"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 misread? I don’t deny that Peter was in Rome at some late point, there’s just no evidence he was there before Paul, and quite a bit of evidence against—it seems most likely that Paul was in Rome alone long before Peter was ever there, and this makes hash of the RCC’s alleged chronology.
“The Scriptural arguments are equally weak” Au contraire, the Scriptural arguments are exceptionally strong. We have an extremely powerful and comprehensive set of records of the debates, interactions, organization, and evangelization of the early Church, and Peter is mentioned in them quite a lot. As I see it the responsibility of someone claiming that Peter possesses a special position and powers in the early church not accorded to any other apostle is to prove their case; by default the hypothesis fails.
"As I see it the responsibility of someone claiming that Peter possesses a special position and powers in the early church not accorded to any other apostle is to prove their case; by default the hypothesis fails."
"Blessed art thou, Simon Bar-Jona: for flesh and blood hath not revealed it unto thee, but my Father which is in heaven. And I say also unto thee, That thou art Peter, and upon this rock I will build my church; and the gates of hell shall not prevail against it. And I will give unto thee the keys of the kingdom of heaven: and whatsoever thou shalt bind on earth shall be bound in heaven: and whatsoever thou shalt loose on earth shall be loosed in heaven."
"Simon Bar-Jona, do you love me more than these others?"
"You know I do, Lord."
"Look after my lambs."
"You are looking for Jesus the Nazarene, who was crucified. He has risen! He is not here. See the place where they laid him. But go, tell his disciples and Peter, 'He is going ahead of you into Galilee. There you will see him, just as he told you.'"
Then Peter stood up with the Eleven, raised his voice and addressed the crowd: "Fellow Jews and all of you who live in Jerusalem, let me explain this to you; listen carefully to what I say."
The angel answered, "Your prayers and gifts to the poor have come up as a memorial offering before God. Now send men to Joppa to bring back a man named Simon who is called Peter."
And so on ad nauseam; it's very evident from the New Testament alone that Peter has a special position and powers in the early church. He's constantly speaking for the apostles, people are brought to him as to an authority, he's mentioned apart from them and especially. This has never been credibly doubted; the schismatic question was always whether Peter had possessed the authority to *transfer* that status to the Bishop of Rome and if so, whether he actually did.
I haven't specifically investigated it, but I thought it was pretty uncontroversial that Peter led the church at Rome, the non-Catholics just don't believe that "Bishop of Rome" was ever meant to be some sort of special title with special authority over the rest of the church.
There is a section in Calvin's Institutes specifically entitled "Peter Was Not the Bishop of Rome" and I think the vast majority following the Reformed tradition have always held to this view. Not sure about Lutherans.
This ties into a concept I recently learned about, "subcultural capital" as coined by Sarah Thornton in 1995. Her book Club Cultures is on my to-read list after I saw a reference in an unrelated book.
The idea is that music/art subcultures like Punk usually define themselves in opposition to whatever the relevant "mainstream" is, which helps in the early stages because it attracts people who are not happy with their mainstream status. Much of the fighting for status in a subculture eventually revolves around being hip or authentic, and I think that's a key part of the involution phase. This is why "selling out" makes people so angry: trying to convert your status inside a subculture to money or mainstream popularity shows a lack of commitment to the subculture. Once a particular subculture has been around long enough it's pretty hard for anything to be "hip" so it has to postcycle and either fragment or stabilize around something other than status.
Wow! This is one of those posts that crystalizes things. You've described exactly what's happened in science fiction. Perhaps it's happened several times. But, I was disappointed you didn't give personal examples. I suggest that it (giving personal examples) would be risky, but high pay-off.
> I never felt like there was any influx of sociopaths.
And I bet many to the large majority of times you were right. But you probably were attracted to movements that didn’t have their fair share of sociopaths. And even if they did, you avoided seeing this at the individual level.
> each faction might well think that the subculture must have been taken over by sociopaths
And they are wrong some of the time. But definitely not all of the time. The cyclic pattern you describe feels right to me, but it’s often accelerated by sociopaths.
I really don't like the use of the word "sociopath" here.
I'm not really sure whether "sociopaths" even really exist as a genuine class of people, but if they do then they're very rare. The label certainly shouldn't be applied to everyone who is a bit of a jerk, or everyone who is insincere, or everyone who is selfish, or everyone who is annoying you at any particular moment.
Idk. I wouldn't say the set of people we're describing lack the ability to feel empathy, etc. They are simply more concerned about status than stated goals.
What people primarily criticize isn't status seeking per se. Not doing hard work for status rewards. What they criticize is people who want the status, or other personal goods regardless of the means. Eg, people who will massively lie, use other people or strategically attack those who stand in their way.
I agree. When Chapman says "sociopath," AFAICT he means "people who are mostly concerned with status as opposed to the object-level thing the movement is about." That's different from people who have an actual mental illness.
My understanding of Chapman's "sociopath" is what you say here, plus a small addition. As you say it's someone who's unmoved by "the thing" at the center of that movement, and who is moved by status. I'd add it is often being after money as well, and primarily about having a knack for, and willingness to, manipulate and exploit the other participants in the movement.
This refers to manipulating/exploiting the "creators" and "fanatics" of Chapman's taxonomy -- i.e. those who actually produce "the thing", and those who dedicate large efforts (without great personal benefit) to spread "the thing" as far as possible -- bleeding both of them dry, while scooping truckloads of status or money for themselves.
When those "sociopaths" are crafty and competent, they can turn out being a net gain for "the thing", in terms of the world ending with more of "the thing" which had spread farther and wider than would have been the case without that "sociopath". They can equally be responsible for the dilution and "the sellout", in pursuit of those goals. Or they can be greedy leeches who end up exhausting everyone and driving "the thing" into the ground, being a net loss for "the thing" compared to the alternative without that "sociopath".
I think Chapman's model does stand on its own, and is not exactly *contradicted* by Scott's model. I find Scott's model wonderful. But Scott's model merely clarifies a "cycle" which naturally happens when people discover a new niche which hasn't been mined previously but whose resources are ultimately limited. Scott's model explains how the negative effects can happen even without any participants being particularly "sociopathic".
But Scott's model by no means *precludes* sociopaths from jumping into that fray...
Yes, that could be a better word. It seems to me that Chapman was using excessively loaded words to make a point. Same with "fanatics", which I don't find to be the best choice of word, I'd have used "evangelists" myself. (Or perhaps Chapman avoided that word because he perceived it as "appropriated by Christianity"? It shouldn't be, it's simply a Greek word)
"Creators" is a straightforward choice of words, of course, and using "MOPs" for "Members of Public" is a quite good pun.
Sometimes they can be a net gain for the thing and a net loss for the people who do it, though. Have enough Sociopath-driven mainstreaming and you end up with a loss of unique cultural and behavioral standards (whether greater or lesser than the broader norm) and their replacement with whatever is in vogue to make the newcomers more comfortable. And often those newcomers have a lot of other options and aren't particularly beholden to the thing itself (and certainly not to its culture), so this growth ends up closer to zero-sum with other unrelated groups than you'd think at first.
Exactly, the sociopaths are mostly people looking to make money off of something. Disney buying Marvel and Star Wars are probably the best examples. The CEO didn't have any specific creative vision for them, he just knew he could make a lot of money if he bought them and handed the reigns to people that said they had creative vision. This had mixed results, depending on who you ask.
I think you missed a key dynamic. As the opportunities to break new grounddry up and it becomes harder to advance and there's more money/momentum the feedback loops break down. People start to be rewarded for conforming to the expectations of the current movement consensus. That's when you get Loyalists. Loyalists are the opposite of Heresiarchs and their followers. They not only dogmatically follow a pro-movement ethos but they actively purge and purity-spiral people who are not sufficiently devoted or who smell too much like Heresiarchs.
In the early days you pushed things forward by improving the movement, having interesting ideas, offering actionable criticism and then executing, and so on. As that becomes harder (and you need to be a genius) you can instead get ahead by unswerving loyalty and attacking the heresiarchs, effectively reassuring people in power. And people who look kind of like heresiarchs which creates space by clearing out competition.
This produces a more orthodox but less interesting kind of thought. It's easier to be a loyalist and it gives you a chance to create new virgin territory by invoking what amount to purity spirals. Yes, you might not be able to align AI as well as that guy. But you can find that time he said that maybe AI alignment wasn't the most important thing ever and he needs to be purged! (Whether this example happens I can't say. But you get the concept.)
This hardens the organization, ossifies it. This can be good if it really has found the one true path. But usually it's actually a trap. One that's especially hard to detect for true believers. And a worse trap than the heresiarchs.
Some of the heretics want to burn everything down but most of them are reformers who just want to make their own ideas dominant. But Loyalists force them out of the movement and the movement itself into increasingly rigid forms of thinking. In the process of making the movement pure it destroys its immune system. And then the question becomes: did the movement amass enough money and power in its earlier stages to maintain itself as a mature organization, driven more by momentum than by innovation? Or does this ossified shell die?
It's not only when things get harder to improve the movement, and long before you need to be a genius, that you can get a Loyalist problem. The thing is that there are many people who think the most fun thing to do in this world is to defend-the-X from the rabble. So you get people, I think you would call Loyalists saying "Stop wasting the leaders' time with your insights, you clearly haven't been around here long enough to know anything worth knowing, blah blah pay your dues, plus your ideas are radically different from what we are already committed to doing." All of this can go on behind the scenes, leaving the leaders scratching their heads and wondering "Where have all the cool, new, different ideas gone? We used to have lots, what happened?" -- What has happened is that the people who have such ideas are getting silenced.
Agreed. Ultimately, I think erring on the side of favoring critics is probably the right call because the natural inclination of most people is to do the opposite. Personally, I think when you think you're so open minded that you'll take any criticism non-ideologically and just haven't heard any of value lately is when you know you're deeply hemmed in by Loyalists.
"plus your ideas are radically different from what we are already committed to doing"
I think this is inevitable, though; you necessarily reach a stage of having to say this in order to accomplish anything at all. At that point I think branching off is the only solution, even if everyone's genuinely dedicated and acting in good faith.
Getting overly attached to the stew-of-innovation-and-brainstorming stage seems analogous to someone who's addicted to the initial dating part of a relationship. There's no harm in enjoying it, but wanting to stay there is pathological and damages your ability to have anything at all in the long term.
Sometimes this happens, indeed. But stagnation happens, too, as well as 'let's organise this thing properly (i.e the way the speaker wants it) and take all the joy out of it'.
My impression is that the catholic church has a lot of experience with such conundrums and, with a hair-raising history of trial and error, somehow got along.
Arguably the Church has had the Holy Spirit for protection and second the Church invented "peer review" ( Paul thinks he had some ideas and they haul him back to Jerusalem to discuss - same idea with councils).
But if a movement changes its ideas all the time, what does it even stand for?
Is ossification a bug or a feature? Every institution was once a new, fresh perspective on changing the world.
If EA ossifies, it'll be right/wrong in a very particular way, that is still novel compared to what existed before. It'll usefully compete with all the other ossified institutions in the mimetic warfare between conventional, established ideas. It will be tantalazingly right and infuriatingly wrong for the people, that will in response to its perceived inadequacy start something new and better (in their opinion, of course).
Something not mentioned is that when the people who are doing this cool new thing because this is a cool thing that I want to do for its own sake (and, incidentally, I might get some status from it, even though I don't care about such things very much, because I don't see any way to stop this) begin to be approached in numbers in the group by the people who are doing this cool new thing because they can get status from it, and are precisely drawn to it because it will generate status for them, and status is what they care about more than anything or most anything in the world) -- Gresham's law kicks in.
Many of the cool people *leave* because they cannot stand to be around people who *aren't* in it for its own sake.
I'm sick of starting cool groups, companies, etc which I have to leave when it stops being about the things I love and care about, done by people I like more than a little, and starts being about giving status to people I am at best indifferent to, and often dislike, and who often take a strong dislike to me because, for as long as I can hold out, I will try to flatten the status levels which cuts into their prestige.
If you haven't looked on the creation of status as an undesirable outcome that needs limiting, you may not have ended up in a situation where the first person to drive you and other likeminded out of your group gets to keep all the chips. And that is one place where the psychopaths thrive.
This is exactly right. At any given point in time, there's a bunch of pre-movements in pre-cycle, and most of them only attract people interested in the ideas of the movement itself rather than the status (since there's really no status to be gained at this point anyway). On the other hand, there would also be a movement or two in the beginning of their cycle, and people interested in getting status would flock to those (thinking it's the next big thing or whatever). These groups of people are not the same!
It's hard to know until after the status has arrived that this was a good thing to get involved with a short time before, but it is possible that writing a substack may work out this way.
Then how do the status-seekers flood the cool new thing? Or is there just enough status-seekers flooding everything that whenever any of them hit it big they've already been infected?
Also isn't writing a substack just giving money/status to the people who already hopped on the "write a blog" subculture a few years ago and not minting new celebrities?
There are enough status-seekers to flood everything.
The 'write a blog' subculture generally produced articles for free. Maybe you could get paid for clicks, and maybe you could set up your blog so that you could use your reader's machines to mine cryptocurrency .... but probably not. The notion of directly subscribing to journalists is becoming more and more attractive. The next big thing? Only time will tell.
Right, the write a blog subculture did it only for (status | art | joy), substack is normalizing paying for it. But are any of the substack stars / success stories people who are not already leveraging preexisting status? Such as through having previously created a blog or news site?
https://subredditstats.com/ shows the subreddits with the highest % follower increase over the last month, week and day. Part of reddit's special charm is the quantification of status, so if you wanted to play that game, the "month" column shows where your time could probably be best invested.
I have to say, though, none of these subreddits look particularly interesting or wholesome. But when an important new fad arises, I'm sure it's reflected in these stats pretty early.
Seen this in a political movement. What was absolutely shocking is how fast it went through the stages once it got to success. It was basically a long grind of ~10 years to get legitimacy, a relatively short burst of success and very rapid expansion to become a national/parliamentary party (around one year)... and 6 months after the elections the energies already started focusing inwards, with everything blowing up and getting completely "taken over by sociopaths" before the 1 year mark. Romania, 2016/17, USR.
Scott' description here is pretty spot on. What I can add is that strong and stable leadership might change the pattern, especially if it has some form of sanctity. May be why religious and ideological organizations thrive more than secular ones. There will always be pressure to go for status seeking inside the org, but if it's either hopeless (with strong leadership) or even better, hopeless and heretical, then you just put a lid on it and use the extra pressure to force expansion and object-level results.
In my example above leadership turned out to be an unexpectedly weak point, and once the inward status race started, there wasn't much hope to do anything else. You could try to do good work, but without getting aligned with the right faction (or at least a faction), at the next power shuffle you'll end up just not getting an eligible spot, even while being literally the most active member of parliament in history (happened), or having great results but being replaced by a glorified intern in very fair internal elections (also happened).
Trying to speculate and model what would have happened with strong enough leadership... and I still see problems. Even if the absolute top status level is not available, there is still pressure to turn inwards for the next few upper levels (I'm reminded of the quip "All politics is internal"). Leadership needs to be not just unassailable, but strong enough to bash heads and force either a clear process, or some form of Sanctity / alignment that makes too much internal focus something that Just Isn't Done.
That's a huge advantage older orgs have over new: the power system is old and ossified enough, almost a bureaucracy. It's true, the best hope is "a position commensurate to your talent and diligence", which means on average you get less. But even if the management may be less competent than you, you get the guarantee that your peers won't be fighting you for status - they'll at most be competing with you, more or less fairly.
The tragedy here is that how passionately people feel about the Cause is not helping at all, without also having a mechanism to turn this Belief into negentropy. The only thing I can think of, that can turn a young org's energies outwards, is an unassailable central figure. And it needs to be unassailable, not just powerful, because he/she's the lid that keeps the pressure up and outwards.
Thanks for sharing. I think the Sweden Democrats is an example of a rapidly growing political organization were strong leadership managed to keep things from falling apart (yet...). Much to the mainstreams dismay (plenty of people have predicted or hoped for a collapse by now). A nice comparison is Ny Demokrati, another right-wing populist party that was 20 years earlier, which fell apart fast after it's first successful election.
The big problem of the Pirate parties is that while they have had a lot of important things to say about intellectual property, privacy etc. their image was still connected mainly, as the name says, to online piracy... which wasn't a problem only in the sense that it creates an image of criminality or frivolity but also that it happened just at the point when Steam, Spotify, Netflix etc. came to partially replace piracy and most importantly made it lose its cultural cachet as a skill everyone needed to know to easily access the world's content at a moment's notice.
Sure, Pirate parties still exist and have had momentary successes (Iceland, Czech Republic etc.) but as far as I know those have been quite momentary and without that much staying power.
Some say that the (Swedish) Pirate Party rolled a hard left/SJW and died, and that this was mostly a top down decision by the leadership and pretty unpopular with the base. I don't know how true it is. They were also largely ignored in the media which didn't help. It would be interesting to read more about its rise and fall.
I think that being a strong leader may be necessary but is not sufficient. At least, some of my early failures seem not to have been because I wasn't strong enough as a leader, but because the people who wanted to co-opt my organisation knew precisely how to do this, whereas, aside from shooting them, I didn't know what to do. I've become better at this, and ... in case anybody is nodding here and saying 'sounds like me' ... the most important thing I have learned is that I need to train a successor leader, early. At some point, and sooner than you would expect, the leaders of the group will spend all their time in internal and external politics and social relations. If this is something you dislike doing, which cuts into the time you have for thinking and other things you like -- wave! wave! -- you need to have somebody set up to do this which you can back with the full extent of your authority. Otherwise, I promise you, you will get somebody else's leadership, and you probably won't like it.
Thinking of a few 'rises and falls' I've observed, and this advice rings very true. The presence of the visionary's consigliere, even if they're not necessarily a successor, goes a long way.
Oftentimes, successful political parties are ones that manage to incorporate the political subcultural churn into their own structures. Ie. new political movements might start their own parties or might operate in established parties; if an established party can open its doors and offer influence to a new political movement, it can get new activists and stay current in the political sphere. The activists, in turn, benefit from the old power structures and bureaucracy - not only in having models for getting things done, but butting heads with the old power structures can also separate the wheat from the chaff and show who really has the (spiritual) wherewithal required to get things done.
Of course, the danger is then getting internal conflict (what if you're a party whose traditional support comes from industrial workers, but you're now incorporating environmental activists?) - if you can manage this tension well you get progress (solutions that are suitable for both industrial workers and environmentalists), but if you don't, you just get your party riven apart.
"if you can manage this tension well you get progress (solutions that are suitable for both industrial workers and environmentalists), but if you don't, you just get your party riven apart."
From an outsider's perspective, something like this (both sides, actually) seems to have happened to the New Labour party in the UK. An ambitious new leader attempted to fuse the old faction, industrial workers, with a new faction, the predominantly-urban middle class. At first it worked and progress was achieved, then the party was riven apart and crippled because the middle class faction totally outmaneuvered the working class faction and turned the Labour party into "the Liberal Democrats, but big!".
"The only thing I can think of, that can turn a young org's energies outwards, is an unassailable central figure. And it needs to be unassailable, not just powerful, because he/she's the lid that keeps the pressure up and outwards." This is the exact principle that pro-monarchist thinkers used to justify monarchy. I can't remember now if it was Burke or Carlyle or someone else who said on the occasion of the murder of Louis XVI that the revolutionaries had not just killed the king's person but the entire structure of legitimacy, inculcated through ages, and that the French people would now be wholly ungovernable since every man would think *he* could wear the golden hat and begin to scheme against the guy wearing it right now, who after all was no different from himself, a former baker or cobbler or something. Assailable, if you like.
Fair enough, and will lead to some uncomfortable introspection later on :)
But I do want to point out that Planned Parenthood seems to work fine without a monarch. I'd guess that some level of bureaucracy is sufficient to make sure things don't go haywire.
"But I do want to point out that Planned Parenthood seems to work fine without a monarch."
Sure, but that undermines your original claim, as (if I read you correctly) you observe.
Or, looked at a different way, Planned Parenthood just had its shit blown open by the unelected Nine Monarchs of United America, so how fine is it working really? Clearly their bureaucracy was no protection for them when it came down to the wire.
Or you could put another twist on it and say, is not the very perceived assailability of the positions of those nine great lords the motor behind much of the political strife in the land of America today? And would not the peasantry be calmer if they thought of the pronouncements of this royal Court as the untouchable commands of supreme beings wholly beyond and above themselves, rather than as the wicked actions of wicked men, the way they clearly do now?
Or maybe Planned Parenthood just isn't that important in the sense of wielding social and actual power, so it naturally lacks the dynamics you observed in political parties.
The original claim was much smaller than how US justice system works long term :) We were just talking about young organizations that grow rapidly. I don't think it's safe to generalize from this. It may work, but it definitely doesn't necessarily work.
I think that's correct and a major reason for the Terror, but not an intrinsic quality of monarchies. The American revolutionaries shook off a king but were quick, smart and perhaps lucky enough to put in place a Constitution and a stable enough government that saw them through the first few decades. That translates into legitimacy. The thing people defer to doesn't have to be a person. The thing is that if you tear it down there's a short "everything goes" period in which whatever is new has to earn that legitimacy and subversion seems no big deal since anyway you're just subverting some newfangled thing no one cares about yet.
>David Chapman’s Geeks, MOPs, and Sociopaths In Subculture Evolution is rightfully a classic, but it doesn’t match my own experience.
IMO Chapman's article exhibits one of the worst trends in the rationalist community: models that sound so profound and convincing that you can't tell if they're actually *true*.
My initial reaction was "Wow, this is brilliant! I see the matrix now!" Then I thought about the subcultures I'm familiar with: his model didn't fit any of them. Yeah, Chapman's mechanism makes sense and there may be elements of truth in it. Or it could just be a castle in the sky.
My own experience: subcultures generally die because the soil that supported them no longer exists.
For example, tape-traders. People used to record songs off the radio onto cassettes and share them at school. Or they'd stay up late and record anime off obscure channels (you'd get "tape kings" with literal mountains of Sailor Moon and Yu Yu Hakusho recordings in their basement, hand-labeled and everything. They held onto them like a hoard of dragon gold).
These subcultures died a long time ago. Was it because of some invasion of sociopaths? No, it's because PirateBay and 1337x made them obsolete.
The same for me when I tried to apply it. I am sure this is one of the ways it plays out, but it doesn't seem reasonable to believe this is something that broadly applies.
"IMO Chapman's article exhibits one of the worst trends in the rationalist community: models that sound so profound and convincing that you can't tell if they're actually *true*."
Rings true to my ears, but I don't recall any good examples of this trend. Do you have any?
I feel like this about simulacrum levels. I acquired a gut-level understanding of the idea, and I'm sure something like this is actually one of the fundamental driving forces of society. It feels *really important*. But the fit to observed phenomena, as well as the details of the theory (why exactly 4 levels?) has always struck me as somewhat tortured.
Another example is how the community talks about AI timelines. Some assumptions (that I guess were originally made in deliberately simplified "wrong but useful" models) have become ubiquitous jargon. For example, the idea that "compute" can be treated as a perfectly fungible, almost physical quantity. But this is only true when comparing relatively similar algorithms to each other.
Things like Alicorn's Living Luminously, Mencius Moldbug's Cathedral, Nick Land's Accelerationism, PJ Eby's Perceptual Control Theory, Roon's wordcel/shape-rotator theory (which to be fair was partly meant as a joke), plus various pick up artist crap from the old days.
