A Taxonomy of Weirdness

I’m not confident these are the right gears, and you might be asking for refined gears than mine, but my working hypothesis is something like:

The umbrella concept of weirdness is about whether people can predict your actions, since this is extremely useful information to track for a social animal. Predictability and therefore weirdness are tracked on a variety of levels—you can be weird because of your sleep schedule, or weird because of your nervous tics and body language, or weird because you talk in a very normal manner about the impending alien rapture, or weird just because you’re a foreigner. The weirdness of an action registers as flags on various mental levels to help you predict when that person later might not do the canonical action, and it registers with a magnitude and some metadata to help you track their weird trait(s) for inner simming. To answer the question of how much disconformity is “enough” to be labeled weird, I have to hand-wave and say that typical people’s social neural nets just get very good at inferring what infractions correspond to how much likelihood of what level of difficulty coordinating with them. (If this is the meat of the question, I could say more later).

Unfortunately, “weird" has had some semantic drift since unpredictable often happens to correlate with “being a less valuable ally” in a variety of ways for systemic or intrinsic reasons. Two important subtypes of weird that this is evident in are 1) the people whom you talk about that are just kind of loners, and 2) the people who actually provide frequent disvalue. The loners are “weird" because they can and do take actions the group hasn’t decided on, which makes them harder to coordinate with and significantly less predictable. But this also correlates with them being weird in other ways, and so it is rightly seen as Bayesian evidence for other problems by their peers—and further, people who sometimes leave the group are just less valuable allies (for dependability, for gossip, etc). When I do focusing on the weirdness of loners, I can kind of pick out these distinct feelings (of which I think the third is most prominent), along with other more personal ones like “weird -> unpredictable -> higher likelihood of new ideas -> valuable” and similar.

I think “weird” has mutated into a slur nowadays because of the subtype of those who provide disvalue and the ways that those traits correlate with weirdness (and why it's hard to get gears on the different types of nonconformity). You certainly can have good weird, where someone is unpredictable but in ways that everyone repeatedly likes (though they are still tracked as “weird”, importantly). But since a large part of social coordination is being predictable, the people who have fine control over their many levels of dials often do work largely within predictable ranges, and only the best optimizers can escape the local optima and be correct without too much disvalue on the way—which means that most people who aren’t being predictable are doing so because of an inability. And since most people can hit the small range of highly valuable parameter space we call “normal”, that gets set as baseline value, so a vast proportion of other actions are negative. So people who have difficulties with certain dials will regularly cause disvalue in various ways, which means that the trait of “weird” is now correlated with bad actions.

After writing this out, I’m wondering whether I should have called “weird” specifically “negative unpredictability”, and call “positive predictability” something like “interesting”. The people I think of as least weird and those I think of as least interesting both end up as “boring”, in the sense of a very predictable wind-up doll. I think you can have separate tickers for both weirdness and interestingness, but often people will black-and-white it one way or the other (and indeed argue whether someone is “weird” or “interesting”). The needle-threading of getting people to follow you demands an entire toolbox of gears itself, but some heuristics on just pushing the scales a little further from bad unpredictability:

One good way is to use your unpredictable actions to help your peers, as in noticing others are hungry and striking out on your own to fix the problem, or hitting the sweet spot of high-level predictability low-level unpredictability we call humor. Another, probably more important way, is to put a little extra effort at being extra predictable when around: prove you’re normal with small talk, say normal stuff about yourself, and forge social ties or commit to the group in other ways so they can know that you’ll (mostly) be there for them. Allies have to be dependable.

(Also "uncompromising" could mean a few things and some of them are pretty bad. The good kind of "uncompromising" is something like believing what you believe, feeling what you feel, thinking what you think, and wanting what you want, and not letting someone else suppress that. The bad kind is trying to impose any of that on someone else / demand that someone else change to accommodate that.)

Relatedly, I'm also concerned that in this taxonomy it's very tempting for people to label themselves as Fried Eggs to justify their lack of social success, or something like that.

I grappled with the same thought process, but I came to the conclusion that any attempt on my part to address this would a) ring false - if for no other reason than my life was the motivation for the term b) be counterproductive, for reasons I will go into below, and c) be kind of missing the point.

I think it would have been counterproductive to make a point about the fact that Fried Eggs as a category contains both people who are just unusual and unable to be usual without life-altering effort, and people who like to come into other people's spaces and wreck shop. I suspect that the sort of people who really do take up too much space, disrupt local status hierarchies, or are deliberately off-putting, are not also the sort of people who it would be useful to address in a general manner. I also suspect that the sort of people who just want freedom to express themselves and can't seem to fit local norms are exactly the sort of people who would take any criticism leveled at the former group as being aimed at them. While such commentary is helpful and necessary, (especially since I don't think Fried Eggs tend to build good communities, which I don't think you dispute) I don't know if general, relatively short blog post is the right format. Or that I am the right author.

As well, as I said in c), this was also very much not the point of the post - which was to divide people by etiology of weirdness and explain the friction between them - and that point was already unclear so I didn't want to muddy the waters too much.

This is the part of the post that personally interests me the most, and I would personally like to hear more from you along these lines; less abstract theorizing about the nature of weirdness and more stories of experiences of you or other weird people you know being / feeling rejected or whatever else prompted this post. (Then theorizing afterwards, maybe. But it's hard for me to tell where you're coming from without the stories.)

As a disclaimer (which I should maybe put in the actual post as an edit) - the beginning anecdote about where "fried eggs" comes from is 100% true, including every detail about which members of my family were what other shape, etc. However, the examples at the end (about Tonari no Totoro and short skirts / biker jackets) come from real examples with the details shifted so as to achieve two things. One, I didn't want to share personal stories about people who are not me, especially if those stories involve rejection. Two, I wanted to generalize the stories in a way that I hoped would reach the intended audience (the LWsphere) better, without sacrificing the relative vividness of specific examples. Again, the broad outline, that someone was told they were bad for not considering the sociopolitical implications of a piece of innocuous media, and that someone was told they couldn't wear idiosyncratic clothing because snobs might be less friendly as a result, both come from true stories. I just didn't want to share those true stories exactly.

Addressing your post, the whole reason I added the beginning segment was that without it, the whole post felt a bit . . . unmotivated. You are right that I should have gone further, and that the structure doesn't actually support the content very well. This is mostly just a writing error on my part, so I can't say much more than, fair enough.