"Hells Angels who don't like riding motorcycles, etc." Such things exist. In my town, a criminal gang managed to become a chapter of an outlaw motorcycle club. The central organisation insisted on them to actually ride but most of them hadn't even a riding license. The president soon suffered a deadly crash and the rest apparently decided it wasn't worth the effort and quit.
It’s interesting that in this particular case there was a specific idea that we don’t *want* any more newcomers and we tried to ban them all for four decades, and still have very strict limits on them!
I think an important thing to note in this post is that most Karate is fake, you can in fact just pretend to be a black belt and start your own school and get status and money, and there's no formal system for preventing it. You may think winning fights would be the final arbiter of skill at a martial art, but in practice it turns out not to matter much. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gjbSCEhmjJA&t=4s
I think the same dynamics and incentives apply to a lot of non-profit stuff too.
The sociopaths can't show up and beat genuine skilled fighters at their own game just by being willing to lie, but they can show up and cash in from ignorant outsiders.
Presumably this is the thing where your research revealed nothing, and yet if you manage to slice the datasets just right, your research can be presented as tho it revealed X, and thus your thesis can still be published.
Yeah, and you get shady teachers who cross-certify each other, and shady orgs that exist to rubber-stamp bad teachers in exchange for money.
It's not even that McDojos are unvalidated: they're a valid part of a rubbish system that exists to extract money from gullible white people.
I think such scams have the angle that most (traditional) martial arts are weird and stilted and arcane, which makes it hard for people to tell whether they're actually good or not. Is your sensei making you stand on your head and recite the alphabet backwards? Who knows, maybe that's the way of the warrior!
The fact that you (and I, and many people) understand that "most Karate is fake" probably limits its status opportunities in practice, which is probably why it's currently seen as something of "kids activity". Kids are naïve enough to be impressed by the teacher's black-colored belt and implied status regardless of actual skill on display. If judging martial art by practical fighting effectiveness, no unbiased person would give Karate high status.
And if karate were actually a highly effective fighting technique, parents wouldn't let their kids learn it.
I'm not sending a seven-year-old boy to learn effective ways to actually hurt people. But I'll happily send him to learn a bunch of coordination and discipline combined with a bunch of lectures about how he should never actually hit people in practice.
It depends. Karate practice, well done and guided, can be an opportunity to reduce worries about physical conflict. There are other ways. Bare knuckle boxing sure gets one there quicker if you don't mind the bleeding and have a good dental plan. Among all the alternatives, karate had a good track record before it became fashionable.
What many people miss is, you gotta do your homework, which is A LOT of basic fitness stuff for strength, flexibility, speed, endurance and toughness. Not talking competition here, just the way of life. The repetition of movements can work, patterns get imprinted somewhere in one's lizard brain. And, if you are generally an agreeable person and stay out of trouble, these reflexes really help when things get quick. I have done stuff before I knew what was happening, so no part of a tree fell on my my head, no drunk nitwit touched my face. Having been a lousy fighter and well past my prime, last year I somehow managed to not get into a fight that would have left me in jail, hospital or the morgue though the other guy was massively aggressive and I had to stand my ground.
Karate is not about barroom brawls, it about survival. It can be tought well. Probably it barely is tought well any more.
Oh, and if you haven't learned well how to fall, better not ride motorcycles or fast bicycles.
It only limits the status opportunities marginally. It's mainly martial arts nerds that believe karate is fake. Most normies are very impressed by people with black belts.
I didn't watch that whole video, but the first minutes talk about things like knocking your opponent out at a distance by supernatural means. It seems to be saying that fake martial arts exist, not that all or most karate is fake. Where in the video does it make that claim?
I wouldn't characterize the video as claiming that karate is "fake", but starting around 19:30 it tells a story about a Chinese MMA fighter who's been challenging and soundly defeating a bunch of masters of traditional martial arts styles (while the Chinese government systematically harasses him to try to get him to stop). The video says the MMA fighter is undefeated after 70 matches, and is self-described as being only mediocre at MMA.
Video also briefly claims that karate practitioners have consistently had poor showings in competitive matches against modern martial arts styles.
So I guess I'd summarize the claim as something like "karate masters are consistently bad at fighting (by the standards of MMA)".
It's a somewhat common meme in MMA circles, and those of the primary MMA feeder arts like BJJ, that MMA is "the ultimate true fighting art" and outclasses all others (especially "traditional" arts). The name UFC even speaks to this mindset somewhat.
Without denying that there are a lot of fake arts out there -- the name "McDojo" arose for a reason -- this claim on the part of the MMA people is somewhat overblown. In particular, it relies on the equation of MMA octagon rules with "real fighting". Of course, it's nothing of the kind -- MMA is a combat sport, and thus must be a functional sport, which implies a lot of attention to the entertainment of the viewers and the safety of the competitors. "Real fighting" is conducive to neither goal.
I haven't seen the video, but many claims like this basically arise from this intra-martial-arts spat, and are colored with the factional sympathies thereof. Some skepticism may be called for.
MMA bases (BJJ, wrestling, boxing) is "the ultimate true fighting art" is not even fully correct. Yes they are good forms in a 1 on 1 situation with no weapons and clear area, which almost never happens in a real fight. In a group fight, anyone who goes to the ground (wresting/BJJ types) are just going to get kicked in the head by the other guy's buddy. In a real situation, if unarmed, you immediately grab an improvised weapon (club or something sharp). Someone with a club is going beat a BJJ blackbelt most of the time.
I firmly believe that cycles don't exist and never have existed.
This is my shitposting way of saying "I have never, once, in my years of experience modeling human behavioral time series, come across an honest-to-god cyclical pattern (excluding time of year/month/week/day effects)." And yet for some reason, every time I show a time series to anyone ever, people swear to god the data looks cyclical.
There's actually a pretty good statistical reason why cyclical patterns are rare: they imply a bizarre mix of positive and negative correlations. A strongly cyclical pattern in status means your status today is positively related to your status yesterday, but negatively related to your status 2 days ago, and so on, oscillating.
Now think about that. If we have a period of 10 years, and I wanted to predict your status based on the fact that you're low-status today, I should predict that 5 years from now, you'll be significantly below-average status. That's weird as hell, to say the least. If someone is high-status, and you ask me to predict their status 5 years from now, the right answer is probably "Somewhat lower status, because of regression to the mean, but still above-average."
As for why observed cyclical "patterns" are very popular among everyone except statisticians who actually work with time series: it's because time series *bounce around*. What that means is they appear to "oscillate," moving from below-average to above-average to below-average again. We mistake this random noise for oscillations, because it looks like the function has a pattern where larger values , but the reality is that's just what happens when you combine random noise with regression to the mean. It's impossible for a function to always be above-average, so it has to have alternating runs of above-average and below-average values. What's more, those "runs" will have some average period, so they'll look like they last *roughly* the same amount of time on average.
The way to distinguish a real cycle from a fake one, apart from doing actual statistics (which is hard TBF), is by looking closely at the periods. Do they line up, almost exactly, across time? Does every social group collapse in popularity after *exactly* 20 years, give or take 1 or 2 at most? Or do you have to throw on massive confidence intervals because some collapse after 10, some after 30, some after 40? If it's the latter, the apparent cycle is probably pareidolia.
The examples given here strike me as that kind of pareidolia. @scottalexander If you'd like, you can give me a bunch of things you feel are examples of this and Google Trends data for them, and then I can actually do the statistics.
Scott uses the word 'cycle' here to mean 'lifecycle', but the model he gives isn't actually cyclical: there are four phases through which a subculture progresses, but then generally it enters a steady state. The commenter above is calling this a 'sequence'.
I think you're right about cycles, but that your criticism doesn't apply to sequences, and hence not to this article.
I don't see why "grow, live, die" is a fake pattern if it doesn't happen on a set chronological time frame. Christianity, for example, had a significant change of character some 325 years in at the Council of Constantine. I suspect that modern trends change much faster. But even 'feminism' has a multi-generational arc.
To steal the example from upthread: It is a cycle just as much as a lifecycle is a cycle for an individual organism. Which is still called a lifecycle even when a _specific_ organism fails to reproduce. The point is that the _pattern_ repeats across different individuals and time. An individual organism (or group) only goes through it once, but then a different organism (or group) will go through it again.
It's not even a pattern is the point! You could just as easily see a sequence go "Grow, live, live, live, grow, decline" instead. In the Google trends, it looks like Atheism never even had a growth stage--presumably it just started high because the internet is full of weird people. Feminism looks like it goes straight from "Growth" to "Decline."
