Generalized Coming Out Of The Closet
You know how most people, probably including you, have stuff about themselves which they keep hidden from the world, because they worry that others would respond negatively to it? I think there’s a lot of alpha in sharing that stuff publicly, online. Just baring your soul to the world. It’s like a much more general version of coming out of the closet.
Obviously there are caveats, but I think the caveats mostly boil down to “there are some skills involved in generalized coming out of the closet to make it be well received”, as opposed to “society just reflexively attacks people who reveal certain things”. This post is mostly about my current best guesses at the relevant skills.
And lest you think this is just armchair speculation… I have put my metaphorical money where my mouth is. I’ve been actively aiming to generalized-come-out-of-the-closet more over the past half year or so. For me, the most significant of those efforts was My Empathy Is Rarely Kind and its Follow-up a couple weeks ago. That was the last big thing I have generally kept hidden from the world, because I feared people reacting negatively to it. And with it out in the open, I’m done; I have no other major things left about myself which I keep hidden for fear of negative response. (Yes, including my sexual kinks. I haven’t actually considered them that emotionally sensitive for me for a long time, but I specifically made a point of sharing them in order to set the stage for this post.) Other notable examples from me include a thread on relationships which lots of people hated (which eventually led to The Value Proposition of Romantic Relationships and its follow-up), and The Field of AI Alignment: A Postmortem.
Value Prop
From the perspective of someone coming out of the closet—whether in the original sense or the generalized sense—the immediate potential upside is to feel seen, validated, not-disliked, and more safe and close with one’s community. The immediate potential downside is that people react negatively, and then one feels the opposite of all those nice things.
Insofar as generalized coming out of the closet in a way which will be well received is a skill, I think the first and most important piece of the skill is to set aside that value proposition. The number one thing you need to do in order to be well received is to provide value to the audience. And “please like me guys” generally isn’t much of a value prop to a broad public audience. That’s how you get cringe.
(“Please like me guys” can sometimes be a decent value prop to a narrower audience. If you’re generalized-coming-out to people who themselves already feel emotionally close to you, then making you feel seen and validated and so forth is probably something which they themselves will feel good about. If you’re coming out to a community whose whole schtick is bonding over the thing you’re coming out about, like e.g. revealing that you’re gay to an LGBT group of some sort, then again that’s probably a fine value prop. People will bond over it. But that is not how it normally works when baring one’s soul to the broader public.)
Fortunately, there is usually plenty of other value one can provide to the audience, by baring one’s soul. Some examples:
“Here’s a part of my experience which many people will find surprising.” The value prop to the audience is to learn something.
“Here’s a part of my experience which I think lots of other people share, but aren’t willing to talk about.” The value prop to the audience is to either feel seen (if they share the experience), or update their models of other people (if they don’t).
“Here’s an engaging story about my experience.” The value prop to the audience is just enjoying an engaging story. This one is especially loaded on storytelling/writing skill, and will help a lot even if your main value prop is something else.
“Here’s something I’m confused/curious about, please inform me.” Someone in the audience will appreciate the opportunity to help someone, and other people who are also secretly confused/ignorant about the thing will also get value. (Example, example.)
“Here’s something I think a lot of people would like to talk about or ask questions about, but which is embarrassing to bring up.” The value prop to the audience is to provide a space, and open up oneself in order to get the discussion started.
For example, the central framing of my original empathy post was “People seem to think that empathy necessarily leads to sympathy, gentleness, compassion, etc. But that is not my experience.”. (… and in hindsight, I think I was partially wrong; I wasn’t using the word “empathy” the way people usually do. But I at least intended a value prop which was very much not “please like me guys”.)
To make this work properly, I think you need to actually gut-level let the (intended) audience’s value prop drive. Like, when writing that empathy post, I wasn’t thinking “please like me guys” or anything like that. Heck, I expected the reception to be relatively negative compared to most of my posts, and that was indeed the case! Don’t go into this as a way to heal insecurity. Go into this as a way to provide value for other people.
There’s likely to be value to provide other people precisely because, whatever your thing is, it’s a thing which people normally don’t talk about.
Audience Choice and Bracing Yourself
Even when posting in public, you have some ability to choose your audience. I would suggest, for example, that LessWrong is usually a better place to bare your soul than the comment section on youtube, let alone 4chan.
I actually expect that the value prop considerations are probably pretty similar across online communities. You probably want to adjust presentation details somewhat to match the audience, but the high level plan is probably mostly the same. Where communities likely differ a lot is in the proportion of negative responses you’re likely to receive.
There will probably be at least some negative responses. (If not, then you were incredibly miscalibrated in your nervousness at sharing this thing with the world! I hereby provide that as a fallback negative response, in case you find yourself with only positive responses.) If you won’t be able to handle any negative responses, then don’t publish.
But on the other hand, if you’ve framed the thing around a solid value prop for a sensibly chosen audience, the negativity will probably be limited. If e.g. you provide an engaging story about your experience, and someone comes along like “wow you’re a loser”, then, well, they probably come off as The Asshole, and you probably come off as sympathetic. People will likely still respond negatively in more muted ways, like e.g. suggesting that you are perhaps a loser but they’re trying to be kind and constructive about it. Such is the cost of alpha. If you can handle that, and have the skills to provide value to an audience, maybe give it a shot.
Your tools for selecting your audience when posting in public are limited and unreliable. You can share information on LessWrong, only to have it, or quotes from it, linked on Hacker News, Reddit, or even the New York Times. Your future boss, future AI, future blackmailer, or future murderer can discover and exploit that information. I just met a queer activist in a rural county who keeps her address a secret, because she’s worried someone will show up to kill her if her address gets around. During the woke era, we had numerous examples of people losing their jobs over un-PC comments they’d made on social media many years ago.
Furthermore, coming out provides a “kernel of truth” around which a hostile audience can spin a lie or play a game of telephone that exaggerates what you shared, when they might not have made up that lie or talked about that topic at all had you not shared it in the first place. If you are somebody’s enemy, there’s no limit to the extent to which they might exaggerate. The New York Time’s efforts to associate Scott Alexander with the far-right are an example. He had to quit his job and start his own business as a result.
