I feel this conflates different kinds of weirdness, by using an overly vague definition and talking about cases where certain narrow kinds of weirdness are useful.
I couldn’t even come up with counterexamples because of the vagueness. Being rude to strangers is weird, but surely you’re not the only person who has done this, so you could argue “well, a lot of people do that so it’s not weird enough to count”. And then there’s reference class manipulation. “Yes, there was only one Unabomber, but he should be considered as a member of the class ‘violent political protests’ and there are too many of that class to count it as weird”.
Pointing to weirdness as good is like crackpots pointing to Galileo and Einstein. If you’re doing something weird, it gets bad reactions, and you blame that on the weirdness, it’s far more likely that you’re just trying to excuse some character flaw in yourself than that you’re the lone Einstein that nobody understands.
This is legitimate- the definition of weirdness was kept open-ended. I intended weirdness to be any behavior that is divergent from what most in a certain group considers to be the status quo, but even within a group, each member may have a different definition of what weird behavior is, and a consensus will be difficult to pin down.
I would consider rudeness to be weird behavior under this definition. It is a social behavior that comes with the cost of disrupting social cohesion. What is considered rude, vs. frank and straightforward, will vary from person to person even within a group, and may change over time as people within the group analyze whether the cost of the behavior is worth the social cost of ostracizing the individual who engages in that behavior. For example, cursing was considered much more rude by my parent’s generation than the current generation. It took time and discourse for the status quo to change, and for people to decide that cursing is less harmful than was once imagined.
As for whether I’m trying to excuse my character flaws, that may well be the case. In learning how to more effectively examine the costs and benefits of my behavior, I hope to recognize what is a flaw, and what is not, and to mend the former.
I feel this conflates different kinds of weirdness, by using an overly vague definition and talking about cases where certain narrow kinds of weirdness are useful.
I couldn’t even come up with counterexamples because of the vagueness. Being rude to strangers is weird, but surely you’re not the only person who has done this, so you could argue “well, a lot of people do that so it’s not weird enough to count”. And then there’s reference class manipulation. “Yes, there was only one Unabomber, but he should be considered as a member of the class ‘violent political protests’ and there are too many of that class to count it as weird”.
Pointing to weirdness as good is like crackpots pointing to Galileo and Einstein. If you’re doing something weird, it gets bad reactions, and you blame that on the weirdness, it’s far more likely that you’re just trying to excuse some character flaw in yourself than that you’re the lone Einstein that nobody understands.
This is legitimate- the definition of weirdness was kept open-ended. I intended weirdness to be any behavior that is divergent from what most in a certain group considers to be the status quo, but even within a group, each member may have a different definition of what weird behavior is, and a consensus will be difficult to pin down.
I would consider rudeness to be weird behavior under this definition. It is a social behavior that comes with the cost of disrupting social cohesion. What is considered rude, vs. frank and straightforward, will vary from person to person even within a group, and may change over time as people within the group analyze whether the cost of the behavior is worth the social cost of ostracizing the individual who engages in that behavior. For example, cursing was considered much more rude by my parent’s generation than the current generation. It took time and discourse for the status quo to change, and for people to decide that cursing is less harmful than was once imagined.
As for whether I’m trying to excuse my character flaws, that may well be the case. In learning how to more effectively examine the costs and benefits of my behavior, I hope to recognize what is a flaw, and what is not, and to mend the former.