I’m not sure exactly what “weird” is made of, on a gears level.
I do have a guess, taken from personal experience. I remember recently being in the orientation session for a new job, and I resolved to fit in and get along with people. Within a few days, though, I was “out of step” with the group and was very clearly more isolated than others.
It wasn’t that I had done something especially shocking or unconventional, though. I decided that I wanted to get up early and exercise, so I went to the gym one morning; as a result, I was a few minutes late to the first event of the day and didn’t arrive in a group with others. Another time, I got hungry and got myself lunch on my own when I felt like it. My natural inclination was to get my needs met by myself, instead of coordinating with someone first, and those quickly added up and within a few days I had gone from “indistinguishable from anybody else in the cohort” to “clearly the loner.” Even though there’s nothing intrinsically “weird” about going to the gym or eating.
Weirdness is clearly somehow about not imitating others “enough”, but I’m not sure what “enough” really means here—is it about how frequently you “check in” to make sure your behavior conforms, or about the size of the nonconformity, or something else? And what about leadership? Sometimes you can get other people to imitate you, and I don’t know how that fits into my model of “not being weird means doing as others do.”
I’m not confident these are the right gears, and you might be asking for refined gears than mine, but my working hypothesis is something like:
The umbrella concept of weirdness is about whether people can predict your actions, since this is extremely useful information to track for a social animal. Predictability and therefore weirdness are tracked on a variety of levels—you can be weird because of your sleep schedule, or weird because of your nervous tics and body language, or weird because you talk in a very normal manner about the impending alien rapture, or weird just because you’re a foreigner. The weirdness of an action registers as flags on various mental levels to help you predict when that person later might not do the canonical action, and it registers with a magnitude and some metadata to help you track their weird trait(s) for inner simming. To answer the question of how much disconformity is “enough” to be labeled weird, I have to hand-wave and say that typical people’s social neural nets just get very good at inferring what infractions correspond to how much likelihood of what level of difficulty coordinating with them. (If this is the meat of the question, I could say more later).
Unfortunately, “weird” has had some semantic drift since unpredictable often happens to correlate with “being a less valuable ally” in a variety of ways for systemic or intrinsic reasons. Two important subtypes of weird that this is evident in are 1) the people whom you talk about that are just kind of loners, and 2) the people who actually provide frequent disvalue. The loners are “weird” because they can and do take actions the group hasn’t decided on, which makes them harder to coordinate with and significantly less predictable. But this also correlates with them being weird in other ways, and so it is rightly seen as Bayesian evidence for other problems by their peers—and further, people who sometimes leave the group are just less valuable allies (for dependability, for gossip, etc). When I do focusing on the weirdness of loners, I can kind of pick out these distinct feelings (of which I think the third is most prominent), along with other more personal ones like “weird → unpredictable → higher likelihood of new ideas → valuable” and similar.
I think “weird” has mutated into a slur nowadays because of the subtype of those who provide disvalue and the ways that those traits correlate with weirdness (and why it’s hard to get gears on the different types of nonconformity). You certainly can have good weird, where someone is unpredictable but in ways that everyone repeatedly likes (though they are still tracked as “weird”, importantly). But since a large part of social coordination is being predictable, the people who have fine control over their many levels of dials often do work largely within predictable ranges, and only the best optimizers can escape the local optima and be correct without too much disvalue on the way—which means that most people who aren’t being predictable are doing so because of an inability. And since most people can hit the small range of highly valuable parameter space we call “normal”, that gets set as baseline value, so a vast proportion of other actions are negative. So people who have difficulties with certain dials will regularly cause disvalue in various ways, which means that the trait of “weird” is now correlated with bad actions.
After writing this out, I’m wondering whether I should have called “weird” specifically “negative unpredictability”, and call “positive predictability” something like “interesting”. The people I think of as least weird and those I think of as least interesting both end up as “boring”, in the sense of a very predictable wind-up doll. I think you can have separate tickers for both weirdness and interestingness, but often people will black-and-white it one way or the other (and indeed argue whether someone is “weird” or “interesting”). The needle-threading of getting people to follow you demands an entire toolbox of gears itself, but some heuristics on just pushing the scales a little further from bad unpredictability:
One good way is to use your unpredictable actions to help your peers, as in noticing others are hungry and striking out on your own to fix the problem, or hitting the sweet spot of high-level predictability low-level unpredictability we call humor. Another, probably more important way, is to put a little extra effort at being extra predictable when around: prove you’re normal with small talk, say normal stuff about yourself, and forge social ties or commit to the group in other ways so they can know that you’ll (mostly) be there for them. Allies have to be dependable.
