Those are good examples, BUT, I wasn’t saying that educated westerners don’t accept all forms of weirdness, but rather that weirdness alone isn’t damning, so dislike for some of your examples could be attributed to something else than conformism (mentally ill people are more likely to be stupid or dangerous, poor speakers are worse at communication, voluntarily unemployed people are more likely to be lazy, promiscuous people may be less likely to be faithful spouses).
That being said, you do make a good argument that weirdness per se will probably get you dark looks, and yeah, parenting and sex are probably areas where weirdness is judged particularly negatively.
Note that Caplan’s argument was that intolerance for weirdness reduced innovation, and I’m not sure that our intolerance of weirdness is strong and broad enough to justify that conclusion.
I’m not really convinced either way; maybe a clearer example of beneficial-but-weird would be eating insects.
It’s also possible that I’m in an unusually-tolerant-of-weirness environment; I work in the game industry (with a very loose dress code, and people with pretty diverse backgrounds and attitudes, and nobody minds if we play board games at lunch break), a lot of my uncles and aunts and cousins went off to marry (or live with) foreigners, and I don’t get any comments when I take my son to the park without my wife. Someone whose family is mostly local and religious, and who works in a bank may get a different impression of how tolerant society is of difference.
mentally ill people are more likely to be stupid or dangerous
False on the dangerous aspect. Can you cite a source on intelligence? Obviously since “mentally ill” technically includes ANYONE below IQ 80, it’s going to be lopsided, but I’ve never seen any research that suggests depression, OCD, etc. correlate with a lower IQ.
I had heard that contrary to some stereotypes, autism and schizophrenia are not associated with higher intelligence; and a bit of checking on Google Scholar seems to confirm that mental disorders are usually associated with lower intelligence:
There was no association between premorbid IQ score and risk of bipolar disorder. Lower IQ was associated with increased risk of schizophrenia, severe depression, and other nonaffective psychoses.
Schizophrenia and related disorders, other psychotic disorders, adjustment, personality, alcohol and substance-use-related disorders were significantly associated with low IQ scores, but this association remained significant for the four non-psychotic disorders only when adjusting for comorbid diagnoses. For most diagnostic categories, test scores were positively associated with the length of the interval between testing and first admission. ICD mood disorders as well as neuroses and related disorders were not significantly associated with low IQ scores.
For OCD I’ve seen some results suggesting there was a link, and other suggesting there wasn’t.
I’ve seen a few studies talking about association of mental illnesses with crime and violence, though it doesn’t seem clear whether it’s because of the mental illness or because of low intelligence, poverty or substance abuse who tend to be associated with mental illness.
Studies of criminality among patients in psychiatric hospitals and of mental disorder among incarcerated offenders have suggested an association between the major mental disorders (schizophrenia and major affective disorders) and crime. However, these investigations are characterized by notable methodological weaknesses, and, consequently, this conclusion has remained tentative. Little is known about the criminality of intellectually handicapped people. The present study examined the relationship between crime and mental disorder and crime and intellectual deficiency in an unselected Swedish birth cohort followed up to age 30 years. It was found that men with major mental disorders were 21⁄2 times more likely than men with no disorder or handicap to be registered for a criminal offense and four times more likely to be registered for a violent offense. Women with major disorders were five times more likely than women with no disorder or handicap to be registered for an offense and 27 times more likely to be registered for a violent offense. These subjects committed many serious offenses throughout their lives. The criminal behavior in over half these cases appeared before the age of 18 years. Intellectually handicapped men were three times more likely to offend than men with no disorder or handicap and five times more likely to commit a violent offense. Intellectually handicapped women were almost four times more likely to offend than women with no disorder or handicap and 25 times more likely to commit a violent offense. The results of this investigation confirm and extend previous findings indicating that individuals with major mental disorders and those with intellectual handicaps are at increased risk for offending and for violent offending.
Huh. I’ll have to update on the intelligence factor.
I’ll also concede that there’s at least mild evidence that severely mentally ill people are potentially more dangerous, but I still think the generalization of “mentally ill people are more likely to be dangerous” is unfounded for general, day-to-day purposes.
i.e. if someone responds badly because I’m clearly mildly schizophrenic, but doesn’t respond equally badly to me being clearly male, then obvious this isn’t any sort of sane risk-reward evaluation. It’s just a bias against a group of people (“the mentally ill”)
Overall, I think we agree that Certain Sorts of weirdness are judged in a way that is inconsistent with the actual risks (i.e. me kissing my girlfriend doesn’t harm anyone, but people still object to lesbianism)
I think we also agree that cultures all have “tolerable” sorts of weirdness, such as the Silicon Valley dress code (but good luck getting away with that as a lawyer or a doctor!)
