One thing I dislike about this model is that it seems to compress varying negative judgments into "this person is weird". A few examples from this post:

• Unprofessional / unserious : If you're a punk rocker vegan advocate, people may judge you to be unserious, as you have not compromised your self-expression in order to appear professional.
• Untrustworthy: If someone hears you advocating for [cryonics / open borders / other radical ideas], they may conclude that you are not forming your beliefs in a normal way, and then choose to generally trust you less. If you only advocate for one of those ideas, among a portfolio of relatively normal beliefs, the average person is probably correctly judging you to be more trustworthy, at least by their epistemic standards.
• Unrealistic: If you are advocating for universal basic income instead of relaxed zoning laws, people may conclude that you are not a good political ally because you are making unrealistic demands.

You can try to respond to all of those by "don't be weird", but it seems better to figure out whether you need to send signals of seriousness, trustworthiness, or pragmatism.

What's more, as EmeryCooper mentioned, this doesn't apply nearly as well to domains like physical appearance as it does to policies and opinions. I've also seen this extended to types of weirdness that seem more difficult to change, like being visibly LGBT+ or having a non-standard accent.

I think this is a good post for starting conversation but it has also received a lot of substantial criticism here and on LessWrong. To sum up my favourites:

• Sharing an unorthodox belief with someone makes them much more likely to listen to you on other topics.
• Weirdness matters a lot if you're an advocate, but much less otherwise
• Being right is different from being normal. People who care a lot about being normal are rarely the best at judging what's true, or contributing to those [discussions] (http://lesswrong.com/lw/lbn/you_have_a_set_amount_of_weirdness_points_spend/bocl). And it's probably more important to figure out what's true than to persuade people.
• Talking about weirdness points is a very negative perspective that could play on people's fear of social rejection. It's probably better to talk about familiarity points instead.
• Weirdness points just alter how much attention people pay to you, and if you only want a subset of the population to pay attention to you, then you are likely to be prepared to spend more weirdness points. i.e. there's not a fixed amount.

I think each of these is a substantial objection to the thesis of the article and taken together they are pretty damaging.

I think that they can be tied together to be even stronger though.

If you're trying to spread a radical intellectual idea, in the beginning, you mostly want to target early adopters who have a lot of pulling power. Think of the Einstein-Russell manifesto against nuclear proliferation, which preceded the antinuclear movement by a couple of decades, or of many other social movements whose intellectual forebears who preceded them. So far, the most valuable contributors to ideas relating to effective altruism are people like Martin Rees, Jaan Tallin, James Martin, Elon Musk. To a substantial extent, they appraise ideas based on their content, rather than on the basis of who is presenting them. As publisher John Brockman puts it, "I'm not interested in the average person. Most people have never had an idea and wouldn't recognize one if did." Or, as Peter Thiel says: "What is something you believe that nearly no one agrees with you on?" For these people, holding some unorthodox ideas is a prerequisite for them to listen to you. So for people who are promoting a radical idea to others who are themselves radical thinkers, trying to be normal is just not going to cut ice.

Not everyone has to be Will MacAskill or Peter Singer. These two are writing popular books about effective altruism and do lots of TV interviews about these things. They practice talking to the masses so that others can focus on industrial and intellectual leaders, and yet others can focus on researching which charities are the most effective. The problem with this post is that it does not apply to others' roles the same as it applies to MacAskill's and Singer's. But rather, the whole spectrum of jobs are important. Arguably, MacAskill and Singer's roles are less important, because if we can't attract the general public, then we can go to high-net worth individuals. However, if we can't figure out which charities are the most effective, then recruiting is no use at all.

