I will second this but with a twist: I tend to look really weird. But looking really weird and FANCY makes for a lot better and fun random social interactions. Put effort into your appearance, decide what you want to look like and what image you like to project, but that image doesn’t have to be optimized for muggles unless you want it to be.
...that image doesn’t have to be optimized for muggles...
Wizards who don’t learn to interact profitably with muggles cut themselves off from most people in the world. Cutting yourself off from most people in the world is a life-altering mistake.
On the contrary: most people in the world are ignorant, useless wastes of your time. One SHOULD cut them out of influencing you and taking up your attention. If you can choose to optimize yourself for interacting with the average mathematician or interacting with the average person, you should choose the mathematician.
But in any case: who said anything about cutting off? What exactly are you picturing here? Some sort of outfit that renders one invisible to anyone but bronies? That’s not how clothing works, except in extreme examples.
People I value won’t care if I have a non-standard hairstyle or wear clothing that doesn’t fit well, I used to think. After cutting my hair and dressing better, I found that this is not the case.
To be clear, I think weird but fancy is great with the right audience. But being unable or not very good at presenting a non-weird image is a bad mistake. I underestimated how strong an image I projected to non-nerdy people. I think many other nerdy people underestimate the strength of the image as well.
I think there a difference between wearing clothing that just doesn’t fit well and wearing the kind of weird clothing that can make a positive impression.
Wearing Hawaii shirts for example is weird but something that people who consider themselves open minded but don’t consider themselves as nerds can see as cool.
I personally make the weird clothing choice of walking around in Vibriam Fivefinger shoes. In contrast to cutting myself off from other people they invite interest and people start conversation with me to ask me about them that they wouldn’t start otherwise.
If you can choose to optimize yourself for interacting with the average mathematician or interacting with the average person, you should choose the mathematician.
If. That would imply that optimizing signals for “muggles” automatically sub-optimizes for “wizards”.
And this is true for most values of wizard (goths, hippies, preps, nudists, professionals) but it’s certainly not true when “wizards” = Intelligent, happy, kind, and effective people. You can signal allegiance to a subculture with a costume, but you can’t signal a virtue.
There is no reliable superficial signal for hidden virtues and abilities which are both universally admired and difficult / impossible to acquire. If such a signal were to exist and become well known, it would immediately become fashionable and thereby lose its signaling properties.
The only honest signal for these traits is actual demonstrations of intelligence, kindness, etc...is actual displays of intellect, altruism, etc. As such, looking weirdly fancy isn’t going to help you to that end. The way to surround yourself with smart/kind/effective people is to inhabit social spaces which attract smart/kind/effective people.
Smart/effective/kind people (especially the elder generations, who happen to be the most useful to impress) are often still prejudiced in all the usual ways though, so you might still alienate them with your appearance.
On the contrary: most people in the world are ignorant, useless wastes of your time.
That’s a really cold way to phrase that. I think that way sometimes, but only when I’m particularly unhappy or frustrated with people. The thought goes away when I remember that most people genuinely care about other people, and many care about me (Or to put it in game theory jargon, my preferences fundamentally overlap with most people’s, and I consider agents who have those preferences intrinsically valuable).
That would imply that optimizing signals for “muggles” automatically sub-optimizes for “wizards”.
I used to think that it didn’t matter how I dressed, because everyone who wasn’t dumb and superficial would just ignore my appearance and focus on other things in me. Then I noticed that I would feel an instinctive dislike towards people who looked bad, and an automatic liking towards people who looked good.
It was the other way round for me—I started instinctively disliking bad-looking people a few months after having started to optimize my appearance for dumb superficial people.
If. That would imply that optimizing signals for “muggles” automatically sub-optimizes for “wizards”.
It almost certainly does, but that is a comment on ‘optimal’ and ‘sub-optimal’, not a claim that optimizing signals for muggles will not result in highly satisfactory wizard signals nevertheless. ‘Sub-optimal’ doesn’t preclude awesome.
