What are the bad things that can happen to you if you get accurately judged as nerdy, and how do they compare to the negative impact of having people assume all the wrong things about you?
What are the bad things that can happen to you if you get accurately judged as nerdy
This brings up an excellent point.
It’s perfectly fine to be Packers fan, but I would judge a person who showed up to a wedding or funeral dressed as a cheesehead. I wouldn’t judge them for being a Packards fan; I would judge them for disrespectfully violating decorum—for choosing to signal that they are a Packards fan.
Projecting nerdiness is similar EDIT in that the first-order signal is not the harmful one. A nerdy appearance emits two important signals:
You are nerdy
You are a person who emits signals that they are nerdy
The second-order signal is the more negative and important. It isn’t too bad if people think you are nerdy; it’s bad if people think that you don’t understand or don’t care how most people perceive you. It signals a lack of self-awareness, or a deficient understanding of cultural norms, or blithe indifference. In my case, it accurately signaled all three.
Signaling my lack of self-awareness didn’t cause bad things to happen; it prevented good things from happening.
how do they compare to the negative impact of having people assume all the wrong things about you?
No negative impact, and I don’t think people do assume the wrong things about me. In conversation I’m usually transparent about who I am. You can credibly profess to be nerdy no matter what clothing you wear. You cannot credibly profess to understand unspoken social norms if your appearance contradicts your words.
I understand that it would be incorrect to show up at a wedding, funeral, or job interview wearing shorts, sandals, and a t-shirt with a bad science pun. Those are special occasions with different rules from the rest of your life, and fortunately they are rare.
Why, in everyday life, would dressing like a nerd indicate blithe indifference towards anyone? Would I seem more empathetic and human if my shirt advertised a band instead, or had buttons? What are some common environments where looking like a nerd is a disrespectful violation of decorum?
Looking like a nerd is not a disrespectful violation of decorum—disrespectful violation of decorum was part of an analogy about first-order and second-order signaling. Sorry that this wasn’t clear. I edited my original comment, and will restate and rephrase the crux of the comment here.
Let’s take it as a premise that a large portion of people believe a nerdy appearance signals poor social prowess. Given the premise, people might emit nerdy signals anyway if:
They don’t realize that they emitting nerdy signals, or
They don’t realize nerdy signals will make many others less disposed to them, or
They don’t care about the opinions of people who make negative assumption about people who signal nerdiness, or
They can’t help but emit nerdy signals, or
(other reasons I won’t list here)
You will notice that all of these explanations indicate the person has poor social prowess. Unless there is common knowledge) that the premise is false, a nerdy appearance is evidence for poor social prowess. The expectation that people who look nerdy have poor social awareness becomes a self-fulfilling prophesy.
ETA This line of reasoning isn’t air-tight. Still, it’s a strong reason why some nerd-friendly people take a dim view on a nerdy appearances.
They don’t care about the opinions of people who make negative assumption about people who signal nerdiness, or
I’m not sure this one belongs to the list: I’d figure that not having to care about strangers’ opinion about you signals self-confidence, not “poor social prowess”.
Unless there is common knowledge that the premise is false,
True that—you can only countersignal to people who already know you. But those are normally the only people whose opinions about me I care about (except in job interviews, first dates, and the like—where someone who doesn’t know me well yet may affect me in the future), so why should worry about what I signal to anyone else?
I’m late to the party, but it’s because you forgo new opportunities to meet people when you signal these things. For example, I knew a man who signalled nerdyness and had no social skills. Talking with him was uncomfortable and he would creep on women unknowingly, driving off other friends. Further, his lack of social awareness made it impossible to get rid of him once he was attached leading to an uncomfortable situation for all concerned. I had 3 other negative experiences from people who signalled nerdyness, each of which had serious problems. Essentially, by choosing to interact with new people who signal nerdyness in their dress I take on a higher than normal risk of having a negative experience.
A large proportion of people have had an experience like this and do not wish to repeat it, so by signalling nerdyness you essentially drive those people away. Aside from that, you make use of the horns effect when you could be using the halo effect. The end result is that signalling nerdyness puts a pointless obstacle in the path of your life.
Just signalling normalness puts you in a better position, because if you want to signal nerdyness to specific people you can just say “I play dwarf fortress” or something similar.
Empirically I think you are wrong. When I wear Vibram Fivefingers in public (with is a quite nerdy choice) it radically increases the amount of people that approach me.
I think we are using the term nerdyness to mean different things. When I say nerdiness I mean at least two of the following: poor dress sense, I’ll fitting clothes, lack of deodorant, low personal hygene, excessively bad posture and bad hair style. What are you using the term to mean?
Are the people you know now awesome and in sufficient variety and number? If so, I can totally understand not needing to know more.
His problem was indeed his lack of social skills, but it was signalled by his nerdyess. The point here is not that there is a 1:1 comparison from these signalling characteristics to the end result, but that enough of the population thinks this way for it to alienate a large portion of the population when one signals in such a manner. That portion of the population includes many interesting people and should not be cast aside lightly. My life for example improved dramatically when I changed my signalling characteristics into a more confident and visually appealing style.
