« My favorite things Dubai | Main | In Defense of Mercenaries »

Do airplanes make weird people stick out less?

When you live in a small village, or hunter-gatherer society, everyone knows that a weird person is weird.  You stick out like a sore thumb.  But when I fly to, say, Dubai, hardly anyone knows I am weird.  Perhaps I dress differently, talk differently, and spend too much time reading books, but to them I appear weird in any case.  The proverbial "Aunt Millie from Peoria" also would come across as strange.  The differences in weirdness are blurred, and the truly weird can pass for simply being "foreign."

I recall my time in Yemen: all the women wore veils, and all the men carried daggers and chewed qat.  Just don't ask me who the weirdos were.

This suggests that airplanes lower the costs of being weird.  Of course, with enough globalization -- especially mass market images -- this relationship can cut the other way.  Perhaps the people in Dubai are wondering why I don't act more like Tom Cruise.  Alternatively, we might send them some more Johnny Depp movies.

Does this mean that weird men are more likely to have foreign wives?

Posted by Tyler Cowen on July 22, 2005 at 06:49 AM in Medicine | Permalink

TrackBack

TrackBack URL for this entry:
http://www.typepad.com/services/trackback/6a00d8341c66b253ef00e5508353ec8833

Listed below are links to weblogs that reference Do airplanes make weird people stick out less?:

» How do we measure odd? from Belligerati
Marginal revolution has an brief article on being weird. His position is that airplane travel lowers the cost of being weird. How? First it makes more people weird by bringing different people in proximity and second by habituating us to... [Read More]

Tracked on Jul 25, 2005 12:30:34 PM

» Japanese develop ‘female’ android from Crazy But Able
Check out the pictures accompanying the article. No mention of the uncanny valley though. It occured to me while reading this article that different cultures will make androids which act like an average person of that culture. So not only do robo... [Read More]

Tracked on Aug 5, 2005 3:54:51 PM