>Unusually weak? They will not want to feed you. Unusually strong? They will send you to fight an impossible war. Unusually clever? They will accuse you of witchcraft and burn you at the stake. Yes, there were some exceptions (for example, "freaks" kept as curiosities by the kings), but the general rule for the vast majority of the population was: don't be weird, or get killed.
To me that sounds like a very post-romantic interpretation of the past, where everything that happened before now, the enlightened times, was savage,cruel and retrograde. It's my understanding that things were a lot more subtle than that and that's a very simplistic approximation. I don't think Da Vinci, Vauban Euclid or Grosseteste were burnt to the stake, not even Galileo was.
Well be weird and be careful. Easier said than done. Because yes most people would rather want to bring you down to their level than try to rise up to yours e.g. Jesus Christ. Because of fear, doubt, and insecurity that they can not stand alone or that you standing alone is a threat to theirs.
I think this is a narrow take, a bit like suggesting that women weren't historically discriminated against and putting forward Cleopatra as an example.
Surely, rich and noble eccentrics have existed in the past with several notable examples. But to point at exceptions and then suggests that this proves that no underlying trend is present seems like incorrect reasoning.
I think the burden of proof would be on the one making the claim than in the past (so I guess from now to 6000 years ago ? In which region ? Which circumstances ?) being weird would result in having you killed. To my knowledge this is a common take in popular culture, but I don't think we have much evidence that this was the case. Modern medievalists know tend to say that the Spanish inquisition resulted in between 3000-5000 over it's 350 years of existence. That's about 14 a year on average. For comparison, since 1819, the state of Texas executed 1,349 people.
I think we might just end up in an argument about what constitutes "weird", or an argument about how good record keeping for killings over the last 6000 years have been. Although I think we could agree that Texas keeps better records about such things compared to villages in the dark ages. Even then, no record of why a violent act was committed likely would have mentioned "weird" and might only mention a dispute between neighbors, or an individual targeted by a mob. Then we might argue over per-capita or some other nit-picky thing.
At any rate, it appears the Witch Trials of 1400-1775 saw ~40k-60k people killed [1]. And in modern times, it is reported for example that ~20k people have been put to death in Tanzania for witchcraft [2].
While poking around Google and Wikipedia for this, it appears that in more stable societies the prevalence of these kinds of mass hysteria are low. However there appears to be sufficient evidence that during times of severe economic hardship, standard societal protections falter. In those circumstances, anyone deemed a burden or an omen of bad luck was at risk.
I think you illustrated the issue with the argument very well. Saying "Weird people in the past were put to death" doesn't make sense because it's too broad both space and time wise. If you look at the article about the witch trial, the peak of the trials, where most of the executions were carried, was between 1560 to 1630, and was mainly in Germany and Scotland, while executions were few in Spain, Italy and France. It's an incredibly narrow band, and then there is the argument that the people convicted of witchcraft were just people deemed weird. While I'm sure that was the case for some of them, it was also a convenient way to appropriate the neighbor's land or get rid of political ennemies
>However there appears to be sufficient evidence that during times of severe economic hardship, standard societal protections falter. In those circumstances, anyone deemed a burden or an omen of bad luck was at risk.
I don't think there is sufficient evidence of that. First of all, being deemed a burden is very different than being weird and shouldn't be bundled together. Second, there has been a lot of periods of severe economic hardship in the past that didn't result in the execution of weird people. It seems like a loose legal system was more to blame than economic crisis. From the article you linked :
The witch trials that occurred there were symptomatic of a weak legal system and "witches were most likely to be tried and convicted in regions where magistrates departed from established legal statutes"
In other words, if you let a bunch of villagers to handle everything themselves with no repercussions they'll start doing stuff like that, but I see no evidence than "weirdness" was a factor in the article, and in the west that was pretty much solved by the 18th century when countries starting having a strong central structure
Dean Radin talked about psi genes that witches may have had in an interview with Rogan. When someone is acting truly unpredictably then normies are afraid.
That was a Millennial generation thing. Back in 2002, "Be Your Own Brand: A Breakthrough Formula for Standing Out from the Crowd"
by Speak and McNally, was arguing for that. They pushed heavy self-promotion. That got us the "brogrammer", "move fast and break things", and startups that tried to buy market share with venture capital.
I don't see the connection of the brogrammer's to the idea of being your own brand and embracing the weird. To me, the brogrammer's were the result of the huge influx of money into the tech ecosystem. It was the arrival of those just chasing a paycheck and stock options rather than those who enjoyed programming for its own sake.
The things you list seem completely unconnected to me, and not driven by people embracing weird. Stereotype "brogrammers" were very similar to each other.
> We tell founders presenting at Demo Day, 'If you dress up too much, you will read to the investors as a stupid person.' They're coming to see the next Larry and Sergey, not some junior MBA type.
lol I didn't realize it got as bad as them literally telling founders to dress like that. The irony is of course in no small part because of YC, the junior MBA types flocked to SV, so that's who the VCs ended up meeting anyway, wearing a sweatshirt instead of a suit jacket.
Interesting essay! Yeah, I think there's some truth to the premise. As it becomes cheaper and cheaper to exploit predictable patterns, a person's value-add needs to include unpredictability. That's a necessary and not a sufficient condition, though, since you can be unpredictable and still mostly useless.
> Obviously, there is nuance. You can take this argument to the limit and say that ultimately the world is made of only two things: Chaos (a.k.a. the vast seas of Wolfram's computational irreducibility, a.k.a. pure noise, a.k.a. quantum randomness) and Logos (the small islands of compressible patterns).
