Wearing a suit in an inappropriate context is like wearing a fedora. It says “I am socially clueless enough to do random inappropriate things”. The fact that people will eventually stop asking you about the suit does not mean that you are no longer saying this message, nor does it mean that people will stop listening to it.
And if your reaction is “I’m just not conforming. I’m not harming anyone, why do they care?”, it’s sending a message. Messages don’t need to cause harm for people to react to them.
That’s because if you wear a suit in a casual culture, then you want to be sending the subconscious message It’s no big deal that I’m wearing a suit.
You have a limited ability to choose the message that your action sends. It may not be possible to wear the suit and avoid sending the message that you are socially clueless. You also have a limited ability to make people believe your message. You can send the message “I think the suit is no big deal”, but nobody is forced to agree that the suit is no big deal.
Wearing a suit in an inappropriate context is like wearing a fedora. It says “I am socially clueless enough to do random inappropriate things”.
“In an inappropriate context” is ambiguous. It can mean “in a context where people don’t normally wear suits” or it can mean “in a place where people consider it actively wrong to wear a suit”.
There are of course places of the latter type, like it would be very weird to wear a suit in a gym or swimming pool. But I don’t think lsusr would advocate that.
If you just mean “in a context where people don’t normally wear suits”, then wearing a suit in such a context could signal social cluelessness, but it could also signal confidence and self-esteem.
This reasoning would justify violating any social convention whatsoever. “Refusing to say ‘please’ and ‘thank you’ signals confidence and self-esteem”.
Yes, it does, but signalling those things and signalling social cluelessness are entwined. “My self esteem is more important than these petty rules” can mean that you think you are really important compared to the rules, or that the rules are unimportant compared to you. You’re also overrating self-esteem. Signalling self-esteem is often a bad thing.
(Remember how fedoras became a sign of cluelessness? It’s not very different from out of context suits.)
This reasoning would justify violating any social convention whatsoever. “Refusing to say ‘please’ and ‘thank you’ signals confidence and self-esteem”.
Wrong. I distinguished between conventions that people have a reason to respond negatively to if you violate them (e.g. wearing a suit to the gym or swimming pool which is stupid since it will ruin both your exercise and your suit), and behaviors that just happen to be unusual but not intrinsically negative. Refusing to say ‘please’ and ‘thank you’ would fall squarely in the category that people would have a reason to feel negative about.
My understanding is that fedoras became a sign of cluelessness because they got associated with groups like pick-up artists, which is also an explicit reason to have a negative reaction to them.
Refusing to say ‘please’ and ‘thank you’ would fall squarely in the category that people would have a reason to feel negative about.
It’s not like wearing a suit in a swimming pool. Never saying “thank you” doesn’t physically damage things. It just makes people upset because of the social inappropriateness, like the inappropriate suit.
Wearing a suit in an inappropriate context is like wearing a fedora. It says “I am socially clueless enough to do random inappropriate things”
This is far too broadly stated, the actual message people will take away from an unexpected suit is verrrrry context-dependent, depending on (among other things) who the suit-wearer is, who the people observing are, how the suit-wearer carries himself, the particular situation the suit is worn in, etc. etc. etc. Judging from the post it sounds like those things create an overall favorable impression for lsusr?(it’s hard to tell from just a post of course, but still)
Yeah, I started wearing a suit in specific contexts after many months of careful consideration. It’s not random at all. Everything about it is carefully considered, from the number of buttons on my jacket to the color of my shoes.
I mostly wear it around artists. Artists basically never wear suits where I live, but they really appreciate them because ① artists are particularly sensitive to aesthetic fundamentals and ② artists like creative clothing.
There’s a Korean expression that basicly seems to be “the look is right” or “the look fits” which seems in line with your comment. The same outfit, hat, shoes, glasses, jacket or even car for different people create a different image in other’s heads. There is a different message getting sent.
So if the overall point for the post is about the signaling then I suspect it is very important to consider the device one chooses to send messages like this. In other words, yes breaking some social/cultural standards to make certain points is fine but thought needs to be put into just how appropriately your chosen device/method “fits” you will probably have a fairly large impact on your success.