(especially the elder generations, who happen to be the most useful to impress) are often still prejudiced in all the usual ways
Even that is less true in the hard sciences. I once had a professor in his mid sixties compliment me for my Clockwork Orange t-shirt after an oral exam, and most of faculty here seldom wears anything more formal than a polo shirt or a pullover.
There is no reliable superficial signal for hidden virtues and abilities which are both universally admired and difficult / impossible to acquire.
What about being seen with lots of friends without looking like the kind of person who would get lots of friends regardless of intelligence, happiness, kindness and effectiveness? Countersignalling FTW!
Hehe, that is a clever/amusing idea. But even if it’s true that this constitutes a meaningful signal (there are plenty of ways to get friends that do not involve intelligence, kindness, or effectiveness that leave no visual cues—like extroversion), it’s a signal so subtle that I don’t think I would pick up on it.
Edit: It would work for simpler things though—we wouldn’t be as impressed with David’s intelligence if his muscles were as large as Goliath’s.
My reference class was “traits I would want in a friend”. I don’t really care about how often my friends feel the need to be alone.
Extroversion is probably correlated with happiness—but then again, if we accept introversion-extroversion as intrinsic personality traits, who is to say that a lonely, socially awkard extrovert won’t give the same test results as a sad introvert? Correlation(extroversion, income) supposedly has a inverse U shaped curve.
Actually, the truth is I don’t pick friends based on raw happiness either...it was shorthand for general emotional maturity. I wouldn’t want to be less friends with someone if they were depressed, for example—it’s just that I don’t want anger, anxiety, insecurity, and other sorts of aggression directed at me, and people who frequently experience negative emotions are more likely to direct aggression at others.
most people in the world are ignorant, useless wastes of your time
Most people in the world would be wastes of time due to the opportunity cost spending time with them would represent. “Useless” seems inaccurate, even without considering ways to stab people to death with their bones.
most people in the world are ignorant, useless wastes of your time
Are you sure you’re not being a bit judgmental? Are you positive you’re upholding proper value subjectivism when making this statement? What exactly are these people ignorant of, and why does it matter? What purpose are they useless for, and who’s utility function contains this purpose? What are you optimizing for socially, and why do you suggest we do the same?
You may say I’m being pedantic, but I don’t think so. There are pitfalls everywhere on this subject. Although you might be correct, you shouldn’t discount the possibility that you believe that statement only because you makes you feel like you’re really awesome. If you changed your mind, you would lose a belief that makes you feel really superior, etc. Using terminology like “wizards” and “muggles” makes me think you’ve really gone off the deep end here.
Besides believing this statement being a good way to feel superior, it’s also a good way to shield oneself from social rejection. As a fundamental fact about how typical human hardware works, we can up-regulate or down-regulate how much we care about success with certain classes of people. If you think someone is really awesome, you feel more enjoyment when they accept you, and more pain when they reject you. If you think they’re an idiot, you feel less of both.
People like us tend to make a strong effort to match up our beliefs with reality, but most fundamentally our motivation system rewards us when we change our beliefs so we feel more enjoyment or less pain, not when the map becomes more matched up with the territory. Sometimes feeling better aligns well with updating to truer beliefs, but sometimes it doesn’t. In this area, few things are more common than people grasping as straws trying to figure out why all the people who reject them are just idiots. Less pain that way.
So here we are. You made a statement that contains a lot of unpacked information that if unpacked may demonstrate that you’re being unfair, and at the same time I’ve identified two strong non-epistemic reasons to believe it. You get to feel superior, and you get to avoid the pain of social rejection from the “muggles”. The moment you realize your beliefs could just be identity trips, you should massively increase the evidence you demand from such a proposition—that is if you want to optimize for true beliefs. This means addressing the questions in my first paragraph, and doing so rigorously.
so I’m not being nice enough, and you want me to defend myself rigorously? Why am I suddenly held to these standards? I think it’s perfectly obvious what I meant, and you don’t want to accept or admit that most people aren’t that great. I think you possess some views about the basic value of humans are afraid to let them go. So you have to attack me as being awkward or deluded in order for your own delusions to make any sense. I can and have explained elsewhere on these forums what I mean and I would gladly again, if you had simply asked what I meant. Instead you generate a multi-paragraph fantasy of myself, a person you’ve never met, involving rejection and inability to accept that rejection. This puts me in no mood to even really interact with you, let alone respond to your what I assume will be ever further rationalized attempts to prove my opinions wrong.
