Being stroppy
For malcontents too perverse to be contrarian like everyone else
March 4, 2022 — July 6, 2022
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. 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 that you are useful for innovation?
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, John von Neumann: A Strange Kind of Bird
5 Incoming
I cannot stop reading about FTX
- Max Read, What to Read About FTX
How the Kayin BGF’s business interests put Myanmar at risk of COVID-19. The ethnic border militias of Myanmar sound fascinating.
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/Festivals of Dangerous Ideas. These things rarely seem to produce anything that exciting for me, but bless ’em for trying guess?
Peter McLaughlin, Embrace interesting ideas
Sam Atis, Beware Interesting Ideas
Life on the Grid (part 1) - by Roger’s Bacon
To review: growing up in simplistic spatial environments and using GPS has given you brain damage and life has become a soul-crushing video game utterly devoid of mystery or adventure. We are trapped in the Grid like an insect in the spider’s web; vigorous struggle will only serve to entangle us further. To extricate ourselves, we must, as individuals, gently subvert the very foundations of the Grid, which is nothing external but a facet of human nature: the impulse towards control, the systematising instinct, the part of us that abhors anomaly and ambiguity and seeks to eradicate them. What begins as an earnest attempt to break free can so easily slip back into a self-imposed system of rules and practices with standards to be met and schedules to be followed. For that reason I am hesitant to provide any concrete suggestions—they will only serve to constrain your thinking. For now, there is perhaps only one thing that can be said: if you want to get off the grid, then get lost.