I suspect that holds just as well if you’re looking at some type of “polarizing” action as a mechanism for breaking the ice and providing some filtering for making new acquaintances and future good friends.
It says “I am socially clueless enough to do random inappropriate things”
In a sense I agree with you, if you are trying to signal something specific, then wearing a suit in an unusual context is probably the wrong way of doing it. But, the social signalling game is exhausting. (I am English, maybe this makes it worse than normal for me). If I am a guest at someone’s house and they offer me food, what am I signalling by saying yes? What if I say no? They didn’t let me buy the next round of drinks, do I try again later or take No for an answer? Are they offering me a lift because they actually don’t mind? How many levels deep do I need to go in trying to work this situation out?
I have known a few people over the years with odd dress preferences (one person really, really liked an Indiana Jones style hat). To me, the hat declared “I know the rules, and I hereby declare no intention of following them. Everyone else here thereby has permission to stop worrying about this tower of imagined formality and relax.” For me that was very nice, creating a more relaxed situation. They tore down the hall of mirrors, and made it easier for me to enjoy myself. I have seen people take other actions with that purpose, clothes are just one way.
Long way of saying, sometimes a good way of asking people to relax is by breaking a few unimportant rules. But, even aside from that, it seems like the OP isn’t trying to do this at all. They have actually just genuinely had enough with the hall of mirrors game and have declared themselves to no longer be playing. Its only socially clueless if you break the rules by mistake. If you know you are breaking them, but just don’t care, it is a different thing. The entire structure of the post makes it clear the OP knows they are breaking the rules.
As a political comparison, Donald Trump didn’t propose putting a “Rivera of the Middle East” in Gaza because he is politically clueless, he did so because he doesn’t care about being politically clued-in and he wants everyone to know it.
Yes, but that doesn’t mean that you can just avoid it and its consequences. Like war, you may not be interested in it, but it is interested in you. And if you can’t avoid sometimes messing up, you can at least avoid making it worse than it has to be (such as by gratuitously wearing inappropriate clothes).
They have actually just genuinely had enough with the hall of mirrors game and have declared themselves to no longer be playing.
Yes, but he’s acting like it’s a triumphant success. Voluntarily deciding “I don’t want social skills” is a surrender that seriously harms you. If you can’t get social skills perfect, at least do what you can. And he certainly can avoid wearing inappropriate suits, even if he might mess up deciding when to buy drinks.
As a political comparison, Donald Trump didn’t propose putting a “Rivera of the Middle East” in Gaza because he is politically clueless, he did so because he doesn’t care about being politically clued-in and he wants everyone to know it.
Genuinely communicating “I don’t care and I want you to know it” without communicating bad things at the same time is countersignalling. Not just anyone can countersignal. Trump can do this because he’s in a powerful position that implies a certain amount of cluefulness (and even then, his opponents are happy to jump on this sort of stuff as evidence of cluelessness).
Personal moderation decision: I’m cutting off the Trump discussion here. Any further comments will be removed, on the grounds that their political mindkillery effects trump their relevance to this discussion.
This policy applies only to this post and does not generalize to my other posts.
Voluntarily deciding “I don’t want social skills” is a surrender that seriously harms you.
citation needed. my own experience is the opposite of that. refusing to play the game let you take the role of the local nerd, and it’s not a bad role. and it’s much much better then trying to play the game and failing.
Where do you live? It’s conceivable that a suit actually does mean these things where you live, but doesn’t in the bay area. Some scenes/areas just don’t expect people to dress in normative ways, they’ll celebrate anything as long as it’s done well.
Late to the thread, but wearing a suit or indeed even a fedora only sends that message to a very particular type of person — to an approximation: highly parochial people who have spent too much time immersed in WASP culture, ie. the same people who care a lot about professionalism and think it’s inappropriate to strike up conversation with strangers on a bus or train.
For a highly insular and parochial crowd like the LessWrong community, that type of person may simply seem like a “normal person”, but normal people (for example: people who live in rural areas and spend much less time online) would disagree. Moreover, it is not possible to avoid giving that kind of WASPy person the impression of social cluelessness without being conformist to the point of profound repression, which is why so many rednecks, blacks, gays, and latinas can agree that you all are kinda hard to get along with.
