You have a set amount of "weirdness points". Spend them wisely.

after a bit of searching I can't find a definitive post describing the concept

The idiom used to describe that concept in social psychology is "idiosyncrasy credits", so searching for that phrase produces more relevant material (though as far as I can tell nothing on Less Wrong specifically).

This post makes some great points. As G.K. Chesterton said:

A man must be orthodox upon most things, or he will never even have time to preach his own heresy.

Fundamentally, other people's attention is a scarce resource, and you have to optimise whatever use of it you can get. Dealing with someone with a large inferential gap can be exhausting and you are liable to be tuned out if you make too many different radical points.

I would also add that part of being persuasive is being persuadable. People do not want to be lectured, and will quickly pick up if you see them as just an audience to be manipulated rather than as equals.

I agree with the general gist of the post, but I would point out that different groups consider different things weird, and have differing opinions about what weirdness is a bad thing.

To use your "a guy wearing a dress in public" example - I do this occasionally, and gauging from the reactions I've seen so far, it seems to earn me points among the liberal, socially progressive crowd. My general opinions and values are such that this is the group that would already be the most likely to listen to me, while the people who are turned off by such a thing would be disinclined to listen to me anyway.

I would thus suggest, not trying to limit your weirdness, but rather choosing a target audience and only limiting the kind of weirdness that this group would consider freakish or negative, while being less concerned by the kind of weirdness that your target audience considers positive. Weirdness that's considered positive by your target audience may even help your case.

I believe the effect you describe exists, but I think there are two effects which make it unclear that implementing your suggestions is an overall benefit to the average reader. Firstly, to summarize your position:

Each extra weird belief you have detracts from your ability to spread other, perhaps more important, wierd memes. Therefore normal beliefs should be preferred to some extent, even when you expect them to be less correct or less locally useful on an issue, in order to improve your overall effectiveness at spreading your most highly valued memes.

1. If you have a cluster of beliefs which seem odd in general then you are more likely to share a "bridge" belief with someone. When you meet someone who shares at least one strange belief with you, you are much more likely to seriously consider their other beliefs because you share some common ground and are aware of their ability to find truth against social pressure. For example, an EA vegan may be vastly more able to introduce the other EA memes to a non-EA vegan than a EA non-vegan. Since almost all people have at least some weird beliefs, and those who have weird beliefs with literally no overlap with yours are likely to not be good targets for you to spread positive memes to, increasing your collection of useful and justifiable weird memes may well give you more opportunities to usefully spread the memes you consider most important

2. Losing the absolute focus on forming an accurate map by making concessions to popularity/not standing out in too many ways seems epistemologically risky and borderline dark arts. I do agree that some situations that not advertizing all your weirdness at once may be a useful strategic choice, but am very wary of the effect putting too much focus on this could have on your actual beliefs. You don't want to strengthen your own absurdity heuristic by accident and miss out on more weird but correct and important things.

While I can imagine situations the advice given is correct (especially the for interacting with domain limited policymakers, or people you have a good read on likely reactions to extra weirdness), recommending it in general seems not sufficiently justified and I believe would have significant drawbacks.

Interesting post (upvoted) but I would add one "correction" : the amount of "weirdness points" isn't completely set, there ways to get more of them, especially by being famous, doing something positive or helping people. For example, by writing a very popular fanfiction (HPMOR), Eliezer earned additional weirdness points to spend.

Or on my own level, I noticed that by being efficient in my job and helpful with my workmates, I'm allowed a higher number of "weirdness points" before having my workmates start considering me as a loonie. But then you've to be very careful, because weirdness points earned within a group (say, my workmates) don't extend outside of the group.

Nerds are very often too shy. They are not willing to go to the extreme. Radical feminism has a lot of influence on our society and plenty of members of that community don't hold back at all.

Bending your own views to be avoid offending other people leads to being perceive as inconfident. It's not authentic. That's bad for movement building.

I think you are making a mistake if you treat the goal of every project as being about affecting public policy. Quite often you don't need a majority. It's much better to have a small group of strongly committed people then a large group that's only lukewarm committed.

