Being weird and the Nerd Humblebrag

Nerds used to be viewed negatively and with a bit of distaste and resentment. I experienced it personally in primary school and to some extent in highschool. This video from Julia Galef expresses my feeling nicely. This attitude has shifted in the past 15 years, because what had seemed like useless ridiculous things only nerds would be interested in has suddenly become the things that rule the world today.

Let’s normalize the weird and appreciate the diversity of thought

I have a strong distaste against sterilized nature of systems governed by fixed rules. This is the main things that kills any creativity we all have inside. And creativity is essential for progress and innovation. We need the ability to form outrageous thoughts and ideas. Every Paradigm shift resulted from at the time unacceptable rebelious idea. I hate the conformity, it sucks the life out of people and makes them into lifeless machines. I want to challenge the status quo, I want to provoke. That said, I am not suggesting that we destroy all order and plunge into uncontrolled chaos. I still want to be able to satisfy all 5 levels of Maslow’s pyramid of needs. That certainly wouldn’t be possible living in a lawless anarchy. I just think there is more room for respecting each other’s points of view, even if we don’t agree with them.

The order-chaos dimension

There is a balance balance between order and chaos. Biological life can adapt to unexpected changes by constantly trying new directions and new possibilities helped by random changes in DNA. Too little mutation and small changes in environment would cause entire species to go extinct. Too large mutation introduces too much disorder, too frequent random mistakes and errors kill overwhelming portion of the population before anything useful can be learned. There is a sweet point, where random errors are covered by the Antifragility of life and new paths forward are effectively searched by mutation.

Crossover and remixes

Evolution also came up with another useful mechanism to exploit disorder. Similar to remixes, that take existing songs and add new flavor to them, crossover remixes two DNA strands and creates new unique organism that helps to spread the best of both parents further in the gene pool. Musical remix makes it easier for the remixer to add some of its own creativity into the mix and smooths out the transition process. The familiarity of the original piece makes it easier for other people to appreciate the new unfamiliar originality, that would otherwise be too unfamiliar and too difficult to understand and appreciate alone. The remix lessens the barrier of spread, similarly to how the crossover helps the new random feature in the DNA to survive, replicate and defeat the unforgiving selection pressure of evolution.

Disagreement is expected

Don’t shame and shut down somebody else just because you don’t understand his point. Listen and try to appreciate his different perspective. Ask questions if you still have difficulty understanding. Having different life goals is perfectly okay. Different goals will inevitably result in different opinions. Different life experiences are just like priors in Bayesian probabilistic reasoning. Using the same valid logic, different priors will result in different conclusions. We may disagree simply because we have different priors, so maybe when listenning to other people, we should try to judge their beliefs through the eyes of their priors.

Order is the default

Humans like rules. It makes their life easier. They don’t have to think anytime they do something. They have to use their System 2 only once when devising the rule. Following it is easy and much more unconsious. Thinking from first principles requires much more mental energy and is hard and painful. Therefore we try our best to avoid it and naturally gravitate towards order. This natural tendency has to be consiously fought and challenged with a little bit of chaos, with a little bit of “weird”. From time to time we have to get out of our comfort zone and re-evaluate our systems. This point is nicely summed up by Jim Keller’s point about chaotic mind being a feature, not a bug