David R. MacIver's Blog

How to be weird

This post was originally published at https://drmaciver.substack.com/p/how-to-be-weird.

Hi everyone,

Bryan Caplan has an interesting piece, Being Normal. In it he defines the “principle of normality”:

A normal person says what others say, but does what others do.

This seems essentially right to me. It’s wrong in some crucial ways, but even given that it’s a good slogan.

Bryan is mostly interested in the “say what others say” vs “do what others do” distinction, and I think it’s a good one and explains why a lot of people go weird (e.g. because we naively thought people were telling us the truth when we asked them to explain what we were supposed to do), but I’m more interested in the experience of being weird and how to do it better.

Normal for…

One of the reasons why this slogan is wrong is that you can’t be a normal person, because “person” is too mixed a category to have norms. A perfectly normal person from the United Kingdom will do very different things from a perfectly normal person from Saudi Arabia.

More than that, even within a society you cannot be a normal person, because a normal man from the United Kingdom will do very different things from a woman from the United Kingdom. If I go out wearing a dress, that is not normal. This isn’t a value judgement - I think I’m perfectly entitled to go out wearing a dress if I want to - but it is absolutely not what other people do.

You can think of this as the labelled version of the principle of normality:

A normal X says what others say, but does what others do. A normal person is a normal X for all values of X others around them think salient.

This is, I think, why a lot of 21st century left-wing discourse is so obsessed with putting ourselves into these tightly labelled boxes and then proudly proclaiming them: It lets us proclaim our behaviour as normal. Being bisexual, or autistic, or poly, might be weird if you consider us as a member of a different reference category, but by having the label we can shout “Look! I’m not weird! I’m a perfectly normal bisexual!” or the like. It is an attempt to shift the set of salient categories that other people use to determine normality.

I am, if I’m honest, not a fan of this approach.

A lifetime ago in 2018 I wrote On Not Quite Fitting, which was mostly about sexuality and I still basically stand by, and Nonspecifically Neurodivergent, which I think was grasping at something important but mostly in the wrong way. Both of these were about figuring out how to navigate labels when none of them quite fit. I’m much more comfortable saying I’m bisexual these days, but not really because the label fits any better it just turns out that bisexual was always something of a miscellaneous label.

The neurodivergence one is harder, because I think the entire way we talk about neurodivergence is probably fake and has been made up to medicalise normal human variation, and that much of the reason we need to medicalise this variation is because of how profoundly we as a society fail those who are in some way weird. The reason even quite different types of neurodivergence look so similar in so many ways is probably just that going through a school system designed for normal people is utterly traumatic if you can’t pass as normal, and we’re all still bearing lasting emotional scars from that (even those who mostly managed to pass).

As a result we cling to these labels like lifelines. “Look! I’m not weird! You don’t have to punish me any more!” - the label gives us a shield that we can use to make the judgement stop hurting.

This isn’t bad exactly - certainly it’s not bad that we do this, self-defence is a perfectly reasonable thing to be doing - and labels do have upsides too, especially around finding others like us, but I can’t help but feel that this is not the system we would have come up with if we lived in a society less inimical to the complexities of human life.

The differences we choose

I was recently introduced to the distinction “The differences we choose versus the differences we are born with”, with the implication that these two are fundamentally different and the being born different entitles you to accommodation while choosing to be different does not.

My position on this distinction, which I have come to after deep philosophical reflection and careful weighing up of all of the issues, is this: Fuck that, and also fuck you.

The easiest way I have to explain why I hate this view and wish to burn it to the ground is that we are currently undergoing an epidemic of left handedness.

(from Gilbert, A. N., & Wysocki, C. J. (1992). Hand preference and age in the United States)

If you look at the age of people who “are” left handed, young people are much more likely to be left handed than old people. This is presumably not the result of people changing handedness over time, as that’s pretty stable, so clearly young people are disrespecting the wisdom of their elders and catching on to this fancy new trend of left handedness! Or possibly chemicals in the water are making people left handed! The degeneracy of the modern era!

Or, possibly, somewhere in the region of 10-15% of the population are naturally left handed, and some subset of them are able to fake right handedness if you force them to, and we’ve gotten better at recognising this over time and we no longer try to beat left-handedness out of small children.

This is also what I suggested happens with queerness in “On Not Quite Fitting”: Sure is weird how when we stop punishing people for not being straight, suddenly there are more queer people.