Mormons who spent 2 years doing their mission are extreme. Mormonism is growing really fast while less extreme Christian groups don't grow. Groups that advocate extreme positions give their members a feeling that they are special. They are not boring.

In the scarce attention economy of the 21st century being boring is one of the worst things you can do if you want to speak to a lot of people.

Thanks, Peter. :) I agree about appearing normal when the issue is trivial. I'm not convince about minimizing weirdness on important topics. Some counter-considerations:

• People like Nick Bostrom seem to acquire prestige by taking on many controversial ideas at once. If Bostrom's only schtick were anthropic bias, he probably wouldn't have reached FP's top 100 thinkers.
• Focusing on only one controversial issue may make you appear single-minded, like "Oh, that guy only cares about X and can't see that Y and Z are also important topics."
• If you advocate many things, people can choose the one they agree with most or find easiest to do.

Clean up and look good. Lookism is a problem in society, and I wish people could look "weird" and still be socially acceptable. But if you're a guy wearing a dress in public, or some punk rocker vegan advocate, recognize that you're spending your weirdness points fighting lookism, which means less weirdness points to spend promoting veganism or something else.

Caveat - if people already know you are well liked and popular, the weirdness actually functions as counter-signalling which makes you more popular - similar to how teasing strengthens friendships. You're signalling, "look, I'm so well liked that I can afford to be weird." If you're surrounded by chattering friends, or a straight A student, or the most skilled person in your field, people see the fact that go out in your pajamas, suffer from Einstein hair, or are covered in tattoos as a sign that you are unconcerned about social status, which in turn raises your status.

This is something I learned by initially not caring due to social ineptitude, and then slowly starting to care with age...and then noticing that caring about appearance strengthened my reception among total strangers but not caring about appearance strengthened by reception among friends and strangers who plainly could see that I had tons of friends.

In another situation, if I was doing poorly in class, dressing like as slob made me look bad...but if I was an impeccable student, it came off as an eccentric genius sort of thing. Weirdness seems to just basically magnify whatever you're already seen as.

I think this applies more to neutral stuff like appearance than to deep stuff like beliefs - but it does generally hold true with weirdness in social behavior. Even with ideas though - I suspect the ideas that made Kurzweil sound cooky would make Einstein seem even more visionary.

Notions of weirdness vary a lot. Also, individual instances of weirdness will be visible to different people. Both these challenge the idea we should bother having aggregated measurements of weirdness at all. People's sensitivity to weirdness also varies, sometimes in complicated ways. Some people are actually more receptive to ideas that sound weird. Other people will believe if someone is both successful and weird they must know something others don't. Others are willing to ignore weirdness if allied with it. This is all very complex.

I think our social brains already do a good job of keeping track of all these important details. Trying to consciously score different traits, beliefs, and actions for an aggregated weirdness score seems like a recipe for anxiety and disaster to me. I don't think it's worth worrying about. Inauthentic strategies like this are too hard and unpleasant to sustain.

It would be helpful to point out that your post is within the context of trying to convince other people, aka memetic warfare. Your "actionable principles" serve a specific goal which you do not identify.

This reminds me of a quote by George Bernard Shaw:

“The reasonable man adapts himself to the world: the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man.”

I think it's important to consider the varying exchange rates, as well as the possible exchange options, when choosing how to spend your weirdness points.

Real example: Like enough other people on this website to make it an even less representative sample of the general population, I'm autistic, so spending a weirdness point on being openly such is useful, not because it's the best possible way to promote disability rights, but rather because I can save a lot of willpower that I need for other tasks that way.

Fake example: The Exemplars, a band popular with the teenage set, are rationalists who want to promote a political cause. However, none of the causes they care about are standard causes for bands. As teenagers are generally more interested in the end of the world than, for example, cryonics, they decide to sing about x-risk on their East Examplestan tour. This still makes them look just about as weird as if they sang about cryonics, but teenagers are more interested in x-risk, so they get better results. (Until the Church of Driving 50 In A 30 Mile Per Hour Zone gets them convicted of blasphemy, that is.)

