Fuck, you’re right, cicadas exist. That’s a legit cycle. Exception that proves the rule, I think.
That being said, business cycles are another great example of a not-a-cycle. It’s not that the cycle has to be exact; I think I gave that impression from oversimplifying the actual statistical model I have in my head of a k-period ARFIMA-like model, which is what I’m used to using for modeling time series. But there have to be real mechanics that pull a time series towards “Overshooting” its target for me to consider it a cycle. A business “cycle” doesn’t count, and in fact intro to macro courses regularly point out that the phrase “Business cycle” is a misnomer caused by exactly this illusion—it was the central example I had in mind of cycle pareidolia! Seeing several consecutive periods of above-average growth mean that the probability of a recession is *lower*, not higher. There’s no point at which, having seen n periods of above-trend GDP, you would conclude that the next-period’s GDP will probably be below-trend.
If you send me the Google trends data for a couple dozen random trends, I can test it! I’m too busy to sort through the data, but it’s a simple enough statistical model.
The other counterexample that proves the rule (that a lot of people brought up) was predator-prey dynamics. But as lots of other people pointed out, those are notoriously unstable.
That being said, after thinking about it some more, I think cicadas count as calendar-based because each species runs off of integer multiples of years. I don’t think that makes it true by definition, though. If cicadas came out of hiding every .4081 years, I would recognize that as not-calendar-based.
It's not calendar based, it's nutrient-density-as-driven-by-solar-inensity based. The categories are aren't made for Man, they just *are*.
Calendars are how we measure a characteristic of cycles, it's not what drives the cycle.
The natural world is chock full of cycles, from Kreb to beating hearts to tides (and tide pools) to estrus in mammals and from there the formation and activity of groups of animals.
The movement of the great clock hands in the sky is the biggest exception that proves the rule for cycles. They are true, long-term-ordered, precise frequency cycles and they drive a lot of stuff.
But I think relaxation oscillations are also moderately common - if a forest burns today, it is very unlikely to burn tomorrow, but very well might burn again in a few decades. I think earthquakes and volcanoes behave similarly. I think the business cycle is similar - immediately after a big bust, you don't have risk-taking investors, so you are unlikely to get another crisis in the next few years.
Actually, immediately after a big bust is exactly when recessions are most common, statistically speaking. There’s a reason double dip recessions happen all the time! Same goes for volcanoes and earthquakes.
IDK about forest fires, but that definitely sounds like another plausible counterexample.
I think you're over-constraining your definition by insisting that cycles be both stable and highly regular. You start with "cycles don't exist" but are eventually argued down to "stable and regular cycles don't exist, except man-made ones and these handful of exceptions that 'prove the rule'".
(Tangentially, you're using that idiom incorrectly: "no parking on Sunday" proves the rule that you can park on other days)
Like, to go back to the original, Turchin's Secular Cycles, nobody thinks you can set your watch to the decline of civilization or anything like that. Regularity is not an implied part of the argument or the dynamic, and to argue that the absence of regularity makes it "not a cycle" seems to miss the point.
However, "In any case, the phrase can be interpreted as a jocular expression of the correct insight that a single counterexample, while sufficient to disprove a strictly logical statement, does not disprove statistical statements which may correctly express a general trend notwithstanding the also commonly encountered existence of a few outliers to this trend."
Yeah, I probably should just let this one go, I have tried to make efforts to not be "that person on the internet who complains whenever 'literally' is misused", and like literally, the horse has probably left the barn on this one.
But in online discussions, I tend to find this usage of the phrase as a bit dismissive, like some sort of rhetorical judo maneuver that takes a counterargument to the point I'm making and frames it as if it somehow actually supports my point. But it's really not a big deal which is why I put it as a parenthetical tangent point.
If it actually came from the archaic "prove" meaning "test", well, all exceptions test the rule so the "...that proves the rule" part would be redundant.
I'm not sure why you think business cycles aren't real. It seems like you're conflating modelability with particular time series models, with cyclicality as a concept. There are obvious structural reasons for growth to be cyclical: the S-curves inherent in technological innovation and growth dynamics. Your very example, predator-prey dynamics dominate economics for exactly these reasons - the mathematical relationships are just much more complex than in animal ecology.
For instance, everyone knew China's 10% GDP growth wouldn't last forever. Not because it's a stochastic process that won't always generate the same value, but because we know for a fact that the long run mean of that process cannot be 10%. There were structural forces that had to drag it down, and drag it down they did.
The same is true of every company in history. There are limits to growth, and once a company hits them their growth rate slows. Forecasting exactly when that will and will not happen is difficult, but that doesn't mean Google's net income was a random walk and could have ended up at any level. Stock prices are a (nearly) random walk, but that is only because they have already discounted the highly forecastable structure of earnings.
The Poisson drip of innovation, restructuring, etc start companies, countries and economies on S-curve trajectories. Those S-curves have a definite structure every time, we just don't know exactly what it is ex ante. Ignorance, however, is not the same as non-existence.
Of course, this does mean that most of these time series do not have "cyclicality" in the strict econometric (linear, measurable) sense, but I don't think Scott was using that sense of the word.
This is probably the place to point out that Turchin is an ecologist by trade, models human society using exactly the same principles and methods that ecologists use to model, e.g., predator-prey dynamics, and if you've accepted that those can form cycles, you're already about 90% of the way to admitting that so can, well, human dynamics.
Also, Turchin's theory is actually two separate mechanics, and the second one, the radical-moderate dynamic, if true, does in fact result in highly regular cycles. (The problem is, it cannot be directly tested and measured, so it only shows up as periodic peaks of social unrest superimposed over the long-term, "secular" trend. This is somewhat ironic in context of your argument, because it means neither of those trends are intuitively visible in the time series Turchin works with.)
regular cycles that are not based on calendars (as in the manmade artifact for timekeeping):
pulsars, some variable stars, orbits of planets, tides, pendulums, reversals of earth's magnetic field (modulo some variance), breathing at rest, butterfly life cycles, influenza, hurricane season, wildfire season, the solar cycle
“Manmade artifact” isn’t what I was going for, so much as… I guess the is “It’s either a very simple physical system that behaves kinda like a harmonic oscillator, or it’s closely tied to one.”
"Politics is based on economics, economics is based on culture, culture is based on environment & genetics, environment is geology under biology, biology is based on chemistry, and chemistry is physics."
Negative feedback exists in plenty of human systems too. All you need for weak cyclicality is some base rate of a thing happening, and then a negative feedback that makes the thing go away.
e.g:
the "current thing" cycle
limerence
stock market bubbles
Maybe we're disagreeing about words here. I would consider something that randomly oscillates modulo being more likely to move towards the mean than away from it, to be weakly cyclical, and maybe you wouldn't.
1. noncyclical: random occilation (brownian motion)
2. weakly cyclical: random occilation modulo a tendency to move towards the mean, but f(t+1) is only dependent on f(t) and independent of other prior values after conditioning on f(t).
3. medium cyclical: if f(t)=x, f(t+1) is bimodal with bell curves centered on either side of f(t), and f(t+1) will be on the side opposite some average of pre-t values.
4. strongly cyclical: same as above, but the bell curves are narrower.
Orbits of planets are not based on calendars only because calendars are based on orbits of planets.
Periodicity is not surprising if you have a second derivative somewhere - and physical laws often do (e.g. Newton's Second Law). Maximum Limelihood Estimator's claim is that there's no reason for human systems to be well modeled using second derivatives. They might even go further and say that all patterns are unlikely, because human systems are often anti-inductive: if a pattern exists, people will respond to it and change it.
I'd like to make a distinction between cycles which are periodic because they're based on some underlying periodic phenomenon, and quasi-periodic cycles which are self-regulating.
Cycles in the first category are constrained to always follow the underlying period, regardless of cycle-to-cycle variation. Butterfly life cycles, hurricane and wildfire seasons, etc., are all locked to the earth's orbit: if they happen early one year, they're no more likely to happen early the next year. There's no phase drift.
Cycles in the second category include reversals of the geomagnetic field, the solar cycle, breathing at rest, etc. There's some timescale on which they tend to vary: the interval between sunspot maxima is more likely to be 11 years than 10 or 12 years, and more likely to be 10 or 12 years than 9 or 13. But they're not locked to any more precise underlying mechanism, so if they ever vary, there's no reason to expect them to return to the previous long-term trend.
Influenza (and other infectious respiratory diseases) are a special case, as discussed by Scott in a previous post here. They can occur in quasi-periodic waves, controlled by the buildup and decay of immunity within the population. But - because they're temperature-sensitive - they can also become locked to the seasonal temperature cycle, controlled ultimately by the earth's orbit.
Before chaos theory, physicists tended to look at complicated time dependence and think that it's actually a combination of a large number of periodic motions with different periods. Chaos theory provides a categorically different way of thinking about complicated time dependence.
Trying to figure out under what conditions chaos occurs has helped to clear up our understanding of when cycles occur. But overall, it has made physicists less likely to look at something and think that a cycle is inevitable.
I think that postwar US presidential elections may plausibly be a genuine cycle, or at least have been until recently, although I certainly wouldn't bet my shirt on it.
From 1944 to 2016, with the single exception of 1980, the Republicans won the presidential election if the date was 0 or 4 mod 16, and the democrats won if it was 8 or 12.
And obviously, if you take the fourier transforms of enough time sequences you're going to see some spikes, especially if you cherry pick your time interval like I'm doing (1940 and 2020 both broke that rule), but that's a really big one that I didn't have to look far to find. It's also one where my prior on causality would by quite high - thermostatic effects in politics are widely documented, and the idea that this one is more regular than most strikes me as surprising but not amazing.
I still feel like I don't understand your claim, so are you contending that he's wrong about the elections (i.e. republicans didn't win on 0 and 4 mod 16, and democrats on 8 and 12), or that this doesn't count as a cycle (in which case, why not? something about the magnitudes of votes or something?)?
Another really important thing that's definitely cyclic: sunspots, and their consequences for climate change and a variety of other things. But looking at nature rather than human activity feels like cheating - nature is obviously full of cycles, as Kerani points out above (below? I still haven't figured out the comment layout...)
I agree that the above/below thing is confusing. For me it's compounded by me sometimes viewing a post with new comments first, and sometimes chronologically - changing from one to the other flips the comments from above to below and vice versa.
> looking at nature rather than human activity feels like cheating
(epistemic status: noodling)
I think maybe this puts a finger on an important part of the problem. Human activity is *really* hard to predictively model, because the act of predicting it changes it.
It seems to me that subculture (life)cycles might be anti-inductive in the same way that markets are. If a market has a predictable motion, you can siphon arbitrary amounts of money from it until it stops being predictable -- which will happen for all the usual reasons.
People also really want status, and status is often (not always, I think?) zero-sum. Even if one of the subculture models under discussion is broadly correct, maybe they can never be precise enough to make predictions. If everybody knows that something will Happen Here at time T, people show up at T-X, falsifying the prediction. The same in reverse for the collapse.
The best human example I know of is US political realignment, which occurred in 1824-1828, 1854-1860, 1892-1896, 1932, and <1968? 1980? 1994?>. Even though the pattern is less well defined recently (or we just don't have the hindsight to understand it yet), we do see 4 periods of a cycle with period of about 35 years. The only other potential realignment before WWII is 1874-1876, but that seems to be less significant outside the South.
Political scientists do seem to have some fairly object measurements of political realignment - I think they look at how correlated each county's vote is with that county's vote in the previous year. I don't know if anyone has looked at the long term data and checked for periodicity.
Shocked but not shocked this hasn’t been brought up yet… the female reproductive system cycle. Ratios of estrogen to progesterone change cyclically in the body.
I want to understand whether this "cycles aren't real" argument really applies here. What Scott's talking about is a *reliable sequence.* If you see A, then you can bet that it will transform, at some point, into B, then C, then D.
Some instances of this are trivial: If I always bet on black at roulette, you can bet that at some point any winning streak will end, and that any losing streak will end. But that doesn't tell you anything important or meaningful about the world. I think perhaps this is what you mean about the business cycle; it's a "cycle" only in the sense that usually GDP trends upwards, but sometimes it goes down. That in itself isn't a "cycle" in even the weakest sense of the term.
But if you can say with confidence that B will follow A, and B is not simply "not A," then you may not have a "cycle," but it seems you do have some useful knowledge about the world. Correct?
The United States during the "unit banking" era had genuinely seasonal business cycles, because it was a mostly agricultural economy and regulations made the banks too small to deal with such big seasonal changes.
To be fair, you did specify *human* behavioral time series.
That said, cycles seem ridiculously common to me. Eg. in work, I, and people around me go through regular cycles of design work, implementation, testing, debugging, crunch that then repeat that pattern at fairly regular intervals. Does this not count as a cyclic human behavioural time series?
Obviously, it happens because it involves doing similar things multiple times: whether product release lifecycles, or repeated projects with similar structure, but that seems a very common pattern in many different areas that naturally leads to cycles in behaviour.
These are being driven by new inputs (eg new demands for work from outside the team). The previous work pattern doesn't drive the current work pattern, so it's not a cycle.
If, say, last time's crunch always caused some failure, and you'd otherwise be done working, but now you have to spin up a whole new round of design, implementation, testing, debugging, and crunch because of that failure, and you can't get off this treadmill for some time, that would be a cycle.
>The previous work pattern doesn't drive the current work pattern, so it's not a cycle.
That's not part of any definition of cycle I've ever heard of though. Yes, the cyclic behaviour is caused by repeating similar work - but that seems a perfectly valid cause of a cycle to me, and a very common one. The whole team really does go through regular, repeated patterns of behaviour.
But as an aside, I think the previous work cycle *does* drive the current one. You say:
> If, say, last time's crunch always caused some failure
But replace this with "Last time's salespeople always cause some new contract" and the rest of the paragraph is perfectly true - and that does seem like a pattern of behaviour in the previous cycle driving the current one. The only difference is that it's not a failure, but a desired outcome. But again, that doesn't really seem related to the definition of a cycle to me.
I sort of agree with your point on business cycles but debt buildups do exhibit this property – the more periods of above-trend debt buildup there are, the more you would predict an unwinding of that debt in the next period.
One thing I guess I would add is that while pointing out reasons 'why this model is wrong' isn't all that difficult (I'm sure our host could have done this on his own, and probably did before posting) , I still think it's a useful way to think about any number of subcultures with a strong intellectual underpinning.
And that said, I still think operations like the LDS are an interesting counterexample , and I think more movements could and should learn from them (and no, I am not a Mormon). If in 150 years you go from screwing around in a wasteland like Utah to building a billion dollar empire, while finding a way to sell a story about Jesus landing in the New World to a bunch of people in Europe (and getting said Europeans to ship cash to SLC in the bargain), then your model a) definitely scales, and b) is probably worth exploring by any would-be activist.
I brought this up to a buddy of mine a while ago, who's a jack Mormon, and he pointed out that one of the things that make the Mormons so successful is that they actual do tangible shit for the people they're trying to win over. Unlike most 'movements' they don't just call you stupid if you don't sign on; they come to your neighborhood and drill wells and build houses in an attempt you win you over. That part of the sales pitch might not scale, but more movements should try to offer actual real-world benefits to the people they want to win over instead of just calling you shit-eyes if you don't sign on the bottom line.
As a practicing Mormon, I concur with this assessment.:) I think early Christianity caught on the same way, even with the controversial divine stuff you still have a doctrine based around loving your neighbor (with "neighbor" defined as anyone who crosses your path, including people you've been taught to hate). This would attract a lot of attention, even among people who didn't have Judaism as a base. Throw in the persecutions, and you get a Streisand Effect when everyone starts wondering why the elites are beating up these people who are just being nice to everyone...
Early Christians were a bit famous for taking in exposed infants, taking people into their homes to help them recover from illnesses (no hospitals back then, if you didn't have a family to care for you while you were sick you'd just have to cough it out on the street somewhere) and caring at all about slaves. I'd say that definitely helped them grow rapidly. Julian the Apostate, who tried the hardest to combat Christianity and restore paganism, wrote that "it is disgraceful that, when no Jew ever has to beg, and the impious Galilaeans [Christians] support not only their own poor but ours as well, all men see that our people lack aid from us." As I understand it Christians were pretty philosophically alone at the time when it came to the idea of helping the poor and slaves materially. The empire fed all the poor in Rome for free, but that was about prestige and not love. Roman philosophy generally restricted donations and gifts as pretty much solely having the purpose of boosting your own prestige and making other people owe you one. Since the poor have little power, there was no point in trading favors with them.
So on the one hand you're a slave in Rome and all of Roman culture tells you that you're scum and must accept whatever your masters deign to give you, and on the other hand a Christian comes along and gives you food and a little money when you're in need and tells you that you are just as valuable in God's eyes as the Emperor himself. I know what movement I'm going to want to join!
> more movements should try to offer actual real-world benefits to the people they want to win over
Cults traditionally provide psychological support to potential new members in form of "love bombing". It is easier than drilling a well or building a house, but it's still appreciated by many.
I think that the weakest part of the original argument is that it assumes that the movement has a natural pool of potential converts and that most of the potential converts join the movement during Stage 2. If you take your pool of potential converts to be literally everyone, then you can grow for a lot longer.
That part of the sales pitch can scale, if you are able to convince many of your current members to do it.
You think the LDS is unique in doing practical work in search of ultimate conversion? It might be unique in the intensity of the mobilization (every single young man) but the practice is common to most Christian sects. The Catholics, Anglicans, and Evangelicals all do it and have long traditions of it.
No, I don't think they're unique. But I think it's a great case study for this discussion, since it's clearly a subculture with a fairly recent origin story, and has by nearly any measure been enormously successful despite facing some long odds against success at its inception.
What's 'worked' for the LDS isn't going to perfectly map on to other subcultures, but I do think there's a lesson in recognizing that demonstrating the personal benefits of joining a movement is one of the smartest things you can do if you want a movement to sustain.
> I guess I should have been more respectful to David Chapman’s model, because the most common criticism in the comments was “actually I think it’s more of [reinvents David Chapman’s model]. Fine. Good work David.
