How To Dress To Improve Your Epistemics
23Jonathan Claybrough
20Kaj_Sotala
2silentbob
11MalcolmMcLeod
2davekasten
10Lucius Bushnaq
4the gears to ascension
9the gears to ascension
6Kaj_Sotala
5Seth Herd
4Kaj_Sotala
4Cole Wyeth
3p
28habryka
4Thane Ruthenis
4nim
2Thane Ruthenis
2Wei Dai
2Thane Ruthenis
2Jiro
3johnswentworth
New Comment
With no shade to John in particular, as this applies to many insular lesswrong topics, I just wanna state this gives me a feeling of the blind leading the blind. I could believe someone reading this behaves in the world worse after reading it, mostly because it'd push them further in the same overwrought see-everything-through-status frame. I think it's particularly the case here because clothing and status are particularly complex and benefit from a wider diversity of frames to think of them in, and require diverse experiences and feedback from many types of communities to generalize well (or to realize just how narrow every "rule" is!)
I'm not saying John has bad social skills or that this doesn't contain true observations or that someone starting from zero wouldn't become better thanks to this, nor that John shouldn't write it, but I do think this is centrally the kind of article one should consider "reverse all advice you read" for, and would like to see more community pushback and articles providing more diverse frames on this.
I'm confident I could sensibly elaborate more on what's missing/wrong, but in the absence of motivation to, I'll just let this comment stand as an agree/disagree rod for the statement "We have no clear reason to believe the author is actually good at social skills in diverse environments, they are writing in a seemingly too confident and not caveated enough tone about a too complicated topic without acknowledging that and are potentially misleading/short term net negative to at least a fifth of lesswrong readers who are already on the worse side of social skills"
1I think one important caveat the post didn't mention is that dressing in a clown suit is likely to be polarizing, and there's a selection bias in that you're likely to get positive feedback from the people who like it, while the people who are privately rolling their eyes at you will say little. Increasing the variance in how you're received can often be a fine tradeoff to make, but you should be aware of the fact that you're making it!
E.g., I used to routinely dress pretty weird and mostly only got positive compliments for it (including from random people on the street), which felt quite cool and good for my self-esteem. Then I happened to mention in one conversation that "yeah, I dress weird, but nobody seems to react negatively" and one person volunteered something like "actually, when I first saw you, I did assume there was something wrong with you and it affected my opinion of you negatively, though that did get corrected when I observed more of you".
I think there's a bit of a "no free lunch" element in status interactions, in that if something gets you points for being seen as unusual and courageous, typically the reason why it's unusual and courageous is that some people will, in fact, deduct you points for it. Now you might still earn more points on average than you lose, but it's something to keep in mind.
Somewhat relatedly, when I started growing my hair long, I got exclusively positive feedback about it. It would have been easy to take this as evidence that clearly this was a good decision and this is just the better hair style for me. But then again, personal feedback like this tends to be very strongly filtered. Firstly, as in your example, the vast majority of people who disagree will just say nothing rather than telling me "I think this looks worse than before". Secondly, there were a few cases where people saw me after a longer time, said something like "Oh, your hair is longer!" and then after a brief pause added something like "Looks good!" - I suspect many of these cases were just the person realizing that pointing that out without giving a compliment would seem rude or awkward, so they quickly made sure to say something nice about it.
Suits can be cool and nonconformist if they're sufficiently unusual suits. >95% of the suits you see in America are black, grey, or dark blue. Usually it's with a white or pale blue plain shirt. Nowadays, neither a tie nor a pocket square. Boring! If you have an even slightly offbeat suit---green, a light color, tweed, seersucker, three-piece, double-breasted---particularly if you have interesting shoes or an interesting tie---however you may look, you don't look like you're trying to fit in.
1I think a potential drawback of this strategy is that people tend to become more hesitant to argue with you. Their instincts tell them you’re a high-status person they can’t afford to offend or risk looking stupid in front of. If you seem less confident, less cool, and less high-status, the mental barrier for others to be disagreeable, share weird ideas, or voice confusion in your presence is lower.
I try to remember to show off some uncoolness and uncertainty for this reason, especially around more junior people. I used to have a big stuffed seal on my desk in the office, partially because I just like cute stuffed animals, but also to try to signal that I am approachable and non-threatening and can be safely disagreed with.
+1 and this seems like an important failure mode John was hitting hard for me until I realized how bad his social skills are a few months ago, at which point I realized I can interact with him like an autist. He isn't advertising that well imo; guessing his opinions by interpolating between autistic people I've known, I doubt as many people updated on his recent posts as he might intuitively expect.