Would it be significant that status and popularity are not (or not at present) really quantifiable? Social birds and mammals behave in ways that suggest they have evolved to sense these purely qualitative things; and one social mammal, humans, talks about them a LOT. Statisticians may use quantifiable things (like Google searches, "likes," etc.) as indicators for these things, but they are not the things themselves, which exist at best only (or at least mainly?) as behavior-causing impressions within the sensoria of the relevant social creatures (and yet these impressions are, of course, extremely important).
Yeah. There are plenty of proxies for status and popularity. But each carry their own subtle bias that I suspect we need to be overtly aware of, so that we can qualify our proxy appropriately. Popularity, formal authority, informal authority, the creation of art or science which inspires derivitave works, socioeconomic status, sexual desirability, etc. are all different kinds of status. These things correlate with each other, but not strongly. Yet they all get rolled up into this thing called 'status.'
So once we say that the map is not the territory the question then becomes which relevant features to include on a particular map for a particular purpose. Are some people looking to control others, looking for reputation, some looking for visibility, some looking for sex, and some looking for material goods? I'd be interested if someone could demonstrate that one of these things holds but not the other. Or if one holds for a particular group and another holds for a different one. (Like if gay men at a particular time period were more likely to join religious orders or the clergy.)
I think you're expecting cycles to be too regular. Some (forget who) once wrote "History doesn't repeat, but it does rhyme.", and I think that's correct. Broad features often tend to repeat in an irregular rhythm. That's cyclic in a broad sense, but not in a narrow one. If you see a country rising in power, you can predict with fair certainty that it won't retain that power. That's a sort of cycle. It doesn't repeat in the same place, but it definitely repeats. It happened in Egypt, Rome, lots of other places. You could even point to non-state actors, like the Hudson Bay Company.
Regression to the mean doesn't imply that another centralized center of power will emerge. But my belief is that it will, unless the entire structure gets torn down. Even if there's another giant asteroid impact, in a few hundred million years (or less) centers of power will start emerging and collapsing again. To me that sounds like a cycle, though not a very regular one.
Great series of comments; the reminder to be aware of finding patterns in static is important. The universe, after all, is under no obligation to package things in an easily understood pattern.
Why do you think that to be a genuine cycle, it needs to take a consistent amount of time each time? I don't see any reason why that would be true. The rain cycle is a cycle, but that cycle doesn't take a consistent amount of time from one repetition to another.
It seems to me that what makes it a cycle is just if there's some actual cyclical causal mechanism for moving from one stage to another, rather than the variation being merely a result of random variation+regression to the mean. While I take your point that mere random variation+regression to the mean could easily get mistaken for a cycle, your reasoning leads me to suspect that you would easily mistake actual cycles for mere random variation+regression to the mean.
It does sound like Turchin takes his cycles to have a predictable length, which I agree is very implausible. But I don't see anything in Scott's post that requires him to buy into that part of the theory. Some cycles are chaotic; it would still be useful to know that there's a cyclical mechanism at work there even if it didn't give us a lot of predictive power.
I think Scott is using cycle in a looser, more vernacular sense, where a similar sequence of events takes place in different groups, but perhaps over different time scales.
Mathmatically, if you're thinking in terms of a single variable, a cycle is hard to make, but in multi-variable situations, they're pretty easy. All you really need is two variables where when one tends to go up the other tends to go down.
The classic example is rabbits and foxes: lots of rabbits, few foxes -> foxes have an easy time finding food -> lots of foxes, few rabbit-> foxes have a hard time finding food so they die off -> repeat.
This may stabilize on an equilibrium, but there can be lots of cycles before it reaches that equilibrium. (And "outside" effects are likely to disrupt the equilibrium kicking it back into "cycles" mode)
I'm not sure how relevant this whole tangent is to the original topic, but my point is just I don't really find the "statistical" reasoning very useful.
It doesn't need to work well. My point was just that simple dynamics can lead to periodicity, so a claim that periodicity requires a hard to balance set of conditions seems false.
To my understanding the cycle being described often has a period much longer than ten years, and refers to aggregate availability of opportunities for advancement rather than predicting sine-wave shaped variations in any specific individual's social status.
"A strongly cyclical pattern in status means your status today is positively related to your status yesterday, but negatively related to your status 2 days ago, and so on, oscillating."
That's not how you get an oscillation in physics. The most common way is to have a restoring force (resulting in an acceleration) negatively proportional to your distance from some point. Of course, this implies inertia, or else the acceleration would be infinite. It's certainly plausible that societies also have restoring forces and inertia.
Positive and negative correlations aren't the usual cause of cyclical events. Mechanical and electrical oscillations are probably the most common. Instead of plus and minus correlations, they have a tradeoff between storing energy in two forms, (height/speed, voltage/current...). One can imagine plenty of ways this could manifest in behavioral situations.
First thought is that humans follow a very regular cycle but one which may not have a constant period with growth, decline and death from one generation to the next.
Any movements that tends to recruit from people at similar points in that cycle may be piggybacking on the larger cycle.
If you recruit a lot of 16-18 year olds then your organisations trends may end up looking a lot like many other organisation that does the same while your core members go from 18 to 30.
Congratulations, you've just come up with a semantic way to make your supposedly statistical argument irrefutable. Nobody uses the word "cycle" that way and defining it in such strict terms means you're not critiquing any actually-existing observation. Turchin certainly wouldn't consent to that requirement.
I think the key semantic point of confusion is that while "cycle" most commonly in my experience refers to a regular series of steps from beginning to end, where end may or may not be a repeat of the beginning, "cyclical" most commonly describes a succession of system states that repeats many times over within the same system. As such, it took me a while to recognuze that Scott was using "cyclical" in a way that to me was nonstandard.
If a cycle isn't (somewhat) periodic, then what differenciate it from random variation over time? Is my health cyclical because I sometimes get sick, then get better, then sick again, even though each sickness is unrelated to each other, and happen in unpredictable intervals, from weeks to years from each others? I'd argue that not, and every time I encountered the concept of cycles in my (short and failed) economic studies, they were, if not defined by their period, at least strongly associated to it.
Or maybe I'm interpreting some of the terms in the wrong way.
This comments section is such fertile ground for likes right now, there's no need for anyone to disagree with me. If you don't agree, just post your own comment and we can both prosper. If you do, just say so and you'll look like a genius for agreeing before everyone else jumped on the bandwagon. Plus you'll be playing out a meta-commentary on the article, which should be good enough to insulate us against one round of criticism. It's free karma real estate!
Scott disabled likes here (for not-entirely-unrelated reasons). Yes, there is a way to get them back, but AIUI most don't use it.
Also, due to the threaded nature of the comments, being part of the thread of the #1 comment puts you higher on the page and thus gets more eyeballs than being the #3 comment.
Brilliant. When there are many comments in a thread, people who want to be heard frame their contribution in opposition to the pre-existing comments at the top to wrest away some of the attention. I see it all the time at MR.
More generally, this fits in with what Robin Hanson calls our utopian hypocrisy. We claim to dislike conflict, but frequently seek it out in hopes of raising our relative status.
Well, propensity for conflict in, say, higher primates is status dependent and individual. Powerful individuals (alpha and beta primates) minimize conflict. But alpha wannabes tend to be high conflict within their in-group and low status. I'm not familiar with Hanson, but he seems to be describing humans acting like alpha wannabes.
I have a hard time believing someone would do this consciously, by going through the top comments and picking one with which to disagree. Rather, people are motivated to say something in response to a strong emotion, such as reading a comment and disagreeing with it. So what you see as some kind of ulterior jockeying for attention, I see as just a natural result of the dopamine feedback pathway.
A key part of Hanson’s theory of human behavior is that much of it is not conscious. We are adept at recognizing opportunities to elevate or our own status, but can’t get caught exploiting them without justification. Thus we developed post-hoc justification and self-deception to avoid being punished for norm violation.
Absolutely! It's wild to see this happen in real time. Theres a brain-body faultline that develops. "Rules are made to be broken" is another side of the coin. Institutional rules are nominally black-and-white, and the only way interesting things happen is some amount of conspiracy.
I've been consciously tempted to try to post my thoughts in response to the top comment to get them more exposure. (Comment that could have been framed as a response or a standalone.)
"I have a hard time believing someone would do this consciously, by going through the top comments and picking one with which to disagree. "
In this environment, perhaps not. But go and have a look at what happens on some of the more popular threads on Reddit. There's a whole subculture of trolls who do precisely that.