If you go to a place full of normal people, you will find that the men generally know very little about clothing and will wear what looks good to them, which is basically just a combination of what their friends wear, what the local people they look up to wear, and what they see in American television. If they wear genuinely odd things like a fedora, they will probably be teased a lot by their friends (which is a good sign; it means full acceptance and not just toleration), but it will not be deemed a social faux pas since the “fedora = neckbeard” association only exists in very specific social spheres. I live in a small town in the middle of nowhere, and I bet you that most people here have never even heard of Reddit and have no idea what a neckbeard is.
TL;DR: not everyone is a yank, if you’ll excuse my French.
Edit: why are y’all downvoting me? Are you just confirming the stereotype about extreme insularity or are you making a non-obvious point? Experience leads me to suspect it’s the former, which makes me wonder: is there anything, even in principle, which could get you to change your mind? If nothing else, could you at least clarify which parts of the post you disagree with?
It’s true that people in some obscure small town may not be aware of online stereotypes, but the stereotype isn’t the cause of the problem, it’s the result. People already notice that wearing a suit or fedora is weird behavior, and they already understand the signal sent out by it. If they see many occurrences of the same weird behavior, they will notice the trend and put a label on it, but the label is not the cause of their disdain.
you will find that the men generally know very little about clothing and will wear what looks good to them
Knowing little isn’t the same as knowing nothing. Suits and fedoras are things that even people who don’t know much know enough not to wear inappropriately.
teased … means full acceptance and not just toleration
I think you are off base here.
It means “you’ve spent some of your weirdness points, but not so many as to end the friendship”.
No, you are missing the point. Even the signal being sent out by it is much more contingent than you seem to realise. In the culture you are familiar with, wearing a fedora inappropriately is strongly correlated with having the neckbeard personality type and being engaged in some pretense or another, but that correlation is far from universal. Neckbeards wear fedoras to LARP as stylish (without understanding how style actually works), much like neckbeards wear trenchcoats to LARP as Neo from the Matrix, etc. But that whole pattern of behaviour is just much less common on a global scale than you think it is. In the environments familiar to you, that kind of neckbeard-poser type accounts for the majority of people wearing fedoras inappropriately. In other places it accounts for only a minority.
Moreover, the loathing directed at neckbeardy types is itself less pronounced outside of nerd-culture. Many nerds are chronically afraid of being deemed neckbeard-adjacent, and hence treat it as the worst thing a person could be. That is also not a universal.
Knowing little isn’t the same as knowing nothing. Suits and fedoras are things that even people who don’t know much know enough not to wear inappropriately.
No, you are simply underestimating how clueless most people are about these things. A great many people still think of American culture as revolving around cowboy hats. Even the concept of situationally dependent dress codes is highly counterintuitive to the many people whose identities are less contextual than those of urbanites. Most people in the world at present, and almost everyone in premodern history, have a communal sense-of-self where who they are is tied up with their role in the community. A medieval blacksmith did not merely “have a job” as a medieval blacksmith, he was a blacksmith, through and through.
Print shirts were not a thing until recently, so older apparel has a tendency to look distinctly “proper” to modern beholders. But an urban worker in Victorian England would not put on an evening suit just because he was seeking a favour with an upperclass gentleman. He would make sure his clothes were tidy and that he was overall well presented, but he would not even know what outfits a gentleman would deem appropriate for the occasion, much less own them. The upper classes of the time did have contextually dependent dress codes, but that is because they were fully living in modernity and engaged in urban commerce.
It means “you’ve spent some of your weirdness points, but not so many as to end the friendship”.
No, the whole construct of “weirdness points” is completely missing the mark where people of this sort are concerned. There actually just isn’t a threshold of weirdness where these types will conclude you are crazy. They do not have Aspergers and are therefore perfectly capable of telling the difference between weirdness and craziness without relying on degree at all. On the other hand, even quite small amounts of craziness will tend to alienate them quite a bit. If they are financially struggling, they tend to be suspicious towards anything that seems foreign, but that’s not quite the same as weirdness, but even setting aside that distinction, it is still not the case that a large amount of slightly weird behaviours add up linearly into a large amount of weirdness, like spending weirdness points. That’s just not how it works outside of the spheres that Peter Wildeford had in mind when writing about weirdness points.