I mean, I am in a sense a weird edge case, due to my weird mix of education/experience levels at different things. But I figured it was worth mentioning.
This is an instance where I think the ambiguity between prestige status and dominance status is unfortunate, and I'd have written it with a straight up s/status/prestige/.
Well, unless you'd argue that dominance status is involved, in which case nevermind this
2I think dominance status is involved. A lot of people would feel uncomfortable wearing unusual clothes in public because they're afraid of drawing attention to themselves, due to some kind of "people who stick out get beaten down" fear that's related to dominance dynamics. And they'd be especially afraid of showing the kind of slight smugness described in the post, as that could be construed as a provocation (I think smugness is dominance in general).
This is fascinating. Let's think a little more about whether this really improves your epistemics. It reduces bias to fit in, but increases bias to "act cool" in ones' beliefs. I'm not sure that's better.
What about being conformist half the itme and anti-conformist the other half, to balance it and try to become conscious of your attitudes and resultant biases?
Also, I'm going thrifting for offbeat clothes. I do dress to conform most of the time and to anti-conform part of the time. I might step that up.
Strangely, just after reading this post somebody happened to link me to this Tumblr thread:
tainbocuailnge:
something ive noticed after being a hobby cosplayer for years is that in a lot of places the general consensus seems to be that wearing costumes in public is weird and/or socially unacceptable, but whenever I'm in costume in public while on the train to the con venue or having a photoshoot on location or something, people by and large fucking love my costume. they think it's so cool. kids think my costume rocks. their parents are impressed that I made it myself. random grandmas tell me my armor kicks ass. I was at a japanese garden once and barely got around to doing the photoshoot me and my homies came there to do because swathes of visitors who had never heard the word cosplay before were lining up to take a picture with me.
it's the same thing with adjacent hobbies like larp or reenactment or fursuiting, the general image of the hobby is that you're weird nerds (and probably also sex perverts) for playing dressup despite not being a child but when you're actually in costume the response from random normies is categorically positive. I inevitably get weird looks from the kind of people who think having a tattoo is an affront to god but they give me that look for just existing with blue hair and pronouns too and the people who actually talk to me always do because they wanted to tell me they love my costume. and the response that always gets me the most is when they say it looks fun but they would never dare to do the same. it's such a shame. why did wearing a silly little costume have to become an act of bravery.
scifigrl47:
A couple of years ago, a bunch of Star Wars costumers went to a state park and met for a photo shoot. The organizer notified the park staff that we were coming only to take still pictures, no video, no commercial use items. We gathered together and lugged our stuff into a fairly low traffic location, set up a portable changing tent for those who needed it and got dressed.
Our scout troopers and Jedi and Sith posed against the rock crags and forests and in dappled sunlight. We got great pictures.
And every once in a while someone would come around the bend and find something TRULY unexpected.
Most people scrambled backwards or ducked behind the nearest tree, apparently thinking they'd stumbled into a film shoot of some kind. A few took pictures from a distance.
Once we explained, all of them were delighted. How strange. How wonderous. Two little boys took pictures with every single costumer, a woman sat on a rock and just watched, one guy called home to FaceTime his brother.
The world is mundane and predictable and painful sometimes. And breaks to that are magic. Little bursts of a world turned on its head. In the best way.
I wish someone (on lesswrong) who understands how fashion works on a nuts-and-bolts level would write this down. I've spent the last year (and a lot of money) on a bunch of outfits, and watched/read some fashion guides for guys, and can't put my finger down on anything but the basics (match colors, collars are better than no collars, etc..)
The feedback is very sparse (coworker complimenting a dress, more smiles from strangers when I'm outside, etc) and all the sources I've read feel like pseudoscience. And yet some people have consistently good style - how do they do this? I now have 8 outfits that I can cycle through during dates etc, but surely this could be improved.
FWIW, this is generally true for design things. In web-design people tend to look for extremely simple surface-level rules (like "what is a good font?" and "what are good colors?") in ways that IMO tends to basically never work. Like, you can end up doing an OK job if you go with a design framework of not looking horrendous, but when you need to make adjustments, or establish a separate brand, there really are no rules at that level of abstraction.
I often get very frustrated responses when people come to me for design feedback and I respond with things like "well, I think this website is communicating that you are a kind of 90s CS professor? Is that what you want?" and then they respond with "I mean... what? I asked you whether this website looks 'good', what does this have to do with 90s CS professors? I just want you to give me a straight answer".
