(A thought inspired by Yvain’s Weak Men are Superweapons.)
Suppose you agree with Idea-Based Group* X more than the average person does but nevertheless disagree with Group X significantly enough to not be a member of it. Group X is often criticized, but for holding ideas you agree with, and not for the ones you disagree with. How do you avoid pattern-matching as a member of Group X?
*By “Idea-Based Group” I mean a group centered around an idea or a related collection of ideas, which includes things like Effective Altruism, adherents to a political ideology, etc.
Holding yourself just outside a large, powerful, controversial social alignment is a pretty uncomfortable thing to do; people in the ingroup aren’t going to think of you as an ally, they’re going to think of you as a heretic. And thanks to outgroup homogenity, you’re going to find it very hard to distinguish yourself from X from the perspective of people outside it. (Insert your own examples here; I’d add some, but all the ones I can think of are politically sensitive.)
If you’re loud enough and can get enough people on board early, you might be able to establish yourself as a sustainable group mutually distinguished from X. But I don’t think it’s possible to reliably keep the groups straight as far as people outside them are concerned: once you’ve defined your ideology you can’t pick and choose the criteria people will be using to make those judgments, so they’ll correctly note the similarities more often than not.
people in the ingroup aren’t going to think of you as an ally, they’re going to think of you as a heretic
The examples that come to mind for me suggest that they’re only going to think of you as a heretic if you identify as a member of the ingroup. If you have exactly the same beliefs but place yourself outside of the group, they’ll likely ignore you altogether—you’re similar enough to not be worth attacking, and small enough to not affect the group’s reputation or inner workings.
I’ve been having this problem a lot lately—I find myself defending various right-wing groups and positions from leftist attacks and end up tarred with the same brush even though I’m far from agreeing with every aspect of the right-wing positions. At the same time there’s a strong psychological push toward political polarisation where I find myself agreeing more strongly with the right-wingers than I would have if I hadn’t been arguing about it.
So far my solution has been to try to reduce my exposure to political arguments, since they don’t do me much good anyway. But if you’re on the internet a lot that’s easier said than done.
I was called “left-wing” by some right-wing people, called “right-wing” by some left-wing people, and when a random Jehovah Wittness called me “an intolerant Catholic”, I stopped caring anymore about how other people call me, because it simply doesn’t make sense.
When someone calls you X, they usually mean that you are not as anti-X as them.
Signalling group loyalty, affective death spirals, et cetera. If you don’t believe that your enemies eat little babies, you are probably one of them; QED. You can’t have a rational debate with mindkilled people on internet. Maybe in a private debate a few of them would admit that you have a point, but in a group, someone will always seize the opportunity to signal group loyalty by accusing you of something.
Possibly you can exploit the Central Category Fallacy. You copy the whole memeplex X, change what you want and declare it to be an entirely different thing, with its own name, ideology, etc. If someone challenges you that it is the same thing as X, you just point to the different things and say “See? Xers believe this and that, but I most emphatically DON’T!” If someone is interested/pedantic enough to point out the similarities, you can concede that sometimes Xers think like you do. Granted, screening for pattern matching means also no Halo Effect from X-ers and their friends.
Finding catchy names for ideologies isn’t easy, but the bigger problem is that people will think “You’re an Xer” much more often than they’ll explicitly accuse you of being an Xer. Although I suppose you could continuously say “I’m not an Xer, but I think this idea they have is right”.
I guess that without proper social experiments it’s hard to tell, but I feel that people rarely take the time to properly distinguish memeplexes based on their memetic content: they rely much more on things like faces, group associations, catchy names, etc. Monkey social stuff, you know. I feel that you can either optimize for distinguished appearance, or arguing about the content of your memeplex of choice. I don’t see the second working well to do the first job.
And on a pop-Kantian note, this would be a good strategy to universalize since an environment with more ideological splinter groups that are mutually distinguished from each other would probably be more intellectually healthy than the current climate.