These are serious problems that you particularly expose yourself to when coming out either to large groups of people in a gossipy environment or online. You can substantially limit your exposure to these downside risks by coming out to a small group of trusted friends or to a therapist. You talk about the benefits of coming out to your “community,” and I think a natural place to start is an in-person, in-confidence conversation with those chosen people.
Your post here primarily focuses on how to not provoke a negative reaction (and how to provoke a positive reaction) by the primary intended readers of your internet post—the “happy path” of internet communication. I think that the overwhelmingly most important aspect of a “theory of generalized coming-out” would be to deal with the “unhappy path” in which an unintended audience takes hold of your initially well-received post and uses it to do you harm.
Realistically, the rule for almost everyone almost always is:
few people will see what you post online at all, even when it’s public
the vast majority of those who do see it won’t remember who wrote it (unless the audience is de-facto a small community who you know)
All of the cases you mention are, for most people, extremely unlikely. They’re exactly the sort of things which are vastly more salient than they are probable, and should be discounted accordingly. Their weight in your EV calculation should be basically zero.
Potential counterargument: That kinda hurts you precisely in the timelines in which you may have large impact, no?
I mean, I guess it’s correct if you don’t have high ambitions, or if you’re very strongly confident that your pathways of realizing those ambitions won’t route through becoming publicly well-known. But if you’re ultimately aiming high, and are leaving yourself the option to be opportunistic about how to do it (rather than committing to a specific path from the start), being open like this early may have significant negative effects for you later on. (Impacting your ability to acquire, compound, or wield power.)
I’m instinctively tempted to reject this counterargument, but I think my instinctive rejection is invalid. It seems to be rooted in the feelings of “how is cyberbullying real, just walk away from the screen” and “if you’re leading your life in a way where you’re at the mercy of the vicissitudes of the public opinion, you’re doing something wrong”. The latter is a preference over paths-to-power, and while paths that route through publicity are dispreferred by me, they’re still valid. The former fails to take into account that, on some paths, your career opportunities/ability to make business deals/whether VCs would fund you/etc. depend on whether other people (or corporations/other entities) believe that cyberbullying is real.
So I think it’s a fine strategy if you’re a hermit researcher aiming to solve alignment and apply the solution to a brain in a box in a basement, or if you don’t have big plans to begin with. But maybe not so good if you’re aiming for policy/advocacy/fieldbuilding/etc.
Inner Taleb says: dude, variance is extremely positive EV when it comes to publicity. Far better to have some people love you and some people hate than to have nobody care, for the vast majority of ambitions.
If you’re ambitious and trying to have nobody hate you, you are making a very major mistake.
You are not considering how the manner in which you gain fame constrains the options for your ambition. If your personal sexual details are online, that may constrain your options for political office, executive and academic leadership, for example.
Being hated is rarely helpful for ambition. It’s a consequence of pursuing ambition—making some people unhappy to make others happy. If you do stuff that garners ambition-undermining hate without giving you a greater base of ambition-serving support, then it’s not helpful for this goal. I continue to not see the case for how posting sexual kinks and other taboo info online will advance people’s ambitions for the vast majority of people and ambitions.
Taleb claims he rarely puts forth new ideas but repeats very Lindy ones.
And that seems to be a variation of:
”Any publicity is good publicity”
Few people will see it out of the blue, but it’s now archived and searchable. Anyone who has your name and is for other reasons determined to find dirt on you, can. I’ve had this happen to me once in a rather minor way (person who had beef with me exposing a scam online who tried to turn the scam’s believers against me by publicly sharing my work place and address) that didn’t really catch, but others haven’t been so lucky. And now you have to add to all that the possibility of someone simply letting an AI agent freely trawl through the internet with the goal of digging up info on you. Like, how far do you expect we are from employers using something like that for “background checks” on applicants?
I definitely think the risks can outweigh the benefits, depending on what it is that you would share. This is absolutely the biggest thing that (reasonably) holds people back.
Few people will see your post, but the ones who do see it might be exactly the people who can hurt you the most — those who specifically sought it out in order to gain information on you. This matters even more if you have ambition, because the incentive to dig up dirt in you increases the more of a public facing role you seek. Putting out this kind of stuff early in your career is a good way to limit what you can achieve, or at least create unnecessary friction, potentially without realizing the impact.
I’d also note that if few people see your post, then that makes it even easier to come out to just them. That more or less eliminates the downside risk while giving you the same benefits.
I really don’t see the benefit unless posting your secrets online happens to scratch a quirky psychological itch, or you’re aiming to use a big megaphone, get a large readership, and find opportunities you couldn’t get any other way. Overall, it seems to me like an area where you should be cautious, clear on your motives, and slow-moving, directly analogous to, say, posting a sex tape online.
Unless you are the sort of person who is likely to have a stalker at some point, that premise is low-grade paranoia, not a realistic concern. Most likely, nobody cares about hurting you enough to put in that kind of effort.
We could quantify some of these risks, such as the base rate of risks associated with stalking, the frequency with which hiring managers research potential hires on Google or social media, and so on. In fact, it would be trivial to pull together a preliminary report using one of the deep research AI products. What level of marginal risk do you think it’s worth taking to post your taboo personal details online, considering the range of risks this potentially exposes you to?
I’d also note that doings stuff like this, and encouraging others to do so, rhymes with cult behavior. Other cults collect dirty details and keep them secret as blackmail. If rationalism establishes a culture of high-status members encouraging others to post potentially embarrassing personal/sexual info online, that can easy be, and be seen as, a way to indoctrinate and trap people within the community.
Dude, that doesn’t make any sense. People making their secrets public is the opposite of what blackmailers want.
This logic is so bad that I think it should be a flag to you that you are clearly motivatedly reasoning real hard here.
Anyway, quantifying a little:
Lifetime incidence of stalking is about 12-16% for women and 4-7% for men. Most of it is from former romantic partners. And stalkers are not usually trying to just hurt the target as much as they can; something like sharing one’s home address would be relevant to stalkers, but sharing emotional secrets much less so.
