Societies do not typically wage intense and ongoing pressure campaigns to prevent behavior that 0.0001% of people want to engage in.
The first time I read this I stared at it and went “wait, here’s an obvious counterexample. It’s a thing that basically nobody wants to engage in, but there’s a pretty intense social pressure not to- oh wait.”
I’m interested in how one might ever become justifiably confident a particular piece of dark matter really doesn’t exist or is as rare as you’d suspect it is. I’m fairly confident there aren’t shapeshifting lizardmen hiding among my friends for instance. I want there to be a way to trade action for knowledge- to credibly claim I won’t get upset or tell anyone if a lizardman admits their secret to me- but obviously the lizardman wouldn’t know that I could be trusted to keep to that, and anyway it is sometimes preferable to know without making that commitment.
I want there to be a way to trade action for knowledge- to credibly claim I won’t get upset or tell anyone if a lizardman admits their secret to me- but obviously the lizardman wouldn’t know that I could be trusted to keep to that,
The thing people are generally trying to avoid, when hiding their socially disapproved of traits, isn’t so much “People are going to see me for what I am”, but that they won’t.
Imagine you and your wife are into BDSM, and it’s a completely healthy and consensual thing—at least, so far as you see. Then imagine your aunt says “You can tell me if you’re one of those BDSM perverts. I won’t tell anybody, nor will I get upset if you’re that degenerate”. You’re still probably not going to be inclined to tell her, because even if she’s telling the truth about what she won’t do, she’s still telling you that she’s already written the bottom line that BDSM folks are “degenerate perverts”. She’s still going to see you differently, and she’s still shown that her stance gives her no room for understanding what you do or why, so her input—hostile or not—cannot be of use.
In contrast, imagine your other aunt tells you about how her friends relationship benefitted a lot from BDSM dynamics which match your own quite well, and then mentions that they stopped doing it because of a more subtle issue that was causing problems they hadn’t recognized. Imagine your aunt goes on to say “This is why I’ve always been opposed to BDSM. It can be so much fun, and healthy and massively beneficial in the short term, but the longer term hidden risks just aren’t worth it”. That aunt sounds worth talking to, even if she might give pushback that the other aunt promised not to. It would be empathetic pushback, coming from a place of actually understanding what you do and why you do it. Instead of feeling written off and misunderstood, you feel seen and heard—warts and all. And that kind of “I got your back, and I care who you are even if you’re not perfect” response is the kind of response you want to get from someone you open up to.
So for lizardmen, you’d probably want to start by understanding why they wouldn’t be so inclined to show their true faces to most people. You’d want to be someone who can say “Oh yeah, I get that. If I were you I’d be doing the same thing” for whatever you think their motivation might be, even if you are going to push back on their plans to exterminate humanity or whatever. And you might want to consider whether “lizardmen” really captures what’s going on or if it’s functioning in the way “pervert” does for your hypothetical aunt.
I don’t have an answer for your question about how you might become confident that something really doesn’t exist (other than a generic ‘reason well about social behaviour in general, taking all possible failure modes into account’). However, I would point out that the example you give is about your group of friends in particular, which is a very different case from society at large. Shapeshifting lizardmen are almost certainly not evenly distributed across friendship groups such that every group of a certain size has one, but rather clumped together as we would expect due to homophily.
Edit: I see this point was already addressed in Bezzi’s response on filter bubbles.
The first time I read this I stared at it and went “wait, here’s an obvious counterexample. It’s a thing that basically nobody wants to engage in, but there’s a pretty intense social pressure not to- oh wait.”
I’m interested in how one might ever become justifiably confident a particular piece of dark matter really doesn’t exist or is as rare as you’d suspect it is. I’m fairly confident there aren’t shapeshifting lizardmen hiding among my friends for instance. I want there to be a way to trade action for knowledge- to credibly claim I won’t get upset or tell anyone if a lizardman admits their secret to me- but obviously the lizardman wouldn’t know that I could be trusted to keep to that, and anyway it is sometimes preferable to know without making that commitment.
The thing people are generally trying to avoid, when hiding their socially disapproved of traits, isn’t so much “People are going to see me for what I am”, but that they won’t.
Imagine you and your wife are into BDSM, and it’s a completely healthy and consensual thing—at least, so far as you see. Then imagine your aunt says “You can tell me if you’re one of those BDSM perverts. I won’t tell anybody, nor will I get upset if you’re that degenerate”. You’re still probably not going to be inclined to tell her, because even if she’s telling the truth about what she won’t do, she’s still telling you that she’s already written the bottom line that BDSM folks are “degenerate perverts”. She’s still going to see you differently, and she’s still shown that her stance gives her no room for understanding what you do or why, so her input—hostile or not—cannot be of use.
In contrast, imagine your other aunt tells you about how her friends relationship benefitted a lot from BDSM dynamics which match your own quite well, and then mentions that they stopped doing it because of a more subtle issue that was causing problems they hadn’t recognized. Imagine your aunt goes on to say “This is why I’ve always been opposed to BDSM. It can be so much fun, and healthy and massively beneficial in the short term, but the longer term hidden risks just aren’t worth it”. That aunt sounds worth talking to, even if she might give pushback that the other aunt promised not to. It would be empathetic pushback, coming from a place of actually understanding what you do and why you do it. Instead of feeling written off and misunderstood, you feel seen and heard—warts and all. And that kind of “I got your back, and I care who you are even if you’re not perfect” response is the kind of response you want to get from someone you open up to.
So for lizardmen, you’d probably want to start by understanding why they wouldn’t be so inclined to show their true faces to most people. You’d want to be someone who can say “Oh yeah, I get that. If I were you I’d be doing the same thing” for whatever you think their motivation might be, even if you are going to push back on their plans to exterminate humanity or whatever. And you might want to consider whether “lizardmen” really captures what’s going on or if it’s functioning in the way “pervert” does for your hypothetical aunt.
I don’t have an answer for your question about how you might become confident that something really doesn’t exist (other than a generic ‘reason well about social behaviour in general, taking all possible failure modes into account’). However, I would point out that the example you give is about your group of friends in particular, which is a very different case from society at large. Shapeshifting lizardmen are almost certainly not evenly distributed across friendship groups such that every group of a certain size has one, but rather clumped together as we would expect due to homophily.
Edit: I see this point was already addressed in Bezzi’s response on filter bubbles.