Are the people you know now awesome and in sufficient variety and number?
It’s not just an issue of awesomeness and number but also time and distance. I have a pretty busy schedule these days so it would be nontrivial for me to find the time(/stamina) to hang out with more than a handful people on a regular basis; also, no matter how awesome someone is it’d be hard for me to be friends with them if they live halfway across the globe, so what matters isn’t how awesome my friends are on an absolute scale, but how awesome my friends are compared to other people in my area. If I lived in the Bay Area and had more time than I know what to do with, things would presumably be different.
Sufficient is no absolute term, it is dependent on free time and other resources. Which is another way of saying I agree. With that said there is unavoidable attrition of friends from changing circumstances, locations, schedules and other factors that get in the way. I find it optimal to spend a certain small proportion of time seeking out new experiences with new people. After all, what are the chances that the people I currently know are the most suited to me out of the tens of thousands in the surrounding area? It feels like a betrayal to think such a thought, but I can come up with no good reason why I should listen to that particular emotion.
Eventually things change and I see no reason to replace the friends who must leave my life with the first reasonably compatible people to come along, when I could instead take a proactive stance and do better. We decide the people we want in our lives
True that—you can only countersignal to people who already know you. But those are normally the only people whose opinions about me I care about (except in job interviews, first dates, and the like—where someone who doesn’t know me well yet may affect me in the future)
As far as first dates go, getting in bad relationship because you are fundamentally incompatible is a lot worse than just not making the second date.
If a woman has a problem with me being nerdy, then it’s no problem that the interaction ends at the first date.
On the other hand full openness about who you are is very conductive to building trust and emotional intimacy.
True that—you can only countersignal to people who already know you.
I don’t think that true. If you engage in an action with full confidence and that confidence is clearly visible in your body language and most people who engage in the same action without much social confidence you can counter signal.
It’s perfectly fine to be Packers fan, but I would judge a person who showed up to a wedding or funeral dressed as a cheesehead. I wouldn’t judge them for being a Packards fan; I would judge them for disrespectfully violating decorum.
The second-order signal is the more negative and important. It isn’t too bad if people think you are nerdy; it’s bad if people think that you don’t understand or don’t care how most people perceive you. It signals a lack of self-awareness, or a deficient understanding of cultural norms, or blithe indifference towards non-nerds. In my case, it accurately signaled all three.
The things in bold—I cannot put myself in the mindset where these things appear inherently bad. Would you mind explaining why should one make an end value out of respecting social and cultural norms?
Signaling my lack of self-awareness didn’t cause bad things to happen; it prevented good things from happening.
I suppose you could frame it like that too. Which are those good things? (Some guesses ahead of time: getting compliments on your outfits? Socializing more easily with certain segments of society? Modifying people’s perception of you into something more positive, as an end in itself or as a means to something else, e.g. a promotion?)
No negative impact, and I don’t think people do assume the wrong things about me.
I assumed negative impact because I’m right on the other side of the pond: I have very good intuitions on dressing in a conventionally pretty, fashionable way, and yet this skill has always had negative value for me, as it influenced people’s reactions to me in a way that worsened my interactions with them. But I’ll expand on this only if it proves necessary.
Would you mind explaining why should one make an end value out of respecting social and cultural norms?
One idea: Social power is contagious, so people want to associate with people that other people want to associate with. This leads to information cascades—one type of person has more power for some reason, so people want to associate with that type of person, so even more people want to associate with that type of person—and the “type of person” that this converges to gets called “normal”.
Another idea: By caring about social norms, you signal that you care about not having people disapprove of you, which gives the group power over you—“I’ll limit my sheep’s grazing of the commons, because I don’t want to look bad.”
It’s perfectly fine to be Packers fan, but I would judge a person who showed up to a wedding or funeral dressed as a cheesehead.
Nitpick on wording: I wouldn’t call wearing a suit to a wedding “looking like a non-Packers fan”—it’s not like non-Packers fans are all that much more likely to do so than Packers fan; I’d call it “not looking like a Packers fan”. By the same token, on hearing “looking like a non-nerd”, I think about an appearance that’s significant evidence than you’re not a nerd; I’d refer to an appearance that doesn’t provide much evidence one way or another as “not looking like a nerd”.
A bit further: Placing little value or interest on personal style, not learning how basic style works, not owning any formal or even smart casual clothes at all, not knowing what terms mean and where they have broken up. This results in you going on really annoying (and maybe expensive) shopping trips under time constraint and makes you vulnerable to cultural guardians and merchants when you eventually are forced to figure out what the hell you are doing.
I will second this but with a twist: I tend to look really weird. But looking really weird and FANCY makes for a lot better and fun random social interactions. Put effort into your appearance, decide what you want to look like and what image you like to project, but that image doesn’t have to be optimized for muggles unless you want it to be.
...that image doesn’t have to be optimized for muggles...