And I think we agree that some cultures, while still having taboos, have fewer taboos. Equally, that while all cultures have norms, some have more inclusive norms.
So if we define weirdness as simply “violating social norms or taboos” then we can see that, yes, weirdness does get a negative reaction. Yet you say that “weirdness alone isn’t damning” and I’m not sure what would constitute this sort of “quintessential weirdness”.
Is there genuinely some other aspect of behavior you’re looking at, or are you just exploring how weirdness ties in to cultural taboos and social norms?
Eh, I’m mostly bouncing ideas around; I was originally annoyed by the lack of strength in Caplan’s argument—and I still don’t think it’s very solid. But also I’m interested in how norms and judgements work in general, and have been jotting down a few ideas that could make another post. I’ve also somewhat revised my opinion as to what extent humans are tolerant of weirdness; I guess Caplan primed me to think of economics and daily life and business models, not gender and sex issues, a more touchy area.
Maybe we could call:
WeirdA = “surprisingly different”
WeirdB = “violates social norms”
And I agree that humans don’t tolerate WeirdnessB (pretty much by definition), and Caplan’s argument is that innovation requires WeirdnessA, and I’m saying that how much WeirdA imples WeirdB depends of the society (and the topic at hand).
(I don’t think there’s much confusion left at this point, this is a big discussion for such a small blog post).
To follow up handoflixue’s points: (1) many of the correlations you noted are very weak, relatively speaking (particularly dangerousness and mental illness) some of these labels are social coding, not bare fact (some people who are “voluntarily unemployed” are called housewives. are they lazy?) (2) why do you care? even if voluntarily unemployed = lazy, what difference does that make in your life? That’s the central problem of intolerance—it’s mostly concealed, unstated judgment about how society should be.
It’s also possible that I’m in an unusually-tolerant-of-weirness environment
It’s possible that some of this is US v. Europe. Not sure how much. The popular culture use of “tolerance” doesn’t match well with the real issue. Popular-culture-tolerance seems to do better in Europe.
Note that Caplan’s argument was that intolerance for weirdness reduced innovation, and I’m not sure that our intolerance of weirdness is strong and broad enough to justify that conclusion.
Once upon a time, having a pager was weird—all sorts of social strangeness associated with them. Would they have been invented sooner if society was more open to social strangeness? Would mobile communication technology generally have progress faster?
About your (1) and (2): I’m not saying such negative judgements are justified! Sure, people make stupid judgements about risk and probability and correlation all the time, I’m discussing whether a negative judgement is due to “dislike for the weird and different” as a general tendancy, or to a specific (possibly wrong!) judgement against something.
The pager is a good example of an innovation hampered by intolerance; I remember a time where cell phones were negatively judged too; though even that could maybe be explained by it’s association to a disliked group (Yuppies), not dislike of weirdness. I’m not very convinced by that explanation though, it may make the standard of what really counts as dislilke of weirdness a bit too high.
Points (1) and (2) are not closely related. A person could believe (2) without believing (1)
I think these comments from fubarobfusco and Qiaochu_Yuan explain the point that what counts as conformity is very culturally dependent. Non-conformity in those situations might just be a disguised way of saying that someone desires the culture to change.
Those are good examples, BUT, I wasn’t saying that educated westerners don’t accept all forms of weirdness, but rather that weirdness alone isn’t damning, so dislike for some of your examples could be attributed to something else than conformism (mentally ill people are more likely to be stupid or dangerous, poor speakers are worse at communication, voluntarily unemployed people are more likely to be lazy, promiscuous people may be less likely to be faithful spouses).
That being said, you do make a good argument that weirdness per se will probably get you dark looks, and yeah, parenting and sex are probably areas where weirdness is judged particularly negatively.
Note that Caplan’s argument was that intolerance for weirdness reduced innovation, and I’m not sure that our intolerance of weirdness is strong and broad enough to justify that conclusion.
I’m not really convinced either way; maybe a clearer example of beneficial-but-weird would be eating insects.
It’s also possible that I’m in an unusually-tolerant-of-weirness environment; I work in the game industry (with a very loose dress code, and people with pretty diverse backgrounds and attitudes, and nobody minds if we play board games at lunch break), a lot of my uncles and aunts and cousins went off to marry (or live with) foreigners, and I don’t get any comments when I take my son to the park without my wife. Someone whose family is mostly local and religious, and who works in a bank may get a different impression of how tolerant society is of difference.
False on the dangerous aspect. Can you cite a source on intelligence? Obviously since “mentally ill” technically includes ANYONE below IQ 80, it’s going to be lopsided, but I’ve never seen any research that suggests depression, OCD, etc. correlate with a lower IQ.