Loyalists aren't sociopaths. Loyalists are distinguished from sociopaths in that they truly believe in the movement and will make significant sacrifices towards the status quo. A key difference is when the status quo or consensus changes, when a heresiarch succeeds. A sociopath switches colors because it's now high status to believe something else. A Loyalist will either need to be convinced or will become a reactionary, supporting the old status quo against the new and becoming a subspecies of heresiarch.
The main difference between this and Chapman's model is that this is better and doesn't have weird personality archetypes that you kind of have to use lots of creative reasoning to ram a resolutely-resistant reality into.
“Or maybe Kaj is talking about going from neutral status to high status (where you start to feel like a special bigshot) and I am including going from negative status to neutral status (where you start to feel accepted and part of the group).”
The word “status” seems like a weird fit to what’s going on here. The concept of measuring nonmembership < membership < bigshotness on on a single scale makes a certain kind of sense, but I don’t think that, for example, from the point of view of Boy Scouts, all nonmembers are in some sense “low-status.”
I would argue that they do, in a sense, although not consciously. Lets say non-boyscouts don't know how to tie knots and boyscouts do. If a non-boyscout decided to join the boyscouts, they would have the lowest status of the group because of their lack of knot-tying ability. Similarly, if a boyscout was out with a bunch of non-boyscouts and they encountered a problem that could be solved by knots, the boyscout would gain some status by providing the solution to the problem.
This feels intuitive to me. I suppose I'm using the word status as a shorthand for "respect, competency in the eyes of other, knowledge".
I think you're referring to what Jordan Peterson would call a "competence hierarchy." It's the theory that humans naturally form hierarchies based on competence: the leader of an ancient tribe of hunter gatherers is probably the guy who is really good at hunting and also gets alone well with everyone and makes good decisions. Since he makes good decisions and everyone knows it, the whole tribe tends to go with his ideas on what to do and listen to him generally.
I think this is true of most groups of humans, and only gets complicated when people find ways to gain official power without demonstrating competence. Which leads to resentment, disloyalty, etc.
I feel like this tied into FarTheThrow's point that status as a term is unhelpfully vague, so making it unfalsifiable. If non competitive feelings of belong and companionship are also status than you could equally predict that people would compete less once they are in a movement in order to retain that. And avoid the distance that being in charge would bring
My speculation is that early in a movement's 'lifecycle', status comes from ability, and other members of the group also place those with ability in positions of power. Later on, this relationship of [ability = status] & [ability = heirarchy] is percieved by newcomers as [heirarchy = status], and so they start competing for power.
Is this still vague? I get the feeling it is. It would probably be useful to atomize the concept of 'status' but that comes with its own headaches. Also I haven't reread the original ACX post today so I suspect I might be repeating points already made
Are things like "reputation" or "self-respect" falsifiable? I agree that the word "status" is pretty vague and confusing, but my impression is that people generally don't intend to frame it as a part of a falsifiable theory, instead more of an overarching worldview, like Freudism. The point is that most interpersonal interactions and relationships can be interpreted in terms of "status", which isn't entirely zero-sum or fungible between different groups/the "mainstream culture", but to some extent is.
> If non competitive feelings of belong and companionship are also status
I would argue that belonging and companionship are not "non competitive". We certainly compete for companionship; particularly in romantic relationships. We compete for belonging as well, think of team try outs.
I'm definitely on Kaj Sotala's side of the last argument. Status is a relative term that implies zero sum kind of economies. Anyone who "gains status" is a threat to anyone who is already "high status." Status is just a very competitive idea. The perks Kaj talks about- "a sense of belonging, being seen and appreciated" is not at all equivalent with "going from negative status to neutral status." Humans are social creatures, and not all this sociability is a zero sum game. We can actually all lose. In fact, we seem to be quickly moving towards a world where people feel like they are are all "losing" socially very, very fast, and it's a very scary development. Saying "having your social needs met" is the same as "having higher status" seems like a very abnormal use of the term "status."
However, I'll add to all these critiques that- even though I'm kind of repulsed by the model where all humans are these status maximizing demons who will use any charity or political organization to stroke their own egos- it actually is a useful model for me to assess my own impure motives. Reading that original article helped me realize that a lot of my instinctive desires to "make the world a better place" were actually more or less desires for "status." Or at least "special significance on the global stage." Which is a good thing to understand about myself/ my motives. So yeah, thanks for that.
To weigh in on the meaningless definitional argument, for what it's worth when I hear staus I think of something like money rather than "relative status". It can be accumulated, and operates in a zero or positive sum game (or even negative!) depending on the environment.
For example some settings feel like they have status UBI (everyone gets a minimum level of respect and belonging), others have status inflation (if you're not actively gaining status you're losing it), etc
Interesting. Status UBI settings/ status inflation settings are fun concepts. I'm still personally more inclined to see status as a zero sum idea, but I'm not personally attached to any definition of the word "status."
For me it's more an argument against the idea that we're all essentially only motivated by subconscious desires to gain social importance/ power. Or that the desire for social power is basically the same thing as the desire to simply not be lonely. We could redefine "status" to mean "poison dart frog" and vice versa and I wouldn't be the least bit bothered by this. I'm just bothered by anyone claiming that I'm only motivated by poison dart frogs.
My justification is something like: assume you're the world's biggest loser, everyone hates you and you have no social skills. Then you gradually improve your charisma and social skills somehow. After one year, people only hate you a little. After two years, you're pretty normal and people accept you. After three years, you're actually pretty popular. After four years you're a natural leader who everyone loves. Etc. I find it more natural to call this "gradually increasing status over four years" than to say "for the first two years, you're gaining acceptance, then for the next two years you're gaining some totally different thing called status".
If you put a bunch of strangers into a room and let them talk, you can end up with them all liking each other but you can also end up with them being mostly indifferent or even hating each other. Kaj seems to be pointing at "it's nice when everyone in the room likes each other instead of the other possibilities" and "status" does a terrible job of describing the difference between those scenarios. Is everyone in the friendly room high status and everyone in the hateful room low status?
Thanks for this example; it seems clear that thinking in terms of "status" is more confusing than illuminating in such a case.
It also suggests why the model might need a specific kind of person to lead to involution (though those people may or may not have been present from the beginning). I like "status" in terms of getting along with people, but I actively *don't* want to run a conference/zine/whatever even though that's also "status". But someone who does, probably isn't a sociopath, just more type-A/driven/ambitious than I (and is definitely useful in the growth phase of a subculture!)
In my head I'm running through the history of various groups in my life: clubs, families, teams, camps, whatever. In some everyone was chill, kind, nice, strong sense of belonging, companionship. People went out of their way to make sure new people were welcomed. I guess you could describe those communities as 'maximizing status' but that's a use of 'status' quite alien to me.
Makes sense to me. As others have pointed out, to me status is about the relative social ranking of people. Status is thus an attribute of an individual.
I see your example in contrast more as a description of an attribute of the whole group (or of a whole subculture or society), you might call it the groups social temperature, a measure of how open, friendly, inviting, cooperative the group is in general.
Then, how accepted a person feels by this group would be something like (individual status) * (groups social temperature).
No, I think there's a lot of truth to this conflating of terms, even if it's kind of unpleasant to stomach. For example, often fantasies of fame are an expression of personal loneliness, which implies this kind of "all social aspirations are on the same spectrum" model. I kind of disagree with you in the same weak way I disagree with the people arguing that there is no free will. "Maybe I'm 99% a product of my environment, but I'm still 1% an independent decision maker" is the stubborn position I cling to there. And here it's similar. "Maybe I'm 99% status-maximizing demon, but I'm 1% something else."
The main downside to this model, in my eyes, is that it treats all idealistic motives as simply jargon, as excuses for private status-questing. And while this is true in a lot of cases, I think idealistic motives are actually a real factor in human decision making that shouldn't be entirely ignored. People genuinely believe in ideologies, fight wars over ideologies. It's often a very serious problem. But human's social motives simply cannot be reduced to rational, self-interested status-questing. People kind of get hypnotized or seduced by the ideals that they collectively believe in. By reducing this all to strategic egotism, you ignore what made the "Precycle" phase so magical to begin with. Back then they didn't think it was ever likely to become mainstream or take off, they were just excited about the ideas/ beliefs/ interests they all shared. And this "enthusiasm for shared ideas" motivates people in very real ways.
This kind of goes back to Noah Harari Sapiens sorts of ideas about how human "belief in imaginary things" like nations and human rights allows us to organize on a massive scale. And that kind of sums up my argument. People don't just mine status. They actually genuinely "believe in imaginary things."
"Calendar" cycle is a cycle that repeats on some multiple of week/month/year cycle. Thus, cicadas are in a calendar cycle, and so are many processes where a simple repeating loop is superimposed on a weekly or annual schedule (say, market volatility around quarterly earnings releases). But the absebse of non calendar multiple loops is still a non trivial claim.
Having watched psychedelics go from subculture to effectively mainstream I've been wondering what happens when the consumerisation forces of the free market root out every niche, selling all possible subcultures back to us as soon as we can develop them, and the low barrier of entry to previously hard-to-enter subcultures that social media brings makes each burgeoning subculture evolve and dissipate quickly with few long term committers.
Doesn't this "mainstream" everything? And if (let's say national) cultures become more mainstreamed, and we run out of taboo, there is no rebellion, your parents are likely still cool af, giving you the only options of being cool af or uncool af, there is no tangible oppressor to position yourself against, the romantic struggle against the other that many cling to for meaning disappears, and therefore we become less differentiated, less individuated (in spite of the individuation force of the free market consumerisation), we all did or are doing the trips and all have tattoo sleeves and tidy beards, the snap-on cultural accessories we pick up and drop become more and more meaningless, the infinite choices we have collapse into our preferences, shaped crudely by our underlying rudimentary culture, we become less concerned about what is happening outside our cultural borders and we gather again around the local maypoles that unites us, we become more culturally unified and nationalistic, we become more tribal within our national boundaries, or other more local boundaries, we are all eventually reading from the same parochial page.
I think this is evident in the recent rise of populism (check ngram for populism to get a feel for that), which leads me to thinking about the tension between the global market economy and it's infinite choice element, and the simultaneous rise of nationalistic politics in the West, effectively revealing our parochial preferences.
What happens to this dynamic when we all become mainstream, when all dogs are having their day together at all times? Do we need to reconfigure connotations to see that the popular mainstream is the big tribe, and that that is where we are all heading with this niche-eliminating system?
Is there no maximum size limit on how many niches "the mainstream" can hold at once?
Even if there isn't, attentional gating already seems to work wonders for artificing new trends and shadowbanning old ones. One must keep in mind that the vast majority of humanity is not, actually, on social media.
I've never understood this "consumerization means the market sells our subcultures back to us" thing.
What would it mean for psychedelics to be consumerized? Maybe one day Eli Lilly will sell you LSD, but it'll probably cost about the same as a drug dealer does now, and the experience will still be the same. Maybe there will be popular books on LSD you'll buy at the bookstore, but is that really any different from reading Timothy Leary now?
Are people just using "consumerization" to make "embraced by normies" sound like capitalism's fault?
You play video games, don't you Scott? At least Civ 4? And you probably have strong (negative) feelings about the newer installments? I don't know if you follow video games in general, but the same thing repeats across all sorts of other video game franchises, and the forces at work are not specific to video games (but are specific to capitalism).
Can you break this down a little more? Civ 4 is my personal drug of choice because it was the civ I was good at when I had kids and stopped having time to play civ more than once a year or so, when I get my Father's Day or birthday gaming weekend. I would like to learn and play the new versions, and one day, when my kids are grown I will. But right now I don't spend my very limited civ time playing new versions because I don't want to spend my time playing throw away learning games.
Is there a thing where people stop at their current version of the game, declare it best, and throw shade at everyone else?
Of course it's a thing, although in these latter days of games-as-a-service players usually don't get to keep their favorite versions, instead lamenting wistfully to each other how the grass was greener a decade ago, while executives say something along the lines of "you think you want it but you don't". There are some exceptions, when those executives eventually reconsider, and stuff like OSRS and WoW Classic happens, both commercial successes.
For older games, when they still used to have separate releases, my favorite example is Heroes of Might and Magic 3. Despite being over 20 years old, it's still consistently in the top 100 watched games on Twitch, has a thriving mod community and a semi-competitive scene, while the later installments are all but forgotten.
The dad barrier definitely seems to apply to complex strategy games more than other genres. I think because they have a high barrier to entry.
Most of my gaming time these days is in 20-30 minute sessions a time or two per week. Which usually means I'm either playing a game I know very well, or I'm playing something new that's very approachable.
I still play Master of Orion 1-2 from time to time because they're the last space 4x games that I ever learned and I can always jump into them very quickly. I imagine Stellaris is probably a better game these days, and I look at it with curiosity. When life hands me a rare opportunity to play a game in uninterrupted solitude for a few hours, I sometimes load Stellaris up and start trying to figure it out. But then I always say, "Eh, trying to figure this game out will consume all of this time and I'll have forgotten how to play by the next time I have an opportunity anyway. Why not do something actually fun?"
Of course, it also doesn't help that Paradox games have an enormous amount of semi-mandatory DLC and so my vanilla copy of Stellaris is ever-more out of date.
Civ 5 tried to make some needed reforms around the big unit stacks by trying "one unit per tile", but it didn't go too well and they mishandled it. Players were pretty mixed on it.
Civ 6 went in a more cartoony/childish direction, and less history focused and more abstract, and has been pretty divisive among the old die-hards.
Over time it gets less and less like a "civilization" game and more and more like a kids' puzzle game.
But yeah there are a lot of people who still play only 4 or 5. Personally I love 2 most of all, (so many good memories) but 4 was probably the peak.
I think Civ has been finding it's niche in a more crowded marketplace. It is a streamlined, abstract, thematic kind of 4x game. It's become that way because if you want crunchier stuff there are a lot more options to choose from.
That's funny, Civ 2 is my favorite and I don't meet many people who agree. Except I haven't had it up and running on a modern machine for quite some time. In particular, I'd like to get it running with the scenarios pack that included the US Civil War, alien invasion, etc.
My observation on Civ games is that the odd-numbered titles represent a paradigm shift and the even-numbered ones a refinement of that shift. 2 is a refinement of 1, while 4 is a refinement of 3, and in both cases the even-numbered titles are more fondly remembered because they worked out the kinks in some of the bigger shifts. I've barely touched 6 but I sensed that the trend continued in that it sought to be a refinement of 5, retaining its one-unit-per-tile system but building upon it, but I guess it didn't do as well because 5 seems to have retained more holdouts than 1 or 3.
I think that franchises (as well as things like a specific band's songs) are susceptioble to this in a way that most things aren't. Nobody else can keep making better Civ games unless the IP owners authorise it.
But for most other things, the average quality goes down by 90% while the quantity goes up by 200% so things end up twice as good in absolute terms.
But the casual observer only sees the relative change. (This is where a lot of accusations of planned obselescence come from)
I don't know how other people come to psychedelics but I spent time reading about them on the internet and became enamored with them as a tool for hacking my brain. But when it came time to try to get some I realized that I didn't know anyone who could source them for me. Eventually I found my way into the world of research chemicals and grey market internet drug dealers and sourced something called DPT, a DMT analog.
I was pretty scared and excited to try this mysterious powder that arrived in the mail in a plastic bag. I eyeballed a "dose" and snorted it and tripped really hard and hallucinated quite vividly and even today, 13 years later I could tell an hour long story about ego death blah blah that would bore everyone.
Anyway the sheer difficulty of sourcing one psychedelic and not knowing if it was going to scramble my brain permanently or what served to deepen the hero's journey quality of it for me. I don't mean to brag but that was like, pretty hard core?
For awhile I thought other people who were into psychedelics were cool as fuck, like me, until I realized that a lot of them were actually hippies. I found myself in a room with them and was actually horrified. Psychedelics were a firm part of their lame sensual culture.
It took a bit more curation to find the right kind of SV adjacent psychonauts that were my kind of people. The actual hardcore people willing to experiment on their brains.
The problem isn't so much that hippies (or normies) are into psychedelics, but rather that if psychedelics were safe and widely available it would make them much less of a signaller for edgy self-experimenter. It deletes a lot of the heroes journey quality from the experience. The kids filling Eli LSDilly scripts to manage their gender dysphoria instead of snorting brown plastic-tasting powder by mail to hack their brains are totally missing the point!
As someone who wants to brain hack with as little risk as possible and so has only tried stuff under specific stabilizing conditions, you are Super Cool and Have My Respect
I had a very similar journey, especially when I met other people into psychedelics where I lived and realized they're not who I had been looking for at all
It follows MTV's anthropological survey of American teenagers, which was funded to better market to them. Worth a watch if you can find the full episode.
It's certainly not the fault of the capitalism, normies have always been the real hustlers.
Somewhat anecdotally, magic mushrooms were legal in UK and the Netherlands until the mid 2000s, simply sold in head-shops, but were far from a popular choice.
NL since sells truffles instead (an unregulated part of the same fungus) but they are now a very popular choice, actively marketed, a big industry that you can see trying to find new ways of getting their product into you.
Universities are now full to the brim with psychedelics, as is the tech world, and very high quality drugs, including exotic phytochemicals, designer 2Cs, medical grade anesthetics, all ordered to your door in most major cities via competing shops with elaborate menus on whatsapp.
Drugs are just one example. Punk and rave are other examples, whole ways of life turned into consumer items, they are no longer scenes with significant barriers to entry, you can just buy yourself the look and experience, it's there being marketed to you right now.
Being a cocaine addict. Being into cosplay. Being into whips and leather. Being a road cyclist, mountain cyclist, film maker, scuba diver, whatever you want, you can now buy the gear, learn the stuff, go out and join in. It's actually the world we dreamed of decades ago, and it sure does bring a lot of joy to a lot of people.
But my more political point of contention is that if these indeed aren't cycles, and we are actually seeing a novel effect from what I perceive to be the influence of social media and a global online market, that in the end does exactly what is says on the tin, it connects everyone and everything everywhere has it's price delivered to your door, then what becomes of subculture? and what becomes of society where everything is mainstream, without taboo, your parents, grandparents, everyone all into the same stuff as you because that is the stuff we all know and love now?
It feels like the only meaningful rebellion anyone can make is become Amish or something similar, and if going basically feral is all that is left then it will remain a backward-facing niche.