Hiring managers blah blah blah: hard to get a base rate, but none of the people who hired other people at half a dozen different companies do that to my knowledge, and even if any of them did I can’t think of anything far short of literally being a KKK member that would make a difference to the hiring process.
You say “and so on” but, like, I don’t think there’s all that much so to on here?
I think the more important point here is not the base rates, but the fact that the kind of things I’m talking about sharing here usually just aren’t usually that relevant to most stalkers or hiring managers or whoever. If the things you’re scared of sharing are political in nature, then sure, some of those can come with some risk, though the risks will be more salient than the base rates merit. But other than that… we’re not talking about sharing things like your address.
I want to flag that you are unilaterally escalating this conversation rhetorically, and making accusations about my psychological state that I really do not appreciate. Let’s keep it civil and focused on the object-level topic.
Literally, on a surface level, you are correct that publicly posting dirty secrets online pre-empts some blackmail threats, although it still exposes the poster to the risk that those posts will be distorted or amplified in ways they didn’t intend.
Functionally, my argument is plausible and logically sound that the outcome of blackmail and publicly posting secrets can be very similar. Both practices can result in an individual being trapped in the group/cult by the perception that their action (handing over blackmail threats or posting embarrassing secrets online) has now cut off or created friction for pathways to careers and relationships outside the community.
Furthermore, if the group acquires an even stronger perception of being a cult than it has as a result of adopting the practice of encouraging members to post dirty secrets about themselves online, then that perception will further taint the reputation of and isolate its members. These sorts of ideas can be a way of gradually converting a formerly healthy community into a cult.
Do you have a particular example in mind which is generating this whole thread, which you’re willing to gesture at? I was escalating because it’s seemed-to-me from the beginning that this whole class of objection is very obviously statistically unrealistic (once one sets aside its emotional salience), and the arguments you’ve made seem to me not only wrong but obviously wrong (again, once one sets aside emotional salience). In my experience, just continuing at the object level usually doesn’t prove useful in such situations.
If I’m being epistemically generous, I would guess that you have some specific example in mind which is very different from the sort of thing I was imagining when writing the post, and as a result we’ve been talking past each other a lot. For instance, elsewhere in this thread, David Davidson brought up “Many people in countries with more authoritarian governments have to worry about going to prison over having the wrong opinion (like China or the UK).”. I thought the examples in the post made it pretty obvious that that was not the sort of thing I was talking about, but maybe that was not obvious?
My core belief on this topic is that coming out is, in fact, a risky practice in America and world wide. It’s risky to come out about your kinks, your sexual gender orientation, your political beliefs, and your historical affiliations with groups or types of groups that have controversial reputations.
Coming out can be net beneficial under controlled circumstances. Generally, it is better to have a world in which people have the ability to achieve those benefits. That starts by being aware of and working to mitigate those risks. The queer community is an excellent example of a group of people who’ve done that and reaped the rewards.
My central problem with your OP and responses here is that you seem to be rejecting the need for consideration or mitigation of those risks. This flies in the face of the historical experience of queers, apostates, atheists, political, radicals, and other groups who’ve come out in ways that failed to control those risks and suffered for it. By encouraging people to just come out without considering or taking steps to mitigate risks, you encourage them to make themselves vulnerable in ways that may make them more dependent on the rationalist community as the place where you’re seeking to enact this attitude toward coming out.
In my view, there is an enormous volume of historical experience of a wide variety of groups that backs up the profound risks of coming out. These risks include ostracism, exclusion from job opportunities, public humiliation, and physical violence. Again, those risks can be mitigated and the reward for doing so are great. But flat out denying those risks strikes me as foolish when it’s done by an individual, and cult-inducing when it becomes a community norm.
There are stories of people losing their jobs over social media posts—the stories I’ve heard have been about high school teachers getting fired over things like pictures of themselves on Facebook drinking at a party.
This does not cut reality at the joints at all. There is no such “type”; stalkers do not care about your “type”. Stalkers tend to be crazy people. And even the tiniest bit of fame is enough to spawn stalkers, no matter how you act.
79% of stalkers are people the victim knows [1]- not parasocial famous relationships. Of parasocial stalkers, erotomanic is most common: men who have power and wealth and older than the stalker are the common victims. Erotomaniacs tend to be women from lower socio-economic classes, as I said in my other comment—I would guess that this means they have less access to mental health support, may in fact be victims of domestic violence of some sort, have low self-confidence or control over their own lives which leads them to project fantasies onto someone, such as David Letterman, whom she might see every night from the television in her home, while she is drifting off to sleep.
I think that’s unnecessarily dehumanizing and doesn’t cut at the joints of reality because ignores a huge body of research that does in fact tell us about the various different types of stalking profiles and what precipitates them. Most stalkers are motivated by personal connection, not fame—tiny or otherwise—at all. I elaborate on that in this comment. Those who are motivated by fame it is not “tiny fame” but repeat exposure, usually by the media, that amplifies relevance to the stalker. Not a “tiny bit of fame.”
79% of victims were acquainted with their pursuer (N = 62), and half of all stalking emerged specifically from romantic relationships (M = 49%, N = 53). (meta-analysis of 175 studies)
The state of the art of stalking: Taking stock of the emerging literature. Brian H. Spitzberg. William R. Cupach.
But that’s not relevant to what we’re discussing here, which is the scenario where someone acquires a stalker (or multiple stalkers) as a consequence of publicly revealing things about themselves (“coming out”).
Seems plausible.
The “huge body of research” tells us that stalkers tend to be crazy people.
There’s nothing “dehumanizing” about that. Crazy people are people, i.e., humans. They’re not aliens, robots, animals, inanimate objects, etc. But they’re still crazy. (And we’re not talking about, like, depression, anxiety disorders, autism, etc.; stalkers—particularly “parasocial stalkers”, as you aptly put it—are crazy in an absolutely central sense of the word.)
A scenario which is statistically unlikely. Not all 21% of non-personal stalkers are triggered by a single internet post. For example, erotomaniacs, most of them fixate on people who are famous.
