Perhaps my deepest insecurity is that I’m too weird. Now, don’t get me wrong, I wouldn’t trade my current life for the world. I’ve lived a very unique life and I love it to bits. But sometimes I stay up at night and think to myself, “am I too weird?”
I have a theory: that you have a certain number of standard deviations away from generally accepted beliefs and still be accepted by an individual/population. When Darwin introduced his theory of evolution, it was a radical departure from the religiously-based belief in creation. Initially, it was accepted only by a few who were closer to the idea (“fewer standard deviations” away from mainstream beliefs), while many rejected it. Over time, as evidence grew, the theory moved closer to the centre of accepted beliefs, gaining broader acceptance in both the scientific community and the general population. In this case, Darwin’s theory was initially several “standard deviations” away from the norm, and only a small portion of the population accepted it. As it became more familiar and evidence grew, it moved closer to the centre of accepted beliefs, and more people came to accept it.
In social psychology, this concept is called idiosyncrasy credits (IC’s), representing an individual’s capacity to acceptably deviate from a group’s expectations. You gain IC’s from being agreeable and conforming to expectations, and decreased every time you deviate from group’s expectations. Therefore, every time you have some weird opinion, you’re actively spending your IC’s that you’ve accrued. You must spend them wisely; do you care more about convincing everyone about open borders, or UBI? Are there more “normal” policies that are almost as good, but that spend less of your IC’s? But also, a lot of great leaders are straight up great at being weird but not spending IC’s; is it because they’re respected?
A man must be orthodox upon most things, or he will never even have time to preach his own heresy.
This is true of ideas, but it’s also true of people; individuals tend to congregate into cliques on similarities, whether hobbies, race, language, profession, etc. If you lie on a long tail of many beliefs, you’re drastically limiting the amount of individuals that are agreeable or relatable. You can only levy a certain number of “idiosyncrasy debts” and still have a reasonable chance of finding compatible others. Perhaps the most vivid illustration of this is the female delusion calculator, but on different metrics; perhaps “accepting of startup risk/”, “fine with someone who is mildly awkward at the start”, “accepting of long distance for long periods/locational uncertainty”, “extreme introversion”, etc.
I don’t think it’s specific to love (and my insecurity from it is definitely not limited to love), but it’s kind of insane to think about romance in this manner. It’s mildly impressive that anyone ever can fall in love — the level of commonality required is absurd. For a successful relationship, one must admire each other at the same time, be in roughly the same city, have a similar upbringing, social class, aligned future growth/plans for the next 5 years, etc. And that you can have all of this, and some black swan happens, and whoopety doo it’s all you can think about for the rest of your life. The dimensionality of relationships is absolutely absurd; you’re trying to find your k-nearest-neighbours in 100-dimension search; and to think that dating apps reduce this to a 2-sentence bio and curated pictures?!
But don’t just take my theorycrafting as fact. I will have to use virginity statistics as a proxy for the harder-to-measure romancelessness statistics, but these are bad enough. In high school each extra IQ point above average increases chances of male virginity by about 3%. 35% of MIT grad students have never had sex, compared to only 20% of average nineteen year old men. This is despite IQ having higher correlation with career success (and therefore income) than structured interviews, experience, GPA, etc.; one would think that higher income/status results in more success, but no, it’s just taking some idiosyncrasy debt.
I’m hugely thankful to be living in the time of the internet; literally all of my closest friends I’ve met in the past 4 years of extreme non-traditionalism have been online, mostly through Twitter, and all of whom approached me first (I’m really awful at making new friends, but working on it). I don’t know how I’d survive without it. And truth be told, sometimes I wish I lived a normal life: gone to university, hung out in dorms with people my age, got co-ops, paid off my student loans slowly, etc. It’s probably a worse experience than I have now, but at least I’d never be alone in my problems, nor successes.
I was hanging out with some new friends today and they were curious about how I got to where I am career wise and I kinda just boiled it down to “haha I just won some competitions”. Which is fine; I don’t think they needed (or wanted) to know more about my background, but it was a weird feeling to know that they’d never really “know” me; and I would also never really “know” them. I read somewhere a long time ago that the reason you make less friends as you get older is because you have more and more lore and it gets harder and harder to tell new people about your lore. I didn’t realize how true it was until today.
I’ve been reading a lot of Ava’s Bookbear Express and there’s a quote I quite like from it.
Anyway I played badminton with Eddie and some of his Chinese friends. That guy drives like a $150k car, absurd. It sounds really good, it’s an AMG with its muffler removed, so the backfires are pretty slick. I wanna buy mom/dad a nice car; maybe a Hyundai Ioniq 5 when I am a bit richer (and plus we already have two extremely old cars). I broke my badminton bag, which was a bit sad, ripped a massive hole. I had that thing for like 10 years though, so it served its purpose well; I ordered a new one. I had a MASSIVE szechuan water-boiled beef bowl. It was $20cad, what an insane steal. Shit slapped, I brought literally 3/4 of it home for mom and dad.
Pocket Universe launched solana rug protection. It seems… fine. Pretty unexceptional, it definitely wasn’t a 10x. I wrote some fucking mean code today. I forgot how much I love coding. It kinda makes me feel like God when I can ship something to 180k users that I just typed up, or when I solve a problem that I know that very, very few people in the world can. I really like feeling needed, it’s maybe my #1 source of purpose/fulfillment these days.
My clothes I ordered from Japan on 08-15 came! I’ll throw together some fit pics tomorrow.
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