I'll readily admit that if I'm reading through a matured comment section, and I have some thoughts on the topic, I'll intentionally opt to express those thoughts as a reply to some active thread rather than posting a new top-level comment. The latter option amounts to yelling into the void once there are more than a hundred or so comments (depending on the forum).
If ithe subculture thing doesn't kill you. I've been into punk rock, still am, in a way. Quite a few of my colleagues there have succumbed to substance consumption issues. Reckon I have become a geek.
Is this post intended to chronicle the cycle of those subcultures that are clearly 'movements', or is it intended to cover subcultures in general? Because I can think of any number of garden variety subcultures (skateboarding in the 70s and 80s, punk rock, D&D guys, etc) that had/have significant cultural traction that don't obviously fit this model.
If we're just talking about 'ism' cultures then it seems like a lot of this tracks, though even there I'm guessing that those 'ism' cultures where a critical number of the participants are clearly committed to making sure everyone knows how smart they are might be more susceptible. The Klan (in its many unfortunate incarnations) was/is definitely a subculture, but just as I don't see it necessarily fitting this pattern I also don't suspect it's a subculture where the members were eager to tell you how bored they were in K-12, or what their SAT scores were.
Perhaps punk rock doesn't fit the model as its own subculture, but it fits well inside the larger rock-n-roll culture as a splinter movement during the involution phase.
Punk rock was interesting because it was marketed in one of two ways.
1) a "back to basics" return to old-school rock after the pretentiousness of the mid-70s
2) a nihilistic "year zero" destruction of popular music itself. (It was considered cool that punk rock songs were produced like shit, that Sid Vicious couldn't play bass, that the Ramones knew like 3 chords, etc.)
These two things contradict each other. You can't both lionize the past and want to destroy it, but somehow both schools of thought found themselves under the punk banner.
That may well be maximally basic and unpretentious. But I think what Coagulopath was getting at was that maximizing basicness and lack of pretense was just one of two competing and often conflated models of punk. That's model 2, whereas model 1 is about trying to revert to an earlier state of cultivation.
If you know Thomas Cole's much-memeified "Course of Empire" paintings, it's like both models are a reaction to the cultivated/decadent "Consummation of Empire" stage. (That is, to the early-70s "rock as 7-minute operetta" moment.) But the first wants to get back to a prior state of non-decadent cultivation, i.e., to sounding like Buddy Holly. (Representative group: Elvis Costello & The Attractions.) Whereas the second wants to push through to a state of uncultivated decadence, to a sort of catharsis in which "talent" and "craft" are subsumed by pure entropy. (Representative group: Sex Pistols, esp. with Sid Vicious.)
"You can't both lionize the past and want to destroy it"
Oh yes you can, if the goal of your joining/evangelizing any movement is to fight with/demonize other people. And that's exactly what most people with strong opinions mostly care about doing.
Contradictions? Hah. My mass movement laughs at your silly claims of contradictions.
there are the genre defining innovators (precycle), then come the classics (growth), after that the soulless cash grabs and their opposition aka punk is dead aka involution and, now we are in postcycle and have been for quite some time. Punk is an institutionalized aesthetic you can choose from the shelf as a 14 year old without shocking anyone and old people go to punk concerts on the weekend before returning to their office job. Noone wants to discuss your opinions on what punk really is and should be, at best they will point you to the authorities that institutionalized it decades ago.
The OSR has been *incredibly* infested with bona-fide Sociopaths who didn't care about or actively hated the Cool New Thing but wanted to make money off it and/or hitch their status-wagon to being A Creator in the Cool New Scene.
As someone pretty deep in the D&D subculture, I agree it's at an involution. I think most of the (new) cultural infighting is happening on tiktok, which targets the same demographic as the most recent growth phase, and to a lesser extent reddit.
In that ecosystem, the elites/"sociopaths" seem to be the content farms that regurgitate random obscure bits of lore that aren't actually part of the common canon, or wild theorycraft builds that would never fly at a real table, divorcing them of the actual context. But that gets you views. The "anti-elites" seem to be the people saying that "5e is okay, but please try playing literally any other TTRPG" (beggartok, apparently?), where the ttrpg of choice is often Pathfinder 2e.
> The "anti-elites" seem to be the people saying that "5e is okay, but please try playing literally any other TTRPG" (beggartok, apparently?), where the ttrpg of choice is often Pathfinder 2e.
Which is ironic, since PF2e is basically "what happens if you merge 5e D&D, 3e D&D, and 4e D&D." Just like PF1e is basically "3.5e, Electric Boogaloo".
I'd phrase it as "what would happen if you took all the lessons learned from (and general good ideas from) those previous editions and built the built the best version of D&D you could". PF2e is for the people who enjoyed 3.5 and wish WoTC hadn't been so scarred by the underperformance of 4e that they crippled 5e's character building options.
Meanwhile, the people who are only interested in the *roleplaying* part of the ttrpg are looking at 5e and say "y'know, 5e can bend over backwards trying to say it's a game with more focus on roleplay over crunch with three core pillars, but it's pretty clear that 'combat' is the load-bearing one based on the 90% of the rules devoted to it", recognizing that it's still fundamentally carrying the legacy of being a tabletop war game with roleplaying bolted on top. And these are the people that are begging these new players that *don't* just want to play a crunchy combat simulation to play anything else. Usually a Powered by the Apocalypse game, which has a *really* great design philosophy.
None of this has anything to do with what you're talking about, though.
TSR went down because of poor business practices. The 3e/4e edition war was also due to poor business practices. None of this had anything to do with any sort of macro level thing.
TSR printed too many books; so did 4E. In TSR's case, they simply were bad at advertising. In 4E's case, the game was designed around having digital tools and the guy in charge of that murdered his wife then killed himself around the time 4E was released. Meanwhile the fact that they had made it possible for anyone to make a knock-off 3rd edition product meant that D&D was actually competing with itself, with Paizo making a knock-off 3.5 product that the grognards could cling to.
5E's popularity was because they made the game massively simpler and used social media to promote the game.
I think you're missing the forest for the trees here.
I'm no expert on early TSR but my understanding that the "poor business practices" you describe was caused by an unhealthy culture at TSR, which in turn was caused by a rapidly growing company hitting a ceiling, forcing the employees to turn from creative work to backstabbing and fighting over the remaining resources, just like how Scott describes. In a way that was remarkably similar for both early TSR and 4e, if I remember correctly.
5E's popularity was of course based on good ideas and good execution, but the popularity created the kind of growth phase Scott described, and when it plateaued, the kind of Involution phase Scott described replaced it. The dynamics Scott ascribe to Involution describes the current state of 5E pretty well as far as I can tell.
TSR had no coherent business strategy and was run very badly. They produced a ton of books no one cared about because they had no coherent plan, and they were not good at marketing.
4E, likewise, suffered from poor management - in that case, they assumed that releasing a book every month was a reasonable business model, but the problem was that:
* Customers got overwhelmed with the amount of content.
* A lot of customers are players who only care about the classes that they're playing, which means a lot of the books wouldn't be for them.
* On the DM side, you don't need tons of books to be able to play, and many books were so specific that they would never be used.
* The books that had the most interesting content (the PHB Xs, which had the new classes) only came out once a year.
* The campaign settings obviously would only be bought by people into the settings.
* There was an online monthly subscription IN ADDITION TO the flood of books
* They failed to deliver many of the digital products which they needed, and the ones that they did deliver often were not as good as they should have been.
The reality is that they just weren't good at the business end of things.
I feel like Scott has identified some genuine forces at work within subcultures, which doesn't quite amount to a one-size-fits-all model of how subcultures and movements grow and die.
I completely agree, but I wonder if there aren't weaknesses inherent in certain types of subcultures that make them more susceptible to this kind of cycle. Subcultures where the members place considerable value on intellectually differentiating themselves (both from the population at large, but also from each other) seem particularly susceptible, at least at first blush, but this can't be the only causal factor.
The most successful American subculture of all time might be the LDS Church; it's been around for 170 years or so, probably has at least an 11 figure war chest, and continues to experience high levels of growth while (IMO) still clearly retaining its status as a subculture. The Satanism subculture of the 1970s, by contrast, probably DID go through this cycle (or at least most of its stages). Why the difference? Is it just accidental, or is there something different in the nature/construct of these cultures that explains this?