Within computational irreducibility, there's pure noise as well as universal computation, which is neither meaningfully predictable nor random. Since you mentioned Wolfram, in terms of elementary cellular automata, it's the difference between rule 30 and rule 110. The latter seems to me to be on the boundary between Chaos and Logos, and where I would expect to find the human intellect. (I think this is also largely the same distinction I made above where unpredictability can be useful or not.)
Since you also mentioned the economy and the possibility of UBI...I also don't know the answer, but I think it's worth thinking about Maslow's hierarchy of needs, which to me is pretty tightly coupled to weirdness. Moreover, I think societies similarly have their own hierarchy of needs, but that's something I don't understand very well. In any case, weirdness seems to be coupled to both of these, in that it best flourishes at the higher levels, when the more fundamental needs are mostly taken care of. At the lower levels, there's too much pressure to reduce social friction to cooperate with others for the sake of survival, and you just can't really afford to be too weird. I don't know if UBI is the answer, but there may be some benefit to just solving the lower levels of the needs hierarchy so we can move past this.
We sure do punish people for being weird, and it's definitely seeing an increase. Ask any gay, trans, disabled, neurodiverse, furry, anarchist, or other outsider group whether life has gotten easier lately.
Guarantee it's almost (but not quite) universally no.
Ridiculous. When Ellen Degeneres came out as gay in the 90s it was a groundshaking media event. Being gay was incredibly stigmatized, far more than today. The other groups at least have public supporters today, instead of being nearly universally rejected.
Stigma is just polarized now. Come out as trans on a platform like Facebook and you will get messages of support that would never have happened in the 90s, but also hate messages and reports to the police(that they will actually follow up on) you wouldn’t have seen back then either.
The future of ~2000 belonged to the weird, too. We commodified all that. Anything briefly and seemingly "quirky" is fodder for branding. Or you can go a little further than quirky, and someone like RFK will want to put you on a list.
Yes. Being weird now means either getting crushed into a fine paste by the machine or being squeezed into an empty crumpled husk for your valuable weirdness juices. There is no winning scenario left for weirdness
The winning move is not to play (in a capitalistic sense). My best guess at a survive-and-thrive strategy for a subculture is to stay as far away as possible from any centralizing influences or infrastructure.
Money is one of those. The millennial compulsion to turn hobbies into income streams is particularly pernicious here and needs deliberate excision.
Another is the majority of today’s internet. I suspect it’s not worth the risk of trying to engage in networked-but-decentralized spaces because that’s such a short leap to Instagram. Just do it offline.
Which means your ability to communicate well becomes paramount. Being weird, being unique does not equate to being unintelligible - but far too many are going to go this way. If "we" want our weird to infect, you need to communicate why your means of expression of self are there, your "weird" is a message: what is it?
I wish this would be true, but simply sampling unusual ideas is something eminently automatable. We already have temperature and other settings to guide a LLM towards this kind of "weird". So I don't think it's just about thinking outside the box as most weird ideas are probably also stupid, you can probably almost exhaust the search space of interesting ideas quite easily.
Maybe we will need humans to experience entirely new things instead. No one knows the taste of a new, bioengineered animal. No one knows what it's like to stimulate specific cell types in their brain. And so on. There are things that are and will remain uniquely human, forever.
> sampling unusual ideas is something eminently automatable. We already have temperature and other settings to guide a LLM towards this kind of "weird"
This isn’t true and changing the temperature of your LLM doesn’t create weird in any way that’s marketable or interesting to people.
But what I will say anything that gives your reach the slightest advantage will just be replicated by a human when they notice it. Think of how niche ASMR content was and now every brand under the sun has done an ASMR unboxing
I think the cherry-picked examples at the beginning completely ignore the massive number of examples throughout history where groups of people pushed back against mainstream society. A lot of them were hurt or died in the process but societies throughout history have been changed by people who refused to fit in.
The best strategy for the majority is homogeny, right? Just go with what others say to do 100% of the time offering no input yourself until the distribution of people becomes homogenous.
It's not about being weird--it's about change vs. stasis.
The problem with weird is that not everyone can be weird, almost by definition. Moreover, people get things done collectively, and for that to work, the group (at whatever size) has to push in the same direction. Pushing in the wrong direction just to be weird will cause the group to fail.
Instead, I think, the future belongs to those who help change the present.
At the limit, any existing process can be done by AI, given a goal. What AI cannot do (and must not do) is come up with new goals. Coming up with new goals must always remain a human prerogative.
We don't need humans to work the assembly line--we need humans to make the assembly line better. AI can't do that alone because it cannot define "better". Humans must decide what "better" means. Do we want the assembly line to be faster or use fewer resources? Should it continue to produce this product or work on a new one? Should we build a bigger assembly line or turn the whole thing into a park?
As long as the world keeps changing, we will need humans to direct that change. People who fear change, who want everything to stay the same will have the hardest time in the future. Those are the people who will be replaced by AI.
The future belongs to those who change the present.
I always took weird to mean "not easily digestible," not necessarily harmful. Like, if the guy is weird, processing his actions is hard, but I'm never threatened by him.
I meant that weird is different, and different is unaligned. If I have a team and each team member is pushing in a different direction, then we're going to get outcompeted by an aligned team.
Of course, often weird/different is how you get the breakthroughs and innovations. I'm not trying to stamp out weird. I just don't think everyone can be or should be weird (which is the implication of the OP).
But everyone can be a change agent and help to change the present into the future.
I don't want to disagree with this article, my motivated reasoning as a weird person is strong. But my contrarian nature is winning.