Another reason why I feel strongly about this is that I hate “born this way” discourse. I understand that it might have been politically useful at the time (I have my doubts, but also I lack a strong opinion or a deep understanding of the history) which treats sexuality, or indeed gender, as innate and immutable.

This has absolutely not been my experience of them (see e.g. Notes on becoming a cis man. Family members reading this newsletter may wish to note that this post contains slightly more information about my sex life than you are likely to want to know), and more importantly even if it were 100% literally true it still wouldn’t help me.

I’m bisexual and poly. I could absolutely pass as straight, and almost nobody believes poly is an intrinsic orientation, so in a very real sense when people push “born this way” narratives as the justification for queerness being OK, they’re very directly throwing me and mine under a bus.

Perhaps I am how I am partly for intrinsic reasons, perhaps not. Certainly who I am is a product of my culture and the people around me. But there was a large element of choice involved in becoming the person I’ve become, and there will be a larger element over the coming years, and at some point my justification for it becomes “Because this is what I choose, and if you don’t like it that’s too damn bad because it’s none of your business and I am not required to justify myself to you. Stop telling people what to do.”

Legible sources of weirdness

The nice thing about being able to illustrate my experience of being different with bisexuality is that you instantly get it. The world is full of narratives about coming out, and how rough it is, and the oppression queer people experience. These narratives are, for many people, absolutely true.

For me though, I’m just playing a dirty rhetorical game - this isn’t my experience at all. I’ve literally never had a bad experience related to my bisexuality. I think I had “Gay!” shouted at me and a friend once by a passing driver and mostly this stands out because it’s such an unusual experience for me.

Poly on the other hand, the narratives are about how smug poly people are, how we think we’re superior to monogamous people, how poly is just a way for asshole men to sleep with lots of women.

Also, people are far more reluctant to come out to their families as poly than they are as gay or bi, because people are far less accepting of it. Poly might have a label, but it hasn’t it seems entered into the official lexicon of ways of being weird that you’re supposed to tolerate, so people feel entirely free to go full knives out at the deviant norm violators.

Once again, this isn’t my experience. I’m out to my family (indeed, many of them are reading this letter) and they’re great about it. I’ve never personally had a particularly bad experience around being poly - the worst I’ve really experienced is a bunch of people on Twitter being jerks, and even that wasn’t really abuse, it’s just that some of the ways people talk about poly are quite hurtful.

But regardless of whether poly is accepted or not, problems experienced as a result of being poly make a great deal of sense to people, because you can talk about them as discrete thing. They are legible - you can clearly communicate them to others.

But there’s no particular reasons your weirdness has to be legible, and indeed most ways of being weird aren’t.

Growing up weird

In my brief stint in therapy before I decided I had better ways to achieve better results, I had a conversation with my therapist who had, entirely innocently, asked me what I was bullied for in school. I’m not sure she was quite prepared for the slightly heated lecture she got on childhood social dynamics.

You see, kids aren’t bullied for specific things. The things bullies say to you are not why you are being bullied, they are the weapons you are being bullied with. The thing you are “bullied for” is that they have decided that you would be easy to single out as a victim.

The easiest way to do that is to be weird. To not do what others do, or to not say what others say.

I couldn’t tell you exactly what it was that made me seem weird. I think mostly I just genuinely didn’t know or understand what to do to fit in. There are plenty of plausible reasons this might be the case, and I’m not sure it really matters which one of them is true, because once you’re designated the weird victim by the group you’re pretty much doomed to become more so until you change groups. You can’t do what others do or say what others say unless people interact with you like they do with others, and on top of that you’ve lost the opportunity to learn the relevant behaviours and skills from those around you because you’re now stuck in an adversarial relationship with them.

This honestly wouldn’t be so bad, except that because of how school works you’re deprived of your exit rights, and you’re deprived of your ability to find the group in which you can be normal. Shunning someone out of your group isn’t so bad, but when they can’t leave and find a group they fit in with better, they’re stuck being your designated victim until they get to the age where we only imprison people in hellish situations when they’ve done something wrong.

Normality is good though

On top of this, and part I think of what drives the yearning for labels that allow us to find people like us, is that the enforcers of normality are not entirely wrong. The normal people construct is often pretty terrible, but having a normality is in many ways pretty good. It helps you establish a baselines of common purpose. When you hang out in a group of people who are in some fundamental way like you, many things become possible through that shared baseline of understanding.

