Does anyone else believe in deliberate alienation? Forums and organizations like Lesswrong often strive to be and claim to want to be more (and by extension indefinitely) inclusive but I think excluding people can be very useful in terms of social utilons and conversation, if not so good for $$$. There’s a lot of value in having a pretty good picture of who you’re talking to in a given social group, in terms of making effective use of jargon and references as well as appeals to emotion that actually appeal. I think thought should be carefully given as to who exactly you let in or block out with any given form of inclusiveness or insensitivity.
On a more personal note, I think looking deliberately weird is a great way to make your day to day happenstance interactions more varied and interesting.
Acting “weird” (well or just weird, depends) is something I have contemplated, too. For now I have to confess that I mostly try to stick to the norms (especially in public) except if I have a good reason to do otherwise. I think I might make this one of my tasks to just do some random “weird” acts of kindness.
About the alienation:
I don’t think that we should do a lot about that. I think enforcing certain rules and having our own memes and terms for stuff already has some strong effects on that. I certainly felt a bit weird when I first came here. And I already was having thoughts like “don’t judge something by it’s cover” etc. in my mind (avoiding certain biases).
Does anyone else believe in deliberate alienation? Forums and organizations like Lesswrong often strive to be and claim to want to be more (and by extension indefinitely) inclusive but I think excluding people can be very useful in terms of social utilons and conversation, if not so good for $$$. There’s a lot of value in having a pretty good picture of who you’re talking to in a given social group, in terms of making effective use of jargon and references as well as appeals to emotion that actually appeal. I think thought should be carefully given as to who exactly you let in or block out with any given form of inclusiveness or insensitivity.
On a more personal note, I think looking deliberately weird is a great way to make your day to day happenstance interactions more varied and interesting.
Yes, insufficient elitism is a failure mode of people who were excluded at some point in their life.
This seems like a good time to link the Five Geek Social Fallacies, one of my favorite subculture sociology articles.
(Insufficient elitism as a failure mode is #1.)
Acting “weird” (well or just weird, depends) is something I have contemplated, too. For now I have to confess that I mostly try to stick to the norms (especially in public) except if I have a good reason to do otherwise. I think I might make this one of my tasks to just do some random “weird” acts of kindness.
About the alienation: I don’t think that we should do a lot about that. I think enforcing certain rules and having our own memes and terms for stuff already has some strong effects on that. I certainly felt a bit weird when I first came here. And I already was having thoughts like “don’t judge something by it’s cover” etc. in my mind (avoiding certain biases).