Uniformity seems to be a feature of scale. Institutions are just one form of scaled human intelligence/activity. Our desire for strong institutions, driven by a belief that strong institutions lead to better overall average outcomes for all humans, therefore creates pressure for uniformity that is shown in our education system. We stop seeing "human" and start seeing "citizen".
But that same need for uniformity to drive massive scale won't be lessened by AI. If I am right, then in order to scale our society AI will require uniformity just as much, if not more. If there is a direct relation between scale and uniformity and if we direct AI towards scale then AI will enforce an even greater uniformity on humanity.
Basically, if we want things cheap then we have to do them at scale. If we want things done at scale then we have to treat the components as uniform. Therefore, AI may lead to more uniformity as we direct it to make things cheaper and scale them out.
Future belongs to ones (let's call them ruling class) who utilizes averages (let's call that masses) to own advantage. Weirds here are the systemic risk to the ruling class. And there is nothing in weirds for masses. Masses avoid, ridicule, mock and exclude the weird stuff. Even the "weird" is about other's perception, not innate property of an individual. Nothing suggests that this perception will change in any observable time.
And what about weirdos who are wrong and selfdelusional? Are they minority of majority of weidos? Then can you blame masses who avoid/exclude veridos?
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To have a society in which weirdos thrive means to put at risk so many things the ruling class thrive for: control, power, social status. Such society will need to cultivate curiosity and critical thinking. Good luck with arranging that at scale.
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It's indeed easier times for weird. But way far from thriving or even "having the future".
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There are way more things in the article to argue about. I just outlined couple.
I've had similar thoughts in regards to generative AI applied to the arts. Taste is subjective, but if you ask 100 random people to rank an AI-generated techno or country track versus one created by an "average" human creator (including amateurs), the AI would probably do pretty well. But if now anyone can create a competent, generic song in a well-known genre, then that sound becomes a lot less interesting, human-made or not. Of course, it turns out a lot of people don't care and will listen to whatever, but I suspect that for those who do, there'll be a higher percentage seeking something weird and new.
That’s great news. We’ve been preparing for exactly this version of it for more than 25 years now - learning, hacking, travelling, doing extreme sports and environments and exploring tribal outdoor gatherings with zero amenities. Hope we see you on the other side.
This is such a great way to summarise the issue facing rank-and-file employees. If your job is predictable, repeatable, systematizable then you're "competing against the price of electricity [and GPUs]"
Culture us already far more ironic and appreciative of irreverent and absurdist humor, and open-minded to ideology- than it was prior generations.
Why would it tend this way before AI? Something to do with the creative potential where tech reduces the consciousness and menial work requirement perhaps.
Sidenote: the "telescopic zoom" feature of the website is very interesting and __useful__. It's amazing to see how one can still bring innovation to blogs/personal websites!
If the future belonged to the weird, everyone would dogpile on it, and it would no longer be weird. Either the weird will become mainstream, or it isn't the future.
The author make a typical mistake, saying that witches were burned at stake in pre-modern times. Which is not true; surprisingly burning witches was not a big thing in Medieval period; it was actually early modernity when witch hunts have become widespread (not in England though, were witchhunts were far less popular, than say in Germany or some other parts of modern UK).
Per wikipedia: "The period of the European witch trials with the most active phase and the largest number of fatalities seems to have occurred between 1560 and 1630." Which is very pre-modern. And that's the language that was chosen in the essay, not the Medieval.
> But with AI (disembodied in software and embodied in robots), the relative value of being normal and predictable is rapidly evaporating.
I would argue this is precisely backwards. The normal and predictable is more valuable. Human errors are largely predictable. AI errors are not. This is one of the reasons why human code is much easier to review than AI code.
ChatGPT, please write an essay about weirdos that follows Paul Graham's methods but not his style. Insert AI as the savior in the end.
The reality is that everything that was considered weird has been co-opted by the tech industry already. LGBTQ and Burning man are boring, commercialized and institutionalized now.
The tech industry did this, because tech people are relentless online advertisers for the industry and they had to placate them. It stopped when Trump was elected, which shows that the people holding the power are normie CEOs and not weirdos.
If you say Amodei is a weirdo: Only to a certain extent and he will be removed one day just like the Google founders. Some Eric Schmidt figure will take over.
Really, this is just AI generated or assisted fiction that improves morale for the tech influencers.
Alternatively these mechanisms push toward subcultures. Several tight and successful groups come to mind:
Environmentalists may be weird, but they bring attention to real problems for society generally and have had significant success despite being targeted for murder by corporate criminals globally. Cannabis enthusiasts may be social jokes, but even during a drug war managed to carry on and find ways of not just existing but bonding and and sharing.
This kind of situation keeps coming up and it seems like the weirdness is a side issue relative to the commitment to some specific sharable experience.
Said this on another post: With AI eventually making everything anyone can think of, it'll come down to who has the better ideas, or at least the most weird ideas that AI can't think of (yet)
Well barely a year ago and within a few months AI went from being a laughing stock and struggling with fingers and toes to being scarily good at some tasks and hard to tell apart for some people.
Like other comments said, the problem isn't whether AI will improve, it's whether the fuckers in politics and power will allow the Common Peasant to keep having full access to AI..
WOW! , a complete history, manual, and set of rules for bieng wierd, almost like a beurocratic normalisation of wierdnesz, which is of course the standard method of the normys when they notice that the strategy of useing the same tactics is failing (and quickly at that) and they need new ideas to steal.
that was revolting to read.
unbelievable cinical double speak.it leaves all real control to industry and is DESIGNED to make "repair" a bespoke boutique privlage.
what was that very reliable french device that was used as "the argument that ends all debate", many I am sure could are likely still operable even aften centuries of sitting, but even if out of commisioncan be quickly returned to service to trim beurocratic and industry excess at the source.
