Recently I had blogged about how I find it hard to get along with people who are generally “popular”, and find it so much easier to get along with oddballs, people who have a reputation of being “arrogant”. So I’ve been discussing this with this one old friend, who is far from being universally popular, and (back when we had a large common network) had a reputation of being arrogant.
So we were recently talking about a mutual acquaintance and she said “She’s very cool. You’d like her. She’s far from ordinary and normal 🙂 “. Now, I must point out that this conversation was conditioned by our earlier discussion about my blog post, but it is interesting how this friend assumes that I’m going to like this mutual acquaintance because she’s also, like the two of us, an “oddball”!
So I wonder if there’s something about us oddballs that attracts us to each other. If there is some kind of inherent solidarity between us because we are all of the type that don’t make us particularly popular. There is no guarantee of course that a randomly chosen pair of oddballs get along, but I wonder if the probability that two randomly chosen oddballs get along is higher than the probability that one “normal guy” and one oddball getting along!
And coming to the data that Christian Rudder has put in Dataclysm, on people getting 1s and 5s being more likely to get a date than straight 3s, I wonder how it will look if we are going to condition the data on the rating profile of the reviewer – maybe someone who has a lot of 1s and 5s is more likely to give 1 and 5 ratings to others? And 3s give 3s to others? It would be interesting to find out, except that the data is not public!
I was just about to quote cataclysm!