Eh, I'm mostly bouncing ideas around; I was originally annoyed by the lack of strength in Caplan's argument - and I still don't think it's very solid. But also I'm interested in how norms and judgements work in general, and have been jotting down a few ideas that could make another post. I've also somewhat revised my opinion as to what extent humans are tolerant of weirdness; I guess Caplan primed me to think of economics and daily life and business models, not gender and sex issues, a more touchy area.

Maybe we could call:

WeirdA = "surprisingly different" WeirdB = "violates social norms"

And I agree that humans don't tolerate WeirdnessB (pretty much by definition), and Caplan's argument is that innovation requires WeirdnessA, and I'm saying that how much WeirdA imples WeirdB depends of the society (and the topic at hand).

(I don't think there's much confusion left at this point, this is a big discussion for such a small blog post).