“Weirdness” is probably a bad abstraction, because it includes things with opposite effect. From statistical perspective, being a king is weird, being a billionaire is weird, being a movie star is weird. Yet this is obviously not what we mean when talking about carefully spending our weirdness points.
Here is a hypothesis I just made up, with no time to test it: Maybe people instinctively try to classify everyone else into three buckets: “higher-status than me”, “the same as me”, and “lower-status than me”. The middle bucket is defined by similarity: if you are sufficiently similar to me, you are there. If you are dissimilar, the choices are only “higher” and “lower”. (In other words, the hypothesis is that the instinctive classification does not support the notion of “different but equal”.) Because you do not assign people higher status for no reason, it follows that if you are different from me, and there is no evidence of you being higher-status than me, then I will perceive and treat you as lower-status. And if you refuse to be treated as lower-status, I will punish you for acting above your status.
From this model, it follows that for people visibly above you, weirdness is not a problem. You expect the king to have unusual manners and opinions compared to the peasants. It is the weird peasant everyone makes fun of.
The answer then is that you must achieve superior status first, and show your weirdness later. Then people will assume that these things are related.
From statistical perspective, being a king is weird, being a billionaire is weird, being a movie star is weird.
Weird is no statistical term and saying that some notion of weirdness that’s a statistical abstraction is a bad abstraction has little to do with whether the concept in it’s usual sense is a good abstraction.
“Weirdness” is probably a bad abstraction, because it includes things with opposite effect. From statistical perspective, being a king is weird, being a billionaire is weird, being a movie star is weird. Yet this is obviously not what we mean when talking about carefully spending our weirdness points.
Here is a hypothesis I just made up, with no time to test it: Maybe people instinctively try to classify everyone else into three buckets: “higher-status than me”, “the same as me”, and “lower-status than me”. The middle bucket is defined by similarity: if you are sufficiently similar to me, you are there. If you are dissimilar, the choices are only “higher” and “lower”. (In other words, the hypothesis is that the instinctive classification does not support the notion of “different but equal”.) Because you do not assign people higher status for no reason, it follows that if you are different from me, and there is no evidence of you being higher-status than me, then I will perceive and treat you as lower-status. And if you refuse to be treated as lower-status, I will punish you for acting above your status.
From this model, it follows that for people visibly above you, weirdness is not a problem. You expect the king to have unusual manners and opinions compared to the peasants. It is the weird peasant everyone makes fun of.
The answer then is that you must achieve superior status first, and show your weirdness later. Then people will assume that these things are related.
Weird is no statistical term and saying that some notion of weirdness that’s a statistical abstraction is a bad abstraction has little to do with whether the concept in it’s usual sense is a good abstraction.