I am not surprised by your disagreement; I think you are less … psychoactive? … on this axis than most-if-not-all of the other Dragons, and that more of this would not have meaningfully changed your experience. The increased confidence comes from nagging suspicions and intimations-of-doom from the near-beginning that kept turning out correct in various cases; it’s less that Dragon Army provided new evidence of microculture’s power, and more that it provided confirming evidence of the problems I intuited in its absence.
EDIT: I also have two widely-spaced and credible data points claiming that the causal arrow I’ve drawn between microculture and cohesion is a major part of why the Army does a lot of the things it does with jargon and rituals and hand gestures and weird tics about physical space. Like, not just that it’s a convenient projection after the fact, but that that’s why it is done and that its power has been tested and confirmed.
Nitpick: this would me that he causes fewer effects in others’ minds, whereas what you meant to say is that he is less acted-on (by the hand signals, etc.), right?
At least that was my understanding of how we were using that term.
I would be curious to hear some examples of the jargon and rituals and hand gestures and weird tics about physical space. (Mostly it’s just idle curiosity. I especially am not sure and thus curious what “weird tics about physical space” means. I’m also wondering how they compare to the examples in the fictional version of Dragon Army that you wrote up way back when.)
Microculture and cohesion? Did you go to any particularly cohesive summer camps when you were young? If not, you might want to talk to someone who did.
I went to a few different CTY sites, and found that 1) my ranking of sites by quality matched up almost perfectly with the consensus, 2) these matched up almost perfectly with the extent to which the traditions (i.e. microculture) existed.
One thing that stands out to me is that I went to one site at which the traditions had almost completely died out. (Siena, if anyone out there remembers better than I do.) The story I heard was that the Catholic college didn’t take too kindly to swarms of degenerate atheists watching Rocky Horror and so on on their campus and insisted that camp management do away with a lot of the traditions, the people who were the most into the traditions left for other sites in response, and with those few people gone, the traditions atrophied, and attendance at that site fell off a cliff. It shut down a few years after I went, and it deserved to go.
On the other hand, the site management was incompetent, so there’s that too.
Did you go to any particularly cohesive summer camps when you were young?
You asked this of Duncan, but I went to CTY twice; I remember my experience being dominated by the class I took, and didn’t really rank the two sites against each other at the time. I seem to be recall both of them seeming tradition-heavy.
I am not surprised by your disagreement; I think you are less … psychoactive? … on this axis than most-if-not-all of the other Dragons, and that more of this would not have meaningfully changed your experience. The increased confidence comes from nagging suspicions and intimations-of-doom from the near-beginning that kept turning out correct in various cases; it’s less that Dragon Army provided new evidence of microculture’s power, and more that it provided confirming evidence of the problems I intuited in its absence.
EDIT: I also have two widely-spaced and credible data points claiming that the causal arrow I’ve drawn between microculture and cohesion is a major part of why the Army does a lot of the things it does with jargon and rituals and hand gestures and weird tics about physical space. Like, not just that it’s a convenient projection after the fact, but that that’s why it is done and that its power has been tested and confirmed.
Nitpick: this would me that he causes fewer effects in others’ minds, whereas what you meant to say is that he is less acted-on (by the hand signals, etc.), right?
At least that was my understanding of how we were using that term.
Right, sorry. Like the misuses of the word “aversive” when people say “I’m aversive to this.”
I would be curious to hear some examples of the jargon and rituals and hand gestures and weird tics about physical space. (Mostly it’s just idle curiosity. I especially am not sure and thus curious what “weird tics about physical space” means. I’m also wondering how they compare to the examples in the fictional version of Dragon Army that you wrote up way back when.)
Microculture and cohesion? Did you go to any particularly cohesive summer camps when you were young? If not, you might want to talk to someone who did.
I went to a few different CTY sites, and found that 1) my ranking of sites by quality matched up almost perfectly with the consensus, 2) these matched up almost perfectly with the extent to which the traditions (i.e. microculture) existed.
One thing that stands out to me is that I went to one site at which the traditions had almost completely died out. (Siena, if anyone out there remembers better than I do.) The story I heard was that the Catholic college didn’t take too kindly to swarms of degenerate atheists watching Rocky Horror and so on on their campus and insisted that camp management do away with a lot of the traditions, the people who were the most into the traditions left for other sites in response, and with those few people gone, the traditions atrophied, and attendance at that site fell off a cliff. It shut down a few years after I went, and it deserved to go.
On the other hand, the site management was incompetent, so there’s that too.
You asked this of Duncan, but I went to CTY twice; I remember my experience being dominated by the class I took, and didn’t really rank the two sites against each other at the time. I seem to be recall both of them seeming tradition-heavy.