I'm not saying any of this stuff is wrong. It's just hard to assess as clearly *right*.
I find it interesting how when Chapman is popular, he is quoted as an outside expert on why the rationalists are wrong, but when he does something unpopular, suddenly he becomes a representative of the worst trends in the rationalist community. Remember, kids, you can only be a post-rationalist if you are cool!
But I agree that there is an aspect of "who cares about the territory, this map is so beautiful" here. Like, hey, this model allows you to call "sociopaths" all people you do not like or do not agree with, can it get better than this?
Formerly exciting new things become obsolete. Some people move on, looking for new frontiers. Some people keep doing the same and expect to keep their former status forever. Some people adapt to the new situation.
For example, atheism was edgy at some moment, when open criticism of religion was outside the Overton window. But now we heard it all. Great books were written on the topic, and most people who care have already read them. There still remain some things to do, but they can probably be done more efficiently under separate banners (e.g. gay rights, education of evolution, criticism of islam). Mere "we don't believe in God and we think the Bible is silly" is not going to surprise anyone anymore.
Perhaps the sociopaths are always with us, but in the postcycle phase they are the ones at the top, exposed by the withdrawal of the enthusiasts for the original subculture?
You think there are no sociopaths? Crypto is 90% sociopaths and it fits every point of your description perfectly. I could believe EA and new atheism had no sociopaths because the average member was too smart.
> you can’t just walk in and argue that YOU should be the black belt and the master should defer to YOU <
This is a common misperception about martial arts and karate in particular - that there is something very special about the achievement of a black belt.
It actually more like the academic equivalent of an undergraduate degree. To a 12 year old it might be extremely impressive, but in a meeting of full professors, a first degree denotes not much more than a basic introduction to a subject.
Wikipedia puts it rather well in its first paragraph about black belt ability -
< In contrast to the "black belt as master" stereotype, a black belt commonly indicates the wearer is competent in a style's basic technique and principles >
Another way of looking at it is that someone who has just achieved a black belt (after maybe two or three years of practice) is much nearer a complete beginner than a master.
Based on this, I'm going to advocate for changing my department's undergraduate degree program from "Bachelor of Science" to "Black Belt in Science". Accurate, way cooler, and not seemingly sexist!
I've seen in the wild an explicit comparison of black belt to PhD: you've got all the basics down, and an advanced understanding, and are starting to make serious contributions to the state of the art. This was from an average-8-year black belt school. "Master", sometimes associated with a red belt, is sometimes a rank, but sometimes a simple recognition that you're now teaching students on your own (with "grandmaster" being when you've successfully taught a master, a direct analogy to "grandparent").
And not a response to you, just wanted to drop this off somewhere, but that thing about having someone come in and declare themselves master due to superior fighting skills? That has happened in the past, and has a Very Bad Reputation. For reasons which should be obvious!
Just adding a "ditto" to this, and elaborating that by the admission of most traditional martial artists I know and work with, there are no TRUE masters of any martial style anymore- that would require you to be someone who's actually spent most of your life using martial arts for their intended purpose (causing harm to others), and even the most skilled kendo practitioner these days hasn't even killed a single man with a sword.
In Japan, they've actually retired the highest two ranks of achievement in their sword, bow, and polearm schools in reflection of this.
Can you explain more about this? In the old days, how would martial arts masters go about having real fights? You go to a monastery or something, you get trained in kung fu, and then what?
It depends on where and when, but duels, war, and just plain murdering people would be the main avenues. In 16th-17th century Europe nobles famously dueled each other at the drop of a hat, sometimes literally, and there were also some pretty long wars. The fencing master Salvator Fabris probably accepted a contract to murder the king of Sweden by participating in a play as an actor, then leaping offstage during a fight scene and stabbing the king, but the whole thing got called off. There's a famous French anecdote of a guy refusing to let a young man marry his daughter because "you can hardly even call yourself an adult yet, go away and kill three or four people, then come back and we'll talk". And so on. Earlier in European history the weapon-bearing classes were also not averse to solving their interpersonal problems with weapons, no surprise there, and the swordmaster Fiore de'i Liberi says he had to fight other swordmasters because he refused to teach them his art[1].
In China, martial artists most often took jobs as security for merchant caravans and other travelers, defending against bandits; this is the profession of Yu Shu Lien in Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, for example (not really made clear in the film, but it's there if you look). Since the other big option was to be a bandit, these people would end up fighting each other all the time, and they also seem to have frequently switched sides. Working as a bodyguard for some prominent person is a kind of subcategory of this which was also fairly common.
As 167 says, in Japan masters often sought each other out specifically in order to fight duels to test who was the strongest; lots of Japanese film and comics tropes are founded on this, such as "dojo busters". This especially happened in the 17th and 18th centuries, after the civil war had been definitively resolved; before that people still had a whole bunch of war to fight, so they did that instead (and in those days swordsmanship was generally less valued in the warrior class, although many people don't like to admit it).
The spread of effective firearms are what killed off a lot of dueling culture, and a lot of the Code Duello revolved around who could challenge whom and who had to respond to a challenge.
It simply would not do to have the Grand Duke's only son and heir ganked by some upstart, and it requires a lot less training to master firearms than edged weapons.
I imagine that a similar process took place in Asia.
In Asia, it had more to do with the warrior class being phased out into a bureaucratic position. There was very little of a code duello among the samurai (beyond the agreement that it was a coward's deed and crime to simply jump your enemy or assault him with your friends)- in fact, for hundreds of years there was rather the opposite in the form of the institution of "gekko-kujo" or "low-surpassing-high". If you were stronger than your lord and he was a worse governor than you, then your coup was not a coup, but instead legitimate succession (contingent on your ability to secure your own position, of course). Knowledge of this explains why the Sengoku period was so bloody and unstable.
I think it's actually highly doubtful that improvements in firearms had anything much to do with it, especially since most rapier and smallsword duels left people good and dead already. Besides, if the pistols had become too deadly, they could have just switched back to swords, as indeed happened in those parts and social classes of Europe where the practice did persist (the last duel I'm aware of was between two French politicians in 1967. It was filmed for a Pathé newsreel, and you can watch it on Youtube[1]). Rather, surviving documents (many people wrote volubly on this topic for a long time) indicate that it was part of the general gradual social shift from seeing violence as normal, sensible and pretty cool to thinking that violence is bad, actually, and we shouldn't have any. Very little surviving literature even mentions increasing mortality from pistols, whereas a *lot* mentions tedious post-Enlightenment moralizing about how wrong it is to deliberately harm another human being and blah blah, senseless waste of human life, blah blah. There's also a strong strain of decrying the stupid hypocrisy of dueling in the military being simultaneously forbidden on pain of prison and absolutely required to maintain one's respectability (refusing would actually get you cashiered for a coward) in the 19th century, where they kind of have a point.
Also of note, the Grand Duke's sons were getting ganked for a century+ before anybody successfully changed the social rules to put an end to it. Louis XIII tried to ban dueling because it was absolutely withering away his entire potential officers' corps, and it didn't work one damn bit. Marquesses and dukes' sons were absolutely dying like pigs all over the place. The fact that it was super inconvenient doesn't seem to have made a dent for a long time.
(And by the way, the Code Duello is specifically a late-18th-century Irish document, did not have wide application outside Ireland, and should not be used as shorthand or assumed to have been some sort of pan-European standard. Italians and Spaniards in the period probably didn't even know it existed.)
Well, for the skills of kenjutsu (swordplay), kyujutsu (archery), and yari/naginatajutsu (polearm fighting), it was more "You're instructed in the dojo alongside the rest of the warrior caste, and then you go out and fight bandits/religious zealots/other clans in the name of your lord." From there, it was an easy case of winnowing out the untalented through rather decisive means: the esteemed master Tsukahara Bokuden attained acknowledgement as a kensei (the superlative kenjutsu rank granted to the absolute greatest swordsmen in history, roughly translating as "saint of the blade") by fighting at least 20 publicized duels to the death and serving in 37 battles, killing over 200 men total. More importantly, of his six known injuries in his professional career, NONE OF THEM were caused by an enemy's blade touching him. That is what one might call a self-demonstrating level of skill.
Miyamoto Musashi, another famed kensei, fought over 61 duels in his life and likewise demonstrated similar feats of superlative skill.
In the case of the Shaolin monks, the answer would be "you train in a kung-fu style, are issued a spear and thick robe, and then you walk along the highway killing the many bandits who live in whatever remote province you live in because the monasteries that practice martial arts are all located in remote regions where there's very little military presence."
Alternatively, you get contracted as a bodyguard or mercenary because the temple needs upkeep.
If you're using "martial arts" to narrowly refer to "exclusively unarmed fighting styles"- most of those are a surviving mixture of ancient full-contact sports used for training in close combat, self-defense training for peasants, the "if you're in the mud and your sword breaks, here's how you hold off someone attacking you until you can steal his weapon/run away/your friends gut him with their spears" part of military instruction, and esoteric religious practices ultimately meant to make you immortal (this is where the Eastern association with unarmed combat and energy blasts comes from- the unarmed stuff was believed to allow its practitioners to cultivate their life-force to attain supernatural powers, with the ultimate goal of attaining a god-like state). Even there, many schools taught weapons alongside unarmed combat (T'ai chi ch'üan originally used a short blade and was an actual fighting art as well as calisthenics for Taoists for example. For another, there's Karate, which was part of the greater canon of Ryukyuan combat which included the tonfa, staff, and other specialized weapons favored by Ryukyuan nobility). Most modern schools thus either acknowledge this (like Okinawan karate, which has eliminated its highest ranks) or retreat into rather sad fantasies of martial-arts superpowers (like T'ai chi ch'üan, whose modern practitioners in China have wrapped themselves up in the mythos of qiggong and claims of supernatural powers- something the Chinese government has taken to enforcing with an iron rod as part of their program of cultural renewal).
All of this is to say that, if you're ever impressed with what some guy is doing in a HEMA or Kendo fight, remember: they're probably, at best, on the level of a slightly-above-average actual soldier in terms of skill and execution.
Couldn't have said it better. The chinese esoteric practice came to a grinding halt in what was called the boxer uprising, when european soldiers killed lots of kung fu experts, not because they were more skilled anyhow, but by weaponry and organization.
Well, some of it did. The rest (minus the vestiges clinging on today) were subject to a rather aggressive purge by the Maoists during the Great Leap Forward, as all that Taoist nonsense about immortals living on secret mountains, abstaining from grain, and seeking immortality through a mixture of calisthenics, diet, herbalism, and (in some branches) free love was seen as very un-Maoist.
Ironically, the CCCP in modern days has moved away from this and now practically tries to identify themselves with the Yellow Turbans (a group of Taoist proto-anarchists whose short-lived rebellion and subsequent insurgency was one of the first signs of major instability in the end of the Han) as part of their general policy of "we're just the culmination of every populist movement in China up until now, so if you oppose us you support every evil thing every emperor did."
I don't think all taijiquan practitoners in modern China are like that? I studied Chen family taijiquan for a while, and it was very down-to-earth. There was no hint whatsoever that anyone thought that anyone had supernatural powers, not even the one of the "four tigers of Chen village" who was my teacher's teacher. He was just a superb martial artist. I can't rule out that that's something that practitioners talk about only in private or only with senior students or only with ethnic Han, but there was no hint of it at my level.
Also, I can't speak for other styles, but Chen taijiquan is very much a martial art, including punching and kicking. Notably, they do not teach applications, not even how to form a fist, at least not to lower-level students like myself. But anyone with a modest amount of outside experience in striking or standing-grappling should be able to figure out parts of it. And from the oral history I got, I can see how other styles of taiji turned into ... what they, well, seem like to me. (My pithy mixed metaphor would be that Chen-style is whole-grain martial arts, whereas Yang, Sun, Wu, and Wu are nutritional supplements.)
>"I don't think all taijiquan practitoners in modern China are like that?"
And not all HEMA fighters in America have a deep interest in history. Regardless, there are men like Wei Lei and Yi Long who make such claims, and when honest fighters such as Xiu Xiaodong rightly criticize them for absurd claims and handily demonstrate the non-existence of their superhuman powers by defeating them, they are subject to persecution and humiliation for "disrespecting Chinese culture" (as if respectable Chinese culture should consist of making fraudulent claims such as "I can defeat ten trained men at once using only one strike each because my qiggong is that powerful").
> And not all HEMA fighters in America have a deep interest in history.
But I try to pay attention to the ones who do. (Or tried, anyway. It's been a while. Is Guy Windsor still awesome like that?)
As for China, that's a huge can of worms. The CCP corrupts everything it touches, and the main thing I don't like about Chen taijiquan is that it's so cozy with the CCP. (One could say similar things about Buddhism and the old Chinese empire, or about Christianity and the Roman Empire, but I think the CCP is distinctly worse.) I hadn't heard of any of these people before, but Xiu Xiaodong has had to go into hiding to escape from being attacked on the street? That's bad. China has a serious problem with xenophobic nationalism. I've seen the CCP downplay this and try to suppress it, which normally I would give credit for, but since this is the CCP, I have to wonder how much of it was their doing in the first place.
In China, on the civilian side, one way this sometimes happened was Lei Tai. My impression is that this was sometimes similar to modern boxing or MMA, where matches were arranged beforehand, but sometimes it was a more daring announcement that you'd take all comers. Sometimes formal, sometimes informal, sometimes legal, sometimes illegal, sometimes with rules, sometimes without. Sometimes people died, and sometimes that was intentional, but mostly they lived.
On the Chinese monastic side, the oral tradition I've heard is that at least some of the Shaolin monasteries made a point of forcing students (maybe just younger ones) to leave after they got to black sash level. They were supposed to go out, see the world, test their practice (ideally Buddhist, but alas sometimes martial), and maybe return if they decided that that's what they really wanted to do for the rest of their life, or maybe settle down and start a family instead. I expect that this, if true, contributed to a lot of stories of wandering martial arts monks, especially ones who have a less-than-firm grasp of Buddhism. But from my understanding, the senior monks rarely left, much like monks in other non-martial monasteries. That said, the use of martial arts as a meditative focus in a pragmatic context clearly leads to questions such as "is this true" and "how can I know if this is true", which after other avenues of research are exhausted leads to the occasional martial arts equivalent of the EA criticism challenge.
I don't know much about the Chinese warrior aristocracy or what they did. Oral tradition is that most of the military input into the monastic system was from peasant soldiers who left the army (one way or another) and decided (for one reason or another) that a Buddhist monastery was a great place to spend the rest of their life. So in a sense they were looking for the opposite kind of thing?
China's fairly notable in that its aristocracy were mostly bureaucrats and scholars, not warriors. There were periods of notable exception, but these were usually periods where having power and NOT being able to fight wasn't really possible (see the Three Kingdoms Period) or periods of foreign rule (like the Yuan dynasty).
In fact, periods like the Three Kingdoms are the REASON for this: Chinese dynasties looked at what happened when they allowed power to concentrate into the hands of warlords, saw that the answer was "they inevitably become power-hungry and start fighting each other", and decided to try and make it as hard as possible for the nobility to directly control the army. This, of course, led to its own problems (like the Song kneecapping the military's potential threat to Imperial control so much that the Mongols could essentially steamroll them without any trouble), but HAS meant that many of the classic problems of feudalism (revolts by uppity nobles, constant weird expansionist wars to keep the gentry happy) didn't really happen in China.
Considering how often I feel the need to say some version of “I’m not, like, one of __those__ members of the Rationalist movement, I just sort of think some of their ideas make sense sometimes.”, I'd suppose we're firmly in at least Stage 3 now.
Also, I can't remember what blog the original reference came from, but I thought this was a somewhat better version of Chapman's article (despite being really wrong in different ways): https://status451.com/2016/09/15/social-gentrification/
The Rationalist movement needs to find their next big thing to do, or get some of their existing things to a dramatically higher level.
From my perspective, the things that currently work are the following: -- People at MIRI and other organizations produce an alignment paper once in a while. People at CFAR work on their rationality techniques. Scott has a successful blog. Less Wrong is also a decent community blog. There is a spin-off movement called Effective Altruism. There are many local meetups all over the world. A few YouTube channels and podcasts with rationality(-adjacent) content. Probably a few more things I forgot at the moment.
Some things that were tried, seem to have either failed or remained very small, but could possibly be tried again in the future with greater success: -- Raising the sanity waterline, i.e. bringing the rationality teachings to the masses. Groups of rationalists living together, using their rationality to optimize their offline lives, e.g. homeschooling their kids together. A rationality dojo that could actually visibly transform its members into more amazing beings. Arbital. HPMOR (was great, but is a finished project). Again, probably forgot a few things.
New things I can imagine happening, which would not be very far from what already exists, but would still feel like something new and exciting happens: -- Making some "AI alignment for the masses" educational tool, like Khan Academy. A great book on rationality that would actually become very famous outside the rationality movement. A theory of human values that most people would actually agree on. A technical demo for extracting coherent extrapolated preferences from people. Rationality meetups becoming an order of magnitude larger, having a permanent place and schedule, and paid organizers. A rationality YouTube channel with diverse content, similar to Joe Rogan Experience and similarly popular. More spin-off movements. Taking over Mensa, and changing its mission to "passing an IQ test was just the first step, now we are going to train you how to actually use your intelligence". Designing a rational education (not just education of rationality, but education of the kind of things that schools typically teach only way better), and establishing a school that actually teaches it successfully. Amazing software projects designed by rationalists that work much better than current clickbait-optimized and stupidity-accelerating social networks. Movies with rationalist protagonists who optimize the world successfully. Etc.
Of that list, Ratflix is the only thing I can actually see realistically possibly affecting the masses. Everything else is too niche, too political, too heterodox. At absolute minimum, the first step would have to be addressing the current climate of anti-intellectualism, anti-expertise; just because Rationalists are more correct than others* doesn't mean they're any more likely to get listened to. Egghead wonks are indistinguishable. It really comes back to the average Rationalist not being willing (constitutionally able?) to play hardball, or otherwise act sociopathically...even though Niceness, Community, and Civilization are a big appeal of this little garden, outside the walls, the Dark Arts reign supreme. If HPMOR taught me anything, it's that the Dark Arts are an asymmetrical weapon, and we're at a disadvantage for neither using them in general nor widely training in direct counters. (One might generalize this to "Rationality focuses too much on improving the individual mind, not how that mind relates to other minds".)
I think there is a very good counterpoint that anyone who takes up the Devil's tools to fight the Devil quickly forgets what their goals were to start with (or, more cynically, someone who's going to use every trick in the book to seize power probably cares more about seizing power than whatever ideology he professes).
Cant't dismantle the Master's house using the Master's tools, huh? Fair enough. I'd still like to see more concrete evidence of the Heavenly approach actually succeeding though...the diversity we do get inside Rat spaces always seems heavily confounded by selection effects. By forswearing the Dark Arts and already mostly being a turn-off to normies, it sorta just feels like intellectual monasticism. Removed from worldly concerns, perfecting ourselves at the cost of losing touch with everything outside the walls. Even the more direct-action spinoffs like EA have a bad habit of falling down esoteric rabbitholes that blunt their effectiveness and alienate people.
It's sorta appealing in one sense if we just target elites, since blah blah politics mostly only responds to elite and UMC interests blah. But by definition that can never include the masses, and they way outnumber us. I think it's easy to forget that...a sort of Shut Up And Multiply blind spot. If we're bad at mind-killing politics (lol, Carrick Flynn effect) and bad at social dark arts, that genuinely doesn't leave too many other avenues of influence open. Rationality is about winning, after all; cheating is technique. If we seize power and then forget to stop using DA, that doesn't seem meaningfully worse or different than what already happens in the status quo. At least we'll be better about aligning incentives against Goodharting?
This feels like what everyone who has ever ended up ruling an extremely bad regime has told themselves.
If the techniques of rationalism have led one to the conclusions of Callicles, why did we bother with all that and not just be Callicles? (no room for status expansion?)
I mean...I feel like that's not a terribly inaccurate summary of the Outside View regarding Rationalism? A lot of frankly rather smug individuals asseting their right to rule via superior <s>philosophy<s/> intellectual prowess...okay, yes, also actual philosophy sometimes, have you heard the Good Epistemic News about consequential utilitarianism. But outside their insular communities, time and again, they relearn the lesson of "no plan survives contact with the enemy". I don't think it's an accident that the big success stories like prediction markets, MIRI, EA, etc. are still nearly unheard of outside the community. And the few times they are, it doesn't tend to be terribly positive overall. When the original Rightful Caliph is Eliezer Yudkowsky, a walking trope of narcissistic hubris, that can't help but trickle down to everything else...
So, yes, the "why did we bother with all that?" is a salient question. The most charitable interpretation I've heard also came from outside the community. I can't remember the writer or the exact piece, but they described the Ratsphere as a sort of group therapy. It's no accident that we attract so many disaffected nonconformists, autists, LGBT, heterodox heretics, etc...more than any particular __outwards__ pressure to repel normies, there's a lot of __inwards__ pressure to select for those whom typical groups leave behind. Someone who can get their philosophical satisfaction from Leftist ideology has a lot less to gain here. Someone who effectively fights akrasia and finds meaning through their religion has a lot less to gain here. And so on.
It's an Island of Misfit Toys in the intellectual Archipelago, and we do take good care of each other, which is noble and commendable cause falling through society's cracks sucks. But it's still ultimately an island - the separation is Bug Not Feature. And while there's noble intentions in wanting to bring the (sometimes novel!) effective techniques and therapy to the lost masses, I think it runs into that particular roadblock. If they'd have worked, they'd probably already be here. You're either in or out - if unwilling to buck self-constraints on exercise of power, then one shouldn't also endlessly grumble and hang-wring about the low Sanity Waterline. Because why would we expect it to fix itself if the masses don't have our techniques, or equivalent substitutes?
Okay, so I have to ask; What observation or observations would falsify this model? Because I suspect we could find some internicean strife in many small groups and emerging cultures.
1. Diagnosing sociopaths takes a fair bit of doing. It's not something a novice (like myself) can achieve just by talking casually with someone a few times. So I'm hesitant to say that ST is an outcome that can be measured objectively enough to falsify anything.
2. But lets say, for the sake of argument, that we jump that big hurdle. How common would it have to be to falsify the theory?
I think the sociopaths very much depend on the nature of the movement. For instance, I think something like EA is fairly 'sociopath-resistant' just because the movement is about finding the most rational ways to help people. The incentives are for finding smart ways of helping people and exploring ideas around that.
On the contrary, movements that are explicitly political or financial (think crypto and antitrust right now) are more likely to attract sociopaths because the paths to status are more direct, the status rewards are much greater, and there is much more incentive for bullshitting and/ or bullying people.
Crypto currently incentivises bullshitting normal people to get them to make your richer. Antitrust currently incentivises harassing big tech at every turn even when it makes everyone (including themselves) miserable.
In short, incentives determine the propensity for sociopathic capture.
Worth noting that EA is not merely an effort to be efficient; at this point it's a full subculture with some well-funded institutions, well-known idiosyncrasies, etc.
Like with Rao, I think so too with Chapman the Sociopath label is off (actually in almost any non-medical context where I've ever seen sociopath or psychopath used the term didn't fit - people just seem to have a hard time resisting the temptation to use it).
What's true is that when a subculture get's big it starts to attract people interested in power, money or status rather than the thing itself. That will lead to professionalisation, mainstreaming and dilution of the subculture. But calling all of that sociopathy seems like a really big stretch to me. By the same logic, anybody who chooses their career with any consideration for the job market, earning potential or potential impact would be a sociopath.