My conclusion is that a mainstreamed, everything out-front and above-board society, which we have for good or ill made ourselves to, flooded with choice and with preference demanded, I think eventually leads to a flattening or greying out of difference, and hence leads back to nationalistic or tribal parochialism, and I believe goes towards explaining the recent rise of populism.
Is there a way out of that trajectory I don't think so, it is just a perhaps unexpected consequence of the system we have built, built basically from the dreams we dreamt from a place of great limitations, and ultimately it is perhaps just what happens to societies, or nations, when they organise themselves as such, with such an intensity of trade and communication, between people and between cultures.
I'm skeptical that "You're just another pack of normies, doing normie stuff." happens to everything. ( I'm writing from the usa. ) Consider tobacco smoking. Judging from all the secondhand smoke PSAs, it looks to me like it has been removed from the set of "normie stuff" (vilified?).
My impression is that some activities have become more accepted, and some have become less accepted (over, say, the last half century or so in the usa). If anything, my impression is that the typical person here has probably lost freedom over that period. ( As one numerical index, the incarceration rate here approximately quadrupled over that period. https://www.sentencingproject.org/publications/u-s-prison-population-trends-massive-buildup-and-modest-decline/ )
"I wonder if what I'm commenting on is simply just a remnant of the shift in the ascendant culture, from the "Silent Majority" / Bush Neocons to the Woke Left of today. "
That's more-or-less my impression - though I think it varies both geographically and organizationally across the usa. I think what you describe is true of blue states and academia + some of the media + silicon valley, but not red states. Personally, I'd be happy to see a net increase in personal freedom - both from attacks by the right and attacks by the left, but I don't think that is what has happened.
I was with you until this point (though I still think that unlike BDSM, swinging is not mainstreamable and is thus a pure subculture):
> My conclusion is that a mainstreamed, everything out-front and above-board society, which we have for good or ill made ourselves to, flooded with choice and with preference demanded, I think eventually leads to a flattening or greying out of difference, and hence leads back to nationalistic or tribal parochialism, and I believe goes towards explaining the recent rise of populism.
But... wasn't the draw of the alt-right movement that it was such an edgy subculture that got its thrills out of griefing the sanctimonious liberals? A new punk, if you will? Which is now further along its cycle, well on its way to being consumerized back at us?
I keep trying to relate this to the rock-climbing subculture, but it doesn't quite fit. The climbing subculture is old - people have been climbing rocks for food since antiquity, and for fun since the 1700s. The modern subculture recognisably existed in the 1940s (check out Lionel Terray's description of Louis Lachenal in _Conquerors of the Useless_ - every inch the modern dirtbag climber), and took off in the 1960s in places like Yosemite Valley and the English Peak District. The bar for "new and cool" is extremely hard to meet now - think _Free Solo_. I did some first ascents in Central Asia a few years ago, and it was enough to impress my friends but no more than that (at least, those of my friends who hadn't already done something similar...). And yet the climbing subculture is still growing, and though I've met the odd elitist asshole I think it's still pretty friendly? Climbers at all levels seem to be encouraging of each other, modulo some friendly rivalry. I think climbing has some structural advantages here:
- Though fashions about what is impressive (or "ethical") change, there really is a core physical skill that can be assessed. If you climb hard then you'll garner respect, and training advice is now readily accessible.
- It's a social activity, but not one that's done in organised teams. If you're an asshole then fewer people will want to climb with you, which means you're faced with a choice between soloing (much more dangerous) or not climbing at all.
- People can and do get killed pushing their limits, which puts a natural brake on most climbers' ambitions: hitting a grade ceiling and then climbing at that level forever isn't something to be particularly ashamed of.
- Though you can win status in the subculture by climbing, it's (currently) very hard to make money doing it. The stereotype of the expert climber living in a van exists for a reason. We'll see if this changes as the sport becomes more prominent, I guess.
Sounds like climbing is simply postcycle. There's no low-hanging fruit, but you don't get the infighting because everyone KNOWS there's no low-hanging fruit; it's just a fun thing to do for a certain subset of the population.
Not really post-cycle, because there was no cycle to begin with. Nobody started rock-climbing for status (tho the status of people I see rock climbing definitely have rised, from quasi-marginals & hippies to software engineers, but it may also be the transition from a small country town in the early 00's to a larger city in the late 10's, so maybe it just pre-cycle)
There are certainly a lot of well-heeled corpses on mountains - the early Alpinists were mainly aristocrats - but "for status" is more controversial. Most of us think we're doing it to satisfy an internal need for self-actualisation.
Nah, there have always been high-status climbers. In the Golden Age of Alpinism the only people who could afford to go mountaineering were aristocrats, and even a few of the first-generation Yosemite dirtbags were slumming it. Likewise scientists and other intellectuals - the discipline of bouldering was invented by a mathematics professor in the 1950s. The explosion in climbing after WW2 happened largely because cheap ex-War gear enabled less-well-off people to try climbing and mountaineering.
AIUI post-cycle implies that the sport has settled into a steady niche, but climbing is still growing in terms of participant numbers, accessibility (better and cheaper gear, more indoor climbing walls) and visibility (Olympics, major movies, televised championships, etc). Maybe there's still intense competition among the elite for sponsorships and Olympic places, and as an amateur I just don't see that? I've met a couple of international-standard climbers and they've been really nice, but maybe I'm not worth scheming against.
Are business cycles really "especially well-established"? It very hard to point to any exact economic trends that are clearly cyclical, even by fairly loose definitions of "cycle".
Even if some trends were predictably cyclical surely the anti-inductive nature of the market would smooth them out anyway, traders would short the peaks and take options on the dips.
>Just because disco was cool in the 70s and uncool in the 80s doesn’t imply it will be cool in the 90s, uncool in the 00s, and so on forever. It will probably just stay uncool.
One of the great ongoing mysteries in life for me..."*Why* did disco become uncool?" The fashion was wacky and the culture was very of-the-times, but the music itself...man. Ain't nothing comparable in modern oeuvres. Still very popular across age groups when I throw it on in public. You say it begat dance music; I claim dance music is but a pale soulless shadow of the original. EDM at least leans hard into this artificiality, going for primal energy in the most raw fashion possible.
I'm sure it'll have a proper rediscovery at some point though. Fashion can't be the only aesthetic with a barberpole model. (Where do barberpoles fit into the cyclic theory of subcultures?)
Beyoncé, one of the biggest cultural forces in music at the moment, just released an album that is heavily disco-inspired – I guess Scott would say that's part of his 'X begets Y begets Z' thing but I think as people would understand that it surely counts as disco being cool right now.
Having said that, I'm not sure any of these models about subcultures are even intended to be a good fit for the popularity of styles of music. Not everything is a subculture.
We already had Rockabilly Revival and Swing Revival (the best two music trends to ever come out of 80's and 90's respectively, if you want my opinion, because I hate rap and most "dance music" with passion). Disco revival seem to be inevitable. I think Reddit's darlings Chromeo are pretty close to being it, musically if not visually?
Re the Intellectual Dark Web, I think it's an interesting example of the cycle being disrupted. A lot of its ideas and members were artificially brought to greater prominence by the rise of the broader alt right and the Trump administration in particular (remember all the think pieces in 2016/2017 talking about Steve Bannon's intellectual justifications). But it wasn't an organic outgrowth of their populaire and they hadn't built an underlying community of supporters. So they were absorbed into the broader tight or just entirely fell apart
>This talk by other folks of "pipelines" to the alt-right was definitely a MSM narrative
I appear to be "other folks" so I'll respond to this :P
I think most of what you said is probably correct, especially since you're clearly more informed on the actual IDW than I am, but want to push back on your skepticism of the pipeline since I think it's one of the key things that associates the alt-right to the IDW.
>But from something like Joe Rogan [...] then yes. Questioning the NY Times "moral clarity" is not a highway to hell.
The pipeline has nothing to do with questioning the NY Times and everything to do with network effects. Joe Rogan is a very illustrative example, because he seems mostly liberal in theory, but on his show he seems to play the part of "man who believes nothing and anything" for his guest to bounce off of. Yet still very much serves as a part of the pipeline, because the pipeline isn't so much about intent, it's an emergent property of modern recommendation algorithms.
So Joe has someone like Ben Shapiro or Jordan Peterson on his podcast. They talk about something broadly agreeable by unaligned normies (say, "cancel culture bad"). Lots of Shapiro's normal audience views this episode, so the YT recs algo associates the two and recommends another of Shapiro's videos to the Rogan-only viewer. The Rogan-only viewers see this recommendation, and clicks on it based on thinking Shapiro seemed respectable based on his appearance on Rogan. This continues to the next video recommendation, each one getting slightly more radical (because that drives engagement). And so on.
While Joe had no *intent* to radicalize people rightward (hopefully), from a consequentialist POV he had a strong effect in doing so.
Now this occasionally goes the other way, of course, but the average of the vectors of radicalization has a very rightward tilt, in part because the IDW, similar to Scott, has a strong tendency to spend time criticizing liberals and their political blunders. This feeds perfectly into internet conservatives' favorite pastime, dunking on SJWs. It also doesn't seem to help that most of the loudest and griftiest (sociopathic) members of the IDW seem to be those on the right side, as those are the one most effective at grabbing the normies. And as Scott's theory predicts, the less dangerous IDW members aren't good at removing the sociopaths from the movement.
(Also, it's worth mentioning that while the pipeline has certainly become a MSM narrative, it's a concept that originates from a contemporary movement to the IDW that I would label as "breadtube", though not everyone agrees with that label)
I think there's definitely some truth to the idea that some people were primed for radicalization no matter what, but as I discussed in another comment in this thread, I think the big difference is what kind of radicalization.
This is especially true because a lot of radical ideas come in rhyming pairs between the left and right, e.g. "there is a problem with workers being underpaid and overextended, the solution is [unions, deporting immigrants]"; "wealth disparity means a tiny percentage of elites have disparate influence over culture and politics, the problem is [unchecked capitalism, the Jews]."
There's certainly an innate appeal for some people in radical and novel ideas, but which path they go down can be very strongly influenced by which radical ideas they get exposed to first.
That seems like a pretty partisan description of what was happening.
Another framing would be "most of the MSM is a pipeline to the left so when people who are otherwise quite on the right naturally, encounter some heterodox in media that lets them know where their people are, they then seek out their people".
It is a such a weird attack on someone "Rogan" who I am not a particularly large fan of, but is definitely not an ideologue.
(I did admit in my other post that most of the information I had on the subject came from partisan sources, so that's not unlikely, but I think the core loop I've described is sound.)
Yours *is* valid framing (for some version of "the left"), but it's one that produces the same answer to the question that Scott asked, whether the IDW are associated with the alt-right. (Yes, because they're the only non-Fox-news platform willing to associate with alt-right ideologues)
I think the bigger specific issue is that the MSM tends to push auth-left-liberalism, and the IDW appeals to those tend towards libertarianism. Them getting funneled towards right-libertarianism and eventually auth-rightism as opposed to left-libertarianism (with which Scott has previously identified) is what I would personally find to have negative utility.
>It is a such a weird attack on someone "Rogan" who I am not a particularly large fan of, but is definitely not an ideologue.
I think it's precisely because he's not an ideologue that he works so well as that first step, and is such a good example. I want to emphasize don't particularly find him morally at fault, except in a consequentialist sense of making Shapiro and Peterson seem more reasonable and respectable than they are.
My impression is the same as random's. In particular, that there is a pretty direct line between Steve Sailer and Brietbart as it was run by Bannon, and Sailer is my archetype for the IDW. But I don't like the movement or the people named, so my bias here is strong.
I never followed (or gave any particular respect to) any self-identified IDW members, so I can only comment of the general views of it in the left-leaning sphere, but the general consensus were that IDW members(?) like Ben Shapiro, Jordan Peterson, and Richard Spencer (and to a lesser extent Joe Rogan, due to being willing to platform anything) either were explicitly or implicitly involved in Trump/alt-right apologism and recruitment, and served as part of the "alt-right pipeline" online recruitment funnel.
I've seen pretty convincing research that there really is something to that last point, that a large number of young alt-right recruits followed a path from IDW -> conservative IDW -> far alt-right. If it's not strictly causative, it seems to at least lower the figurative activation energy to make such a jump.
Meh I kind of think the causation might be backwards there. People drifting right on their own drifting through various media they are comfortable with, rather than the media radicalizing them. And the media servicing them gaining prominence.
I mean, that's valid. I think conservative/liberal/authoritarian/libertarian tendencies are at least partly heritable, so we'd expect that to be causative. There's also definitely a large component of what ideas you're exposed to at what parts of your mental development and ideological formation, though, for which the causation *should* run in the direction I was implying, at least for the portion determined in the teens.
I dunno. Ben Shapiro was anti-Trump all the way through 2016, and the Daily Wire is still warring with alt-right figures like...what's his name? The young guy, says racist things. I've honestly forgotten.
The point is, Ben Shapiro doesn't strike me as a alt-right gateway guy. Then again, I never thought he fit in with the IDW label anyway. Everyone else in that article was a liberal or former liberal who was against wokeness (before we called it wokeness). Ben Shapiro is the successor to Rush Limbaugh, he's a conservative through and through and hasn't changed.
Is Nick Fuentes the person you're talking about? Recently a prominent young righty got into hot-water because he was too respectful when arguing against Fuentes (after Fuentes crashed a discussion dedicated to criticizing him).
My (very uncertain) impression is that the Intellectual Dark Web never was a community and was largely defined by their enemies. If they weren't friends to begin with, it wouldn't be surprising that they rapidly started infighting.
I agree, though I don't even know if you could even say they fell to infighting. They had nothing in common except having large audiences (through podcasts and social media, mostly) and agreeing that wokeness is bad. A lot of them are still friends, but there isn't really a movement that unites them. But did they really fight each other at all? Jordan Peterson just joined the Daily Wire's streaming service. Rubin, Peterson, and Shapiro are all on good terms as I understand it. Who was fighting?
I don't think anybody was fighting because, to your point, there was never any subculture to fight over.
(The word "cycle" seems like a red herring. Let's look at the model as a description of "stages".)
If I compare Chapman's and Scott's models, they both describe how a success of a community carries the seeds of its later fall (in quality, at least). But there is a subtle difference in *timing*, if I understand both theories correctly.
In Chapman's model, the community is ruined for its more idealistic members when it grows large enough so that the "sociopaths" notice it as a potential source of resources to be exploited. The fact that the "sociopaths" joined the community, and started shaping it in their own image, is the bad thing.
In Scott's model, the growth phase is actually okay, and the bad thing only happens when the growth inevitably slows down or stops entirely. The source of problem is not the abundance of resources, but rather their subsequent relative lack, especially of status (which is zero-sum, so it can only grow when the community grows in size).
These two models make two different assumptions about human nature. In Chapman's model, some people are intrinsically good, some people are intrinsically bad, and it is a tragedy for the former to be noticed by the latter. (Not just noticed as in "they exist", but noticed as in "actually, it would be profitable to exploit them". Noticed as a potential food.) In Scott's model, it is the circumstances that trigger our evolved instincts; it is the same kind of people who would cooperate in one situation, but turn against each other in a different situation.
So, uhm, two contradictory falsifiable predictions? Imagine a movement that stays niche for 10 years, then experiences 10 years of constant-rate growth, followed by 10 years of stagnation. Keep measuring how happy the original members feel. Will their reported happiness drop during the phase of growth, or during the phase of stagnation?
Methodological remarks: It would be better to measure the happiness of the old members in real time, to prevent them from editing their opinions in retrospective. ("Currently I have a conflict with X, therefore the things started going downhill 10 years ago when X joined us." Except, the conflict only started recently; previously they were both happy ignoring each other.) Also, get the responses from the average old members, not just the old elites. (The old elites may have been involved in zero-sum status fights already when the community was tiny.) As a control group, measure the happiness in a movement that remained niche for 30 years. (To control for "spending 30 years in the same bubble makes you a bit crazy and obsessed.")
> This is a pretty pessimistic social moment (eg the thing where dystopian SF has become more popular than the utopian SF of the late 20th century).
I hope this trend jumps the shark as well, I'm so tired of this attitude. You have to be out of your mind to be a doomer in 2022, yet people mostly are.
Seems like a pretty clear argument against the “people don’t do things explicitly for status” (and more generally for this theory in general) is startups.
It’s generally been my experience and the experience of my social groups that:
- small startups (<50 or so people) are true believers: they believe in the mission, are spending large amounts of time building, and are interested by the idea of a large payout or fame potentially but mostly love the idea
- growth phase startups (100-250 people) have “large company” employees join to set up the scale. By this point, it’s more likely the startup will succeed, and these people are less interested in the mission and more so in large payouts and acquiring power at a smaller startup. This is when politics usually begin: people fighting for “territory” and “owning” things rather than wanting to build the coolest product. At this point, many of the early employees will leave and feel pushed out
- large company (>250). At this point, there is significantly less building - partly because it’s harder to coordinate and there’s more at stake, but also because it’s now full of people fighting for just power
In my expericne, the people at each are quite self aware as well. In other words, the people who join at growth phase startups will explicitly tell you they’re interested in joining a growing company and taking on a larger team than they had at the large company - explicitly signaling they want status. And large company employees will say they enjoy the perks of the large company (the status of working for a brand name). I think this directly shows sometimes people are explicitly going for “status points”, making decisions about it, and willing to talk about it
"I guess Kaj is using status in a strict sense and I am using it in a loose sense. [...]
Normally in a situation like this I would use a different word, but I don't know if there's a good snappy replacement. Accepting suggestions!"
Dominance status and prestige status. These two kinds of social status are totally different, especially under the surface. Kaj Sotala distinguishes "sense of belonging, being seen and appreciated" from status, "since it doesn't require you to be above anyone else": so apparently, unlike you, when he thinks "status" he means "dominance status" mainly, and hence the confusion.
Now, when Kevin Simler wrote his "Social Status: Down the Rabbit Hole" in 2015, where he lays out the two-kinds-of-status view, you answered with "Contra Simler on Prestige" --- but also acknowledged at the end that "separating dominance from prestige is a good start".
