Ingroup
Ingroup is such a fantastic community. You guys are the best. You aren’t bad, like those icky people in outgroup who lack our special characteristics.
I could just go on and on about how uniquely valuable and worthy of appreciation we are, individually, and together, but I bet you guys understand what I’m trying to say, and can fill in the blanks for yourself. You’re just that smart.
And I’m sure you can see through some of the bullshit here. There’s a bit of flattery going on anytime ingroup is praised so broadly, or so directly, but ingroup isn’t fooled by such flattery… and that unique mix of humbleness and pride is part of our charm.
Copying from my response to your DM:
I don’t think vacuous ingroup signaling and us-vs-them meme juice is in any way a good idea. to me, “ingroup” is almost synonymous with “bad pattern”, “thing that shouldn’t happen”, “the thing where humans are prejudiced against outgroups”. this seems to me to just be a bad post, and the reinterpreting all my negative feedback as somehow positive is frustrating and amplifies the intensity of my dislike about this sort of thing. disagreeing while thinking in some vaguely similar ways about math does not make me in your private club.
Upvoted! Since you are part of ingroup, your feelings are valid, of course! Thank you for being honest. And since you’re in my ingroup, of course I’m going to offer you unconditional positive regard based on your clear good faith expression of feelings. Can people gain “secure attachment” just from near strangers on the Internet being irrepressibly friendly towards them? I dunno, but maybe we should try! <3
I know this is a tricky topic …and copying likewise from my DM...
I basically don’t believe jokes are a real thing about stuff like this. it’s just an excuse to do the bad thing while pretending not to be, maybe even to oneself. jokes are for stuff where we have common knowledge that doing the bad thing is unlikely; in this context I have way too much probability (like, >90%) on “you want me to feel good as if it wasn’t a joke, but pass it off as though it is one”. no thanks. if you want to push for the world where this doesn’t happen, try not doing it. I think the people on those social media sites are also making a mistake (or using your post as post-irony), and are likely exemplar for why I feel this way, rather than being reassuring. if people who don’t mean it don’t make these jokes, it doesn’t provide cover for the people who do mean it. I developed this opinion about things which are much more immediately clearly bad if the “joke” is interpreted as post-irony rather than irony; but in general, irony based jokes which could be bad if interpreted as post-irony get interpreted as post-irony by me, and thus not interpreted as jokes, and I respond to the literal text.
the world has changed in 15 years. and I don’t think it was serving lesswrong well to be like that then, anyway.
Fully agreed. This was one of the more unfortunate aspects of LW-fifteen-years-ago’s culture, and I’m glad to see it gone.
I upvoted you both because I appreciate the apparent honesty!
However, surely you agree that the world has gotten much sociologically worse in the last 15 years?
Friendship rates are down. Birth rates are down. Happiness rates are down. Distrust is up. Etc.
Having grown up in a small town in northern California full of aging hippies, where the idea that “almost everyone is in almost everyone else’s ingroup (and the people who aren’t tend to be literal psychos who literally commit robberies or literally murder their parents or whatever (and visible social separations could be grounded in coherent individual failures at basic ethics))” was normal...
...I find it really sad to see a world arise where the idea of distrust and tribalism is so socially real that we can no longer joke about having transcended it successfully.
When I was growing up, my father was in the Rotary Club (which almost eradicated polio via an international network of voluntary cooperators) and they had a vision for World Peace built on friendships between people traveling around the world being virtuous with each other. Some nights, the club would have all the members bring their family to a Thursday Dinner, and we’d hear a speech by someone from the Philippines (or where ever (sometimes it was just the High School principal from the town one valley over (or whatever))) who happened to be visiting my little town in the redwoods, after having been a President of his local Rotary Club in a little town on the other side of the planet, and it was nice and it seemed normal to me.
Not more than three months ago, I saw a slideshow at the my father’s church, about a trip deep into a jungle, to a place that has zero roads, and can be reached only part of the year, to help build a community center for a community in decline, and deliver bundles of christmas presents to the community’s children. Then we took a collection for doing that again for a new town.
Following scholars like Putnam, I believe that civic engagement is essential for the civic virtue that makes a constitutional democratic republic possible.
All of this feels consonant and consistent with themes of sociological happiness and success and progress going back at least as far as Tocqueville.
You two seem to share an “anti-ingroup vision” of virtue and happiness and systematically good outcomes that is NOT just a joke… and I’m wondering if you could unpack how you think that works so that I could learn to participate in your novel-to-me and hypothetically learnable culture?
From my perspective, if you guys are being entirely literal, and not joking, then… I kinda predict that your society will be a sad place that loses cohesion and falls apart, rather than being a community that grows, and links up, and aims for common goods with all, in a spirit of friendship and reason?
If >80% of humans don’t love and trust >80% of humans, in some very abstract and yet very deep sense, based on our shared humanity (ie based on our shared genesis as children made by the same God in the image of universal reasoners?), and our shared belief that humanity is pretty darn OK, then… why have a country together? Why aim for world peace? Why pretend that justice is possible? Why be against racism, or imagine that open borders could ever be a good idea? Why tolerate interstate travel? Why should any city let infectious people enter that city? Why unify Europe? Why keep India together? Why keep China together? Why have cities are all? Why not “social nihilism”?
