Being stroppy
For malcontents too perverse to be contrarian like everyone else
March 4, 2022 — January 26, 2025
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Content warning:
Links to and discussion of edgy people with perverse opinions on hot-button topics too diverse to mention but which surely include gender, eugenics, speech and religion
Notes on eccentrics, mavericks, outsider geniuses and fools. What my family called stroppy people.
Lacking an identifiable label so you show up in diversity metrics? Not sure whether you are rebelling against society or conforming to a subgroup? How do you get by as a mad outsider? Will you be right twice a day?
Do you want to find a rationale for people like you? How about the justification that you are useful for innovation? Or be an outlier without a cause?
1 Crazy ideas are mostly wrong
Case studies?
2 Eccentricity and group context
For an interesting perspective on whether taking one for the team and being the house oddball is worthwhile, see Olga Khazan on Living and Flourishing While Being Weird (Khazan 2021).
3 Genius or madness?
For the really interesting cases, this question only works ex ante.
4 Interesting people
Olga Khazan (Khazan 2021)
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[…]this is a newsletter where I write about disability and capitalism, covering the politics of mental health, the history of popular psychology, and the philosophies of living outside the norm.
Ingeborg van Teeseling’s collection of Australian stroppiness
Ada Palmer
Audrey Tang, Taiwan’s digital minister in 2020.
Eric Gilliam on John von Neumann
SBF is interesting (Faux 2023; Lewis 2023). For what my purely parasocial intuitions are worth, I tend more to Michael Lewis’s sympathetic face-value read of SBF than Faux’s censorious one.
- Max Read, What to Read About FTX
5 Incoming
The new Matthew Syed book might pertain (Syed 2020).
benkuhn.net, Searching for outliers
Normies vs Statistical Normality
Normies claim to be a larger and more powerful coalition than they actually are by conflating their conformity target with statistical normality.
Roger’s Bacon, 20 Modern Heresies
Festivals of contrarian ideas such Hereticon. These things rarely seem to produce anything that exciting for me, but bless ’em for trying I guess?
Peter McLaughlin, Embrace interesting ideas
Sam Atis, Beware Interesting Ideas
