Two permutations $(x_1,\dots,x_w)$ and $(y_1,\dots,y_w)$ are weakly similar if $x_i<x_{i+1}$ if and only if $y_i<y_{i+1}$ for all $1\leqslant i \leqslant w$. Let $π$ be a permutation of the set $[n]=\{1,2,\dots, n\}$ and let $wt(π)$ denote the largest integer $w$ such that $π$ contains a pair of disjoint weakly similar sub-permutations (called weak twins) of length $w$. Finally, let $wt(n)$ denote the minimum of $wt(π)$ over all permutations $π$ of $[n]$. Clearly, $wt(n)\le n/2$. In this paper we show that $\tfrac n{12}\le wt(n)\le\tfrac n2-Ω(n^{1/3})$. We also study a variant of this problem. Let us say that $π'=(π(i_1),...,π(i_j))$, $i_1<\cdots<i_j$, is an alternating (or up-and-down) sub-permutation of $π$ if $π(i_1)>π(i_2)<π(i_3)>...$ or $π(i_1)<π(i_2)>π(i_3)<...$. Let $Π_n$ be a random permutation selected uniformly from all $n!$ permutations of $[n]$. It is known that the length of a longest alternating permutation in $Π_n$ is asymptotically almost surely (a.a.s.) close to $2n/3$. We study the maximum length $α(n)$ of a pair of disjoint alternating sub-permutations in $Π_n$ and show that there are two constants $1/3<c_1<c_2<1/2$ such that a.a.s. $c_1n\le α(n)\le c_2n$. In addition, we show that the alternating shape is the most popular among all permutations of a given length.