With no shade to John in particular, as this applies to many insular lesswrong topics, I just wanna state this gives me a feeling of the blind leading the blind. I could believe someone reading this behaves in the world worse after reading it, mostly because it’d push them further in the same overwrought see-everything-through-status frame. I think it’s particularly the case here because clothing and status are particularly complex and benefit from a wider diversity of frames to think of them in, and require diverse experiences and feedback from many types of communities to generalize well (or to realize just how narrow every “rule” is!)
I’m not saying John has bad social skills or that this doesn’t contain true observations or that someone starting from zero wouldn’t become better thanks to this, nor that John shouldn’t write it, but I do think this is centrally the kind of article one should consider “reverse all advice you read” for, and would like to see more community pushback and articles providing more diverse frames on this.
I’m confident I could sensibly elaborate more on what’s missing/wrong, but in the absence of motivation to, I’ll just let this comment stand as an agree/disagree rod for the statement “We have no clear reason to believe the author is actually good at social skills in diverse environments, they are writing in a seemingly too confident and not caveated enough tone about a too complicated topic without acknowledging that and are potentially misleading/short term net negative to at least a fifth of lesswrong readers who are already on the worse side of social skills”
I think one important caveat the post didn’t mention is that dressing in a clown suit is likely to be polarizing, and there’s a selection bias in that you’re likely to get positive feedback from the people who like it, while the people who are privately rolling their eyes at you will say little. Increasing the variance in how you’re received can often be a fine tradeoff to make, but you should be aware of the fact that you’re making it!
E.g., I used to routinely dress pretty weird and mostly only got positive compliments for it (including from random people on the street), which felt quite cool and good for my self-esteem. Then I happened to mention in one conversation that “yeah, I dress weird, but nobody seems to react negatively” and one person volunteered something like “actually, when I first saw you, I did assume there was something wrong with you and it affected my opinion of you negatively, though that did get corrected when I observed more of you”.
I think there’s a bit of a “no free lunch” element in status interactions, in that if something gets you points for being seen as unusual and courageous, typically the reason why it’s unusual and courageous is that some people will, in fact, deduct you points for it. Now you might still earn more points on average than you lose, but it’s something to keep in mind.
Somewhat relatedly, when I started growing my hair long, I got exclusively positive feedback about it. It would have been easy to take this as evidence that clearly this was a good decision and this is just the better hair style for me. But then again, personal feedback like this tends to be very strongly filtered. Firstly, as in your example, the vast majority of people who disagree will just say nothing rather than telling me “I think this looks worse than before”. Secondly, there were a few cases where people saw me after a longer time, said something like “Oh, your hair is longer!” and then after a brief pause added something like “Looks good!”—I suspect many of these cases were just the person realizing that pointing that out without giving a compliment would seem rude or awkward, so they quickly made sure to say something nice about it.
Oh yeah, that actually reminds me that after not cutting my hair for several years, I recently did cut it. That gave me the chance to notice that when I had long hair, various people told me it looked good—and then after I cut it, different people told me that I looked good for having cut it shorter. But at no point did anyone say “your hair looks bad now”. (Actually no wait, one person did say that my hair was “ruined” now that I cut it, but that person was also ten years old.)
+1 to this. Tying it back to coolness specifically: coolness will absolutely alienate some people. That is not just an unavoidable side effect, it’s load bearing for the game theory to work.
Trying to offend as few people as possible leaves one looking generic, or like a politician/middle manager.
As the opening of the post points out, nonconformity is a strict requirement for better-than-baseline epistemics. If one is trying to offend few people in general, then one’s epistemics are doomed to basically-baseline. So I don’t recommend that goal.
One could still argue that looking generic and inoffensive is fine, so long as one’s beliefs aren’t under lots of conformity pressure. But man, I sure would be very skeptical if someone claimed that were true of themselves.
There’s also the aspect of target audiences. There’s the baseline of looking like everybody else (though of course there isn’t any single baseline, and it changes over time, etc.). Any divergences from this will grant and deduct points from different groups. This should be fine as long as you’re gaining points from groups which you value, and losing points from groups which you don’t care about.
I just wanna state this gives me a feeling of the blind leading the blind.
I think I agree with this. To illustrate: When I met John (which was an overall pleasant interaction) I really did not think that the hat and sunglasses looked cool, but just assumed this was Berkeley style idiosyncracy. Usually I would not deem it appropriate to comment about this publicly, but since it was used as an example in the post this feels like a relevant enough data point to bring up.
I don’t have this feeling. I wouldn’t say that this is the full and final analysis of fashion, but I think the kind of analysis done in this post is very aware of social signaling games in a way that is very hard to find anywhere else on the internet, and so a pretty good contribution to people’s understanding of fashion for that reason.
