) where you’re forced to either not conform or join the cult. (Also fits my (very limited) observation of fraternity initiations.)
Just because a story is flattering to your group doesn’t mean it’s false. The research I’ve seen on the usefulness of high IQ for achieving desirable life outcomes has been pretty positive.
Personally, I think nerds are self-deprecating way beyond what’s justified by rationally looking at the data. I suspect this is due to school socialization effects (higher-IQ folks have a hard time finding cognitive peers, and therefore making friends, and therefore end up being lower status; I recommend this essay for more on this idea). Is it really so implausible that intelligent people would be better at stuff that requires thinking and decision-making? This conclusion almost seems like it would follow directly from the definition of general intelligence.
Also keep in mind that people who join cults are not a random sample of the population. It is generally believed that people who join cults are usually in some way social outcasts to begin with. Cults offer them the possibility of being part of a close-knit community. Traditional religions also offer that, but to a lesser extent.
References?
AFAIK, it is well established that IQ positively correlates with many performance metrics for levels of IQ around and below the average, while the correlation for above average IQ is more dubious. In fact, IQ tests were originally designed to detect underperforming individuals.
The correlation between an high IQ and being a “nerd” is also debatable, while, at least in some circles, nerds may have an high IQ, it doesn’t follow that many high-IQ people are nerds. Also note that the whole concept of being a “nerd” migh be largely the effect of conformity biases.
These weren’t what I had in mind originally, but they look reasonably good:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intelligence_quotient#Income
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intelligence_quotient#Real-life_accomplishments
Indeed: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intelligence_quotient#Income
Low IQ precludes you various job opportunities, while the correlation between high IQ and performace is more dubious, some studies show decreasing marginal value, other studies show linear correlation.
This means that certain groups of professionally successful people have higher than average IQ, not that many higher than average IQ people become more professionally successful than average people.
I’d be interested in citations on that.
Entirely possible. I’m not sure the fraternity analogy holds water; at many colleges I would expect the decision to seek out a fraternity (as opposed to the decision to join one) to be at least partially motivated by obtaining higher status, whereas joining a cult generally only gets you higher status among existing cult members. I’m working primarily off of Cultish Countercultishness, in particular this part:
Your second point is also fair. What I think is implausible is that everyone who self-identifies as an intelligent nerd is actually intelligent. Maybe they only like thinking about nerdy topics but aren’t good at it and tell themselves a story about how they’re intelligent to fit in and maintain their self-image (being a dumb nerd sounds awful).
For most people, conformity is an instrumental value, given consideration only because it helps implement some terminal value. Thus, your assertion contains an implicit “in order to advance terminal value X.”
If I don’t think conformity advances value X, or if I don’t agree with value X, then I don’t see why I should value conformity.
Since most new ideas are bad, this isn’t necessarily a bad thing.
Meh; what is the state-of-the-art evidence that (modern, western, educated) people actually are huge conformists and will automatically judge weird behaviors negatively? There seems to be a jump from conformist-as-copying-others (yep, we have plenty of that) to conformist-as-intolerant-of-difference (I’m more dubious).
In recent decades there has been a heavy emphasis in our popular culture that being close-minded, conformist, or supporting the status quo are bad things, and that open mindedness and difference and originality and thinking for yourself and finding your own way and understanding are admirable (or at least, you often have moralizing stories about that in children’s media).
Sure, there’s also a strong push towards conformity, and even many of our subcultures that seem to pride themselves on their originality actually do feature a lot of copying-each-other (so it’s fair to call them conformist, but not necessarily intolerant), but I don’t get the impression that being seen as weird or different has particularly bad consequences, at least not among educated western adults.
Most intolerance doesn’t announce itself. It usually dresses itself up as something positive.
The cynic in me would say the so-called tolerant people within our society aren’t actually tolerant, rather they’ve adopted a potpourri of non-traditional behaviours in order to signal their faux tolerance, and then act with intolerance to so-called traditionalists (who are racist, homophobic, misogynist, authoritarian, etc). It all depends on how you value the liberal project. Personally I think it rests on shaky foundations, so I have some sympathy for this cynical view, although I think there are genuine moral concerns caught up in a very confused (and often destructive) ideology.
