I think this is our empirical disagreement, so I’m not sure if conversation beyond this point is productive, but I’m glad we’ve pinpointed it. Concretely, I think this:
insofar as one is honest with oneself, one’s own reaction/vibe to a mirror is damn strong evidence of other peoples’ reaction/vibe.
is simply false, and is especially false for the sort of people who need fashion advice. There are some relevant nitpicks here, mainly that if reactions to an outfit are more than one-dimensional we shouldn’t expect a “majority” vibe to exist at all, but those only seem important because I think people are often very mistaken about how others receive us.
Beyond that there’s a mindset here that I think you should be wary of, or at least should emphasize more strongly so that others are wary of it:
There may be lots of people who hate it, but at that point it is plausibly just correct to respond “well you can’t please everyone, and anyone who stands out is gonna bother some people”.
This is plausibly correct, sure, but I don’t think it feels more correct in cases where it’s true compared to cases where it’s false. Naively chalking up another person’s negative impression of oneself to them being bothered by anybody who stands out is in my view the dominant failure mode for personality, it’s the thought-terminating cliche that stops disagreeable or reactively non-conformist people from performing useful introspection.
Earlier we talked about the information content of a person’s impression of one’s outfit. I expect that very few people can get enough bits out of people who strongly dislike their style to make reasonable judgments about why they bother some people. Thus the strength with which this response resonates is controlled more by one’s prior, which is controlled by these personality factors. Some people may need to hear this, sure, but I’d usually accompany it with “On the other hand, the most stylish people I know very rarely get strong negative reactions, draw a lot of positive attention, and are not optimizing for perceived status or polarization.”
This second point seems more like a values difference than an object-level disagreement, though. If the goal is to optimize for the number of people who see you as (ingroup-proximate + high-status) your advice becomes makes a little more sense, and I’d recommend approaching things differently but broadly adopting the more polarizing, counter-signalling approach (although this means you don’t get to choose the ingroup you’re proximate to! It’s just going to be Todd Phillips fans and co.) I just don’t think this is a worthwhile or efficient thing to optimize for in this medium, and I expect whatever you can accomplish in this way to not be worth the downsides.
I think this is our empirical disagreement, so I’m not sure if conversation beyond this point is productive, but I’m glad we’ve pinpointed it. Concretely, I think this:
is simply false, and is especially false for the sort of people who need fashion advice. There are some relevant nitpicks here, mainly that if reactions to an outfit are more than one-dimensional we shouldn’t expect a “majority” vibe to exist at all, but those only seem important because I think people are often very mistaken about how others receive us.
Beyond that there’s a mindset here that I think you should be wary of, or at least should emphasize more strongly so that others are wary of it:
This is plausibly correct, sure, but I don’t think it feels more correct in cases where it’s true compared to cases where it’s false. Naively chalking up another person’s negative impression of oneself to them being bothered by anybody who stands out is in my view the dominant failure mode for personality, it’s the thought-terminating cliche that stops disagreeable or reactively non-conformist people from performing useful introspection.
Earlier we talked about the information content of a person’s impression of one’s outfit. I expect that very few people can get enough bits out of people who strongly dislike their style to make reasonable judgments about why they bother some people. Thus the strength with which this response resonates is controlled more by one’s prior, which is controlled by these personality factors. Some people may need to hear this, sure, but I’d usually accompany it with “On the other hand, the most stylish people I know very rarely get strong negative reactions, draw a lot of positive attention, and are not optimizing for perceived status or polarization.”
This second point seems more like a values difference than an object-level disagreement, though. If the goal is to optimize for the number of people who see you as (ingroup-proximate + high-status) your advice becomes makes a little more sense, and I’d recommend approaching things differently but broadly adopting the more polarizing, counter-signalling approach (although this means you don’t get to choose the ingroup you’re proximate to! It’s just going to be Todd Phillips fans and co.) I just don’t think this is a worthwhile or efficient thing to optimize for in this medium, and I expect whatever you can accomplish in this way to not be worth the downsides.