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Abstractly the difference between the solid-normal and the cozy-weird is that the cozy-weird is indeed weird.
Artistically, https://youtube.com/watch?v=4mdiZ9rwoSQ is a scifi story about hi tech perceptual filters leading people astray. Err, it is over long and clunky, but it does have an interesting, oblique take on the dangers of consensus reality.
Concretely one wants examples. But this is where it gets self-defeating. If X is genuinely cozy-weird in our shared culture, you will not accept X as an example of the cozy-weird, because it appears normal to you. Worse, I will not suggest X as an example of the cozy-weird because it appears normal to me. One only catches glimpses of the cozy-weird out of the corner of ones eye.
I've encountered this kind of tangle, where it is impossible to give good examples, before when thinking about subduction phrases
Why think that the cozy-weird exists at all? I started down this path by reading https://slatestarcodex.com/2016/04/28/why-were-early-psychedelicists-so-weird/ with discussion at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16386406 It struck me that people hoped that psychedelics would tear away the veil of illusion, and let people see reality as it really was. It was a hope that I had been warned against, but still shared. However, psychedelics tear away too much, one just ends up out-there-weird. Meanwhile I read some economics and noticed that people believe strongly in folk economics. Some folk economics is both weird and not out-there-weird. Early psychedelicists could believe in folk economics and no-one would include that as evidence that they believed weird things, because the weird things appear normal.
One example is that people talk confidently about raising and lowering taxes. If raising, do they mean raising taxes rates? Or raising taxes revenues? Taxes rates are directly within the power of governments, so it is tempting to assume that the discussion is about raising raising rates. But following the discussion one notices that it is about what the money gets spent on. There is an assumption that raising rates brings in more money. That is not in itself a problem. But people are also comfortable with the idea of punitive taxes. Protect people from lung cancer by taxing cigarettes so heavily that they smoke a lot less. Shame about the tax revenue, which falls due to people quitting. So the cozy weird bit is a belief. We can infer that people believe that government ministers have psychic powers. When they intend an increase in tax rates to raise additional revenue they hypnotize the general public to keep paying. When they intend an increase in tax rates to change behavior at the cost of lost revenue, that works too. No discussion needed. Nor even permitted. People don't actually believe that government ministers have psychic powers, but people do have psychological defense mechanisms. They will push back angrily against the idea that tax rates and tax revenues are two different things. There is a tangled mess of weirdness here, but it is cozy, people like it and will defend their cozy fuzziness.
People also talk about raising and lowering the minimum wage. That is bizarre. The minimum wage is a prohibition. It is parameterized. One might prefer to call it a restriction. Whatever. It is the kind of thing that you make tighter or looser. If you like brutal and disturbing satire, the Manifesto of the Nasty Fascist Party might help you get the point.
I realize that the previous paragraph is a flawed example of the cozy-weird. Arguments are soldiers, and words are the uniforms they wear. "Raise and lower" are the dark blue words worn by the good guys, and "Tighten and loosen" are the gray words worn by the bad guys. It is natural to dress your arguments in the uniform words of ones own side.
And yet dressing your arguments-soldiers in the appropriate color uniform-words is perhaps a good example of the cozy weird. We are supposed to be helping the poor. Instead we play elaborate word games. As the Nasty Fascist Party would put it " The booze and TV addled brains of the comfortably off are actually too feeble to distinguish between these two opposites."
I've tried addressing the distinction between solid-normal and cozy-weird abstractly, artistically, and concretely. Concretely is the important one, but articulating good examples is too hard for me. Fourth option: Praxis. What can one do to improve the chances of catching sight of the cozy-weird?
I think that psychedelics hinder, by leading you towards the out-there-weird and away from the cozy weird. The invisibility of the cozy-weird is policed by emotional reactions and defense mechanisms. Perhaps Buddhist meditation practices can help. One learns to notice the flickering play of emotions. Notice and let go rather than getting sucked in by the illusion. Maybe cached thoughts are important. Re-reading Eliezer Yudkowsky's "cached thoughts" essay, to check the relevance of linking to it, I notice that his examples have a vibe of "cozy-weird thoughts sitting in the cache". There are strong emotions telling you not to clear the cache, because you must Never Question Conventional Wisdom. Noticing the unreasonable strength of the strong emotions telling you not to clear the cache leads you towards noticing the cozy-weird. Getting stale answers straight from the cache leads you away.