I feel like you might be missing (1) a really important principle for manifesting utopia inside of history with existing humans, and also (2) you’re missing (or not tying together?) key facts that undergird this principle and make its hopes into something other than cope, but rather make the hopes practical and realizable on both a local and global basis.
In the same way that I’ve offered (1) three links that point to political theorists from past centuries, past decades, and also some friendly voluntary associations living up to those ideals in living memory, and then (2) three more links reiterating “morally universal” conclusions from Christian ethics without actually citing any Christians such as to put the ideas on a more worldly and secular and scientific basis...
...I wonder if you could offer three links to substantive material that hangs together to describe the theory and practice of the “vision of the good” that you are preaching here, so that I could learn to sing along with whatever song you are singing that is similarly hopeful and similarly real but which somehow gives the opposite advice on “being friendly to strangers (by calling them ingroup or any other joke term), and telling jokes about human nature, and trying to make friends”?
In good faith, I hope that you have such a theory and I am open to learning about it.
But epistemically, I fear that I will hear no such theory, and maybe, rather, if my epistemic predictions are born out… then perhaps, morally, I have a minor imperfect duty to offer to teach you my theory, so your praxis can become happier and friendlier and more conducive to helping the world get better outcomes than otherwise… if that’s even what you want?
it feels like we’re talking past each other. I want everyone to be friends, so I don’t like ingroup/outgroup distinctions? being friendly to strangers good! doing it in a way that requires outgrouping other strangers bad. that’s all?
edit: coming back to this—like, I disagree with very little you’ve said here besides the “joking”
and maybe also ambient praise of
having seen society seem to move in a direction where these jokes are consistently used as cover to mean such things literally, I’ve stopped playing along when people try to be dismissive of an outgroup even as a joke. the fact that things got worse is why I’ve come to distrust that people who make jokes of criticism don’t mean it—countersignaling doesn’t work when people often mean it literally. you could have said “I really appreciate the people on this website” without having to say “unlike everyone else, who are bad”. you can say that, of course, but I’ll reliably react negatively to it, because I’ve come to dislike countersignaling that produces cover for actually just meaning the bad thing. if you want to say “lots of people have problem x” then please be specific about what x is, rather than producing incentive to conformity by criticizing people who differ and passing it off as a joke.
if you want to say positive things, just … say the positive thing? I don’t want people to try to make me feel good by tearing others down.
So brave.
It is true that in some of the less wrong parts of social media, bravery exists! Someone other than me added the Community tag to my joke post, and I am totally tickled :-)
This might require too many inferences even for the ingroup.
One of the things I love about this is that the people who I appreciate the most might very well downvote it, to prove that they haven’t been tricked by all the flattery.
Those people are the most ingroup of all, and I can express my appreciation for them by being humbly grateful for their downvotes.
Their downvote-to-show-understanding is a sort of an echo of my meta-pandering-OP <3
A little piece of me wishes I could get a list of the people I’m being humbly grateful to, but part of the joys of timeless coordination is that you don’t have to do all that expensive interpersonal hand-shaking every time you want a single pitiful bilateral link in a coordination network to not fail.
Maybe some of my downvoters are downvoting without irony or awareness, but… I’m OK with that too <3
The real question is how many (and how large of) cliques there are around these parts that do have powers of multi-step inference, and have done N(N-1)/2 bilateral handshakes, such that the entire clique, thrown into a standard one-shot 0-to-100-scaled p-beauty contest with each other, would all justifiably bid zero.
One thing I would want to point out to people who “don’t get the joke yet” (so they feel “called to learn more” rather than “getting an ego bruise”) is to learn that humans-in-general do almost zero steps of serial processing, but rely almost entirely (even when doing math proofs from scratch) on cached thoughts, and so one of the best methods they could have to understood this joke (or “get gud” at the math) is almost only by having already been exposed to this kind of joke (and the math that undergirds it) in the deep past, so the relevant stuff was in their cache.
Luckily, we are still in the deep past relative to the massive amounts of chaos and need for coordination that probably exists in most possible futures.
So they can read the two links I’ve offered, and ponder them, especially in conjunction, maybe re-reading them both again after pondering how they might be related.
And in meantime, in the short term, I hope (but believe it is unlikely) that there are many “zero bid beauty contest cliques” among my readership, and I hope they make sure to keep my vote count decently low, and I hope each one also elects a leader to send me a Direct Message :-)
This is, of course, unlikely… but it is slightly more likely to happen in good timelines, and it is important to have hope.
It is maybe telling that the people downvoting and using the sophistry of the reacts do not comment. Though, to be honest, for me, you are playing a bit too much of a 4D chess game here.
One possible response: Wigner space has way more than four dimensions. Eventually, if I keep knocking on doors like this, maybe I’ll find an opening to a dimension where we survive on purpose rather than “by accident or not at all”.
Another possible response: Now the downvoters are expressing their admiration for your emotional fortitude as well! You have my apologies for causing them to admire you in this way. But since you are part of ingroup, I bet you have the toughness to take it! <3
Another possible response: I sent the person with the interesting reacts a DM to ask about some of the logic to thank them for the kind honesty and ask for more of the logic behind the the “disagreement” react. I still don’t understand it.