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Metus comments on Open thread, September 8-14, 2014 - Less Wrong Discussion
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I can't count the number of times I didn't do something that would have been beneficial because my social circle thought it would be weird or stupid. Just shows how important it is to choose the people around you carefully.
Someone -- maybe on LW? -- said that their strategy was to choose their friends carefully enough that they didn't have to resist peer pressure.
That has other dangers -- e.g. living in an echo chamber or facing the peer pressure to not change.
Yes, you have to be very careful. (And live in a place where the number of such people is large enough that it's even viable as a strategy, and ignore/isolate yourself from the wider culture or still maintain resistance to it, and so on, which makes it inaccessible to a large number of people, but it seems close to ideal in the rare circumstances where it's possible.)
I don't know if "careful" is the right word -- it's more an issue of finding a good balance and the optimal point isn't necessarily obvious. On the one hand, you should like your friends and not have them annoy you or push you in the directions you don't want to go. On the other hand, being surrounded by the best clones of yourself that you could find doesn't sound too appealing.
It's a bit like an ecosystem -- you want a healthy amount of diversity and not monoculture, but at the same time want to avoid what will poison you or maybe just eat you X-)
Paul Graham wrote about that in A Student's Guide To Startups:
I've always been a huge non-conformist, caring relatively little what others think. I now believe that I went too far and my advice to my younger self would be to try and fit in more.
You have a couple of graduate degrees and are a professor at a liberal arts college in the Northeast... People I would describe as "huge non-conformists" would probably be tailed by campus security if they ever showed up in the area X-D
See this.
Oh, I know you're a conservative in academia and had tenure troubles because of that. But that makes you a conservative in very liberal environment, not a non-conformist.
Of course you can call yourself anything you want to and the label is sufficiently fuzzy and could be defined in many ways. Still, from my perspective you're now a part of the establishment -- Smith did grant you tenure, even if screaming and kicking.
I am not passing judgement on you, it just surprised me that what you mean by a "huge non-conformist" is clearly very different from what I mean by a "huge non-conformist".
It's also stuff such as I don't like sports, music, fashion, or small talk, and in high school and college made zero effort to pay attention to them and it cost me socially. I realize now I should have at least pretended to like them to have had a better social life.
That makes you a fully-conforming geek, as you undoubtedly know. Welcome to the club :-)
I figured out when I was about 15 years old that I had to keep on things I didn't care about to earn points socially and it helped me a great deal and powers what I do as a writer and talk show presenter.
Such as?
In a great example of serendipity, the talking to myself is a case. I was observed doing that and people thought it would be weird, so I stopped doing that.
When I was younger, some adults told be that "you only understand something when you can teach it to someone", which people in my circle disputed as they were the kind of people that like to think of themselves as smart.
I didn't go to a couple of parties to socialise because there were people drinking copious amounts of alcohol, because there was a stigma against getting drunk and stupid. While the not drinking certainly was a good idea, the not socialising was not.
As a child I was extremely interested in everything scientific. Then in school none of the cooler kids were and neither were the friends I actually had, so I started playing video games. Thankfully I later found people interested in scholarship so I started doing that again.
(I am starting to realise most of these are from when I was in school. Might be because I matured or because I have more perspective through the distance)
Not that peer pressure can't have good effects, it is a tool like any other.
Though that certainly has happened to me as well, it strikes me that the opposite has happened more often: I've done things which turned out to be beneficial, and avoided to do things that would have been bad, because of the opinions of my social circles.
Lots of the time, things that are seen as weird and stupid by the majority actually are weird and stupid.
My go-to catchphrase when I notice this sort of situation is (spoken sarcastically):
"Why be happy when you can be normal?"