For something like LDS, I would think the keys would be institutionalization and heritability--two things that, perhaps unsurprisingly, Satanists were not very big on. But then one could consider something like D&D. Despite the (possibly cyclical) mini-quarrels others have described here, D&D overall is still going strong without institutionalization or heritability. Well, on institutionalization, there's the book publishing, conventions, etc., but I don't think these actually create D&D's enduring popularity.
Look close enough and you get factions of anti-D&D people, spin-offs creating indie RPG subcultures, accusations of various improprieties by popular individuals and then accusations that other popular individuals shelter the improper group and should also be cast out. From a practical standpoint all these things may be various levels of true or useful. From a status framework it's infighting to create room for others to move up in status.
Just because infighting exists doesn't mean a subculture is dead. It also doesn't mean it isn't growing. Being possible to make marginal gains through growth effort doesn't mean there isn't incentive for some to make gains through infighting effort.
You're right, but I'm struck by the fact that D&D is the sort of thing that flourishes in spite of or because of the fact that many/most of those involved don't much care about the infighting. I've been playing since the seventies, and I know almost nothing about what you're describing--and I *think* I'm the norm rather than the exception. My point is there are things (like, apparently, EA) that seem to exist by and through the cycles described in the essay, and other subcultures where, perhaps (or arguably) that is largely beside the point. Or maybe the impression of status-availability-driven cycles is just the impression created by looking at the leaders of any subculture, and meanwhile there are legions of pure nerdy fans? One could say the same about LDS or other religious groups: in these, there are clearly legions of believers (or at least adherents) who have no interest in getting ahead or making a name for themselves (beyond, maybe, their immediate circle) through it. In fact, a religion seems on the way to death when it seems to consist mainly of institutional staff, no matter how hard-working (perhaps this describes some mainline Protestant churches right now?). A religion, like a popular pastime, needs unambitious adherents as much as it needs hard-working professionals.
I mentioned in a comment elsewhere that I have seen a community mostly avoid the infighting. That community was the board game community, which recently saw an explosion of growth (and therefore status opportunities) in the last decade. I hypothesize that the method by which they avoided it is inbuilt competition. Board games are products on a market, and while you generally don't see people being cutthroat, and everyone wants the market to grow, they are naturally competing against each other in a healthy way that is expected by everyone in the community (in a community that engages in healthy competition as a hobby!)
D&D (and RPGs in general) is also a business and therefore benefits from healthy competition. It also has a MLM type structure where each gaming group (or multi-group community that shares members in a geographic region) is it's own sub-sub-culture. And each sub-sub-culture might fall victim to power struggles or it might not, but there are firewalls between groups. Power struggles might happen at higher levels in the community, but only the people who run conventions, employ staff, or read comments ever see it.
In the LDS, power struggles happen at an organizational level and lead to organizational change or potentially splinter sects like the various FLDS groups. At the local level they become the stuff of memes about bickering at bake sales and "_____ politics is the most vicious and bitter form of politics, because the stakes are so low."
Perhaps you could model the status games as a form of drag/friction. With enough growth/acceleration they don't matter, without it you need some kind of organizational structure that is either low-friction or ablative.
Pretty sure structural factors are important. Building a robust memetic immune system, and then encoding it as self-replicating, self-correcting institutional procedures, probably isn't any easier than the biological equivalent. Delicate balance between letting the good ideas in and keeping the bad ideas out, lots of other necessary moving parts to work around. A potential subculture that gets the basics completely wrong never grows in the first place, one which gets enough factors almost right will grow for a while but then self-destruct. Really successful ones learn from early mistakes, find a niche where their culture-specific practices provide comparative advantage, and reinvest in expanding that niche before it gets too crowded.
Specific to the LDS church, to my (very limited) understanding it's notably careful not to over-promise in terms of advancement: while anyone can theoretically work their way up to any position, to get ahead requires actual work, proving that you can reliably produce useful results. Not necessarily big, heroic results - routine maintenance gets recognized and valued - but functionally almost nothing is guaranteed to prospective members just by virtue of them walking in the door and waiting on the next tier of a ponzi scheme.
If you look at the early history of Mormonism, I think you'll find the subculture wars *there*. Messy, really weird-looking ones, with murders, secret societies, secret murder societies, and a phase where every competing leader had to have his own set of metal scripture plates. The consequence is a half dozen plus subgroupings of Mormen, several of which survive to this day. As the others suggested, the main LDS most likely succeeded via institutionalization, rigid hierarchy and an associated heavy-handed top-down management. Personally I also suspect their fairly long period of comparative geographical isolation helped a great deal.
I think it’s land base and timing. They came at the right moment to settle an area the size of Utah when it was not yet owned by other colonists, still in Native American hands. Land base requires governance structures. And they lucked out with whoever designed those. Whole-town, whole-life, social programs built in. Antifragile in very clever ways (right down to the way missions take rebellious youth & send them off to do something extremely difficult in another language.)
Waco, Jonestown, Northern Idaho, is what you get when the land base is smaller due to being expensive, & the leaders crazier and more violent .
I would hardly say "no good reason". The unanimous testimony of the Fathers, combined with the lack of (i) any alternative tradition and (ii) any apologetic motif (of course, now that there is a Cath/prot split, it's apologetically relevant, but it was not then) seems as good a reason as any. Certainly, it can't be outweighed by Paul not making the issue explicit in the way some people would have liked.
Need it be said that the Fathers are very much not unanimous on this point? Irenaeus seems to think that Linus was the very first bishop of Rome, appointed by Peter and Paul. The epistles, rather than simply being silent on the issue, present a good deal of evidence that Peter wasn’t in Rome and had not yet been in Rome at the times he was supposed to have been bishop there; it seems much more likely that Paul was the first apostle in Rome and the only one there for some time.
What? Irenaeus *explicitly* states that Peter and Paul founded the Roman church, and that Peter was in Rome when Matthew composed his gospel. Even when enumerating the succession list, he counts them by their order *after* Peter and Paul. To read this as denying Peter's roman episcopacy, you'd need to erect a huge wedge between Irenaeus' list, and just about every other list. (Think of the paradigm lists of Epiphanius or those of earlier historians recorded in Eusebius). Name one Father who (i) takes a stand on whether Peter was bishop of Rome and (ii) denies that claim. Even better, name one Father who denies Peter was ever in Rome.
The Scriptural arguments are equally weak. But you didn't present any for me to engage with.
In fairness, I presented a longer source, George Salmon’s 19th lecture in “The Infallibility of the Church,” which collects and synthesizes the evidence more fully than Godoth could do in a brief internet comment. (Again, free on Google Books!) Salmon (among many others) goes through all of these issues in a lot more depth if you have an interest.
I concur with GSalmon, you’ve already been presented with a pretty comprehensive argument which you’re not engaging with; you should jump that hurdle first.
“Irenaeus *explicitly* states that Peter and Paul founded the Roman church” And says that Linus was the first appointed to the episcopate. It’s a bizarre lapse if Peter was known to be the bishop of Rome. The problem you have is that every close source which should mention this doesn’t, and they don’t do it in circumstances where it would very much make sense to do so.
“Even better, name one Father who denies Peter was ever in Rome.” You misrea
"Hells Angels who don't like riding motorcycles, etc." Such things exist. In my town, a criminal gang managed to become a chapter of an outlaw motorcycle club. The central organisation insisted on them to actually ride but most of them hadn't even a riding license. The president soon suffered a deadly crash and the rest apparently decided it wasn't worth the effort and quit.
It’s interesting that in this particular case there was a specific idea that we don’t *want* any more newcomers and we tried to ban them all for four decades, and still have very strict limits on them!
I think an important thing to note in this post is that most Karate is fake, you can in fact just pretend to be a black belt and start your own school and get status and money, and there's no formal system for preventing it. You may think winning fights would be the final arbiter of skill at a martial art, but in practice it turns out not to matter much. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gjbSCEhmjJA&t=4s
I think the same dynamics and incentives apply to a lot of non-profit stuff too.
The sociopaths can't show up and beat genuine skilled fighters at their own game just by being willing to lie, but they can show up and cash in from ignorant outsiders.
I've seen the same phenomenon play out in academia: the stats genius who can salvage your thesis.
I'm puzzled as to what you mean by "the stats genius who can salvage your thesis." Can you explain? I'm genuinely curious.
Presumably this is the thing where your research revealed nothing, and yet if you manage to slice the datasets just right, your research can be presented as tho it revealed X, and thus your thesis can still be published.
That's my reading, yes. They can p-hack it enough that you can present a shiny thesis that rejects the null.
