LessWrong 2.0 Reader

Excellent summary! Would be interested in a list of corollaries to this, i.e.:

a) If "condemned" X is necessary for "prestigious" Y, people with Y will mislead and lie to the public about how they achieved Y, despite wanting others to attain success at Y too. Furthermore, the narrative of their path to achieving Y without anything to do with X will be extremely uniform & coordinated despite any huge differences amongst people with Y. For example, some Y people have X, some don't, some hope for others to attain Y, some don't- but the "public narrative" all with Y tell will still end up extremely uniform.

This corollary was extremely unintuitive to me- outlined my experience in a "condemned X" which was often needed for "prestigious Y" if anyone is curious of how the corollary plays out in practice (in my direct comment to this post).

Jimmy phrased it really well- the "lizardmen" don't want to let anyone know precisely because they won't be perceived by you as rational/moral humans as you would've without knowing, but rather "lizardmen". 

"how one might ever become justifiably confident a particular piece of dark matter really doesn't exist or is as rare as you'd suspect it is" - as someone in a "lizardman" community myself (commented regarding my own experience), probably one of the only ways to know for sure is to join as a lizardman. Any other way, you'll be inundated with misinformation, speculation, and even red herrings directed at distorting the "map" as much as possible for anyone trying to understand lizardmen. 

For my part, after joining the lizardman community, I did realize the prevalance was about 100x what I'd previously assumed, just as OP predicted. 

As for trading action for knowledge, I personally wouldn't share my "membership" with anyone in my close social circle unless they gave me something equally taboo. I wouldn't believe anyone's commitment to not be upset, because often disgust or horror is a gut reaction and uncontrollable. Never mind trusting others to keep any secret without a counterweight.

Okay hopefully the layering worked to hide the answer- 

The X I was talking about is being extremely thin- model thin. And the social dark matter is "anorexia".

I've always wanted to be model-thin, and slender women online would say to eat healthy, moderate portions, exercise, drink water, don't starve or be unhealthy, etc. And emphasize to avoid eating disorder behaviors (putting big red stop signs around even the borders of ED territory!) because during the height of the "fat acceptance" movement anyone even giving weight loss advice would get ED accusations thrown at them- which would then often get them deplatformed, demonetized, etc.

It's only once I got fed up never reaching my goal weight, that I decided "eff it" and crossed the huge red stop signs into ED forums to see what they spoke about. And since then I've made rapid progress & easily broke past barriers I'd never been able to in 10+ years to listening to "mainstream" advice. In this "social dark matter" community, everyone talks about doing everything they can to hide the truth from their friends & family, and plan what lies they can say to maintain the image of natural or effortless thinness. I've never suspected anyone I knew of EDs in the past, but now I see several people who say things straight out of the "playbook"- it's like a united "public narrative" of what people can say if accused of EDs or anorexia.

As with your "law of extremity", people immediately think "eating disorder" means you look like a wartime victim on the brink of death. But really most women in that community have society's "perfect" body type. 

(I have so much to say on how my mindset and understanding of the "map" of weight loss changed after unlocking the secret community I was told to avoid at all costs, but unsure if anyone would be interested given this forum's likely male majority.)

Anyways, this experience made me rather skeptical of instances where all people of X prestigious trait claim the same story about how they attained X. For example, how so many Silicon Valley VCs say they got where they are through being good people, honest, and never shady, because anyone who backstabbed or was dishonest would be kicked out of the industry through not receiving deal flow. Of course the logic makes sense to me on initial inspection and I'd like to believe it, but the incentive structure for adhering strictly to that "public narrative" regardless of if you're honest or a "backstabber" is self evident.

Overall, it's just fascinating and unintuitive to me. Before, I'd have guessed, "maybe they're lying because they don't want me to attain X too!". But in reality there's so many reasons people mislead & distort the map despite wanting others to also attain X.

When I click "New Post", I see this

(did you guess & comment X?)

(open if you've guessed X already)

Love how you named this "Social Dark Matter", I recently came across an instance of this that you didn't mention! 

It came in the form of "group of people prestigious in X way". I really wanted to join that group with X trait, and so studied what "X people" had to say about how they got that way & their journey, advice, pitfalls to avoid, etc. Only after 10+ years did I stumble across the fact that almost all people with the highest X actually attained it through going deep into the very "pitfall" they advised to steer clear of. But because of the "law of extremity" you mentioned, none of them could share the true way to attain X without being socially ostracized and likely banned from their respective platforms. So they all lie and say untrue or exaggerated things about their journey to obtaining X.

Overall, this dynamic is severely detrimental and even actively sabotaging to anyone attempting to attain X. And while everyone involved has good intentions, this "social dark matter" likely contributes heavily to the "lack of X" epidemic in the world.

I'd love for anyone reading to guess what "X" I'm referring to and comment below before revealing the answer!

(I'll hide it a few layers down in the replies to this comment)



 

Wow, this part really resonated with me:

This is why "build a 10% better mousetrap" is a legitimate goal, but "build a 10% better web portal for artists" is not. The 10% improvement means nothing if the community accuses you of being a greedy selfish bastard who only cares about money and not about art, and they blacklist you and everyone who cooperates with you. And yes, if you understand how the game is played, the initiators of the backlash are those who profit from the existing system. But you can't say this out loud; it would only prove that you care about the money. So both sides will keep arguing complete bullshit, trying to get the confused people on their side. The important thing is to get confused high-status people on your side, because then the rest will follow. 

Certainly have noticed a similar dynamic where people take pride in & applaud blind faith in the project & founders, and those who profess to be in it for love of community & not money are rewarded socially. Very cult like behavior, which of course is perfect for the leaders & ideal for that startup's "customer base", so I definitely applaud the founders for doing their job exceptionally. 

Lately I've been fascinated by these group dynamics, and how power & influence lie among any given "scene". Joined 3 vastly different scenes lately, which have vastly different norms, nearly 0 overlap, and norms/status symbols that aren't even on the same axes- it's been fascinating on my end to constantly context switch & pick up on what the differences vs commonalities are in these totally different communities.

I bet there's many axioms or essays out there about navigating the rules of social scenes, but so far only one leaps to mind for me.

I maybe mistaken as to the availability of the lab grown meat to the general public. apparently they are no longer on sale

https://www.wired.com/story/upside-foods-good-meat-cultivated-lab-grown-sale-stopped-singapore-california-crenn/

seem like my information are out of date

I've had caps lock remapped to escape for a few years now, and I also remapped a bunch of symbol keys like parentheses to be easier to type when coding. On other people's computers it is slower for me type text with symbols or use vim, but I don't mind since all of my deeply focused work (when the mini-distraction of reaching for a difficult key is most costly) happens on my own computers.