I’m banning you from commenting on my posts on the grounds that your comments are, on tone alone, argumentative rather than constructive. This has nothing to do with whether you are correct.
Spend your weirdness points wisely.
Wearing a suit in an inappropriate context is like wearing a fedora. It says “I am socially clueless enough to do random inappropriate things”. The fact that people will eventually stop asking you about the suit does not mean that you are no longer saying this message, nor does it mean that people will stop listening to it.
And if your reaction is “I’m just not conforming. I’m not harming anyone, why do they care?”, it’s sending a message. Messages don’t need to cause harm for people to react to them.
You have a limited ability to choose the message that your action sends. It may not be possible to wear the suit and avoid sending the message that you are socially clueless. You also have a limited ability to make people believe your message. You can send the message “I think the suit is no big deal”, but nobody is forced to agree that the suit is no big deal.
“In an inappropriate context” is ambiguous. It can mean “in a context where people don’t normally wear suits” or it can mean “in a place where people consider it actively wrong to wear a suit”.
There are of course places of the latter type, like it would be very weird to wear a suit in a gym or swimming pool. But I don’t think lsusr would advocate that.
If you just mean “in a context where people don’t normally wear suits”, then wearing a suit in such a context could signal social cluelessness, but it could also signal confidence and self-esteem.
This reasoning would justify violating any social convention whatsoever. “Refusing to say ‘please’ and ‘thank you’ signals confidence and self-esteem”.
Yes, it does, but signalling those things and signalling social cluelessness are entwined. “My self esteem is more important than these petty rules” can mean that you think you are really important compared to the rules, or that the rules are unimportant compared to you. You’re also overrating self-esteem. Signalling self-esteem is often a bad thing.
(Remember how fedoras became a sign of cluelessness? It’s not very different from out of context suits.)
Wrong. I distinguished between conventions that people have a reason to respond negatively to if you violate them (e.g. wearing a suit to the gym or swimming pool which is stupid since it will ruin both your exercise and your suit), and behaviors that just happen to be unusual but not intrinsically negative. Refusing to say ‘please’ and ‘thank you’ would fall squarely in the category that people would have a reason to feel negative about.
My understanding is that fedoras became a sign of cluelessness because they got associated with groups like pick-up artists, which is also an explicit reason to have a negative reaction to them.
It’s not like wearing a suit in a swimming pool. Never saying “thank you” doesn’t physically damage things. It just makes people upset because of the social inappropriateness, like the inappropriate suit.
This is far too broadly stated, the actual message people will take away from an unexpected suit is verrrrry context-dependent, depending on (among other things) who the suit-wearer is, who the people observing are, how the suit-wearer carries himself, the particular situation the suit is worn in, etc. etc. etc. Judging from the post it sounds like those things create an overall favorable impression for lsusr?(it’s hard to tell from just a post of course, but still)
Yeah, I started wearing a suit in specific contexts after many months of careful consideration. It’s not random at all. Everything about it is carefully considered, from the number of buttons on my jacket to the color of my shoes.
I mostly wear it around artists. Artists basically never wear suits where I live, but they really appreciate them because ① artists are particularly sensitive to aesthetic fundamentals and ② artists like creative clothing.
There’s a Korean expression that basicly seems to be “the look is right” or “the look fits” which seems in line with your comment. The same outfit, hat, shoes, glasses, jacket or even car for different people create a different image in other’s heads. There is a different message getting sent.
So if the overall point for the post is about the signaling then I suspect it is very important to consider the device one chooses to send messages like this. In other words, yes breaking some social/cultural standards to make certain points is fine but thought needs to be put into just how appropriately your chosen device/method “fits” you will probably have a fairly large impact on your success.
I suspect that holds just as well if you’re looking at some type of “polarizing” action as a mechanism for breaking the ice and providing some filtering for making new acquaintances and future good friends.