Probably the strongest example of intolerance dressed up as tolerance, though, is Western political ideology and how we relate to other societies. The democratic countries are extremely intolerant of other political systems; probably more so than many of their most hated rivals. This is expressed in terms of freedom, individual rights, etc, but elections and other Western political institutions are only tenuously connected to freedom. It’s certainly not the case, as is usually assumed by Westerners, that elections are by definition a form of freedom and no further argument is needed. A case needs to be made.
Most discussion of Western political ideology tends to assume what it’s trying to prove. For example, it’s assumed that being incarcerated for a political crime is much worse than being incarcerated for something recognised as a crime in the West, but this is only obviously the case if you already agree with Western political ideology. It’s not hard to come up with arguments (the standard line being that it’s too easy to abuse) but if a country started giving political prisoners fair trials and following accepted legal practice for incarcerating people based on well-defined political crimes, would we accept that? I doubt it. The fact is that we won’t accept anything short of them adopting our practices because their perceived superiority stems not from the particular benefits of adopting them but from that they are ours.
The same is true for freedom of speech, assembly, etc. I’ve been stuck in traffic because of a protest and it occurred to me then that marching down the street is something we make an exception for in political circumstances but would almost definitely outlaw if we didn’t have that ideal. Are countries that don’t share our ideals outlawing protests because they hate freedom or because that’s just a really, extremely obvious thing to outlaw if you don’t share our ideals? Calls for elections in countries without them are calls for the destruction of the prevailing political system. In the West, communists, fascists, anarchists and other rivals to the prevailing political system (as opposed to a party within the system) are not tolerated either. They’re often demonised and sometimes they’re arrested.
These are some of the ways we disguise intolerance for political and cultural differences as sympathy for the plight of individuals under other regimes (while simultaneously ignoring their differences from us, as if everybody has a Westerner trapped inside them, just waiting to be freed). There’s also the tendency to file under propaganda any expression of political views that doesn’t fall under the party system (for example., that the party system is not optimal). There are Chinese and Singaporean political thinkers (and some leaders) who write very eloquently about the limitations of Western political thought and are summarily dismissed as having ulterior motives. Almost everything the Chinese government does is dismissed as a way to prop up the regime, as if nobody there cares about the fate of their own country at all.
Of course, this all stems from the Western idea that the state is an antagonist and opportunist rather than an organic part of society (and, relatedly, that society doesn’t transcend the individual). These ideas are not shared by others but, again, rather than provide an argument we just assume differences in opinion are examples of oppression. Often these differences in opinion are shared by the very people we consider “oppressed” (this is where we bring in nice words like “enlightened” which deny the autonomy of the individual we’re expressing our sympathy for; once they’ve become like us, they’ll understand why being like us is better, but until then… well, screw their opinions).
Your examples are mostly intolerance of specific things, and I agree that there’s plenty of that going on; and I also agree that a good deal of our public praise of “tolerance” is probably not completely true. My question was however whether we really disliked weirdness itself, not specific weird behaviors. If we irrationally dislike 20% of weird behaviors, than we may not be living up to our ideals of tolerance, but it’s also unlikely that that intolerance is slowing our progress down much.
(edit) To take an example from another branch of this thread, a video game startup may claim to not have any dress code like those boring stuffy banks, but anybody wearing a suit will be sneered at anyway. SO, they are still intolerant, despite their claims to the contrary, BUT, a norm of accepting anything but a suit allows for a lot more variance than a norm of only accepting suits, so in practice you’ll still get the benefits of tolerance (in terms of finding comfortable clothes).
It depends how you define weirdness, I think. What I’m claiming, by use of examples, is that we have a very specific out-group/in-group separation. What we usually label “weird” is harmless in-group stuff. We might even use it to signal our tolerance/freedom/etc. What is actually weird to us, we tend not to define explicitly at all, but to separate by exclusion and by favouring in-group stuff without argument. Sometimes we consider it offensive. The examples in the original article are not great, I think, since our society is tolerant of people wearing wacky clothing, etc (i.e., the other day I saw an adult woman in the supermarket wearing an animal onesie and nobody even looked twice). But if you take “weirdness” to be actual out-group behaviour then I think there’s ample evidence that we’re inherently intolerant of it (some of which I tried to provide).