So even if we convince ourselves that it's more important to do fundamental research and talking to intellectual leaders while avoiding public discourse, it's very hard to stave off our human need for social approval. The bottom line, though, is that people don't need a post to tell them to be more aware of social rejection. Most people couldn't forget about social rejection if they tried. In fact, some of the people who gain the most confidence and passion in making a big change to the world do so because they realise that society's big problems are not going to be fixed by themselves. Take Nate Soares for one reasonably articulate example. This can be because of a realisation that society is pretty selfish or crazy a lot of the time, and so some people are going to have to take on the responsibility of improving it. Instead, trying to get across the idea that society is weird might be a better approach to breeding people with a sense of heroic responsibility for fixing it.

So altogether, although I agree with the post broadly - that it's valuable to be familiar and normal, I think people already behave as though it is. Instead, we should pay more attention to the fact that effective altruism is quite a radical idea, that it already has some people who are focussed on acting as its public face, and that it might be better for people to focus on feeling responsible for improving the world, or for figuring out how, before becoming so alert to social considerations.

Clean up and look good

This is one of the big benefits I've found from learning to dress well. People generally seem much more positively disposed to the weird ideas I talk about now that I dress well and have good social skills. People interpret weird ideas from high status people much more favorably than they do from less high status people.

I think the lesson here is that its useful to spend time learning to dress well, develop social skills and otherwise become high status. I have some advice on learning how to dress well (mostly for men).

I like this way of thinking about weirdness, Peter. I've been saying for a while that EA is associated with a lot of weird ideas that are sure to turn off many ordinary people.

Another thing I'd recommend is remaining sympathetic to mildly and moderately important issues (e.g. fighting police brutality in the USA, supporting gay rights, containing ebola, the ALS ice bucket challenge) even when you see everybody around you overrating their importance relative to other issues that you consider far more important. Raining on everybody else's warm, fuzzy parade will make you "weird," and people will be less willing to hear about your alternative causes. I think the general strategy should be to care about EA issues in addition to mainstream issues, rather than supporting them as an alternative to mainstream issues.

Thanks for the write-up. This gets the sense of weirdness points as I understand them pretty well.

The one thing that you say that seems wrong to me is in the title: the idea that you have a set amount of weirdness points. Rather I think you can choose to spend more or less weirdness points, but the more you spend, the less people will pay attention to you.

Of course it is a simplifying metaphor to say you have a set number (and you may often want to act this way, where that number is at the right trade-off between being weird and taking important positions). But as weirdness points are themselves a simplifying metaphor, this level may not be clear to readers meeting the idea for the first time.

Why it matters: sometimes it's right to shift the number of weirdness points you're spending. You don't want to lead people into thinking that whenever they become weird on some axis they need to rein in on another axis. Rather the important takeaway message is: weirdness is a cost, so like any other cost we should be aware of it, and it sometimes won't be worth paying.

Hey Peter,

I think it's important to highlight that this article is about weirdness in the context of advocacy.

While I enjoyed the message, I'm concerned about the negative approach. People (especially weird ones) tend to be afraid of social rejection, and setting up a framework for failure (spending too many weirdness points) instead of a framework for success (winning familiarity points) can create a culture of fear/guilt around one's identity. I believe this is why some EAs had a cautious reaction to this article.

I love connecting with people, and I've found the most effective way to do so is to be vulnerable, instead of conservative. This has psychological and philosophical underpinnings, which I don't have room to expound on here.

So I propose a different metric: familiarity points. People want to affirm you, just as they want to be affirmed. We are all (including EAs, I've discovered) fundamentally human in how we've figured out how the world works. If you can tap into the basic emotions and thoughts that have brought you to your position, in a way that is familiar to others, then you can share your perspective and gain familiarity points at the same time.

You can also gain easy familiarity points with something that a lot of people are comfortable with, like talking about sports or movies. These are cheap points and not very valuable, but you can leverage them if you dig a little deeper. If you've both seen Inception, great. But if you can both talk about idiosyncrasies in Christopher Nolan's directing over his past 5 movies, then you're getting more familiarity points. You've found something that you're both weird about, and this gains you FAR more traction than simply “not scaring them off”.

