# Outlier ideas tend to come from people who are outliers in other ways It’s tempting to defend the idea that brilliant assholes are indispensable by counter-attacking the trends or movements that threaten it (“cancel culture!” “Triggered snowflakes!”) Instead, I want to argue that the tradeoff is an intractable subset of the consequences of the fact that [[You can’t cut off just one tail of a distribution]] and explore non-obvious corollaries. It seems pretty straightforward that you need to think different thoughts from other people in order to create new knowledge. One way to do this is to have different inputs. [[Environment shapes our thoughts]]! Different inputs can only go so far though, so it seems straightforward that to have different thoughts, you need to process inputs differently than other people. <[[Where do ideas come from?]]> It seems hard to process inputs differently in one domain (like science) but not in another domain (like human interactions). It seems hard to believe that non-standard thinking can be isolated to professional ideas in a specific domain. Or that non-standard thinking can be confined to an overton window. As a corollary to “divergent thinking in a domain often requires divergent thinking overall,” I suspect that “brilliant assholes” are a salient subset of a bigger category of “brilliant [divergent behavior].” In addition to the assholes, top-performers in high-variance fields seem to more often defy (or are oblivious to) other social conventions. “What’s the point of small talk?” “Why should I dress the way other people do?” “Why does hygiene matter?” “Why should I keep a normal schedule?” Through this lens, assholery becomes “Why should I do things to not piss off other people?” This point is not an excuse for the behavior, but to place it as an inextricable part of a bigger complex. There’s also the fact that disagreeing with consensus requires, well, disagreeability. ### Reasons assholery might be decoupled from brilliance There’s also a possibility that the observation simply comes from the fact that weird character traits will be more common among any group that you put under a microscope. That is, we have disproportionate numbers of accounts for outlier behavior from acclaimed brilliant people because they’re acclaimed. This fallacy would be similar to how people honestly think they observe more weird things when the moon is full when in fact it’s just that the full moon makes them more memorable. I don’t have numbers, but it does seem like notable scientists and engineers tend to have antisocial tendencies more than *other groups* of notable people. Except maybe artists. There’s of course the danger of screwing up causality here. The most straightforward causality screwup is the obviously fallacious “being an asshole causes brilliance.” It could be that the expectation that brilliant people have outlier behavior in part *causes* that behavior. Perhaps anybody would start acting more eccentrically when everybody around you expects you too either because we like conforming to expectations or we all have pent-up eccentricity. This notion is a compelling reason behind “no assholes” policies. If people’s assholery is a relatively independent variable that is heavily influenced by the expectations of people around them, then it makes sense to be intolerant of outlier behavior. However, I buy the narrative that people’s outlier behavior and outlier output are correlated because they share an underlying confounder. ### Upshots Weirdos and loners are much better suited to absolute games because [[Absolute games are anchored to reality]] so even if you hate someone, you listen to them if they produce results. It’s uncomfortable to say, but we should think twice about filtering participants in high-variance disciplines on agreeableness. One of the arguments against brilliant assholes is that they drive people out of the field and continue to normalize the bad behavior. So the question becomes “do you want to filter out nice people or assholes?” If you can get all of the brilliance without any of the assholery obviously you do want to filter out the assholes. Even if the coupling between assholery and brilliance is real, filtering out assholes may also be an acceptable loss. Whether or not this is the case depends on a number of factors that it’s worth laying out in the open instead of hardline “no assholes” or “all assholes” approaches. One question is “how important is the contribution of individuals to this domain?” Another possibly-impossible-to-answer question is “what is the counterfactual?” Are there many (or more) not-assholes who are driven away by the assholes? ### List of People * [[Isaac Newton]] * [[Paul Erdös]] * [[Fritz Zwicky]] * [[Alan Turing]] * [[William Shockley]] * [[Claude Shannon]] * [[Craig Venter]] ### Related * [[Anyone on the knowledge frontier is a bit of a crackpot]] * [[Legibility forces you to fall back on conventional framings which causes you to think about the thing in a conventional way]] * [[Individuals vs Collectives]] [^1]: One example includes removing Milikan’s name/image from Caltech. <[[Argument for why Getting rid of Milikans statue is a good idea]]> Other examples are less salient but it feels like there is a lot of effort to discredit previously-celebrated historical/contemporary figures by highlighting a whole spectrum of personal failings from “being a jerk” at one end of the spectrum to “being a rapist/murderer” at the other. Lumping all of this together is negligent on my part — people are doing this for many different reasons and the situations are very different. However, even with that caveat it does feel like there is ‘something in the air.’ <!-- #evergreen --> [Web URL for this note](http://notes.benjaminreinhardt.com/Outlier+ideas+tend+to+come+from+people+who+are+outliers+in+other+ways) [Comment on this note](http://via.hypothes.is/http://notes.benjaminreinhardt.com/Outlier+ideas+tend+to+come+from+people+who+are+outliers+in+other+ways)