I think another thing that happens in a cycle is that the early fanatics are usually young people full of passion and idealism. As they get older and start to settle down, they themselves try to make the whole thing more stable and businesslike, something that can support their family. In Chapmans terminology the geek becomes the sociopath. Again, the label doesnt fit the category.
I think another important phenomenon is what we'd call dilution by casuals.
Anything that's sufficiently interesting to attract obsessive fans is also sufficiently interesting to attract a far larger cadre of casual fans; people who kinda like the thing but also have a lot of other things going on. "Oh sure I like punk music, I like everything except rap and country".
Invariably, the hardcore fans will absolutely hate the casual fans for not liking the thing in the "right" way. I think they'll often mistake this for "those filthy casuals are only joining us for the status", which I think is usually wrong because there's not usually that much status to be gained from these sorts of things... they're joining because they like the thing, but they're failing to turn into a hardcore fan like _you_ because they don't like the thing that much.
I think most people's hobbies never really leave Phase 1, and they're probably better off that way.
For example, one of my hobbies is playing Ultimate. I don't care about whether Ultimate is taking over as a major sport - it's popular enough already that I never have trouble finding people to play with. (There are semi-professional Ultimate teams, but they're not growing very much.)
I don't even care that much about improving my own playing skills - I've almost certainly plateaued. I play because it's fun, because it's healthy exercise, and because I've made a few friends. And most of the people I play with have the same attitude.
On the other hand, one of my hobbies that didn't work out well was writing on Quora. It was a great experience until around 2018 because few of the Top Writers took it seriously. But when the company tried to become profitable, they wrecked the existing culture.
So the lesson here is that if you want a simple, fun, drama-free life, you should look for things you enjoy that are low-status and have little chance of ever changing. And definitely stay away from political movements and from anything that's backed by VCs.
A side note: my son got interested in ultimate and so I watched a couple of our hometown’s semipro team on YouTube with him. It’s a really good spectator sport, very entertaining. As a sideline to Scott’s argument, it will be interesting to track whether an accessible and exciting marginal sport like Ultimate can gain an audience and get big.
To shine Scott’s approach in a direction he maybe he hadn’t thought of, what about the early days of football? College and pro football emerged in the 1910s and 1920s, going from a disreputable, marginalized sport to one that in the 1920s produced national celebrities. It’s probably analogous to Planned Parenthood, Scott’s example, where a movement produced hierarchical organizations with access to funding. So football and feminism both resisted the arc Scott describes because they were financially successful and allowed maturing young people to “move to the suburbs” and gain financial stability.
This is a great post (thanks Scott!) and one that bears much further thought.
I assume the semipro team you watched is in the AUDL, right?
It's funny to me that you mention how it's a really good spectator sport. The AUDL deliberately made lots of rule changes to make the sport more watchable, some of which were pretty controversial.
I wouldn't call the creators of the AUDL "sociopaths", but David Chapman's framework captured the basic idea. Leaving the pejoratives aside, the thesis is that the nature of an activity usually has to change for it to go mainstream, in ways that make the founding members feel unhappy, or at least ambivalent.
I think Scott missed this part - he made it sound like everyone is still happy in the growth phase and there's no competition. That's not always the case.
I knew a guy when we were college age who was just obsessed with how Ultimate was "disrespected" and wanted it to be taken seriously by other athletes etc. And I always wanted to say to him... why? What will that get you, really? Right now you get to play a fun competitive game with other enthusiasts. You're not naive enough to hope to ever "go pro." So what does respect have to offer you?
I think for most college guys, the one way respect would help is for impressing girls.
At least according to stereotypes, the quarterback of a school's football team always gets any girl he wants. That probably doesn't happen for Ultimate players.
On a related note, Ultimate frisbee has been exploding in popularity lately in China. Perhaps we will see some of the phases in Scott's article play out there:
Oh man, this resonated. I used to write a lot on Quora, mostly on topics I was passionate about but which nobody at work was interested in, so it was an outlet of sorts. Like yours, my experience was wrecked by the changes.
I think the term "Sociopath" sets up too high a bar."status seeking relatively unscrupulous person" rolls terribly off the tongue, but would definitely describe a lot of people in these spaces whose intentions might not be unaligned with the movement.
Probably not super mind-blowing, but I think the sociopaths are more likely to show up if the nature of the thing provides a path to personal enrichment (like monetarily). They might not all be antisocial but they certainly are grifters.
"One way for this to happen is institutionalization. A movement rises. It founds some groups to promote its agenda. The fires of excitement die down, and the groups remain. Feminism is no longer as big a deal as it once was, but we still have NOW and Planned Parenthood. These institutions have stopped being social Ponzi schemes. You join them as a day job. You expect to work hard, and at best get a position commensurate to your talent and diligence. It’s not really worth criticizing the leadership, because everything happens through formal governance structures which are hard to affect. Most people who want to be feminists have already decided to support Planned Parenthood and not you. And you cannot take over Planned Parenthood unless you win over their Board of Directors, which you won’t."
This process and its impact on progressive institutions, particularly nonprofits, will be a big part of my next book. (Available in 2023 from Simon & Schuster!)
Book by Albert-László Barabási (2002) might be insightful, if we operationalize "subculture" as meaning a particular kind of "networked relationship".
I also think Scale: The Universal Laws of Life and Death in Organisms, Cities and Companies by Geoffrey West (2017) might useful to better describe the process of the growth and decline a subculture.
All of the sub-discussions here about calcification/true believers etc is really important too. Especially on a political/civilizational level.
All of the structures mentioned (the conferences, the journals, and so on) are institutions. And institutions at their core exist to stay the same. To perpetually stand firm on some core set of organizing principles. It applies to whatever institution you like--you are "instituting" something at a particular point in time and hoping that it will hold the line. Marriage, Boy Scouts, the church, the military, whatever.
This line of thinking is one of the bright lines of distinction between what we can loosely call "conservatives" and "liberals." In my case I am particularly in tune with this because I would rather conserve most things even if they are obsolete due to the aesthetic. And having that instinct gets one labelled [fill in the blank "ist" or "ophobe"]. It's not really any of those things, and comes from a good place in most cases.
However, things like the second amendment were instituted when the most powerful weapon on earth was an 8" ball that could knock down a wall and kill 2-3 people. This is the part where people like me must confront our nature to conserve, even if the proposed change is scary. It's just one example.
The "liberal" has another set of second and third-order effects and consequences to his internal drives that he must confront. To keep myself from going crazy I must, out of necessity assume they do that soul searching as well. Or else it becomes "they are trying to make America a communist/woke/totalitarian state with gulags and gas chambers for cis white males with jobs."
It sounds cliche, but the "truth" may be somewhere in the middle.
Well said. Speaking as a liberal feminist, I am constantly thinking of second/third order effects and trying to reconcile them with my core values. Am also constantly seeking new ideas and data to inform the soul searching (which is a reason I have followed SSC/ACX for so many years). I am as uncomfortable with declining fertility rates in WEIRD nations as I imagine you are with school shootings.
It’s unfortunate that there are so many loud voices in media who don’t appear to do this. The optimist in me who wants to leave a better world for my kid would like to believe that they are the minority across the board.
Yes. There is a very strong side of me that instinctively wants my children to have the EXACT same life, the EXACT same America I did, just on repeat. That's what makes me "conservative." I get that. But then I think about it really hard, and no, its not true.
I don't hate anyone. I want moral progress. Riding along the top of a moving snake with leftist wokeism on one side and rightist reactionary thought on the other is exhausting.
It’s exhausting. I agree. Wish I had any insight to offer here, but after getting fed up with the state of things, the only move that helps me is tossing the phone in a drawer and heading out for some gardening (…humanity’s first ever subculture?).
I wonder if mature professions follow this pattern. I’ve read (maybe here?) that 150 years ago, pretty much anyone who could read could get into law school, and practice law. Now you have to do five extracurricular activities to get into a good college, do volunteering and more activities in college while maintaining good grades to get into law school. Then get into good internships once you’re in law school etc.
Same with many other mature professions. What’s missing though, is the decline. And barring the collapse of society and/or the rule of law, I don’t imagine being a lawyer will ever be low status.
Other commenters seem to have more or less pointed out already that in this usage "sociopath" is a kind of pejorative label for a group rather than a literal diagnosis, but I'm surprised to see that nobody's mentioned the more obvious fact that *everybody who's in it for status* is a Sociopath in this model of subcultures. You're supposed (according to the implicit moral of this type of model, which I subscribe to) to be in a subculture for the thing in itself; *any amount* of using it instrumentally, as a means to status rather than an end in itself, makes you a Sociopath (or arguably I guess a MOP). All of the people you describe who join in phase three and are disappointed to find there's no free-floating status to harvest and upset that they're doomed to be low-status forever, rather than rejoicing that so many people share their special interest, are fuckups.
My own experience with the rationalist community, and political organisations is that a major factor is people having other things to do with their time that takes them away from the community, either not working on the same stuff anymore, or working on it in private. If you look at the main posters from the less wrong 'golden age' in the late 2000s early 2010s most don't post anymore. Not because of ideological schisms but because they had kids, or have jobs that take up most of their time and energy. Even if they're working on related areas it won't be in a publicly visible way (e.g someone who used to post about game theory and economics goes and works for a bank, they might be writing similar things but it's all internal). And while new people can replace them they're less enthusiastic.
It's a cliché that people are radicals when they're young, then settle down to do the same things as their parents. But it's a significant phenomenon
It sounds like your theory is that subcultures don't replace themselves - that once the original members get older and drift away, that's it. This sounds like it's probably true to different degrees in different subcultures. The rationalists seem like an especially likely case because people were attracted by EY's blogging, and then he mostly stopped blogging, and if new people came in they would have had to come from somewhere else.
My impression is that that probably *would* have happened, but that we didn't get that far before effective altruism became a super-big-deal and kind of swallowed rationalism and now there are lots of new EAs because they have great recruitment.
I think for other things these stories make less sense - for example, naively you would expect whatever made people learn karate in 1990 to continue making about the same percent of people learn karate now.
The meta level question is maybe why some self replace and some don't. Partly I think its a question of scale and cohesion (or lack of).
Individual Karate clubs and schools rise and fall and go out of business, but there are enough people who do Karate that new ones pop up to replace them. In part because Karate doesn't require a central organization to function. There's not a single president of Karate releasing new Karate moves that everyone pays attention to. There was to begin with when it was new, but it became self perpetuating as it was decentralised. And while there are scandals and feuds within professional karate world (I assume, though I don't know the details) they don't change why an 8 year old wants to do karate.
Some political movements reach that point, with local chapters becoming pretty much autonomous, others are very much tied to individual charismatic figures and short term movements. I'd like to say that the successful ones are focused on something more abstract that doesn't require particular people, but that's not quite right, as a lot of ideologies are abstract but fleeting. Maybe its the difference between a shared activity and an organization formed around a particular project or goal. If your shared activity is raising money for veterans or cat sanctuaries, or protesting pollution, you can keep doing that perpetually in a self contained way.
I think this insufficiently considers the explanation typically given by the actual people in the movement who are making criticisms / fragmenting off: that they've grown disillusioned with the core ideas of the movement & realized it doesn't solve everything like it claimed to (or that it at least has deep unaddressed issues). What makes you doubt that explanation (and think instead that it's primarily a status competition thing)? Or do you think those are actually compatible in some deep way?
There's a much simpler explanation for feminism being in the "postcycle" phase: feminism accomplished huge swathes of its goals (right to vote, reduced sexism, etc), so people who agree with it have less reason to make an effort.
I think this is just a different way to look at the same point - there was originally a lot for people to do in feminism and a lot of reasons for it to grow, and now there's less to do and it's growing less quickly (because it's less attractive to people because they need it less).
Sure but I do think there's a significant difference between "feminism attracts less passion because there's less to be angry about" and "feminism attracts less passion because people recognise that there's less status to mine", and I read your post as emphasising the latter.
There's also the fact that if you spend ten years forming a new school of art with two other people you're close with and who also live for that school, you're unlikely to be willing to say "This movement has accomplished what it set out to accomplish so I guess I'll go home." More likely you'll create things more worthy of negative criticism while also being much less personally willing to heed that criticism.
I wonder if this is the next evolutionary step of the thing you and Chapman are both describing. Like Chapman's version is how subcultures primarily functioned 1960~2000 and your version is how subcultures function(ed) from 2000~now.
I think about the 60's and 70's subcultures of my parents' generation and they seem (with a nod to the possible distortions of pandering/revisionist histories) to fit Chapman's model (e.g. Jobs vs Woz) much more so than the ones from the last 10 to 20 years.
Come to think of it, that would actually tie into Chapman's thesis a bit, i.e. that subcultures no longer function. It isn't worth it to the sociopaths to become involved anymore.
A lot of this sounds like truism, or selection bias. Thing isn't popular or exciting to most, then it catches on and grows, then it stops growing, fragments into new directions and isn't novel but becomes part of the mainstream. This HAS TO describe literally anything in the past that was ever popular/exciting, because it wasn't always that way (started small) and can't grow indefinitely without becoming either an institution (stable leadership/direction), fragmented (new leadership/direction), or just falling apart.
But what about cultures that never grew, or that don't confer enough money/status/passion among participants (not exciting enough) that you can quit your day job? I guess you wouldn't call it a subculture then ... but some people take e.g. being a bike rider quite seriously, without there being a status struggle about who is True Lord of the Bike Shorts and Leader of the Movement.
Rewards being high for the innovators (like the example of founding Google) isn't a Ponzi scheme, because the reward for doing X is how much value X produces, not getting people to pay you so that they too can do X. The Google founders don't sell the secret of how to found Google in an infinite cycle of Google sales, they sell ads. Probably why Google isn't "a subculture" either, but weird example.
Also a Ponzi scheme is strictly better for the first movers. Here we have a phase of low-reward die-hards before growth that don't get their investment paid off, that were there before it became a Ponzi. Maybe blogs in the 90s were higher-visibility and you trace that to the culture of today, what about the BBS users before that? So better to say "at some point, some subcultures become a sort of Ponzi scheme", which would also make more clear the post-selection of picking just the successful subcultures and just the right times.
I think you aren't accounting for things that start and stay small but endure. Capuchin monks have existed for 500 years, but Capuchin Catholicism and related processes have never become a cool subculture that's subject to the cycles Scott describes.
I think Scott isn't accounting for those things, this is what I meant by the selection bias of the theory. Only subcultures that get big enough work with the model, if they're too small they "never grew" like I said.
An alternative, parallel explanation is just about doing work.
Initially, there's a lot of work to do, and consistency isn't as important. Then there's some foundational work left, but mostly people are building on the foundations, sometimes in different directions, and conflicts are becoming more obvious. And finally, all basic parts are in place, so new work is either a refinement which (as you point out) no one notices, or constructive criticism, or a fork of some part, depending on whether the new person agrees, partially agrees, or disagrees with the part they're most interested in. Since as postulated no one notices the refinements, all people notice are the criticisms and the forks.
I'm not saying your model doesn't exist. Maybe it's more salient! Mostly I'm asking, how would we tell the difference?
I think there's a new movement starting up now, which is something like "religion is inevitable and attempts to banish it have only created not-so-great religions (marxism, wokism, various cryptocurrencies etc) so we might as well be conscious about it and try to create one that doesn't have the problems of either traditional religions, or the newer non-religion religions."
I'm seeing this play out in multiple different substacks with lots of followers. Lots of people realizing we can't escape the conscious cultivation of value systems, the only question is _which_ value system to consciously cultivate.
Of course, this new movement seems like it's probably the oldest movement in the book. Perhaps what's different is that ideas are now far more competitive with each other than ever before. It's like social media was 'gain of function' research for memes, and the ubermeme, the great-grandaddy of all memes, "good", is now likely to stumble upon some incredibly powerful variant, possibly one that's K selected in stead of r-selected.
This is a really interesting comment! This is something I have suspected for the past year or so, but I haven’t ran into good evidence. Which substacks are having these discussions? I would love to hear more of your thoughts, and learn more about this trend, to see if my naive intuitions were right. I think we are moving towards Steelman Religion and I’m eager to test that guess.
these are all pointing in the direction of something like, "you can't _not_ have a religion, the only thing you can change is how you answer religious questions like why is there evil in the world, and what a good life looks like"
My take is that most people read "desperately struggling" as "sociopathy" because people very rarely encounter desperate struggle, and it is sociopathic, in that to desperately struggle you have to turn off that part of you that cares who is hurt in your desperate struggles.
Status is one of the few places left where the sort of people who comment online encounter a situation where A. resources are scarce, B. "wealth" can be gained by cruelty and so C. it's worthwhile to sociopath.
I feel this is a very strong framework with useful applications. The communities I have (as a lurker) seen this happen to this seems like a good fit, and the community I saw that partially avoided this had a baked-in solution.
However, twice in this essay a word was chosen that took me out of stream. It showed up at critical points that discussed the method of action but the word chosen seemed itself to contradict the thesis. That word was "realize".
The thesis, as I understand it, is this process enters its infighting stage due to status games pursued not by sociopaths, but by well-meaning people (my interpretation of "good") being affected by incentives. Realize, to me, implies a conscious discovery of information. So when you say "This is the stage where the last tier joins the pyramid, realizes that there won’t be a tier below them, and feels betrayed." why would a well-meaning person feel betrayed by that? Again, when you say "At some point, everyone realizes you can’t get easy status from the subculture anymore." and to a lesser extent on "The actual elites realize their status is also precarious, and some of them side with the counterelites in order to get a new base, bringing the conflicts to the highest levels." why would well-meaning people consciously seeing the rules of status affecting them make them start behaving in intentionally antisocial ways?
The people who see "my status or opportunity of status is threatened, therefore I need to wrest status away from someone else" are the sociopaths you said there isn't an influx of or aren't taking over. Unless your greater point is the sociopaths were there from the start and the change of incentives directs energy previously building something into competitive energy. Which is a fair point to make but it doesn't coexist well next to your other points barring some other synthesis like "sociopaths are good people" or "sociopaths naturally occur everywhere and the only way to contain them is to create an incentive system that focuses their energies on growth/good".
Those might actually be good syntheses, but I wonder if the non-sociopath thesis can be salvaged by finding a different method of action other than realizing that status is no longer available and desiring status.
There is a difference between doing something knowingly, and having an instinct that gets triggered by the perceived status scarcity, feels from inside like "doing the good and reasonable thing", but was actually selected by evolution because it helps at some zero-sum games.
Seeing the status pyramid already filled feels from inside like this:
You see a movement that fills you with great enthusiasm, so you join, full of energy, and ready to contribute. But soon you notice an annoying thing: whenever you propose to do something useful, people stop you by saying that someone else is already doing that (so instead of starting your own project, you should rather contact that person and do what they tell you to, if you want to be useful) or that doing so would disrupt some existing processes which would be a bad thing. All your new ideas get a negative response.
At some moment you get angry and realize that the existing powers are more interested in keeping the status quo, than in helping the movement to achieve its nominal goals. So you try your new ideas anyway, which somehow makes many people irrationally angry at you. You either get bitter and leave... or you succeed to get some people on your side and create a new faction, which spends a lot of energy fighting the existing factions. You don't really like this, but unfortunately they are not leaving you another choice.
When you are halfway towards achieving your goals and finally making the movement what it was supposed to be, you notice a new member, full of optimism and energy. He has a lot of naive ideas. You try to explain why certain things are impossible in given situation, and try to redirect his energy towards doing something actually useful. But the new guy is stubborn, takes your advice as a personal offense, and just starts doing stupid things. Even worse, other people are now joining him and doing stupid things, too. Your goals, seemingly so close to completion, are now ruined. People start irrationally hating you. Nothing makes sense anymore, the world is going crazy.
I don't think desire for status has to be antisocial. I think most people want to be recognized by others positively. They want their work to be noticed, they want people to know their name, they want to build a good reputation. If they enter a subculture and discover that their work is not being noticed, and nobody knows who they are, and they have no reputation despite the amount of work they put in, then they're going to seek that "status" elsewhere. Some people will seek it through anti-social means, others through pro-social, but it's natural to want to seek it.
As an example, I don't have a lot of free time these days, but I am motivated to be somewhat active in the comments of this blog, and at DSL or r/themotte because I get some "status" out of it. I feel like sometimes people notice and appreciate my work: they might reply positively, and even a negative reply means I have been noticed. I don't think I have much status around here, but I think I do have a little and some reputation. People who have stuck around a long time have probably seen me comment. There are people here who recognize me. And I didn't have to move heaven and earth to accomplish that, just read a blog I enjoy and participate in communities that discuss things I'm interested in discussing. I don't participate in other communities online because I don't feel heard there, and there's no opportunity to be heard. We're social creatures, everybody wants to be a member of a group, and an esteemed member is better than a nobody member.
In other places if I take the effort to participate I don't feel heard. I think that's all there is to the "realize" part: you are excited to join a group, you put in work, and you feel ignored. What you are doing is not appreciated. So you either drop out or you protest, and when your protest gets enough attention that you feel heard you continue in that direction.
A direction for Further Research: how does the down cycle of an existing movement breed the fomentation of a new one? what about a cultural space that is absolutely glutted with conflicting movements, or one in which one movement is so hegemonic that new movements become subordinate to it?
Interesting essay, but it would be nice if it incorporated the insights of Mark Fisher “Exiting the Vampire Castle,” which was referred to yesterday in "Present At the Creation: Of the Social Justice Memeplex Within the Anarchist Movemen" on the Year Zero substack.
To summarize, these essays outline how the politics of denunciation affect left-wing subcultures.
Thank you very much. I've carefully asked a few Social Justice people whether they had ever been in a conversation which met their standards, and the answer was always no.
Hypothetically, a subculture is kept healthy if there are many opportunities to do the thing without winning big. For example, the basis for gaming sub-cultures is small groups doing gaming. It's probably possible to become a big name DM and make money at it (I'm guessing) but that's very little of what's going on.
There are a few professional "big name" DMs these days: Matt Mercer and Brandon Lee Mulligan come to mind, they both make money DMing. Of course that's only possible thanks to the internet and streaming video. Lets people take chances on lots of weird possibilities like "Hey, maybe enough people might want to watch a DnD campaign that we could make money off of it." Nobody would have risked putting that on network TV.
This is just geeks mops sociopaths with different words. Only a sociopath allows their "desperation" of high status to disrupt and bring bad vibes to an entire subculture for their own personal gain. A non-sociopath would just be at peace with the fact that they showed up too late and stay in their lane. The "counterelites" in this article are just the sociopaths of geeksmops.
I think the disctinction is that GMS is about 3 different types of people (drawn to a movement at different times) whereas this theory posits one type of person acting differently in 3 situations.
I find the theory described by Scott very convincing. But, why wouldn't the psycopaths turn up in these movements and utlimately take over? After all, there is research showing that psychopats are over-proportionally represented at managerial positions in corporations. Why should movements be different?
I first learned the term "involution" while studying breast cancer. After a female (mouse, human, whatever) ceases to breast feed, the breast tissue reduces back somewhat so that it's closer to the pre-pregnancy state. Because otherwise you're producing milk all the time and anybody's baby will make you leak all over the place. Interesting to see the term catch on outside a strict biological context.