Wizards who don’t learn to interact profitably with muggles cut themselves off from most people in the world. Cutting yourself off from most people in the world is a life-altering mistake.
On the contrary: most people in the world are ignorant, useless wastes of your time. One SHOULD cut them out of influencing you and taking up your attention. If you can choose to optimize yourself for interacting with the average mathematician or interacting with the average person, you should choose the mathematician.
But in any case: who said anything about cutting off? What exactly are you picturing here? Some sort of outfit that renders one invisible to anyone but bronies? That’s not how clothing works, except in extreme examples.
People I value won’t care if I have a non-standard hairstyle or wear clothing that doesn’t fit well, I used to think. After cutting my hair and dressing better, I found that this is not the case.
To be clear, I think weird but fancy is great with the right audience. But being unable or not very good at presenting a non-weird image is a bad mistake. I underestimated how strong an image I projected to non-nerdy people. I think many other nerdy people underestimate the strength of the image as well.
I think there a difference between wearing clothing that just doesn’t fit well and wearing the kind of weird clothing that can make a positive impression.
Wearing Hawaii shirts for example is weird but something that people who consider themselves open minded but don’t consider themselves as nerds can see as cool.
I personally make the weird clothing choice of walking around in Vibriam Fivefinger shoes. In contrast to cutting myself off from other people they invite interest and people start conversation with me to ask me about them that they wouldn’t start otherwise.
If you can choose to optimize yourself for interacting with the average mathematician or interacting with the average person, you should choose the mathematician.
If. That would imply that optimizing signals for “muggles” automatically sub-optimizes for “wizards”.
And this is true for most values of wizard (goths, hippies, preps, nudists, professionals) but it’s certainly not true when “wizards” = Intelligent, happy, kind, and effective people. You can signal allegiance to a subculture with a costume, but you can’t signal a virtue.
There is no reliable superficial signal for hidden virtues and abilities which are both universally admired and difficult / impossible to acquire. If such a signal were to exist and become well known, it would immediately become fashionable and thereby lose its signaling properties.
The only honest signal for these traits is actual demonstrations of intelligence, kindness, etc...is actual displays of intellect, altruism, etc. As such, looking weirdly fancy isn’t going to help you to that end. The way to surround yourself with smart/kind/effective people is to inhabit social spaces which attract smart/kind/effective people.
Smart/effective/kind people (especially the elder generations, who happen to be the most useful to impress) are often still prejudiced in all the usual ways though, so you might still alienate them with your appearance.
On the contrary: most people in the world are ignorant, useless wastes of your time.
That’s a really cold way to phrase that. I think that way sometimes, but only when I’m particularly unhappy or frustrated with people. The thought goes away when I remember that most people genuinely care about other people, and many care about me (Or to put it in game theory jargon, my preferences fundamentally overlap with most people’s, and I consider agents who have those preferences intrinsically valuable).
That would imply that optimizing signals for “muggles” automatically sub-optimizes for “wizards”.
I used to think that it didn’t matter how I dressed, because everyone who wasn’t dumb and superficial would just ignore my appearance and focus on other things in me. Then I noticed that I would feel an instinctive dislike towards people who looked bad, and an automatic liking towards people who looked good.
It was the other way round for me—I started instinctively disliking bad-looking people a few months after having started to optimize my appearance for dumb superficial people.
If. That would imply that optimizing signals for “muggles” automatically sub-optimizes for “wizards”.
It almost certainly does, but that is a comment on ‘optimal’ and ‘sub-optimal’, not a claim that optimizing signals for muggles will not result in highly satisfactory wizard signals nevertheless. ‘Sub-optimal’ doesn’t preclude awesome.
(especially the elder generations, who happen to be the most useful to impress) are often still prejudiced in all the usual ways
Even that is less true in the hard sciences. I once had a professor in his mid sixties compliment me for my Clockwork Orange t-shirt after an oral exam, and most of faculty here seldom wears anything more formal than a polo shirt or a pullover.
There is no reliable superficial signal for hidden virtues and abilities which are both universally admired and difficult / impossible to acquire.
What about being seen with lots of friends without looking like the kind of person who would get lots of friends regardless of intelligence, happiness, kindness and effectiveness? Countersignalling FTW!
Hehe, that is a clever/amusing idea. But even if it’s true that this constitutes a meaningful signal (there are plenty of ways to get friends that do not involve intelligence, kindness, or effectiveness that leave no visual cues—like extroversion), it’s a signal so subtle that I don’t think I would pick up on it.
Edit: It would work for simpler things though—we wouldn’t be as impressed with David’s intelligence if his muscles were as large as Goliath’s.
My reference class was “traits I would want in a friend”. I don’t really care about how often my friends feel the need to be alone.
Extroversion is probably correlated with happiness—but then again, if we accept introversion-extroversion as intrinsic personality traits, who is to say that a lonely, socially awkard extrovert won’t give the same test results as a sad introvert? Correlation(extroversion, income) supposedly has a inverse U shaped curve.