If you're interested there are books on Oikophobia (there is one called Western Self-Contempt).
It's a theory that societies generate a luxury class which loathes itself and attacks it's own history and culture.
This usually happens prior to a collapse in the example societies...
and I love how it puts a historical context on the phenomenon because part of the current disease is a rejection of history.
A general problem I see in circles I have been in lately has been a general distrust of authority, like I am in a Tarot group and people (especially the hierophants!) there tend to have trouble with cards like The Emperor, The Hierophant, Kings and Queens, etc. [1] Of course it's complicated, like the best spokespeople for guru yoga are people like
[1] ... whereas I very much identify with the male-leaning figures in myself and see the female-leaning figures in the mature women around me such as my wife and other witches
That sounds like a much weaker claim than the original one. "These values directly lead to civilization collapse" is a lot different from "these values roughly resemble some of the ones in societies that have collapsed when trying to view them relative to the society itself"; now your claim is predicated on a subjective analogy from modern societies to past ones, and at that point it seems like the result is already basically predetermined based on how much you agree with the values or not.
Yeah it's kind of hard to understand how someone can argue this without giving any examples. What would be an example of a civilization that's been destroyed by "modern liberal society and feminism"? "Modern" implies relatively recent, but I can't think of any civilizations that have collapsed recently. There are certainly people claiming that a collapse is imminent, but that's not a new thing either, and even if I were going to accept the premise that it will happen soon I still wouldn't agree with those as the most likely causes (and there isn't any objective way to know right now given that it hasn't happened yet).
I think there is a crisis coming. It is not likely to be terminal, in and of itself, the immediate problem is that all the thing that leftist like such as public schools, higher ed, and the welfare state are going to become a lot harder to maintain thanks to demographic issues.
"Feminism" is not one thing, I mean, women are 50% of the population and they have very different beliefs, experiences, interests, etc. Often "feminism" is an expression of "individualism" and many of the major social changes have been driven by capital and the empire: I mean, a woman who stays home is not paying taxes on the fruits of her labor, she is not driving up stock market prices and making billionaires richer. I think there's not a lot of understanding that other career paths are possible. One of my friends had a child at age 19, spent some time living in a tent, worked in food service, but then got a masters in teaching and now works as an educator and union steward. And her daughter was off on her own at an age where some other women are stuggling with IVF and miscarriages. I know another teen mom who got an accounting degree, went down to New Jersey and became an experienced corporate accountant, and now she does the books for a well-regarded regional bank.
I believe in 50 years there is going to be more talk about duty and responsibility (which can be feminine, masculine or neither) and less about individual rights. Either our culture changes or there will be a rupture in which people will turn their backs on everything our culture stood for.
I know you weren't the one who posted the original comment that spawned this thread, but trying to pivot the discussion into "I think there is a crisis coming" after people pushed back against a wild claim that the same type of thing you're discussing being an objective cause of civilization collapse does not give the impression of good faith, so it does not seem obvious to me that it's worthwhile to try to engage with the points you're making
I think the default mode is lack of population and getting outcompeted by pro-natal civilisations, like amish etc. You need to provide a reputable source for why is that not the case.
I must be either misreading your point or not recognizing intentional irony. I would expect the Amish to average a lot of kids per family, but I'm not aware of any instance of a civilization disappearing due to being outcompeted by them.
>Unusually weak? They will not want to feed you. Unusually strong? They will send you to fight an impossible war. Unusually clever? They will accuse you of witchcraft and burn you at the stake. Yes, there were some exceptions (for example, "freaks" kept as curiosities by the kings), but the general rule for the vast majority of the population was: don't be weird, or get killed.
To me that sounds like a very post-romantic interpretation of the past, where everything that happened before now, the enlightened times, was savage,cruel and retrograde. It's my understanding that things were a lot more subtle than that and that's a very simplistic approximation. I don't think Da Vinci, Vauban Euclid or Grosseteste were burnt to the stake, not even Galileo was.
Well be weird and be careful. Easier said than done. Because yes most people would rather want to bring you down to their level than try to rise up to yours e.g. Jesus Christ. Because of fear, doubt, and insecurity that they can not stand alone or that you standing alone is a threat to theirs.
Keep the weird in the art. People don't mind as much if the weird is bounded by 4 corners and a frame; they secretly want to view it.
I think this is a narrow take, a bit like suggesting that women weren't historically discriminated against and putting forward Cleopatra as an example.
Surely, rich and noble eccentrics have existed in the past with several notable examples. But to point at exceptions and then suggests that this proves that no underlying trend is present seems like incorrect reasoning.
I think the burden of proof would be on the one making the claim than in the past (so I guess from now to 6000 years ago ? In which region ? Which circumstances ?) being weird would result in having you killed. To my knowledge this is a common take in popular culture, but I don't think we have much evidence that this was the case. Modern medievalists know tend to say that the Spanish inquisition resulted in between 3000-5000 over it's 350 years of existence. That's about 14 a year on average. For comparison, since 1819, the state of Texas executed 1,349 people.
I think we might just end up in an argument about what constitutes "weird", or an argument about how good record keeping for killings over the last 6000 years have been. Although I think we could agree that Texas keeps better records about such things compared to villages in the dark ages. Even then, no record of why a violent act was committed likely would have mentioned "weird" and might only mention a dispute between neighbors, or an individual targeted by a mob. Then we might argue over per-capita or some other nit-picky thing.
At any rate, it appears the Witch Trials of 1400-1775 saw ~40k-60k people killed [1]. And in modern times, it is reported for example that ~20k people have been put to death in Tanzania for witchcraft [2].
