Norms

A/N: Between the last post and this one, I hit 1,000 page views. Yay!

EDIT: Because I can say this better than I can write this, I edited this to try and make it closer to how I say it. Then it didn't work. I revamped, and here you go. Still not as good as I can say it. *mutters*

Brief & even more confusing than normal: People normalize to people like them, so average people end up normalizing and other people end up with more time before they find anyone with the same amount and type of pull.

I think about this occasionally. If someone is a genius, that person is going to be weird. Really, being notably smart is probably going to make one weird.

The obvious way to explain that is that "weird" just means "not in the middle of the bell curve", so smart people are weird by the definition of the adjectives. That's probably true sometimes.

I have another idea: People at varying points on a given bell curve gravitate toward each other. Someone exactly at the peak will like people who are somewhere around the peak. People at one edge or the other will be incomprehensible to and will not comprehend those in the middle, or those on the opposite side. If people devote the energy to it, they can skip around--especially if the person isn't in the middle of some other bell curve--but the point remains that that takes energy. The default is among one's similars.

This means that, in elementary school, when social groups are forming, one of a few things happens to people far East or West of the peak: 1)the edgers do not interact with the middlers much because they stick to their own groups, creating parallel but slightly separate cultures, 2)the middlers do not interact with the edgers because they are weird--same basic thing as one, but with a little more ostracizing because individual middlers can genuinely decide to avoid the edgers most of the time, while the opposite is difficult to impossible, or 3)the edgers do not normalize to anything, because 2 is present but other edgers (on the viable side) are not.

Even in option 3, edgers will still develop patterns of behavior and ways of seeing the world; the patterns will just end up alien. They started out significantly more/less X than everyone else, and then were pushed even farther. I'd like to point out what that means to me in light of previous posts: patterns, the basis of any action a human makes, end up being alien and/or incomprehensible.

So smart people are visibly weird because they don't start out at the same baseline, and then that fact pushes them farther unless they decide to expend energy in avoiding that, and even then. People who are willing to expend that energy probably want to be able to talk to everyone. Someone who flows everywhere doesn't completely belong anywhere. The island is not the ocean, the continent not the sea.