My usual objections against dress codes are that they often require social skills to figure out, and sometimes are expensive. Well, this explanation seems simple, and “buy a black shirt” should be within most people’s budgets.
(Of course, there is a space to navigate within the proposed dress code. You could have cheaper or more expensive black clothing, etc. But this complication was already there; the proposal does not make it worse.)
So what remains is signaling of conformity. Which I would expect to be controversial, and I am surprised that there is no pushback against it already. Because our kind, famously, sucks at cooperation. (For some people, it would probably be better to say “fights against it with suicidal fanaticism”.) So it would be nice to have a simple way to select for people who are pro-rationality and open to cooperation. Those sound like nice people to cooperate with.
In general, social conventions are a signal of conformity and cooperation. Problem is, they often come with a cost we would consider inappropriate (for example the convention of never talking about certain topics comes with a cost of not being able to discuss those topics without incurring social penalty), or are difficult to understand for autistic people (so they do not distinguish between defecting on purpose and merely failing to infer the unwritten social norm from other people’s behavior).
I like this idea a lot!
My usual objections against dress codes are that they often require social skills to figure out, and sometimes are expensive. Well, this explanation seems simple, and “buy a black shirt” should be within most people’s budgets.
(Of course, there is a space to navigate within the proposed dress code. You could have cheaper or more expensive black clothing, etc. But this complication was already there; the proposal does not make it worse.)
So what remains is signaling of conformity. Which I would expect to be controversial, and I am surprised that there is no pushback against it already. Because our kind, famously, sucks at cooperation. (For some people, it would probably be better to say “fights against it with suicidal fanaticism”.) So it would be nice to have a simple way to select for people who are pro-rationality and open to cooperation. Those sound like nice people to cooperate with.
In general, social conventions are a signal of conformity and cooperation. Problem is, they often come with a cost we would consider inappropriate (for example the convention of never talking about certain topics comes with a cost of not being able to discuss those topics without incurring social penalty), or are difficult to understand for autistic people (so they do not distinguish between defecting on purpose and merely failing to infer the unwritten social norm from other people’s behavior).