Can you point to even a single instance of a “confessional” “out of the closet blog post” causing someone to become a stalker with no prior personal contact, and the person who wrote the blog post not having a previous history of revealing things about their life.
The dictionary definition of dehumanizing is “To deprive of human qualities such as individuality, [1]compassion, or civility.”—whenever you dismiss a large group of people as “crazy” you are depriving them of their individuality, therefore dehumanize them. I think my assessment was correct.
And the research shows that most people who seek out information on someone have a preexisting relationship with them, a smaller group become fixated on famous people—neither conform to a single “out of the closet” post.
Cambridge Dictionary: “to remove from a person the special human qualities of independent thought...”
Merriam-Webster: “To address or portray (someone) in a way that obscures or demeans that person’s humanity or individuality”
Of course not, but how likely is that? Take the post that we’re commenting under. Can John be described as someone who just wrote one blog post about himself, and has no prior history of revealing things about his life, and has no other claim to fame at all? No, none of those things are true.
And this is going to be the norm. Nobody’s just writing one blog post where they say “btw here is a fact about me” and otherwise it’s radio silence.
It’s very easy, these days, to gain enough internet fame to acquire stalkers. A bit of social media activity / blogging / other forms of poasting, a few of people talk about you a few times, and bam—you’re there.
Seems like a fully general argument against ever describing anyone as being crazy. I reject it.
Some people are crazy. “Parasocial stalkers” usually are. That’s facts.
No it’s not easy to gain internet fame. I know. I’ve tried it.
What is a fact exactly, what specifically do you mean by they are “crazy”? Why is that the most unambiguous word you can think of?
I don’t know what to tell you; I’ve tried it too, and it’s pretty easy.
Regular, ordinary-person meaning of the word.
Well, now, this is a new complaint. Is it the most unambiguous word I can think of? Maybe, maybe not. I don’t make that claim.
But it is a perfectly ordinary, straightforward word, which conveys my meaning.
Anyhow, I’m done litigating my word choice here. I don’t believe that you don’t know what I mean, so this isn’t about ambiguity or a failure to communicate.
Of course stalkers, as a group, have a type. For starters, female.
If this is humor, I don’t get it.
This is false. Many men have stalkers. Basically any male celebrity, for instance… even minor, local or “internet” celebrities often have stalkers.
I didn’t say males don’t have stalkers. There is simply a large statistical disparity: the very large majority of stalkers stalk females.
I did say upthread “likely to have a stalker at some point”, not certain to have/not have one. That is what’s relevant to EV/risk.
The sort of person who is likely to have a stalker, if you know nothing about this person other than their sex, is very likely female.
The sort of person who is likely to have a stalker, conditional on being at all famous, cannot have their sex predicted so easily.
I googled “what fraction of famous stalkees are female”. After insisting I meant “stalkees” not “stalkers”, Google’s AI said:
It cited this for the first paragraph: https://psycnet.apa.org/record/2008-04841-009
Which, unfortunately, doesn’t give the answers in its abstract, and doesn’t appear on sci-hub.
Epistemic status: frustrated.
If few people see your post, then this almost by definition means it is unlikely anyone will seek to “gain information over you”. The kind of people who obsessively try to collect information about other people tend to fall into two broad groups: anti-fans—which are people who were stans and then were shut out, or people who had some kind of direct personal relationship or interaction with the person that went sour.
Anti-Fans may be in some cases be catalyzed by someone “coming out of the closet” if they have been misrepresenting themselves in a way which was intrinsic and important to the ongoing parasocial relationship they had with their stans (think of cruxy things, like Bob Dylan going electric, or more recently MAGA supporters enraged over the lack of disclosure about Epstein). More often than not, it is actually provoked by something very different: the sudden radio silence or “taking a step back for my privacy”—in a sense, going into a closet. This lack of closure causes resentment and fans begin trying to find out everything they can to reach the previous level of exposure. (Does this remind you of “ghosting”?)
This behavior is very similar to stalker behavior is interconnected to domestic violence. A romantic partner or potential suitor is rejected, but unable to accept why—as it is said “To stalk is to seek relevance.” (Not all stalking behaviour is caused by a sudden step back, but it is the most common[1]. Erotomanic delusions almost always involve repeated exposure to the victim, which is why they tend to be very famous and powerful people like Kings, Late Night TV show hosts, famous baseballers, or movie idols: people for whom media exposure is great- in a sense their obsession is a subset of the media’s obsession. Victims are tends to be males who are older and wealthier than the stalker, stalkers tend to be women with low socio-ecoonomic status (which I would guess means less mental health support, less self-confidence, more likely to be victims of abuse too—but that’s my speculation) dreaming of ‘escape’)
Not so fun fact: “approach behaviour” of stalkers is a counterintuitive indicator of likelihood of harm—threats are less likely to lead to acting on threats[2]. This again leads me to suspect that one single blog post isn’t going to trigger an obsessive information gatherer. They need to already have some kind of investment in the confessor.
Simply put—a post unlikely to be seen by anyone means that no one is sufficiently invested in their parasocial relationship with you to obsessively seek information over you. What does trigger that kind of behavior—is suddenly ghosting an audience.
So a couple of years ago I wanted to write about why people get obsessive and start collections—and part of that lead me to collect a lot of anecdotes and research on stalking behaviour, vexatious litigants, chronic complainers, OCD and Schizophrenia. I wrote a first draft of the book but never polished it since the topic is too vague to be cohesive. Might turn it into a Youtube series. It’s less about stalking—more about collecting—lot’s of stuff about Pinterest boards, wardrobes, sneakerheads and the bus-ticket theory of genius. Hopefully you’re not worried why I have all this info now.
79% of victims were acquainted with their pursuer (N = 62), and half of all stalking emerged specifically from romantic relationships (M = 49%, N = 53). (meta-analysis of 175 studies)
The state of the art of stalking: Taking stock of the emerging literature. Brian H. Spitzberg. William R. Cupach.
