(Also “uncompromising” could mean a few things and some of them are pretty bad. The good kind of “uncompromising” is something like believing what you believe, feeling what you feel, thinking what you think, and wanting what you want, and not letting someone else suppress that. The bad kind is trying to impose any of that on someone else / demand that someone else change to accommodate that.)
Relatedly, I’m also concerned that in this taxonomy it’s very tempting for people to label themselves as Fried Eggs to justify their lack of social success, or something like that.
I grappled with the same thought process, but I came to the conclusion that any attempt on my part to address this would a) ring false—if for no other reason than my life was the motivation for the term b) be counterproductive, for reasons I will go into below, and c) be kind of missing the point.
I think it would have been counterproductive to make a point about the fact that Fried Eggs as a category contains both people who are just unusual and unable to be usual without life-altering effort, and people who like to come into other people’s spaces and wreck shop. I suspect that the sort of people who really do take up too much space, disrupt local status hierarchies, or are deliberately off-putting, are not also the sort of people who it would be useful to address in a general manner. I also suspect that the sort of people who just want freedom to express themselves and can’t seem to fit local norms are exactly the sort of people who would take any criticism leveled at the former group as being aimed at them. While such commentary is helpful and necessary, (especially since I don’t think Fried Eggs tend to build good communities, which I don’t think you dispute) I don’t know if general, relatively short blog post is the right format. Or that I am the right author.
As well, as I said in c), this was also very much not the point of the post—which was to divide people by etiology of weirdness and explain the friction between them—and that point was already unclear so I didn’t want to muddy the waters too much.
This is the part of the post that personally interests me the most, and I would personally like to hear more from you along these lines; less abstract theorizing about the nature of weirdness and more stories of experiences of you or other weird people you know being / feeling rejected or whatever else prompted this post. (Then theorizing afterwards, maybe. But it’s hard for me to tell where you’re coming from without the stories.)
As a disclaimer (which I should maybe put in the actual post as an edit) - the beginning anecdote about where “fried eggs” comes from is 100% true, including every detail about which members of my family were what other shape, etc. However, the examples at the end (about Tonari no Totoro and short skirts / biker jackets) come from real examples with the details shifted so as to achieve two things. One, I didn’t want to share personal stories about people who are not me, especially if those stories involve rejection. Two, I wanted to generalize the stories in a way that I hoped would reach the intended audience (the LWsphere) better, without sacrificing the relative vividness of specific examples. Again, the broad outline, that someone was told they were bad for not considering the sociopolitical implications of a piece of innocuous media, and that someone was told they couldn’t wear idiosyncratic clothing because snobs might be less friendly as a result, both come from true stories. I just didn’t want to share those true stories exactly.
Addressing your post, the whole reason I added the beginning segment was that without it, the whole post felt a bit . . . unmotivated. You are right that I should have gone further, and that the structure doesn’t actually support the content very well. This is mostly just a writing error on my part, so I can’t say much more than, fair enough.
I grappled with the same thought process, but I came to the conclusion that any attempt on my part to address this would a) ring false—if for no other reason than my life was the motivation for the term b) be counterproductive, for reasons I will go into below, and c) be kind of missing the point.
I think it would have been counterproductive to make a point about the fact that Fried Eggs as a category contains both people who are just unusual and unable to be usual without life-altering effort, and people who like to come into other people’s spaces and wreck shop. I suspect that the sort of people who really do take up too much space, disrupt local status hierarchies, or are deliberately off-putting, are not also the sort of people who it would be useful to address in a general manner. I also suspect that the sort of people who just want freedom to express themselves and can’t seem to fit local norms are exactly the sort of people who would take any criticism leveled at the former group as being aimed at them. While such commentary is helpful and necessary, (especially since I don’t think Fried Eggs tend to build good communities, which I don’t think you dispute) I don’t know if general, relatively short blog post is the right format. Or that I am the right author.
As well, as I said in c), this was also very much not the point of the post—which was to divide people by etiology of weirdness and explain the friction between them—and that point was already unclear so I didn’t want to muddy the waters too much.
As a disclaimer (which I should maybe put in the actual post as an edit) - the beginning anecdote about where “fried eggs” comes from is 100% true, including every detail about which members of my family were what other shape, etc. However, the examples at the end (about Tonari no Totoro and short skirts / biker jackets) come from real examples with the details shifted so as to achieve two things. One, I didn’t want to share personal stories about people who are not me, especially if those stories involve rejection. Two, I wanted to generalize the stories in a way that I hoped would reach the intended audience (the LWsphere) better, without sacrificing the relative vividness of specific examples. Again, the broad outline, that someone was told they were bad for not considering the sociopolitical implications of a piece of innocuous media, and that someone was told they couldn’t wear idiosyncratic clothing because snobs might be less friendly as a result, both come from true stories. I just didn’t want to share those true stories exactly.
Addressing your post, the whole reason I added the beginning segment was that without it, the whole post felt a bit . . . unmotivated. You are right that I should have gone further, and that the structure doesn’t actually support the content very well. This is mostly just a writing error on my part, so I can’t say much more than, fair enough.