While poking around Google and Wikipedia for this, it appears that in more stable societies the prevalence of these kinds of mass hysteria are low. However there appears to be sufficient evidence that during times of severe economic hardship, standard societal protections falter. In those circumstances, anyone deemed a burden or an omen of bad luck was at risk.
1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Witch_trials_in_the_early_mode... 2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Modern_witch_hunts#Tanzania
I think you illustrated the issue with the argument very well. Saying "Weird people in the past were put to death" doesn't make sense because it's too broad both space and time wise. If you look at the article about the witch trial, the peak of the trials, where most of the executions were carried, was between 1560 to 1630, and was mainly in Germany and Scotland, while executions were few in Spain, Italy and France. It's an incredibly narrow band, and then there is the argument that the people convicted of witchcraft were just people deemed weird. While I'm sure that was the case for some of them, it was also a convenient way to appropriate the neighbor's land or get rid of political ennemies
>However there appears to be sufficient evidence that during times of severe economic hardship, standard societal protections falter. In those circumstances, anyone deemed a burden or an omen of bad luck was at risk.
I don't think there is sufficient evidence of that. First of all, being deemed a burden is very different than being weird and shouldn't be bundled together. Second, there has been a lot of periods of severe economic hardship in the past that didn't result in the execution of weird people. It seems like a loose legal system was more to blame than economic crisis. From the article you linked :
The witch trials that occurred there were symptomatic of a weak legal system and "witches were most likely to be tried and convicted in regions where magistrates departed from established legal statutes"
In other words, if you let a bunch of villagers to handle everything themselves with no repercussions they'll start doing stuff like that, but I see no evidence than "weirdness" was a factor in the article, and in the west that was pretty much solved by the 18th century when countries starting having a strong central structure
Galileo may not have been burnt at the stake, but he was placed on house arrest for the rest of his life for his beliefs.
Sure, where he was free to pursue his researches. Not saying it was right, but hardly what the article claims.
Dean Radin talked about psi genes that witches may have had in an interview with Rogan. When someone is acting truly unpredictably then normies are afraid.
That was a Millennial generation thing. Back in 2002, "Be Your Own Brand: A Breakthrough Formula for Standing Out from the Crowd" by Speak and McNally, was arguing for that. They pushed heavy self-promotion. That got us the "brogrammer", "move fast and break things", and startups that tried to buy market share with venture capital.
I don't see the connection of the brogrammer's to the idea of being your own brand and embracing the weird. To me, the brogrammer's were the result of the huge influx of money into the tech ecosystem. It was the arrival of those just chasing a paycheck and stock options rather than those who enjoyed programming for its own sake.
The things you list seem completely unconnected to me, and not driven by people embracing weird. Stereotype "brogrammers" were very similar to each other.
So were beats, hippies, punks, goths...[1]
[1] https://www.clrn.org/what-is-counterculture-in-sociology/
Yes. To even mention venture in this era. It is more associated with status quo than being weird.
Didn’t PG have an explicit investment thesis to fund people who wore hoodies and looked / acted like Zuckerberg?
Eventually people figured that out and started wearing hoodies instead of suits on purpose.
> We tell founders presenting at Demo Day, 'If you dress up too much, you will read to the investors as a stupid person.' They're coming to see the next Larry and Sergey, not some junior MBA type.
https://www.wired.com/2010/04/ff-hackers
lol I didn't realize it got as bad as them literally telling founders to dress like that. The irony is of course in no small part because of YC, the junior MBA types flocked to SV, so that's who the VCs ended up meeting anyway, wearing a sweatshirt instead of a suit jacket.
Not true. Not sure why you are hyperfixating on millennials either. Startups and programming/crunch culture existed in the 90s all the same.
Interesting essay! Yeah, I think there's some truth to the premise. As it becomes cheaper and cheaper to exploit predictable patterns, a person's value-add needs to include unpredictability. That's a necessary and not a sufficient condition, though, since you can be unpredictable and still mostly useless.
> Obviously, there is nuance. You can take this argument to the limit and say that ultimately the world is made of only two things: Chaos (a.k.a. the vast seas of Wolfram's computational irreducibility, a.k.a. pure noise, a.k.a. quantum randomness) and Logos (the small islands of compressible patterns).
Within computational irreducibility, there's pure noise as well as universal computation, which is neither meaningfully predictable nor random. Since you mentioned Wolfram, in terms of elementary cellular automata, it's the difference between rule 30 and rule 110. The latter seems to me to be on the boundary between Chaos and Logos, and where I would expect to find the human intellect. (I think this is also largely the same distinction I made above where unpredictability can be useful or not.)
Since you also mentioned the economy and the possibility of UBI...I also don't know the answer, but I think it's worth thinking about Maslow's hierarchy of needs, which to me is pretty tightly coupled to weirdness. Moreover, I think societies similarly have their own hierarchy of needs, but that's something I don't understand very well. In any case, weirdness seems to be coupled to both of these, in that it best flourishes at the higher levels, when the more fundamental needs are mostly taken care of. At the lower levels, there's too much pressure to reduce social friction to cooperate with others for the sake of survival, and you just can't really afford to be too weird. I don't know if UBI is the answer, but there may be some benefit to just solving the lower levels of the needs hierarchy so we can move past this.
We sure do punish people for being weird, and it's definitely seeing an increase. Ask any gay, trans, disabled, neurodiverse, furry, anarchist, or other outsider group whether life has gotten easier lately.
Guarantee it's almost (but not quite) universally no.