(A thought inspired by Yvain’s Weak Men are Superweapons.)
Suppose you agree with Idea-Based Group* X more than the average person does but nevertheless disagree with Group X significantly enough to not be a member of it. Group X is often criticized, but for holding ideas you agree with, and not for the ones you disagree with. How do you avoid pattern-matching as a member of Group X?
*By “Idea-Based Group” I mean a group centered around an idea or a related collection of ideas, which includes things like Effective Altruism, adherents to a political ideology, etc.
Holding yourself just outside a large, powerful, controversial social alignment is a pretty uncomfortable thing to do; people in the ingroup aren’t going to think of you as an ally, they’re going to think of you as a heretic. And thanks to outgroup homogenity, you’re going to find it very hard to distinguish yourself from X from the perspective of people outside it. (Insert your own examples here; I’d add some, but all the ones I can think of are politically sensitive.)
If you’re loud enough and can get enough people on board early, you might be able to establish yourself as a sustainable group mutually distinguished from X. But I don’t think it’s possible to reliably keep the groups straight as far as people outside them are concerned: once you’ve defined your ideology you can’t pick and choose the criteria people will be using to make those judgments, so they’ll correctly note the similarities more often than not.
The examples that come to mind for me suggest that they’re only going to think of you as a heretic if you identify as a member of the ingroup. If you have exactly the same beliefs but place yourself outside of the group, they’ll likely ignore you altogether—you’re similar enough to not be worth attacking, and small enough to not affect the group’s reputation or inner workings.
I’ve been having this problem a lot lately—I find myself defending various right-wing groups and positions from leftist attacks and end up tarred with the same brush even though I’m far from agreeing with every aspect of the right-wing positions. At the same time there’s a strong psychological push toward political polarisation where I find myself agreeing more strongly with the right-wingers than I would have if I hadn’t been arguing about it.
So far my solution has been to try to reduce my exposure to political arguments, since they don’t do me much good anyway. But if you’re on the internet a lot that’s easier said than done.
I was called “left-wing” by some right-wing people, called “right-wing” by some left-wing people, and when a random Jehovah Wittness called me “an intolerant Catholic”, I stopped caring anymore about how other people call me, because it simply doesn’t make sense.
When someone calls you X, they usually mean that you are not as anti-X as them.
Signalling group loyalty, affective death spirals, et cetera. If you don’t believe that your enemies eat little babies, you are probably one of them; QED. You can’t have a rational debate with mindkilled people on internet. Maybe in a private debate a few of them would admit that you have a point, but in a group, someone will always seize the opportunity to signal group loyalty by accusing you of something.
Possibly you can exploit the Central Category Fallacy. You copy the whole memeplex X, change what you want and declare it to be an entirely different thing, with its own name, ideology, etc.
If someone challenges you that it is the same thing as X, you just point to the different things and say “See? Xers believe this and that, but I most emphatically DON’T!”
If someone is interested/pedantic enough to point out the similarities, you can concede that sometimes Xers think like you do. Granted, screening for pattern matching means also no Halo Effect from X-ers and their friends.
Finding catchy names for ideologies isn’t easy, but the bigger problem is that people will think “You’re an Xer” much more often than they’ll explicitly accuse you of being an Xer. Although I suppose you could continuously say “I’m not an Xer, but I think this idea they have is right”.
I guess that without proper social experiments it’s hard to tell, but I feel that people rarely take the time to properly distinguish memeplexes based on their memetic content: they rely much more on things like faces, group associations, catchy names, etc. Monkey social stuff, you know.
I feel that you can either optimize for distinguished appearance, or arguing about the content of your memeplex of choice. I don’t see the second working well to do the first job.
And on a pop-Kantian note, this would be a good strategy to universalize since an environment with more ideological splinter groups that are mutually distinguished from each other would probably be more intellectually healthy than the current climate.