(And as it happens, for what it's worth, I published something on two-kinds-of-status myself just a couple of days ago. But it isn't about subcultures and instead begins with your review of The Gervais Principle a while ago --- I'm very slow.)
Alternative word for status: “respect.” People will deny wanting status, but everyone admits wanting respect. Also, while we’re thinking about semantics, I think the pattern Scott is describing is less cyclical than it is fractal: hooks and spirals that spin off into similar-looking hooks and spirals, ad infinitum.
I like "respect". It seems like "status" is measured relative to a group of people, whereas "respect" can be just two people, so it's a more absolute measure. You always have less or more status than some other person (according to a third observer), but you can get zero respect, or great respect, even if it's only you and one observer. So status can go negative, but respect has a hard floor.
There could be a society where everybody gets a lot of respect, but there's still wide variance in status. Say, if everybody acts polite to everybody else, but only four or five people in the whole city would be received in the formal dining room and served on the china.
"You always have less or more status than some other person (according to a third observer), but you can get zero respect, or great respect, even if it's only you and one observer. So status can go negative, but respect has a hard floor."
Occasionally there is a person who "has hit bottom - and started to dig" - so perhaps the hard floor can sometimes be excavated...
"Belonging" is the other half. Or, maybe, just another version of respect. How do you belong to a group? You belong if everyone in the group recognizes that you belong. Think of a group of kids who are friends: you belong because they all know your name and want to play with you on the regular.
I was in a group of four kids in elementary school who always played together at recess. Our group had a leader. Why was he the leader? Because we all listened to what he said, and usually did whatever he thought of doing. Why did we do that? Because we liked the things he said, and the ideas he had for games usually worked and were fun. Nobody declared him leader. He just became it because everyone respected him, and we respected him because he was good at being a leader.
Wouldn’t clocks in general count as cycles? And therefore anything that derives from them? This encapsulates cicadas, earnings season in the stock market, etc.
I don't know if I identify with or just want to identify with having people "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." But I love Laura Creighton's comment so much I wish she could be ruler of the world, at least until that stops being cool.
Is there a non-socialist political movement loosely based around this idea? Asking for a friend.
"The atheist movement begets the feminist movement begets the anti-racist movement begets and so on." Slightly snorted out loud after looking at the past article. Good to know the world started around 2004.
Should maybe we explore Vico?
Burnham. 1970. Critical elections and the mainsprings of American politics?
Floyd's cycle-finding algorithm (see Knuth, Donald E. (1969), The Art of Computer Programming, vol. II p. 7, exercises 6 and 7) as well as other cycle-detection methods.
The "status" abstraction does cover things like "my contributions are appreciated”, “people respond to my comments", etc... but it doesn't cover things like "actually caring about the thing the movement is trying to accomplish".
I wanted to make a couple of stray comments of little significance.
>The atheist movement begets the feminist movement begets the anti-racist movement begets and so on.
I find it really off-putting (though I should be used to it, as Scott has been consistent on this over the past decade) the way Scott uses "feminism" and "the feminist" movement to refer to the particular popular flavor of it that emerged in certain parts of the internet 10-12 years ago, as if there were no feminist movement prior to the 2010's; feminism didn't first become a thing at that time. I wish he would refer to it as "SJ-ish online feminist movement (what we would now call woke feminism)" or something. I also feel that the claim of this strain of feminism emerging directly from New Atheism requires some unpacking and examination although it's arguable correct from some angle.
>Imagine if the word “money” had a connotation of “thing you use to buy luxury goods so that poor people are jealous of you”. Then people would tell economists “You’re so cynical in thinking that labor markets are about money - a lot of people just want to pay their monthly rent and provide food for their families”.
It seems reasonable to use a word to refer to the present incarnation of it, rather than what it was like in the past, seeing as we live in the present.
I also don't think "woke feminism" would work, since that evokes the more recent "intersectional feminism", the last remnant of 2000s/2010s feminism that remains after being subsumed by this current movement. (Not sure if there's a good name for it yet, but the all-encompassing philosophy that frames morality in terms of relative power dynamics based on the collection of historically oppressed groups one is a member of, with a particular emphasis on black / trans people. Basically the anti-straight-white-male coalition)
"Intersectional feminism" maybe, with a brief qualifier like "popular online" or something like that. As for "third-wave feminism", it started much earlier, but just now I checked Wikipedia and without getting around to reading much, I discovered that it classifies probably exactly the type of feminism we're talking about as fourth-wave feminism (starting in 2012): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fourth-wave_feminism
This looser definition of status seems to contradict the earlier description of the involution phase as where infighting and fragmentation and mutual excommunication happens.
With the looser definition of status, I would expect the involution phase to be when the subculture stops being welcoming to newcomers, since noobs can no longer contribute anything new without acclimatization and/or specialized training.
The zero-sum model involving sociopaths predicts that the subculture would fade away as the excitement ends and the infighting kills the fun, while the loose-definition-of-status model predicts that the subculture would slowly fade away as the founders and the first few generations fail to replace themselves, plus a bit of evaporative cooling as the required commitment/knowledge to be "in" grows over time.
Maybe both effects occur in different amounts in the involution phase, depending on what type of subculture we are talking about?
Can anyone make explicit predictions about what will happen to a subculture and/or political movement based on its focus, internal laws, cultural norms, etc.?
Even if all subcultures must reach involution because none can keep growing forever, there is a big difference between
a). took over the country, converted 99% of the population, passed every policy reform on the wishlist, became a beloved national tradition that continues to this day
vs.
b). failed to achieve anything, torn apart from the inside with infighting, ridiculed/hated/ignored by most of the population, remembered only as a passing fad
It would be very helpful for the founders of a new subculture/movement to know what made things like Christianity, soccer, and the civil rights movement succeed while Gnosticism, pet rocks, and Defund the Police failed.
People's brains are wired to see patterns in things.
Before anyone claims that anything is a "cycle" that is not really blatant (planetary movements, cicadas), I'd want a statistical analysis which can distinguish between cycles and random variation that someone saw a pattern in. And even then, it's easy to P-hack by looking at a hundrfed examples of different things until you find one containing a "cycle", so I'd expect to see a lot better confidence than 95%.
One possible driver of subculture ‘lifecycles’ is that it takes much longer to prospect, mine, and refine a collection of good ideas than it does to share them. Open questions drive good answers, but usually not to interviews until you have those answers.
If an author spends a decade coming up with a great first book, and then the publishing company expects them to have another ready in a year or two, while doing a press tour, well duh the odds aren’t great. Even though they were the rare person who wrote a great first book!
If you then select retrospectively the successive winners, then like magic you can cherry-pick your way to ‘cyclic’ anything.
I think this is an important piece of the puzzle that works on a different level from (but still interacts with) the status stuff. Part of what makes an intellectual movement in particular appealing is that they have good ideas that respond well to the time. And a great way to gain status is to be the person that surfaces and advocates for an idea that the group ultimately agrees on. But it’s *hard* to come up with great ideas that are also right for the community. Once the most clearly good (yet initially controversial) ones have been shared, pure regression to the mean is enough that you might expect your other ideas won’t resonate as well, regardless of their truth values.
Global health development in EA contrasts especially well with the state of popular activism of the past couple years. “You should buy bed nets or give cash instead of consuming a marginal luxury good (or even donating to your local synagogue)” is a good argument, but “You should buy bed nets or give cash instead of posting on twitter like those slacker posers/rioting like those crazy people” is both clearly true and draws a stark contrast between yourself and people you dislike.
AI risk, by comparison, may be extremely important but is much less accessible (the stronger versions of the arguments in favor can be fairly abstract), there’s a lot less certainty around it (take what I perceive to be the increasing pushback from people-with-some-programming-experience against people-that-like-philosophy about the likelihood of going from modern machine learning to true AGI), etc. etc. And, while I myself am in the concerned camp, it’s not crazy to be skeptical! Even if we all die in an AI apocalypse, in the years prior it will be much harder to either convince your aunt of the risk or have a conversation in which third parties think you sound smart.
>>>"Just because disco was cool in the 70s and uncool in the 80s doesn’t imply it will be cool in the 90s, uncool in the 00s, and so on forever. It will probably just stay uncool."
I think at the end there you just gave a good replacement word. For going from neutral to high you can use "advancement" and for going from negative to neutral you can use "acceptance". So in FTT's scenario, not responding would mean they had achieved the level of acceptance they wanted, while responding would mean they wanted more advancement. In Kaj's situation, their involvement declined once they achieved acceptance, and didn't feel the need to advance, but that doesn't mean that other people couldn't have continued on mining for more advancement within the movement.
Or, if you want something shorter and pithier, how about "survival" and "thrival"?
Another example: This theory reminds me a lot of my experience in the My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic fandom (aka "bronies"). In the early days, it was exhilarating and felt like being part of a rapidly growing but still secret club, unrecognized and un-understood by the mainstream, and it was small enough that doing practically anything could plausibly get you featured on the frontpage of Equestria Daily.
I may be getting too esoteric here, but... everything that we call a thing is by nature cyclical. We detect entities by determining their boundaries against some ground, or backdrop. If some existing state changes, and never changes back, everything that depends on it causally just tracks that change, and there's very little difference from ground to observe. An entity just changing in one direction, then never ever reverting, is even almost impossible to talk about. It's just ... time passing, like usual.
When an entity changes and then changes back, then it's a bit more noticeable, because then there's a genuine boundary against ground reality to be seen. But if an entity changed, and then changed back, and never became cyclical by repeating, we wouldn't call it a thing. Even if you did, nobody would believe you; it'd be divorced from natural law, like a ghost, a miracle or an alien abduction. We need it to happen _again_ before we can handle it epistemologically.
A chair gets to be a thing because I can change my state relative to it by sitting in it; then I can change it back again by getting up. And then I can repeat this as many times as I want. My seatedness is a reliable square wave; if it's 1, then it's going to be 0 next. If it's 0, then it's going to be 1 next. Imagine if you sat in a chair, and then got up again, and then the chair vanished. That chair was not cyclical; also, probably, it was imaginary. Imagine if you sat down in a chair and never got up again, ever, even after death, never for any reason. That chair was not cyclical either; but also, it is probably a symbolic or metaphysical chair we're talking about, rather than a real thing.
Anyway, when you argue about whether something is cyclical, you're arguing about ontology; and until you get your ontology settled, you're going to chase your tail around and around forever.
people seem to generally think of "status" as something involving ranking, and if you're talking about the same thing as kaj--which explicitly does *not* involve ranking--then it sounds like status isnt a good word to use; "belonging" fits a lot better. not clear to me that this is the case though.
I like the clarity of some of your descriptions, but I disagree these are obvious phases, unless indeed you restrict them to political or politics-adjacent stuff (but even there I'd be concerned I'm observing those as a caricature of themselves).
Is Google in a Growth phase (any Noogler can gain status freely - not the 'superstar' level status, that does take work, but a very comfortable level of status) or a Postcycle phase (because *formal* status gains go through rigid processes)? I think the way to resolve the ambiguity is to realise that there are lots of groups of things you can join that have a fractal specialisation status behaviour, where you can effectively fit an infinite number of people into the group who all specialise and become respect for their specialisation. But those don't fit this phase model properly at all; you can squint at it and try to hammer it in there, but I suspect it won't really tell you many interesting things about what it's like to join that group or how the group is viewed from the outside.
As an example, I am the documentation specialist in my team, there's a Product X specialist in our team and a Product Y specialist, but there's also a person in my team who thrives off of being the almost-trollish subversive idea generator (sometimes those ideas are rubbish but we're super glad they're there to generate them!), and a person whose social status is basically 'did something break and you're not sure how to fix it? This person knows a ton of nerdy details of the Google infrastructure and loves to help'. I suck at all the non-Documentation things, but I feel like my team really, really wouldn't want to lose me.
(I do appreciate some of the comments here that differentiate between different kinds of status, but I believe most people are concerned with the kind of status in their immediate social circle, the one that gives them a feeling of belonging, safety and being valued. If one starts to separate them out and just focus on status as the sort where you can *dominate* others, then Google is fairly clearly a Postcycle phase. But you seem to specifically reject this separation, if I understand correctly.)
So I don't think things map neatly enough to the phases you've identified for your theory to work as a general social observation - but there are nuggets of important insights in your descriptions of the phases, and e.g. it's tautologically true that there will be some time where infighting hits its peak and tautologically true that there will be a phase where it's easiest to become a superstar in the movement, but I think these component parts mix a bit more chaotically in practise than a sequence of phases gives it credit for.
(Arguably since it's a social theory 'but this will never map 100% to reality' is a feature, not a bug. But I honestly just don't find the 'phase' framing as useful as the description of the individual component parts by themselves, which you might observe at any one time in various forms of intermix.)
Instead of "status", I suggest "esteem", cribbing from Maslow. The other thing about "status" is that it seems to be centered on other people's evaluations of you, which are kind of unknowable. What really matters is not what other people think of you, but what YOU THINK other people think of you. Self-esteem as a subcategory of esteem covers that nicely.
Hadn't seen that deBoer article before, I feel like the obvious response is: 'You want to be online and up-to-date enough to make money commenting on the very-online social media bonfire, but you want to be old and slow enough that you don't have to change all of your terminology and ideas every 3-6 months. Sorry, the memetic selection and backlash cycles are just happening faster than that now, you can keep up or you can go back to be a normal person who is not involved. Blame the structure of the internet that is approaching a memetic singularity of near-infinite change over time.'
Now that I'm ~40, a year or two or even three doesn't feel like very much time, so I may hear about Thing X in 2018 and finally get around to working my way into Thing X's culture in 2022. If Thing X is filled with energetic 20-somethings who have more urgency, then most may have moved on by the time I show up, but I usually DO find such a group of people, who keep the fire burning and are content to be the main players of a diminished thing. I think that if you find that corner of the world where you're a big deal and solidify it at age 29, you aren't likely to move onto the next thing and scramble with the others, you're just gonna hold onto it from inertia so long as there's even a handful of people around. To take the one commenter's D&D example, I certainly expect that if 3 years from now I wanna get into Old School Renaissance content but all the energy moved onto the Rank and Flank Revival, there will be guys from OSR subculture at GenCon still running hexcrawls because that was the particular moment they seized upon.
But political movements don't seem to be like that. When the Free Speech Movement at Berkeley "won", it changed literally 30 seconds later into the Anti-War Movement. As John Searle recounts, Mario shouted "where ya going? we still got a war to stop!", whereupon the people who didn't want to be part of the openly leftist anti-war movement walked away, and there was no FSM anymore by that afternoon.
TL:DR all comments of comments, sorry if I repeat anyone.
After reading the original post and the comments highlights, I can't help but think: what is being described is an emergent phenomenon by which humanity, unconsciously, sorts new ideas in an effort to survive. What you have is an process, which manifests socially, derived from the adaptive unconsciousness of individuals as they interact with others on cyclicly grander scales. Ideas with fitness are reinforced through institutional solidification, cultural value shifts, legislation, new markets, etc. Low fitness or detrimental ideas decay into turmoil, irrevance, and, sadly, social cannibalism.
And like all emergent phenomenon, inputs cannot be easily manipulated and the outputs cannot be predicted. This is the dilemma of the human experiment.
I think the term "cycle" becomes useless if you apply it to anything that goes up and down repeatedly. It must be distinguishable from a random walk to be useful.
Any thoughts from anyone on whether the progression of events (that which is being alleged to be one wavelength of a cycle) can be mapped onto the history of academia and universities in the 20th century? (I'm not really interested in whether it's cyclic. I mean, I /would/ be interested if I didn't think the odds of finding cyclic behavior were so low that attempts would be a distraction from the more important question of what happened to academia in the 20th century. Universities go back to the 11th century and I doubt we even have the data to ask about that millenium.)
Fuck, you’re right, cicadas exist. That’s a legit cycle. Exception that proves the rule, I think.
That being said, business cycles are another great example of a not-a-cycle. It’s not that the cycle has to be exact; I think I gave that impression from oversimplifying the actual statistical model I have in my head of a k-period ARFIMA-like model, which is what I’m used to using for modeling time series. But there have to be real mechanics that pull a time series towards “Overshooting” its target for me to consider it a cycle. A business “cycle” doesn’t count, and in fact intro to macro courses regularly point out that the phrase “Business cycle” is a misnomer caused by exactly this illusion—it was the central example I had in mind of cycle pareidolia! Seeing several consecutive periods of above-average growth mean that the probability of a recession is *lower*, not higher. There’s no point at which, having seen n periods of above-trend GDP, you would conclude that the next-period’s GDP will probably be below-trend.
If you send me the Google trends data for a couple dozen random trends, I can test it! I’m too busy to sort through the data, but it’s a simple enough statistical model.
The other counterexample that proves the rule (that a lot of people brought up) was predator-prey dynamics. But as lots of other people pointed out, those are notoriously unstable.
That being said, after thinking about it some more, I think cicadas count as calendar-based because each species runs off of integer multiples of years. I don’t think that makes it true by definition, though. If cicadas came out of hiding every .4081 years, I would recognize that as not-calendar-based.
It's not calendar based, it's nutrient-density-as-driven-by-solar-inensity based. The categories are aren't made for Man, they just *are*.
Calendars are how we measure a characteristic of cycles, it's not what drives the cycle.
The natural world is chock full of cycles, from Kreb to beating hearts to tides (and tide pools) to estrus in mammals and from there the formation and activity of groups of animals.
The movement of the great clock hands in the sky is the biggest exception that proves the rule for cycles. They are true, long-term-ordered, precise frequency cycles and they drive a lot of stuff.
But I think relaxation oscillations are also moderately common - if a forest burns today, it is very unlikely to burn tomorrow, but very well might burn again in a few decades. I think earthquakes and volcanoes behave similarly. I think the business cycle is similar - immediately after a big bust, you don't have risk-taking investors, so you are unlikely to get another crisis in the next few years.
BOB (*) rules(**) all!(***)
* Big Orange Ball
** 'has a definative effect on
*** or, yah know, everything under the sun.
Actually, immediately after a big bust is exactly when recessions are most common, statistically speaking. There’s a reason double dip recessions happen all the time! Same goes for volcanoes and earthquakes.
IDK about forest fires, but that definitely sounds like another plausible counterexample.
