+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.
+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.