Actually, the truth is I don’t pick friends based on raw happiness either...it was shorthand for general emotional maturity. I wouldn’t want to be less friends with someone if they were depressed, for example—it’s just that I don’t want anger, anxiety, insecurity, and other sorts of aggression directed at me, and people who frequently experience negative emotions are more likely to direct aggression at others.
most people in the world are ignorant, useless wastes of your time
Most people in the world would be wastes of time due to the opportunity cost spending time with them would represent. “Useless” seems inaccurate, even without considering ways to stab people to death with their bones.
most people in the world are ignorant, useless wastes of your time
Are you sure you’re not being a bit judgmental? Are you positive you’re upholding proper value subjectivism when making this statement? What exactly are these people ignorant of, and why does it matter? What purpose are they useless for, and who’s utility function contains this purpose? What are you optimizing for socially, and why do you suggest we do the same?
You may say I’m being pedantic, but I don’t think so. There are pitfalls everywhere on this subject. Although you might be correct, you shouldn’t discount the possibility that you believe that statement only because you makes you feel like you’re really awesome. If you changed your mind, you would lose a belief that makes you feel really superior, etc. Using terminology like “wizards” and “muggles” makes me think you’ve really gone off the deep end here.
Besides believing this statement being a good way to feel superior, it’s also a good way to shield oneself from social rejection. As a fundamental fact about how typical human hardware works, we can up-regulate or down-regulate how much we care about success with certain classes of people. If you think someone is really awesome, you feel more enjoyment when they accept you, and more pain when they reject you. If you think they’re an idiot, you feel less of both.
People like us tend to make a strong effort to match up our beliefs with reality, but most fundamentally our motivation system rewards us when we change our beliefs so we feel more enjoyment or less pain, not when the map becomes more matched up with the territory. Sometimes feeling better aligns well with updating to truer beliefs, but sometimes it doesn’t. In this area, few things are more common than people grasping as straws trying to figure out why all the people who reject them are just idiots. Less pain that way.
So here we are. You made a statement that contains a lot of unpacked information that if unpacked may demonstrate that you’re being unfair, and at the same time I’ve identified two strong non-epistemic reasons to believe it. You get to feel superior, and you get to avoid the pain of social rejection from the “muggles”. The moment you realize your beliefs could just be identity trips, you should massively increase the evidence you demand from such a proposition—that is if you want to optimize for true beliefs. This means addressing the questions in my first paragraph, and doing so rigorously.
so I’m not being nice enough, and you want me to defend myself rigorously? Why am I suddenly held to these standards? I think it’s perfectly obvious what I meant, and you don’t want to accept or admit that most people aren’t that great. I think you possess some views about the basic value of humans are afraid to let them go. So you have to attack me as being awkward or deluded in order for your own delusions to make any sense. I can and have explained elsewhere on these forums what I mean and I would gladly again, if you had simply asked what I meant. Instead you generate a multi-paragraph fantasy of myself, a person you’ve never met, involving rejection and inability to accept that rejection. This puts me in no mood to even really interact with you, let alone respond to your what I assume will be ever further rationalized attempts to prove my opinions wrong.
I didn’t mean to accuse you of anything. I even said you may be correct. I was just pointing out that there are a couple common pitfalls on this subject which suggest one should require a higher level of rigor. It’s indeed perfectly obvious what you meant, but what’s not obvious is whether you’re correct in your appraisal. If there were no pitfalls here, perhaps just the statement itself would be enough. But the presence of the pitfalls suggests that unpacking the propositions you made would be beneficial.
I guess I learned my lesson though. I clearly worded my post in an unfair or offensive manner. Sorry about that.
In modern culture, you get a fair amount of weirdness allowed as long as you are capable of being normal when it counts and are not too self-indulgent with it…
But “people who should be ignored” and “people who don’t care how you look” are hardly identical sets. If anything, they’re more likely to be opposed than overlapping. The sort of people you want to deal with are usually those with enough merit to have choices in who they interact with, and thus they’re naturally more picky.
I’m not against CARING HOW YOU LOOK. I’m against the view that caring how you look means you need to wear a suit or polo shirt and slacks or whatever the generic high-class look is.
There’s other ways to care, but as a rule successful people are more likely to be worth knowing than others, are more able to be picky with their class distinctions, and are thus most likely to be worth emulating. It’s not a universal strategy, but it’s a common enough one that it’s worth keeping it available.
I am probably already cut off from most people in the world. A large fraction, possibly of a majority, of the world population can’t speak any of the languages I can speak.
But I’m only ever going to interact with a tiny fraction of all the people in the world anyway, so that’s not a big deal. And if I have to choose whether to have 150 wizard friends or 150 muggle friends, I’ll surely pick the former.
I don’t think the boundaries of “nerd” are important to the mistake. If I were a and placed zero value on appearing as anything other than a , that would have been a huge mistake. I didn’t realize how much appearance and mannerisms had pigeonholed me until after I changed them.