I’m not sure exactly what “weird” is made of, on a gears level.
I do have a guess, taken from personal experience. I remember recently being in the orientation session for a new job, and I resolved to fit in and get along with people. Within a few days, though, I was “out of step” with the group and was very clearly more isolated than others.
It wasn’t that I had done something especially shocking or unconventional, though. I decided that I wanted to get up early and exercise, so I went to the gym one morning; as a result, I was a few minutes late to the first event of the day and didn’t arrive in a group with others. Another time, I got hungry and got myself lunch on my own when I felt like it. My natural inclination was to get my needs met by myself, instead of coordinating with someone first, and those quickly added up and within a few days I had gone from “indistinguishable from anybody else in the cohort” to “clearly the loner.” Even though there’s nothing intrinsically “weird” about going to the gym or eating.
Weirdness is clearly somehow about not imitating others “enough”, but I’m not sure what “enough” really means here—is it about how frequently you “check in” to make sure your behavior conforms, or about the size of the nonconformity, or something else? And what about leadership? Sometimes you can get other people to imitate you, and I don’t know how that fits into my model of “not being weird means doing as others do.”
I’m not confident these are the right gears, and you might be asking for refined gears than mine, but my working hypothesis is something like:
The umbrella concept of weirdness is about whether people can predict your actions, since this is extremely useful information to track for a social animal. Predictability and therefore weirdness are tracked on a variety of levels—you can be weird because of your sleep schedule, or weird because of your nervous tics and body language, or weird because you talk in a very normal manner about the impending alien rapture, or weird just because you’re a foreigner. The weirdness of an action registers as flags on various mental levels to help you predict when that person later might not do the canonical action, and it registers with a magnitude and some metadata to help you track their weird trait(s) for inner simming. To answer the question of how much disconformity is “enough” to be labeled weird, I have to hand-wave and say that typical people’s social neural nets just get very good at inferring what infractions correspond to how much likelihood of what level of difficulty coordinating with them. (If this is the meat of the question, I could say more later).
Unfortunately, “weird” has had some semantic drift since unpredictable often happens to correlate with “being a less valuable ally” in a variety of ways for systemic or intrinsic reasons. Two important subtypes of weird that this is evident in are 1) the people whom you talk about that are just kind of loners, and 2) the people who actually provide frequent disvalue. The loners are “weird” because they can and do take actions the group hasn’t decided on, which makes them harder to coordinate with and significantly less predictable. But this also correlates with them being weird in other ways, and so it is rightly seen as Bayesian evidence for other problems by their peers—and further, people who sometimes leave the group are just less valuable allies (for dependability, for gossip, etc). When I do focusing on the weirdness of loners, I can kind of pick out these distinct feelings (of which I think the third is most prominent), along with other more personal ones like “weird → unpredictable → higher likelihood of new ideas → valuable” and similar.
I think “weird” has mutated into a slur nowadays because of the subtype of those who provide disvalue and the ways that those traits correlate with weirdness (and why it’s hard to get gears on the different types of nonconformity). You certainly can have good weird, where someone is unpredictable but in ways that everyone repeatedly likes (though they are still tracked as “weird”, importantly). But since a large part of social coordination is being predictable, the people who have fine control over their many levels of dials often do work largely within predictable ranges, and only the best optimizers can escape the local optima and be correct without too much disvalue on the way—which means that most people who aren’t being predictable are doing so because of an inability. And since most people can hit the small range of highly valuable parameter space we call “normal”, that gets set as baseline value, so a vast proportion of other actions are negative. So people who have difficulties with certain dials will regularly cause disvalue in various ways, which means that the trait of “weird” is now correlated with bad actions.
After writing this out, I’m wondering whether I should have called “weird” specifically “negative unpredictability”, and call “positive predictability” something like “interesting”. The people I think of as least weird and those I think of as least interesting both end up as “boring”, in the sense of a very predictable wind-up doll. I think you can have separate tickers for both weirdness and interestingness, but often people will black-and-white it one way or the other (and indeed argue whether someone is “weird” or “interesting”). The needle-threading of getting people to follow you demands an entire toolbox of gears itself, but some heuristics on just pushing the scales a little further from bad unpredictability:
One good way is to use your unpredictable actions to help your peers, as in noticing others are hungry and striking out on your own to fix the problem, or hitting the sweet spot of high-level predictability low-level unpredictability we call humor. Another, probably more important way, is to put a little extra effort at being extra predictable when around: prove you’re normal with small talk, say normal stuff about yourself, and forge social ties or commit to the group in other ways so they can know that you’ll (mostly) be there for them. Allies have to be dependable.