There’s a massive divide between the Consensus and the Slighted that runs through many domains. I think healing this would in particular help decrease AGI X-risk by decreasing the motivation to make AGI and decreasing the motivated reasoning around X-risks. A conjecture is that both poles are attracting states in social space (let’s say the vector space of people represented as a vector v where v_i is how much you talk with / listen to person number i).
Example: Graham Hancock (and generally “conspiracy” theorists in the sense of people who have a hard to change belief in a big hidden truth that is just barely hinted at) is Slighted, Flint Dibble is Consensus https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-DL1_EMIw6w
Example: LessWrong tends Slighted I think
(I think the ontology here is probably complicated because “Slighted” is a predicate on (person, group of people they view as their “containing context” such as a country or religion or ideology or similar), so it can apply in crisscrossing ways. Slighted can even form large communities, which seems paradoxical, but there you go.)
IDK. Something like, Consensus is the default agreed-upon stance / the people who take that stance; Slighted is the people who don’t take that stance. (To be clear, I think I’m mostly saying something fairly obvious / not novel.)
For various reasons, the Slighted often end up viewing themselves as having been slighted by the Consensus. (E.g. they were actually slighted by the Consensus; or they were slighted by someone, and misattributed it to the Consensus; or they weren’t really slighted, but view themselves that way anyway.)
As an example, sometimes tech people (Slighted) are super dismissive of academia (Consensus) in general, describing them as cowards, liars, etc.
The ends of political horseshoes are very often Slighted. (Though not necessarily. Nick Fuentes is extremely Slighted; a far-right conservative guy who views himself as being old establishment may not be especially Slighted by default, though might later become so. Likewise far left.) Slightedness attracts and creates Slightedness. E.g. because you might actually be slighted some as punishment for association with other Slighted; and becauase you hang out with Slighted; etc. That’s also true for Consensus, though with different flavors.
A Slighted might view a Consensus as sanctimonious, cowardly, conformist, overconfident, boring, virtue signaling, envious, self-deceiving, power-thirsty (in the sense of wanting to be in control of arbitrary social consensus), wanting to cut down tall poppies, arbitrary / not truth seeking, getting sucked into a locked-in equilibrium, tribalistic.
A Consensus might view a Slighted as delusional, aggressive, contrarian, overconfident, wanting to feel special, power-thirsty (in the sense of wanting to avoid social or legal accountability), needing to be put in their place / needing to be socialized / needing moral correction / needed to have values transmitted to them, overly focused on the perceived Slight, having a big ego about their contrarian positions and not updating, getting sucked into spirals of networks of misinformation, reckless, uncaring, tribalistic, paranoid/conspiratorial.
As someone who probably fits under this label (and hopes it’s not too offtopic) I coincidentally had a post including a lot of what my personal beliefs are and how it is like to be under this feeling https://icely.substack.com/p/is-thinking-for-yourself-a-luxury—though I mildly dislike the term just because it feels close to sounding like a “slight” thing, perhaps other words that may give the feeling are like “justified-bitterness, society-disgust, consensus-disgust, disenfranchisement, consensus alienation”.
(Sorry, your post seems pretty interesting but I don’t have enough spare bandwidth; I’ll just note that those things you list here sound of course related to Slight but being Slighted is always a kind of choice you’re making, similar to being Consensus, and neither is that great—they both have advantages and disadvantages. They’re social and attitudinal attractors to some extent, but far from absolute.)
Feel free to respond/go into detail more if you happen to have the time/choose to. I guess I’ll say that is not how I personally experience it. The default state is to be in Consensus and not even be aware there is a choice, even if you were born in some feral culture and then say move to a very different culture, it’s very different because you think your own culture is normal and act that way. At my current point in time to “act Consensus” or to suppress Slighted-beliefs is like a constant forced strain on my moral compass. This is not a choice framing in my opinion, although as is with all definitions people can see very different things in certain words despite potential overlap and I would not want to discount that.
I guess one thing I’m saying is that one can have any given beliefs without taking the Slighted affiliations/attitudes too far. It’s not a mere choice, it’s a skill, potentially a big one (like lots of subskills, like “programming” is a skill), that one could learn over time.