That’s the point. Looking like a non-nerd sounds like selling non-apples to me. One possible way to “look like a non-nerd” is to look like a ’80 skateboarder, but that wouldn’t achieve your actual goal, so what you’re actually trying to do is more complicated than that.
And what do you mean by “nerd” in the first place? Someone with a very high IQ? Someone with poor social skills? Someone who studies or works in a hard science or maths? Someone who couldn’t play football halfway decently to save their life? Someone who is into certain particular games and works of fiction such as (say) Dungeons and Dragons or Star Trek? Only a few of those things would I want to advertise the opposite of via appearance. (Your age, gender and social circle are also relevant to that.)
Placing zero value on the ability to look, dress, and act like a non-nerd. I seriously overestimated the effort and underestimated the benefits.
What are the bad things that can happen to you if you get accurately judged as nerdy, and how do they compare to the negative impact of having people assume all the wrong things about you?
This brings up an excellent point.
It’s perfectly fine to be Packers fan, but I would judge a person who showed up to a wedding or funeral dressed as a cheesehead. I wouldn’t judge them for being a Packards fan; I would judge them for disrespectfully violating decorum—for choosing to signal that they are a Packards fan.
Projecting nerdiness is similar EDIT in that the first-order signal is not the harmful one. A nerdy appearance emits two important signals:
You are nerdy
You are a person who emits signals that they are nerdy
The second-order signal is the more negative and important. It isn’t too bad if people think you are nerdy; it’s bad if people think that you don’t understand or don’t care how most people perceive you. It signals a lack of self-awareness, or a deficient understanding of cultural norms, or blithe indifference. In my case, it accurately signaled all three.
Signaling my lack of self-awareness didn’t cause bad things to happen; it prevented good things from happening.
No negative impact, and I don’t think people do assume the wrong things about me. In conversation I’m usually transparent about who I am. You can credibly profess to be nerdy no matter what clothing you wear. You cannot credibly profess to understand unspoken social norms if your appearance contradicts your words.
I understand that it would be incorrect to show up at a wedding, funeral, or job interview wearing shorts, sandals, and a t-shirt with a bad science pun. Those are special occasions with different rules from the rest of your life, and fortunately they are rare.
Why, in everyday life, would dressing like a nerd indicate blithe indifference towards anyone? Would I seem more empathetic and human if my shirt advertised a band instead, or had buttons? What are some common environments where looking like a nerd is a disrespectful violation of decorum?
Looking like a nerd is not a disrespectful violation of decorum—disrespectful violation of decorum was part of an analogy about first-order and second-order signaling. Sorry that this wasn’t clear. I edited my original comment, and will restate and rephrase the crux of the comment here.
Let’s take it as a premise that a large portion of people believe a nerdy appearance signals poor social prowess. Given the premise, people might emit nerdy signals anyway if:
They don’t realize that they emitting nerdy signals, or
They don’t realize nerdy signals will make many others less disposed to them, or
They don’t care about the opinions of people who make negative assumption about people who signal nerdiness, or
They can’t help but emit nerdy signals, or
(other reasons I won’t list here)
You will notice that all of these explanations indicate the person has poor social prowess. Unless there is common knowledge) that the premise is false, a nerdy appearance is evidence for poor social prowess. The expectation that people who look nerdy have poor social awareness becomes a self-fulfilling prophesy.
ETA This line of reasoning isn’t air-tight. Still, it’s a strong reason why some nerd-friendly people take a dim view on a nerdy appearances.
I’m not sure this one belongs to the list: I’d figure that not having to care about strangers’ opinion about you signals self-confidence, not “poor social prowess”.
True that—you can only countersignal to people who already know you. But those are normally the only people whose opinions about me I care about (except in job interviews, first dates, and the like—where someone who doesn’t know me well yet may affect me in the future), so why should worry about what I signal to anyone else?
I’m late to the party, but it’s because you forgo new opportunities to meet people when you signal these things. For example, I knew a man who signalled nerdyness and had no social skills. Talking with him was uncomfortable and he would creep on women unknowingly, driving off other friends. Further, his lack of social awareness made it impossible to get rid of him once he was attached leading to an uncomfortable situation for all concerned. I had 3 other negative experiences from people who signalled nerdyness, each of which had serious problems. Essentially, by choosing to interact with new people who signal nerdyness in their dress I take on a higher than normal risk of having a negative experience.
A large proportion of people have had an experience like this and do not wish to repeat it, so by signalling nerdyness you essentially drive those people away. Aside from that, you make use of the horns effect when you could be using the halo effect. The end result is that signalling nerdyness puts a pointless obstacle in the path of your life.
Just signalling normalness puts you in a better position, because if you want to signal nerdyness to specific people you can just say “I play dwarf fortress” or something similar.
Empirically I think you are wrong. When I wear Vibram Fivefingers in public (with is a quite nerdy choice) it radically increases the amount of people that approach me.
I think we are using the term nerdyness to mean different things. When I say nerdiness I mean at least two of the following: poor dress sense, I’ll fitting clothes, lack of deodorant, low personal hygene, excessively bad posture and bad hair style. What are you using the term to mean?