With no shade to John in particular, as this applies to many insular lesswrong topics, I just wanna state this gives me a feeling of the blind leading the blind. I could believe someone reading this behaves in the world worse after reading it, mostly because it’d push them further in the same overwrought see-everything-through-status frame. I think it’s particularly the case here because clothing and status are particularly complex and benefit from a wider diversity of frames to think of them in, and require diverse experiences and feedback from many types of communities to generalize well (or to realize just how narrow every “rule” is!)
I’m not saying John has bad social skills or that this doesn’t contain true observations or that someone starting from zero wouldn’t become better thanks to this, nor that John shouldn’t write it, but I do think this is centrally the kind of article one should consider “reverse all advice you read” for, and would like to see more community pushback and articles providing more diverse frames on this.
I’m confident I could sensibly elaborate more on what’s missing/wrong, but in the absence of motivation to, I’ll just let this comment stand as an agree/disagree rod for the statement “We have no clear reason to believe the author is actually good at social skills in diverse environments, they are writing in a seemingly too confident and not caveated enough tone about a too complicated topic without acknowledging that and are potentially misleading/short term net negative to at least a fifth of lesswrong readers who are already on the worse side of social skills”
I think one important caveat the post didn’t mention is that dressing in a clown suit is likely to be polarizing, and there’s a selection bias in that you’re likely to get positive feedback from the people who like it, while the people who are privately rolling their eyes at you will say little. Increasing the variance in how you’re received can often be a fine tradeoff to make, but you should be aware of the fact that you’re making it!
E.g., I used to routinely dress pretty weird and mostly only got positive compliments for it (including from random people on the street), which felt quite cool and good for my self-esteem. Then I happened to mention in one conversation that “yeah, I dress weird, but nobody seems to react negatively” and one person volunteered something like “actually, when I first saw you, I did assume there was something wrong with you and it affected my opinion of you negatively, though that did get corrected when I observed more of you”.
I think there’s a bit of a “no free lunch” element in status interactions, in that if something gets you points for being seen as unusual and courageous, typically the reason why it’s unusual and courageous is that some people will, in fact, deduct you points for it. Now you might still earn more points on average than you lose, but it’s something to keep in mind.
Somewhat relatedly, when I started growing my hair long, I got exclusively positive feedback about it. It would have been easy to take this as evidence that clearly this was a good decision and this is just the better hair style for me. But then again, personal feedback like this tends to be very strongly filtered. Firstly, as in your example, the vast majority of people who disagree will just say nothing rather than telling me “I think this looks worse than before”. Secondly, there were a few cases where people saw me after a longer time, said something like “Oh, your hair is longer!” and then after a brief pause added something like “Looks good!”—I suspect many of these cases were just the person realizing that pointing that out without giving a compliment would seem rude or awkward, so they quickly made sure to say something nice about it.
Oh yeah, that actually reminds me that after not cutting my hair for several years, I recently did cut it. That gave me the chance to notice that when I had long hair, various people told me it looked good—and then after I cut it, different people told me that I looked good for having cut it shorter. But at no point did anyone say “your hair looks bad now”. (Actually no wait, one person did say that my hair was “ruined” now that I cut it, but that person was also ten years old.)
Fwiw., my hair grew longer and people often point that out, but never has anyone followed with “looks good”.
Then let me be the first one to (honestly) say that you do look good in long hair.
+1 to this. Tying it back to coolness specifically: coolness will absolutely alienate some people. That is not just an unavoidable side effect, it’s load bearing for the game theory to work.
Trying to offend as few people as possible leaves one looking generic, or like a politician/middle manager.
As the opening of the post points out, nonconformity is a strict requirement for better-than-baseline epistemics. If one is trying to offend few people in general, then one’s epistemics are doomed to basically-baseline. So I don’t recommend that goal.
One could still argue that looking generic and inoffensive is fine, so long as one’s beliefs aren’t under lots of conformity pressure. But man, I sure would be very skeptical if someone claimed that were true of themselves.
There’s also the aspect of target audiences. There’s the baseline of looking like everybody else (though of course there isn’t any single baseline, and it changes over time, etc.). Any divergences from this will grant and deduct points from different groups. This should be fine as long as you’re gaining points from groups which you value, and losing points from groups which you don’t care about.
I think I agree with this. To illustrate: When I met John (which was an overall pleasant interaction) I really did not think that the hat and sunglasses looked cool, but just assumed this was Berkeley style idiosyncracy. Usually I would not deem it appropriate to comment about this publicly, but since it was used as an example in the post this feels like a relevant enough data point to bring up.
I don’t have this feeling. I wouldn’t say that this is the full and final analysis of fashion, but I think the kind of analysis done in this post is very aware of social signaling games in a way that is very hard to find anywhere else on the internet, and so a pretty good contribution to people’s understanding of fashion for that reason.
I for one would be interested in hearing an elaboration.