One of the lenses I have that I think is coded somewhat vaguely conservative/right-wing/alt-right is that the (Western) elites of today do not see themselves by default as elites in the powerholding sense. Like there’s a lot of active work being done to obfuscate their power and responsibilities, including from themselves. Tanner Greer’s article here makes a narrower version of the same point:
This is not an unreasonable demand on Brady’s part. In the Washington Post Daniel Dreznerdismisses Bradyas a “plutocrat …who [thinks he] must be pretty smart to get so rich, and therefore [his] ideas have merit.”9 But Brady is more than a pompous moneybag! Brady is a retired statesman of note. His most famous action as Secretary of the Treasury was developing the “Brady Plan,” which saved a dozen Latin American governments from insolvency. The Brady Plan was just as much a geopolitical move as an economic project. One might expect—and Brady certainly seems to have—that a program devoted to “grand strategy” would produce graduates capable of parsing Brady’s decisions. In other words, when Brady signed over millions of dollars to Yale, he did so in the hope that Yale would train the next generation of statesmen-officials like himself. Instead they are using his money to train the next generation of social activists.
In other words, that the elites of tomorrow (and likely today) see themselves as future activists rather than future (or current) statesmen, and are in institutions that train them in ways consistent with this self-image.
Pretty much, yeah. Though it’s especially dysfunctional when the elites/leaders are wrong here (whether a normal worker in a company sees their slightly non-capitalist actions as Establishment political orthodoxy or being an idiosyncratic Maverick matters much less).
While I’m probably unlikely/unskilled to personally craft AGI, I certainly spend effort theorycrafting AGI systems and think about doing so due to feeling incredibly disenfranchised (not actually particularly seeing AGI as a hugely negative thing even if my doom% was 99%). Although there are a few people I’ve talked to who don’t feel Slighted but are maybe oddly ambivalent about AGI/ASI creation due to “climate change, constant new wars, loneliness and addictions, WW3 indicator” and not feeling like it would lead to doom (edit: to clarify, both the mentalities of “not really believing AGI/ASI would lead to doom” + thinking the non-AGI track of the world is already not on a good path so ‘whatever, bring on the AGI’).
Although there are a few people I’ve talked to who don’t feel Slighted but are maybe oddly ambivalent about AGI/ASI creation due to “climate change, constant new wars, loneliness and addictions, WW3 indicator” and not feeling like it would lead to doom
Interesting. I guess feeling disenfranchised often leads one to being Slighted, but doesn’t necessarily, since one could instead just do some kind of giving up. (One could also do other things, such as maybe finding other hopeworthy long-term shared intentions with other people to invest in.)
(I edited my comment to clarify that these people I mention aren’t necessarily ‘disenfranchised’ or even emotionally disturbed/unhappy people. But yeah I guess ‘giving up’ could fit, that also includes perhaps current 10-18 year olds who still treat the life track they’re on as “normal” who still see these big world events as very abstract and sort of imaginary, as not something that impacts them)
There’s a massive divide between the Consensus and the Slighted that runs through many domains. I think healing this would in particular help decrease AGI X-risk by decreasing the motivation to make AGI and decreasing the motivated reasoning around X-risks. A conjecture is that both poles are attracting states in social space (let’s say the vector space of people represented as a vector v where v_i is how much you talk with / listen to person number i).
What does this mean?
Example: Joe Rogan is Slighted
Example: Graham Hancock (and generally “conspiracy” theorists in the sense of people who have a hard to change belief in a big hidden truth that is just barely hinted at) is Slighted, Flint Dibble is Consensus https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-DL1_EMIw6w
Example: LessWrong tends Slighted I think
(I think the ontology here is probably complicated because “Slighted” is a predicate on (person, group of people they view as their “containing context” such as a country or religion or ideology or similar), so it can apply in crisscrossing ways. Slighted can even form large communities, which seems paradoxical, but there you go.)
IDK. Something like, Consensus is the default agreed-upon stance / the people who take that stance; Slighted is the people who don’t take that stance. (To be clear, I think I’m mostly saying something fairly obvious / not novel.)
For various reasons, the Slighted often end up viewing themselves as having been slighted by the Consensus. (E.g. they were actually slighted by the Consensus; or they were slighted by someone, and misattributed it to the Consensus; or they weren’t really slighted, but view themselves that way anyway.)
As an example, sometimes tech people (Slighted) are super dismissive of academia (Consensus) in general, describing them as cowards, liars, etc.
The ends of political horseshoes are very often Slighted. (Though not necessarily. Nick Fuentes is extremely Slighted; a far-right conservative guy who views himself as being old establishment may not be especially Slighted by default, though might later become so. Likewise far left.) Slightedness attracts and creates Slightedness. E.g. because you might actually be slighted some as punishment for association with other Slighted; and becauase you hang out with Slighted; etc. That’s also true for Consensus, though with different flavors.