″...stalkers who communicate hateful, threatening, or obscene messages or content are the least likely to physically attack their target. This is especially true when the unwelcome communications are made anonymously. However, if such communications persist, the risk increases with each successive contact. Stalkers who express a desire to meet their target in person and to travel for that purpose are much more likely to be dangerous. But paradoxically, those who express a desire to have children with their target are typically less of a threat.”
https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/machiavellians-gulling-the-rubes/201810/the-many-stalkers-taylor-swift
This was an interesting read. Thank you for sharing your information. I personally wouldn’t have been worried about why you have all this information, as it simply reads to me like an essay by somebody who’s done research on an important topic.
The way your comment is written, the underlying narrative is that the only risk to consider with coming out online is turning a reader into a stalker due to that post in isolation, and that this risk is insubstantial. I think your argument is plausible for that specific risk. However, I am considering a wider variety of risks, including:
A person with a larger body of online writings who comes out.
A person who publishes their post to an audience or on a platform that’s more likely to generate unwanted attention.
A person who is being investigated and/or stalked online as a result of real-world activities, such as applying for a job or pursuing political office.
A person for whom coming out will create friction in pursuing real-world activities in the future that oughtweighs the benefits they gain from coming out online.
A potential sense of paranoia about having disclosed potentially embarrassing information online.
The reputational and perceptions risk for a controversial community of its high-status members advocating that its low-status members post embarrassing information online.
LessWrong and the rationalist community already has a controversial reputation and is often accused of being a cult. It is an online platform, which is capable of spawning hate-readers like r/sneerclub. It is also a real-world community with a notorious history of deeply exploitative behavior and what seems to be a higher-than-average fraction of self-identified participants or ex-participants with deep mental health issues. It has a history of scandal and has generated a substantial amount of negative media coveage, considering its small size.
Considering all of this, I believe that the LessWrong and rationalist community is not well-positioned to reduce the risks of coming out beyond the normal level available in the wider culture. In other words, if there’s an X that you don’t feel safe to come out about, then I don’t think LessWrong/rationalism in its current form is capable of helping you feel more safe about coming out about X. This is a heuristic, not a general rule, and if other people do feel LessWrong/rationalism helps them come out about their personal characteristics in a way other communities don’t, I’m interested to hear it. But for this reason, I think that high-status LessWrong members should not be encouraging others to come out in public about more things with little regard for risks. That seems irresponsible and likely to result in damage both to members and to the community as a whole.
I do think that it would be beneficial if LessWrong/rationalism worked to think through this problem and become the sort of community that is capable of effectively supporting its members in “coming out” in a way that improved the community, its relations with the rest of the world, and the health and wellbeing of its members. Basically, I like the vision of “generalized coming out,” but I don’t like the strategy John proposes in his OP for getting there for LessWrong/rationalism.
Thank you for that reply specifying the controversy and history within the lesswrong community—and therefore that being the chosen platform for “coming out”, does seem to me to increase the risks.
I have to reflect more on this. But I think it’s important to acknowledge your reply in the meantime.
I think my current question or crux is sort of “okay, but if you don’t have a substantial posting history—why will you become stalked out of all the others?”. And that is probably case-by-case thing that depends, even within the localized environment of Lesswrong, important factors like: what actual topic or taboo they are coming out about, even how much it resonates with the community so how it gets displayed on the front-page and therefore how visible it might be to r/sneerclub-ers, other aspects of their identity could also make them more vulnerable—even gender.
I think I need to think more fine-grain about this.
>for most people
Many people in countries with more authoritarian governments have to worry about going to prison over having the wrong opinion (like China or the UK). The overwhelming majority in the UK oppose the massive waves of non-European immigration, but if you ask them why, their response is the same as Uyghurs’ response to a question about CCP policy.
I think I’d go to prison if I told you.
And you’re suggesting… that that’s a skill issue...?
While I have major problems with how free speech is handled in the UK, saying that people would go to prison over expressing their dislike of immigration is ludicrous. The entire media and political discourse right now is a competition for who dislikes immigration harder. Go to r/ukpolitics to see people complaining about immigration on a daily basis, and that used to be a liberal subreddit.
The things UK limits free speech on are others. For example, after its recent proscription, it’s become literally illegal to express any kind of sympathy or support for the organisation Palestine Action. Just last Saturday, over 500 people were arrested in London for participating in a protest about PA (and there’s also been cases of the police simply assuming any kind of support for Palestine equated support for PA).
I said you they can’t tell you why they oppose immigration, because many people’s true full reasons break the law. There are people in jail for naming non-government-approved reasons, and there are millions more who would agree with what they said to get there, if they could, without going to jail. They do not have freedom of speech on the issue. People on reddit have to carefully dance around how they describe their young girls’ rapists to avoid being “racist” or they will be banned instantly, and even face jail time, like [that woman who was jailed longer than the rapists she insulted](https://www.reddit.com/r/centrist/comments/1dt3bji/germany_woman_convicted_of_offending_migrant_gang/). Being so ignorant as to think they can freely speak their mind about this in 2025, and so confident in your ignorance to lecture others on the issue is, frankly, ludicrous. (I hope you don’t think that’s too combative of a word.)
And, OP, you have completely neglected to actually address the point that DirectedEvolution and I made about tons of people having circumstances where they CAN’T say things, despite multiple invitations. This completely undermines your post in many cases. How many cases?
Well, you also missed my point that your statement about “almost everyone” / “most people” is clearly not well thought out, (Did you mean more than 4.1 billion people, having considered the political and cybersecurity climate of each country, and estimated the secret unspoken political opinions of all of the citizens? -- could you post the math behind this?), or were you just talking about sheltered Californians who hold zero verboten opinions? I took pains to avoid saying my opinion of your post too directly, since that would be too combative—deliberately keeping hidden from the world my secrets like “I think your post sounds like you live in a fantasy land”, but despite this, you pressed the “too combative” button on me anyway (which would be the ban button if you were a mod on reddit), on YOUR post that told me I should speak my mind and tell my truth.
I believe this is not an honest description of the case. Even the simple investigation of this, that I did by following the link, suggested that the woman was jailed for a weekend because of a previous theif, and for not attending and court hearing. All the defendants of the rape case got youth sentences of at least a year.
I’m strongly downvoting your post. I hope you understand that this is not because I want to censor your political views, but because I want information on less wrong to not be misleading.