I had heard that contrary to some stereotypes, autism and schizophrenia are not associated with higher intelligence; and a bit of checking on Google Scholar seems to confirm that mental disorders are usually associated with lower intelligence:
http://archpsyc.jamanetwork.com/article.aspx?articleid=481989#qundefined :
http://bjp.rcpsych.org/content/187/5/407.short
For OCD I’ve seen some results suggesting there was a link, and other suggesting there wasn’t.
I’ve seen a few studies talking about association of mental illnesses with crime and violence, though it doesn’t seem clear whether it’s because of the mental illness or because of low intelligence, poverty or substance abuse who tend to be associated with mental illness.
For example, http://archpsyc.jamanetwork.com/article.aspx?articleid=495755#qundefined
Huh. I’ll have to update on the intelligence factor.
I’ll also concede that there’s at least mild evidence that severely mentally ill people are potentially more dangerous, but I still think the generalization of “mentally ill people are more likely to be dangerous” is unfounded for general, day-to-day purposes.
i.e. if someone responds badly because I’m clearly mildly schizophrenic, but doesn’t respond equally badly to me being clearly male, then obvious this isn’t any sort of sane risk-reward evaluation. It’s just a bias against a group of people (“the mentally ill”)
Overall, I think we agree that Certain Sorts of weirdness are judged in a way that is inconsistent with the actual risks (i.e. me kissing my girlfriend doesn’t harm anyone, but people still object to lesbianism)
I think we also agree that cultures all have “tolerable” sorts of weirdness, such as the Silicon Valley dress code (but good luck getting away with that as a lawyer or a doctor!)
And I think we agree that some cultures, while still having taboos, have fewer taboos. Equally, that while all cultures have norms, some have more inclusive norms.
So if we define weirdness as simply “violating social norms or taboos” then we can see that, yes, weirdness does get a negative reaction. Yet you say that “weirdness alone isn’t damning” and I’m not sure what would constitute this sort of “quintessential weirdness”.
Is there genuinely some other aspect of behavior you’re looking at, or are you just exploring how weirdness ties in to cultural taboos and social norms?
Eh, I’m mostly bouncing ideas around; I was originally annoyed by the lack of strength in Caplan’s argument—and I still don’t think it’s very solid. But also I’m interested in how norms and judgements work in general, and have been jotting down a few ideas that could make another post. I’ve also somewhat revised my opinion as to what extent humans are tolerant of weirdness; I guess Caplan primed me to think of economics and daily life and business models, not gender and sex issues, a more touchy area.
Maybe we could call:
WeirdA = “surprisingly different” WeirdB = “violates social norms”
And I agree that humans don’t tolerate WeirdnessB (pretty much by definition), and Caplan’s argument is that innovation requires WeirdnessA, and I’m saying that how much WeirdA imples WeirdB depends of the society (and the topic at hand).
(I don’t think there’s much confusion left at this point, this is a big discussion for such a small blog post).
Doesn’t seem to be any confusion, thanks :)
Hopefully I was helpful in revising your opinion to include other areas of behavior :)
To follow up handoflixue’s points:
(1) many of the correlations you noted are very weak, relatively speaking (particularly dangerousness and mental illness) some of these labels are social coding, not bare fact (some people who are “voluntarily unemployed” are called housewives. are they lazy?)
(2) why do you care? even if voluntarily unemployed = lazy, what difference does that make in your life? That’s the central problem of intolerance—it’s mostly concealed, unstated judgment about how society should be.
It’s possible that some of this is US v. Europe. Not sure how much. The popular culture use of “tolerance” doesn’t match well with the real issue. Popular-culture-tolerance seems to do better in Europe.
Once upon a time, having a pager was weird—all sorts of social strangeness associated with them. Would they have been invented sooner if society was more open to social strangeness? Would mobile communication technology generally have progress faster?
About your (1) and (2): I’m not saying such negative judgements are justified! Sure, people make stupid judgements about risk and probability and correlation all the time, I’m discussing whether a negative judgement is due to “dislike for the weird and different” as a general tendancy, or to a specific (possibly wrong!) judgement against something.
The pager is a good example of an innovation hampered by intolerance; I remember a time where cell phones were negatively judged too; though even that could maybe be explained by it’s association to a disliked group (Yuppies), not dislike of weirdness. I’m not very convinced by that explanation though, it may make the standard of what really counts as dislilke of weirdness a bit too high.
Points (1) and (2) are not closely related. A person could believe (2) without believing (1)
I think these comments from fubarobfusco and Qiaochu_Yuan explain the point that what counts as conformity is very culturally dependent. Non-conformity in those situations might just be a disguised way of saying that someone desires the culture to change.