It says you gave me a subscription? I don't know how to PM on this platform. So... thank you? Wow.
You're welcome, just a little gesture that I appreciated your comment.
What comment was this?
'Savage your thesis', maybe?
Yeah, and you get shady teachers who cross-certify each other, and shady orgs that exist to rubber-stamp bad teachers in exchange for money.
It's not even that McDojos are unvalidated: they're a valid part of a rubbish system that exists to extract money from gullible white people.
I think such scams have the angle that most (traditional) martial arts are weird and stilted and arcane, which makes it hard for people to tell whether they're actually good or not. Is your sensei making you stand on your head and recite the alphabet backwards? Who knows, maybe that's the way of the warrior!
>they're a valid part of a rubbish system that exists to extract money from gullible white people
Troll detected.
Thanks for the video-- fake martial arts are especially poisonous when entangled with nationalism.
The fact that you (and I, and many people) understand that "most Karate is fake" probably limits its status opportunities in practice, which is probably why it's currently seen as something of "kids activity". Kids are naïve enough to be impressed by the teacher's black-colored belt and implied status regardless of actual skill on display. If judging martial art by practical fighting effectiveness, no unbiased person would give Karate high status.
As the TV show Archer put it, "karate is the Dane Cook of martial arts."
And if karate were actually a highly effective fighting technique, parents wouldn't let their kids learn it.
I'm not sending a seven-year-old boy to learn effective ways to actually hurt people. But I'll happily send him to learn a bunch of coordination and discipline combined with a bunch of lectures about how he should never actually hit people in practice.
This is why my children are going to defeat your children.
I honestly think it is an important part of parenting teaching boys who to throw a punch and box/wrestle.
You want it to be a tool they have access to.
I mean, children's Jiu Jitsu classes are very much a thing
It depends. Karate practice, well done and guided, can be an opportunity to reduce worries about physical conflict. There are other ways. Bare knuckle boxing sure gets one there quicker if you don't mind the bleeding and have a good dental plan. Among all the alternatives, karate had a good track record before it became fashionable.
What many people miss is, you gotta do your homework, which is A LOT of basic fitness stuff for strength, flexibility, speed, endurance and toughness. Not talking competition here, just the way of life. The repetition of movements can work, patterns get imprinted somewhere in one's lizard brain. And, if you are generally an agreeable person and stay out of trouble, these reflexes really help when things get quick. I have done stuff before I knew what was happening, so no part of a tree fell on my my head, no drunk nitwit touched my face. Having been a lousy fighter and well past my prime, last year I somehow managed to not get into a fight that would have left me in jail, hospital or the morgue though the other guy was massively aggressive and I had to stand my ground.
Karate is not about barroom brawls, it about survival. It can be tought well. Probably it barely is tought well any more.
Oh, and if you haven't learned well how to fall, better not ride motorcycles or fast bicycles.
It only limits the status opportunities marginally. It's mainly martial arts nerds that believe karate is fake. Most normies are very impressed by people with black belts.
I didn't watch that whole video, but the first minutes talk about things like knocking your opponent out at a distance by supernatural means. It seems to be saying that fake martial arts exist, not that all or most karate is fake. Where in the video does it make that claim?
I wouldn't characterize the video as claiming that karate is "fake", but starting around 19:30 it tells a story about a Chinese MMA fighter who's been challenging and soundly defeating a bunch of masters of traditional martial arts styles (while the Chinese government systematically harasses him to try to get him to stop). The video says the MMA fighter is undefeated after 70 matches, and is self-described as being only mediocre at MMA.
Video also briefly claims that karate practitioners have consistently had poor showings in competitive matches against modern martial arts styles.
So I guess I'd summarize the claim as something like "karate masters are consistently bad at fighting (by the standards of MMA)".
It's a somewhat common meme in MMA circles, and those of the primary MMA feeder arts like BJJ, that MMA is "the ultimate true fighting art" and outclasses all others (especially "traditional" arts). The name UFC even speaks to this mindset somewhat.
Without denying that there are a lot of fake arts out there -- the name "McDojo" arose for a reason -- this claim on the part of the MMA people is somewhat overblown. In particular, it relies on the equation of MMA octagon rules with "real fighting". Of course, it's nothing of the kind -- MMA is a combat sport, and thus must be a functional sport, which implies a lot of attention to the entertainment of the viewers and the safety of the competitors. "Real fighting" is conducive to neither goal.
I haven't seen the video, but many claims like this basically arise from this intra-martial-arts spat, and are colored with the factional sympathies thereof. Some skepticism may be called for.
MMA bases (BJJ, wrestling, boxing) is "the ultimate true fighting art" is not even fully correct. Yes they are good forms in a 1 on 1 situation with no weapons and clear area, which almost never happens in a real fight. In a group fight, anyone who goes to the ground (wresting/BJJ types) are just going to get kicked in the head by the other guy's buddy. In a real situation, if unarmed, you immediately grab an improvised weapon (club or something sharp). Someone with a club is going beat a BJJ blackbelt most of the time.
I firmly believe that cycles don't exist and never have existed.
This is my shitposting way of saying "I have never, once, in my years of experience modeling human behavioral time series, come across an honest-to-god cyclical pattern (excluding time of year/month/week/day effects)." And yet for some reason, every time I show a time series to anyone ever, people swear to god the data looks cyclical.
There's actually a pretty good statistical reason why cyclical patterns are rare: they imply a bizarre mix of positive and negative correlations. A strongly cyclical pattern in status means your status today is positively related to your status yesterday, but negatively related to your status 2 days ago, and so on, oscillating.
Now think about that. If we have a period of 10 years, and I wanted to predict your status based on the fact that you're low-status today, I should predict that 5 years from now, you'll be significantly below-average status. That's weird as hell, to say the least. If someone is high-status, and you ask me to predict their status 5 years from now, the right answer is probably "Somewhat lower status, because of regression to the mean, but still above-average."
As for why observed cyclical "patterns" are very popular among everyone except statisticians who actually work with time series: it's because time series *bounce around*. What that means is they appear to "oscillate," moving from below-average to above-average to below-average again. We mistake this random noise for oscillations, because it looks like the function has a pattern where larger values , but the reality is that's just what happens when you combine random noise with regression to the mean. It's impossible for a function to always be above-average, so it has to have alternating runs of above-average and below-average values. What's more, those "runs" will have some average period, so they'll look like they last *roughly* the same amount of time on average.
The way to distinguish a real cycle from a fake one, apart from doing actual statistics (which is hard TBF), is by looking closely at the periods. Do they line up, almost exactly, across time? Does every social group collapse in popularity after *exactly* 20 years, give or take 1 or 2 at most? Or do you have to throw on massive confidence intervals because some collapse after 10, some after 30, some after 40? If it's the latter, the apparent cycle is probably pareidolia.
The examples given here strike me as that kind of pareidolia. @scottalexander If you'd like, you can give me a bunch of things you feel are examples of this and Google Trends data for them, and then I can actually do the statistics.
What’s the difference between a cycle and a sequence?
Not sure I understand what you’re asking, what do you mean?
Growth-peak-decline is clearly a sequence. What would make it a cycle?
Scott uses the word 'cycle' here to mean 'lifecycle', but the model he gives isn't actually cyclical: there are four phases through which a subculture progresses, but then generally it enters a steady state. The commenter above is calling this a 'sequence'.
I think you're right about cycles, but that your criticism doesn't apply to sequences, and hence not to this article.
I don't see why "grow, live, die" is a fake pattern if it doesn't happen on a set chronological time frame. Christianity, for example, had a significant change of character some 325 years in at the Council of Constantine. I suspect that modern trends change much faster. But even 'feminism' has a multi-generational arc.
It's a pattern or arc, but does that make it a cycle?
To steal the example from upthread: It is a cycle just as much as a lifecycle is a cycle for an individual organism. Which is still called a lifecycle even when a _specific_ organism fails to reproduce. The point is that the _pattern_ repeats across different individuals and time. An individual organism (or group) only goes through it once, but then a different organism (or group) will go through it again.
It's not even a pattern is the point! You could just as easily see a sequence go "Grow, live, live, live, grow, decline" instead. In the Google trends, it looks like Atheism never even had a growth stage--presumably it just started high because the internet is full of weird people. Feminism looks like it goes straight from "Growth" to "Decline."