I think you're over-constraining your definition by insisting that cycles be both stable and highly regular. You start with "cycles don't exist" but are eventually argued down to "stable and regular cycles don't exist, except man-made ones and these handful of exceptions that 'prove the rule'".
(Tangentially, you're using that idiom incorrectly: "no parking on Sunday" proves the rule that you can park on other days)
Like, to go back to the original, Turchin's Secular Cycles, nobody thinks you can set your watch to the decline of civilization or anything like that. Regularity is not an implied part of the argument or the dynamic, and to argue that the absence of regularity makes it "not a cycle" seems to miss the point.
I was going to object that "proves the rule" comes from the archaic meaning of "prove" as "test", but TIL there's not good evidence for that! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exception_that_proves_the_rule
However, "In any case, the phrase can be interpreted as a jocular expression of the correct insight that a single counterexample, while sufficient to disprove a strictly logical statement, does not disprove statistical statements which may correctly express a general trend notwithstanding the also commonly encountered existence of a few outliers to this trend."
Yeah, I probably should just let this one go, I have tried to make efforts to not be "that person on the internet who complains whenever 'literally' is misused", and like literally, the horse has probably left the barn on this one.
But in online discussions, I tend to find this usage of the phrase as a bit dismissive, like some sort of rhetorical judo maneuver that takes a counterargument to the point I'm making and frames it as if it somehow actually supports my point. But it's really not a big deal which is why I put it as a parenthetical tangent point.
If it actually came from the archaic "prove" meaning "test", well, all exceptions test the rule so the "...that proves the rule" part would be redundant.
I'm not sure why you think business cycles aren't real. It seems like you're conflating modelability with particular time series models, with cyclicality as a concept. There are obvious structural reasons for growth to be cyclical: the S-curves inherent in technological innovation and growth dynamics. Your very example, predator-prey dynamics dominate economics for exactly these reasons - the mathematical relationships are just much more complex than in animal ecology.
For instance, everyone knew China's 10% GDP growth wouldn't last forever. Not because it's a stochastic process that won't always generate the same value, but because we know for a fact that the long run mean of that process cannot be 10%. There were structural forces that had to drag it down, and drag it down they did.
The same is true of every company in history. There are limits to growth, and once a company hits them their growth rate slows. Forecasting exactly when that will and will not happen is difficult, but that doesn't mean Google's net income was a random walk and could have ended up at any level. Stock prices are a (nearly) random walk, but that is only because they have already discounted the highly forecastable structure of earnings.
The Poisson drip of innovation, restructuring, etc start companies, countries and economies on S-curve trajectories. Those S-curves have a definite structure every time, we just don't know exactly what it is ex ante. Ignorance, however, is not the same as non-existence.
Of course, this does mean that most of these time series do not have "cyclicality" in the strict econometric (linear, measurable) sense, but I don't think Scott was using that sense of the word.
This is probably the place to point out that Turchin is an ecologist by trade, models human society using exactly the same principles and methods that ecologists use to model, e.g., predator-prey dynamics, and if you've accepted that those can form cycles, you're already about 90% of the way to admitting that so can, well, human dynamics.
Also, Turchin's theory is actually two separate mechanics, and the second one, the radical-moderate dynamic, if true, does in fact result in highly regular cycles. (The problem is, it cannot be directly tested and measured, so it only shows up as periodic peaks of social unrest superimposed over the long-term, "secular" trend. This is somewhat ironic in context of your argument, because it means neither of those trends are intuitively visible in the time series Turchin works with.)
regular cycles that are not based on calendars (as in the manmade artifact for timekeeping):
pulsars, some variable stars, orbits of planets, tides, pendulums, reversals of earth's magnetic field (modulo some variance), breathing at rest, butterfly life cycles, influenza, hurricane season, wildfire season, the solar cycle
“Manmade artifact” isn’t what I was going for, so much as… I guess the is “It’s either a very simple physical system that behaves kinda like a harmonic oscillator, or it’s closely tied to one.”
But breathing is a really good example!
"Politics is based on economics, economics is based on culture, culture is based on environment & genetics, environment is geology under biology, biology is based on chemistry, and chemistry is physics."
It's all tied to vibrating physical systems.
Why the Wheel of Samsara is a wheel.
Negative feedback exists in plenty of human systems too. All you need for weak cyclicality is some base rate of a thing happening, and then a negative feedback that makes the thing go away.
e.g:
the "current thing" cycle
limerence
stock market bubbles
Maybe we're disagreeing about words here. I would consider something that randomly oscillates modulo being more likely to move towards the mean than away from it, to be weakly cyclical, and maybe you wouldn't.
perhaps the following taxonomy:
1. noncyclical: random occilation (brownian motion)
2. weakly cyclical: random occilation modulo a tendency to move towards the mean, but f(t+1) is only dependent on f(t) and independent of other prior values after conditioning on f(t).
3. medium cyclical: if f(t)=x, f(t+1) is bimodal with bell curves centered on either side of f(t), and f(t+1) will be on the side opposite some average of pre-t values.
4. strongly cyclical: same as above, but the bell curves are narrower.
Orbits of planets are not based on calendars only because calendars are based on orbits of planets.
Periodicity is not surprising if you have a second derivative somewhere - and physical laws often do (e.g. Newton's Second Law). Maximum Limelihood Estimator's claim is that there's no reason for human systems to be well modeled using second derivatives. They might even go further and say that all patterns are unlikely, because human systems are often anti-inductive: if a pattern exists, people will respond to it and change it.
I'd like to make a distinction between cycles which are periodic because they're based on some underlying periodic phenomenon, and quasi-periodic cycles which are self-regulating.
Cycles in the first category are constrained to always follow the underlying period, regardless of cycle-to-cycle variation. Butterfly life cycles, hurricane and wildfire seasons, etc., are all locked to the earth's orbit: if they happen early one year, they're no more likely to happen early the next year. There's no phase drift.
Cycles in the second category include reversals of the geomagnetic field, the solar cycle, breathing at rest, etc. There's some timescale on which they tend to vary: the interval between sunspot maxima is more likely to be 11 years than 10 or 12 years, and more likely to be 10 or 12 years than 9 or 13. But they're not locked to any more precise underlying mechanism, so if they ever vary, there's no reason to expect them to return to the previous long-term trend.
Influenza (and other infectious respiratory diseases) are a special case, as discussed by Scott in a previous post here. They can occur in quasi-periodic waves, controlled by the buildup and decay of immunity within the population. But - because they're temperature-sensitive - they can also become locked to the seasonal temperature cycle, controlled ultimately by the earth's orbit.
How about (El/La) Nin(o/a)?
(I agree with you that cycles are absurdly rare for the same reason machines usually don't spontaneously exist)
Wasn't one of the discoveries of chaos theory that cycles are inevitable once a few common mathematical prerequisites are in place?
No. Quite the opposite.
Before chaos theory, physicists tended to look at complicated time dependence and think that it's actually a combination of a large number of periodic motions with different periods. Chaos theory provides a categorically different way of thinking about complicated time dependence.
Trying to figure out under what conditions chaos occurs has helped to clear up our understanding of when cycles occur. But overall, it has made physicists less likely to look at something and think that a cycle is inevitable.
I think that postwar US presidential elections may plausibly be a genuine cycle, or at least have been until recently, although I certainly wouldn't bet my shirt on it.
From 1944 to 2016, with the single exception of 1980, the Republicans won the presidential election if the date was 0 or 4 mod 16, and the democrats won if it was 8 or 12.
And obviously, if you take the fourier transforms of enough time sequences you're going to see some spikes, especially if you cherry pick your time interval like I'm doing (1940 and 2020 both broke that rule), but that's a really big one that I didn't have to look far to find. It's also one where my prior on causality would by quite high - thermostatic effects in politics are widely documented, and the idea that this one is more regular than most strikes me as surprising but not amazing.
Funnily enough, I’ve been working on election modeling the past few months. There’s definitely no cyclical behavior in elections.
I still feel like I don't understand your claim, so are you contending that he's wrong about the elections (i.e. republicans didn't win on 0 and 4 mod 16, and democrats on 8 and 12), or that this doesn't count as a cycle (in which case, why not? something about the magnitudes of votes or something?)?
Another really important thing that's definitely cyclic: sunspots, and their consequences for climate change and a variety of other things. But looking at nature rather than human activity feels like cheating - nature is obviously full of cycles, as Kerani points out above (below? I still haven't figured out the comment layout...)
I agree that the above/below thing is confusing. For me it's compounded by me sometimes viewing a post with new comments first, and sometimes chronologically - changing from one to the other flips the comments from above to below and vice versa.
> looking at nature rather than human activity feels like cheating
(epistemic status: noodling)
I think maybe this puts a finger on an important part of the problem. Human activity is *really* hard to predictively model, because the act of predicting it changes it.
It seems to me that subculture (life)cycles might be anti-inductive in the same way that markets are. If a market has a predictable motion, you can siphon arbitrary amounts of money from it until it stops being predictable -- which will happen for all the usual reasons.
People also really want status, and status is often (not always, I think?) zero-sum. Even if one of the subculture models under discussion is broadly correct, maybe they can never be precise enough to make predictions. If everybody knows that something will Happen Here at time T, people show up at T-X, falsifying the prediction. The same in reverse for the collapse.
The best human example I know of is US political realignment, which occurred in 1824-1828, 1854-1860, 1892-1896, 1932, and <1968? 1980? 1994?>. Even though the pattern is less well defined recently (or we just don't have the hindsight to understand it yet), we do see 4 periods of a cycle with period of about 35 years. The only other potential realignment before WWII is 1874-1876, but that seems to be less significant outside the South.
Political scientists do seem to have some fairly object measurements of political realignment - I think they look at how correlated each county's vote is with that county's vote in the previous year. I don't know if anyone has looked at the long term data and checked for periodicity.
Shocked but not shocked this hasn’t been brought up yet… the female reproductive system cycle. Ratios of estrogen to progesterone change cyclically in the body.
To be fair, you did say "in my years of experience modeling human behavioral time series", so by implication cicadas are excluded.
I want to understand whether this "cycles aren't real" argument really applies here. What Scott's talking about is a *reliable sequence.* If you see A, then you can bet that it will transform, at some point, into B, then C, then D.
Some instances of this are trivial: If I always bet on black at roulette, you can bet that at some point any winning streak will end, and that any losing streak will end. But that doesn't tell you anything important or meaningful about the world. I think perhaps this is what you mean about the business cycle; it's a "cycle" only in the sense that usually GDP trends upwards, but sometimes it goes down. That in itself isn't a "cycle" in even the weakest sense of the term.
But if you can say with confidence that B will follow A, and B is not simply "not A," then you may not have a "cycle," but it seems you do have some useful knowledge about the world. Correct?
The United States during the "unit banking" era had genuinely seasonal business cycles, because it was a mostly agricultural economy and regulations made the banks too small to deal with such big seasonal changes.
To be fair, you did specify *human* behavioral time series.
That said, cycles seem ridiculously common to me. Eg. in work, I, and people around me go through regular cycles of design work, implementation, testing, debugging, crunch that then repeat that pattern at fairly regular intervals. Does this not count as a cyclic human behavioural time series?
Obviously, it happens because it involves doing similar things multiple times: whether product release lifecycles, or repeated projects with similar structure, but that seems a very common pattern in many different areas that naturally leads to cycles in behaviour.
These are being driven by new inputs (eg new demands for work from outside the team). The previous work pattern doesn't drive the current work pattern, so it's not a cycle.
If, say, last time's crunch always caused some failure, and you'd otherwise be done working, but now you have to spin up a whole new round of design, implementation, testing, debugging, and crunch because of that failure, and you can't get off this treadmill for some time, that would be a cycle.
>The previous work pattern doesn't drive the current work pattern, so it's not a cycle.
That's not part of any definition of cycle I've ever heard of though. Yes, the cyclic behaviour is caused by repeating similar work - but that seems a perfectly valid cause of a cycle to me, and a very common one. The whole team really does go through regular, repeated patterns of behaviour.
But as an aside, I think the previous work cycle *does* drive the current one. You say:
> If, say, last time's crunch always caused some failure
But replace this with "Last time's salespeople always cause some new contract" and the rest of the paragraph is perfectly true - and that does seem like a pattern of behaviour in the previous cycle driving the current one. The only difference is that it's not a failure, but a desired outcome. But again, that doesn't really seem related to the definition of a cycle to me.
I sort of agree with your point on business cycles but debt buildups do exhibit this property – the more periods of above-trend debt buildup there are, the more you would predict an unwinding of that debt in the next period.
One thing I guess I would add is that while pointing out reasons 'why this model is wrong' isn't all that difficult (I'm sure our host could have done this on his own, and probably did before posting) , I still think it's a useful way to think about any number of subcultures with a strong intellectual underpinning.
And that said, I still think operations like the LDS are an interesting counterexample , and I think more movements could and should learn from them (and no, I am not a Mormon). If in 150 years you go from screwing around in a wasteland like Utah to building a billion dollar empire, while finding a way to sell a story about Jesus landing in the New World to a bunch of people in Europe (and getting said Europeans to ship cash to SLC in the bargain), then your model a) definitely scales, and b) is probably worth exploring by any would-be activist.
I brought this up to a buddy of mine a while ago, who's a jack Mormon, and he pointed out that one of the things that make the Mormons so successful is that they actual do tangible shit for the people they're trying to win over. Unlike most 'movements' they don't just call you stupid if you don't sign on; they come to your neighborhood and drill wells and build houses in an attempt you win you over. That part of the sales pitch might not scale, but more movements should try to offer actual real-world benefits to the people they want to win over instead of just calling you shit-eyes if you don't sign on the bottom line.
As a practicing Mormon, I concur with this assessment.:) I think early Christianity caught on the same way, even with the controversial divine stuff you still have a doctrine based around loving your neighbor (with "neighbor" defined as anyone who crosses your path, including people you've been taught to hate). This would attract a lot of attention, even among people who didn't have Judaism as a base. Throw in the persecutions, and you get a Streisand Effect when everyone starts wondering why the elites are beating up these people who are just being nice to everyone...
Early Christians were a bit famous for taking in exposed infants, taking people into their homes to help them recover from illnesses (no hospitals back then, if you didn't have a family to care for you while you were sick you'd just have to cough it out on the street somewhere) and caring at all about slaves. I'd say that definitely helped them grow rapidly. Julian the Apostate, who tried the hardest to combat Christianity and restore paganism, wrote that "it is disgraceful that, when no Jew ever has to beg, and the impious Galilaeans [Christians] support not only their own poor but ours as well, all men see that our people lack aid from us." As I understand it Christians were pretty philosophically alone at the time when it came to the idea of helping the poor and slaves materially. The empire fed all the poor in Rome for free, but that was about prestige and not love. Roman philosophy generally restricted donations and gifts as pretty much solely having the purpose of boosting your own prestige and making other people owe you one. Since the poor have little power, there was no point in trading favors with them.
So on the one hand you're a slave in Rome and all of Roman culture tells you that you're scum and must accept whatever your masters deign to give you, and on the other hand a Christian comes along and gives you food and a little money when you're in need and tells you that you are just as valuable in God's eyes as the Emperor himself. I know what movement I'm going to want to join!
> more movements should try to offer actual real-world benefits to the people they want to win over
Cults traditionally provide psychological support to potential new members in form of "love bombing". It is easier than drilling a well or building a house, but it's still appreciated by many.
I think that the weakest part of the original argument is that it assumes that the movement has a natural pool of potential converts and that most of the potential converts join the movement during Stage 2. If you take your pool of potential converts to be literally everyone, then you can grow for a lot longer.
That part of the sales pitch can scale, if you are able to convince many of your current members to do it.
You think the LDS is unique in doing practical work in search of ultimate conversion? It might be unique in the intensity of the mobilization (every single young man) but the practice is common to most Christian sects. The Catholics, Anglicans, and Evangelicals all do it and have long traditions of it.
No, I don't think they're unique. But I think it's a great case study for this discussion, since it's clearly a subculture with a fairly recent origin story, and has by nearly any measure been enormously successful despite facing some long odds against success at its inception.
What's 'worked' for the LDS isn't going to perfectly map on to other subcultures, but I do think there's a lesson in recognizing that demonstrating the personal benefits of joining a movement is one of the smartest things you can do if you want a movement to sustain.
> I guess I should have been more respectful to David Chapman’s model, because the most common criticism in the comments was “actually I think it’s more of [reinvents David Chapman’s model]. Fine. Good work David.
Loyalists aren't sociopaths. Loyalists are distinguished from sociopaths in that they truly believe in the movement and will make significant sacrifices towards the status quo. A key difference is when the status quo or consensus changes, when a heresiarch succeeds. A sociopath switches colors because it's now high status to believe something else. A Loyalist will either need to be convinced or will become a reactionary, supporting the old status quo against the new and becoming a subspecies of heresiarch.
The main difference between this and Chapman's model is that this is better and doesn't have weird personality archetypes that you kind of have to use lots of creative reasoning to ram a resolutely-resistant reality into.
“Or maybe Kaj is talking about going from neutral status to high status (where you start to feel like a special bigshot) and I am including going from negative status to neutral status (where you start to feel accepted and part of the group).”
The word “status” seems like a weird fit to what’s going on here. The concept of measuring nonmembership < membership < bigshotness on on a single scale makes a certain kind of sense, but I don’t think that, for example, from the point of view of Boy Scouts, all nonmembers are in some sense “low-status.”
I would argue that they do, in a sense, although not consciously. Lets say non-boyscouts don't know how to tie knots and boyscouts do. If a non-boyscout decided to join the boyscouts, they would have the lowest status of the group because of their lack of knot-tying ability. Similarly, if a boyscout was out with a bunch of non-boyscouts and they encountered a problem that could be solved by knots, the boyscout would gain some status by providing the solution to the problem.
This feels intuitive to me. I suppose I'm using the word status as a shorthand for "respect, competency in the eyes of other, knowledge".
I think you're referring to what Jordan Peterson would call a "competence hierarchy." It's the theory that humans naturally form hierarchies based on competence: the leader of an ancient tribe of hunter gatherers is probably the guy who is really good at hunting and also gets alone well with everyone and makes good decisions. Since he makes good decisions and everyone knows it, the whole tribe tends to go with his ideas on what to do and listen to him generally.