What if I’ve already met enough people? Dunbar’s number is not infinity, so meeting people has an opportunity cost.
I’m guessing the real problem was his lack of social skills, not his nerdiness.
Are the people you know now awesome and in sufficient variety and number? If so, I can totally understand not needing to know more.
His problem was indeed his lack of social skills, but it was signalled by his nerdyess. The point here is not that there is a 1:1 comparison from these signalling characteristics to the end result, but that enough of the population thinks this way for it to alienate a large portion of the population when one signals in such a manner. That portion of the population includes many interesting people and should not be cast aside lightly. My life for example improved dramatically when I changed my signalling characteristics into a more confident and visually appealing style.
It’s not just an issue of awesomeness and number but also time and distance. I have a pretty busy schedule these days so it would be nontrivial for me to find the time(/stamina) to hang out with more than a handful people on a regular basis; also, no matter how awesome someone is it’d be hard for me to be friends with them if they live halfway across the globe, so what matters isn’t how awesome my friends are on an absolute scale, but how awesome my friends are compared to other people in my area. If I lived in the Bay Area and had more time than I know what to do with, things would presumably be different.
Sufficient is no absolute term, it is dependent on free time and other resources. Which is another way of saying I agree. With that said there is unavoidable attrition of friends from changing circumstances, locations, schedules and other factors that get in the way. I find it optimal to spend a certain small proportion of time seeking out new experiences with new people. After all, what are the chances that the people I currently know are the most suited to me out of the tens of thousands in the surrounding area? It feels like a betrayal to think such a thought, but I can come up with no good reason why I should listen to that particular emotion.
Eventually things change and I see no reason to replace the friends who must leave my life with the first reasonably compatible people to come along, when I could instead take a proactive stance and do better. We decide the people we want in our lives
As far as first dates go, getting in bad relationship because you are fundamentally incompatible is a lot worse than just not making the second date.
If a woman has a problem with me being nerdy, then it’s no problem that the interaction ends at the first date.
On the other hand full openness about who you are is very conductive to building trust and emotional intimacy.
I don’t think that true. If you engage in an action with full confidence and that confidence is clearly visible in your body language and most people who engage in the same action without much social confidence you can counter signal.
The things in bold—I cannot put myself in the mindset where these things appear inherently bad. Would you mind explaining why should one make an end value out of respecting social and cultural norms?
I suppose you could frame it like that too. Which are those good things? (Some guesses ahead of time: getting compliments on your outfits? Socializing more easily with certain segments of society? Modifying people’s perception of you into something more positive, as an end in itself or as a means to something else, e.g. a promotion?)
I assumed negative impact because I’m right on the other side of the pond: I have very good intuitions on dressing in a conventionally pretty, fashionable way, and yet this skill has always had negative value for me, as it influenced people’s reactions to me in a way that worsened my interactions with them. But I’ll expand on this only if it proves necessary.
One idea: Social power is contagious, so people want to associate with people that other people want to associate with. This leads to information cascades—one type of person has more power for some reason, so people want to associate with that type of person, so even more people want to associate with that type of person—and the “type of person” that this converges to gets called “normal”.
Another idea: By caring about social norms, you signal that you care about not having people disapprove of you, which gives the group power over you—“I’ll limit my sheep’s grazing of the commons, because I don’t want to look bad.”
Nitpick on wording: I wouldn’t call wearing a suit to a wedding “looking like a non-Packers fan”—it’s not like non-Packers fans are all that much more likely to do so than Packers fan; I’d call it “not looking like a Packers fan”. By the same token, on hearing “looking like a non-nerd”, I think about an appearance that’s significant evidence than you’re not a nerd; I’d refer to an appearance that doesn’t provide much evidence one way or another as “not looking like a nerd”.
This is excellent and is relevant to my thoughts.
I defined it as self-hatred, but lack of self-awareness is close.
Seconded.
A bit further: Placing little value or interest on personal style, not learning how basic style works, not owning any formal or even smart casual clothes at all, not knowing what terms mean and where they have broken up. This results in you going on really annoying (and maybe expensive) shopping trips under time constraint and makes you vulnerable to cultural guardians and merchants when you eventually are forced to figure out what the hell you are doing.
I will second this but with a twist: I tend to look really weird. But looking really weird and FANCY makes for a lot better and fun random social interactions. Put effort into your appearance, decide what you want to look like and what image you like to project, but that image doesn’t have to be optimized for muggles unless you want it to be.
Wizards who don’t learn to interact profitably with muggles cut themselves off from most people in the world. Cutting yourself off from most people in the world is a life-altering mistake.
On the contrary: most people in the world are ignorant, useless wastes of your time. One SHOULD cut them out of influencing you and taking up your attention. If you can choose to optimize yourself for interacting with the average mathematician or interacting with the average person, you should choose the mathematician.
But in any case: who said anything about cutting off? What exactly are you picturing here? Some sort of outfit that renders one invisible to anyone but bronies? That’s not how clothing works, except in extreme examples.