Would it be significant that status and popularity are not (or not at present) really quantifiable? Social birds and mammals behave in ways that suggest they have evolved to sense these purely qualitative things; and one social mammal, humans, talks about them a LOT. Statisticians may use quantifiable things (like Google searches, "likes," etc.) as indicators for these things, but they are not the things themselves, which exist at best only (or at least mainly?) as behavior-causing impressions within the sensoria of the relevant social creatures (and yet these impressions are, of course, extremely important).
Yeah. There are plenty of proxies for status and popularity. But each carry their own subtle bias that I suspect we need to be overtly aware of, so that we can qualify our proxy appropriately. Popularity, formal authority, informal authority, the creation of art or science which inspires derivitave works, socioeconomic status, sexual desirability, etc. are all different kinds of status. These things correlate with each other, but not strongly. Yet they all get rolled up into this thing called 'status.'
So once we say that the map is not the territory the question then becomes which relevant features to include on a particular map for a particular purpose. Are some people looking to control others, looking for reputation, some looking for visibility, some looking for sex, and some looking for material goods? I'd be interested if someone could demonstrate that one of these things holds but not the other. Or if one holds for a particular group and another holds for a different one. (Like if gay men at a particular time period were more likely to join religious orders or the clergy.)
I think you're expecting cycles to be too regular. Some (forget who) once wrote "History doesn't repeat, but it does rhyme.", and I think that's correct. Broad features often tend to repeat in an irregular rhythm. That's cyclic in a broad sense, but not in a narrow one. If you see a country rising in power, you can predict with fair certainty that it won't retain that power. That's a sort of cycle. It doesn't repeat in the same place, but it definitely repeats. It happened in Egypt, Rome, lots of other places. You could even point to non-state actors, like the Hudson Bay Company.
Regression to the mean doesn't imply that another centralized center of power will emerge. But my belief is that it will, unless the entire structure gets torn down. Even if there's another giant asteroid impact, in a few hundred million years (or less) centers of power will start emerging and collapsing again. To me that sounds like a cycle, though not a very regular one.
Merely assigning a name to members of the set of types-of-cycle, does not remove them from the set. They are still cycles.
Great series of comments; the reminder to be aware of finding patterns in static is important. The universe, after all, is under no obligation to package things in an easily understood pattern.
Makes sense to me as a zero lycra cyclist, it sure seems there's a lot of spurious nonsense about cycles https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_cycle_theory
Why do you think that to be a genuine cycle, it needs to take a consistent amount of time each time? I don't see any reason why that would be true. The rain cycle is a cycle, but that cycle doesn't take a consistent amount of time from one repetition to another.
It seems to me that what makes it a cycle is just if there's some actual cyclical causal mechanism for moving from one stage to another, rather than the variation being merely a result of random variation+regression to the mean. While I take your point that mere random variation+regression to the mean could easily get mistaken for a cycle, your reasoning leads me to suspect that you would easily mistake actual cycles for mere random variation+regression to the mean.
It does sound like Turchin takes his cycles to have a predictable length, which I agree is very implausible. But I don't see anything in Scott's post that requires him to buy into that part of the theory. Some cycles are chaotic; it would still be useful to know that there's a cyclical mechanism at work there even if it didn't give us a lot of predictive power.
I think Scott is using cycle in a looser, more vernacular sense, where a similar sequence of events takes place in different groups, but perhaps over different time scales.
Mathmatically, if you're thinking in terms of a single variable, a cycle is hard to make, but in multi-variable situations, they're pretty easy. All you really need is two variables where when one tends to go up the other tends to go down.
The classic example is rabbits and foxes: lots of rabbits, few foxes -> foxes have an easy time finding food -> lots of foxes, few rabbit-> foxes have a hard time finding food so they die off -> repeat.
This may stabilize on an equilibrium, but there can be lots of cycles before it reaches that equilibrium. (And "outside" effects are likely to disrupt the equilibrium kicking it back into "cycles" mode)
I'm not sure how relevant this whole tangent is to the original topic, but my point is just I don't really find the "statistical" reasoning very useful.
It's pretty easy to write down some dynamics that lead to periodic-ish behavior is it not? (E.g. predator-prey models)
Lotka-Volterra only really works for very simple ecosystems, and even then it doesn't work that well https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lotka%E2%80%93Volterra_equations
It doesn't need to work well. My point was just that simple dynamics can lead to periodicity, so a claim that periodicity requires a hard to balance set of conditions seems false.
To my understanding the cycle being described often has a period much longer than ten years, and refers to aggregate availability of opportunities for advancement rather than predicting sine-wave shaped variations in any specific individual's social status.
"A strongly cyclical pattern in status means your status today is positively related to your status yesterday, but negatively related to your status 2 days ago, and so on, oscillating."
That's not how you get an oscillation in physics. The most common way is to have a restoring force (resulting in an acceleration) negatively proportional to your distance from some point. Of course, this implies inertia, or else the acceleration would be infinite. It's certainly plausible that societies also have restoring forces and inertia.
Positive and negative correlations aren't the usual cause of cyclical events. Mechanical and electrical oscillations are probably the most common. Instead of plus and minus correlations, they have a tradeoff between storing energy in two forms, (height/speed, voltage/current...). One can imagine plenty of ways this could manifest in behavioral situations.
Must a cycle be periodic?
Yes
Must the period be constant?
First thought is that humans follow a very regular cycle but one which may not have a constant period with growth, decline and death from one generation to the next.
Any movements that tends to recruit from people at similar points in that cycle may be piggybacking on the larger cycle.
If you recruit a lot of 16-18 year olds then your organisations trends may end up looking a lot like many other organisation that does the same while your core members go from 18 to 30.
Congratulations, you've just come up with a semantic way to make your supposedly statistical argument irrefutable. Nobody uses the word "cycle" that way and defining it in such strict terms means you're not critiquing any actually-existing observation. Turchin certainly wouldn't consent to that requirement.
I think the key semantic point of confusion is that while "cycle" most commonly in my experience refers to a regular series of steps from beginning to end, where end may or may not be a repeat of the beginning, "cyclical" most commonly describes a succession of system states that repeats many times over within the same system. As such, it took me a while to recognuze that Scott was using "cyclical" in a way that to me was nonstandard.
If a cycle isn't (somewhat) periodic, then what differenciate it from random variation over time? Is my health cyclical because I sometimes get sick, then get better, then sick again, even though each sickness is unrelated to each other, and happen in unpredictable intervals, from weeks to years from each others? I'd argue that not, and every time I encountered the concept of cycles in my (short and failed) economic studies, they were, if not defined by their period, at least strongly associated to it.
Or maybe I'm interpreting some of the terms in the wrong way.
Not if it is heavily damped.
This comments section is such fertile ground for likes right now, there's no need for anyone to disagree with me. If you don't agree, just post your own comment and we can both prosper. If you do, just say so and you'll look like a genius for agreeing before everyone else jumped on the bandwagon. Plus you'll be playing out a meta-commentary on the article, which should be good enough to insulate us against one round of criticism. It's free karma real estate!
Scott disabled likes here (for not-entirely-unrelated reasons). Yes, there is a way to get them back, but AIUI most don't use it.
Also, due to the threaded nature of the comments, being part of the thread of the #1 comment puts you higher on the page and thus gets more eyeballs than being the #3 comment.
Well put.
Brilliant. When there are many comments in a thread, people who want to be heard frame their contribution in opposition to the pre-existing comments at the top to wrest away some of the attention. I see it all the time at MR.
More generally, this fits in with what Robin Hanson calls our utopian hypocrisy. We claim to dislike conflict, but frequently seek it out in hopes of raising our relative status.
https://infovores.substack.com/p/irrational-institutions-5
Well, propensity for conflict in, say, higher primates is status dependent and individual. Powerful individuals (alpha and beta primates) minimize conflict. But alpha wannabes tend to be high conflict within their in-group and low status. I'm not familiar with Hanson, but he seems to be describing humans acting like alpha wannabes.
I have a hard time believing someone would do this consciously, by going through the top comments and picking one with which to disagree. Rather, people are motivated to say something in response to a strong emotion, such as reading a comment and disagreeing with it. So what you see as some kind of ulterior jockeying for attention, I see as just a natural result of the dopamine feedback pathway.
A key part of Hanson’s theory of human behavior is that much of it is not conscious. We are adept at recognizing opportunities to elevate or our own status, but can’t get caught exploiting them without justification. Thus we developed post-hoc justification and self-deception to avoid being punished for norm violation.
Absolutely! It's wild to see this happen in real time. Theres a brain-body faultline that develops. "Rules are made to be broken" is another side of the coin. Institutional rules are nominally black-and-white, and the only way interesting things happen is some amount of conspiracy.