I didn’t mean to accuse you of anything. I even said you may be correct. I was just pointing out that there are a couple common pitfalls on this subject which suggest one should require a higher level of rigor. It’s indeed perfectly obvious what you meant, but what’s not obvious is whether you’re correct in your appraisal. If there were no pitfalls here, perhaps just the statement itself would be enough. But the presence of the pitfalls suggests that unpacking the propositions you made would be beneficial.
I guess I learned my lesson though. I clearly worded my post in an unfair or offensive manner. Sorry about that.
In modern culture, you get a fair amount of weirdness allowed as long as you are capable of being normal when it counts and are not too self-indulgent with it…
But “people who should be ignored” and “people who don’t care how you look” are hardly identical sets. If anything, they’re more likely to be opposed than overlapping. The sort of people you want to deal with are usually those with enough merit to have choices in who they interact with, and thus they’re naturally more picky.
I’m not against CARING HOW YOU LOOK. I’m against the view that caring how you look means you need to wear a suit or polo shirt and slacks or whatever the generic high-class look is.
There’s other ways to care, but as a rule successful people are more likely to be worth knowing than others, are more able to be picky with their class distinctions, and are thus most likely to be worth emulating. It’s not a universal strategy, but it’s a common enough one that it’s worth keeping it available.
I am probably already cut off from most people in the world. A large fraction, possibly of a majority, of the world population can’t speak any of the languages I can speak.
But I’m only ever going to interact with a tiny fraction of all the people in the world anyway, so that’s not a big deal. And if I have to choose whether to have 150 wizard friends or 150 muggle friends, I’ll surely pick the former.
I will second this but with a twist: I tend to look really weird. But looking really weird and FANCY makes for a lot better and fun random social interactions. Put effort into your appearance, decide what you want to look like and what image you like to project, but that image doesn’t have to be optimized for muggles unless you want it to be.
Wizards who don’t learn to interact profitably with muggles cut themselves off from most people in the world. Cutting yourself off from most people in the world is a life-altering mistake.
On the contrary: most people in the world are ignorant, useless wastes of your time. One SHOULD cut them out of influencing you and taking up your attention. If you can choose to optimize yourself for interacting with the average mathematician or interacting with the average person, you should choose the mathematician.
But in any case: who said anything about cutting off? What exactly are you picturing here? Some sort of outfit that renders one invisible to anyone but bronies? That’s not how clothing works, except in extreme examples.
People I value won’t care if I have a non-standard hairstyle or wear clothing that doesn’t fit well, I used to think. After cutting my hair and dressing better, I found that this is not the case.
To be clear, I think weird but fancy is great with the right audience. But being unable or not very good at presenting a non-weird image is a bad mistake. I underestimated how strong an image I projected to non-nerdy people. I think many other nerdy people underestimate the strength of the image as well.
I think there a difference between wearing clothing that just doesn’t fit well and wearing the kind of weird clothing that can make a positive impression.
Wearing Hawaii shirts for example is weird but something that people who consider themselves open minded but don’t consider themselves as nerds can see as cool.
I personally make the weird clothing choice of walking around in Vibriam Fivefinger shoes. In contrast to cutting myself off from other people they invite interest and people start conversation with me to ask me about them that they wouldn’t start otherwise.
If. That would imply that optimizing signals for “muggles” automatically sub-optimizes for “wizards”.