In a sense I agree with you, if you are trying to signal something specific, then wearing a suit in an unusual context is probably the wrong way of doing it. But, the social signalling game is exhausting. (I am English, maybe this makes it worse than normal for me). If I am a guest at someone’s house and they offer me food, what am I signalling by saying yes? What if I say no? They didn’t let me buy the next round of drinks, do I try again later or take No for an answer? Are they offering me a lift because they actually don’t mind? How many levels deep do I need to go in trying to work this situation out?
I have known a few people over the years with odd dress preferences (one person really, really liked an Indiana Jones style hat). To me, the hat declared “I know the rules, and I hereby declare no intention of following them. Everyone else here thereby has permission to stop worrying about this tower of imagined formality and relax.” For me that was very nice, creating a more relaxed situation. They tore down the hall of mirrors, and made it easier for me to enjoy myself. I have seen people take other actions with that purpose, clothes are just one way.
Long way of saying, sometimes a good way of asking people to relax is by breaking a few unimportant rules. But, even aside from that, it seems like the OP isn’t trying to do this at all. They have actually just genuinely had enough with the hall of mirrors game and have declared themselves to no longer be playing. Its only socially clueless if you break the rules by mistake. If you know you are breaking them, but just don’t care, it is a different thing. The entire structure of the post makes it clear the OP knows they are breaking the rules.
As a political comparison, Donald Trump didn’t propose putting a “Rivera of the Middle East” in Gaza because he is politically clueless, he did so because he doesn’t care about being politically clued-in and he wants everyone to know it.
Yes, but that doesn’t mean that you can just avoid it and its consequences. Like war, you may not be interested in it, but it is interested in you. And if you can’t avoid sometimes messing up, you can at least avoid making it worse than it has to be (such as by gratuitously wearing inappropriate clothes).
Yes, but he’s acting like it’s a triumphant success. Voluntarily deciding “I don’t want social skills” is a surrender that seriously harms you. If you can’t get social skills perfect, at least do what you can. And he certainly can avoid wearing inappropriate suits, even if he might mess up deciding when to buy drinks.
Genuinely communicating “I don’t care and I want you to know it” without communicating bad things at the same time is countersignalling. Not just anyone can countersignal. Trump can do this because he’s in a powerful position that implies a certain amount of cluefulness (and even then, his opponents are happy to jump on this sort of stuff as evidence of cluelessness).
I believe that Trump is, in fact, exactly that clueless and completely unaware of how clueless he is.
Edit: For the record: my biggest reason for believing this is having read reports of what many mainstream Republicans who worked under him during his first term have said and written about what he was like.
Personal moderation decision: I’m cutting off the Trump discussion here. Any further comments will be removed, on the grounds that their political mindkillery effects trump their relevance to this discussion.
This policy applies only to this post and does not generalize to my other posts.
Pun intended? ;)
But yeah, it’s getting off-topic and there’s plenty of other places to discuss that kind of thing.
I’m glad we’re on the same page. :)
Voluntarily deciding “I don’t want social skills” is a surrender that seriously harms you.
citation needed. my own experience is the opposite of that. refusing to play the game let you take the role of the local nerd, and it’s not a bad role. and it’s much much better then trying to play the game and failing.
Where do you live? It’s conceivable that a suit actually does mean these things where you live, but doesn’t in the bay area. Some scenes/areas just don’t expect people to dress in normative ways, they’ll celebrate anything as long as it’s done well.
I live in a place culturally similar to the Bay Area.
Late to the thread, but wearing a suit or indeed even a fedora only sends that message to a very particular type of person — to an approximation: highly parochial people who have spent too much time immersed in WASP culture, ie. the same people who care a lot about professionalism and think it’s inappropriate to strike up conversation with strangers on a bus or train.
For a highly insular and parochial crowd like the LessWrong community, that type of person may simply seem like a “normal person”, but normal people (for example: people who live in rural areas and spend much less time online) would disagree. Moreover, it is not possible to avoid giving that kind of WASPy person the impression of social cluelessness without being conformist to the point of profound repression, which is why so many rednecks, blacks, gays, and latinas can agree that you all are kinda hard to get along with.