People I value won’t care if I have a non-standard hairstyle or wear clothing that doesn’t fit well, I used to think. After cutting my hair and dressing better, I found that this is not the case.
To be clear, I think weird but fancy is great with the right audience. But being unable or not very good at presenting a non-weird image is a bad mistake. I underestimated how strong an image I projected to non-nerdy people. I think many other nerdy people underestimate the strength of the image as well.
I think there a difference between wearing clothing that just doesn’t fit well and wearing the kind of weird clothing that can make a positive impression.
Wearing Hawaii shirts for example is weird but something that people who consider themselves open minded but don’t consider themselves as nerds can see as cool.
I personally make the weird clothing choice of walking around in Vibriam Fivefinger shoes. In contrast to cutting myself off from other people they invite interest and people start conversation with me to ask me about them that they wouldn’t start otherwise.
If. That would imply that optimizing signals for “muggles” automatically sub-optimizes for “wizards”.
And this is true for most values of wizard (goths, hippies, preps, nudists, professionals) but it’s certainly not true when “wizards” = Intelligent, happy, kind, and effective people. You can signal allegiance to a subculture with a costume, but you can’t signal a virtue.
There is no reliable superficial signal for hidden virtues and abilities which are both universally admired and difficult / impossible to acquire. If such a signal were to exist and become well known, it would immediately become fashionable and thereby lose its signaling properties.
The only honest signal for these traits is actual demonstrations of intelligence, kindness, etc...is actual displays of intellect, altruism, etc. As such, looking weirdly fancy isn’t going to help you to that end. The way to surround yourself with smart/kind/effective people is to inhabit social spaces which attract smart/kind/effective people.
Smart/effective/kind people (especially the elder generations, who happen to be the most useful to impress) are often still prejudiced in all the usual ways though, so you might still alienate them with your appearance.
That’s a really cold way to phrase that. I think that way sometimes, but only when I’m particularly unhappy or frustrated with people. The thought goes away when I remember that most people genuinely care about other people, and many care about me (Or to put it in game theory jargon, my preferences fundamentally overlap with most people’s, and I consider agents who have those preferences intrinsically valuable).
I used to think that it didn’t matter how I dressed, because everyone who wasn’t dumb and superficial would just ignore my appearance and focus on other things in me. Then I noticed that I would feel an instinctive dislike towards people who looked bad, and an automatic liking towards people who looked good.
Did you conclude that your initial belief was incorrect, or did you conclude that you were dumb and superficial?
I think both.
It was the other way round for me—I started instinctively disliking bad-looking people a few months after having started to optimize my appearance for dumb superficial people.
It almost certainly does, but that is a comment on ‘optimal’ and ‘sub-optimal’, not a claim that optimizing signals for muggles will not result in highly satisfactory wizard signals nevertheless. ‘Sub-optimal’ doesn’t preclude awesome.
this is very true. My appearance is more optimized towards wizards but usually gets positive comments from muggles as well
Even that is less true in the hard sciences. I once had a professor in his mid sixties compliment me for my Clockwork Orange t-shirt after an oral exam, and most of faculty here seldom wears anything more formal than a polo shirt or a pullover.
For the purpose impressing people is most important for elder generations are not the most useful to impress.
What about being seen with lots of friends without looking like the kind of person who would get lots of friends regardless of intelligence, happiness, kindness and effectiveness? Countersignalling FTW!
Hehe, that is a clever/amusing idea. But even if it’s true that this constitutes a meaningful signal (there are plenty of ways to get friends that do not involve intelligence, kindness, or effectiveness that leave no visual cues—like extroversion), it’s a signal so subtle that I don’t think I would pick up on it.
Edit: It would work for simpler things though—we wouldn’t be as impressed with David’s intelligence if his muscles were as large as Goliath’s.
I would have counted extroversion as in the same reference class as intelligence, happiness, kindness and effectiveness.
My reference class was “traits I would want in a friend”. I don’t really care about how often my friends feel the need to be alone.
Extroversion is probably correlated with happiness—but then again, if we accept introversion-extroversion as intrinsic personality traits, who is to say that a lonely, socially awkard extrovert won’t give the same test results as a sad introvert? Correlation(extroversion, income) supposedly has a inverse U shaped curve.
Actually, the truth is I don’t pick friends based on raw happiness either...it was shorthand for general emotional maturity. I wouldn’t want to be less friends with someone if they were depressed, for example—it’s just that I don’t want anger, anxiety, insecurity, and other sorts of aggression directed at me, and people who frequently experience negative emotions are more likely to direct aggression at others.
Most people in the world would be wastes of time due to the opportunity cost spending time with them would represent. “Useless” seems inaccurate, even without considering ways to stab people to death with their bones.
Are you sure you’re not being a bit judgmental? Are you positive you’re upholding proper value subjectivism when making this statement? What exactly are these people ignorant of, and why does it matter? What purpose are they useless for, and who’s utility function contains this purpose? What are you optimizing for socially, and why do you suggest we do the same?