And this is true for most values of wizard (goths, hippies, preps, nudists, professionals) but it’s certainly not true when “wizards” = Intelligent, happy, kind, and effective people. You can signal allegiance to a subculture with a costume, but you can’t signal a virtue.
There is no reliable superficial signal for hidden virtues and abilities which are both universally admired and difficult / impossible to acquire. If such a signal were to exist and become well known, it would immediately become fashionable and thereby lose its signaling properties.
The only honest signal for these traits is actual demonstrations of intelligence, kindness, etc...is actual displays of intellect, altruism, etc. As such, looking weirdly fancy isn’t going to help you to that end. The way to surround yourself with smart/kind/effective people is to inhabit social spaces which attract smart/kind/effective people.
Smart/effective/kind people (especially the elder generations, who happen to be the most useful to impress) are often still prejudiced in all the usual ways though, so you might still alienate them with your appearance.
That’s a really cold way to phrase that. I think that way sometimes, but only when I’m particularly unhappy or frustrated with people. The thought goes away when I remember that most people genuinely care about other people, and many care about me (Or to put it in game theory jargon, my preferences fundamentally overlap with most people’s, and I consider agents who have those preferences intrinsically valuable).
I used to think that it didn’t matter how I dressed, because everyone who wasn’t dumb and superficial would just ignore my appearance and focus on other things in me. Then I noticed that I would feel an instinctive dislike towards people who looked bad, and an automatic liking towards people who looked good.
Did you conclude that your initial belief was incorrect, or did you conclude that you were dumb and superficial?
I think both.
It was the other way round for me—I started instinctively disliking bad-looking people a few months after having started to optimize my appearance for dumb superficial people.
It almost certainly does, but that is a comment on ‘optimal’ and ‘sub-optimal’, not a claim that optimizing signals for muggles will not result in highly satisfactory wizard signals nevertheless. ‘Sub-optimal’ doesn’t preclude awesome.
this is very true. My appearance is more optimized towards wizards but usually gets positive comments from muggles as well
Even that is less true in the hard sciences. I once had a professor in his mid sixties compliment me for my Clockwork Orange t-shirt after an oral exam, and most of faculty here seldom wears anything more formal than a polo shirt or a pullover.
For the purpose impressing people is most important for elder generations are not the most useful to impress.
What about being seen with lots of friends without looking like the kind of person who would get lots of friends regardless of intelligence, happiness, kindness and effectiveness? Countersignalling FTW!
Hehe, that is a clever/amusing idea. But even if it’s true that this constitutes a meaningful signal (there are plenty of ways to get friends that do not involve intelligence, kindness, or effectiveness that leave no visual cues—like extroversion), it’s a signal so subtle that I don’t think I would pick up on it.
Edit: It would work for simpler things though—we wouldn’t be as impressed with David’s intelligence if his muscles were as large as Goliath’s.
I would have counted extroversion as in the same reference class as intelligence, happiness, kindness and effectiveness.
My reference class was “traits I would want in a friend”. I don’t really care about how often my friends feel the need to be alone.
Extroversion is probably correlated with happiness—but then again, if we accept introversion-extroversion as intrinsic personality traits, who is to say that a lonely, socially awkard extrovert won’t give the same test results as a sad introvert? Correlation(extroversion, income) supposedly has a inverse U shaped curve.
Actually, the truth is I don’t pick friends based on raw happiness either...it was shorthand for general emotional maturity. I wouldn’t want to be less friends with someone if they were depressed, for example—it’s just that I don’t want anger, anxiety, insecurity, and other sorts of aggression directed at me, and people who frequently experience negative emotions are more likely to direct aggression at others.
Most people in the world would be wastes of time due to the opportunity cost spending time with them would represent. “Useless” seems inaccurate, even without considering ways to stab people to death with their bones.
Are you sure you’re not being a bit judgmental? Are you positive you’re upholding proper value subjectivism when making this statement? What exactly are these people ignorant of, and why does it matter? What purpose are they useless for, and who’s utility function contains this purpose? What are you optimizing for socially, and why do you suggest we do the same?
