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"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.

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deletedAug 10, 2022·edited Aug 10, 2022
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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!

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founding

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.

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I've seen the same phenomenon play out in academia: the stats genius who can salvage your thesis.

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I'm puzzled as to what you mean by "the stats genius who can salvage your thesis." Can you explain? I'm genuinely curious.

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founding

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.

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That's my reading, yes. They can p-hack it enough that you can present a shiny thesis that rejects the null.

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It says you gave me a subscription? I don't know how to PM on this platform. So... thank you? Wow.

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You're welcome, just a little gesture that I appreciated your comment.

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What comment was this?

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'Savage your thesis', maybe?

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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!

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>they're a valid part of a rubbish system that exists to extract money from gullible white people

Troll detected.

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Thanks for the video-- fake martial arts are especially poisonous when entangled with nationalism.

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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.

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As the TV show Archer put it, "karate is the Dane Cook of martial arts."

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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.

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This is why my children are going to defeat your children.

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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.

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I mean, children's Jiu Jitsu classes are very much a thing

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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.

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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.

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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?

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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)".

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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."

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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.

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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.

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What’s the difference between a cycle and a sequence?

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Not sure I understand what you’re asking, what do you mean?

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Growth-peak-decline is clearly a sequence. What would make it a cycle?

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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.

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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.

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It's a pattern or arc, but does that make it a cycle?

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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.

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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."

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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).

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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.)

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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.

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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.

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Merely assigning a name to members of the set of types-of-cycle, does not remove them from the set. They are still cycles.

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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.

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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

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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.

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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.

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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.

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Aug 10, 2022·edited Aug 10, 2022

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.

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It's pretty easy to write down some dynamics that lead to periodic-ish behavior is it not? (E.g. predator-prey models)

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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

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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.

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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.

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"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.

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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.

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Must a cycle be periodic?

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Yes

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Must the period be constant?

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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Not if it is heavily damped.

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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!

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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.

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Well put.

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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

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.)

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"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.

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Aug 11, 2022·edited Aug 11, 2022

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).

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You either exit the subculture a geek or stay long enough to see yourself become the sociopath.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.)

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"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.

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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

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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.

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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.

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Aug 10, 2022·edited Aug 10, 2022

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.

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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.

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> 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".

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Aug 11, 2022·edited Aug 11, 2022

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)

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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?

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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 .

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I really could have used some examples in this essay

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First follower is Andrew, not Simon Peter.

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And, with apologies to our Catholic friends, there is no good reason to

believe that Peter ever served as the Bishop of Rome.

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(For anyone interested in the evidence on this latter question, “I” summarize it in lecture 19 of “my” “Infallibility of the Church.”)

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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.

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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.

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That sums up the situation very well and concisely.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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"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.

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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.

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I grew up Anglican (which, OK, is at the Catholic end of Protestantism), and was taught that Peter was the Bishop of Rome.

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Take a look at that lecture (free in Google Books). It really doesn’t strike me as a close question.

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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.

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Ah, TIL.

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👍

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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.

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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.

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> 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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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...

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Agreed. And that definition feels useful, even if the word itself is slightly wrong.

Is there a better word?

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Exploiters?

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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.

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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.

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Agreed, and I do think that this is one of the points that Chapman was trying to make.

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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)

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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.

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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?

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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.

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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.

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"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.

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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'.

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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.

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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).

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This is a pretty perfect description of our current western 'civilisation'.

Innovation ––> bureaucracy ––> dogmatism ––> anti-innovation

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I'd say it's a pretty good description of our politics. But not our entire civilization.

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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).

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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.

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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!

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> 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?

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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.

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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?

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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.

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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?

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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.

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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.

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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.

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The Pirate Party hasn't done so well after not having Rick Falkvinge at the helm, either.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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"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!".

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This post is very rediscovering-monarchy-from-first-principles, so I approve.

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...what?

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Aug 10, 2022·edited Aug 10, 2022

"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!

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founding

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.

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Aug 11, 2022·edited Aug 11, 2022

"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.

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founding

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.

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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.

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>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.

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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.

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"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?

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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.

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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*.

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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.

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> 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

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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?

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Thank you for the article. It is plausible in certain conditions.

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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.

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That's because crypto is a Ponzi scheme for money first and foremost, not status. So, a regular Ponzi scheme.

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Hey, not all crypto is a Ponzi scheme - some are conventional pyramid schemes, or just a good ol' fashioned pump-and-dump!

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> 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.

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Yes, good point.

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Sorry replied to your comment instead of the thread my bad

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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!

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Aug 10, 2022·edited Aug 10, 2022

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!

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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.

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author

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?

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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.

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Aug 10, 2022·edited Aug 10, 2022

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

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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.

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Aug 10, 2022·edited Aug 10, 2022

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.

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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

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Aug 10, 2022·edited Aug 10, 2022

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.

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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.

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