I have seen plenty of people making arguments that are absolutely to the effect of “this nationality/ethnicity/religion is in some way fundamentally incompatible with our understanding of civilized life” in all kinds of capacities. And others that are just thinly veiled versions of that, but I suspect that’s more about rhetorical motte and bailey than fear of literal legal repercussions.
Now you can argue whatever about e.g. the legality of using slurs, but you don’t need those to make a cogent racist argument. And plenty of such arguments are made daily. I’m not here to say they should be curtailed by speech laws (as I said, I’m actually much closer to the US’ First Amendment on what should be free speech), but it’s just playing the victim to pretend they are right now.
I’m sorry I was totally wrong, everyone else was totally right, I kneel, I will never express these opinions or try to speak honestly and with conviction if I feel like it might incite a mob of people to downvote me again
I do not think arresting people for speech crimes is right. But the answer was addressing specifically the notion that people could not express racist opinions in support of anti-immigration policies. And that is false, because expressing racist opinions in general does not seem to be criminalised—specific instances of doing so in roles in which you have a responsibility to the public, or in forms that constitute direct attacks or threats to specific individuals, or incitement to crime, etcetera, are.
As I said, the current political debate has virtually everyone arguing various points on the anti-immigration spectrum. Reform UK is an entire party that basically does nothing else.
(I’m a regular poster/commenter on LW; I don’t feel comfortable saying this under my real name for various reasons.)
I’m horrified by the fact that some men have sexual kinks like the ones that John describes having. My (m/ hetero/experienced) own sexuality is well-described as a reflection of my identity and values: I’m moderately but not extremely dominant, mostly playful and passionate, and want everyone to have a great time.
My attitude towards John has moved from skepticism to distrust. I wonder if I’ll learn that people can be deeply good while having violent sexual preferences at the same time. Anecdotally, so far I found that men with violent sexual kinks also tend to be slightly creepy in other ways. I did find John a bit creepy when I met him in person some time ago.
I resonate with this as a question.
I have an outstanding confusion about this. Specifically, the Sequences ring with vibrant and determined will-to-Goodness, but also Eliezer apparently likes hurting people (or something like that?) in bed. To me, these would seem, if not incompatible, than at least in tension.
But, apparently, these are not in tension for at least some people.
I think that properly understanding the psychology of BDSM might provide the key to understanding psychology in general (in ways that are pretty continuous with the insights of early pioneers of psychology, e.g. Freud and particularly Jung).
My current model is:
The process of learning to be “good” typically involves renouncing and suppressing your “antisocial” desires, some of which are biologically ingrained (e.g. many aspects of male aggression) and some of which are learned idiosyncratically (e.g. having a traumatic childhood which teaches you that the world is zero-sum and you can only gain by hurting others). It also involves renouncing and suppressing parts of yourself which are “pathetic” or “weak” (e.g. the desire to not have to make any choices, the belief that you are bad and unworthy of existing).
These desires/beliefs aren’t removed from your psyche (since internal subagents have strong survival instincts, making it difficult to fully destroy them) but rather coagulate into a “shadow”: a coalition of drives and desires which mostly remains hidden from your conscious thinking, but still influences your behavior in various ways. The influence of your shadow on your behavior is typically hard for you to detect yourself, but often easy for (emotionally intelligent) others to detect in you.
People who have a very strong “will-to-Goodness” don’t necessarily have very strong/extreme shadows, but often do, because they created the very strong will-to-Goodness by strongly suppressing their antisocial desires, which then strongly polarized those desires.
Many types of BDSM are a fairly straightforward manifestation of the desires in your shadow. Participating in BDSM can be good for one’s psyche in the sense that it represents a partial reconciliation with one’s shadow, reducing internal conflict. I.e. rather than having a shadow that’s fully repressed, you can have a “bargain” between your ego and your shadow that’s something like “the ego is (mostly) in charge almost all the time, while the shadow is (mostly) in charge during kinky sex”. It feels really somatically nice for parts of your psyche which are almost always repressed and shamed to be allowed to act for once.
However, BDSM can also be bad for one’s psyche in the sense that positive reinforcement during BDSM causes your shadow to grow, thereby increasing internal conflict longer-term. Also, doing BDSM with others can cause their shadow to grow too. “Healthy” BDSM probably looks more like an outlet which gradually helps you to accept and integrate your shadow then move on, rather than a lifestyle or a part of your long-term identity. My guess is that BDSM communities end up instantiating similar “crab in a bucket” dynamics as incel communities—i.e. holding people back from developing healthier psychologies.
Young children are rightly horrified by BDSM when they stumble upon it, because it’s an indication that there’s something twisted/perverse going on in the world. However, I suspect that almost all adults who feel horrified by BDSM are in part reacting to their own shadow. My guess is that the few people who have actually integrated their shadows in a healthy way are neither very interested in nor very horrified by BDSM, but rather mostly sad about it (like they’re sad about suffering more generally). When I say that they’ve “integrated” their shadows, I mean that their BDSM-like desires are cooperating strongly enough with their other desires that they’re a little bit present most of the time, rather than driving them to create simulacra of highly transgressive behavior. This might sound scary, but I expect that fully experiencing the ways in which we all have power over each other in normal life provides enough fodder to satisfy the BDSM-like desires in almost all of us. (For example, if you really allowed yourself to internalize how much power being a westerner gives you over people in developing countries, or the power dynamics in friendships where one person is more successful than the other, I expect that thought process to feel kinda like BDSM.)
Trying to evoke and deal with your shadow is a difficult and fraught process, since (by definition) it involves grappling with the parts of yourself that you’re most ashamed about and most scared of giving control to. I recommend doing so gradually and carefully. My most direct engagement with shadow work was regrettably intense (analogous to a bad psychedelic trip) and came very close to having very bad effects on my life (though I’ve now wrestled those effects into a positive direction, and find shadow work very valuable on an ongoing basis).
As you can probably infer, most of the points above are informed by my own past and ongoing experiences.