You may say I’m being pedantic, but I don’t think so. There are pitfalls everywhere on this subject. Although you might be correct, you shouldn’t discount the possibility that you believe that statement only because you makes you feel like you’re really awesome. If you changed your mind, you would lose a belief that makes you feel really superior, etc. Using terminology like “wizards” and “muggles” makes me think you’ve really gone off the deep end here.
Besides believing this statement being a good way to feel superior, it’s also a good way to shield oneself from social rejection. As a fundamental fact about how typical human hardware works, we can up-regulate or down-regulate how much we care about success with certain classes of people. If you think someone is really awesome, you feel more enjoyment when they accept you, and more pain when they reject you. If you think they’re an idiot, you feel less of both.
People like us tend to make a strong effort to match up our beliefs with reality, but most fundamentally our motivation system rewards us when we change our beliefs so we feel more enjoyment or less pain, not when the map becomes more matched up with the territory. Sometimes feeling better aligns well with updating to truer beliefs, but sometimes it doesn’t. In this area, few things are more common than people grasping as straws trying to figure out why all the people who reject them are just idiots. Less pain that way.
So here we are. You made a statement that contains a lot of unpacked information that if unpacked may demonstrate that you’re being unfair, and at the same time I’ve identified two strong non-epistemic reasons to believe it. You get to feel superior, and you get to avoid the pain of social rejection from the “muggles”. The moment you realize your beliefs could just be identity trips, you should massively increase the evidence you demand from such a proposition—that is if you want to optimize for true beliefs. This means addressing the questions in my first paragraph, and doing so rigorously.
so I’m not being nice enough, and you want me to defend myself rigorously? Why am I suddenly held to these standards? I think it’s perfectly obvious what I meant, and you don’t want to accept or admit that most people aren’t that great. I think you possess some views about the basic value of humans are afraid to let them go. So you have to attack me as being awkward or deluded in order for your own delusions to make any sense. I can and have explained elsewhere on these forums what I mean and I would gladly again, if you had simply asked what I meant. Instead you generate a multi-paragraph fantasy of myself, a person you’ve never met, involving rejection and inability to accept that rejection. This puts me in no mood to even really interact with you, let alone respond to your what I assume will be ever further rationalized attempts to prove my opinions wrong.
I didn’t mean to accuse you of anything. I even said you may be correct. I was just pointing out that there are a couple common pitfalls on this subject which suggest one should require a higher level of rigor. It’s indeed perfectly obvious what you meant, but what’s not obvious is whether you’re correct in your appraisal. If there were no pitfalls here, perhaps just the statement itself would be enough. But the presence of the pitfalls suggests that unpacking the propositions you made would be beneficial.
I guess I learned my lesson though. I clearly worded my post in an unfair or offensive manner. Sorry about that.
In modern culture, you get a fair amount of weirdness allowed as long as you are capable of being normal when it counts and are not too self-indulgent with it…
World of squibs.
But “people who should be ignored” and “people who don’t care how you look” are hardly identical sets. If anything, they’re more likely to be opposed than overlapping. The sort of people you want to deal with are usually those with enough merit to have choices in who they interact with, and thus they’re naturally more picky.
I’m not against CARING HOW YOU LOOK. I’m against the view that caring how you look means you need to wear a suit or polo shirt and slacks or whatever the generic high-class look is.
There’s other ways to care, but as a rule successful people are more likely to be worth knowing than others, are more able to be picky with their class distinctions, and are thus most likely to be worth emulating. It’s not a universal strategy, but it’s a common enough one that it’s worth keeping it available.
I’m not at all sure that avoiding high variance strategies is always a great idea.
I am probably already cut off from most people in the world. A large fraction, possibly of a majority, of the world population can’t speak any of the languages I can speak.
But I’m only ever going to interact with a tiny fraction of all the people in the world anyway, so that’s not a big deal. And if I have to choose whether to have 150 wizard friends or 150 muggle friends, I’ll surely pick the former.