Ehh...
I've been consciously tempted to try to post my thoughts in response to the top comment to get them more exposure. (Comment that could have been framed as a response or a standalone.)
"I have a hard time believing someone would do this consciously, by going through the top comments and picking one with which to disagree. "
In this environment, perhaps not. But go and have a look at what happens on some of the more popular threads on Reddit. There's a whole subculture of trolls who do precisely that.
I'll readily admit that if I'm reading through a matured comment section, and I have some thoughts on the topic, I'll intentionally opt to express those thoughts as a reply to some active thread rather than posting a new top-level comment. The latter option amounts to yelling into the void once there are more than a hundred or so comments (depending on the forum).
You either exit the subculture a geek or stay long enough to see yourself become the sociopath.
If ithe subculture thing doesn't kill you. I've been into punk rock, still am, in a way. Quite a few of my colleagues there have succumbed to substance consumption issues. Reckon I have become a geek.
Is this post intended to chronicle the cycle of those subcultures that are clearly 'movements', or is it intended to cover subcultures in general? Because I can think of any number of garden variety subcultures (skateboarding in the 70s and 80s, punk rock, D&D guys, etc) that had/have significant cultural traction that don't obviously fit this model.
If we're just talking about 'ism' cultures then it seems like a lot of this tracks, though even there I'm guessing that those 'ism' cultures where a critical number of the participants are clearly committed to making sure everyone knows how smart they are might be more susceptible. The Klan (in its many unfortunate incarnations) was/is definitely a subculture, but just as I don't see it necessarily fitting this pattern I also don't suspect it's a subculture where the members were eager to tell you how bored they were in K-12, or what their SAT scores were.
Perhaps punk rock doesn't fit the model as its own subculture, but it fits well inside the larger rock-n-roll culture as a splinter movement during the involution phase.
Punk rock was interesting because it was marketed in one of two ways.
1) a "back to basics" return to old-school rock after the pretentiousness of the mid-70s
2) a nihilistic "year zero" destruction of popular music itself. (It was considered cool that punk rock songs were produced like shit, that Sid Vicious couldn't play bass, that the Ramones knew like 3 chords, etc.)
These two things contradict each other. You can't both lionize the past and want to destroy it, but somehow both schools of thought found themselves under the punk banner.
That may well be maximally basic and unpretentious. But I think what Coagulopath was getting at was that maximizing basicness and lack of pretense was just one of two competing and often conflated models of punk. That's model 2, whereas model 1 is about trying to revert to an earlier state of cultivation.
If you know Thomas Cole's much-memeified "Course of Empire" paintings, it's like both models are a reaction to the cultivated/decadent "Consummation of Empire" stage. (That is, to the early-70s "rock as 7-minute operetta" moment.) But the first wants to get back to a prior state of non-decadent cultivation, i.e., to sounding like Buddy Holly. (Representative group: Elvis Costello & The Attractions.) Whereas the second wants to push through to a state of uncultivated decadence, to a sort of catharsis in which "talent" and "craft" are subsumed by pure entropy. (Representative group: Sex Pistols, esp. with Sid Vicious.)
"You can't both lionize the past and want to destroy it"
Oh yes you can, if the goal of your joining/evangelizing any movement is to fight with/demonize other people. And that's exactly what most people with strong opinions mostly care about doing.
Contradictions? Hah. My mass movement laughs at your silly claims of contradictions.
there are the genre defining innovators (precycle), then come the classics (growth), after that the soulless cash grabs and their opposition aka punk is dead aka involution and, now we are in postcycle and have been for quite some time. Punk is an institutionalized aesthetic you can choose from the shelf as a 14 year old without shocking anyone and old people go to punk concerts on the weekend before returning to their office job. Noone wants to discuss your opinions on what punk really is and should be, at best they will point you to the authorities that institutionalized it decades ago.
fits on any music genre really
D&D definitely went through a couple of rounds like this. First the breakup of the original TSR: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TSR,_Inc.#TSR's_demise Then the decline of 3e and the edition wars: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dungeons_%26_Dragons#Wizards_of_the_Coast Currently 5e is at involution, having had an explosive growth phase driven by streaming and 80thies nostalgia. You can also observe this in RPG subcultures, e.g. the OSR.
The OSR has been *incredibly* infested with bona-fide Sociopaths who didn't care about or actively hated the Cool New Thing but wanted to make money off it and/or hitch their status-wagon to being A Creator in the Cool New Scene.
As someone pretty deep in the D&D subculture, I agree it's at an involution. I think most of the (new) cultural infighting is happening on tiktok, which targets the same demographic as the most recent growth phase, and to a lesser extent reddit.
In that ecosystem, the elites/"sociopaths" seem to be the content farms that regurgitate random obscure bits of lore that aren't actually part of the common canon, or wild theorycraft builds that would never fly at a real table, divorcing them of the actual context. But that gets you views. The "anti-elites" seem to be the people saying that "5e is okay, but please try playing literally any other TTRPG" (beggartok, apparently?), where the ttrpg of choice is often Pathfinder 2e.
Pssh, if you want indie cred, I play FantasyCraft, ever heard of it?
But for real, I've been playing Monster of the Week and loving having an actually story-driven game.
> The "anti-elites" seem to be the people saying that "5e is okay, but please try playing literally any other TTRPG" (beggartok, apparently?), where the ttrpg of choice is often Pathfinder 2e.
Which is ironic, since PF2e is basically "what happens if you merge 5e D&D, 3e D&D, and 4e D&D." Just like PF1e is basically "3.5e, Electric Boogaloo".
I'd phrase it as "what would happen if you took all the lessons learned from (and general good ideas from) those previous editions and built the built the best version of D&D you could". PF2e is for the people who enjoyed 3.5 and wish WoTC hadn't been so scarred by the underperformance of 4e that they crippled 5e's character building options.
Meanwhile, the people who are only interested in the *roleplaying* part of the ttrpg are looking at 5e and say "y'know, 5e can bend over backwards trying to say it's a game with more focus on roleplay over crunch with three core pillars, but it's pretty clear that 'combat' is the load-bearing one based on the 90% of the rules devoted to it", recognizing that it's still fundamentally carrying the legacy of being a tabletop war game with roleplaying bolted on top. And these are the people that are begging these new players that *don't* just want to play a crunchy combat simulation to play anything else. Usually a Powered by the Apocalypse game, which has a *really* great design philosophy.
(For the record, I am both of these :P)
None of this has anything to do with what you're talking about, though.
TSR went down because of poor business practices. The 3e/4e edition war was also due to poor business practices. None of this had anything to do with any sort of macro level thing.
TSR printed too many books; so did 4E. In TSR's case, they simply were bad at advertising. In 4E's case, the game was designed around having digital tools and the guy in charge of that murdered his wife then killed himself around the time 4E was released. Meanwhile the fact that they had made it possible for anyone to make a knock-off 3rd edition product meant that D&D was actually competing with itself, with Paizo making a knock-off 3.5 product that the grognards could cling to.
5E's popularity was because they made the game massively simpler and used social media to promote the game.
I think you're missing the forest for the trees here.
I'm no expert on early TSR but my understanding that the "poor business practices" you describe was caused by an unhealthy culture at TSR, which in turn was caused by a rapidly growing company hitting a ceiling, forcing the employees to turn from creative work to backstabbing and fighting over the remaining resources, just like how Scott describes. In a way that was remarkably similar for both early TSR and 4e, if I remember correctly.
5E's popularity was of course based on good ideas and good execution, but the popularity created the kind of growth phase Scott described, and when it plateaued, the kind of Involution phase Scott described replaced it. The dynamics Scott ascribe to Involution describes the current state of 5E pretty well as far as I can tell.
No.
TSR had no coherent business strategy and was run very badly. They produced a ton of books no one cared about because they had no coherent plan, and they were not good at marketing.
4E, likewise, suffered from poor management - in that case, they assumed that releasing a book every month was a reasonable business model, but the problem was that:
* Customers got overwhelmed with the amount of content.
* A lot of customers are players who only care about the classes that they're playing, which means a lot of the books wouldn't be for them.
* On the DM side, you don't need tons of books to be able to play, and many books were so specific that they would never be used.
* The books that had the most interesting content (the PHB Xs, which had the new classes) only came out once a year.
* The campaign settings obviously would only be bought by people into the settings.
* There was an online monthly subscription IN ADDITION TO the flood of books
* They failed to deliver many of the digital products which they needed, and the ones that they did deliver often were not as good as they should have been.
