“Yet many highly intelligent people with normal rationality have terrible fashion sense”
Hrm, I’m not sure what evidence there is that highly intelligent people worse fashion sense than equivalent people [let’s stick to the category of males, with which I’m most familiar]. It seems to me like “fashion” for males comes down to a few simple rules, that a monkey (or, for that matter any programmer or mathematician) can master. The problem seems to be that (1) one does need to master these rules (2) sometimes, it means one does not dress comfortably.
I would like to offer a competing hypothesis: nerds have just as much “innate” fashion sense as non-nerds, but they feel that fashion is beneath them, that dressing comfortably is more important than following fashion, or that they would prefer to dress to impress nerds (with T-shirts that say “P(H|E) = P(E|H)*P(H)/P(E)” for example) than to impress non-nerds. In other words, the much simpler hypothesis “dress is usually worn to self-identify as a member of a tribe” is enough to explain nerds’ perceived lack of fashion sense.
[For the record, here is how a nerd male can “simulate” a reasonable facsimile of fashion sense: for semi-formal occasions, get a couple of nice suits and wear them. If nobody else would wear a tie, wear a suit without the tie (if your ability to predict whether people will wear a tie is that bad, improve it with explicit Bayesian approximation). For all other occasions, wear dark colored slacks and a button down shirt with a compatible color (ask a person you trust about which colors go with which, and keep a table glued to the inside of your closet. Any “nerd” has mastered skills tremendously more complicated than that (hell, correctly writing HTML is more complicated). One can only assume it is lack of motivation, not of ability.]
For myself as an example of nerd, I can definitely say the reason I dress “with a horrible fashion sense” is as a tribal identification scheme. In situations where my utility function would actually suffer because of that, I do the rational thing, and wear the disguise of a different tribe… (For example, when going on sales pitches to customers, I let the sales rep in charge of the sale to tell me what to dress down to the socks, on my wedding I let my wife pick out my clothes, etc.)
Personally, I’ve been able to get away with just dark slacks and a dark formal shirt. That said, I usually dress quite “horribly” by fashion standards, because there’s no one in my day-to-day life who’d be impressed by my mad fashion skills, so I might as well dress comfortably at no penalty.
“Yet many highly intelligent people with normal rationality have terrible fashion sense”
Hrm, I’m not sure what evidence there is that highly intelligent people worse fashion sense than equivalent people [let’s stick to the category of males, with which I’m most familiar]. It seems to me like “fashion” for males comes down to a few simple rules, that a monkey (or, for that matter any programmer or mathematician) can master. The problem seems to be that (1) one does need to master these rules (2) sometimes, it means one does not dress comfortably.
I would like to offer a competing hypothesis: nerds have just as much “innate” fashion sense as non-nerds, but they feel that fashion is beneath them, that dressing comfortably is more important than following fashion, or that they would prefer to dress to impress nerds (with T-shirts that say “P(H|E) = P(E|H)*P(H)/P(E)” for example) than to impress non-nerds. In other words, the much simpler hypothesis “dress is usually worn to self-identify as a member of a tribe” is enough to explain nerds’ perceived lack of fashion sense.
[For the record, here is how a nerd male can “simulate” a reasonable facsimile of fashion sense: for semi-formal occasions, get a couple of nice suits and wear them. If nobody else would wear a tie, wear a suit without the tie (if your ability to predict whether people will wear a tie is that bad, improve it with explicit Bayesian approximation). For all other occasions, wear dark colored slacks and a button down shirt with a compatible color (ask a person you trust about which colors go with which, and keep a table glued to the inside of your closet. Any “nerd” has mastered skills tremendously more complicated than that (hell, correctly writing HTML is more complicated). One can only assume it is lack of motivation, not of ability.]
For myself as an example of nerd, I can definitely say the reason I dress “with a horrible fashion sense” is as a tribal identification scheme. In situations where my utility function would actually suffer because of that, I do the rational thing, and wear the disguise of a different tribe… (For example, when going on sales pitches to customers, I let the sales rep in charge of the sale to tell me what to dress down to the socks, on my wedding I let my wife pick out my clothes, etc.)
Personally, I’ve been able to get away with just dark slacks and a dark formal shirt. That said, I usually dress quite “horribly” by fashion standards, because there’s no one in my day-to-day life who’d be impressed by my mad fashion skills, so I might as well dress comfortably at no penalty.