Ridiculous. When Ellen Degeneres came out as gay in the 90s it was a groundshaking media event. Being gay was incredibly stigmatized, far more than today. The other groups at least have public supporters today, instead of being nearly universally rejected.
Stigma is just polarized now. Come out as trans on a platform like Facebook and you will get messages of support that would never have happened in the 90s, but also hate messages and reports to the police(that they will actually follow up on) you wouldn’t have seen back then either.
I'm 50. And agree, back in the 90s things were different. But we're sliding way way way back over the past five years.
The future of ~2000 belonged to the weird, too. We commodified all that. Anything briefly and seemingly "quirky" is fodder for branding. Or you can go a little further than quirky, and someone like RFK will want to put you on a list.
Yes. Being weird now means either getting crushed into a fine paste by the machine or being squeezed into an empty crumpled husk for your valuable weirdness juices. There is no winning scenario left for weirdness
The winning move is not to play (in a capitalistic sense). My best guess at a survive-and-thrive strategy for a subculture is to stay as far away as possible from any centralizing influences or infrastructure.
Money is one of those. The millennial compulsion to turn hobbies into income streams is particularly pernicious here and needs deliberate excision.
Another is the majority of today’s internet. I suspect it’s not worth the risk of trying to engage in networked-but-decentralized spaces because that’s such a short leap to Instagram. Just do it offline.
Which means your ability to communicate well becomes paramount. Being weird, being unique does not equate to being unintelligible - but far too many are going to go this way. If "we" want our weird to infect, you need to communicate why your means of expression of self are there, your "weird" is a message: what is it?
The truly "weird"—the kind "futures belong to"—cannot be commodified into yet another off-the-shelf-personality. You either are or you aren't.
I wish this would be true, but simply sampling unusual ideas is something eminently automatable. We already have temperature and other settings to guide a LLM towards this kind of "weird". So I don't think it's just about thinking outside the box as most weird ideas are probably also stupid, you can probably almost exhaust the search space of interesting ideas quite easily.
Maybe we will need humans to experience entirely new things instead. No one knows the taste of a new, bioengineered animal. No one knows what it's like to stimulate specific cell types in their brain. And so on. There are things that are and will remain uniquely human, forever.
> sampling unusual ideas is something eminently automatable. We already have temperature and other settings to guide a LLM towards this kind of "weird"
This isn’t true and changing the temperature of your LLM doesn’t create weird in any way that’s marketable or interesting to people.
But what I will say anything that gives your reach the slightest advantage will just be replicated by a human when they notice it. Think of how niche ASMR content was and now every brand under the sun has done an ASMR unboxing
“When the going gets weird,the weird turn pro.” Surprised I didn’t find this quote from Hunter S Thompson in the comments yet.
Oh shit this should have been the epigraph
I think the cherry-picked examples at the beginning completely ignore the massive number of examples throughout history where groups of people pushed back against mainstream society. A lot of them were hurt or died in the process but societies throughout history have been changed by people who refused to fit in.
Yes. But my argument is about what's the best strategy for the majority!
The best strategy for the majority is homogeny, right? Just go with what others say to do 100% of the time offering no input yourself until the distribution of people becomes homogenous.
"Don't think a small group of dedicated people can't change the world. They are the only thing that ever has".
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It's not about being weird--it's about change vs. stasis.
The problem with weird is that not everyone can be weird, almost by definition. Moreover, people get things done collectively, and for that to work, the group (at whatever size) has to push in the same direction. Pushing in the wrong direction just to be weird will cause the group to fail.
Instead, I think, the future belongs to those who help change the present.
At the limit, any existing process can be done by AI, given a goal. What AI cannot do (and must not do) is come up with new goals. Coming up with new goals must always remain a human prerogative.
We don't need humans to work the assembly line--we need humans to make the assembly line better. AI can't do that alone because it cannot define "better". Humans must decide what "better" means. Do we want the assembly line to be faster or use fewer resources? Should it continue to produce this product or work on a new one? Should we build a bigger assembly line or turn the whole thing into a park?
As long as the world keeps changing, we will need humans to direct that change. People who fear change, who want everything to stay the same will have the hardest time in the future. Those are the people who will be replaced by AI.
The future belongs to those who change the present.
I always took weird to mean "not easily digestible," not necessarily harmful. Like, if the guy is weird, processing his actions is hard, but I'm never threatened by him.
I meant that weird is different, and different is unaligned. If I have a team and each team member is pushing in a different direction, then we're going to get outcompeted by an aligned team.
Of course, often weird/different is how you get the breakthroughs and innovations. I'm not trying to stamp out weird. I just don't think everyone can be or should be weird (which is the implication of the OP).
But everyone can be a change agent and help to change the present into the future.
I don't want to disagree with this article, my motivated reasoning as a weird person is strong. But my contrarian nature is winning.
Uniformity seems to be a feature of scale. Institutions are just one form of scaled human intelligence/activity. Our desire for strong institutions, driven by a belief that strong institutions lead to better overall average outcomes for all humans, therefore creates pressure for uniformity that is shown in our education system. We stop seeing "human" and start seeing "citizen".
But that same need for uniformity to drive massive scale won't be lessened by AI. If I am right, then in order to scale our society AI will require uniformity just as much, if not more. If there is a direct relation between scale and uniformity and if we direct AI towards scale then AI will enforce an even greater uniformity on humanity.
Basically, if we want things cheap then we have to do them at scale. If we want things done at scale then we have to treat the components as uniform. Therefore, AI may lead to more uniformity as we direct it to make things cheaper and scale them out.