I agree that it depends of what is meant by “weirdness”, and that if by that you mean out-group behavior then yes we are intolerant of it.
However, Caplan’s argument was that signaling conformity discouraged innovation, so the important question becomes how many potential innovations get discouraged—how many fall under ’harmless in-group stuff”, and how many fall under “actually weird out-group stuff”.
You could conceivably have an out-group/in-group separation such that the “out-group” is a restricted set of characteristics, and the in-group is anything else (it’s defined by what it’s not, which isn’t that rare), in which case most innovations wouldn’t be hindered. Or more generally, in-group borders can vary in how restrictive they are; some groups (catholic housewives) can be such that any innovation is likely to fall outside the group, and others (hippies, geeks), while still having borders, may be broad enough to allow a lot more potential innovations to fall in.
I think there are potential examples of “suppressed” innovation due to our ideology. Our political ideology is based on a particular view of individual psychology and sociology. I mentioned the view of the state as an antagonistic actor and the idea that society doesn’t transcend the individual. Both of these assumptions are absent from other traditions (pre-Englightenment West, Confucian, etc) and both appear to set the bounds of how we reason about people and society. I would add to this the idea that morality is problematic in that it doesn’t fit into the natural world without revision, which is perhaps the central philosophical problem that led to modern Western political ideology, and is the reason we look for legal and institutional solutions to social problems rather than the character-centric solutions common to traditional approaches.
It would be very hard, I think, for a Western sociologist or a political scientist to argue for a view of the individual and of society that wasn’t compatible with our political ideology. This also restricts the available possibilities in psychology because we tend to strongly favour “internal” solutions (representations, models, etc) rather than solutions that would imply the interdependence between individuals and culture/society. But again, only occasionally does this rise to the point where people say, “this is too weird!” Usually the suppression is more subtle. There are just certain places we don’t go, intellectually, because the coherence of our ideology depends on it not being true. I think it’s very hard to get a grip on how restrictive your own ideology is because of this.
For example, it’s possible to imagine that I might come up with a psychological theory that seemingly justifies authoritarianism and that might provoke a reaction in others, but what of a psychological theory that shows our very concept of authority to be mistaken? What if I think we’re confused about what freedom is altogether? It’s likely that such a theory would still be evaluated as authoritarian (or not) within the ideology it seemingly undermines. But the situation can be more subtle still. For example, many people have argued that the problem of free will is a non-problem. But what does a world where this question has been dissolved really look like? It certainly doesn’t look like our intellectual climate. Dissolution is merely accepted among the pantheon of answers. You could say that our ideology is especially defined by what we consider a problem rather than the answers we consider legitimate. I don’t think it’s a coincidence that our society is organised around ideas that come from the same era as many of our most intractable philosophical problems.
As someone who believes mainstream cognitive science is mistaken, I run into this issue all the time. Even people in heterodox research seem to have a hard time taking their theories “all the way.” I think it’s at least plausible that the sticking point here is an intolerance of the genuinely ideologically strange. In fact, I became interested in heterodox, pre-Enlightenment and non-Western political ideology while doing research in heterodox cognitive science, because it helps me clear away biases. So I’ve spent some time reading about other cultures and other eras and trying to get a handle on their perspective, so that I can “think outside the box.” Of course, I could be wrong about mainstream cognitive science, but I think it’s clear there are avenues of investigation that are closed off because they are intermingled with actually weird out-group stuff. I wonder if it’s possible to genuinely dissolve problems without becoming an outsider of sorts.
On the other hand, someone who consistently dresses as a distinguished gentleman can do so in a jeans-and-T-shirt culture, if he actually is a distinguished gentleman. When the richest dudes around wear Crocs and bike shorts, it’s just another way of expressing personality.
That said, the situation for women’s clothing seems to be substantially more fraught, especially for engineers.