I think this is true of most groups of humans, and only gets complicated when people find ways to gain official power without demonstrating competence. Which leads to resentment, disloyalty, etc.
I feel like this tied into FarTheThrow's point that status as a term is unhelpfully vague, so making it unfalsifiable. If non competitive feelings of belong and companionship are also status than you could equally predict that people would compete less once they are in a movement in order to retain that. And avoid the distance that being in charge would bring
My speculation is that early in a movement's 'lifecycle', status comes from ability, and other members of the group also place those with ability in positions of power. Later on, this relationship of [ability = status] & [ability = heirarchy] is percieved by newcomers as [heirarchy = status], and so they start competing for power.
Is this still vague? I get the feeling it is. It would probably be useful to atomize the concept of 'status' but that comes with its own headaches. Also I haven't reread the original ACX post today so I suspect I might be repeating points already made
Are things like "reputation" or "self-respect" falsifiable? I agree that the word "status" is pretty vague and confusing, but my impression is that people generally don't intend to frame it as a part of a falsifiable theory, instead more of an overarching worldview, like Freudism. The point is that most interpersonal interactions and relationships can be interpreted in terms of "status", which isn't entirely zero-sum or fungible between different groups/the "mainstream culture", but to some extent is.
> If non competitive feelings of belong and companionship are also status
I would argue that belonging and companionship are not "non competitive". We certainly compete for companionship; particularly in romantic relationships. We compete for belonging as well, think of team try outs.
I'm definitely on Kaj Sotala's side of the last argument. Status is a relative term that implies zero sum kind of economies. Anyone who "gains status" is a threat to anyone who is already "high status." Status is just a very competitive idea. The perks Kaj talks about- "a sense of belonging, being seen and appreciated" is not at all equivalent with "going from negative status to neutral status." Humans are social creatures, and not all this sociability is a zero sum game. We can actually all lose. In fact, we seem to be quickly moving towards a world where people feel like they are are all "losing" socially very, very fast, and it's a very scary development. Saying "having your social needs met" is the same as "having higher status" seems like a very abnormal use of the term "status."
However, I'll add to all these critiques that- even though I'm kind of repulsed by the model where all humans are these status maximizing demons who will use any charity or political organization to stroke their own egos- it actually is a useful model for me to assess my own impure motives. Reading that original article helped me realize that a lot of my instinctive desires to "make the world a better place" were actually more or less desires for "status." Or at least "special significance on the global stage." Which is a good thing to understand about myself/ my motives. So yeah, thanks for that.
To weigh in on the meaningless definitional argument, for what it's worth when I hear staus I think of something like money rather than "relative status". It can be accumulated, and operates in a zero or positive sum game (or even negative!) depending on the environment.
For example some settings feel like they have status UBI (everyone gets a minimum level of respect and belonging), others have status inflation (if you're not actively gaining status you're losing it), etc
Interesting. Status UBI settings/ status inflation settings are fun concepts. I'm still personally more inclined to see status as a zero sum idea, but I'm not personally attached to any definition of the word "status."
For me it's more an argument against the idea that we're all essentially only motivated by subconscious desires to gain social importance/ power. Or that the desire for social power is basically the same thing as the desire to simply not be lonely. We could redefine "status" to mean "poison dart frog" and vice versa and I wouldn't be the least bit bothered by this. I'm just bothered by anyone claiming that I'm only motivated by poison dart frogs.
My justification is something like: assume you're the world's biggest loser, everyone hates you and you have no social skills. Then you gradually improve your charisma and social skills somehow. After one year, people only hate you a little. After two years, you're pretty normal and people accept you. After three years, you're actually pretty popular. After four years you're a natural leader who everyone loves. Etc. I find it more natural to call this "gradually increasing status over four years" than to say "for the first two years, you're gaining acceptance, then for the next two years you're gaining some totally different thing called status".
If you put a bunch of strangers into a room and let them talk, you can end up with them all liking each other but you can also end up with them being mostly indifferent or even hating each other. Kaj seems to be pointing at "it's nice when everyone in the room likes each other instead of the other possibilities" and "status" does a terrible job of describing the difference between those scenarios. Is everyone in the friendly room high status and everyone in the hateful room low status?
Thanks for this example; it seems clear that thinking in terms of "status" is more confusing than illuminating in such a case.
It also suggests why the model might need a specific kind of person to lead to involution (though those people may or may not have been present from the beginning). I like "status" in terms of getting along with people, but I actively *don't* want to run a conference/zine/whatever even though that's also "status". But someone who does, probably isn't a sociopath, just more type-A/driven/ambitious than I (and is definitely useful in the growth phase of a subculture!)
I feel similarly.
In my head I'm running through the history of various groups in my life: clubs, families, teams, camps, whatever. In some everyone was chill, kind, nice, strong sense of belonging, companionship. People went out of their way to make sure new people were welcomed. I guess you could describe those communities as 'maximizing status' but that's a use of 'status' quite alien to me.
Makes sense to me. As others have pointed out, to me status is about the relative social ranking of people. Status is thus an attribute of an individual.
I see your example in contrast more as a description of an attribute of the whole group (or of a whole subculture or society), you might call it the groups social temperature, a measure of how open, friendly, inviting, cooperative the group is in general.
Then, how accepted a person feels by this group would be something like (individual status) * (groups social temperature).
Thanks for the reply.
No, I think there's a lot of truth to this conflating of terms, even if it's kind of unpleasant to stomach. For example, often fantasies of fame are an expression of personal loneliness, which implies this kind of "all social aspirations are on the same spectrum" model. I kind of disagree with you in the same weak way I disagree with the people arguing that there is no free will. "Maybe I'm 99% a product of my environment, but I'm still 1% an independent decision maker" is the stubborn position I cling to there. And here it's similar. "Maybe I'm 99% status-maximizing demon, but I'm 1% something else."
The main downside to this model, in my eyes, is that it treats all idealistic motives as simply jargon, as excuses for private status-questing. And while this is true in a lot of cases, I think idealistic motives are actually a real factor in human decision making that shouldn't be entirely ignored. People genuinely believe in ideologies, fight wars over ideologies. It's often a very serious problem. But human's social motives simply cannot be reduced to rational, self-interested status-questing. People kind of get hypnotized or seduced by the ideals that they collectively believe in. By reducing this all to strategic egotism, you ignore what made the "Precycle" phase so magical to begin with. Back then they didn't think it was ever likely to become mainstream or take off, they were just excited about the ideas/ beliefs/ interests they all shared. And this "enthusiasm for shared ideas" motivates people in very real ways.
This kind of goes back to Noah Harari Sapiens sorts of ideas about how human "belief in imaginary things" like nations and human rights allows us to organize on a massive scale. And that kind of sums up my argument. People don't just mine status. They actually genuinely "believe in imaginary things."
"Calendar" cycle is a cycle that repeats on some multiple of week/month/year cycle. Thus, cicadas are in a calendar cycle, and so are many processes where a simple repeating loop is superimposed on a weekly or annual schedule (say, market volatility around quarterly earnings releases). But the absebse of non calendar multiple loops is still a non trivial claim.
Having watched psychedelics go from subculture to effectively mainstream I've been wondering what happens when the consumerisation forces of the free market root out every niche, selling all possible subcultures back to us as soon as we can develop them, and the low barrier of entry to previously hard-to-enter subcultures that social media brings makes each burgeoning subculture evolve and dissipate quickly with few long term committers.
Doesn't this "mainstream" everything? And if (let's say national) cultures become more mainstreamed, and we run out of taboo, there is no rebellion, your parents are likely still cool af, giving you the only options of being cool af or uncool af, there is no tangible oppressor to position yourself against, the romantic struggle against the other that many cling to for meaning disappears, and therefore we become less differentiated, less individuated (in spite of the individuation force of the free market consumerisation), we all did or are doing the trips and all have tattoo sleeves and tidy beards, the snap-on cultural accessories we pick up and drop become more and more meaningless, the infinite choices we have collapse into our preferences, shaped crudely by our underlying rudimentary culture, we become less concerned about what is happening outside our cultural borders and we gather again around the local maypoles that unites us, we become more culturally unified and nationalistic, we become more tribal within our national boundaries, or other more local boundaries, we are all eventually reading from the same parochial page.
I think this is evident in the recent rise of populism (check ngram for populism to get a feel for that), which leads me to thinking about the tension between the global market economy and it's infinite choice element, and the simultaneous rise of nationalistic politics in the West, effectively revealing our parochial preferences.
What happens to this dynamic when we all become mainstream, when all dogs are having their day together at all times? Do we need to reconfigure connotations to see that the popular mainstream is the big tribe, and that that is where we are all heading with this niche-eliminating system?
Is there no maximum size limit on how many niches "the mainstream" can hold at once?
Even if there isn't, attentional gating already seems to work wonders for artificing new trends and shadowbanning old ones. One must keep in mind that the vast majority of humanity is not, actually, on social media.
I've never understood this "consumerization means the market sells our subcultures back to us" thing.
What would it mean for psychedelics to be consumerized? Maybe one day Eli Lilly will sell you LSD, but it'll probably cost about the same as a drug dealer does now, and the experience will still be the same. Maybe there will be popular books on LSD you'll buy at the bookstore, but is that really any different from reading Timothy Leary now?
Are people just using "consumerization" to make "embraced by normies" sound like capitalism's fault?
You play video games, don't you Scott? At least Civ 4? And you probably have strong (negative) feelings about the newer installments? I don't know if you follow video games in general, but the same thing repeats across all sorts of other video game franchises, and the forces at work are not specific to video games (but are specific to capitalism).
Can you break this down a little more? Civ 4 is my personal drug of choice because it was the civ I was good at when I had kids and stopped having time to play civ more than once a year or so, when I get my Father's Day or birthday gaming weekend. I would like to learn and play the new versions, and one day, when my kids are grown I will. But right now I don't spend my very limited civ time playing new versions because I don't want to spend my time playing throw away learning games.
Is there a thing where people stop at their current version of the game, declare it best, and throw shade at everyone else?
Of course it's a thing, although in these latter days of games-as-a-service players usually don't get to keep their favorite versions, instead lamenting wistfully to each other how the grass was greener a decade ago, while executives say something along the lines of "you think you want it but you don't". There are some exceptions, when those executives eventually reconsider, and stuff like OSRS and WoW Classic happens, both commercial successes.
For older games, when they still used to have separate releases, my favorite example is Heroes of Might and Magic 3. Despite being over 20 years old, it's still consistently in the top 100 watched games on Twitch, has a thriving mod community and a semi-competitive scene, while the later installments are all but forgotten.
The dad barrier definitely seems to apply to complex strategy games more than other genres. I think because they have a high barrier to entry.
Most of my gaming time these days is in 20-30 minute sessions a time or two per week. Which usually means I'm either playing a game I know very well, or I'm playing something new that's very approachable.
I still play Master of Orion 1-2 from time to time because they're the last space 4x games that I ever learned and I can always jump into them very quickly. I imagine Stellaris is probably a better game these days, and I look at it with curiosity. When life hands me a rare opportunity to play a game in uninterrupted solitude for a few hours, I sometimes load Stellaris up and start trying to figure it out. But then I always say, "Eh, trying to figure this game out will consume all of this time and I'll have forgotten how to play by the next time I have an opportunity anyway. Why not do something actually fun?"
Of course, it also doesn't help that Paradox games have an enormous amount of semi-mandatory DLC and so my vanilla copy of Stellaris is ever-more out of date.
Civ 5 tried to make some needed reforms around the big unit stacks by trying "one unit per tile", but it didn't go too well and they mishandled it. Players were pretty mixed on it.
Civ 6 went in a more cartoony/childish direction, and less history focused and more abstract, and has been pretty divisive among the old die-hards.
Over time it gets less and less like a "civilization" game and more and more like a kids' puzzle game.
But yeah there are a lot of people who still play only 4 or 5. Personally I love 2 most of all, (so many good memories) but 4 was probably the peak.
I think Civ has been finding it's niche in a more crowded marketplace. It is a streamlined, abstract, thematic kind of 4x game. It's become that way because if you want crunchier stuff there are a lot more options to choose from.
That's funny, Civ 2 is my favorite and I don't meet many people who agree. Except I haven't had it up and running on a modern machine for quite some time. In particular, I'd like to get it running with the scenarios pack that included the US Civil War, alien invasion, etc.
My observation on Civ games is that the odd-numbered titles represent a paradigm shift and the even-numbered ones a refinement of that shift. 2 is a refinement of 1, while 4 is a refinement of 3, and in both cases the even-numbered titles are more fondly remembered because they worked out the kinks in some of the bigger shifts. I've barely touched 6 but I sensed that the trend continued in that it sought to be a refinement of 5, retaining its one-unit-per-tile system but building upon it, but I guess it didn't do as well because 5 seems to have retained more holdouts than 1 or 3.
I loved the Midgard scenario as I got sick of the original game. Greta to have Led Zeppelin on in the background.
I think 6 also was itself just a big step towards a new direction in art/realism.
Civ2 was my favorite too, and now I play the open-source clone version called freeciv, which is similar but better.
I think that franchises (as well as things like a specific band's songs) are susceptioble to this in a way that most things aren't. Nobody else can keep making better Civ games unless the IP owners authorise it.
But for most other things, the average quality goes down by 90% while the quantity goes up by 200% so things end up twice as good in absolute terms.
But the casual observer only sees the relative change. (This is where a lot of accusations of planned obselescence come from)
I don't know how other people come to psychedelics but I spent time reading about them on the internet and became enamored with them as a tool for hacking my brain. But when it came time to try to get some I realized that I didn't know anyone who could source them for me. Eventually I found my way into the world of research chemicals and grey market internet drug dealers and sourced something called DPT, a DMT analog.
I was pretty scared and excited to try this mysterious powder that arrived in the mail in a plastic bag. I eyeballed a "dose" and snorted it and tripped really hard and hallucinated quite vividly and even today, 13 years later I could tell an hour long story about ego death blah blah that would bore everyone.
Anyway the sheer difficulty of sourcing one psychedelic and not knowing if it was going to scramble my brain permanently or what served to deepen the hero's journey quality of it for me. I don't mean to brag but that was like, pretty hard core?
For awhile I thought other people who were into psychedelics were cool as fuck, like me, until I realized that a lot of them were actually hippies. I found myself in a room with them and was actually horrified. Psychedelics were a firm part of their lame sensual culture.
It took a bit more curation to find the right kind of SV adjacent psychonauts that were my kind of people. The actual hardcore people willing to experiment on their brains.
The problem isn't so much that hippies (or normies) are into psychedelics, but rather that if psychedelics were safe and widely available it would make them much less of a signaller for edgy self-experimenter. It deletes a lot of the heroes journey quality from the experience. The kids filling Eli LSDilly scripts to manage their gender dysphoria instead of snorting brown plastic-tasting powder by mail to hack their brains are totally missing the point!
As someone who wants to brain hack with as little risk as possible and so has only tried stuff under specific stabilizing conditions, you are Super Cool and Have My Respect
I had a very similar journey, especially when I met other people into psychedelics where I lived and realized they're not who I had been looking for at all
"Consumerization means the market sells our subcultures back to us."
Makes me think of the classic PBS Frontline: The Merchants of Cool
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cu_vJDmi2fo
It follows MTV's anthropological survey of American teenagers, which was funded to better market to them. Worth a watch if you can find the full episode.
Thanks for the reply!
It's certainly not the fault of the capitalism, normies have always been the real hustlers.
Somewhat anecdotally, magic mushrooms were legal in UK and the Netherlands until the mid 2000s, simply sold in head-shops, but were far from a popular choice.
NL since sells truffles instead (an unregulated part of the same fungus) but they are now a very popular choice, actively marketed, a big industry that you can see trying to find new ways of getting their product into you.
Universities are now full to the brim with psychedelics, as is the tech world, and very high quality drugs, including exotic phytochemicals, designer 2Cs, medical grade anesthetics, all ordered to your door in most major cities via competing shops with elaborate menus on whatsapp.
Drugs are just one example. Punk and rave are other examples, whole ways of life turned into consumer items, they are no longer scenes with significant barriers to entry, you can just buy yourself the look and experience, it's there being marketed to you right now.
Being a cocaine addict. Being into cosplay. Being into whips and leather. Being a road cyclist, mountain cyclist, film maker, scuba diver, whatever you want, you can now buy the gear, learn the stuff, go out and join in. It's actually the world we dreamed of decades ago, and it sure does bring a lot of joy to a lot of people.
But my more political point of contention is that if these indeed aren't cycles, and we are actually seeing a novel effect from what I perceive to be the influence of social media and a global online market, that in the end does exactly what is says on the tin, it connects everyone and everything everywhere has it's price delivered to your door, then what becomes of subculture? and what becomes of society where everything is mainstream, without taboo, your parents, grandparents, everyone all into the same stuff as you because that is the stuff we all know and love now?
It feels like the only meaningful rebellion anyone can make is become Amish or something similar, and if going basically feral is all that is left then it will remain a backward-facing niche.
My conclusion is that a mainstreamed, everything out-front and above-board society, which we have for good or ill made ourselves to, flooded with choice and with preference demanded, I think eventually leads to a flattening or greying out of difference, and hence leads back to nationalistic or tribal parochialism, and I believe goes towards explaining the recent rise of populism.
Is there a way out of that trajectory I don't think so, it is just a perhaps unexpected consequence of the system we have built, built basically from the dreams we dreamt from a place of great limitations, and ultimately it is perhaps just what happens to societies, or nations, when they organise themselves as such, with such an intensity of trade and communication, between people and between cultures.
I'm skeptical that "You're just another pack of normies, doing normie stuff." happens to everything. ( I'm writing from the usa. ) Consider tobacco smoking. Judging from all the secondhand smoke PSAs, it looks to me like it has been removed from the set of "normie stuff" (vilified?).