Future belongs to ones (let's call them ruling class) who utilizes averages (let's call that masses) to own advantage. Weirds here are the systemic risk to the ruling class. And there is nothing in weirds for masses. Masses avoid, ridicule, mock and exclude the weird stuff. Even the "weird" is about other's perception, not innate property of an individual. Nothing suggests that this perception will change in any observable time.
And what about weirdos who are wrong and selfdelusional? Are they minority of majority of weidos? Then can you blame masses who avoid/exclude veridos?
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To have a society in which weirdos thrive means to put at risk so many things the ruling class thrive for: control, power, social status. Such society will need to cultivate curiosity and critical thinking. Good luck with arranging that at scale.
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It's indeed easier times for weird. But way far from thriving or even "having the future".
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There are way more things in the article to argue about. I just outlined couple.
I've had similar thoughts in regards to generative AI applied to the arts. Taste is subjective, but if you ask 100 random people to rank an AI-generated techno or country track versus one created by an "average" human creator (including amateurs), the AI would probably do pretty well. But if now anyone can create a competent, generic song in a well-known genre, then that sound becomes a lot less interesting, human-made or not. Of course, it turns out a lot of people don't care and will listen to whatever, but I suspect that for those who do, there'll be a higher percentage seeking something weird and new.
That’s great news. We’ve been preparing for exactly this version of it for more than 25 years now - learning, hacking, travelling, doing extreme sports and environments and exploring tribal outdoor gatherings with zero amenities. Hope we see you on the other side.
Hi, Dan from Red Bull here - would you be interested in being one of our brand ambassadors?
> You can't out-cog a robot
This is such a great way to summarise the issue facing rank-and-file employees. If your job is predictable, repeatable, systematizable then you're "competing against the price of electricity [and GPUs]"
This bodes well for me, as a furry who's often too weird even for the other furries.
That it might actually be remunerative (economically, socially)...
Hello Hacker (M)ews furry. Tell me a little about your journey. What got you into furries and tech? What kind of tech are you most interested in?
To what end?
This rests on the assumption that AI can't do weird stuff.
I think it depends.
For measurable goals and simulatable systems, AI and other methods like evolutionary optimization can create weird things on their own.
But what if the goals themselves are weird? This exists, There's a niche for that in the economy, but it's pretty small.
Nah, it belongs to the slop consuming unthinking normies. More and more apparent by the day. Wishful thinking that it belongs to the weird.
And they belong to the rich.
Culture us already far more ironic and appreciative of irreverent and absurdist humor, and open-minded to ideology- than it was prior generations.
Why would it tend this way before AI? Something to do with the creative potential where tech reduces the consciousness and menial work requirement perhaps.
The author raises some good observations but I think that the actual proposition is ridiculous.
We are supposed to resist the automation of normalcy with AI by...remodeling the process from some sort of set of civilizational first principles?
Sidenote: the "telescopic zoom" feature of the website is very interesting and __useful__. It's amazing to see how one can still bring innovation to blogs/personal websites!
Thank you!
If the future belonged to the weird, everyone would dogpile on it, and it would no longer be weird. Either the weird will become mainstream, or it isn't the future.
My argument is precisely that it will become mainstream. But as long as it's not all weird in the same way - I'm here for it.
Why wouldn't it be weird in the same way if the flavor of weird is effective?
The author make a typical mistake, saying that witches were burned at stake in pre-modern times. Which is not true; surprisingly burning witches was not a big thing in Medieval period; it was actually early modernity when witch hunts have become widespread (not in England though, were witchhunts were far less popular, than say in Germany or some other parts of modern UK).
Per wikipedia: "The period of the European witch trials with the most active phase and the largest number of fatalities seems to have occurred between 1560 and 1630." Which is very pre-modern. And that's the language that was chosen in the essay, not the Medieval.
1560 is Early Modern. *Per wikipedia:* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Early_modern_period
There is no pre-Modern. Right after Late Middle Ages [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Late_Middle_Ages] goes Early Modern.
>>> The always-on Burning Man is coming. Ready or not.
You must toggle to the minified telescopic version of the essay to experience this closing statement.
> but the general rule for the vast majority of the population was: don't be weird, or get killed.
I suspect this is a very Eurocentric view. Take India for a counter-example, it has always been full of weirdoes starting their own cults.
India has/had a caste-based system. For many people they could not act outside of their caste.
Most of the essay is pretty unapologetically Eurocentric, particularly with the talk of frontiers. I appreciated it being upfront about that.
"weird-maxxing"
Lady Gaga, its already here.
Still only a limited number of slots for weird to be successful.
> But with AI (disembodied in software and embodied in robots), the relative value of being normal and predictable is rapidly evaporating.
I would argue this is precisely backwards. The normal and predictable is more valuable. Human errors are largely predictable. AI errors are not. This is one of the reasons why human code is much easier to review than AI code.
Just not my kind of weird.
Not quite my tempo
when the going gets weird the weird turn pro.
ChatGPT, please write an essay about weirdos that follows Paul Graham's methods but not his style. Insert AI as the savior in the end.
The reality is that everything that was considered weird has been co-opted by the tech industry already. LGBTQ and Burning man are boring, commercialized and institutionalized now.
The tech industry did this, because tech people are relentless online advertisers for the industry and they had to placate them. It stopped when Trump was elected, which shows that the people holding the power are normie CEOs and not weirdos.
If you say Amodei is a weirdo: Only to a certain extent and he will be removed one day just like the Google founders. Some Eric Schmidt figure will take over.
Really, this is just AI generated or assisted fiction that improves morale for the tech influencers.
If by "everything considered weird" you mean a small chosen part of it from a decade ago. There are infinite pockets of it.
Or.
AI sees we have too many 'cogs' available, and they are using up resources. Lets cull them back a bit.