When I read that, I feel both like it’s describing a phenomenon which probably does happen a fair bit, and like it basically misses the core drivers behind most of my own BDSM-esque experiences. There’s more than one other pattern I’ve experienced, but here’s one which I feel able to flesh out right now.
For certain relationships, a strong dom/sub dynamic feels like the natural shape of the relationship. Ordinary social norms dictate maintaining a much greater semblance of equality, but adhering to those norms feels psychologically forced and uncomfortable in a way analogous to holding one’s body in an awkward shape for a long time.
In the cases I’m thinking of, there are domains in which she usually feels either anxious or insecure or both. She mostly doesn’t understand what’s going on, or mostly doesn’t know what to do, or feels embarrassed or decision-paralyzed, or doesn’t know what she wants or what I want, etc. (Sex is one such domain, but often there are many.) And on the other side, I mostly do understand what’s going on, mostly do have a good plan, feel comfortable making decisions, know what we both want, etc. In such a domain, asking her to make decisions is frustrating for both of us; it’s much smoother if I just take charge and tell her what to do (and ask narrow questions of her when I need information, or delegate narrow tasks when I need her to do things).
That’s one type of pressure which pushes toward dom/sub shaped relationships. And when the relationship naturally takes that shape, it feels so much smoother to step into explicit dom/sub roles, rather than trying to maintain a semblance of power balance.
Another pattern I’ve experienced: rather than an inability to make decisions or stress making decisions, she wants to shut down her brain and let someone else handle everything. That’s the sort of thing Aella talks about in her “Good at Sex” series; it applies to the sexual trance state, but also some similar states outside the bedroom like e.g. following in a lot of dances. And on my side, that leaves me a lot of freedom to take things wherever I please; I can act relatively unconstrained. The upshot is similar: the relationship naturally falls into a dom/sub shape, and making it take some other shape feels psychologically forced and uncomfortable.
[I’m not sure how to productively engage here, because it seems like it’s hard to do more than throw our differing impressions at each other, and we should expect to have wildly differing experiences depending on the details of our own psychologies, which are both putting a lot of selection on what social and psychological observations we make of others, and also how we interpret those observations. It’s a bit like discussing shapes in clouds, except with more of an annoying insistence that the shapes we’re seeing correspond to something real in the territory and not just our projections.]
My impression is that this is mostly wrong, or at least least wrong with regard to what I meant by “will-to-Goodness”, though I agree that there are some dynamics like this in play around these topics.
A lot of particularly scrupulous people’s moral behavior routes through social or parental acceptance (who behave in some approved pattern of behavior out of an insecurity). I think that often does involve suppressing their shadow, maybe even in the typical case.
I’ve never known a person with vibrant will-to-Goodness (as I mean it, and as I am able to detect it) who was, to my knowledge, motivated that way.[1]
Further, those people have various issues (from poor emotional regulation, to social-epistemic confidence-anxiety, to various blindspots), but they definitely don’t read to me to be repressing socially-disapproved shadow parts more than most people. Almost the opposite.
However, almost 100% of the cases I’m thinking of are people who are unusually disembodied, which is at least suggestive of repressing something, but not suppression of antisocial desires. That might be a kind of shadow, but it’s not a central example of what comes to mind when people talk about shadow work, and it’s not the kind of thing that is sated by BDSM.
I’m on weaker ground here, but I speculate that the thing that I’m detecting is a morality that is grounded in their own desires for the world, or for how to be, instead of a morality that’s motivationally grounded in a social acceptance desire.
I’m not sure this is true.
My model of the psychology of BDSM has a lot of overlap with Richard’s, but I think there are other dynamics that are probably as important as ‘renouncing antisocial desires’ — in particular, something like ‘blocks to perceiving aspects of vanilla sex/sexuality’ (which can contribute to a desire for kink as nearest-unblocked-strategy). It makes sense to me that disembodiment could be correlated with such blocks.
I can also imagine other plausible-to-me ways that repression of embodiment (and by extension sexuality, but not because it’s seen as antisocial) could contribute to BDSM-orientation, e.g. less integration of sexuality & more influence by developmental [not exactly noise, but things that would be less influential with more consciousness].
This seems insightful and important!
Can you give some examples of people with vibrant will-to-Goodness?
My guess is that the people who are unusually disembodied that you’re thinking of probably suppress a kind of contempt and/or anger at other people who don’t have so much will-to-Goodness.
Uh, I think I don’t want to leave a list of people, who didn’t opt in to being a topic of discussion. But Eliezer has already been mentioned, as an example. We could talk privately about other specific cases.
I think...maybe yes, of all the men that I’m thinking of, but no of all the women that I’m thinking of? Modulo, it doesn’t seem very suppressed.
What am I to conclude about your values from the fact that you’re moderately dominant in bed?
This is a bit amusing for me to read, because while I certainly didn’t have any clarity about the details, your revelations were not surprising, given what its like to interact with you in person, such that it didn’t really feel like a revelation.
To be more specific, I would have guessed that you were generally internally contemptuous of pretty much everyone in a kind of low key way, but “contemptuous” isn’t quite right, because it’s not as active as that—there’s not much emotional heat or ego attachment for you in it, it’s just kind of a background fact of your engagement with the world.
(Noting that these kinds of statements are not that reliable, due to hindsight bias).
With respect to the online rationalist community, my main thing to come out of the closet about is that I was a Young-Earth Creationist all the way up until the end of grad school (and even a Young-Universe Creationist up until the middle of undergrad). Not very rational of me to avoid honestly facing mountains of evidence in order to protect sacred beliefs!
With respect to my family and life-long friends, my main thing to come out of the closet about is that I am now a liberal atheist. Not very respectable of me to willfully join the ranks of the enemy!
My main hurdle in exposing myself on the latter front is not so much my desire to be liked, but my desire not to hurt those I care about. There’s no kind way to inform someone that you think that they are fundamentally wrong about every belief they hold sacred and that they build their entire identity as an individual and a community upon. I am unfortunately the most emotionally stable person I know among those I’m close to, and an unfortunate number of people look up to me as an intelligent person who agrees with them on everything they hold dear, thereby helping them feel more justified in their beliefs. Coming out to them will necessarily create feelings of disappointment, betrayal, devastation, fear, doubt, and/or existential crisis, varying in mixture and intensity according to the individual.