(And I expect it is different again in the game industry, which seems to have its own sort of presumptuousness.)
I think it would be interesting to analyze in more detail what you mean by “intolerance”. We might distinguish the sort of “intolerance” that is expressed by mass violence against its target, and the sort that is expressed by simply not taking the target’s claims very seriously.
The existence of sexism, racism, able-ism, transphobia, the lack of gay marriage in the United States (unless we’re excluding it from that group?), trans people still can’t serve in the US military, anyone who has ever committed a felony isn’t even allowed to VOTE, anyone whose sexual orientation includes an interest in anyone under 18 (even if they would NEVER act on it) is potentially subject to violent vigilante mobs hunting them down...
I personally get confronted about 50% of the time I go shopping without wearing shoes, and that seems like it should be a relatively minor trespass. I’ve been thrown off a bus for it despite having written confirmation that it doesn’t violate any of the company’s policies.
Some basic experiments should confirm this one. Go to the video store and walk around on all fours, do a three-way makeout session in a high-traffic public area. If you’re female, take the bus or go to a restaurant topless (assuming that’s even legal where you are—that it’s NOT legal in some areas should tell you tons)
There IS definitely a level of weirdness that’s tolerated. My general experience is that it goes “no reaction”, “being ignored”, “people are nervous”, and then “people actively want to get away from me”. If I put even a bit of thought and creativity in to it, getting to “people are nervous” is pretty easy, but I’m often baffled by what ends up truly getting people to shun me (seriously, bare feet gets me more hate than anything else I’ve done in my life o.o)
“trans people still can’t serve in the US military” You mean people who intend to, are transitioning, or who have? Because if it’s the second option, seems like there’s a few good reasons (huge mood swings, poor ability to -cope- with said mood swings, unreliable physical performance).
“do a three-way makeout session in a high-traffic public area”
I presume you mean high foot traffic, because the alternative (say, on a roundabout) would make it materially harder to drive safely.
It’s interesting that all of your examples seem connectable to hygiene.
Barefeet doesn’t present a hygiene risk unless you are in the habit of then jumping on counters or tabletops, but there is a clearly evident superstition that it does.
Walking on all fours transfers germs from the floor to your hands, which is a genuine, though perhaps not very large, risk to anyone who handles a video you’ve picked up or shakes your hand
Makeouts seem to have some level of ‘dirtiness’ associated with them. This is not altogether unfounded (transfer of herpes/cold sore bugs is well documented) but doesn’t present a passive environmental risk (ie. it’s only a risk to others whom you kiss or give oral to.)
Go to a restaurant topless—This doesn’t actually have hygiene implications but it’s not a great leap for people to think it does. Also if we’re talking about staff intolerance, topless people are more vulnerable to food burns in case of accident, particularly given that said toplessness may distract enough to cause an accident. Which probably is significant given how litigous the US is.
Take the bus topless—I think this is the same as the above but may also present a traffic hazard.
I seem to remember someone posting research before, that connected people’s sense of morality directly with their sense of hygiene (that is, morally problematic acts actually -felt- physically dirty). Wish I could recall the link.
“Transgender individuals are prohibited from entering military service by medical regulations. To join the military, potential service members are required to undergo a physical examination as part of the entry process. During this examination, the military may reject the potential service member if he or she has had any type of genital surgery. ”
And, yes, I’d meant foot traffic. I find major bus/train stops, and parks, both work well for this purpose.
I’ve read the same hygiene article, bu I’m not sure what would be weird and NOT technically a tenuous connection given that you’ve managed to make “topless” in to a hygiene issue. Off-hand, though… walking on all fours but wearing gloves AND having a friend with you who handles all interacting-with-objects? Possibly leashed, to help clarify that you’re just a pet. Although that might get taken as BDSM or beastiality, which are both obviously “dirty” :)
Fur suiting… connects to furry… sexual… therefor dirty.
Wearing a price sign on one’s head… clearly rude since it’s violating their property/ownership boundaries. Ditto muttering to yourself, singing weird songs, dancing, staring at people… even OCD can come across as rude (compulsive handwashing = you think I’m dirty just for touching you, harumph!)