Alternatively these mechanisms push toward subcultures. Several tight and successful groups come to mind:
Environmentalists may be weird, but they bring attention to real problems for society generally and have had significant success despite being targeted for murder by corporate criminals globally. Cannabis enthusiasts may be social jokes, but even during a drug war managed to carry on and find ways of not just existing but bonding and and sharing.
This kind of situation keeps coming up and it seems like the weirdness is a side issue relative to the commitment to some specific sharable experience.
Said this on another post: With AI eventually making everything anyone can think of, it'll come down to who has the better ideas, or at least the most weird ideas that AI can't think of (yet)
Unless those with power and money decide to stamp them out. I think this article is naively optimistic.
We're nowhere near that, though. You still have to fight with image generators to make particular changes or keep parts consistent.
Well barely a year ago and within a few months AI went from being a laughing stock and struggling with fingers and toes to being scarily good at some tasks and hard to tell apart for some people.
Like other comments said, the problem isn't whether AI will improve, it's whether the fuckers in politics and power will allow the Common Peasant to keep having full access to AI..
WOW! , a complete history, manual, and set of rules for bieng wierd, almost like a beurocratic normalisation of wierdnesz, which is of course the standard method of the normys when they notice that the strategy of useing the same tactics is failing (and quickly at that) and they need new ideas to steal.
good luck with that.
that was revolting to read. unbelievable cinical double speak.it leaves all real control to industry and is DESIGNED to make "repair" a bespoke boutique privlage. what was that very reliable french device that was used as "the argument that ends all debate", many I am sure could are likely still operable even aften centuries of sitting, but even if out of commisioncan be quickly returned to service to trim beurocratic and industry excess at the source.
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What we call "normal" is the historical convergence to behaviour that allows a civilization to thrive and survive long term.
Change that and the weirdos will create a society that will die out.
See: modern liberal society and feminisim which leads to population collapse and destruction of the civilizations that embrace it.
> See: modern liberal society and feminisim which leads to population collapse and destruction of the civilizations that embrace it.
I would absolutely love any kind of reputable source on this.
If you're interested there are books on Oikophobia (there is one called Western Self-Contempt). It's a theory that societies generate a luxury class which loathes itself and attacks it's own history and culture.
This usually happens prior to a collapse in the example societies...
I saw
https://cornellpress.cornell.edu/book/9781501763182/western-...
and I love how it puts a historical context on the phenomenon because part of the current disease is a rejection of history.
A general problem I see in circles I have been in lately has been a general distrust of authority, like I am in a Tarot group and people (especially the hierophants!) there tend to have trouble with cards like The Emperor, The Hierophant, Kings and Queens, etc. [1] Of course it's complicated, like the best spokespeople for guru yoga are people like
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ch%C3%B6gyam_Trungpa#Controver...
[1] ... whereas I very much identify with the male-leaning figures in myself and see the female-leaning figures in the mature women around me such as my wife and other witches
That sounds like a much weaker claim than the original one. "These values directly lead to civilization collapse" is a lot different from "these values roughly resemble some of the ones in societies that have collapsed when trying to view them relative to the society itself"; now your claim is predicated on a subjective analogy from modern societies to past ones, and at that point it seems like the result is already basically predetermined based on how much you agree with the values or not.
Yeah it's kind of hard to understand how someone can argue this without giving any examples. What would be an example of a civilization that's been destroyed by "modern liberal society and feminism"? "Modern" implies relatively recent, but I can't think of any civilizations that have collapsed recently. There are certainly people claiming that a collapse is imminent, but that's not a new thing either, and even if I were going to accept the premise that it will happen soon I still wouldn't agree with those as the most likely causes (and there isn't any objective way to know right now given that it hasn't happened yet).
I think there is a crisis coming. It is not likely to be terminal, in and of itself, the immediate problem is that all the thing that leftist like such as public schools, higher ed, and the welfare state are going to become a lot harder to maintain thanks to demographic issues.
"Feminism" is not one thing, I mean, women are 50% of the population and they have very different beliefs, experiences, interests, etc. Often "feminism" is an expression of "individualism" and many of the major social changes have been driven by capital and the empire: I mean, a woman who stays home is not paying taxes on the fruits of her labor, she is not driving up stock market prices and making billionaires richer. I think there's not a lot of understanding that other career paths are possible. One of my friends had a child at age 19, spent some time living in a tent, worked in food service, but then got a masters in teaching and now works as an educator and union steward. And her daughter was off on her own at an age where some other women are stuggling with IVF and miscarriages. I know another teen mom who got an accounting degree, went down to New Jersey and became an experienced corporate accountant, and now she does the books for a well-regarded regional bank.
I believe in 50 years there is going to be more talk about duty and responsibility (which can be feminine, masculine or neither) and less about individual rights. Either our culture changes or there will be a rupture in which people will turn their backs on everything our culture stood for.
I know you weren't the one who posted the original comment that spawned this thread, but trying to pivot the discussion into "I think there is a crisis coming" after people pushed back against a wild claim that the same type of thing you're discussing being an objective cause of civilization collapse does not give the impression of good faith, so it does not seem obvious to me that it's worthwhile to try to engage with the points you're making
I think the default mode is lack of population and getting outcompeted by pro-natal civilisations, like amish etc. You need to provide a reputable source for why is that not the case.
I must be either misreading your point or not recognizing intentional irony. I would expect the Amish to average a lot of kids per family, but I'm not aware of any instance of a civilization disappearing due to being outcompeted by them.
I don't need to provide anything, I'm not the one making claims. (Especially ones as wild as this.)
That's... That's not how discourse works.