My impression is that some activities have become more accepted, and some have become less accepted (over, say, the last half century or so in the usa). If anything, my impression is that the typical person here has probably lost freedom over that period. ( As one numerical index, the incarceration rate here approximately quadrupled over that period. https://www.sentencingproject.org/publications/u-s-prison-population-trends-massive-buildup-and-modest-decline/ )
"I wonder if what I'm commenting on is simply just a remnant of the shift in the ascendant culture, from the "Silent Majority" / Bush Neocons to the Woke Left of today. "
That's more-or-less my impression - though I think it varies both geographically and organizationally across the usa. I think what you describe is true of blue states and academia + some of the media + silicon valley, but not red states. Personally, I'd be happy to see a net increase in personal freedom - both from attacks by the right and attacks by the left, but I don't think that is what has happened.
I was with you until this point (though I still think that unlike BDSM, swinging is not mainstreamable and is thus a pure subculture):
> My conclusion is that a mainstreamed, everything out-front and above-board society, which we have for good or ill made ourselves to, flooded with choice and with preference demanded, I think eventually leads to a flattening or greying out of difference, and hence leads back to nationalistic or tribal parochialism, and I believe goes towards explaining the recent rise of populism.
But... wasn't the draw of the alt-right movement that it was such an edgy subculture that got its thrills out of griefing the sanctimonious liberals? A new punk, if you will? Which is now further along its cycle, well on its way to being consumerized back at us?
A friend and I tried thinking of subcultures that were resistant to being "co-opted by the mainstream".
Our shortlist was (1) psychedelics and
(2) swinging.
Seems like just swinging is left?
First they ignore you.
Then they laugh at you.
Then they fight you.
Then you win.
Then you get taken over by sociopaths.
Then you hate yourself.
LOL
I keep trying to relate this to the rock-climbing subculture, but it doesn't quite fit. The climbing subculture is old - people have been climbing rocks for food since antiquity, and for fun since the 1700s. The modern subculture recognisably existed in the 1940s (check out Lionel Terray's description of Louis Lachenal in _Conquerors of the Useless_ - every inch the modern dirtbag climber), and took off in the 1960s in places like Yosemite Valley and the English Peak District. The bar for "new and cool" is extremely hard to meet now - think _Free Solo_. I did some first ascents in Central Asia a few years ago, and it was enough to impress my friends but no more than that (at least, those of my friends who hadn't already done something similar...). And yet the climbing subculture is still growing, and though I've met the odd elitist asshole I think it's still pretty friendly? Climbers at all levels seem to be encouraging of each other, modulo some friendly rivalry. I think climbing has some structural advantages here:
- Though fashions about what is impressive (or "ethical") change, there really is a core physical skill that can be assessed. If you climb hard then you'll garner respect, and training advice is now readily accessible.
- It's a social activity, but not one that's done in organised teams. If you're an asshole then fewer people will want to climb with you, which means you're faced with a choice between soloing (much more dangerous) or not climbing at all.
- People can and do get killed pushing their limits, which puts a natural brake on most climbers' ambitions: hitting a grade ceiling and then climbing at that level forever isn't something to be particularly ashamed of.
- Though you can win status in the subculture by climbing, it's (currently) very hard to make money doing it. The stereotype of the expert climber living in a van exists for a reason. We'll see if this changes as the sport becomes more prominent, I guess.
Sounds like climbing is simply postcycle. There's no low-hanging fruit, but you don't get the infighting because everyone KNOWS there's no low-hanging fruit; it's just a fun thing to do for a certain subset of the population.
Not really post-cycle, because there was no cycle to begin with. Nobody started rock-climbing for status (tho the status of people I see rock climbing definitely have rised, from quasi-marginals & hippies to software engineers, but it may also be the transition from a small country town in the early 00's to a larger city in the late 10's, so maybe it just pre-cycle)
There are a lot of well-heeled corpses on a lot of mountains that sure seem to be failed attempts at status.
There are certainly a lot of well-heeled corpses on mountains - the early Alpinists were mainly aristocrats - but "for status" is more controversial. Most of us think we're doing it to satisfy an internal need for self-actualisation.
Nah, there have always been high-status climbers. In the Golden Age of Alpinism the only people who could afford to go mountaineering were aristocrats, and even a few of the first-generation Yosemite dirtbags were slumming it. Likewise scientists and other intellectuals - the discipline of bouldering was invented by a mathematics professor in the 1950s. The explosion in climbing after WW2 happened largely because cheap ex-War gear enabled less-well-off people to try climbing and mountaineering.
AIUI post-cycle implies that the sport has settled into a steady niche, but climbing is still growing in terms of participant numbers, accessibility (better and cheaper gear, more indoor climbing walls) and visibility (Olympics, major movies, televised championships, etc). Maybe there's still intense competition among the elite for sponsorships and Olympic places, and as an amateur I just don't see that? I've met a couple of international-standard climbers and they've been really nice, but maybe I'm not worth scheming against.
Are business cycles really "especially well-established"? It very hard to point to any exact economic trends that are clearly cyclical, even by fairly loose definitions of "cycle".
Even if some trends were predictably cyclical surely the anti-inductive nature of the market would smooth them out anyway, traders would short the peaks and take options on the dips.
>Just because disco was cool in the 70s and uncool in the 80s doesn’t imply it will be cool in the 90s, uncool in the 00s, and so on forever. It will probably just stay uncool.
One of the great ongoing mysteries in life for me..."*Why* did disco become uncool?" The fashion was wacky and the culture was very of-the-times, but the music itself...man. Ain't nothing comparable in modern oeuvres. Still very popular across age groups when I throw it on in public. You say it begat dance music; I claim dance music is but a pale soulless shadow of the original. EDM at least leans hard into this artificiality, going for primal energy in the most raw fashion possible.
I'm sure it'll have a proper rediscovery at some point though. Fashion can't be the only aesthetic with a barberpole model. (Where do barberpoles fit into the cyclic theory of subcultures?)
Beyoncé, one of the biggest cultural forces in music at the moment, just released an album that is heavily disco-inspired – I guess Scott would say that's part of his 'X begets Y begets Z' thing but I think as people would understand that it surely counts as disco being cool right now.
Having said that, I'm not sure any of these models about subcultures are even intended to be a good fit for the popularity of styles of music. Not everything is a subculture.
We already had Rockabilly Revival and Swing Revival (the best two music trends to ever come out of 80's and 90's respectively, if you want my opinion, because I hate rap and most "dance music" with passion). Disco revival seem to be inevitable. I think Reddit's darlings Chromeo are pretty close to being it, musically if not visually?
Re the Intellectual Dark Web, I think it's an interesting example of the cycle being disrupted. A lot of its ideas and members were artificially brought to greater prominence by the rise of the broader alt right and the Trump administration in particular (remember all the think pieces in 2016/2017 talking about Steve Bannon's intellectual justifications). But it wasn't an organic outgrowth of their populaire and they hadn't built an underlying community of supporters. So they were absorbed into the broader tight or just entirely fell apart
Huh, I don't think of Steve Bannon or any of the Trump people as remotely IDW or even having strong IDW links, am I wrong or is randomstring?
>This talk by other folks of "pipelines" to the alt-right was definitely a MSM narrative
I appear to be "other folks" so I'll respond to this :P
I think most of what you said is probably correct, especially since you're clearly more informed on the actual IDW than I am, but want to push back on your skepticism of the pipeline since I think it's one of the key things that associates the alt-right to the IDW.
>But from something like Joe Rogan [...] then yes. Questioning the NY Times "moral clarity" is not a highway to hell.
The pipeline has nothing to do with questioning the NY Times and everything to do with network effects. Joe Rogan is a very illustrative example, because he seems mostly liberal in theory, but on his show he seems to play the part of "man who believes nothing and anything" for his guest to bounce off of. Yet still very much serves as a part of the pipeline, because the pipeline isn't so much about intent, it's an emergent property of modern recommendation algorithms.
So Joe has someone like Ben Shapiro or Jordan Peterson on his podcast. They talk about something broadly agreeable by unaligned normies (say, "cancel culture bad"). Lots of Shapiro's normal audience views this episode, so the YT recs algo associates the two and recommends another of Shapiro's videos to the Rogan-only viewer. The Rogan-only viewers see this recommendation, and clicks on it based on thinking Shapiro seemed respectable based on his appearance on Rogan. This continues to the next video recommendation, each one getting slightly more radical (because that drives engagement). And so on.
While Joe had no *intent* to radicalize people rightward (hopefully), from a consequentialist POV he had a strong effect in doing so.
Now this occasionally goes the other way, of course, but the average of the vectors of radicalization has a very rightward tilt, in part because the IDW, similar to Scott, has a strong tendency to spend time criticizing liberals and their political blunders. This feeds perfectly into internet conservatives' favorite pastime, dunking on SJWs. It also doesn't seem to help that most of the loudest and griftiest (sociopathic) members of the IDW seem to be those on the right side, as those are the one most effective at grabbing the normies. And as Scott's theory predicts, the less dangerous IDW members aren't good at removing the sociopaths from the movement.
(Also, it's worth mentioning that while the pipeline has certainly become a MSM narrative, it's a concept that originates from a contemporary movement to the IDW that I would label as "breadtube", though not everyone agrees with that label)
I think there's definitely some truth to the idea that some people were primed for radicalization no matter what, but as I discussed in another comment in this thread, I think the big difference is what kind of radicalization.
This is especially true because a lot of radical ideas come in rhyming pairs between the left and right, e.g. "there is a problem with workers being underpaid and overextended, the solution is [unions, deporting immigrants]"; "wealth disparity means a tiny percentage of elites have disparate influence over culture and politics, the problem is [unchecked capitalism, the Jews]."
There's certainly an innate appeal for some people in radical and novel ideas, but which path they go down can be very strongly influenced by which radical ideas they get exposed to first.
That seems like a pretty partisan description of what was happening.
Another framing would be "most of the MSM is a pipeline to the left so when people who are otherwise quite on the right naturally, encounter some heterodox in media that lets them know where their people are, they then seek out their people".
It is a such a weird attack on someone "Rogan" who I am not a particularly large fan of, but is definitely not an ideologue.
(I did admit in my other post that most of the information I had on the subject came from partisan sources, so that's not unlikely, but I think the core loop I've described is sound.)
Yours *is* valid framing (for some version of "the left"), but it's one that produces the same answer to the question that Scott asked, whether the IDW are associated with the alt-right. (Yes, because they're the only non-Fox-news platform willing to associate with alt-right ideologues)
I think the bigger specific issue is that the MSM tends to push auth-left-liberalism, and the IDW appeals to those tend towards libertarianism. Them getting funneled towards right-libertarianism and eventually auth-rightism as opposed to left-libertarianism (with which Scott has previously identified) is what I would personally find to have negative utility.
>It is a such a weird attack on someone "Rogan" who I am not a particularly large fan of, but is definitely not an ideologue.
I think it's precisely because he's not an ideologue that he works so well as that first step, and is such a good example. I want to emphasize don't particularly find him morally at fault, except in a consequentialist sense of making Shapiro and Peterson seem more reasonable and respectable than they are.
My recollection of IDW also includes stuff like Richard Spencer and his rise and fall as associated with the runup to the 2016 election.
I don't think anyone in the mainstream media considered Spencer an "intellectual".
My impression is the same as random's. In particular, that there is a pretty direct line between Steve Sailer and Brietbart as it was run by Bannon, and Sailer is my archetype for the IDW. But I don't like the movement or the people named, so my bias here is strong.
They may not have strong links, but googling "Bannon Yarvin" you can easily find examples of MSM pushing this narrative.
I never followed (or gave any particular respect to) any self-identified IDW members, so I can only comment of the general views of it in the left-leaning sphere, but the general consensus were that IDW members(?) like Ben Shapiro, Jordan Peterson, and Richard Spencer (and to a lesser extent Joe Rogan, due to being willing to platform anything) either were explicitly or implicitly involved in Trump/alt-right apologism and recruitment, and served as part of the "alt-right pipeline" online recruitment funnel.
I've seen pretty convincing research that there really is something to that last point, that a large number of young alt-right recruits followed a path from IDW -> conservative IDW -> far alt-right. If it's not strictly causative, it seems to at least lower the figurative activation energy to make such a jump.
Meh I kind of think the causation might be backwards there. People drifting right on their own drifting through various media they are comfortable with, rather than the media radicalizing them. And the media servicing them gaining prominence.
I mean, that's valid. I think conservative/liberal/authoritarian/libertarian tendencies are at least partly heritable, so we'd expect that to be causative. There's also definitely a large component of what ideas you're exposed to at what parts of your mental development and ideological formation, though, for which the causation *should* run in the direction I was implying, at least for the portion determined in the teens.
I dunno. Ben Shapiro was anti-Trump all the way through 2016, and the Daily Wire is still warring with alt-right figures like...what's his name? The young guy, says racist things. I've honestly forgotten.
The point is, Ben Shapiro doesn't strike me as a alt-right gateway guy. Then again, I never thought he fit in with the IDW label anyway. Everyone else in that article was a liberal or former liberal who was against wokeness (before we called it wokeness). Ben Shapiro is the successor to Rush Limbaugh, he's a conservative through and through and hasn't changed.
Is Nick Fuentes the person you're talking about? Recently a prominent young righty got into hot-water because he was too respectful when arguing against Fuentes (after Fuentes crashed a discussion dedicated to criticizing him).
https://twitter.com/hamandcheese/status/1555649597581791234
That’s the fellow!
My (very uncertain) impression is that the Intellectual Dark Web never was a community and was largely defined by their enemies. If they weren't friends to begin with, it wouldn't be surprising that they rapidly started infighting.
I agree, though I don't even know if you could even say they fell to infighting. They had nothing in common except having large audiences (through podcasts and social media, mostly) and agreeing that wokeness is bad. A lot of them are still friends, but there isn't really a movement that unites them. But did they really fight each other at all? Jordan Peterson just joined the Daily Wire's streaming service. Rubin, Peterson, and Shapiro are all on good terms as I understand it. Who was fighting?
I don't think anybody was fighting because, to your point, there was never any subculture to fight over.
(The word "cycle" seems like a red herring. Let's look at the model as a description of "stages".)
If I compare Chapman's and Scott's models, they both describe how a success of a community carries the seeds of its later fall (in quality, at least). But there is a subtle difference in *timing*, if I understand both theories correctly.
In Chapman's model, the community is ruined for its more idealistic members when it grows large enough so that the "sociopaths" notice it as a potential source of resources to be exploited. The fact that the "sociopaths" joined the community, and started shaping it in their own image, is the bad thing.
In Scott's model, the growth phase is actually okay, and the bad thing only happens when the growth inevitably slows down or stops entirely. The source of problem is not the abundance of resources, but rather their subsequent relative lack, especially of status (which is zero-sum, so it can only grow when the community grows in size).
These two models make two different assumptions about human nature. In Chapman's model, some people are intrinsically good, some people are intrinsically bad, and it is a tragedy for the former to be noticed by the latter. (Not just noticed as in "they exist", but noticed as in "actually, it would be profitable to exploit them". Noticed as a potential food.) In Scott's model, it is the circumstances that trigger our evolved instincts; it is the same kind of people who would cooperate in one situation, but turn against each other in a different situation.
So, uhm, two contradictory falsifiable predictions? Imagine a movement that stays niche for 10 years, then experiences 10 years of constant-rate growth, followed by 10 years of stagnation. Keep measuring how happy the original members feel. Will their reported happiness drop during the phase of growth, or during the phase of stagnation?
Methodological remarks: It would be better to measure the happiness of the old members in real time, to prevent them from editing their opinions in retrospective. ("Currently I have a conflict with X, therefore the things started going downhill 10 years ago when X joined us." Except, the conflict only started recently; previously they were both happy ignoring each other.) Also, get the responses from the average old members, not just the old elites. (The old elites may have been involved in zero-sum status fights already when the community was tiny.) As a control group, measure the happiness in a movement that remained niche for 30 years. (To control for "spending 30 years in the same bubble makes you a bit crazy and obsessed.")
> This is a pretty pessimistic social moment (eg the thing where dystopian SF has become more popular than the utopian SF of the late 20th century).
I hope this trend jumps the shark as well, I'm so tired of this attitude. You have to be out of your mind to be a doomer in 2022, yet people mostly are.
As you said, "2100 is not a real year".
I present to you Hugh Laurie's monologue from "Tomorrowland":
https://imgur.com/gallery/8PsQR7x
Status -> social credit
Seems like a pretty clear argument against the “people don’t do things explicitly for status” (and more generally for this theory in general) is startups.
It’s generally been my experience and the experience of my social groups that:
- small startups (<50 or so people) are true believers: they believe in the mission, are spending large amounts of time building, and are interested by the idea of a large payout or fame potentially but mostly love the idea
- growth phase startups (100-250 people) have “large company” employees join to set up the scale. By this point, it’s more likely the startup will succeed, and these people are less interested in the mission and more so in large payouts and acquiring power at a smaller startup. This is when politics usually begin: people fighting for “territory” and “owning” things rather than wanting to build the coolest product. At this point, many of the early employees will leave and feel pushed out
- large company (>250). At this point, there is significantly less building - partly because it’s harder to coordinate and there’s more at stake, but also because it’s now full of people fighting for just power
In my expericne, the people at each are quite self aware as well. In other words, the people who join at growth phase startups will explicitly tell you they’re interested in joining a growing company and taking on a larger team than they had at the large company - explicitly signaling they want status. And large company employees will say they enjoy the perks of the large company (the status of working for a brand name). I think this directly shows sometimes people are explicitly going for “status points”, making decisions about it, and willing to talk about it
"I guess Kaj is using status in a strict sense and I am using it in a loose sense. [...]
Normally in a situation like this I would use a different word, but I don't know if there's a good snappy replacement. Accepting suggestions!"
Dominance status and prestige status. These two kinds of social status are totally different, especially under the surface. Kaj Sotala distinguishes "sense of belonging, being seen and appreciated" from status, "since it doesn't require you to be above anyone else": so apparently, unlike you, when he thinks "status" he means "dominance status" mainly, and hence the confusion.
Now, when Kevin Simler wrote his "Social Status: Down the Rabbit Hole" in 2015, where he lays out the two-kinds-of-status view, you answered with "Contra Simler on Prestige" --- but also acknowledged at the end that "separating dominance from prestige is a good start".