There seems to be a kind of tension in this piece. You note that periods of involution come about when "the only source of status is to seize someone else’s - ie to start a fight." Which makes sense! But later on you say that a) the phenomenon of these cycles doesn't really actually involve sociopathy and b) "doesn't require that the new people be any different in ethics or commitment from the old people".
Isn't it the case that deliberately starting a fight for the motive of gaining status is a kind of sociopathic behavior? Likewise, doesn't intentionally making a movement more vulnerable and fractious, if not sabotaging it directly, for your own gain count as a kind of evidence for being unethical, or uncommitted to the movement?
I wonder if part of the problem is the difficulty of getting a job in EA. If I was the EA leadership, I think I would've only done a marketing campaign to attract more junior EAs once the movement reached the point where it was having a hard time filling open positions. I wonder if the current strategy is creating a sort of "EA overproduction" where a huge wave of new junior EAs compete over a comparatively tiny pool of EA jobs. In the worst case, this could create a huge pool of disaffected ex-EAs and cripple EA's potential for a generation.
> Sometimes I found myself on opposite sides of battle lines from some of the earliest and most valued members of the movement. But I never doubted they were honest; I hope they didn’t doubt me either.
I don't doubt that you're honest, Scott, and I don't think you're a sociopath. You just never seemed to grasp that writing about politics comes with a certain amount of responsibility. That your communities actually did have more racists in them because you deliberately sought a neoreactionary audience (a predictable effect), and your denialism about the frightening and very definitely fascistic movement behind Trump only made things worse.
I don't think you're dishonest, or a sociopath. I just think you were a useful idiot, and until you figure out where the extremism in our politics really lies (oof that was a bad essay), you're perpetually going to be fighting the fact that your own writing discredits you as a political commentator of merit.
Woke Derangement Syndrome is just as real as the Trump Derangement Syndrome I've been accused of having in all of your communities. The evaporative cooling effect of your apparent willingness to indulge a 'two screens' postmodern methodology for papering over basic warning signs is so strong that the people who are willing to tell you you were wrong are vanishingly few.
Sometimes it's as simple as: you were wrong about such an important thing at such an early date that you can't recover until you publicly recognize that. Trumpism was fascistic from 2016. This is the basic political intelligence test that your communities tend to fail very badly.
It can be difficult to recognize that you parted ways with reality because so many of your newfound followers flattered your intelligence for being woke-critical. If you can't listen to the speech Trump gave on 1/6 and put the pieces together on how the fascist organism directs itself: from mob ("FIGHT FOR TRUMP") to leader, to the mob in the halls of our power, then you, as well as your subculture, are doomed to irrelevancy.
My question is whether or not Scott Alexander, or his followers, can recognize Trumpism as an instantiation of the fascistic impulse. Being unable to recognize this reality because of an unwillingness to 'cooperate with the wokes' is a myopia that I file under Woke Derangement Syndrome.
> (Incidentally, since you're so concerned about violent mobs and whatnot, may I assume you were just as upset at what Black Lives Matter was doing a few months earlier, and consider the politicians and cultural figures who supported it just as illegitimate as those who support Trump?)
This is an idiotic and insipid false equivalency. Individuals who committed crimes were generally charged with those crimes to the extent of the evidence available. A cursory google will provide you with more information on the application of the legal process to those criminals, and I am in support of prosecution for crimes committed by individuals.
Your idiotic and insipid false equivalency, so popular among Scott Alexander's environs, to me suggests a robotic application of a comparison process in which motivated reasoning factors highly. Your political intelligence is malfunctioning. Woke Derangement Syndrome is real.
I don't grant credence to any of your arguments. I reject them. Upon encountering disagreement you call it gaslighting: you're not here in good faith.
Your model of politics is deeply broken. You tally up a ledger for 'both sides' and think you are making a meaningful comparison, but you are not.
A death caused by a rioter acting in self-directed rage is different from a footstep in the Capitol directed by a president telling a false story. Your inability to understand this is why you fail.
I admire how willing you are to just fantasize what you think my argument should be so you can dare me to contradict it, because I think it makes you look like you're putting words in my mouth. This is what it's like dealing with SFBA Rationalist political discourse.
Woke Derangement Syndrome is precisely this delusional hysteria. For you there _are_ only two choices. For you if I am a person who demands we notice that Trumpism is a fascistic impulse, I must also be a person who requires allegiance to Democrats. But is there any point in telling you that your construction of your ideological opponents is inaccurate simply because there is no such thing as a homogeneity of viewpoint among the left?
The existence of pseudo-paramilitary groups isn't the concern, both sides have that. Coordination between the government, the media, and large corporations is a very real concern, but both sides have that (and you have really bought the propaganda if you think the left is the only one with agents in government, the media, and large corporations: don't be that stupid please).
The actual explicitly stated narrative of the Republican Party of the United States is that Joe Biden didn't win an election against a president who deliberately made himself unpopular (in fact, his unpopularity was said to be part of his appeal). Whatever the Democrats -- the political party, not the anarchist gangs, and that distinction is important -- whatever the Democrats are, they're not actually driving the country towards a civil war on purpose the same way the Republicans are simply because a boomer couldn't face the reality that he lost an election.
Wake up dude. I don't know how it is you got so poisoned by politics online but you're actually functionally insane if you think you can hallucinate my argument for me and have me take you seriously.
The difference between Chapman's analysis and Scott's isn't Chapman's (admittedly poorly named) Sociopaths. Those are basically the same people as Scott's zero-sum-status-seeking infighters, though Chapman mostly focuses on their financial rather than social ambitions. Approximately the same process works for both, and approximately the same people will chose to pursue them at the expense of the subculture's health.
The difference is that Chapman's version includes the MOPs as an important transitional element. Scott describes a subculture as composed of people who want to create something new, contribute to the subculture's goal, and build positive-sum status in so doing. And when that becomes impractical because all the low-hanging fruit is picked and what little is out of reach of the newbies, Scott sees people who are seeking to create and contribute and earn status and are frustrated.
One hundred and thirty five thousand people attended San Diego Comicon this year. I'll wager that at *least* a hundred thousand of them never intended to create anything and never expected to gain any status within the Comicon community. They were just there for the show, to watch the movies and see all the other cool stuff, and hang out with people who shared their tastes. Possibly a few of them even read some comic books. These are the MOPs, "Members Of the Public".
Many of these MOPs can easily be monetized by "sociopaths", which is the dynamic Chapman describes. Other people here have described D&D and boardgaming as subcultures that don't seem to fit Scott's model - but they do fit the model of lots of people just wanting to consume the content and willing to deliver money who provides their sort of content.
In other subcultures, the MOPs will be some combination of less numerous, less visible, and harder to monetize. I don't think they'll be wholly absent, though - when e.g. a political protest movement becomes popular enough, it will get plenty of people who just want to join the party, enjoy the rallies (or riots), and feel like they are Doing Something. I think these are the sort of subcultures Scott is experiencing, and generalizing from. The MOPs are still there, but they're not as obviously distinct from the later generations of Geeks.
But even there, the MOPs are I think important to the status-infighting part of the process. They are harder to monetize than e.g. gamers or comic-book fans, but they can still afford status to the people they accept as leaders. And even where there *is* money to be had, there will also be status and people will want to grab it. But status (and money) as given by content-consuming MOPs, is different from status as given by content-creating Geeks. Two separate axes of status, in a single community with a limited supply of e.g. awards and podium space and steering-committee memberships, gets you an extra dose of infighting.
I'm curious if anyone thinks the space expansionism movement has any resemblances to a subculture, or whether it has gone through phases, such as in Golden Age sci-fi vs. what we're seeing now with Zubrin's Mars Society and Musk's mission.
I don't know Chinese, but google translate suggests that the term means something like coiling in on itself, which I would describe as "Ouroborosing". Once the outside fertile ground is exhausted, the competition and fights naturally turn inward.
Scott had a post about human history on the old blog... About how each expansion eventually fizzles, until some cataclismic event kicks the state out of the (inadequate) equilibrium.
Scott, you are really really high status, and consequently you are going to be pretty much ground zero for any sociopathic reality distortion attempts. Of course you think you are lucky to never have witnessed a sociopath takeover. In other news, the teacher has never noticed any bullying in her classroom, and the king's son has never noticed any corruption in the kingdom.
This is pretty depressing. I mean, it seems to imply that all movements are primarily about a quest for status, rather than about the thing the movement claims to be about. To the extent that any
new movement is primarily about status, it's doomed to become uninteresting very quickly. Agreed. But to the extent that a new movement is about something other than status- then it can stay interesting/ relevant indefinitely. How often do those new movements succeed? Or how often do those new movements have their goals corrupted/ why do these goals get corrupted? Is it because of status seekers? Is it because the goals were not in tune with reality in the first place? These are the questions about new movements that interest me. Treating all new movements as interchangeable status-seeking machines seems to do great injustice to them. They're usually about more than this. At least at first.
"Yet unlike Chapman, I never felt like there was any influx of sociopaths. Sometimes I found myself on opposite sides of battle lines from some of the earliest and most valued members of the movement. But I never doubted they were honest; I hope they didn’t doubt me either."
Did they ever start a Scissor topic, or just, like you, felt obliged to pick a side? The sociopaths hypothesis have them rock the boat as they rise, no sense for anyone on top to pick a fight.
One other dynamic that I've seen that feeds into the cyclic nature of subcultures that is hinted at both in the status and the sociopath explanations, but is slightly different (apologies if other commenters have mentioned this):
Subcultures start off as several weirdos doing a cool, new thing that shares some sort of je ne sais quoi. However, the early and influential works are often *surprisingly* different - this is particularly salient in the early works of new genres of music. At some point, "the thing" becomes codified and, rather than being a melting pot of weirdos, there is a template for how "the thing" is done. This codification is in part caused by the arrival of the mop/sociopath axis alliance. It's also facilitated by copycats looking for easy (but vanishing) status. I think it's slightly different than either of those things, though.
Once the "cool, weird new thing" becomes "a checklist of things you can do," several things happen. Copycats flood the market. N00b purists evangelize the "checklist of things you can do" without perspective on the early nature of the movement. Both the excesses and the insipidity of the movement are rightly criticized by smart weirdos — who then form a new subculture in response to their frustration with the homogenization, status-seeking, and perspectiveless moralizing that ruined the cool, weird new thing they used to love.
The Chapman model is, I think, based on music, and seems very much on-point. A fascination book that many readers here may enjoy is _Major Labels: A History of Popular Music in Seven Genres_ which is constantly talking about this and the constantly repeated themes of
- the rest of world is <insert epithet> because they don't like our music
- the old music was great when it was authentic, before the rest of the world got involved
It works for music (and perhaps some music-adjacent things like clubs and fashion?) because all the elements meet the model. But most sub-cultures don't match the model in some way.
I think artists want to believe that they somehow fit into this model, and perhaps there's a weird art world I know nothing about where it works. But art is not something that is sold to the masses (a sociopath invading an art scene will monetize perhaps by making it cool to certain millionaires, but there's not really any machinery to monetize art by selling it to the masses).
Film goes the other way, you don't even get started in film unless you sell to the masses. The gap between some weirdo making art movies that three other people watch and a normal movie is basically unbridgeable. Mumblecore is just on the edge – with the result that normal people are irritated as hell by it, whereas hipsters don't gain much cred by referring to it. There's not much there to monetize and no obvious path to do so.
(Perhaps porn represents the invasion of the sociopaths into what used to be a quiet little niche for afficionados? I guess that's what Boogie Nights is trying to claim.)
So consider for example either atheism or feminism. Is there a way to monetize atheism?
Is there even much cultural capital in atheism? Honestly the people talking about the influence of the Four Horsemen of Atheism (for good or ill) always struck me as basically far up their own fundaments, absolutely certain that the rest of the world was obsessed with their fights as to whether Jungle Music was a legitimate evolution of Punk or a heresy that betrayed Punk, unaware that the outside world had no idea about either and could not care less.
How about feminism? Well plenty of people will tell you that Woke has sold out, that feminism has become a way for Dove to advertise and for Target to sell even more different types of clothes ("a spunky girl can be mountain climbing in the morning, at the office in the afternoon, at a cocktail party at night, and she needs appropriate outfits for all three!")
That this hasn't led to any sort of "collapse of feminism" probably says nothing about sub-cultures, but says something about holy words. If a culture manages to become holy then you never criticize the words, they just mean whatever you want them to mean. So: is it feminist to go to bed on the first date, or to hold out for marriage? Apparently, yes. Is it feminist to support trans-rights or see them as distraction? Yes. Is it feminist to be a home maker, or to prioritize starting a company over starting a family? Yes.
I think what this tells us is that there are multiple ways for scenes/subcultures to evolve.
One is the Chapman model (if there's a way to monetize the mops).
One is the Scott Alexander model, where there's no money but there is status to fight over.
One is the apotheosis model, where (largely for historo-political reasons) words and symbols associated with the subculture become sacred, so sacred that they cannot be attacked (which means, inevitably, that they become meaningless attached to anything and everything).
I think there are other models. For example a field may be technically demanding enough that even the fans are rare, and mops are largely impossible. (Some games of skill? Any sort of serious discussion of math pr physics?)
"Don't different subcultures play out differently?"
Very much so, in my experience. When I first read Chapman's piece I thought it was spot on for the hippy sub-culture, but then thought of other sub-cultures I've been involved in that do not fit either his or Scott's model. Perhaps the key difference is whether there is any status to be had - what about low status sub-cultures like square dancing or furries?
I have some Thomist friends. They create endless frustration and intellectual stimulation. But Thomism, you will quickly find, had it's own efflorescence and involution in the 19th and early 20th century. Did you know it wasn't until 1879 that Thomism became *the philosophy* of the Catholic church, that even to this day Canon Law says that Thomas Aquinas' theology and philosophical method will have a high place in the instruction of priests? But that this mandate is only loosely followed? For by 1879, the influence of Kant, Hegel, and other continental philosophers was so great upon theology, that the Vatican thought putting Aquinas on top, might help stem the tide of idealism and Kantian dualism - at least within the Church - and provide a workable realism to ground the sciences and theology? That this effort resulted in many schools of Thomism forming, synthesizing different elements from the contemporary and the ancient tradition, and then fracturing into an endless pit of ineffectual navel gazing? Did you know that after 30 minutes one can find out "what type of Thomist" one is talking to and be able to forecast their opinion on such topics as prime matter, animal welfare, the foundations of mathematics, and the role of consequences in moral action? What perfect loveliness of this colossal wreck!
Too long, didn't read. How do I get large status with no effort? (This is a joke).
The book "Speedrunning Science" notes one solution to this, specficially in speedrunning: Endlessly splitting by game, category, etc. Everyone famous to 15 people.
Another solution would be to give me, FractalCycle, 100% of the world's status.
I think that endless splitting is a big reason why smaller sub societies work better than larger: every small town gets its own status hierarchy across various fields, where as when everyone accesses the same hierarchy there is no more room. It is nice being the best singer in town and less nice being 7539th best singer in your country. A larger congealed society makes gaining status a lot harder for any given endeavor.
One of the few pleasures of getting old is believing you are uniquely capable of realizing stuff like this because of your age -- which you do occasionally whereupon you immediate remember something you've read somewhere about wisdom. You've stolen that pleasure. Good on you!
I think this is an excellent post, very insightful and well-reasoned, with just one issue: I think the use of the word "status" almost ruins it. Here's the question: do the people within the movement fighting each other think they're fighting for personal status (rather than for what they believe is right, or other principled goal)? If yes, well I'm struggling to imagine someone consciously joining an intellectual or ethical movement for the purpose of gaining status as NOT being a borderline sociopath. If no, then it seems pretty uncharitable to use the word.
"I'm on a crusade to return this movement to what I believe are its true principles."
"Oh, you're on a crusade for higher status?"
"...no, I really believe the movement's lost its way morally and--"
"Yeah, that's what we call wanting status,"
"But it's not about my status it's about--"
"La la la, all I'm hearing is you're a power-hungry seeker of status."
I'm sure there are lots of people unconsciously motivated by selfish self-advancement in what they think are moral crusades, but assuming that of everyone, without requiring evidence of it in any particular case, is not only rudely uncharitable, it's also in tension with the anti-cynical "no sociopaths required" tone of the rest of the post.
This doesn't seem to explain the evolution of punk rock to me. Do you think it's possible that maybe some people get something more "authentic" out of some subcultures then the simple factors that are modeled here? This model strike me as being way over reductionist and doesnt seem to account for something like "genuine value".
Something like this goes on in literature. There seems to be a large-scale cycle in which entire philosophies of literature are replaced every century or so: late middle-ages allegory, the Renaissance, neo-classicism, Enlightenment, Romanticism, naturalism, modernism. These large-scale cycles affect nearly all art in unison, although in different ways (e.g., modern art is quite different from modern literature), and not in unison at different places (e.g., the Renaissance didn't really reach England until 2 centuries after beginning in Italy).
English literature and literary theory has smaller-scale waves, which don't sync up neatly with the bigger multi-modal waves, e.g.: realism (Balzac), scientific experimental realism (Zola), progressive fiction (Dickens), modernism, New Criticism, whatever you call what they did in the 1950s, post-modernism, wokeness.
The pattern isn't perfect. For instance, Marxism played a large role in 20th-century literary criticism, but can't be assigned to a single time period; it was big at least in the 1930s, 1960s, and 1990s.
Scott's model is missing some things that played a big part in literary cycles:
1. Inversion. Each cycle or wave is primarily an attack on the previous one, which derives its values mostly by inverting most of the values of the previous one. The English Renaissance, which to us is just Shakespeare, cast aside the dictums of the Middle Ages; neo-classicism brought them back; the Enlightenment brought back Renaissance naturalism, individualism, & scientific inquiry; Romanticism rebelled against the science part and against naturalist metaphysics (but not technique); modernism became largely defined as the opposition to naturalism and modernity (which is why photography is considered non-art rather than modernized painting).
2. Infiltration of institutions. One clear example is how Ezra Pound deliberately infiltrated prominent English Literature journals with his own people and used them to promote his ideology, most-notably in manufacturing an artificial positive reception of James Joyce's /Ulysses/. Another is how the American English Literature and English teacher journals were taken over by Marxists, leveraging the anti-war movement, in the late 1960s.
3. Slander, usually done after infiltrating institutions. The clearest example is the slander of the New Critics. Every book on the history of English literary theory that talks about the New Critics says nothing but lies about them. The wave of new literary theorists after them, starting perhaps with Northrup Frye and Frank Kermode, first convinced people that "New Critics" was a valid category (it mostly was), then convinced them that the New Critics had said nothing but things they'd never said or at least never agreed on (like "historical context and authorial intent is irrelevant"), then finally, when the New Critics had been swept off the scene, claimed as their own novel ideas the things the New Critics had actually advocated.
Having watched psychedelics go from subculture to effectively mainstream I've been wondering what happens when the consumerisation forces of the free market root out every niche, selling all possible subcultures back to us as soon as we can develop them, and the low barrier of entry to previously hard-to-enter subcultures that social media brings makes each burgeoning subculture evolve and dissipate quickly with few long term committers.
Doesn't this "mainstream" everything? And if (let's say national) cultures become more mainstreamed, and we run out of taboo, there is no rebellion, your parents are likely still cool af, giving you the only options of being cool af or uncool af, there is no tangible oppressor to position yourself against, the romantic struggle against the other that many cling to for meaning disappears, and therefore we become less differentiated, less individuated (in spite of the individuation force of the free market consumerisation), we all did or are doing the trips and all have tattoo sleeves and tidy beards, the snap-on cultural accessories we pick up and drop become more and more meaningless, the infinite choices we have collapse into our preferences, shaped crudely by our underlying rudimentary culture, we become less concerned about what is happening outside our cultural borders and we gather again around the local maypoles that unites us, we become more culturally unified and nationalistic, we become more tribal within our national boundaries, or other more local boundaries, we are all eventually reading from the same parochial page.
I think this is evident in the recent rise of populism (check ngram for populism to get a feel for that), which leads me to thinking about the tension between the global market economy and it's infinite choice element, and the simultaneous rise of nationalistic politics in the West, effectively revealing our parochial preferences.
What happens to this dynamic when we all become mainstream, when all dogs are having their day together at all times? Do we need to reconfigure connotations to see that the popular mainstream is the big tribe, and that that is where we are all heading with this niche-eliminating system?
>Ordinary rank-and-file members hear so much criticism of the movement that it’s hard for them to stay optimistic about it. They stop talking about it as The Amazing Movement That Will Change Everything, and become defensive: “I’m not, like, one of those members of the movement, I just sort of think some of their ideas make sense sometimes.”
"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 misread? I don’t deny that Peter was in Rome at some late point, there’s just no evidence he was there before Paul, and quite a bit of evidence against—it seems most likely that Paul was in Rome alone long before Peter was ever there, and this makes hash of the RCC’s alleged chronology.
“The Scriptural arguments are equally weak” Au contraire, the Scriptural arguments are exceptionally strong. We have an extremely powerful and comprehensive set of records of the debates, interactions, organization, and evangelization of the early Church, and Peter is mentioned in them quite a lot. As I see it the responsibility of someone claiming that Peter possesses a special position and powers in the early church not accorded to any other apostle is to prove their case; by default the hypothesis fails.
"As I see it the responsibility of someone claiming that Peter possesses a special position and powers in the early church not accorded to any other apostle is to prove their case; by default the hypothesis fails."
"Blessed art thou, Simon Bar-Jona: for flesh and blood hath not revealed it unto thee, but my Father which is in heaven. And I say also unto thee, That thou art Peter, and upon this rock I will build my church; and the gates of hell shall not prevail against it. And I will give unto thee the keys of the kingdom of heaven: and whatsoever thou shalt bind on earth shall be bound in heaven: and whatsoever thou shalt loose on earth shall be loosed in heaven."
"Simon Bar-Jona, do you love me more than these others?"
"You know I do, Lord."
"Look after my lambs."
"You are looking for Jesus the Nazarene, who was crucified. He has risen! He is not here. See the place where they laid him. But go, tell his disciples and Peter, 'He is going ahead of you into Galilee. There you will see him, just as he told you.'"
Then Peter stood up with the Eleven, raised his voice and addressed the crowd: "Fellow Jews and all of you who live in Jerusalem, let me explain this to you; listen carefully to what I say."
The angel answered, "Your prayers and gifts to the poor have come up as a memorial offering before God. Now send men to Joppa to bring back a man named Simon who is called Peter."
And so on ad nauseam; it's very evident from the New Testament alone that Peter has a special position and powers in the early church. He's constantly speaking for the apostles, people are brought to him as to an authority, he's mentioned apart from them and especially. This has never been credibly doubted; the schismatic question was always whether Peter had possessed the authority to *transfer* that status to the Bishop of Rome and if so, whether he actually did.
I haven't specifically investigated it, but I thought it was pretty uncontroversial that Peter led the church at Rome, the non-Catholics just don't believe that "Bishop of Rome" was ever meant to be some sort of special title with special authority over the rest of the church.
I grew up Anglican (which, OK, is at the Catholic end of Protestantism), and was taught that Peter was the Bishop of Rome.
Take a look at that lecture (free in Google Books). It really doesn’t strike me as a close question.
There is a section in Calvin's Institutes specifically entitled "Peter Was Not the Bishop of Rome" and I think the vast majority following the Reformed tradition have always held to this view. Not sure about Lutherans.
Ah, TIL.
👍
This ties into a concept I recently learned about, "subcultural capital" as coined by Sarah Thornton in 1995. Her book Club Cultures is on my to-read list after I saw a reference in an unrelated book.