I can’t think of anything that can’t technically be reduced to either “dirty” or “rude”! But I think such a reduction doesn’t really invalidate my point, especially given how much you have to stretch it when you realize that men can often get away with being topless where women cannot.
Sweat is often present! Therefore, OBVIOUSLY, germs are. Obviously. And That’s Terrible. (I feel the need to mention that I say this as an outsider—I merely have a very strong impression that Americans tend to be rather overwrought on the subject of hygiene.)
As for the sexism angle, I think men are expected to be careless about some part of their appearance. But more realistically, we’re culturally encouraged to view exposure of breasts as a sexual signal, but not pecs. So breasts are automatically ‘dirtier’.
Whereas it’s roleplay? (I confess that before you made that distinction, it didn’t occur to me that petplay was different enough from BDSM to be considered as a separate thing.)
Anyway it’s unclear to me what sort of scenario has actually played out for you. How much of this is based on your experiences, and how much on extrapolation?
That sounds like ‘their problem’ rather than ‘rude’, but maybe those are often the same thing.
I think your original point is perfectly valid. I was trying to figure out if there was anything other than unthinking gut disgust underlying these responses.
I’ve gone to a video store on all fours, and I’ve gone out leashed, but not at the same time. I’ve been openly affectionate to multiple people (all of us the same gender). I’ve done all sorts of gender bending. The price sign is also a personal example—I went to an electronics store, they had a triangular price sign that worked perfectly as a hat, and it was clear the employee that asked me to stop was seriously alarmed by the situation. I go barefoot routinely during the summer, and occasionally in the winter (0C / 32F hurts to walk in, but I’ll sometimes do it to the coffee shop 2 blocks from me just for fun :))
I don’t consider going around on all fours, leashed, to automatically be BDSM. BDSM suggests I’m getting something sexual out of it, that it’s a relationship activity rather than improv theatre, a sociology experiment, or just good fun weirding out the the normals with friends :) (In case it’s not clear from me kissing other girls in public, I’m fine being weird for it’s own sake AND weird ’cause girls are hot :))
I was taking an object which belonged to someone else, and using it in a way that they didn’t like, even though it was technically harmful. Sort of like if I borrowed your pencil without asking, or even introducing myself. My experience is people react to it as “rude”, rather than “theft”, since it’s obvious I don’t plan to keep the object, and I’m not harming it. I’m just touching something without permission.
That example is clearly not about mere intolerance of weirdness: people dislike criminals because they’re criminals, not because they’re different!
Some of your other examples are more borderline; I agree that for pretty much any behavior related to sex weirdness is judged negatively.
Walking barefooted and on all fours are clearer examples of negatively judging weirdness. I wouldn’t have expected bare feet to be the worst!
The Moldbuggian interpretation of the outward valorisation of nonconformity would be that the supposed nonconformity is but conformity to a different ideology, the actual status quo that he calls the Cathedral, actual nonconformity with which is severely punished by the self-styled nonconformists. “Open mindedness and difference and originality and thinking for yourself and finding your own way and understanding” are (on this view) code for loyalty and obedience to the Cathedral. Thinking for yourself is allowed precisely so long as you arrive at approved answers.
Well, it’s fun running a Moldbug simulation in my head.
I don’t deny that there are some kinds of nonconformisms that will make people look down upon you (no need to get into politics for that, bestiality is a fine example), but it would be quite surprising if all this drum-beating around the values of originality and open-mindedness didn’t actually result in more respect for open-mindedness and originality, even as a side effect.
Do you think all nonconformity is actually punished, or just some specific types of nonconformity?
“College is where nonconformists go to conform to the prevailing standard of nonconformity.”
Pretty sure I once saw that in a Unix fortune file, likely dating to the ’80s.
