Thank you for writing this! A lot of it felt “obviously true” to me in a way that I find pleasant and at this point consider a mark of quality explication of everyday topics which are easy to misconstrue badly. There were maybe half a dozen points where I went “yup that absolutely tracks with my own experience and what I know of others’ ”.
Most notably, the way in which some behaviors/frames/flinches propagate themselves by bending people along their creases; I saw the gears-level punchline for “why do people develop and dissimulate like this” coming a couple of sections in; and there were at least a few points where on having read them, if somehow that article were the course of a conversation between us, I’d have piped up with some probably-nontrivial extension. (I’ll bring a couple of those up below.)
I’m also delighted to see that my question about your cherry-blossom hoodie made it in here. (Maybe I’ll talk to you about what my favorite hoodie means to me sometime.)
There were at least three importantly adjacent things that I think you missed here, likely because of the tenor of your life experiences:
First off, I think a major missing piece was a treatment of what Truth Or Dare looks like if the ceiling looks high, the floor looks to be far enough down that it’d maybe break your ankle to fall into it, and the median is unbound. Maybe that’s just what it looks like, when you’re long out of a Dark World and you’re headtilting and squinting curiously-but-dubiously at Maybe A Light World? Something about that specific case where the floor is very low but the ceiling is promisingly high seems importantly noncentral to me.
Another notably missing piece: a straightforward “hold concept A up to the light next to concept B and see what happens”, where “concept A” is [gestures vaguely to all of the ~20k words above] and “concept B” is something like “predictive mental modeling and felt-senses that arise from poking that model”. Roughly: “the morning after the Truth or Dare, how do(es your felt-predictive-model expect that) the information and memories from it get used?” The answer to that is strongly dependent on the symmetry-breaking process you spotlight and also on how much ambient Shit is in the environment, and is probably part of how the Dark World cascades get started in Shit-naive environments. That dynamic seems like an important part of the equilibrium-to-be-solved-for here!
Yet another is something about banter and countersignaling?
When you have ten thousand points in the bank, you can sort of tell yourself that you’re wealthy by gambling with fifty of them without a lot of anxiety or caution.
I claim this rhymes-boringly-well with “When you have ten thousand points of credit in the Bank Of Someone Else, you can point out that you’re wealthy by setting fifty of them on fire without a lot of anxiety or caution.” (My mental image is that the Credit Points are sparkly when set on fire or maybe just perfumed, like incense.) Something about this also rhymes (if perhaps less well) with the (in)famously showy destruction of wealth at potlatches—“look how much wealth I have, that I can trivially afford to give a lot of it away, or even destroy it altogether!”. Actually, thinking about it more, it feels like it has to do with ~everything to do with—plenty/(over?)abundance, construed broadly? Material plenty leading to psychological/social plenty and it all loops back on itself as long as it can, and then you have Too Much Plenty but that’s alright because you can give it away or even set it on fire, just to prove a valuable point. Seems kinda fragile, though, all that relying on ambient plenty! (...then again, so few valuable things aren’t fragile thus.)
As a final larger speculation, I wonder to what extent the aphorism that “if a community isn’t growing, it’s dying” comes down to symmetry-breaking mechanisms like the one(s) you detailed here. People leave a Light World community at some constant rate-per-person, while the larger environment the community sits in determines a lot about what happens with new people entering: both whether people trust this supposed Light World community (which might, from outside view, be a scam at best) and also whether the people who feel up to putting a foot in will then immediately step in something (and how everyone then responds).
Thank you for writing this! A lot of it felt “obviously true” to me in a way that I find pleasant and at this point consider a mark of quality explication of everyday topics which are easy to misconstrue badly. There were maybe half a dozen points where I went “yup that absolutely tracks with my own experience and what I know of others’ ”.
Most notably, the way in which some behaviors/frames/flinches propagate themselves by bending people along their creases; I saw the gears-level punchline for “why do people develop and dissimulate like this” coming a couple of sections in; and there were at least a few points where on having read them, if somehow that article were the course of a conversation between us, I’d have piped up with some probably-nontrivial extension. (I’ll bring a couple of those up below.)
I’m also delighted to see that my question about your cherry-blossom hoodie made it in here. (Maybe I’ll talk to you about what my favorite hoodie means to me sometime.)
There were at least three importantly adjacent things that I think you missed here, likely because of the tenor of your life experiences:
First off, I think a major missing piece was a treatment of what Truth Or Dare looks like if the ceiling looks high, the floor looks to be far enough down that it’d maybe break your ankle to fall into it, and the median is unbound. Maybe that’s just what it looks like, when you’re long out of a Dark World and you’re headtilting and squinting curiously-but-dubiously at Maybe A Light World? Something about that specific case where the floor is very low but the ceiling is promisingly high seems importantly noncentral to me.
Another notably missing piece: a straightforward “hold concept A up to the light next to concept B and see what happens”, where “concept A” is [gestures vaguely to all of the ~20k words above] and “concept B” is something like “predictive mental modeling and felt-senses that arise from poking that model”. Roughly: “the morning after the Truth or Dare, how do(es your felt-predictive-model expect that) the information and memories from it get used?” The answer to that is strongly dependent on the symmetry-breaking process you spotlight and also on how much ambient Shit is in the environment, and is probably part of how the Dark World cascades get started in Shit-naive environments. That dynamic seems like an important part of the equilibrium-to-be-solved-for here!
Yet another is something about banter and countersignaling?
I claim this rhymes-boringly-well with “When you have ten thousand points of credit in the Bank Of Someone Else, you can point out that you’re wealthy by setting fifty of them on fire without a lot of anxiety or caution.” (My mental image is that the Credit Points are sparkly when set on fire or maybe just perfumed, like incense.) Something about this also rhymes (if perhaps less well) with the (in)famously showy destruction of wealth at potlatches—“look how much wealth I have, that I can trivially afford to give a lot of it away, or even destroy it altogether!”. Actually, thinking about it more, it feels like it has to do with ~everything to do with—plenty/(over?)abundance, construed broadly? Material plenty leading to psychological/social plenty and it all loops back on itself as long as it can, and then you have Too Much Plenty but that’s alright because you can give it away or even set it on fire, just to prove a valuable point. Seems kinda fragile, though, all that relying on ambient plenty! (...then again, so few valuable things aren’t fragile thus.)
As a final larger speculation, I wonder to what extent the aphorism that “if a community isn’t growing, it’s dying” comes down to symmetry-breaking mechanisms like the one(s) you detailed here. People leave a Light World community at some constant rate-per-person, while the larger environment the community sits in determines a lot about what happens with new people entering: both whether people trust this supposed Light World community (which might, from outside view, be a scam at best) and also whether the people who feel up to putting a foot in will then immediately step in something (and how everyone then responds).