You may say I’m being pedantic, but I don’t think so. There are pitfalls everywhere on this subject. Although you might be correct, you shouldn’t discount the possibility that you believe that statement only because you makes you feel like you’re really awesome. If you changed your mind, you would lose a belief that makes you feel really superior, etc. Using terminology like “wizards” and “muggles” makes me think you’ve really gone off the deep end here.
Besides believing this statement being a good way to feel superior, it’s also a good way to shield oneself from social rejection. As a fundamental fact about how typical human hardware works, we can up-regulate or down-regulate how much we care about success with certain classes of people. If you think someone is really awesome, you feel more enjoyment when they accept you, and more pain when they reject you. If you think they’re an idiot, you feel less of both.
People like us tend to make a strong effort to match up our beliefs with reality, but most fundamentally our motivation system rewards us when we change our beliefs so we feel more enjoyment or less pain, not when the map becomes more matched up with the territory. Sometimes feeling better aligns well with updating to truer beliefs, but sometimes it doesn’t. In this area, few things are more common than people grasping as straws trying to figure out why all the people who reject them are just idiots. Less pain that way.
So here we are. You made a statement that contains a lot of unpacked information that if unpacked may demonstrate that you’re being unfair, and at the same time I’ve identified two strong non-epistemic reasons to believe it. You get to feel superior, and you get to avoid the pain of social rejection from the “muggles”. The moment you realize your beliefs could just be identity trips, you should massively increase the evidence you demand from such a proposition—that is if you want to optimize for true beliefs. This means addressing the questions in my first paragraph, and doing so rigorously.
so I’m not being nice enough, and you want me to defend myself rigorously? Why am I suddenly held to these standards? I think it’s perfectly obvious what I meant, and you don’t want to accept or admit that most people aren’t that great. I think you possess some views about the basic value of humans are afraid to let them go. So you have to attack me as being awkward or deluded in order for your own delusions to make any sense. I can and have explained elsewhere on these forums what I mean and I would gladly again, if you had simply asked what I meant. Instead you generate a multi-paragraph fantasy of myself, a person you’ve never met, involving rejection and inability to accept that rejection. This puts me in no mood to even really interact with you, let alone respond to your what I assume will be ever further rationalized attempts to prove my opinions wrong.
I didn’t mean to accuse you of anything. I even said you may be correct. I was just pointing out that there are a couple common pitfalls on this subject which suggest one should require a higher level of rigor. It’s indeed perfectly obvious what you meant, but what’s not obvious is whether you’re correct in your appraisal. If there were no pitfalls here, perhaps just the statement itself would be enough. But the presence of the pitfalls suggests that unpacking the propositions you made would be beneficial.
I guess I learned my lesson though. I clearly worded my post in an unfair or offensive manner. Sorry about that.
In modern culture, you get a fair amount of weirdness allowed as long as you are capable of being normal when it counts and are not too self-indulgent with it…
World of squibs.
But “people who should be ignored” and “people who don’t care how you look” are hardly identical sets. If anything, they’re more likely to be opposed than overlapping. The sort of people you want to deal with are usually those with enough merit to have choices in who they interact with, and thus they’re naturally more picky.
I’m not against CARING HOW YOU LOOK. I’m against the view that caring how you look means you need to wear a suit or polo shirt and slacks or whatever the generic high-class look is.
There’s other ways to care, but as a rule successful people are more likely to be worth knowing than others, are more able to be picky with their class distinctions, and are thus most likely to be worth emulating. It’s not a universal strategy, but it’s a common enough one that it’s worth keeping it available.
I’m not at all sure that avoiding high variance strategies is always a great idea.
I am probably already cut off from most people in the world. A large fraction, possibly of a majority, of the world population can’t speak any of the languages I can speak.
But I’m only ever going to interact with a tiny fraction of all the people in the world anyway, so that’s not a big deal. And if I have to choose whether to have 150 wizard friends or 150 muggle friends, I’ll surely pick the former.
Define/taboo this term, please.
I don’t think the boundaries of “nerd” are important to the mistake. If I were a and placed zero value on appearing as anything other than a , that would have been a huge mistake. I didn’t realize how much appearance and mannerisms had pigeonholed me until after I changed them.
That’s the point. Looking like a non-nerd sounds like selling non-apples to me. One possible way to “look like a non-nerd” is to look like a ’80 skateboarder, but that wouldn’t achieve your actual goal, so what you’re actually trying to do is more complicated than that.
And what do you mean by “nerd” in the first place? Someone with a very high IQ? Someone with poor social skills? Someone who studies or works in a hard science or maths? Someone who couldn’t play football halfway decently to save their life? Someone who is into certain particular games and works of fiction such as (say) Dungeons and Dragons or Star Trek? Only a few of those things would I want to advertise the opposite of via appearance. (Your age, gender and social circle are also relevant to that.)
I consider this a successful taboo of what you meant, and it was quite different from the first thing I thought of when I read the word “nerd”.