Am I misunderstanding that "cozy weird" is believing something false or ambiguous? When medieval people were talking about humes and treating bacterial infections with bloodletting, and 1900s people were talking about mental association centers and treating mental issues with lobotomies, it was weird even though it was mainstream, because people incorrectly believed how the illnesses worked. Now we treat bacteria with antibiotics and mental health with medication, it's less weird.
Although in that case, today's treatments are still weird, compared to a more advanced society, who discovers ways to treat bacteria that don't breed resistance, and ways to treat mental conditions without medications' side effects, and understands that our biological concepts were too broad (for example, DNA is not the only way genes are inherited). "Reality as it is" is impossible to perceive, we can only get closer by experimentation, so everyone is weird to some extent.
You are misunderstanding.
Since life is about seventy years long, and science grinds slowly, taking hundreds of years, we all end up in forced choice situations, forced to guess. We guess wrong and believe something false. "Believe"? Maybe we knew at the time that we were guessing, but we still acted upon the false "belief"; that is the main part of believing. Shrug. Believing something false is built-in to the human condition. It is part of the solid-normal. It is not part of the cozy-weird.
I've an essay to write, provisional title: "Life is more complicated than language, nothing that needs saying can be said briefly." Since life is more complicated than language, ambiguity is inevitable. We can push back a little, by writing at greater length, using the extra words to disambiguate. But watch out for two dangers. First, wittering on at great length usually muddies the waters; more words, more ambiguity. Second, the seventy year thing; we don't have the time. So again, ambiguity is built-in to the human condition and part of the solid-normal, not the cozy-weird.
I'm hoping that we share a common understanding of the out-there-weird. One kind of out-there-weird is when you fry your brains with LSD. But humans are flaky. There are a lot of beliefs that are crazy, and the people who hold them just latched on to them with no chemical assistance. "flat earth in 2026 AD" is out-there-weird. "flat earth in 700 BC" is solid-normal. Why is "flat earth in 700 BC" solid normal? Wikipedia has Eratosthenes of Cyrene measuring the size of the Earth in around 200 BC, and tells the tale
The Earth is big enough to be locally flat, and few people in 700 BC were travelling far enough to notice that something was off. (Wait! I'm forgetting the long distances involved in the Bronze Age tin trade. Shit!)
Back to the cozy-weird. How does inter-generational transmission of culture work? As a child I wanted to grow up and become an adult and that meant copying the adults around me. My father would tell me "You will understand when you grow up." and I would accept what I was told, trusting that I would indeed understand when I grew up. It is worse than that. My father was a Yorkshire man and proud of his deadpan irony. I was a socially incompetent child and did not get the joke. Looking back I think that some of my world view was formed by the following route. My father would attempt to tell me that X was false, by stating X ironically. I would miss the irony and learn that X was true. I think that inter-generation transmission of culture works badly in two different ways.
First, culture is transmitted faithfully, but the "You will understand when you grow up" bit doesn't happen. Father passes belief to Son. Son never does understand, but Son passes belief to Grandson with the words "You will understand when you grow up". There is no error correction.
Second, beliefs are flipped due to too much irony. Young people are not in on the joke. Old people do not notice that young people are not in on the joke and are getting the opposite of the intended message. The message gets corrupted.
The idea of the cozy-weird is that there are many beliefs that an outsider (to our culture) would consider out-there-weird (not false, not ambiguous, but crazy and weird) that we are brought up to believe and which pass for normal inside our culture. I'm claiming a disastrous failure of culture transmission with crazy rubbish being passed down the generations so well that the craziness is invisible to those inside that culture. Hence my subdivision of normal into solid-normal and cozy-weird.
Do we all live in a single global culture? Not yet, but things are heading that way, and it is hard to find an outsider. Or maybe talking to an outsider doesn't help. The details of the cozy-weird are culture bound, but the phenomenon of the cozy-weird is universal. You could go to Tehran and talk to a Mullah. He would point out the craziness of Western Culture. But he cannot show you the cozy-weird that both cultures share. Worse, he is embedded in his own culture. He may be quite convincing that the important thing is to submit to Islam, because he sincerely believes it, but that is his own culture's cozy-weird. His sincerity and conviction are warning signs of the invisibility of the cozy-weird details specific to a particular culture, to those within that culture.
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