And like, often I can make guesses about what their aims are with a website and try to translate things into a single "good" or "bad" scalar, but it usually just fails because I don't know what people are going for. IMO the same tends to be true for fashion.
Almost any piece of clothing you can buy will be the right choice in some context, or given some aim! If you are SBF then in order to signal your contrarian genius you maybe want to wear mildly ill-fitting tees with your company logo to your formal dinners. Signaling is complicated and messy and it's very hard to give hard and fast rules.
In many cases the things people tend to ask here often feel to me about as confused as people saying "can you tell me how to say good things in conversations? Like, can someone just write down at a nuts-and-bolts level what makes for being good at talking to people?". Like, yes, of course there are skills related to conversations, but it centrally depends on what you are hoping to communicate in your conversations!
I still think there's a science to it which is yet to be properly written up. It's not at the level of "this combination of design choices/clothing elements is bad, this one is good", but there is a high-level organization to the related skills/principles, which can be taught to speed up someone learning design/fashion. They would still need to do a bunch of case studies/bottom-up learning afterwards (to learn specific extant patterns like "the vibe of a 90s CS professor"), but you can make that learning more sample-efficient.
Social skills are a good parallel. Actually talking to people and trying to accomplish different things with your conversations is necessary for developing social competence, but knowing some basics of the theory of mind and social dynamics is incredibly helpful for knowing what to pay attention to and try.
"good style" by what metric of good?
Do you accessorize? Collecting some accessories that you genuinely like / enjoy / think are cool, and then wearing whichever combination aligns with your mood on a given day, is one of the easiest ways to elicit positive remarks from strangers.
It's socially acceptable to remark positively on a recent choice that a stranger has made, but things start getting fraught when one remarks on things that aren't recent or aren't choices. Therefore, to dress in a way that's amenable to positive remarks, it's kind of the bare minimum to include some element which is clearly a choice today rather than your default. When someone dresses to blend in, it's a signal of "please do not remark on my appearance", so it can start feeling weird to do so.
For more concrete suggestions, if you'd like to tell me a bit about how you currently dress and what attributes you're most proud of about your identity (appearance, personality, character, whatever), I'd be happy to offer some suggestions from which you might find a couple that resonate.
I agree that a competent write-up on the (true) theory of fashion seems to be missing. The usual way to deal with such situations is to act like the neural network you are: find some big dataset of [clothing example, fashionability analysis] pairs, consume it, then reverse-engineer the intuitions you've learned. If there's no extant literature on the top-down theory available, go bottom-up and derive it yourself. (It will be time-consuming.)
Of course, there are lots of other options besides literally just a leather jacket. As a general rule, any outfit which makes people ask “are you in a band?” signals coolness.
There are lots of options in the possibility-space. But are there lots of options on the actual market?
Fashion industry is one of those things that makes me want to just go do it all myself in frustration.[1] The clothing-space seems drastically underexplored.
The most obvious element is coloration. For any piece of clothing, there's a wide variety of complex-yet-tasteful multicolor patterns one might try. Very subtle highlights and gradients; unusual but simple geometric patterns; strong but carefully-chosen contrasts. You don't want a literal clash-of-colors clown outfit, but there's a wealth of possibilities beyond "one simple color"; e. g., mixing different hues of the same color.
Yet, most items on the market do just pick one simple color. Alternatively, they pick a common, basic (and therefore boring, conformist) pattern, e. g. plaid shirts. On the other end of the spectrum, you have graphic tees and such, which are varied but are decidedly unsubtle and, in my opinion, pretty lame (outside very specific combinations of design and social context[2]).
You can slightly deal with that by wearing several items of different colors that combine the way you want. But this only allows basic combinations, and the ability to do that becomes very constrained in hot weather.
Eagerly awaiting the point when AI advances enough for me to vibe-design and 3D print anything I can imagine.
High status is something you can only control to a limited degree, especially when you are trying to do things that have an immediate effect rather than doing thigns that gain status in the long run. Acting confident certainly helps, but it won't help by so much that you can get away with wearing a clown suit because you're acting confident. What will happen is that instead of confidence making the clown suit work, the clown suit will make the confidence fail.
Fedoras aren't quite clown suits, but still, you can see how they worked, which is "not well".
None of the ideas you're saying are completely wrong, but you're wrong about how they balance against each other.
Curated and popular this week