The reality is that they just weren't good at the business end of things.
I feel like Scott has identified some genuine forces at work within subcultures, which doesn't quite amount to a one-size-fits-all model of how subcultures and movements grow and die.
I completely agree, but I wonder if there aren't weaknesses inherent in certain types of subcultures that make them more susceptible to this kind of cycle. Subcultures where the members place considerable value on intellectually differentiating themselves (both from the population at large, but also from each other) seem particularly susceptible, at least at first blush, but this can't be the only causal factor.
The most successful American subculture of all time might be the LDS Church; it's been around for 170 years or so, probably has at least an 11 figure war chest, and continues to experience high levels of growth while (IMO) still clearly retaining its status as a subculture. The Satanism subculture of the 1970s, by contrast, probably DID go through this cycle (or at least most of its stages). Why the difference? Is it just accidental, or is there something different in the nature/construct of these cultures that explains this?
For something like LDS, I would think the keys would be institutionalization and heritability--two things that, perhaps unsurprisingly, Satanists were not very big on. But then one could consider something like D&D. Despite the (possibly cyclical) mini-quarrels others have described here, D&D overall is still going strong without institutionalization or heritability. Well, on institutionalization, there's the book publishing, conventions, etc., but I don't think these actually create D&D's enduring popularity.
Look close enough and you get factions of anti-D&D people, spin-offs creating indie RPG subcultures, accusations of various improprieties by popular individuals and then accusations that other popular individuals shelter the improper group and should also be cast out. From a practical standpoint all these things may be various levels of true or useful. From a status framework it's infighting to create room for others to move up in status.
Just because infighting exists doesn't mean a subculture is dead. It also doesn't mean it isn't growing. Being possible to make marginal gains through growth effort doesn't mean there isn't incentive for some to make gains through infighting effort.
You're right, but I'm struck by the fact that D&D is the sort of thing that flourishes in spite of or because of the fact that many/most of those involved don't much care about the infighting. I've been playing since the seventies, and I know almost nothing about what you're describing--and I *think* I'm the norm rather than the exception. My point is there are things (like, apparently, EA) that seem to exist by and through the cycles described in the essay, and other subcultures where, perhaps (or arguably) that is largely beside the point. Or maybe the impression of status-availability-driven cycles is just the impression created by looking at the leaders of any subculture, and meanwhile there are legions of pure nerdy fans? One could say the same about LDS or other religious groups: in these, there are clearly legions of believers (or at least adherents) who have no interest in getting ahead or making a name for themselves (beyond, maybe, their immediate circle) through it. In fact, a religion seems on the way to death when it seems to consist mainly of institutional staff, no matter how hard-working (perhaps this describes some mainline Protestant churches right now?). A religion, like a popular pastime, needs unambitious adherents as much as it needs hard-working professionals.
I mentioned in a comment elsewhere that I have seen a community mostly avoid the infighting. That community was the board game community, which recently saw an explosion of growth (and therefore status opportunities) in the last decade. I hypothesize that the method by which they avoided it is inbuilt competition. Board games are products on a market, and while you generally don't see people being cutthroat, and everyone wants the market to grow, they are naturally competing against each other in a healthy way that is expected by everyone in the community (in a community that engages in healthy competition as a hobby!)
D&D (and RPGs in general) is also a business and therefore benefits from healthy competition. It also has a MLM type structure where each gaming group (or multi-group community that shares members in a geographic region) is it's own sub-sub-culture. And each sub-sub-culture might fall victim to power struggles or it might not, but there are firewalls between groups. Power struggles might happen at higher levels in the community, but only the people who run conventions, employ staff, or read comments ever see it.
In the LDS, power struggles happen at an organizational level and lead to organizational change or potentially splinter sects like the various FLDS groups. At the local level they become the stuff of memes about bickering at bake sales and "_____ politics is the most vicious and bitter form of politics, because the stakes are so low."
Perhaps you could model the status games as a form of drag/friction. With enough growth/acceleration they don't matter, without it you need some kind of organizational structure that is either low-friction or ablative.
Pretty sure structural factors are important. Building a robust memetic immune system, and then encoding it as self-replicating, self-correcting institutional procedures, probably isn't any easier than the biological equivalent. Delicate balance between letting the good ideas in and keeping the bad ideas out, lots of other necessary moving parts to work around. A potential subculture that gets the basics completely wrong never grows in the first place, one which gets enough factors almost right will grow for a while but then self-destruct. Really successful ones learn from early mistakes, find a niche where their culture-specific practices provide comparative advantage, and reinvest in expanding that niche before it gets too crowded.
Specific to the LDS church, to my (very limited) understanding it's notably careful not to over-promise in terms of advancement: while anyone can theoretically work their way up to any position, to get ahead requires actual work, proving that you can reliably produce useful results. Not necessarily big, heroic results - routine maintenance gets recognized and valued - but functionally almost nothing is guaranteed to prospective members just by virtue of them walking in the door and waiting on the next tier of a ponzi scheme.
If you look at the early history of Mormonism, I think you'll find the subculture wars *there*. Messy, really weird-looking ones, with murders, secret societies, secret murder societies, and a phase where every competing leader had to have his own set of metal scripture plates. The consequence is a half dozen plus subgroupings of Mormen, several of which survive to this day. As the others suggested, the main LDS most likely succeeded via institutionalization, rigid hierarchy and an associated heavy-handed top-down management. Personally I also suspect their fairly long period of comparative geographical isolation helped a great deal.
I think it’s land base and timing. They came at the right moment to settle an area the size of Utah when it was not yet owned by other colonists, still in Native American hands. Land base requires governance structures. And they lucked out with whoever designed those. Whole-town, whole-life, social programs built in. Antifragile in very clever ways (right down to the way missions take rebellious youth & send them off to do something extremely difficult in another language.)
Waco, Jonestown, Northern Idaho, is what you get when the land base is smaller due to being expensive, & the leaders crazier and more violent .
I really could have used some examples in this essay
First follower is Andrew, not Simon Peter.
And, with apologies to our Catholic friends, there is no good reason to
believe that Peter ever served as the Bishop of Rome.
(For anyone interested in the evidence on this latter question, “I” summarize it in lecture 19 of “my” “Infallibility of the Church.”)
I would hardly say "no good reason". The unanimous testimony of the Fathers, combined with the lack of (i) any alternative tradition and (ii) any apologetic motif (of course, now that there is a Cath/prot split, it's apologetically relevant, but it was not then) seems as good a reason as any. Certainly, it can't be outweighed by Paul not making the issue explicit in the way some people would have liked.
Need it be said that the Fathers are very much not unanimous on this point? Irenaeus seems to think that Linus was the very first bishop of Rome, appointed by Peter and Paul. The epistles, rather than simply being silent on the issue, present a good deal of evidence that Peter wasn’t in Rome and had not yet been in Rome at the times he was supposed to have been bishop there; it seems much more likely that Paul was the first apostle in Rome and the only one there for some time.
That sums up the situation very well and concisely.
What? Irenaeus *explicitly* states that Peter and Paul founded the Roman church, and that Peter was in Rome when Matthew composed his gospel. Even when enumerating the succession list, he counts them by their order *after* Peter and Paul. To read this as denying Peter's roman episcopacy, you'd need to erect a huge wedge between Irenaeus' list, and just about every other list. (Think of the paradigm lists of Epiphanius or those of earlier historians recorded in Eusebius). Name one Father who (i) takes a stand on whether Peter was bishop of Rome and (ii) denies that claim. Even better, name one Father who denies Peter was ever in Rome.
The Scriptural arguments are equally weak. But you didn't present any for me to engage with.
In fairness, I presented a longer source, George Salmon’s 19th lecture in “The Infallibility of the Church,” which collects and synthesizes the evidence more fully than Godoth could do in a brief internet comment. (Again, free on Google Books!) Salmon (among many others) goes through all of these issues in a lot more depth if you have an interest.
I concur with GSalmon, you’ve already been presented with a pretty comprehensive argument which you’re not engaging with; you should jump that hurdle first.
“Irenaeus *explicitly* states that Peter and Paul founded the Roman church” And says that Linus was the first appointed to the episcopate. It’s a bizarre lapse if Peter was known to be the bishop of Rome. The problem you have is that every close source which should mention this doesn’t, and they don’t do it in circumstances where it would very much make sense to do so.
“Even better, name one Father who denies Peter was ever in Rome.” You misrea