In your model, the typical educated western adult would not negatively judge someone who is:
promiscuous
polygamous
voluntarily celibate (why is the expert worried about “curing” this non-problem)
mentally ill
gender non-conforming (eg cross-dressing)
a poor speaker of the native language of the community
voluntarily unemployed
male and primary child care provider
I would have great difficulty if I wanted to avoid hearing negative judgments of those or similar traits from college educated adults. I’m not sure we are communicating with the same concepts. I understand intolerance as any act that occurs primarily to make that state of being less frequent / less visible. When I take my son to the park without my wife, and others comment on how unusual I’m being, that’s a kind of intolerance of my behavior.
Not that intolerance is necessarily bad. I’m quite intolerant of murderers, child-rapists, and thieves. But saying a particular intolerance isn’t problematic is different from saying that type of intolerance never occurs.
Those are good examples, BUT, I wasn’t saying that educated westerners don’t accept all forms of weirdness, but rather that weirdness alone isn’t damning, so dislike for some of your examples could be attributed to something else than conformism (mentally ill people are more likely to be stupid or dangerous, poor speakers are worse at communication, voluntarily unemployed people are more likely to be lazy, promiscuous people may be less likely to be faithful spouses).
That being said, you do make a good argument that weirdness per se will probably get you dark looks, and yeah, parenting and sex are probably areas where weirdness is judged particularly negatively.
Note that Caplan’s argument was that intolerance for weirdness reduced innovation, and I’m not sure that our intolerance of weirdness is strong and broad enough to justify that conclusion.
I’m not really convinced either way; maybe a clearer example of beneficial-but-weird would be eating insects.
It’s also possible that I’m in an unusually-tolerant-of-weirness environment; I work in the game industry (with a very loose dress code, and people with pretty diverse backgrounds and attitudes, and nobody minds if we play board games at lunch break), a lot of my uncles and aunts and cousins went off to marry (or live with) foreigners, and I don’t get any comments when I take my son to the park without my wife. Someone whose family is mostly local and religious, and who works in a bank may get a different impression of how tolerant society is of difference.
False on the dangerous aspect. Can you cite a source on intelligence? Obviously since “mentally ill” technically includes ANYONE below IQ 80, it’s going to be lopsided, but I’ve never seen any research that suggests depression, OCD, etc. correlate with a lower IQ.
I had heard that contrary to some stereotypes, autism and schizophrenia are not associated with higher intelligence; and a bit of checking on Google Scholar seems to confirm that mental disorders are usually associated with lower intelligence:
http://archpsyc.jamanetwork.com/article.aspx?articleid=481989#qundefined :
http://bjp.rcpsych.org/content/187/5/407.short
For OCD I’ve seen some results suggesting there was a link, and other suggesting there wasn’t.
I’ve seen a few studies talking about association of mental illnesses with crime and violence, though it doesn’t seem clear whether it’s because of the mental illness or because of low intelligence, poverty or substance abuse who tend to be associated with mental illness.
For example, http://archpsyc.jamanetwork.com/article.aspx?articleid=495755#qundefined
Huh. I’ll have to update on the intelligence factor.
I’ll also concede that there’s at least mild evidence that severely mentally ill people are potentially more dangerous, but I still think the generalization of “mentally ill people are more likely to be dangerous” is unfounded for general, day-to-day purposes.
i.e. if someone responds badly because I’m clearly mildly schizophrenic, but doesn’t respond equally badly to me being clearly male, then obvious this isn’t any sort of sane risk-reward evaluation. It’s just a bias against a group of people (“the mentally ill”)
Overall, I think we agree that Certain Sorts of weirdness are judged in a way that is inconsistent with the actual risks (i.e. me kissing my girlfriend doesn’t harm anyone, but people still object to lesbianism)
I think we also agree that cultures all have “tolerable” sorts of weirdness, such as the Silicon Valley dress code (but good luck getting away with that as a lawyer or a doctor!)
And I think we agree that some cultures, while still having taboos, have fewer taboos. Equally, that while all cultures have norms, some have more inclusive norms.
So if we define weirdness as simply “violating social norms or taboos” then we can see that, yes, weirdness does get a negative reaction. Yet you say that “weirdness alone isn’t damning” and I’m not sure what would constitute this sort of “quintessential weirdness”.