Once you have gained enough familiarity points, you can start introducing unfamiliar ideas, but from a much better grounding. “You know, I was thinking about how Nolan portrays the world's collapse in Interstellar, and I was wondering what existential risks are really a problem, so I started reading material from FHI.” This is the foot-in-the-door technique, but since you already have familiarity points, you've got a warm lead, instead of a cold one (to continue the sales lingo). Or, you can use the door-in-face technique: “speaking of Interstellar, I have some crazy ideas about AI development.” Because you have familiarity points, your interlocutor wants to hear more – they consider you a kindred spirit, and thus might have some great new information (you are crazy like me, I want to hear your crazy ideas).

Of course, it's also important to incorporate expectation-setting and have preexisting constructions for conversation entry and the “close”. But I'm getting too long-winded. Maybe I should write a post.

Thanks for writing this up! This is why I decided to stop with my idiosyncratic capitalization and write normally.

I like your thoughts, however I think you oversee one important aspect: People who are more weird will take away weirdness points from less weird people. Meaning, one really radical advocate for an idea helps plenty more less radical advocates promote their position in society. People living vegan make vegetarians seem less weird than they would without vegans. People advocating total smoking bans everywhere make people asking for smoking bans indoors seem less weird, People demanding a universal basic income make people lobbying for minimum wages and social security less weird. And so on. So while a radical position might not come through, and while a person holding that position might not be successful from a superficial point of view, the position and the person will actually do good by taking away the weirdness of less radical activists. I argue that this is actually a strong multiplicator, much stronger than lowering ones own weirdness and advocating for the more socially acceptable positions and solutions. I also argue that this is the reason why policy develops through the aforementioned six stages. And I argue that the more maximum-weird people there are, the faster this development will be. In that sense I can only encourage anyone to be as radical and weird as possible when it comes to altruistic ideas and activism.

I think this is good advise, but advice that people will find hard to accept. Every piece of weird behavior comes packaged with object-level inside view considerations in favor of it, which generate convenient excuses for why we should exempt it from this general argument.

"Yes, of course I agree with this evidence in general, but it doesn't really apply to me. I don't need to [wear gender-appropriate clothing / have monogamous relationships / shave my beard / eat normal food / use normal pronouns], because I have really good inside-view reasons for why my weirdness is special."

I'm as guilty of this as anyone.

Worse, being asked to seem less weird feels like asking people to give up a part of their personality. Especially for the sort of person EA tends to attract, this can seem like a much higher costs than simply donating money. Plus, you don't get to signal your virtue!

I think there are people where you can earn points in their books for being weird and able to convince them of some of the weird things. "This person gave me true beliefs that are otherwise hard to come by, I should listen to them more and see if I can find more rare true beliefs among the rare things they believe." I think these people are disproportionately able to become super-weird. And that super-weird EAs (including undercover super-weird EAs) provide most of the expected value of the EA movement (because of x-risk, donating large fractions of income, and earning to give in tech startups). It may be worth driving away quite a few people with low weirdness tolerance in order to attract more people with the potential to become super-weird.

It is like being an author, one has to always ask who your audience is. There are lots of policies, for example, that would help people but seem to be bad for business. When talking to government folks or business folks, show how they are actually good for business and lead with that. So, random third world country suffering from horrible government corruption: normal approach is to denounce corruption and demand reforms. But corruption is bad for business, the GDP grows more slowly the more corruption one has. And it costs companies money directly in bribes. What actually fights corruption is more democracy, more transparency, and more freedom of speech and assembly. What creates those is broad support from the business community for more democracy, more transparency, and more freedom of speech and assembly. The people of England did not rise up and demand the Magna Carta, the Barons marched on London, took it by force of arms, and then demanded the Magna Carta. Power responds to power. Lead with what they want, follow with how they can get it, and no need to even mention what you want in this case.

But reforming the earned income tax credit and relaxing zoning laws would also both do a lot to help the poor in the US.

The link above didn't seem to have any proposals of how to reform the earned income tax credit. It argues for an alternative measure of poverty in the US.