The idea is that music/art subcultures like Punk usually define themselves in opposition to whatever the relevant "mainstream" is, which helps in the early stages because it attracts people who are not happy with their mainstream status. Much of the fighting for status in a subculture eventually revolves around being hip or authentic, and I think that's a key part of the involution phase. This is why "selling out" makes people so angry: trying to convert your status inside a subculture to money or mainstream popularity shows a lack of commitment to the subculture. Once a particular subculture has been around long enough it's pretty hard for anything to be "hip" so it has to postcycle and either fragment or stabilize around something other than status.
Wow! This is one of those posts that crystalizes things. You've described exactly what's happened in science fiction. Perhaps it's happened several times. But, I was disappointed you didn't give personal examples. I suggest that it (giving personal examples) would be risky, but high pay-off.
> I never felt like there was any influx of sociopaths.
And I bet many to the large majority of times you were right. But you probably were attracted to movements that didn’t have their fair share of sociopaths. And even if they did, you avoided seeing this at the individual level.
> each faction might well think that the subculture must have been taken over by sociopaths
And they are wrong some of the time. But definitely not all of the time. The cyclic pattern you describe feels right to me, but it’s often accelerated by sociopaths.
I really don't like the use of the word "sociopath" here.
I'm not really sure whether "sociopaths" even really exist as a genuine class of people, but if they do then they're very rare. The label certainly shouldn't be applied to everyone who is a bit of a jerk, or everyone who is insincere, or everyone who is selfish, or everyone who is annoying you at any particular moment.
Idk. I wouldn't say the set of people we're describing lack the ability to feel empathy, etc. They are simply more concerned about status than stated goals.
I don't think it does! The lack of such pursuit may infact be closer to pathological.
The main thing I'm trying to point out, is when Scott says:
> ...each faction might well think that the subculture must have been taken over by sociopaths...
those factions are probably, on average, more right than wrong.
What people primarily criticize isn't status seeking per se. Not doing hard work for status rewards. What they criticize is people who want the status, or other personal goods regardless of the means. Eg, people who will massively lie, use other people or strategically attack those who stand in their way.
I agree. When Chapman says "sociopath," AFAICT he means "people who are mostly concerned with status as opposed to the object-level thing the movement is about." That's different from people who have an actual mental illness.
My understanding of Chapman's "sociopath" is what you say here, plus a small addition. As you say it's someone who's unmoved by "the thing" at the center of that movement, and who is moved by status. I'd add it is often being after money as well, and primarily about having a knack for, and willingness to, manipulate and exploit the other participants in the movement.
This refers to manipulating/exploiting the "creators" and "fanatics" of Chapman's taxonomy -- i.e. those who actually produce "the thing", and those who dedicate large efforts (without great personal benefit) to spread "the thing" as far as possible -- bleeding both of them dry, while scooping truckloads of status or money for themselves.
When those "sociopaths" are crafty and competent, they can turn out being a net gain for "the thing", in terms of the world ending with more of "the thing" which had spread farther and wider than would have been the case without that "sociopath". They can equally be responsible for the dilution and "the sellout", in pursuit of those goals. Or they can be greedy leeches who end up exhausting everyone and driving "the thing" into the ground, being a net loss for "the thing" compared to the alternative without that "sociopath".
I think Chapman's model does stand on its own, and is not exactly *contradicted* by Scott's model. I find Scott's model wonderful. But Scott's model merely clarifies a "cycle" which naturally happens when people discover a new niche which hasn't been mined previously but whose resources are ultimately limited. Scott's model explains how the negative effects can happen even without any participants being particularly "sociopathic".
But Scott's model by no means *precludes* sociopaths from jumping into that fray...
Agreed. And that definition feels useful, even if the word itself is slightly wrong.
Is there a better word?
Exploiters?
Yes, that could be a better word. It seems to me that Chapman was using excessively loaded words to make a point. Same with "fanatics", which I don't find to be the best choice of word, I'd have used "evangelists" myself. (Or perhaps Chapman avoided that word because he perceived it as "appropriated by Christianity"? It shouldn't be, it's simply a Greek word)
"Creators" is a straightforward choice of words, of course, and using "MOPs" for "Members of Public" is a quite good pun.
Sometimes they can be a net gain for the thing and a net loss for the people who do it, though. Have enough Sociopath-driven mainstreaming and you end up with a loss of unique cultural and behavioral standards (whether greater or lesser than the broader norm) and their replacement with whatever is in vogue to make the newcomers more comfortable. And often those newcomers have a lot of other options and aren't particularly beholden to the thing itself (and certainly not to its culture), so this growth ends up closer to zero-sum with other unrelated groups than you'd think at first.
Agreed, and I do think that this is one of the points that Chapman was trying to make.
Completely agree.
That's fair. I was using the word "sociopath" as Gašo describes below.
I think Scott was too? And so my point still stands.
What would be a better word?
(Wow substack makes account mgmt hard)
Exactly, the sociopaths are mostly people looking to make money off of something. Disney buying Marvel and Star Wars are probably the best examples. The CEO didn't have any specific creative vision for them, he just knew he could make a lot of money if he bought them and handed the reigns to people that said they had creative vision. This had mixed results, depending on who you ask.
I think you missed a key dynamic. As the opportunities to break new grounddry up and it becomes harder to advance and there's more money/momentum the feedback loops break down. People start to be rewarded for conforming to the expectations of the current movement consensus. That's when you get Loyalists. Loyalists are the opposite of Heresiarchs and their followers. They not only dogmatically follow a pro-movement ethos but they actively purge and purity-spiral people who are not sufficiently devoted or who smell too much like Heresiarchs.
In the early days you pushed things forward by improving the movement, having interesting ideas, offering actionable criticism and then executing, and so on. As that becomes harder (and you need to be a genius) you can instead get ahead by unswerving loyalty and attacking the heresiarchs, effectively reassuring people in power. And people who look kind of like heresiarchs which creates space by clearing out competition.
This produces a more orthodox but less interesting kind of thought. It's easier to be a loyalist and it gives you a chance to create new virgin territory by invoking what amount to purity spirals. Yes, you might not be able to align AI as well as that guy. But you can find that time he said that maybe AI alignment wasn't the most important thing ever and he needs to be purged! (Whether this example happens I can't say. But you get the concept.)
This hardens the organization, ossifies it. This can be good if it really has found the one true path. But usually it's actually a trap. One that's especially hard to detect for true believers. And a worse trap than the heresiarchs.
Some of the heretics want to burn everything down but most of them are reformers who just want to make their own ideas dominant. But Loyalists force them out of the movement and the movement itself into increasingly rigid forms of thinking. In the process of making the movement pure it destroys its immune system. And then the question becomes: did the movement amass enough money and power in its earlier stages to maintain itself as a mature organization, driven more by momentum than by innovation? Or does this ossified shell die?
It's not only when things get harder to improve the movement, and long before you need to be a genius, that you can get a Loyalist problem. The thing is that there are many people who think the most fun thing to do in this world is to defend-the-X from the rabble. So you get people, I think you would call Loyalists saying "Stop wasting the leaders' time with your insights, you clearly haven't been around here long enough to know anything worth knowing, blah blah pay your dues, plus your ideas are radically different from what we are already committed to doing." All of this can go on behind the scenes, leaving the leaders scratching their heads and wondering "Where have all the cool, new, different ideas gone? We used to have lots, what happened?" -- What has happened is that the people who have such ideas are getting silenced.
Agreed. Ultimately, I think erring on the side of favoring critics is probably the right call because the natural inclination of most people is to do the opposite. Personally, I think when you think you're so open minded that you'll take any criticism non-ideologically and just haven't heard any of value lately is when you know you're deeply hemmed in by Loyalists.
"plus your ideas are radically different from what we are already committed to doing"
I think this is inevitable, though; you necessarily reach a stage of having to say this in order to accomplish anything at all. At that point I think branching off is the only solution, even if everyone's genuinely dedicated and acting in good faith.
Getting overly attached to the stew-of-innovation-and-brainstorming stage seems analogous to someone who's addicted to the initial dating part of a relationship. There's no harm in enjoying it, but wanting to stay there is pathological and damages your ability to have anything at all in the long term.
Sometimes this happens, indeed. But stagnation happens, too, as well as 'let's organise this thing properly (i.e the way the speaker wants it) and take all the joy out of it'.
My impression is that the catholic church has a lot of experience with such conundrums and, with a hair-raising history of trial and error, somehow got along.
Arguably the Church has had the Holy Spirit for protection and second the Church invented "peer review" ( Paul thinks he had some ideas and they haul him back to Jerusalem to discuss - same idea with councils).
This is a pretty perfect description of our current western 'civilisation'.
Innovation ––> bureaucracy ––> dogmatism ––> anti-innovation
I'd say it's a pretty good description of our politics. But not our entire civilization.
But if a movement changes its ideas all the time, what does it even stand for?
Is ossification a bug or a feature? Every institution was once a new, fresh perspective on changing the world.
If EA ossifies, it'll be right/wrong in a very particular way, that is still novel compared to what existed before. It'll usefully compete with all the other ossified institutions in the mimetic warfare between conventional, established ideas. It will be tantalazingly right and infuriatingly wrong for the people, that will in response to its perceived inadequacy start something new and better (in their opinion, of course).
Something not mentioned is that when the people who are doing this cool new thing because this is a cool thing that I want to do for its own sake (and, incidentally, I might get some status from it, even though I don't care about such things very much, because I don't see any way to stop this) begin to be approached in numbers in the group by the people who are doing this cool new thing because they can get status from it, and are precisely drawn to it because it will generate status for them, and status is what they care about more than anything or most anything in the world) -- Gresham's law kicks in.
Many of the cool people *leave* because they cannot stand to be around people who *aren't* in it for its own sake.
I'm sick of starting cool groups, companies, etc which I have to leave when it stops being about the things I love and care about, done by people I like more than a little, and starts being about giving status to people I am at best indifferent to, and often dislike, and who often take a strong dislike to me because, for as long as I can hold out, I will try to flatten the status levels which cuts into their prestige.
If you haven't looked on the creation of status as an undesirable outcome that needs limiting, you may not have ended up in a situation where the first person to drive you and other likeminded out of your group gets to keep all the chips. And that is one place where the psychopaths thrive.
This is exactly right. At any given point in time, there's a bunch of pre-movements in pre-cycle, and most of them only attract people interested in the ideas of the movement itself rather than the status (since there's really no status to be gained at this point anyway). On the other hand, there would also be a movement or two in the beginning of their cycle, and people interested in getting status would flock to those (thinking it's the next big thing or whatever). These groups of people are not the same!
> approached in numbers in the group by the people who are doing this cool new thing because they can get status from it
Are there concrete examples of this? What cool new things can I do right now in order to get status?
It's hard to know until after the status has arrived that this was a good thing to get involved with a short time before, but it is possible that writing a substack may work out this way.
Then how do the status-seekers flood the cool new thing? Or is there just enough status-seekers flooding everything that whenever any of them hit it big they've already been infected?
Also isn't writing a substack just giving money/status to the people who already hopped on the "write a blog" subculture a few years ago and not minting new celebrities?
There are enough status-seekers to flood everything.
The 'write a blog' subculture generally produced articles for free. Maybe you could get paid for clicks, and maybe you could set up your blog so that you could use your reader's machines to mine cryptocurrency .... but probably not. The notion of directly subscribing to journalists is becoming more and more attractive. The next big thing? Only time will tell.
Right, the write a blog subculture did it only for (status | art | joy), substack is normalizing paying for it. But are any of the substack stars / success stories people who are not already leveraging preexisting status? Such as through having previously created a blog or news site?
https://subredditstats.com/ shows the subreddits with the highest % follower increase over the last month, week and day. Part of reddit's special charm is the quantification of status, so if you wanted to play that game, the "month" column shows where your time could probably be best invested.
I have to say, though, none of these subreddits look particularly interesting or wholesome. But when an important new fad arises, I'm sure it's reflected in these stats pretty early.
Seen this in a political movement. What was absolutely shocking is how fast it went through the stages once it got to success. It was basically a long grind of ~10 years to get legitimacy, a relatively short burst of success and very rapid expansion to become a national/parliamentary party (around one year)... and 6 months after the elections the energies already started focusing inwards, with everything blowing up and getting completely "taken over by sociopaths" before the 1 year mark. Romania, 2016/17, USR.
Scott' description here is pretty spot on. What I can add is that strong and stable leadership might change the pattern, especially if it has some form of sanctity. May be why religious and ideological organizations thrive more than secular ones. There will always be pressure to go for status seeking inside the org, but if it's either hopeless (with strong leadership) or even better, hopeless and heretical, then you just put a lid on it and use the extra pressure to force expansion and object-level results.
In my example above leadership turned out to be an unexpectedly weak point, and once the inward status race started, there wasn't much hope to do anything else. You could try to do good work, but without getting aligned with the right faction (or at least a faction), at the next power shuffle you'll end up just not getting an eligible spot, even while being literally the most active member of parliament in history (happened), or having great results but being replaced by a glorified intern in very fair internal elections (also happened).
Trying to speculate and model what would have happened with strong enough leadership... and I still see problems. Even if the absolute top status level is not available, there is still pressure to turn inwards for the next few upper levels (I'm reminded of the quip "All politics is internal"). Leadership needs to be not just unassailable, but strong enough to bash heads and force either a clear process, or some form of Sanctity / alignment that makes too much internal focus something that Just Isn't Done.
That's a huge advantage older orgs have over new: the power system is old and ossified enough, almost a bureaucracy. It's true, the best hope is "a position commensurate to your talent and diligence", which means on average you get less. But even if the management may be less competent than you, you get the guarantee that your peers won't be fighting you for status - they'll at most be competing with you, more or less fairly.
The tragedy here is that how passionately people feel about the Cause is not helping at all, without also having a mechanism to turn this Belief into negentropy. The only thing I can think of, that can turn a young org's energies outwards, is an unassailable central figure. And it needs to be unassailable, not just powerful, because he/she's the lid that keeps the pressure up and outwards.
Thanks for sharing. I think the Sweden Democrats is an example of a rapidly growing political organization were strong leadership managed to keep things from falling apart (yet...). Much to the mainstreams dismay (plenty of people have predicted or hoped for a collapse by now). A nice comparison is Ny Demokrati, another right-wing populist party that was 20 years earlier, which fell apart fast after it's first successful election.
The Pirate Party hasn't done so well after not having Rick Falkvinge at the helm, either.
The big problem of the Pirate parties is that while they have had a lot of important things to say about intellectual property, privacy etc. their image was still connected mainly, as the name says, to online piracy... which wasn't a problem only in the sense that it creates an image of criminality or frivolity but also that it happened just at the point when Steam, Spotify, Netflix etc. came to partially replace piracy and most importantly made it lose its cultural cachet as a skill everyone needed to know to easily access the world's content at a moment's notice.
Sure, Pirate parties still exist and have had momentary successes (Iceland, Czech Republic etc.) but as far as I know those have been quite momentary and without that much staying power.
Some say that the (Swedish) Pirate Party rolled a hard left/SJW and died, and that this was mostly a top down decision by the leadership and pretty unpopular with the base. I don't know how true it is. They were also largely ignored in the media which didn't help. It would be interesting to read more about its rise and fall.
I think that being a strong leader may be necessary but is not sufficient. At least, some of my early failures seem not to have been because I wasn't strong enough as a leader, but because the people who wanted to co-opt my organisation knew precisely how to do this, whereas, aside from shooting them, I didn't know what to do. I've become better at this, and ... in case anybody is nodding here and saying 'sounds like me' ... the most important thing I have learned is that I need to train a successor leader, early. At some point, and sooner than you would expect, the leaders of the group will spend all their time in internal and external politics and social relations. If this is something you dislike doing, which cuts into the time you have for thinking and other things you like -- wave! wave! -- you need to have somebody set up to do this which you can back with the full extent of your authority. Otherwise, I promise you, you will get somebody else's leadership, and you probably won't like it.
Thinking of a few 'rises and falls' I've observed, and this advice rings very true. The presence of the visionary's consigliere, even if they're not necessarily a successor, goes a long way.
Oftentimes, successful political parties are ones that manage to incorporate the political subcultural churn into their own structures. Ie. new political movements might start their own parties or might operate in established parties; if an established party can open its doors and offer influence to a new political movement, it can get new activists and stay current in the political sphere. The activists, in turn, benefit from the old power structures and bureaucracy - not only in having models for getting things done, but butting heads with the old power structures can also separate the wheat from the chaff and show who really has the (spiritual) wherewithal required to get things done.
Of course, the danger is then getting internal conflict (what if you're a party whose traditional support comes from industrial workers, but you're now incorporating environmental activists?) - if you can manage this tension well you get progress (solutions that are suitable for both industrial workers and environmentalists), but if you don't, you just get your party riven apart.
"if you can manage this tension well you get progress (solutions that are suitable for both industrial workers and environmentalists), but if you don't, you just get your party riven apart."
From an outsider's perspective, something like this (both sides, actually) seems to have happened to the New Labour party in the UK. An ambitious new leader attempted to fuse the old faction, industrial workers, with a new faction, the predominantly-urban middle class. At first it worked and progress was achieved, then the party was riven apart and crippled because the middle class faction totally outmaneuvered the working class faction and turned the Labour party into "the Liberal Democrats, but big!".
This post is very rediscovering-monarchy-from-first-principles, so I approve.
...what?
"The only thing I can think of, that can turn a young org's energies outwards, is an unassailable central figure. And it needs to be unassailable, not just powerful, because he/she's the lid that keeps the pressure up and outwards." This is the exact principle that pro-monarchist thinkers used to justify monarchy. I can't remember now if it was Burke or Carlyle or someone else who said on the occasion of the murder of Louis XVI that the revolutionaries had not just killed the king's person but the entire structure of legitimacy, inculcated through ages, and that the French people would now be wholly ungovernable since every man would think *he* could wear the golden hat and begin to scheme against the guy wearing it right now, who after all was no different from himself, a former baker or cobbler or something. Assailable, if you like.
EDIT: It was De Maistre! Of course!
Fair enough, and will lead to some uncomfortable introspection later on :)
But I do want to point out that Planned Parenthood seems to work fine without a monarch. I'd guess that some level of bureaucracy is sufficient to make sure things don't go haywire.
"But I do want to point out that Planned Parenthood seems to work fine without a monarch."
Sure, but that undermines your original claim, as (if I read you correctly) you observe.
Or, looked at a different way, Planned Parenthood just had its shit blown open by the unelected Nine Monarchs of United America, so how fine is it working really? Clearly their bureaucracy was no protection for them when it came down to the wire.
Or you could put another twist on it and say, is not the very perceived assailability of the positions of those nine great lords the motor behind much of the political strife in the land of America today? And would not the peasantry be calmer if they thought of the pronouncements of this royal Court as the untouchable commands of supreme beings wholly beyond and above themselves, rather than as the wicked actions of wicked men, the way they clearly do now?
Or maybe Planned Parenthood just isn't that important in the sense of wielding social and actual power, so it naturally lacks the dynamics you observed in political parties.
The original claim was much smaller than how US justice system works long term :) We were just talking about young organizations that grow rapidly. I don't think it's safe to generalize from this. It may work, but it definitely doesn't necessarily work.
I think that's correct and a major reason for the Terror, but not an intrinsic quality of monarchies. The American revolutionaries shook off a king but were quick, smart and perhaps lucky enough to put in place a Constitution and a stable enough government that saw them through the first few decades. That translates into legitimacy. The thing people defer to doesn't have to be a person. The thing is that if you tear it down there's a short "everything goes" period in which whatever is new has to earn that legitimacy and subversion seems no big deal since anyway you're just subverting some newfangled thing no one cares about yet.
>David Chapman’s Geeks, MOPs, and Sociopaths In Subculture Evolution is rightfully a classic, but it doesn’t match my own experience.
IMO Chapman's article exhibits one of the worst trends in the rationalist community: models that sound so profound and convincing that you can't tell if they're actually *true*.
My initial reaction was "Wow, this is brilliant! I see the matrix now!" Then I thought about the subcultures I'm familiar with: his model didn't fit any of them. Yeah, Chapman's mechanism makes sense and there may be elements of truth in it. Or it could just be a castle in the sky.
My own experience: subcultures generally die because the soil that supported them no longer exists.
For example, tape-traders. People used to record songs off the radio onto cassettes and share them at school. Or they'd stay up late and record anime off obscure channels (you'd get "tape kings" with literal mountains of Sailor Moon and Yu Yu Hakusho recordings in their basement, hand-labeled and everything. They held onto them like a hoard of dragon gold).
These subcultures died a long time ago. Was it because of some invasion of sociopaths? No, it's because PirateBay and 1337x made them obsolete.
The same for me when I tried to apply it. I am sure this is one of the ways it plays out, but it doesn't seem reasonable to believe this is something that broadly applies.
"IMO Chapman's article exhibits one of the worst trends in the rationalist community: models that sound so profound and convincing that you can't tell if they're actually *true*."
Rings true to my ears, but I don't recall any good examples of this trend. Do you have any?
I feel like this about simulacrum levels. I acquired a gut-level understanding of the idea, and I'm sure something like this is actually one of the fundamental driving forces of society. It feels *really important*. But the fit to observed phenomena, as well as the details of the theory (why exactly 4 levels?) has always struck me as somewhat tortured.
Another example is how the community talks about AI timelines. Some assumptions (that I guess were originally made in deliberately simplified "wrong but useful" models) have become ubiquitous jargon. For example, the idea that "compute" can be treated as a perfectly fungible, almost physical quantity. But this is only true when comparing relatively similar algorithms to each other.
Things like Alicorn's Living Luminously, Mencius Moldbug's Cathedral, Nick Land's Accelerationism, PJ Eby's Perceptual Control Theory, Roon's wordcel/shape-rotator theory (which to be fair was partly meant as a joke), plus various pick up artist crap from the old days.
I'm not saying any of this stuff is wrong. It's just hard to assess as clearly *right*.
I find it interesting how when Chapman is popular, he is quoted as an outside expert on why the rationalists are wrong, but when he does something unpopular, suddenly he becomes a representative of the worst trends in the rationalist community. Remember, kids, you can only be a post-rationalist if you are cool!
But I agree that there is an aspect of "who cares about the territory, this map is so beautiful" here. Like, hey, this model allows you to call "sociopaths" all people you do not like or do not agree with, can it get better than this?
Formerly exciting new things become obsolete. Some people move on, looking for new frontiers. Some people keep doing the same and expect to keep their former status forever. Some people adapt to the new situation.
For example, atheism was edgy at some moment, when open criticism of religion was outside the Overton window. But now we heard it all. Great books were written on the topic, and most people who care have already read them. There still remain some things to do, but they can probably be done more efficiently under separate banners (e.g. gay rights, education of evolution, criticism of islam). Mere "we don't believe in God and we think the Bible is silly" is not going to surprise anyone anymore.
> IMO Chapman's article exhibits one of the worst trends in the rationalist community
I thought this was an interesting impression, because Chapman stridently disagrees with the rationality community: https://metarationality.com/bayesianism-updating
Perhaps the sociopaths are always with us, but in the postcycle phase they are the ones at the top, exposed by the withdrawal of the enthusiasts for the original subculture?
Thank you for the article. It is plausible in certain conditions.
You think there are no sociopaths? Crypto is 90% sociopaths and it fits every point of your description perfectly. I could believe EA and new atheism had no sociopaths because the average member was too smart.
