Breaking stereotypes

It is a tautology to state that the more the number of bits someone needs to describe you, the more interesting you are

People who break stereotypes are interesting because you need more bits to describe them.

My most recent post on my work blog was also on information theory - about how LLMs basically compress the world’s information in their 5XL matrices - and that they do much better when you ask them questions that are “more compressible”, i.e. have more redundancy in the training set.

I first thought about this stereotype thing when I was returning home this morning from dropping my daughter to school. Maybe I was thinking of this guitarist Maya Neelakantan, who shreds wearing insanely traditional Indian clothes, big bindis, etc.

The reason you pay attention to her is that she breaks stereotypes. You look at her and you intuitively think of her as possibly playing Carnatic classical violin or something. And then you see her using an electric guitar to play Master Of Puppets. Suddenly you “need more bits to describe her” - and for this you need to pay more attention.

This breaking of stereotypes can come in any possible combination. Clothes and profession. Political views across different topics (one reason I’ve stopped reading OpEds is that they are so predictable - most columnists are strongly stereotypical in their views, and once you know their views on one thing, you know their views one everything. It’s funny that “intersectionality” actually promotes such conformism). Age and opinion.

It is a tautology to state that the more the number of bits someone needs to describe you, the more interesting you are! The more conventional your views (whatever those views are), the easier it is to describe all your views with as little as one word (“bhakt”, “woke”, “MAGA”, etc.).

The thing is - the less stereotypical you are, people need to observe you more to describe you. Suddenly, this means that people need to pay more attention to you. And some people’s attention will result in other people giving you their attention, and when they discover that you need a lot of bits to be described in, they give you more attention. And so there is a virtuous cycle.

The downside of breaking stereotypes is that you don’t get the audience that you get by being “strongly in-group”. On social media, for example, you get much more following if you easily fit into some "tribe” - from other members of that tribe. Then again, social media is all about limited attention, and so if people need more bits to describe you there, they don’t want you.

I’m not saying that you need to make an effort to be non-stereotypical - if you need to make an effort to be that way, then you are possibly still stereotypical. All I’m saying is that if there are parts of you that break stereotypes, in whatever manner, highlight those. People will find you far more interesting.

PS: I had constructed this post broadly in my head this morning on the way back from school, and then forgotten about it. And then I see this video on twitter of this guy in traditional south indian Brahmin clothes playing House Of The Rising Sun on the guitar. This breakage of stereotypes means he’s getting some well-deserved attention!