I want to say something in favor of haphazard archipelagos!
I think that it can often be a case of James Scott-ian local knowledge. Certain norms may naturally evolve because they are suited to the people who evolve them, in a way it’s hard to imitate through conscious norm design (because you can’t predict people’s needs, or you can’t come up with as clever solutions as the hivemind can, or whatever). In general, people can do a lot of really clever social cognition subconsciously that is really hard to explain consciously (this is why social skills classes are so bad).
To be clear, I am absolutely behind deliberate subculture design (with reasonable safeguards to avoid institutionally abusive communities); I am pretty much always in favor of more experimentation and more empiricism. But I also think that “haphazard archipelago” is not the same as “bad archipelago”.
I think the existing system is basically an ad-hoc filtering system that meets the social goals of many othe peoplealready in it. I’m not sure whether it works for finding people who are competent when you need competent people. (It might be doing a reasonable job of filtering for some combo of “competentish and a person you want to hang out with”)
Three problems that seem like they need solving are:
1) It’s hard for newcomers (or even, “moderately-old-timers” to network their way into the existing social groups). This sucks for them.
2) I seem to run into people who do end up in one sub-community but don’t really know which the other ones are or how to find them.
3) The aforementioned “none of the subcultures actually do quite the thing I want”.
4) I worry that the system filters more for “people’s ability to proactively navigate social clusters” then it filters for any other particular kind of competence.
I want to say something in favor of haphazard archipelagos!
I think that it can often be a case of James Scott-ian local knowledge. Certain norms may naturally evolve because they are suited to the people who evolve them, in a way it’s hard to imitate through conscious norm design (because you can’t predict people’s needs, or you can’t come up with as clever solutions as the hivemind can, or whatever). In general, people can do a lot of really clever social cognition subconsciously that is really hard to explain consciously (this is why social skills classes are so bad).
To be clear, I am absolutely behind deliberate subculture design (with reasonable safeguards to avoid institutionally abusive communities); I am pretty much always in favor of more experimentation and more empiricism. But I also think that “haphazard archipelago” is not the same as “bad archipelago”.
Definitely agreed with that.
I think the existing system is basically an ad-hoc filtering system that meets the social goals of many othe people already in it. I’m not sure whether it works for finding people who are competent when you need competent people. (It might be doing a reasonable job of filtering for some combo of “competentish and a person you want to hang out with”)
Three problems that seem like they need solving are:
1) It’s hard for newcomers (or even, “moderately-old-timers” to network their way into the existing social groups). This sucks for them.
2) I seem to run into people who do end up in one sub-community but don’t really know which the other ones are or how to find them.
3) The aforementioned “none of the subcultures actually do quite the thing I want”.
4) I worry that the system filters more for “people’s ability to proactively navigate social clusters” then it filters for any other particular kind of competence.