I guess I could offer them the tools of sound epistemology and existential equanimity as a value proposition, but I have doubts as to whether others would see that as a fair trade-off.
I grew up Mormon and remained so until my early 20s and this is very relatable. I do not explain my choices in depth to my family because any sufficiently detailed explanation would inevitably be interpreted as an attack on their beliefs.
Furthermore I’m not going to try to convince them of my point of view, not from fear of failure but fear of success: It would be devastating for their mental and emotional health.
If I’m understanding, you’re saying that being well-received by an online audience when sharing hidden things has less to do with the unacceptability of the thing itself, and more to do with the talent of the writer. Talent in selecting the right people to present to, framing the subject to pique their interest, and just in being plain good with words.
This seems probably true to me, but you might underestimate how big a caveat “having the skills to provide value to an audience” is. An established platform, with writerly experience and long-term feedback on what people respond well to and what they don’t—if you have all these things already, it seems to me you’re already most of the way out of the thicket of feeling not-seen, not-validated, unsafe, etc. Without the grounding of confidence that you can provide value to an audience, revealing hidden things still seems pretty risky.
Plus, if one doesn’t have writing talent, generalized-coming-out-of-the-closet seems like a bad way to try and build it. Then you’re risking the bad feelings of having something shameful exposed publicly, in addition to the general badness of not being received well.
I think the skill of baring your soul to the world (successfully) is really admirable, so I hope I’m wrong and it’s not as risky as it seems.
I’ve been considering “coming out” on a topic for some time now to my family (not in the traditional sense, but on a topic which I nevertheless expect will be painful to discuss). The main reason I feel the need to do so is to achieve a state of truthfulness/wholeness—i.e. I want how other people understand me to align with how I understand myself, and to no longer feel the need to behave in a way that aligns with THEIR image of me.
This post gave me a new perspective that “coming out” could mean something slightly different than what I mention above: the idea that there are aspects of ourselves we don’t actively hide, but which we make a point not to share with some or all of our social groups.
Do you think that/did you observe in your own experiences of “generalized coming out” that you found this feeling of wholeness? In other words, do you feel that your interactions with the community will be fundamentally different post “coming out”? Or was the payoff you experienced primarily in the form of knowing that the community now understands you in a more complete way and still accepts you?
I wrote the Using Negative Hallucinations to Manage Sexual Desire because I thought it might be useful to others. I discovered an effective technique for controlling sexual desire.
I failed to predict a negative response at all. And probably in part this made me not optimize for well-receivedness.
Ultimately what I got out of this is that poeople said that my models where broken and I agreed. So I got a lot of value out this from people disagreeing with me (somehow after that it still took 2 years though to figure out an actually good policy).
Be the most upvoted and well received LW account ever.
Hey guys I think everybody should open up! You just need to make it interesting!
If you browse newest (which is almost impossible to do on lesswrong.com) then you will find someone opening up like this every couple days and almost always getting downvoted and attacked.
I mean, yes, I think those people are failing to make it interesting, so I wrote a post explaining what I think their main error is and what to do instead.
Also, amusing but not relevant to the main point:
This very post was actually the one which finally bumped me ahead of @Raemon.
They always try to make it interesting. I would even say that all these downvoted posts already seem to be trying to follow your advice here. The hard part is guessing correctly. Your advice here is obvious but you clearly have some knowledge/skill/understanding that is not obvious. If you really want to help people accomplish successful closet exit then you will need to give a better tutorial with more detail. I think that would be a good thing to have around.
Your post inspired me to write this.
Interesting post! Thank you.
Firstly, I’d like to warn against solving this issue too well. If you’re ashamed of nudity, for instance, and you accidentally fix this too well—then all you will feel being nude in the future is ‘nothing’. You will have removed the thrill as well. I consider this problem to be similar to being unable to cry, or to being weirdly unaffected when something terrible happens around you.
I think this is true, and that it’s because they already want to get to know you better, or to find a weakness in you which they can exploit. If they want your vulnerability with a value of 0.2, then it’s alright that your insecurity has a negative value of −0.1. The other persons “demand” protects your “supply” from falling below 0 value, so you’re forgiven.
For instance, if I offered you a bottle of water and you didn’t even want it, that could seem quite pathetic, an attempt at giving gifts to be liked, perhaps. But.. What if you were thirsty? Then you’d interpret me as providing value, and not as a person begging to be valued. Other people having an interest in you helps create a situation in which you’re not merely oversharing to strangers online.
Speaking of supply and demand, things are higher value when they’re rare. People usually appreciate you sharing your weakness more if it’s special (i.e. they’re the only person you told). It can come across positively even if this is not the case, but then it’s more of a “This person seems open-minded, so I don’t have to fear being judged by them” interpretation. Nobody would want to cuddle with a hedgehog.
I know much better places to share my soul than LW. Young people seem more accepting in general, they have learned less red flags, so they treat you as an individual. In short, there’s less false positives, projected fears and such. People on LW tend to be high in openness, though, so there’s at least that.
I learn a lot from observing women. Women are good at making weakness, vulnerability, helplessness and other such traits appear endaring rather than pathetic, which impresses me a lot. Turning something bad into something good? If we could generalize this, we wouldn’t even need to reduce suffering, we could simply give it value instead. Idol personalities do similar things, they’re forced to retain a very high value, while still being ordinary and human in a lot of ways in order to connect with their fans. They need to ignore common dating advice like “be cold, stoic, masculine and mature” and still get women to fight over them! In short, this seems more like an artistic skill than a technical one. Can you write a book with a likable villian? Then you can likely also be mischievous in an endaring manner.
Finally, if you don’t want to be judged negatively, avoid moralizers. Preaching in general is a sign that somebody is fighting against something that they’re afraid of, and that they might label you negatively if you remind them of something which they associate with something which they associate with something which they hate or fear. Most traits that somebody else would actually harm you for having are in the category of politics, so I’d also avoid anyone who talks about politics a lot.