One of the problems we have, culturally, is that the way we create normality through punishment rather than teaching. If someone had ever sat me down as a child and given me one on one tutoring on how to be a functioning social human being I would probably have passed as normal just fine, and I’ve have probably had a better experience of school. I don’t just mean I could have masked and fit in - there would have been a certain element of that, but most of the things I needed to learn are things I happily do as a rather weird adult and my life is genuinely improved thereby.

Nobody ever did that, because that’s just not the sort of thing we do. We don’t have even the barest idea of how, and I think the reason is the “say what other people say, but do what other people do” distinction that Bryan draws. Norms of behaviour are not defined by a verbal list of rules that people can communicate, you pick them up implicitly from people.

You can see this when you ask people how the rules work. There was a great thread I read on Twitter years ago about eye contact. If you ask an allistic (non-autistic) person how eye contact works, they’ll tell you, and almost everything they say will be wrong. Maintaining direct eye contact with someone is creepy, and trying to follow the rules people will give you around doing so will make you seem creepier than if you just avoid eye contact all together. There’s instead a complex set of procedures around turn taking that treat eye contact as part of a broader language of interaction, but people can’t tell you how that works because they don’t explicitly understand it themselves. (cf. There are no hidden rules).

Instead of teaching people our norms, we punish them for not having internalised them already, but if that could work they’d probably have already internalised them, and the punishment typically makes it impossible that they will ever succeed where previously it would merely have been hard.

Communities of weirdos

I do think there is probably scope for community norms that are better at communicating themselves to people who want to join, and that are much more tolerant of differences within community members. I’m not sure anyone has really figured out what these are in any sort of generalised sense. I think something along the lines of what I was getting at in Norms of Excellence is helpful, but it’s not even close to sufficient.

On the internet there are what I refer to as “communities of last resort” - places which will take you no matter how weird you are. They are typically not that nice places, because if people were well enough socialised to operate in a healthy community they’d have gone elsewhere. 4chan is kinda the canonical example of this, but there are others.

I regard the Less Wrong rationalists as another example, but they seem to have the unusual property that people seem to genuinely get better for their membership in the community, which I find rather admirable. They get a lot of flak, not all of it undeserved, but I think the world and especially members are probably genuinely better for the existence of the Less Wrong community.

I also can’t help but feel a lot of that flak looks suspiciously like the way the people delivering it would have behaved on the playground.

Being a weird adult

The best (and sometimes worst) thing about being an adult is autonomy. The hardest part of becoming an adult is learning to exercise it.

A few years ago I had a bit of a revelation: None of the people I had surrounded myself with thought I was normal, even for people in the subgroup I was in, and they liked me anyway.

Meanwhile, I was putting in all of this emotional energy into trying to pass as normal. This was exhausting and also didn’t work and didn’t seem to be necessary.

So I set an intention: I would just not do that. I would choose to become weirder.

What this looked like in practice is that I would pay attention to my energy usage, and when I found myself stressing about coming off as weird and putting in a lot of energy to pass, I’d ask myself if I really needed to do that and if I did not I would stop.

About two months later I found myself in a poly triad (I had been single for about seven or eight years prior to that point). This is probably partly a coincidence, but I don’t think it would have happened without the prior intention.

In Mark Manson’s book, Models, which is allegedly a book about dating aimed at men but honestly I’d recommend it to most people (though only the revised edition. The original is much worse), he talks about polarising as a dating strategy: Someone you are interested in dating starts out neutral, and then over time decides they either do or don’t want to date you. Your goal is to move them to one of these two decisions by being yourself, and if they correctly decide that they don’t want to date you, that’s good from your perspective - you probably shouldn’t date someone who doesn’t want to date you without you having to pretend to be someone you’re not.

This is at least as true with friendships as an adult. If people are going to judge you for being weird, this is really useful and important information that you should not be friends with them, and you should stop wasting your time trying to please them.

This is where the autonomy of adulthood comes in. You can’t do this nearly so well as a child, because you have a smaller pool of people who you are stuck with, but as an adult you have more ability to pick and choose, and surround yourself with the people who will accept you without you having to hide who you are.

By doing what you choose to do, and saying what you choose to say, you surround yourself with those who think that is good rather than those who would punish you for it.