That's because crypto is a Ponzi scheme for money first and foremost, not status. So, a regular Ponzi scheme.
Hey, not all crypto is a Ponzi scheme - some are conventional pyramid schemes, or just a good ol' fashioned pump-and-dump!
> you can’t just walk in and argue that YOU should be the black belt and the master should defer to YOU <
This is a common misperception about martial arts and karate in particular - that there is something very special about the achievement of a black belt.
It actually more like the academic equivalent of an undergraduate degree. To a 12 year old it might be extremely impressive, but in a meeting of full professors, a first degree denotes not much more than a basic introduction to a subject.
Wikipedia puts it rather well in its first paragraph about black belt ability -
< In contrast to the "black belt as master" stereotype, a black belt commonly indicates the wearer is competent in a style's basic technique and principles >
Another way of looking at it is that someone who has just achieved a black belt (after maybe two or three years of practice) is much nearer a complete beginner than a master.
Yes, good point.
Sorry replied to your comment instead of the thread my bad
Based on this, I'm going to advocate for changing my department's undergraduate degree program from "Bachelor of Science" to "Black Belt in Science". Accurate, way cooler, and not seemingly sexist!
I've seen in the wild an explicit comparison of black belt to PhD: you've got all the basics down, and an advanced understanding, and are starting to make serious contributions to the state of the art. This was from an average-8-year black belt school. "Master", sometimes associated with a red belt, is sometimes a rank, but sometimes a simple recognition that you're now teaching students on your own (with "grandmaster" being when you've successfully taught a master, a direct analogy to "grandparent").
And not a response to you, just wanted to drop this off somewhere, but that thing about having someone come in and declare themselves master due to superior fighting skills? That has happened in the past, and has a Very Bad Reputation. For reasons which should be obvious!
Just adding a "ditto" to this, and elaborating that by the admission of most traditional martial artists I know and work with, there are no TRUE masters of any martial style anymore- that would require you to be someone who's actually spent most of your life using martial arts for their intended purpose (causing harm to others), and even the most skilled kendo practitioner these days hasn't even killed a single man with a sword.
In Japan, they've actually retired the highest two ranks of achievement in their sword, bow, and polearm schools in reflection of this.
Can you explain more about this? In the old days, how would martial arts masters go about having real fights? You go to a monastery or something, you get trained in kung fu, and then what?
In at least some cases, they would have duels with each other. See, for example, Miyamoto Musashi having engaged in (and won) 61 duels in his life.
It depends on where and when, but duels, war, and just plain murdering people would be the main avenues. In 16th-17th century Europe nobles famously dueled each other at the drop of a hat, sometimes literally, and there were also some pretty long wars. The fencing master Salvator Fabris probably accepted a contract to murder the king of Sweden by participating in a play as an actor, then leaping offstage during a fight scene and stabbing the king, but the whole thing got called off. There's a famous French anecdote of a guy refusing to let a young man marry his daughter because "you can hardly even call yourself an adult yet, go away and kill three or four people, then come back and we'll talk". And so on. Earlier in European history the weapon-bearing classes were also not averse to solving their interpersonal problems with weapons, no surprise there, and the swordmaster Fiore de'i Liberi says he had to fight other swordmasters because he refused to teach them his art[1].
In China, martial artists most often took jobs as security for merchant caravans and other travelers, defending against bandits; this is the profession of Yu Shu Lien in Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, for example (not really made clear in the film, but it's there if you look). Since the other big option was to be a bandit, these people would end up fighting each other all the time, and they also seem to have frequently switched sides. Working as a bodyguard for some prominent person is a kind of subcategory of this which was also fairly common.
As 167 says, in Japan masters often sought each other out specifically in order to fight duels to test who was the strongest; lots of Japanese film and comics tropes are founded on this, such as "dojo busters". This especially happened in the 17th and 18th centuries, after the civil war had been definitively resolved; before that people still had a whole bunch of war to fight, so they did that instead (and in those days swordsmanship was generally less valued in the warrior class, although many people don't like to admit it).
[1] Here's a fun video on this topic. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4GoQlvc_H3s
The spread of effective firearms are what killed off a lot of dueling culture, and a lot of the Code Duello revolved around who could challenge whom and who had to respond to a challenge.
It simply would not do to have the Grand Duke's only son and heir ganked by some upstart, and it requires a lot less training to master firearms than edged weapons.
I imagine that a similar process took place in Asia.
In Asia, it had more to do with the warrior class being phased out into a bureaucratic position. There was very little of a code duello among the samurai (beyond the agreement that it was a coward's deed and crime to simply jump your enemy or assault him with your friends)- in fact, for hundreds of years there was rather the opposite in the form of the institution of "gekko-kujo" or "low-surpassing-high". If you were stronger than your lord and he was a worse governor than you, then your coup was not a coup, but instead legitimate succession (contingent on your ability to secure your own position, of course). Knowledge of this explains why the Sengoku period was so bloody and unstable.
I think it's actually highly doubtful that improvements in firearms had anything much to do with it, especially since most rapier and smallsword duels left people good and dead already. Besides, if the pistols had become too deadly, they could have just switched back to swords, as indeed happened in those parts and social classes of Europe where the practice did persist (the last duel I'm aware of was between two French politicians in 1967. It was filmed for a Pathé newsreel, and you can watch it on Youtube[1]). Rather, surviving documents (many people wrote volubly on this topic for a long time) indicate that it was part of the general gradual social shift from seeing violence as normal, sensible and pretty cool to thinking that violence is bad, actually, and we shouldn't have any. Very little surviving literature even mentions increasing mortality from pistols, whereas a *lot* mentions tedious post-Enlightenment moralizing about how wrong it is to deliberately harm another human being and blah blah, senseless waste of human life, blah blah. There's also a strong strain of decrying the stupid hypocrisy of dueling in the military being simultaneously forbidden on pain of prison and absolutely required to maintain one's respectability (refusing would actually get you cashiered for a coward) in the 19th century, where they kind of have a point.
Also of note, the Grand Duke's sons were getting ganked for a century+ before anybody successfully changed the social rules to put an end to it. Louis XIII tried to ban dueling because it was absolutely withering away his entire potential officers' corps, and it didn't work one damn bit. Marquesses and dukes' sons were absolutely dying like pigs all over the place. The fact that it was super inconvenient doesn't seem to have made a dent for a long time.
(And by the way, the Code Duello is specifically a late-18th-century Irish document, did not have wide application outside Ireland, and should not be used as shorthand or assumed to have been some sort of pan-European standard. Italians and Spaniards in the period probably didn't even know it existed.)
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e68nuAcSuWQ
Well, for the skills of kenjutsu (swordplay), kyujutsu (archery), and yari/naginatajutsu (polearm fighting), it was more "You're instructed in the dojo alongside the rest of the warrior caste, and then you go out and fight bandits/religious zealots/other clans in the name of your lord." From there, it was an easy case of winnowing out the untalented through rather decisive means: the esteemed master Tsukahara Bokuden attained acknowledgement as a kensei (the superlative kenjutsu rank granted to the absolute greatest swordsmen in history, roughly translating as "saint of the blade") by fighting at least 20 publicized duels to the death and serving in 37 battles, killing over 200 men total. More importantly, of his six known injuries in his professional career, NONE OF THEM were caused by an enemy's blade touching him. That is what one might call a self-demonstrating level of skill.
Miyamoto Musashi, another famed kensei, fought over 61 duels in his life and likewise demonstrated similar feats of superlative skill.
In the case of the Shaolin monks, the answer would be "you train in a kung-fu style, are issued a spear and thick robe, and then you walk along the highway killing the many bandits who live in whatever remote province you live in because the monasteries that practice martial arts are all located in remote regions where there's very little military presence."
Alternatively, you get contracted as a bodyguard or mercenary because the temple needs upkeep.
If you're using "martial arts" to narrowly refer to "exclusively unarmed fighting styles"- most of those are a surviving mixture of ancient full-contact sports used for training in close combat, self-defense training for peasants, the "if you're in the mud and your sword breaks, here's how you hold off someone attacking you until you can steal his weapon/run away/your friends gut him with their spears" part of military instruction, and esoteric religious practices ultimately meant to make you immortal (this is where the Eastern association with unarmed combat and energy blasts comes from- the unarmed stuff was believed to allow its practitioners to cultivate their life-force to attain supernatural powers, with the ultimate goal of attaining a god-like state). Even there, many schools taught weapons alongside unarmed combat (T'ai chi ch'üan originally used a short blade and was an actual fighting art as well as calisthenics for Taoists for example. For another, there's Karate, which was part of the greater canon of Ryukyuan combat which included the tonfa, staff, and other specialized weapons favored by Ryukyuan nobility). Most modern schools thus either acknowledge this (like Okinawan karate, which has eliminated its highest ranks) or retreat into rather sad fantasies of martial-arts superpowers (like T'ai chi ch'üan, whose modern practitioners in China have wrapped themselves up in the mythos of qiggong and claims of supernatural powers- something the Chinese government has taken to enforcing with an iron rod as part of their program of cultural renewal).
All of this is to say that, if you're ever impressed with what some guy is doing in a HEMA or Kendo fight, remember: they're probably, at best, on the level of a slightly-above-average actual soldier in terms of skill and execution.
Couldn't have said it better. The chinese esoteric practice came to a grinding halt in what was called the boxer uprising, when european soldiers killed lots of kung fu experts, not because they were more skilled anyhow, but by weaponry and organization.
Well, some of it did. The rest (minus the vestiges clinging on today) were subject to a rather aggressive purge by the Maoists during the Great Leap Forward, as all that Taoist nonsense about immortals living on secret mountains, abstaining from grain, and seeking immortality through a mixture of calisthenics, diet, herbalism, and (in some branches) free love was seen as very un-Maoist.
Ironically, the CCCP in modern days has moved away from this and now practically tries to identify themselves with the Yellow Turbans (a group of Taoist proto-anarchists whose short-lived rebellion and subsequent insurgency was one of the first signs of major instability in the end of the Han) as part of their general policy of "we're just the culmination of every populist movement in China up until now, so if you oppose us you support every evil thing every emperor did."
" a mixture of calisthenics, diet, herbalism, and (in some branches) free love"
And mercury!
I don't think all taijiquan practitoners in modern China are like that? I studied Chen family taijiquan for a while, and it was very down-to-earth. There was no hint whatsoever that anyone thought that anyone had supernatural powers, not even the one of the "four tigers of Chen village" who was my teacher's teacher. He was just a superb martial artist. I can't rule out that that's something that practitioners talk about only in private or only with senior students or only with ethnic Han, but there was no hint of it at my level.
Also, I can't speak for other styles, but Chen taijiquan is very much a martial art, including punching and kicking. Notably, they do not teach applications, not even how to form a fist, at least not to lower-level students like myself. But anyone with a modest amount of outside experience in striking or standing-grappling should be able to figure out parts of it. And from the oral history I got, I can see how other styles of taiji turned into ... what they, well, seem like to me. (My pithy mixed metaphor would be that Chen-style is whole-grain martial arts, whereas Yang, Sun, Wu, and Wu are nutritional supplements.)
>"I don't think all taijiquan practitoners in modern China are like that?"
And not all HEMA fighters in America have a deep interest in history. Regardless, there are men like Wei Lei and Yi Long who make such claims, and when honest fighters such as Xiu Xiaodong rightly criticize them for absurd claims and handily demonstrate the non-existence of their superhuman powers by defeating them, they are subject to persecution and humiliation for "disrespecting Chinese culture" (as if respectable Chinese culture should consist of making fraudulent claims such as "I can defeat ten trained men at once using only one strike each because my qiggong is that powerful").
> And not all HEMA fighters in America have a deep interest in history.
But I try to pay attention to the ones who do. (Or tried, anyway. It's been a while. Is Guy Windsor still awesome like that?)
As for China, that's a huge can of worms. The CCP corrupts everything it touches, and the main thing I don't like about Chen taijiquan is that it's so cozy with the CCP. (One could say similar things about Buddhism and the old Chinese empire, or about Christianity and the Roman Empire, but I think the CCP is distinctly worse.) I hadn't heard of any of these people before, but Xiu Xiaodong has had to go into hiding to escape from being attacked on the street? That's bad. China has a serious problem with xenophobic nationalism. I've seen the CCP downplay this and try to suppress it, which normally I would give credit for, but since this is the CCP, I have to wonder how much of it was their doing in the first place.
In China, on the civilian side, one way this sometimes happened was Lei Tai. My impression is that this was sometimes similar to modern boxing or MMA, where matches were arranged beforehand, but sometimes it was a more daring announcement that you'd take all comers. Sometimes formal, sometimes informal, sometimes legal, sometimes illegal, sometimes with rules, sometimes without. Sometimes people died, and sometimes that was intentional, but mostly they lived.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lei_tai
On the Chinese monastic side, the oral tradition I've heard is that at least some of the Shaolin monasteries made a point of forcing students (maybe just younger ones) to leave after they got to black sash level. They were supposed to go out, see the world, test their practice (ideally Buddhist, but alas sometimes martial), and maybe return if they decided that that's what they really wanted to do for the rest of their life, or maybe settle down and start a family instead. I expect that this, if true, contributed to a lot of stories of wandering martial arts monks, especially ones who have a less-than-firm grasp of Buddhism. But from my understanding, the senior monks rarely left, much like monks in other non-martial monasteries. That said, the use of martial arts as a meditative focus in a pragmatic context clearly leads to questions such as "is this true" and "how can I know if this is true", which after other avenues of research are exhausted leads to the occasional martial arts equivalent of the EA criticism challenge.
I don't know much about the Chinese warrior aristocracy or what they did. Oral tradition is that most of the military input into the monastic system was from peasant soldiers who left the army (one way or another) and decided (for one reason or another) that a Buddhist monastery was a great place to spend the rest of their life. So in a sense they were looking for the opposite kind of thing?
China's fairly notable in that its aristocracy were mostly bureaucrats and scholars, not warriors. There were periods of notable exception, but these were usually periods where having power and NOT being able to fight wasn't really possible (see the Three Kingdoms Period) or periods of foreign rule (like the Yuan dynasty).
In fact, periods like the Three Kingdoms are the REASON for this: Chinese dynasties looked at what happened when they allowed power to concentrate into the hands of warlords, saw that the answer was "they inevitably become power-hungry and start fighting each other", and decided to try and make it as hard as possible for the nobility to directly control the army. This, of course, led to its own problems (like the Song kneecapping the military's potential threat to Imperial control so much that the Mongols could essentially steamroll them without any trouble), but HAS meant that many of the classic problems of feudalism (revolts by uppity nobles, constant weird expansionist wars to keep the gentry happy) didn't really happen in China.
Right. Three years is fast, though. Took me more than a decade and I don't know anyone achieving that in less than five years.
Considering how often I feel the need to say some version of “I’m not, like, one of __those__ members of the Rationalist movement, I just sort of think some of their ideas make sense sometimes.”, I'd suppose we're firmly in at least Stage 3 now.
Also, I can't remember what blog the original reference came from, but I thought this was a somewhat better version of Chapman's article (despite being really wrong in different ways): https://status451.com/2016/09/15/social-gentrification/
The Rationalist movement needs to find their next big thing to do, or get some of their existing things to a dramatically higher level.
From my perspective, the things that currently work are the following: -- People at MIRI and other organizations produce an alignment paper once in a while. People at CFAR work on their rationality techniques. Scott has a successful blog. Less Wrong is also a decent community blog. There is a spin-off movement called Effective Altruism. There are many local meetups all over the world. A few YouTube channels and podcasts with rationality(-adjacent) content. Probably a few more things I forgot at the moment.
Some things that were tried, seem to have either failed or remained very small, but could possibly be tried again in the future with greater success: -- Raising the sanity waterline, i.e. bringing the rationality teachings to the masses. Groups of rationalists living together, using their rationality to optimize their offline lives, e.g. homeschooling their kids together. A rationality dojo that could actually visibly transform its members into more amazing beings. Arbital. HPMOR (was great, but is a finished project). Again, probably forgot a few things.
New things I can imagine happening, which would not be very far from what already exists, but would still feel like something new and exciting happens: -- Making some "AI alignment for the masses" educational tool, like Khan Academy. A great book on rationality that would actually become very famous outside the rationality movement. A theory of human values that most people would actually agree on. A technical demo for extracting coherent extrapolated preferences from people. Rationality meetups becoming an order of magnitude larger, having a permanent place and schedule, and paid organizers. A rationality YouTube channel with diverse content, similar to Joe Rogan Experience and similarly popular. More spin-off movements. Taking over Mensa, and changing its mission to "passing an IQ test was just the first step, now we are going to train you how to actually use your intelligence". Designing a rational education (not just education of rationality, but education of the kind of things that schools typically teach only way better), and establishing a school that actually teaches it successfully. Amazing software projects designed by rationalists that work much better than current clickbait-optimized and stupidity-accelerating social networks. Movies with rationalist protagonists who optimize the world successfully. Etc.
Of that list, Ratflix is the only thing I can actually see realistically possibly affecting the masses. Everything else is too niche, too political, too heterodox. At absolute minimum, the first step would have to be addressing the current climate of anti-intellectualism, anti-expertise; just because Rationalists are more correct than others* doesn't mean they're any more likely to get listened to. Egghead wonks are indistinguishable. It really comes back to the average Rationalist not being willing (constitutionally able?) to play hardball, or otherwise act sociopathically...even though Niceness, Community, and Civilization are a big appeal of this little garden, outside the walls, the Dark Arts reign supreme. If HPMOR taught me anything, it's that the Dark Arts are an asymmetrical weapon, and we're at a disadvantage for neither using them in general nor widely training in direct counters. (One might generalize this to "Rationality focuses too much on improving the individual mind, not how that mind relates to other minds".)
*big YMMV
I think there is a very good counterpoint that anyone who takes up the Devil's tools to fight the Devil quickly forgets what their goals were to start with (or, more cynically, someone who's going to use every trick in the book to seize power probably cares more about seizing power than whatever ideology he professes).
Cant't dismantle the Master's house using the Master's tools, huh? Fair enough. I'd still like to see more concrete evidence of the Heavenly approach actually succeeding though...the diversity we do get inside Rat spaces always seems heavily confounded by selection effects. By forswearing the Dark Arts and already mostly being a turn-off to normies, it sorta just feels like intellectual monasticism. Removed from worldly concerns, perfecting ourselves at the cost of losing touch with everything outside the walls. Even the more direct-action spinoffs like EA have a bad habit of falling down esoteric rabbitholes that blunt their effectiveness and alienate people.
It's sorta appealing in one sense if we just target elites, since blah blah politics mostly only responds to elite and UMC interests blah. But by definition that can never include the masses, and they way outnumber us. I think it's easy to forget that...a sort of Shut Up And Multiply blind spot. If we're bad at mind-killing politics (lol, Carrick Flynn effect) and bad at social dark arts, that genuinely doesn't leave too many other avenues of influence open. Rationality is about winning, after all; cheating is technique. If we seize power and then forget to stop using DA, that doesn't seem meaningfully worse or different than what already happens in the status quo. At least we'll be better about aligning incentives against Goodharting?
This feels like what everyone who has ever ended up ruling an extremely bad regime has told themselves.
If the techniques of rationalism have led one to the conclusions of Callicles, why did we bother with all that and not just be Callicles? (no room for status expansion?)
I mean...I feel like that's not a terribly inaccurate summary of the Outside View regarding Rationalism? A lot of frankly rather smug individuals asseting their right to rule via superior <s>philosophy<s/> intellectual prowess...okay, yes, also actual philosophy sometimes, have you heard the Good Epistemic News about consequential utilitarianism. But outside their insular communities, time and again, they relearn the lesson of "no plan survives contact with the enemy". I don't think it's an accident that the big success stories like prediction markets, MIRI, EA, etc. are still nearly unheard of outside the community. And the few times they are, it doesn't tend to be terribly positive overall. When the original Rightful Caliph is Eliezer Yudkowsky, a walking trope of narcissistic hubris, that can't help but trickle down to everything else...
So, yes, the "why did we bother with all that?" is a salient question. The most charitable interpretation I've heard also came from outside the community. I can't remember the writer or the exact piece, but they described the Ratsphere as a sort of group therapy. It's no accident that we attract so many disaffected nonconformists, autists, LGBT, heterodox heretics, etc...more than any particular __outwards__ pressure to repel normies, there's a lot of __inwards__ pressure to select for those whom typical groups leave behind. Someone who can get their philosophical satisfaction from Leftist ideology has a lot less to gain here. Someone who effectively fights akrasia and finds meaning through their religion has a lot less to gain here. And so on.
It's an Island of Misfit Toys in the intellectual Archipelago, and we do take good care of each other, which is noble and commendable cause falling through society's cracks sucks. But it's still ultimately an island - the separation is Bug Not Feature. And while there's noble intentions in wanting to bring the (sometimes novel!) effective techniques and therapy to the lost masses, I think it runs into that particular roadblock. If they'd have worked, they'd probably already be here. You're either in or out - if unwilling to buck self-constraints on exercise of power, then one shouldn't also endlessly grumble and hang-wring about the low Sanity Waterline. Because why would we expect it to fix itself if the masses don't have our techniques, or equivalent substitutes?
FdB's recent piece about EA I think speaks fairly accurately to the vibes I'm trying to gesture at, despite its hyperbole and factual inaccuracies which are totally out of character for him: https://freddiedeboer.substack.com/p/effective-altruism-has-a-novelty
Okay, so I have to ask; What observation or observations would falsify this model? Because I suspect we could find some internicean strife in many small groups and emerging cultures.
Sociopathic takeover being more common?
Okay, I'm still a little lost.
1. Diagnosing sociopaths takes a fair bit of doing. It's not something a novice (like myself) can achieve just by talking casually with someone a few times. So I'm hesitant to say that ST is an outcome that can be measured objectively enough to falsify anything.
2. But lets say, for the sake of argument, that we jump that big hurdle. How common would it have to be to falsify the theory?
I think the sociopaths very much depend on the nature of the movement. For instance, I think something like EA is fairly 'sociopath-resistant' just because the movement is about finding the most rational ways to help people. The incentives are for finding smart ways of helping people and exploring ideas around that.
On the contrary, movements that are explicitly political or financial (think crypto and antitrust right now) are more likely to attract sociopaths because the paths to status are more direct, the status rewards are much greater, and there is much more incentive for bullshitting and/ or bullying people.
Crypto currently incentivises bullshitting normal people to get them to make your richer. Antitrust currently incentivises harassing big tech at every turn even when it makes everyone (including themselves) miserable.
In short, incentives determine the propensity for sociopathic capture.
What is "EA" mentioned in the tweet there? Tried looking it up but nothing really made any sense.
Effective Altruism-- an effort to be efficient about helping people.
Worth noting that EA is not merely an effort to be efficient; at this point it's a full subculture with some well-funded institutions, well-known idiosyncrasies, etc.
Try https://www.effectivealtruism.org/articles/introduction-to-effective-altruism
Like with Rao, I think so too with Chapman the Sociopath label is off (actually in almost any non-medical context where I've ever seen sociopath or psychopath used the term didn't fit - people just seem to have a hard time resisting the temptation to use it).
What's true is that when a subculture get's big it starts to attract people interested in power, money or status rather than the thing itself. That will lead to professionalisation, mainstreaming and dilution of the subculture. But calling all of that sociopathy seems like a really big stretch to me. By the same logic, anybody who chooses their career with any consideration for the job market, earning potential or potential impact would be a sociopath.