If you go to a place full of normal people, you will find that the men generally know very little about clothing and will wear what looks good to them, which is basically just a combination of what their friends wear, what the local people they look up to wear, and what they see in American television. If they wear genuinely odd things like a fedora, they will probably be teased a lot by their friends (which is a good sign; it means full acceptance and not just toleration), but it will not be deemed a social faux pas since the “fedora = neckbeard” association only exists in very specific social spheres. I live in a small town in the middle of nowhere, and I bet you that most people here have never even heard of Reddit and have no idea what a neckbeard is.
TL;DR: not everyone is a yank, if you’ll excuse my French.
Edit: why are y’all downvoting me? Are you just confirming the stereotype about extreme insularity or are you making a non-obvious point? Experience leads me to suspect it’s the former, which makes me wonder: is there anything, even in principle, which could get you to change your mind? If nothing else, could you at least clarify which parts of the post you disagree with?
It’s true that people in some obscure small town may not be aware of online stereotypes, but the stereotype isn’t the cause of the problem, it’s the result. People already notice that wearing a suit or fedora is weird behavior, and they already understand the signal sent out by it. If they see many occurrences of the same weird behavior, they will notice the trend and put a label on it, but the label is not the cause of their disdain.
Knowing little isn’t the same as knowing nothing. Suits and fedoras are things that even people who don’t know much know enough not to wear inappropriately.
I think you are off base here.
It means “you’ve spent some of your weirdness points, but not so many as to end the friendship”.
No, you are missing the point. Even the signal being sent out by it is much more contingent than you seem to realise. In the culture you are familiar with, wearing a fedora inappropriately is strongly correlated with having the neckbeard personality type and being engaged in some pretense or another, but that correlation is far from universal. Neckbeards wear fedoras to LARP as stylish (without understanding how style actually works), much like neckbeards wear trenchcoats to LARP as Neo from the Matrix, etc. But that whole pattern of behaviour is just much less common on a global scale than you think it is. In the environments familiar to you, that kind of neckbeard-poser type accounts for the majority of people wearing fedoras inappropriately. In other places it accounts for only a minority.
Moreover, the loathing directed at neckbeardy types is itself less pronounced outside of nerd-culture. Many nerds are chronically afraid of being deemed neckbeard-adjacent, and hence treat it as the worst thing a person could be. That is also not a universal.
No, you are simply underestimating how clueless most people are about these things. A great many people still think of American culture as revolving around cowboy hats. Even the concept of situationally dependent dress codes is highly counterintuitive to the many people whose identities are less contextual than those of urbanites. Most people in the world at present, and almost everyone in premodern history, have a communal sense-of-self where who they are is tied up with their role in the community. A medieval blacksmith did not merely “have a job” as a medieval blacksmith, he was a blacksmith, through and through.
Print shirts were not a thing until recently, so older apparel has a tendency to look distinctly “proper” to modern beholders. But an urban worker in Victorian England would not put on an evening suit just because he was seeking a favour with an upperclass gentleman. He would make sure his clothes were tidy and that he was overall well presented, but he would not even know what outfits a gentleman would deem appropriate for the occasion, much less own them. The upper classes of the time did have contextually dependent dress codes, but that is because they were fully living in modernity and engaged in urban commerce.
No, the whole construct of “weirdness points” is completely missing the mark where people of this sort are concerned. There actually just isn’t a threshold of weirdness where these types will conclude you are crazy. They do not have Aspergers and are therefore perfectly capable of telling the difference between weirdness and craziness without relying on degree at all. On the other hand, even quite small amounts of craziness will tend to alienate them quite a bit. If they are financially struggling, they tend to be suspicious towards anything that seems foreign, but that’s not quite the same as weirdness, but even setting aside that distinction, it is still not the case that a large amount of slightly weird behaviours add up linearly into a large amount of weirdness, like spending weirdness points. That’s just not how it works outside of the spheres that Peter Wildeford had in mind when writing about weirdness points.
I’m banning you from commenting on my posts on the grounds that your comments are, on tone alone, argumentative rather than constructive. This has nothing to do with whether you are correct.
Update: Unbanned following private conversation.