for people who are not very good at navigating social conventions, it is often easier to learn to be visibly weird than to learn to adapt to the social conventions.
this often works because there are some spaces where being visibly weird is tolerated, or even celebrated. in fact, from the perspective of an organization, it is good for your success if you are good at protecting weird people.
but from the perspective of an individual, leaning too hard into weirdness is possibly harmful. part of leaning into weirdness is intentional ignorance of normal conventions. this traps you in a local minimum where any progress on understanding normal conventions hurts your weirdness, but isn’t enough to jump all the way to the basin of the normal mode of interaction.
(epistemic status: low confidence, just a hypothesis)
Pretty sure @Ronny Fernandez has opinions about this (in particular, I expect he disagrees that actively being visibly weird requires being ignorant of how to behave conventionally).
Perhaps I misunderstand your use of the phrase “intentionally ignorant” but I believe many cases of people who are seen to have acted with “integrity” are people who have been hyperaware and well informed of what normal social conventions are in a given environment and made deliberate choice not to adhere to them, not ignoring said conventions out of a lack of interest.
I also am not sure what you mean by “weird”. I assume you mean any behavior which is not the normal convention of any randomly selected cohesive group of people, from a family, to a local soccer club, to a informal but tight knit circle of friends, to a department of a large company. Have I got that right?
My idea of ‘weird’ tends to involve the stereotypical artists and creatives I associate with, which is, within those circles not weird at all but normal. But I’m meta-aware that might be a weird take.
I don’t think I understand what “learn to be visibly weird” means, and how it differs from not following social conventions because you fail to understand them correctly.
for people who are not very good at navigating social conventions, it is often easier to learn to be visibly weird than to learn to adapt to the social conventions.
are you basing this on intuition or personal experience or something else? I guess we should avoid basing it on observations of people who did succeed in that way. People who try and succeed in adapting to social conventions are likely much less noticeable/salient than people who succeed at being visibly weird.
for people who are not very good at navigating social conventions, it is often easier to learn to be visibly weird than to learn to adapt to the social conventions.
this often works because there are some spaces where being visibly weird is tolerated, or even celebrated. in fact, from the perspective of an organization, it is good for your success if you are good at protecting weird people.
but from the perspective of an individual, leaning too hard into weirdness is possibly harmful. part of leaning into weirdness is intentional ignorance of normal conventions. this traps you in a local minimum where any progress on understanding normal conventions hurts your weirdness, but isn’t enough to jump all the way to the basin of the normal mode of interaction.
(epistemic status: low confidence, just a hypothesis)
Pretty sure @Ronny Fernandez has opinions about this (in particular, I expect he disagrees that actively being visibly weird requires being ignorant of how to behave conventionally).
Perhaps I misunderstand your use of the phrase “intentionally ignorant” but I believe many cases of people who are seen to have acted with “integrity” are people who have been hyperaware and well informed of what normal social conventions are in a given environment and made deliberate choice not to adhere to them, not ignoring said conventions out of a lack of interest.
I also am not sure what you mean by “weird”. I assume you mean any behavior which is not the normal convention of any randomly selected cohesive group of people, from a family, to a local soccer club, to a informal but tight knit circle of friends, to a department of a large company. Have I got that right?
My idea of ‘weird’ tends to involve the stereotypical artists and creatives I associate with, which is, within those circles not weird at all but normal. But I’m meta-aware that might be a weird take.
I don’t think I understand what “learn to be visibly weird” means, and how it differs from not following social conventions because you fail to understand them correctly.
are you basing this on intuition or personal experience or something else? I guess we should avoid basing it on observations of people who did succeed in that way. People who try and succeed in adapting to social conventions are likely much less noticeable/salient than people who succeed at being visibly weird.
I think my ideal is to lean into weirdness in a way that doesn’t rely on ignorance of normal conventions