I think another thing that happens in a cycle is that the early fanatics are usually young people full of passion and idealism. As they get older and start to settle down, they themselves try to make the whole thing more stable and businesslike, something that can support their family. In Chapmans terminology the geek becomes the sociopath. Again, the label doesnt fit the category.
I think another important phenomenon is what we'd call dilution by casuals.
Anything that's sufficiently interesting to attract obsessive fans is also sufficiently interesting to attract a far larger cadre of casual fans; people who kinda like the thing but also have a lot of other things going on. "Oh sure I like punk music, I like everything except rap and country".
Invariably, the hardcore fans will absolutely hate the casual fans for not liking the thing in the "right" way. I think they'll often mistake this for "those filthy casuals are only joining us for the status", which I think is usually wrong because there's not usually that much status to be gained from these sorts of things... they're joining because they like the thing, but they're failing to turn into a hardcore fan like _you_ because they don't like the thing that much.
I think most people's hobbies never really leave Phase 1, and they're probably better off that way.
For example, one of my hobbies is playing Ultimate. I don't care about whether Ultimate is taking over as a major sport - it's popular enough already that I never have trouble finding people to play with. (There are semi-professional Ultimate teams, but they're not growing very much.)
I don't even care that much about improving my own playing skills - I've almost certainly plateaued. I play because it's fun, because it's healthy exercise, and because I've made a few friends. And most of the people I play with have the same attitude.
On the other hand, one of my hobbies that didn't work out well was writing on Quora. It was a great experience until around 2018 because few of the Top Writers took it seriously. But when the company tried to become profitable, they wrecked the existing culture.
So the lesson here is that if you want a simple, fun, drama-free life, you should look for things you enjoy that are low-status and have little chance of ever changing. And definitely stay away from political movements and from anything that's backed by VCs.
A side note: my son got interested in ultimate and so I watched a couple of our hometown’s semipro team on YouTube with him. It’s a really good spectator sport, very entertaining. As a sideline to Scott’s argument, it will be interesting to track whether an accessible and exciting marginal sport like Ultimate can gain an audience and get big.
To shine Scott’s approach in a direction he maybe he hadn’t thought of, what about the early days of football? College and pro football emerged in the 1910s and 1920s, going from a disreputable, marginalized sport to one that in the 1920s produced national celebrities. It’s probably analogous to Planned Parenthood, Scott’s example, where a movement produced hierarchical organizations with access to funding. So football and feminism both resisted the arc Scott describes because they were financially successful and allowed maturing young people to “move to the suburbs” and gain financial stability.
This is a great post (thanks Scott!) and one that bears much further thought.
I assume the semipro team you watched is in the AUDL, right?
It's funny to me that you mention how it's a really good spectator sport. The AUDL deliberately made lots of rule changes to make the sport more watchable, some of which were pretty controversial.
I wouldn't call the creators of the AUDL "sociopaths", but David Chapman's framework captured the basic idea. Leaving the pejoratives aside, the thesis is that the nature of an activity usually has to change for it to go mainstream, in ways that make the founding members feel unhappy, or at least ambivalent.
I think Scott missed this part - he made it sound like everyone is still happy in the growth phase and there's no competition. That's not always the case.
I knew a guy when we were college age who was just obsessed with how Ultimate was "disrespected" and wanted it to be taken seriously by other athletes etc. And I always wanted to say to him... why? What will that get you, really? Right now you get to play a fun competitive game with other enthusiasts. You're not naive enough to hope to ever "go pro." So what does respect have to offer you?
I think for most college guys, the one way respect would help is for impressing girls.
At least according to stereotypes, the quarterback of a school's football team always gets any girl he wants. That probably doesn't happen for Ultimate players.
On a related note, Ultimate frisbee has been exploding in popularity lately in China. Perhaps we will see some of the phases in Scott's article play out there:
https://theworld.org/stories/2022-07-27/rise-ultimate-frisbee-team-sport-china
https://supchina.com/2022/05/25/ultimate-frisbee-soars-in-china-as-a-fashion-sport/
Oh man, this resonated. I used to write a lot on Quora, mostly on topics I was passionate about but which nobody at work was interested in, so it was an outlet of sorts. Like yours, my experience was wrecked by the changes.
I think the term "Sociopath" sets up too high a bar."status seeking relatively unscrupulous person" rolls terribly off the tongue, but would definitely describe a lot of people in these spaces whose intentions might not be unaligned with the movement.
Probably not super mind-blowing, but I think the sociopaths are more likely to show up if the nature of the thing provides a path to personal enrichment (like monetarily). They might not all be antisocial but they certainly are grifters.
"One way for this to happen is institutionalization. A movement rises. It founds some groups to promote its agenda. The fires of excitement die down, and the groups remain. Feminism is no longer as big a deal as it once was, but we still have NOW and Planned Parenthood. These institutions have stopped being social Ponzi schemes. You join them as a day job. You expect to work hard, and at best get a position commensurate to your talent and diligence. It’s not really worth criticizing the leadership, because everything happens through formal governance structures which are hard to affect. Most people who want to be feminists have already decided to support Planned Parenthood and not you. And you cannot take over Planned Parenthood unless you win over their Board of Directors, which you won’t."
This process and its impact on progressive institutions, particularly nonprofits, will be a big part of my next book. (Available in 2023 from Simon & Schuster!)
Linked: The New Science of Networks
Book by Albert-László Barabási (2002) might be insightful, if we operationalize "subculture" as meaning a particular kind of "networked relationship".
I also think Scale: The Universal Laws of Life and Death in Organisms, Cities and Companies by Geoffrey West (2017) might useful to better describe the process of the growth and decline a subculture.
All of the sub-discussions here about calcification/true believers etc is really important too. Especially on a political/civilizational level.
All of the structures mentioned (the conferences, the journals, and so on) are institutions. And institutions at their core exist to stay the same. To perpetually stand firm on some core set of organizing principles. It applies to whatever institution you like--you are "instituting" something at a particular point in time and hoping that it will hold the line. Marriage, Boy Scouts, the church, the military, whatever.
This line of thinking is one of the bright lines of distinction between what we can loosely call "conservatives" and "liberals." In my case I am particularly in tune with this because I would rather conserve most things even if they are obsolete due to the aesthetic. And having that instinct gets one labelled [fill in the blank "ist" or "ophobe"]. It's not really any of those things, and comes from a good place in most cases.
However, things like the second amendment were instituted when the most powerful weapon on earth was an 8" ball that could knock down a wall and kill 2-3 people. This is the part where people like me must confront our nature to conserve, even if the proposed change is scary. It's just one example.
The "liberal" has another set of second and third-order effects and consequences to his internal drives that he must confront. To keep myself from going crazy I must, out of necessity assume they do that soul searching as well. Or else it becomes "they are trying to make America a communist/woke/totalitarian state with gulags and gas chambers for cis white males with jobs."
It sounds cliche, but the "truth" may be somewhere in the middle.
Well said. Speaking as a liberal feminist, I am constantly thinking of second/third order effects and trying to reconcile them with my core values. Am also constantly seeking new ideas and data to inform the soul searching (which is a reason I have followed SSC/ACX for so many years). I am as uncomfortable with declining fertility rates in WEIRD nations as I imagine you are with school shootings.
It’s unfortunate that there are so many loud voices in media who don’t appear to do this. The optimist in me who wants to leave a better world for my kid would like to believe that they are the minority across the board.
Yes. There is a very strong side of me that instinctively wants my children to have the EXACT same life, the EXACT same America I did, just on repeat. That's what makes me "conservative." I get that. But then I think about it really hard, and no, its not true.
I don't hate anyone. I want moral progress. Riding along the top of a moving snake with leftist wokeism on one side and rightist reactionary thought on the other is exhausting.
It’s exhausting. I agree. Wish I had any insight to offer here, but after getting fed up with the state of things, the only move that helps me is tossing the phone in a drawer and heading out for some gardening (…humanity’s first ever subculture?).
No, that's an agriculture.
*applause*
I wonder if mature professions follow this pattern. I’ve read (maybe here?) that 150 years ago, pretty much anyone who could read could get into law school, and practice law. Now you have to do five extracurricular activities to get into a good college, do volunteering and more activities in college while maintaining good grades to get into law school. Then get into good internships once you’re in law school etc.
Same with many other mature professions. What’s missing though, is the decline. And barring the collapse of society and/or the rule of law, I don’t imagine being a lawyer will ever be low status.
"pretty much anyone who could read could get into law school, and practice law. "
Having practiced law for 30+ years, this is still true. Being a lawyer is neither high status nor very complicated.
When I took the bar examine the pass rate was 49% in my state. It is now like 70% and I see no appreciable increase in talent.
Other commenters seem to have more or less pointed out already that in this usage "sociopath" is a kind of pejorative label for a group rather than a literal diagnosis, but I'm surprised to see that nobody's mentioned the more obvious fact that *everybody who's in it for status* is a Sociopath in this model of subcultures. You're supposed (according to the implicit moral of this type of model, which I subscribe to) to be in a subculture for the thing in itself; *any amount* of using it instrumentally, as a means to status rather than an end in itself, makes you a Sociopath (or arguably I guess a MOP). All of the people you describe who join in phase three and are disappointed to find there's no free-floating status to harvest and upset that they're doomed to be low-status forever, rather than rejoicing that so many people share their special interest, are fuckups.
My own experience with the rationalist community, and political organisations is that a major factor is people having other things to do with their time that takes them away from the community, either not working on the same stuff anymore, or working on it in private. If you look at the main posters from the less wrong 'golden age' in the late 2000s early 2010s most don't post anymore. Not because of ideological schisms but because they had kids, or have jobs that take up most of their time and energy. Even if they're working on related areas it won't be in a publicly visible way (e.g someone who used to post about game theory and economics goes and works for a bank, they might be writing similar things but it's all internal). And while new people can replace them they're less enthusiastic.
It's a cliché that people are radicals when they're young, then settle down to do the same things as their parents. But it's a significant phenomenon
It sounds like your theory is that subcultures don't replace themselves - that once the original members get older and drift away, that's it. This sounds like it's probably true to different degrees in different subcultures. The rationalists seem like an especially likely case because people were attracted by EY's blogging, and then he mostly stopped blogging, and if new people came in they would have had to come from somewhere else.
My impression is that that probably *would* have happened, but that we didn't get that far before effective altruism became a super-big-deal and kind of swallowed rationalism and now there are lots of new EAs because they have great recruitment.
I think for other things these stories make less sense - for example, naively you would expect whatever made people learn karate in 1990 to continue making about the same percent of people learn karate now.
The meta level question is maybe why some self replace and some don't. Partly I think its a question of scale and cohesion (or lack of).
Individual Karate clubs and schools rise and fall and go out of business, but there are enough people who do Karate that new ones pop up to replace them. In part because Karate doesn't require a central organization to function. There's not a single president of Karate releasing new Karate moves that everyone pays attention to. There was to begin with when it was new, but it became self perpetuating as it was decentralised. And while there are scandals and feuds within professional karate world (I assume, though I don't know the details) they don't change why an 8 year old wants to do karate.
Some political movements reach that point, with local chapters becoming pretty much autonomous, others are very much tied to individual charismatic figures and short term movements. I'd like to say that the successful ones are focused on something more abstract that doesn't require particular people, but that's not quite right, as a lot of ideologies are abstract but fleeting. Maybe its the difference between a shared activity and an organization formed around a particular project or goal. If your shared activity is raising money for veterans or cat sanctuaries, or protesting pollution, you can keep doing that perpetually in a self contained way.
I think this insufficiently considers the explanation typically given by the actual people in the movement who are making criticisms / fragmenting off: that they've grown disillusioned with the core ideas of the movement & realized it doesn't solve everything like it claimed to (or that it at least has deep unaddressed issues). What makes you doubt that explanation (and think instead that it's primarily a status competition thing)? Or do you think those are actually compatible in some deep way?
There's a much simpler explanation for feminism being in the "postcycle" phase: feminism accomplished huge swathes of its goals (right to vote, reduced sexism, etc), so people who agree with it have less reason to make an effort.
I think this is just a different way to look at the same point - there was originally a lot for people to do in feminism and a lot of reasons for it to grow, and now there's less to do and it's growing less quickly (because it's less attractive to people because they need it less).
Sure but I do think there's a significant difference between "feminism attracts less passion because there's less to be angry about" and "feminism attracts less passion because people recognise that there's less status to mine", and I read your post as emphasising the latter.
My claim is there's less status to mine because there's less to be angry about.
There's also the fact that if you spend ten years forming a new school of art with two other people you're close with and who also live for that school, you're unlikely to be willing to say "This movement has accomplished what it set out to accomplish so I guess I'll go home." More likely you'll create things more worthy of negative criticism while also being much less personally willing to heed that criticism.
I wonder if this is the next evolutionary step of the thing you and Chapman are both describing. Like Chapman's version is how subcultures primarily functioned 1960~2000 and your version is how subcultures function(ed) from 2000~now.
I think about the 60's and 70's subcultures of my parents' generation and they seem (with a nod to the possible distortions of pandering/revisionist histories) to fit Chapman's model (e.g. Jobs vs Woz) much more so than the ones from the last 10 to 20 years.
Come to think of it, that would actually tie into Chapman's thesis a bit, i.e. that subcultures no longer function. It isn't worth it to the sociopaths to become involved anymore.
A lot of this sounds like truism, or selection bias. Thing isn't popular or exciting to most, then it catches on and grows, then it stops growing, fragments into new directions and isn't novel but becomes part of the mainstream. This HAS TO describe literally anything in the past that was ever popular/exciting, because it wasn't always that way (started small) and can't grow indefinitely without becoming either an institution (stable leadership/direction), fragmented (new leadership/direction), or just falling apart.
But what about cultures that never grew, or that don't confer enough money/status/passion among participants (not exciting enough) that you can quit your day job? I guess you wouldn't call it a subculture then ... but some people take e.g. being a bike rider quite seriously, without there being a status struggle about who is True Lord of the Bike Shorts and Leader of the Movement.
Rewards being high for the innovators (like the example of founding Google) isn't a Ponzi scheme, because the reward for doing X is how much value X produces, not getting people to pay you so that they too can do X. The Google founders don't sell the secret of how to found Google in an infinite cycle of Google sales, they sell ads. Probably why Google isn't "a subculture" either, but weird example.
Also a Ponzi scheme is strictly better for the first movers. Here we have a phase of low-reward die-hards before growth that don't get their investment paid off, that were there before it became a Ponzi. Maybe blogs in the 90s were higher-visibility and you trace that to the culture of today, what about the BBS users before that? So better to say "at some point, some subcultures become a sort of Ponzi scheme", which would also make more clear the post-selection of picking just the successful subcultures and just the right times.
I think you aren't accounting for things that start and stay small but endure. Capuchin monks have existed for 500 years, but Capuchin Catholicism and related processes have never become a cool subculture that's subject to the cycles Scott describes.
I think Scott isn't accounting for those things, this is what I meant by the selection bias of the theory. Only subcultures that get big enough work with the model, if they're too small they "never grew" like I said.
Ah, I see.
An alternative, parallel explanation is just about doing work.
Initially, there's a lot of work to do, and consistency isn't as important. Then there's some foundational work left, but mostly people are building on the foundations, sometimes in different directions, and conflicts are becoming more obvious. And finally, all basic parts are in place, so new work is either a refinement which (as you point out) no one notices, or constructive criticism, or a fork of some part, depending on whether the new person agrees, partially agrees, or disagrees with the part they're most interested in. Since as postulated no one notices the refinements, all people notice are the criticisms and the forks.
I'm not saying your model doesn't exist. Maybe it's more salient! Mostly I'm asking, how would we tell the difference?
I think there's a new movement starting up now, which is something like "religion is inevitable and attempts to banish it have only created not-so-great religions (marxism, wokism, various cryptocurrencies etc) so we might as well be conscious about it and try to create one that doesn't have the problems of either traditional religions, or the newer non-religion religions."
I'm seeing this play out in multiple different substacks with lots of followers. Lots of people realizing we can't escape the conscious cultivation of value systems, the only question is _which_ value system to consciously cultivate.
Of course, this new movement seems like it's probably the oldest movement in the book. Perhaps what's different is that ideas are now far more competitive with each other than ever before. It's like social media was 'gain of function' research for memes, and the ubermeme, the great-grandaddy of all memes, "good", is now likely to stumble upon some incredibly powerful variant, possibly one that's K selected in stead of r-selected.
This is a really interesting comment! This is something I have suspected for the past year or so, but I haven’t ran into good evidence. Which substacks are having these discussions? I would love to hear more of your thoughts, and learn more about this trend, to see if my naive intuitions were right. I think we are moving towards Steelman Religion and I’m eager to test that guess.
Some relevant examples:
- https://experimentalhistory.substack.com/p/why-arent-smart-people-happier
- https://treeofwoe.substack.com/p/why-has-our-world-gone-so-crazy
- https://laulpogan.substack.com/p/expropriative-altruism-the-endgame
and my own writing like this:
https://apxhard.substack.com/p/healing-the-wounded-western-mind
these are all pointing in the direction of something like, "you can't _not_ have a religion, the only thing you can change is how you answer religious questions like why is there evil in the world, and what a good life looks like"
My take is that most people read "desperately struggling" as "sociopathy" because people very rarely encounter desperate struggle, and it is sociopathic, in that to desperately struggle you have to turn off that part of you that cares who is hurt in your desperate struggles.
Status is one of the few places left where the sort of people who comment online encounter a situation where A. resources are scarce, B. "wealth" can be gained by cruelty and so C. it's worthwhile to sociopath.
I feel this is a very strong framework with useful applications. The communities I have (as a lurker) seen this happen to this seems like a good fit, and the community I saw that partially avoided this had a baked-in solution.
However, twice in this essay a word was chosen that took me out of stream. It showed up at critical points that discussed the method of action but the word chosen seemed itself to contradict the thesis. That word was "realize".
The thesis, as I understand it, is this process enters its infighting stage due to status games pursued not by sociopaths, but by well-meaning people (my interpretation of "good") being affected by incentives. Realize, to me, implies a conscious discovery of information. So when you say "This is the stage where the last tier joins the pyramid, realizes that there won’t be a tier below them, and feels betrayed." why would a well-meaning person feel betrayed by that? Again, when you say "At some point, everyone realizes you can’t get easy status from the subculture anymore." and to a lesser extent on "The actual elites realize their status is also precarious, and some of them side with the counterelites in order to get a new base, bringing the conflicts to the highest levels." why would well-meaning people consciously seeing the rules of status affecting them make them start behaving in intentionally antisocial ways?
The people who see "my status or opportunity of status is threatened, therefore I need to wrest status away from someone else" are the sociopaths you said there isn't an influx of or aren't taking over. Unless your greater point is the sociopaths were there from the start and the change of incentives directs energy previously building something into competitive energy. Which is a fair point to make but it doesn't coexist well next to your other points barring some other synthesis like "sociopaths are good people" or "sociopaths naturally occur everywhere and the only way to contain them is to create an incentive system that focuses their energies on growth/good".
Those might actually be good syntheses, but I wonder if the non-sociopath thesis can be salvaged by finding a different method of action other than realizing that status is no longer available and desiring status.
These are the kinds of comments that make me love this place. I'll be thinking about this for a week.
> why would well-meaning people consciously seeing the rules of status affecting them make them start behaving in intentionally antisocial ways?
Nice people have dark instincts, too. https://www.lesswrong.com/tag/corrupted-hardware
There is a difference between doing something knowingly, and having an instinct that gets triggered by the perceived status scarcity, feels from inside like "doing the good and reasonable thing", but was actually selected by evolution because it helps at some zero-sum games.
Seeing the status pyramid already filled feels from inside like this:
You see a movement that fills you with great enthusiasm, so you join, full of energy, and ready to contribute. But soon you notice an annoying thing: whenever you propose to do something useful, people stop you by saying that someone else is already doing that (so instead of starting your own project, you should rather contact that person and do what they tell you to, if you want to be useful) or that doing so would disrupt some existing processes which would be a bad thing. All your new ideas get a negative response.
At some moment you get angry and realize that the existing powers are more interested in keeping the status quo, than in helping the movement to achieve its nominal goals. So you try your new ideas anyway, which somehow makes many people irrationally angry at you. You either get bitter and leave... or you succeed to get some people on your side and create a new faction, which spends a lot of energy fighting the existing factions. You don't really like this, but unfortunately they are not leaving you another choice.
When you are halfway towards achieving your goals and finally making the movement what it was supposed to be, you notice a new member, full of optimism and energy. He has a lot of naive ideas. You try to explain why certain things are impossible in given situation, and try to redirect his energy towards doing something actually useful. But the new guy is stubborn, takes your advice as a personal offense, and just starts doing stupid things. Even worse, other people are now joining him and doing stupid things, too. Your goals, seemingly so close to completion, are now ruined. People start irrationally hating you. Nothing makes sense anymore, the world is going crazy.
I don't think desire for status has to be antisocial. I think most people want to be recognized by others positively. They want their work to be noticed, they want people to know their name, they want to build a good reputation. If they enter a subculture and discover that their work is not being noticed, and nobody knows who they are, and they have no reputation despite the amount of work they put in, then they're going to seek that "status" elsewhere. Some people will seek it through anti-social means, others through pro-social, but it's natural to want to seek it.
As an example, I don't have a lot of free time these days, but I am motivated to be somewhat active in the comments of this blog, and at DSL or r/themotte because I get some "status" out of it. I feel like sometimes people notice and appreciate my work: they might reply positively, and even a negative reply means I have been noticed. I don't think I have much status around here, but I think I do have a little and some reputation. People who have stuck around a long time have probably seen me comment. There are people here who recognize me. And I didn't have to move heaven and earth to accomplish that, just read a blog I enjoy and participate in communities that discuss things I'm interested in discussing. I don't participate in other communities online because I don't feel heard there, and there's no opportunity to be heard. We're social creatures, everybody wants to be a member of a group, and an esteemed member is better than a nobody member.
In other places if I take the effort to participate I don't feel heard. I think that's all there is to the "realize" part: you are excited to join a group, you put in work, and you feel ignored. What you are doing is not appreciated. So you either drop out or you protest, and when your protest gets enough attention that you feel heard you continue in that direction.
Haven't even read this article yet but immediately thought of: https://xkcd.com/1095/
And for a much less generous variant that I regularly see posted:
https://i.kym-cdn.com/photos/images/original/002/169/949/6e0.jpg
A direction for Further Research: how does the down cycle of an existing movement breed the fomentation of a new one? what about a cultural space that is absolutely glutted with conflicting movements, or one in which one movement is so hegemonic that new movements become subordinate to it?
Interesting essay, but it would be nice if it incorporated the insights of Mark Fisher “Exiting the Vampire Castle,” which was referred to yesterday in "Present At the Creation: Of the Social Justice Memeplex Within the Anarchist Movemen" on the Year Zero substack.
To summarize, these essays outline how the politics of denunciation affect left-wing subcultures.
Thank you very much. I've carefully asked a few Social Justice people whether they had ever been in a conversation which met their standards, and the answer was always no.
It is impossible to read this article without thinking of a relevant article in the June 1959 issue of Mad Magazine.
http://www.kaleberg.com/public/Non%20Conformists.pdf
This is why I love little communities like the blog commentariat: getting to enjoy other peoples random knowledge. That was a very amusing link.
Funny how, in the following 73 years, sweet potato chips went from MAD to a run-of-the-mill nonconformist side.