Simler answered your objections here:
https://meltingasphalt.com/social-status-ii-cults-and-loyalty/
(And as it happens, for what it's worth, I published something on two-kinds-of-status myself just a couple of days ago. But it isn't about subcultures and instead begins with your review of The Gervais Principle a while ago --- I'm very slow.)
Alternative word for status: “respect.” People will deny wanting status, but everyone admits wanting respect. Also, while we’re thinking about semantics, I think the pattern Scott is describing is less cyclical than it is fractal: hooks and spirals that spin off into similar-looking hooks and spirals, ad infinitum.
I like "respect". It seems like "status" is measured relative to a group of people, whereas "respect" can be just two people, so it's a more absolute measure. You always have less or more status than some other person (according to a third observer), but you can get zero respect, or great respect, even if it's only you and one observer. So status can go negative, but respect has a hard floor.
There could be a society where everybody gets a lot of respect, but there's still wide variance in status. Say, if everybody acts polite to everybody else, but only four or five people in the whole city would be received in the formal dining room and served on the china.
"You always have less or more status than some other person (according to a third observer), but you can get zero respect, or great respect, even if it's only you and one observer. So status can go negative, but respect has a hard floor."
Occasionally there is a person who "has hit bottom - and started to dig" - so perhaps the hard floor can sometimes be excavated...
"Belonging" is the other half. Or, maybe, just another version of respect. How do you belong to a group? You belong if everyone in the group recognizes that you belong. Think of a group of kids who are friends: you belong because they all know your name and want to play with you on the regular.
I was in a group of four kids in elementary school who always played together at recess. Our group had a leader. Why was he the leader? Because we all listened to what he said, and usually did whatever he thought of doing. Why did we do that? Because we liked the things he said, and the ideas he had for games usually worked and were fun. Nobody declared him leader. He just became it because everyone respected him, and we respected him because he was good at being a leader.
How about Progress Studies as a movement in its happy growth spurt phase?
Wouldn’t clocks in general count as cycles? And therefore anything that derives from them? This encapsulates cicadas, earnings season in the stock market, etc.
I don't know if I identify with or just want to identify with having people "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." But I love Laura Creighton's comment so much I wish she could be ruler of the world, at least until that stops being cool.
Is there a non-socialist political movement loosely based around this idea? Asking for a friend.
How much of the recent EA spotlight is just William MacAskill's book publicist being very good at their job?
Plenty, but EA having dozens of billions to spend nowadays and starting to dip its toes into politics certainly help to draw attention.
"The atheist movement begets the feminist movement begets the anti-racist movement begets and so on." Slightly snorted out loud after looking at the past article. Good to know the world started around 2004.
Should maybe we explore Vico?
Burnham. 1970. Critical elections and the mainsprings of American politics?
Floyd's cycle-finding algorithm (see Knuth, Donald E. (1969), The Art of Computer Programming, vol. II p. 7, exercises 6 and 7) as well as other cycle-detection methods.
Seems more like Comte in reverse: from the positive to the metaphysical to the religious
The "status" abstraction does cover things like "my contributions are appreciated”, “people respond to my comments", etc... but it doesn't cover things like "actually caring about the thing the movement is trying to accomplish".
I wanted to make a couple of stray comments of little significance.
>The atheist movement begets the feminist movement begets the anti-racist movement begets and so on.
I find it really off-putting (though I should be used to it, as Scott has been consistent on this over the past decade) the way Scott uses "feminism" and "the feminist" movement to refer to the particular popular flavor of it that emerged in certain parts of the internet 10-12 years ago, as if there were no feminist movement prior to the 2010's; feminism didn't first become a thing at that time. I wish he would refer to it as "SJ-ish online feminist movement (what we would now call woke feminism)" or something. I also feel that the claim of this strain of feminism emerging directly from New Atheism requires some unpacking and examination although it's arguable correct from some angle.
>Imagine if the word “money” had a connotation of “thing you use to buy luxury goods so that poor people are jealous of you”. Then people would tell economists “You’re so cynical in thinking that labor markets are about money - a lot of people just want to pay their monthly rent and provide food for their families”.
I don't really have a point to make in bringing this up, but it so happens that I ran across <a href="https://www.facebook.com/nomoremoney/photos/a.261799670651242/2267316716766184/?type=3&p=30&_rdr">this meme</a> on Facebook and the above excerpt reminds me of it.
Okay well this is my reminder that html code apparently doesn't work in Substack comments. The link to the Facebook meme is at https://www.facebook.com/nomoremoney/photos/a.261799670651242/2267316716766184/?type=3&p=30&_rdr.
It seems reasonable to use a word to refer to the present incarnation of it, rather than what it was like in the past, seeing as we live in the present.
I also don't think "woke feminism" would work, since that evokes the more recent "intersectional feminism", the last remnant of 2000s/2010s feminism that remains after being subsumed by this current movement. (Not sure if there's a good name for it yet, but the all-encompassing philosophy that frames morality in terms of relative power dynamics based on the collection of historically oppressed groups one is a member of, with a particular emphasis on black / trans people. Basically the anti-straight-white-male coalition)
Maybe "third-wave feminism" is closer?
"Intersectional feminism" maybe, with a brief qualifier like "popular online" or something like that. As for "third-wave feminism", it started much earlier, but just now I checked Wikipedia and without getting around to reading much, I discovered that it classifies probably exactly the type of feminism we're talking about as fourth-wave feminism (starting in 2012): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fourth-wave_feminism
There is an alternative for a movement: it can win, become status-quo, and completely dissolve into society.
For example: washing hands, abolition of Slavery, division of Sudan
I was going to mention this; glad you got there first.
Alternatively a rump movement can be left behind, composed of institutions and fanatics. (see: post-referendum UKIP)
> Normally in a situation like this I would use a different word, but I don’t know if there’s a good snappy replacement. Accepting suggestions!
Any replacement would soon suffer from the exact same problem. Don't get on the euphemistic treadmill.
This looser definition of status seems to contradict the earlier description of the involution phase as where infighting and fragmentation and mutual excommunication happens.
With the looser definition of status, I would expect the involution phase to be when the subculture stops being welcoming to newcomers, since noobs can no longer contribute anything new without acclimatization and/or specialized training.
The zero-sum model involving sociopaths predicts that the subculture would fade away as the excitement ends and the infighting kills the fun, while the loose-definition-of-status model predicts that the subculture would slowly fade away as the founders and the first few generations fail to replace themselves, plus a bit of evaporative cooling as the required commitment/knowledge to be "in" grows over time.
Maybe both effects occur in different amounts in the involution phase, depending on what type of subculture we are talking about?
Can anyone make explicit predictions about what will happen to a subculture and/or political movement based on its focus, internal laws, cultural norms, etc.?
Ie, maybe splitting should be encouraged to remove internal friction, such as the pre-existing differences described in https://slatestarcodex.com/2016/04/04/the-ideology-is-not-the-movement/, or maybe splitting should be discouraged to preserve the raw numbers of the group?
Even if all subcultures must reach involution because none can keep growing forever, there is a big difference between
a). took over the country, converted 99% of the population, passed every policy reform on the wishlist, became a beloved national tradition that continues to this day
vs.
b). failed to achieve anything, torn apart from the inside with infighting, ridiculed/hated/ignored by most of the population, remembered only as a passing fad
It would be very helpful for the founders of a new subculture/movement to know what made things like Christianity, soccer, and the civil rights movement succeed while Gnosticism, pet rocks, and Defund the Police failed.
People's brains are wired to see patterns in things.
Before anyone claims that anything is a "cycle" that is not really blatant (planetary movements, cicadas), I'd want a statistical analysis which can distinguish between cycles and random variation that someone saw a pattern in. And even then, it's easy to P-hack by looking at a hundrfed examples of different things until you find one containing a "cycle", so I'd expect to see a lot better confidence than 95%.
I'm curious if you've looked into Everett Rogers' work on the diffusion of innovations (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diffusion_of_innovations) as there seems to be overlap.
In the late 90's/early 00's this gained new visibility (to the public at least? I assume marketeers had continued to refine DoI since it came up in the 60's) due to the rise of "coolhunting" firms. There were books (https://www.amazon.com/Coolhunting-Chasing-Down-Next-Thing/dp/0814473865/) and PBS shows (https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/cool/). Nothing like when TRL, Myspace and Insane Clown Posse were the bleeding edge of culture...
One possible driver of subculture ‘lifecycles’ is that it takes much longer to prospect, mine, and refine a collection of good ideas than it does to share them. Open questions drive good answers, but usually not to interviews until you have those answers.
If an author spends a decade coming up with a great first book, and then the publishing company expects them to have another ready in a year or two, while doing a press tour, well duh the odds aren’t great. Even though they were the rare person who wrote a great first book!
If you then select retrospectively the successive winners, then like magic you can cherry-pick your way to ‘cyclic’ anything.
I think this is an important piece of the puzzle that works on a different level from (but still interacts with) the status stuff. Part of what makes an intellectual movement in particular appealing is that they have good ideas that respond well to the time. And a great way to gain status is to be the person that surfaces and advocates for an idea that the group ultimately agrees on. But it’s *hard* to come up with great ideas that are also right for the community. Once the most clearly good (yet initially controversial) ones have been shared, pure regression to the mean is enough that you might expect your other ideas won’t resonate as well, regardless of their truth values.
Global health development in EA contrasts especially well with the state of popular activism of the past couple years. “You should buy bed nets or give cash instead of consuming a marginal luxury good (or even donating to your local synagogue)” is a good argument, but “You should buy bed nets or give cash instead of posting on twitter like those slacker posers/rioting like those crazy people” is both clearly true and draws a stark contrast between yourself and people you dislike.
AI risk, by comparison, may be extremely important but is much less accessible (the stronger versions of the arguments in favor can be fairly abstract), there’s a lot less certainty around it (take what I perceive to be the increasing pushback from people-with-some-programming-experience against people-that-like-philosophy about the likelihood of going from modern machine learning to true AGI), etc. etc. And, while I myself am in the concerned camp, it’s not crazy to be skeptical! Even if we all die in an AI apocalypse, in the years prior it will be much harder to either convince your aunt of the risk or have a conversation in which third parties think you sound smart.
>>>"Just because disco was cool in the 70s and uncool in the 80s doesn’t imply it will be cool in the 90s, uncool in the 00s, and so on forever. It will probably just stay uncool."
I bring to you capris / culottes/pedal pushers.
Or whatever they're called this year.
I think at the end there you just gave a good replacement word. For going from neutral to high you can use "advancement" and for going from negative to neutral you can use "acceptance". So in FTT's scenario, not responding would mean they had achieved the level of acceptance they wanted, while responding would mean they wanted more advancement. In Kaj's situation, their involvement declined once they achieved acceptance, and didn't feel the need to advance, but that doesn't mean that other people couldn't have continued on mining for more advancement within the movement.
Or, if you want something shorter and pithier, how about "survival" and "thrival"?
Another example: This theory reminds me a lot of my experience in the My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic fandom (aka "bronies"). In the early days, it was exhilarating and felt like being part of a rapidly growing but still secret club, unrecognized and un-understood by the mainstream, and it was small enough that doing practically anything could plausibly get you featured on the frontpage of Equestria Daily.
I may be getting too esoteric here, but... everything that we call a thing is by nature cyclical. We detect entities by determining their boundaries against some ground, or backdrop. If some existing state changes, and never changes back, everything that depends on it causally just tracks that change, and there's very little difference from ground to observe. An entity just changing in one direction, then never ever reverting, is even almost impossible to talk about. It's just ... time passing, like usual.
When an entity changes and then changes back, then it's a bit more noticeable, because then there's a genuine boundary against ground reality to be seen. But if an entity changed, and then changed back, and never became cyclical by repeating, we wouldn't call it a thing. Even if you did, nobody would believe you; it'd be divorced from natural law, like a ghost, a miracle or an alien abduction. We need it to happen _again_ before we can handle it epistemologically.
A chair gets to be a thing because I can change my state relative to it by sitting in it; then I can change it back again by getting up. And then I can repeat this as many times as I want. My seatedness is a reliable square wave; if it's 1, then it's going to be 0 next. If it's 0, then it's going to be 1 next. Imagine if you sat in a chair, and then got up again, and then the chair vanished. That chair was not cyclical; also, probably, it was imaginary. Imagine if you sat down in a chair and never got up again, ever, even after death, never for any reason. That chair was not cyclical either; but also, it is probably a symbolic or metaphysical chair we're talking about, rather than a real thing.
Anyway, when you argue about whether something is cyclical, you're arguing about ontology; and until you get your ontology settled, you're going to chase your tail around and around forever.
people seem to generally think of "status" as something involving ranking, and if you're talking about the same thing as kaj--which explicitly does *not* involve ranking--then it sounds like status isnt a good word to use; "belonging" fits a lot better. not clear to me that this is the case though.
Not clear that Planned Parenthood is (anymore) an organization whose strong board protects them from these self-destructive patterns:
https://theintercept.com/2022/06/13/progressive-organizing-infighting-callout-culture/
Raises hand: I just found an example, a religious movement I'd never heard of, John Thomas's Christadelphians.
They weren't going to be another sect. No sectarianism here!
I like the clarity of some of your descriptions, but I disagree these are obvious phases, unless indeed you restrict them to political or politics-adjacent stuff (but even there I'd be concerned I'm observing those as a caricature of themselves).
Is Google in a Growth phase (any Noogler can gain status freely - not the 'superstar' level status, that does take work, but a very comfortable level of status) or a Postcycle phase (because *formal* status gains go through rigid processes)? I think the way to resolve the ambiguity is to realise that there are lots of groups of things you can join that have a fractal specialisation status behaviour, where you can effectively fit an infinite number of people into the group who all specialise and become respect for their specialisation. But those don't fit this phase model properly at all; you can squint at it and try to hammer it in there, but I suspect it won't really tell you many interesting things about what it's like to join that group or how the group is viewed from the outside.
As an example, I am the documentation specialist in my team, there's a Product X specialist in our team and a Product Y specialist, but there's also a person in my team who thrives off of being the almost-trollish subversive idea generator (sometimes those ideas are rubbish but we're super glad they're there to generate them!), and a person whose social status is basically 'did something break and you're not sure how to fix it? This person knows a ton of nerdy details of the Google infrastructure and loves to help'. I suck at all the non-Documentation things, but I feel like my team really, really wouldn't want to lose me.
(I do appreciate some of the comments here that differentiate between different kinds of status, but I believe most people are concerned with the kind of status in their immediate social circle, the one that gives them a feeling of belonging, safety and being valued. If one starts to separate them out and just focus on status as the sort where you can *dominate* others, then Google is fairly clearly a Postcycle phase. But you seem to specifically reject this separation, if I understand correctly.)
So I don't think things map neatly enough to the phases you've identified for your theory to work as a general social observation - but there are nuggets of important insights in your descriptions of the phases, and e.g. it's tautologically true that there will be some time where infighting hits its peak and tautologically true that there will be a phase where it's easiest to become a superstar in the movement, but I think these component parts mix a bit more chaotically in practise than a sequence of phases gives it credit for.
(Arguably since it's a social theory 'but this will never map 100% to reality' is a feature, not a bug. But I honestly just don't find the 'phase' framing as useful as the description of the individual component parts by themselves, which you might observe at any one time in various forms of intermix.)
Instead of "status", I suggest "esteem", cribbing from Maslow. The other thing about "status" is that it seems to be centered on other people's evaluations of you, which are kind of unknowable. What really matters is not what other people think of you, but what YOU THINK other people think of you. Self-esteem as a subcategory of esteem covers that nicely.
Hadn't seen that deBoer article before, I feel like the obvious response is: 'You want to be online and up-to-date enough to make money commenting on the very-online social media bonfire, but you want to be old and slow enough that you don't have to change all of your terminology and ideas every 3-6 months. Sorry, the memetic selection and backlash cycles are just happening faster than that now, you can keep up or you can go back to be a normal person who is not involved. Blame the structure of the internet that is approaching a memetic singularity of near-infinite change over time.'
Now that I'm ~40, a year or two or even three doesn't feel like very much time, so I may hear about Thing X in 2018 and finally get around to working my way into Thing X's culture in 2022. If Thing X is filled with energetic 20-somethings who have more urgency, then most may have moved on by the time I show up, but I usually DO find such a group of people, who keep the fire burning and are content to be the main players of a diminished thing. I think that if you find that corner of the world where you're a big deal and solidify it at age 29, you aren't likely to move onto the next thing and scramble with the others, you're just gonna hold onto it from inertia so long as there's even a handful of people around. To take the one commenter's D&D example, I certainly expect that if 3 years from now I wanna get into Old School Renaissance content but all the energy moved onto the Rank and Flank Revival, there will be guys from OSR subculture at GenCon still running hexcrawls because that was the particular moment they seized upon.
But political movements don't seem to be like that. When the Free Speech Movement at Berkeley "won", it changed literally 30 seconds later into the Anti-War Movement. As John Searle recounts, Mario shouted "where ya going? we still got a war to stop!", whereupon the people who didn't want to be part of the openly leftist anti-war movement walked away, and there was no FSM anymore by that afternoon.
TL:DR all comments of comments, sorry if I repeat anyone.
After reading the original post and the comments highlights, I can't help but think: what is being described is an emergent phenomenon by which humanity, unconsciously, sorts new ideas in an effort to survive. What you have is an process, which manifests socially, derived from the adaptive unconsciousness of individuals as they interact with others on cyclicly grander scales. Ideas with fitness are reinforced through institutional solidification, cultural value shifts, legislation, new markets, etc. Low fitness or detrimental ideas decay into turmoil, irrevance, and, sadly, social cannibalism.
And like all emergent phenomenon, inputs cannot be easily manipulated and the outputs cannot be predicted. This is the dilemma of the human experiment.
I think the term "cycle" becomes useless if you apply it to anything that goes up and down repeatedly. It must be distinguishable from a random walk to be useful.
Any thoughts from anyone on whether the progression of events (that which is being alleged to be one wavelength of a cycle) can be mapped onto the history of academia and universities in the 20th century? (I'm not really interested in whether it's cyclic. I mean, I /would/ be interested if I didn't think the odds of finding cyclic behavior were so low that attempts would be a distraction from the more important question of what happened to academia in the 20th century. Universities go back to the 11th century and I doubt we even have the data to ask about that millenium.)