This seems like a subset of point #7 here (https://slatestarcodex.com/2016/02/20/writing-advice/)

7. Figure out who you’re trying to convince, then use the right tribal signals

I would define weirdness as emitting signals that the tribe recognizes as "other" but not "enemy".  Emitting enough of the in-group signals may counteract that.

This is also reminiscent of John Gottman's empirical research on married couples where he found they were much more likely to split if the ratio of positive to negative interactions was less than 5 to 1.

Have we worked through the game theory here? It feels like negotiating with terrorists.

Ozy Frantz wrote a thoughtful response to the idea of weirdness points. Not necessarily disagreeing, but pointing out serious limitations in the idea. Peter Hurford, I think you'll appreciate their insights whether you agree or not.

https://thingofthings.wordpress.com/2015/04/14/on-weird-points/

Weirdness is incredibly important. If people weren't willing to deviate from society and hold weird beliefs, we wouldn't have had the important social movements that ended slavery and pushed back against racism, that created democracy, that expanded social roles for women, and that made the world a better place in numerous other ways.

Well, there is that. But there's also just the fact that being weird is what makes people interesting and fun, the sort of people I want to hang out with.

While many of these ideas might make the world a better place if made into policy, all of these ideas are pretty weird.

I think we need another adjective for the category of ideas that make people uncomfortable due to being substantially morally superior to the status quo. (And I don't even do all those things or believe all those particular ideas are good ones.)

...But we can use this knowledge to our advantage. The halo effect can work in reverse -- if we're normal in many ways, our weird beliefs will seem more normal too. If we have a notion of weirdness as a kind of currency that we have a limited supply of, we can spend it wisely, without looking like a crank.

Well, when propagandizing, yes.

But maybe EA should disconnect a bit more and compartmentalize -- for example, leaving AI risk to MIRI, for example, and not talk about it much, say, on 80,000 Hours.

Yes, this is a very good example of allocating scarce weirdness points in one's propaganda.

It might be worth emphasizing the difference between persuading people and being right. The kind of people who care about weirdness points are seldom the ones contributing good new data to any question of fact, nor those posing the best reasoning for judgments of value. I appreciate the impulse to try to convince people of things, but convincing people is extremely hard. I'm not Noam Chomsky; therefore, I have other things to do aside from thinking and arguing with people. And if I have to do one of those two worse in order to save time, I choose to dump the 'convince people' stat and load up on clear thinking.

Weirdness is a scarce resource with respect to ourselves? Great! Does that mean that we'd benefit from cooperating such that we all take on different facets of the weirder whole, like different faces of a PR operation?

Lots I agree with here. I was suprised to see basic income in your clustering above. As much as I think Cuban's are the ones doing socialism wrong, and everyone doing socialism less, like Venezuala isn't socialist enough, I'm right wing and mindkilled enough to have rejected basic income using general right wing arguments and assumptions until I read the consistency of positive examples on the Wikipedia page. The straw that broke the camels back was that there is right wing support for basic income. That being said, I'm confident that I would pass ideological turing tests.

I agree that people who want to influence others should avoid having others discount their opinions. I don't see what your analysis here offers beyond noticing that and the simple fact that people generally discount the opinions of weirdos, though. Notions of weirdness vary a lot. Also, individual instances of weirdness will be visible to different people. Both these strain the idea of having any aggregated measurement of weirdness at all. People's sensitivity to weirdness also varies, sometimes in complicated ways. Some people are actually more receptive to ideas that sound weird. Other people will believe if someone is both successful and weird they must know something others don't.

I think our social brains already do a good job of keeping track of all these important details. Trying to consciously score different traits, beliefs, and actions for weirdness seems like a recipe for anxiety and disaster to me. I don't think it's worth worrying about. Inauthentic strategies like this are too hard and unpleasant to sustain.

trevinos degrees of acceptance, not overton's window

Use the foot-in-door technique and the door-in-face technique

Using tactics intentionally designed to appeal to people's biases is dark arts. If you try these, you completely deserve having rationalists tell you "Sorry, I've been trying to remove my biases, not encourage them. Go away until you can be more honest."