What I found striking is that poodles were listed as a non-conformist pet. Its funny how one era's hipster becomes another era's boomer.
Hey, my straitjacket still fits, but I use my pith helmet to hold all my darned meds now.
As an unironic enjoyer of old Tom Swift books, I am clearly a MAD nonconformist.
Hypothetically, a subculture is kept healthy if there are many opportunities to do the thing without winning big. For example, the basis for gaming sub-cultures is small groups doing gaming. It's probably possible to become a big name DM and make money at it (I'm guessing) but that's very little of what's going on.
There are a few professional "big name" DMs these days: Matt Mercer and Brandon Lee Mulligan come to mind, they both make money DMing. Of course that's only possible thanks to the internet and streaming video. Lets people take chances on lots of weird possibilities like "Hey, maybe enough people might want to watch a DnD campaign that we could make money off of it." Nobody would have risked putting that on network TV.
This is just geeks mops sociopaths with different words. Only a sociopath allows their "desperation" of high status to disrupt and bring bad vibes to an entire subculture for their own personal gain. A non-sociopath would just be at peace with the fact that they showed up too late and stay in their lane. The "counterelites" in this article are just the sociopaths of geeksmops.
I think the disctinction is that GMS is about 3 different types of people (drawn to a movement at different times) whereas this theory posits one type of person acting differently in 3 situations.
I find the theory described by Scott very convincing. But, why wouldn't the psycopaths turn up in these movements and utlimately take over? After all, there is research showing that psychopats are over-proportionally represented at managerial positions in corporations. Why should movements be different?
I have long believed that the existence of a Rock and Roll Hall of Fame is a sure sign that rock and roll is dead as a seminal cultural movement.
Now, it's an institution, complete with self-appointed Authorities.
I first learned the term "involution" while studying breast cancer. After a female (mouse, human, whatever) ceases to breast feed, the breast tissue reduces back somewhat so that it's closer to the pre-pregnancy state. Because otherwise you're producing milk all the time and anybody's baby will make you leak all over the place. Interesting to see the term catch on outside a strict biological context.
There seems to be a kind of tension in this piece. You note that periods of involution come about when "the only source of status is to seize someone else’s - ie to start a fight." Which makes sense! But later on you say that a) the phenomenon of these cycles doesn't really actually involve sociopathy and b) "doesn't require that the new people be any different in ethics or commitment from the old people".
Isn't it the case that deliberately starting a fight for the motive of gaining status is a kind of sociopathic behavior? Likewise, doesn't intentionally making a movement more vulnerable and fractious, if not sabotaging it directly, for your own gain count as a kind of evidence for being unethical, or uncommitted to the movement?
My favorite Scottpost in years :D
I wonder if part of the problem is the difficulty of getting a job in EA. If I was the EA leadership, I think I would've only done a marketing campaign to attract more junior EAs once the movement reached the point where it was having a hard time filling open positions. I wonder if the current strategy is creating a sort of "EA overproduction" where a huge wave of new junior EAs compete over a comparatively tiny pool of EA jobs. In the worst case, this could create a huge pool of disaffected ex-EAs and cripple EA's potential for a generation.
> Sometimes I found myself on opposite sides of battle lines from some of the earliest and most valued members of the movement. But I never doubted they were honest; I hope they didn’t doubt me either.
I don't doubt that you're honest, Scott, and I don't think you're a sociopath. You just never seemed to grasp that writing about politics comes with a certain amount of responsibility. That your communities actually did have more racists in them because you deliberately sought a neoreactionary audience (a predictable effect), and your denialism about the frightening and very definitely fascistic movement behind Trump only made things worse.
I don't think you're dishonest, or a sociopath. I just think you were a useful idiot, and until you figure out where the extremism in our politics really lies (oof that was a bad essay), you're perpetually going to be fighting the fact that your own writing discredits you as a political commentator of merit.
Woke Derangement Syndrome is just as real as the Trump Derangement Syndrome I've been accused of having in all of your communities. The evaporative cooling effect of your apparent willingness to indulge a 'two screens' postmodern methodology for papering over basic warning signs is so strong that the people who are willing to tell you you were wrong are vanishingly few.
Sometimes it's as simple as: you were wrong about such an important thing at such an early date that you can't recover until you publicly recognize that. Trumpism was fascistic from 2016. This is the basic political intelligence test that your communities tend to fail very badly.
It can be difficult to recognize that you parted ways with reality because so many of your newfound followers flattered your intelligence for being woke-critical. If you can't listen to the speech Trump gave on 1/6 and put the pieces together on how the fascist organism directs itself: from mob ("FIGHT FOR TRUMP") to leader, to the mob in the halls of our power, then you, as well as your subculture, are doomed to irrelevancy.
My question is whether or not Scott Alexander, or his followers, can recognize Trumpism as an instantiation of the fascistic impulse. Being unable to recognize this reality because of an unwillingness to 'cooperate with the wokes' is a myopia that I file under Woke Derangement Syndrome.
> (Incidentally, since you're so concerned about violent mobs and whatnot, may I assume you were just as upset at what Black Lives Matter was doing a few months earlier, and consider the politicians and cultural figures who supported it just as illegitimate as those who support Trump?)
This is an idiotic and insipid false equivalency. Individuals who committed crimes were generally charged with those crimes to the extent of the evidence available. A cursory google will provide you with more information on the application of the legal process to those criminals, and I am in support of prosecution for crimes committed by individuals.
Your idiotic and insipid false equivalency, so popular among Scott Alexander's environs, to me suggests a robotic application of a comparison process in which motivated reasoning factors highly. Your political intelligence is malfunctioning. Woke Derangement Syndrome is real.
I don't grant credence to any of your arguments. I reject them. Upon encountering disagreement you call it gaslighting: you're not here in good faith.
Your model of politics is deeply broken. You tally up a ledger for 'both sides' and think you are making a meaningful comparison, but you are not.
A death caused by a rioter acting in self-directed rage is different from a footstep in the Capitol directed by a president telling a false story. Your inability to understand this is why you fail.
I admire how willing you are to just fantasize what you think my argument should be so you can dare me to contradict it, because I think it makes you look like you're putting words in my mouth. This is what it's like dealing with SFBA Rationalist political discourse.
Woke Derangement Syndrome is precisely this delusional hysteria. For you there _are_ only two choices. For you if I am a person who demands we notice that Trumpism is a fascistic impulse, I must also be a person who requires allegiance to Democrats. But is there any point in telling you that your construction of your ideological opponents is inaccurate simply because there is no such thing as a homogeneity of viewpoint among the left?
The existence of pseudo-paramilitary groups isn't the concern, both sides have that. Coordination between the government, the media, and large corporations is a very real concern, but both sides have that (and you have really bought the propaganda if you think the left is the only one with agents in government, the media, and large corporations: don't be that stupid please).
The actual explicitly stated narrative of the Republican Party of the United States is that Joe Biden didn't win an election against a president who deliberately made himself unpopular (in fact, his unpopularity was said to be part of his appeal). Whatever the Democrats -- the political party, not the anarchist gangs, and that distinction is important -- whatever the Democrats are, they're not actually driving the country towards a civil war on purpose the same way the Republicans are simply because a boomer couldn't face the reality that he lost an election.
Wake up dude. I don't know how it is you got so poisoned by politics online but you're actually functionally insane if you think you can hallucinate my argument for me and have me take you seriously.
The difference between Chapman's analysis and Scott's isn't Chapman's (admittedly poorly named) Sociopaths. Those are basically the same people as Scott's zero-sum-status-seeking infighters, though Chapman mostly focuses on their financial rather than social ambitions. Approximately the same process works for both, and approximately the same people will chose to pursue them at the expense of the subculture's health.
The difference is that Chapman's version includes the MOPs as an important transitional element. Scott describes a subculture as composed of people who want to create something new, contribute to the subculture's goal, and build positive-sum status in so doing. And when that becomes impractical because all the low-hanging fruit is picked and what little is out of reach of the newbies, Scott sees people who are seeking to create and contribute and earn status and are frustrated.
One hundred and thirty five thousand people attended San Diego Comicon this year. I'll wager that at *least* a hundred thousand of them never intended to create anything and never expected to gain any status within the Comicon community. They were just there for the show, to watch the movies and see all the other cool stuff, and hang out with people who shared their tastes. Possibly a few of them even read some comic books. These are the MOPs, "Members Of the Public".
Many of these MOPs can easily be monetized by "sociopaths", which is the dynamic Chapman describes. Other people here have described D&D and boardgaming as subcultures that don't seem to fit Scott's model - but they do fit the model of lots of people just wanting to consume the content and willing to deliver money who provides their sort of content.
In other subcultures, the MOPs will be some combination of less numerous, less visible, and harder to monetize. I don't think they'll be wholly absent, though - when e.g. a political protest movement becomes popular enough, it will get plenty of people who just want to join the party, enjoy the rallies (or riots), and feel like they are Doing Something. I think these are the sort of subcultures Scott is experiencing, and generalizing from. The MOPs are still there, but they're not as obviously distinct from the later generations of Geeks.
But even there, the MOPs are I think important to the status-infighting part of the process. They are harder to monetize than e.g. gamers or comic-book fans, but they can still afford status to the people they accept as leaders. And even where there *is* money to be had, there will also be status and people will want to grab it. But status (and money) as given by content-consuming MOPs, is different from status as given by content-creating Geeks. Two separate axes of status, in a single community with a limited supply of e.g. awards and podium space and steering-committee memberships, gets you an extra dose of infighting.
I'm curious if anyone thinks the space expansionism movement has any resemblances to a subculture, or whether it has gone through phases, such as in Golden Age sci-fi vs. what we're seeing now with Zubrin's Mars Society and Musk's mission.
I don't know Chinese, but google translate suggests that the term means something like coiling in on itself, which I would describe as "Ouroborosing". Once the outside fertile ground is exhausted, the competition and fights naturally turn inward.
Scott had a post about human history on the old blog... About how each expansion eventually fizzles, until some cataclismic event kicks the state out of the (inadequate) equilibrium.
Scott, you are really really high status, and consequently you are going to be pretty much ground zero for any sociopathic reality distortion attempts. Of course you think you are lucky to never have witnessed a sociopath takeover. In other news, the teacher has never noticed any bullying in her classroom, and the king's son has never noticed any corruption in the kingdom.
This is pretty depressing. I mean, it seems to imply that all movements are primarily about a quest for status, rather than about the thing the movement claims to be about. To the extent that any
new movement is primarily about status, it's doomed to become uninteresting very quickly. Agreed. But to the extent that a new movement is about something other than status- then it can stay interesting/ relevant indefinitely. How often do those new movements succeed? Or how often do those new movements have their goals corrupted/ why do these goals get corrupted? Is it because of status seekers? Is it because the goals were not in tune with reality in the first place? These are the questions about new movements that interest me. Treating all new movements as interchangeable status-seeking machines seems to do great injustice to them. They're usually about more than this. At least at first.
Tangentially relevant: http://benjaminrosshoffman.com/construction-beacons/
How could a group of people coordinate to avoid this infighting?
"Yet unlike Chapman, I never felt like there was any influx of sociopaths. Sometimes I found myself on opposite sides of battle lines from some of the earliest and most valued members of the movement. But I never doubted they were honest; I hope they didn’t doubt me either."
Did they ever start a Scissor topic, or just, like you, felt obliged to pick a side? The sociopaths hypothesis have them rock the boat as they rise, no sense for anyone on top to pick a fight.
One other dynamic that I've seen that feeds into the cyclic nature of subcultures that is hinted at both in the status and the sociopath explanations, but is slightly different (apologies if other commenters have mentioned this):
Subcultures start off as several weirdos doing a cool, new thing that shares some sort of je ne sais quoi. However, the early and influential works are often *surprisingly* different - this is particularly salient in the early works of new genres of music. At some point, "the thing" becomes codified and, rather than being a melting pot of weirdos, there is a template for how "the thing" is done. This codification is in part caused by the arrival of the mop/sociopath axis alliance. It's also facilitated by copycats looking for easy (but vanishing) status. I think it's slightly different than either of those things, though.
Once the "cool, weird new thing" becomes "a checklist of things you can do," several things happen. Copycats flood the market. N00b purists evangelize the "checklist of things you can do" without perspective on the early nature of the movement. Both the excesses and the insipidity of the movement are rightly criticized by smart weirdos — who then form a new subculture in response to their frustration with the homogenization, status-seeking, and perspectiveless moralizing that ruined the cool, weird new thing they used to love.
Don't different subcultures play out differently?
The Chapman model is, I think, based on music, and seems very much on-point. A fascination book that many readers here may enjoy is _Major Labels: A History of Popular Music in Seven Genres_ which is constantly talking about this and the constantly repeated themes of
- the rest of world is <insert epithet> because they don't like our music
- the old music was great when it was authentic, before the rest of the world got involved
It works for music (and perhaps some music-adjacent things like clubs and fashion?) because all the elements meet the model. But most sub-cultures don't match the model in some way.
I think artists want to believe that they somehow fit into this model, and perhaps there's a weird art world I know nothing about where it works. But art is not something that is sold to the masses (a sociopath invading an art scene will monetize perhaps by making it cool to certain millionaires, but there's not really any machinery to monetize art by selling it to the masses).
Film goes the other way, you don't even get started in film unless you sell to the masses. The gap between some weirdo making art movies that three other people watch and a normal movie is basically unbridgeable. Mumblecore is just on the edge – with the result that normal people are irritated as hell by it, whereas hipsters don't gain much cred by referring to it. There's not much there to monetize and no obvious path to do so.
(Perhaps porn represents the invasion of the sociopaths into what used to be a quiet little niche for afficionados? I guess that's what Boogie Nights is trying to claim.)
So consider for example either atheism or feminism. Is there a way to monetize atheism?
Is there even much cultural capital in atheism? Honestly the people talking about the influence of the Four Horsemen of Atheism (for good or ill) always struck me as basically far up their own fundaments, absolutely certain that the rest of the world was obsessed with their fights as to whether Jungle Music was a legitimate evolution of Punk or a heresy that betrayed Punk, unaware that the outside world had no idea about either and could not care less.
How about feminism? Well plenty of people will tell you that Woke has sold out, that feminism has become a way for Dove to advertise and for Target to sell even more different types of clothes ("a spunky girl can be mountain climbing in the morning, at the office in the afternoon, at a cocktail party at night, and she needs appropriate outfits for all three!")
That this hasn't led to any sort of "collapse of feminism" probably says nothing about sub-cultures, but says something about holy words. If a culture manages to become holy then you never criticize the words, they just mean whatever you want them to mean. So: is it feminist to go to bed on the first date, or to hold out for marriage? Apparently, yes. Is it feminist to support trans-rights or see them as distraction? Yes. Is it feminist to be a home maker, or to prioritize starting a company over starting a family? Yes.
I think what this tells us is that there are multiple ways for scenes/subcultures to evolve.
One is the Chapman model (if there's a way to monetize the mops).
One is the Scott Alexander model, where there's no money but there is status to fight over.
One is the apotheosis model, where (largely for historo-political reasons) words and symbols associated with the subculture become sacred, so sacred that they cannot be attacked (which means, inevitably, that they become meaningless attached to anything and everything).
I think there are other models. For example a field may be technically demanding enough that even the fans are rare, and mops are largely impossible. (Some games of skill? Any sort of serious discussion of math pr physics?)
"Don't different subcultures play out differently?"
Very much so, in my experience. When I first read Chapman's piece I thought it was spot on for the hippy sub-culture, but then thought of other sub-cultures I've been involved in that do not fit either his or Scott's model. Perhaps the key difference is whether there is any status to be had - what about low status sub-cultures like square dancing or furries?
I have some Thomist friends. They create endless frustration and intellectual stimulation. But Thomism, you will quickly find, had it's own efflorescence and involution in the 19th and early 20th century. Did you know it wasn't until 1879 that Thomism became *the philosophy* of the Catholic church, that even to this day Canon Law says that Thomas Aquinas' theology and philosophical method will have a high place in the instruction of priests? But that this mandate is only loosely followed? For by 1879, the influence of Kant, Hegel, and other continental philosophers was so great upon theology, that the Vatican thought putting Aquinas on top, might help stem the tide of idealism and Kantian dualism - at least within the Church - and provide a workable realism to ground the sciences and theology? That this effort resulted in many schools of Thomism forming, synthesizing different elements from the contemporary and the ancient tradition, and then fracturing into an endless pit of ineffectual navel gazing? Did you know that after 30 minutes one can find out "what type of Thomist" one is talking to and be able to forecast their opinion on such topics as prime matter, animal welfare, the foundations of mathematics, and the role of consequences in moral action? What perfect loveliness of this colossal wreck!
Too long, didn't read. How do I get large status with no effort? (This is a joke).
The book "Speedrunning Science" notes one solution to this, specficially in speedrunning: Endlessly splitting by game, category, etc. Everyone famous to 15 people.
Another solution would be to give me, FractalCycle, 100% of the world's status.
(Is this "Girardian"?)
I think that endless splitting is a big reason why smaller sub societies work better than larger: every small town gets its own status hierarchy across various fields, where as when everyone accesses the same hierarchy there is no more room. It is nice being the best singer in town and less nice being 7539th best singer in your country. A larger congealed society makes gaining status a lot harder for any given endeavor.
Exactly! I think this was part of the point of Gwern's "subculture society" article (mainly the last sections)
What's EA??
Effective Altruism
https://www.effectivealtruism.org/
There have been several news stories about it recently:
https://time.com/6204627/effective-altruism-longtermism-william-macaskill-interview/
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2022/08/15/the-reluctant-prophet-of-effective-altruism
One of the few pleasures of getting old is believing you are uniquely capable of realizing stuff like this because of your age -- which you do occasionally whereupon you immediate remember something you've read somewhere about wisdom. You've stolen that pleasure. Good on you!
What was the original movement for which the emergence and fragmentation of the intellectual dark web was the involution?
All of this sounds like the true definition of involution. This is the process of aging.
I think this is an excellent post, very insightful and well-reasoned, with just one issue: I think the use of the word "status" almost ruins it. Here's the question: do the people within the movement fighting each other think they're fighting for personal status (rather than for what they believe is right, or other principled goal)? If yes, well I'm struggling to imagine someone consciously joining an intellectual or ethical movement for the purpose of gaining status as NOT being a borderline sociopath. If no, then it seems pretty uncharitable to use the word.
"I'm on a crusade to return this movement to what I believe are its true principles."
"Oh, you're on a crusade for higher status?"
"...no, I really believe the movement's lost its way morally and--"
"Yeah, that's what we call wanting status,"
"But it's not about my status it's about--"
"La la la, all I'm hearing is you're a power-hungry seeker of status."
I'm sure there are lots of people unconsciously motivated by selfish self-advancement in what they think are moral crusades, but assuming that of everyone, without requiring evidence of it in any particular case, is not only rudely uncharitable, it's also in tension with the anti-cynical "no sociopaths required" tone of the rest of the post.
This doesn't seem to explain the evolution of punk rock to me. Do you think it's possible that maybe some people get something more "authentic" out of some subcultures then the simple factors that are modeled here? This model strike me as being way over reductionist and doesnt seem to account for something like "genuine value".
And this from the author of Beware The Man Of One Study.
Something like this goes on in literature. There seems to be a large-scale cycle in which entire philosophies of literature are replaced every century or so: late middle-ages allegory, the Renaissance, neo-classicism, Enlightenment, Romanticism, naturalism, modernism. These large-scale cycles affect nearly all art in unison, although in different ways (e.g., modern art is quite different from modern literature), and not in unison at different places (e.g., the Renaissance didn't really reach England until 2 centuries after beginning in Italy).
English literature and literary theory has smaller-scale waves, which don't sync up neatly with the bigger multi-modal waves, e.g.: realism (Balzac), scientific experimental realism (Zola), progressive fiction (Dickens), modernism, New Criticism, whatever you call what they did in the 1950s, post-modernism, wokeness.
The pattern isn't perfect. For instance, Marxism played a large role in 20th-century literary criticism, but can't be assigned to a single time period; it was big at least in the 1930s, 1960s, and 1990s.
Scott's model is missing some things that played a big part in literary cycles:
1. Inversion. Each cycle or wave is primarily an attack on the previous one, which derives its values mostly by inverting most of the values of the previous one. The English Renaissance, which to us is just Shakespeare, cast aside the dictums of the Middle Ages; neo-classicism brought them back; the Enlightenment brought back Renaissance naturalism, individualism, & scientific inquiry; Romanticism rebelled against the science part and against naturalist metaphysics (but not technique); modernism became largely defined as the opposition to naturalism and modernity (which is why photography is considered non-art rather than modernized painting).
2. Infiltration of institutions. One clear example is how Ezra Pound deliberately infiltrated prominent English Literature journals with his own people and used them to promote his ideology, most-notably in manufacturing an artificial positive reception of James Joyce's /Ulysses/. Another is how the American English Literature and English teacher journals were taken over by Marxists, leveraging the anti-war movement, in the late 1960s.
3. Slander, usually done after infiltrating institutions. The clearest example is the slander of the New Critics. Every book on the history of English literary theory that talks about the New Critics says nothing but lies about them. The wave of new literary theorists after them, starting perhaps with Northrup Frye and Frank Kermode, first convinced people that "New Critics" was a valid category (it mostly was), then convinced them that the New Critics had said nothing but things they'd never said or at least never agreed on (like "historical context and authorial intent is irrelevant"), then finally, when the New Critics had been swept off the scene, claimed as their own novel ideas the things the New Critics had actually advocated.
Having watched psychedelics go from subculture to effectively mainstream I've been wondering what happens when the consumerisation forces of the free market root out every niche, selling all possible subcultures back to us as soon as we can develop them, and the low barrier of entry to previously hard-to-enter subcultures that social media brings makes each burgeoning subculture evolve and dissipate quickly with few long term committers.
Doesn't this "mainstream" everything? And if (let's say national) cultures become more mainstreamed, and we run out of taboo, there is no rebellion, your parents are likely still cool af, giving you the only options of being cool af or uncool af, there is no tangible oppressor to position yourself against, the romantic struggle against the other that many cling to for meaning disappears, and therefore we become less differentiated, less individuated (in spite of the individuation force of the free market consumerisation), we all did or are doing the trips and all have tattoo sleeves and tidy beards, the snap-on cultural accessories we pick up and drop become more and more meaningless, the infinite choices we have collapse into our preferences, shaped crudely by our underlying rudimentary culture, we become less concerned about what is happening outside our cultural borders and we gather again around the local maypoles that unites us, we become more culturally unified and nationalistic, we become more tribal within our national boundaries, or other more local boundaries, we are all eventually reading from the same parochial page.
I think this is evident in the recent rise of populism (check ngram for populism to get a feel for that), which leads me to thinking about the tension between the global market economy and it's infinite choice element, and the simultaneous rise of nationalistic politics in the West, effectively revealing our parochial preferences.
What happens to this dynamic when we all become mainstream, when all dogs are having their day together at all times? Do we need to reconfigure connotations to see that the popular mainstream is the big tribe, and that that is where we are all heading with this niche-eliminating system?
>Ordinary rank-and-file members hear so much criticism of the movement that it’s hard for them to stay optimistic about it. They stop talking about it as The Amazing Movement That Will Change Everything, and become defensive: “I’m not, like, one of those members of the movement, I just sort of think some of their ideas make sense sometimes.”
Why do they have to? Ideas aren't people.