A Slighted might view a Consensus as sanctimonious, cowardly, conformist, overconfident, boring, virtue signaling, envious, self-deceiving, power-thirsty (in the sense of wanting to be in control of arbitrary social consensus), wanting to cut down tall poppies, arbitrary / not truth seeking, getting sucked into a locked-in equilibrium, tribalistic.
A Consensus might view a Slighted as delusional, aggressive, contrarian, overconfident, wanting to feel special, power-thirsty (in the sense of wanting to avoid social or legal accountability), needing to be put in their place / needing to be socialized / needing moral correction / needed to have values transmitted to them, overly focused on the perceived Slight, having a big ego about their contrarian positions and not updating, getting sucked into spirals of networks of misinformation, reckless, uncaring, tribalistic, paranoid/conspiratorial.
As someone who probably fits under this label (and hopes it’s not too offtopic) I coincidentally had a post including a lot of what my personal beliefs are and how it is like to be under this feeling https://icely.substack.com/p/is-thinking-for-yourself-a-luxury—though I mildly dislike the term just because it feels close to sounding like a “slight” thing, perhaps other words that may give the feeling are like “justified-bitterness, society-disgust, consensus-disgust, disenfranchisement, consensus alienation”.
(Sorry, your post seems pretty interesting but I don’t have enough spare bandwidth; I’ll just note that those things you list here sound of course related to Slight but being Slighted is always a kind of choice you’re making, similar to being Consensus, and neither is that great—they both have advantages and disadvantages. They’re social and attitudinal attractors to some extent, but far from absolute.)
Feel free to respond/go into detail more if you happen to have the time/choose to. I guess I’ll say that is not how I personally experience it. The default state is to be in Consensus and not even be aware there is a choice, even if you were born in some feral culture and then say move to a very different culture, it’s very different because you think your own culture is normal and act that way. At my current point in time to “act Consensus” or to suppress Slighted-beliefs is like a constant forced strain on my moral compass. This is not a choice framing in my opinion, although as is with all definitions people can see very different things in certain words despite potential overlap and I would not want to discount that.
I guess one thing I’m saying is that one can have any given beliefs without taking the Slighted affiliations/attitudes too far. It’s not a mere choice, it’s a skill, potentially a big one (like lots of subskills, like “programming” is a skill), that one could learn over time.
One of the lenses I have that I think is coded somewhat vaguely conservative/right-wing/alt-right is that the (Western) elites of today do not see themselves by default as elites in the powerholding sense. Like there’s a lot of active work being done to obfuscate their power and responsibilities, including from themselves. Tanner Greer’s article here makes a narrower version of the same point:
In other words, that the elites of tomorrow (and likely today) see themselves as future activists rather than future (or current) statesmen, and are in institutions that train them in ways consistent with this self-image.
is this a faithful rephrasing?
‘~No one thinks of themselves as The Establishment.’
Pretty much, yeah. Though it’s especially dysfunctional when the elites/leaders are wrong here (whether a normal worker in a company sees their slightly non-capitalist actions as Establishment political orthodoxy or being an idiosyncratic Maverick matters much less).
‘…not even The Establishment! [Which of course causes problems because The Establishment has Responsibilities.]’
I fully agree with this and felt like it was sniping me through the screen in one of your previous articles about it lol ( https://tsvibt.blogspot.com/2025/11/hia-and-x-risk-part-1-why-it-helps.html#abundance-makes-a-healthier-society—the part going ‘Fewer smart kids traumatized into researching AGI capabilities’ is like the precursor to this idea)
While I’m probably unlikely/unskilled to personally craft AGI, I certainly spend effort theorycrafting AGI systems and think about doing so due to feeling incredibly disenfranchised (not actually particularly seeing AGI as a hugely negative thing even if my doom% was 99%). Although there are a few people I’ve talked to who don’t feel Slighted but are maybe oddly ambivalent about AGI/ASI creation due to “climate change, constant new wars, loneliness and addictions, WW3 indicator” and not feeling like it would lead to doom (edit: to clarify, both the mentalities of “not really believing AGI/ASI would lead to doom” + thinking the non-AGI track of the world is already not on a good path so ‘whatever, bring on the AGI’).
Interesting. I guess feeling disenfranchised often leads one to being Slighted, but doesn’t necessarily, since one could instead just do some kind of giving up. (One could also do other things, such as maybe finding other hopeworthy long-term shared intentions with other people to invest in.)
(I edited my comment to clarify that these people I mention aren’t necessarily ‘disenfranchised’ or even emotionally disturbed/unhappy people. But yeah I guess ‘giving up’ could fit, that also includes perhaps current 10-18 year olds who still treat the life track they’re on as “normal” who still see these big world events as very abstract and sort of imaginary, as not something that impacts them)