Is there genuinely some other aspect of behavior you’re looking at, or are you just exploring how weirdness ties in to cultural taboos and social norms?
Eh, I’m mostly bouncing ideas around; I was originally annoyed by the lack of strength in Caplan’s argument—and I still don’t think it’s very solid. But also I’m interested in how norms and judgements work in general, and have been jotting down a few ideas that could make another post. I’ve also somewhat revised my opinion as to what extent humans are tolerant of weirdness; I guess Caplan primed me to think of economics and daily life and business models, not gender and sex issues, a more touchy area.
Maybe we could call:
WeirdA = “surprisingly different” WeirdB = “violates social norms”
And I agree that humans don’t tolerate WeirdnessB (pretty much by definition), and Caplan’s argument is that innovation requires WeirdnessA, and I’m saying that how much WeirdA imples WeirdB depends of the society (and the topic at hand).
(I don’t think there’s much confusion left at this point, this is a big discussion for such a small blog post).
Doesn’t seem to be any confusion, thanks :)
Hopefully I was helpful in revising your opinion to include other areas of behavior :)
To follow up handoflixue’s points:
(1) many of the correlations you noted are very weak, relatively speaking (particularly dangerousness and mental illness) some of these labels are social coding, not bare fact (some people who are “voluntarily unemployed” are called housewives. are they lazy?)
(2) why do you care? even if voluntarily unemployed = lazy, what difference does that make in your life? That’s the central problem of intolerance—it’s mostly concealed, unstated judgment about how society should be.
It’s possible that some of this is US v. Europe. Not sure how much. The popular culture use of “tolerance” doesn’t match well with the real issue. Popular-culture-tolerance seems to do better in Europe.
Once upon a time, having a pager was weird—all sorts of social strangeness associated with them. Would they have been invented sooner if society was more open to social strangeness? Would mobile communication technology generally have progress faster?
About your (1) and (2): I’m not saying such negative judgements are justified! Sure, people make stupid judgements about risk and probability and correlation all the time, I’m discussing whether a negative judgement is due to “dislike for the weird and different” as a general tendancy, or to a specific (possibly wrong!) judgement against something.
The pager is a good example of an innovation hampered by intolerance; I remember a time where cell phones were negatively judged too; though even that could maybe be explained by it’s association to a disliked group (Yuppies), not dislike of weirdness. I’m not very convinced by that explanation though, it may make the standard of what really counts as dislilke of weirdness a bit too high.
Points (1) and (2) are not closely related. A person could believe (2) without believing (1)
I think these comments from fubarobfusco and Qiaochu_Yuan explain the point that what counts as conformity is very culturally dependent. Non-conformity in those situations might just be a disguised way of saying that someone desires the culture to change.
How did you choose those examples?
Yes, people who talk about tolerance are not very tolerant of those things, but they are more tolerant of them (except probably mental illness) than people who do not talk about tolerance (including people 50 years ago).
It appears to me that this is pretty much the list of things where Richard Kennaway and scientism concede tolerance, but say are too minor to talk about.
How much conformity people expect from you depends heavily on the culture you’re in. Contrast Japanese culture and Burning Man culture, for instance.
“Intercultural conformity comparison” doesn’t seem like a trivial problem to me. What it means to conform is different in different cultures. In Japan it might mean using polite language. At Burning Man it might mean not being greedy (based on skimming the Wikipedia article; I have no first-hand experience). People at Burning Man might care less about polite language, but that just suggests that they use something other than polite language as a social signal of respect. It doesn’t mean they’ve stopped caring entirely about the concept of respect.
Chanting “nonconformity” doesn’t make you a nonconformist any more than chanting “rationality” makes you a rationalist.
I still think expectations of conformity are largely cultural. “Different cultures demand conformity in different ways” is a compatible assertion. It would be interesting if total conformity demands tend to sum to the same number across cultures, but that seems really unlikely to me.
Perhaps Bryan should check out some birds of paradise. Their mating habits are very diverse—due to sexual selection and signalling. Signalling produces amazing diversity—which helps if the environment ever changes.
Signalling makes changes away from utilitarian norms possible.