This essay was originally going to be an ode to my weird friends.
I pride myself on knowing a lot of people I’d describe as “fae”—weird, illegible, but talented artists, excellent thinkers, bodywork experts, and other people whose lives don’t easily fit into the kinds of categories I have.
I was going to write about “trades with fae”, or basically bounded distrust. If you do a good job of verifying whether weird people are reliable, can adhere to social norms when required, and noticing whether they actually deliver on their weird ideas, you can cause great things to happen by helping make them legible1. Plus, if you stick around for a while, you might find that eventually, they’re right in extremely important ways—rationalists being early on AI and COVID comes to mind.
People use the word “schizo” as a sorta-compliment out in the Bay—it often means someone who’s excellent at making connections between disparate topics, who might be way off the money five times and is brutally right one time. I considered this to mostly be an exaggerated bit, until I met someone best described as “insanely creative”.
(a particular thing that stuck with me was someone throwing out how obviously the future will give everyone their own attention-directed swarm of nanobots, which falls apart as a stable equilibrium if you think about it for half a second)
And then another person who I had considered “weird but worth making trades with” under this ontology had an Actual Literal Psychotic Break, in which a group of his friends made a group chat to find him because he had become delirious and unresponsive and just walked onto the streets of San Francisco without a phone or ID.
(he was eventually found walking along the side of the road).
This is the fourth or fifth time I’ve seen someone I know who I thought was kinda crazy (colloquially)2 actually go insane.
Sometimes this is just not hearing from them for a while, and then it turns out they had a psychotic break but they’re better now. Sometimes it involves helping with a missing persons case and then helping find a babysitter for them. And sometimes it involves them becoming convinced an acquaintance of yours is an actively harmful cult leader who is manipulating you in particular, and they’ve DM’d a bunch of people that they should kick this person out, naming you as a victim.
I still think that “trading with fae” like this is very much worth doing—if you rule out Janus or Pliny as thinkers for being “obviously off the rails”, you lose out on a particular kind of expertise on LLMs, for example.
There’s also the 80/20 version, where you just…do a better job of distinguishing, say, the friends who are really into ayurveda but otherwise completely sane, and the people with a really effective antipsychotic routine, from the people with serious ongoing mental problems. Most of the people I know who are prone to psychosis/other kinds of mental breaks, I’d still trust them for most things, provided they’re on their meds and unlikely to have another episode.
But, to People Like Me who might consider “finding fae and helping them become successful” as a ~career path…be careful.
See also Rule Thinkers In, Not Out.
(broadly coordinate-able, even if it’s not someone you’d want to cofound a company with)