Clueless World vs. Loser World

After reading this post 2-3 times it started to make some sense to me, so I upvoted it. But the writing was a bit too impenetrable for me to understand it on first read, or to communicate that I would have to read it multiple times to understand it. The fact that it was written by you specifically was the thing that got me to read it multiple times, since I expected there to be hidden value in it, but I am not sure how much I should expect this of other readers.

This is currently making me hesitant to promote it to the frontpage, even though I think the core point is a valuable one.

Let's play the clarification game!

So, in this essay, high-trust SSC readers are Losers, right? They aren't bothering to play competitive status games very much. They don't see the world as full of (social) threats because they are privileged enough not to have to respond to them. So we see cheerful engineers or cheerful camgirls who think everyone is just being nice, partly because they project some kind of Niceness Field, or partly because they're just not very threat-sensitive, because their livelihood is secure enough without having to fear small amounts of social hostility.

Clueless people would be the people who opt in, not out, to mainstream social-status competitions, right? So, these are the women who complain that their world is full of subtle sexist slights, for instance. They're not quite talented enough or lucky enough to be able to ignore it when people respect them a little less; they need to work on constant reputation maintenance, and so they feel the stress of trying to balance the conflicting social demands of femininity. I could say "life's so much simpler when you don't worry about that crap!" but that would be unfair -- my life is structured so I don't have to worry about it.

Is that a good summary?

Fixed a broken link in the first paragraph. Links that aren't prefixed with a http:// are currently registered as internal links. We might want to change that in the long run.

Let me know if you don't want moderators to fix small things like this on future posts.

"It was a huge disappointment for me when Ben Hoffman compellingly argued in favor of parallel social worlds coexisting unobtrusively adjacent to one another without causing a large shift in our community discourse. It was consequentially a huge source of relief when the blog of record, made a similar argument almost exactly a year later, and the discussion was everything I could have hoped for."

I think one factor here is that Scott took efforts to "de-politicise"* the post which made it more sharable and useful as a go-to reference. It also meant that more of the attention was going to focus on the object-level discussion, rather than the general principle.

I do agree that we probably have a bias towards being too skeptical, especially when it comes towards evaluating claims from groups that refuse to apply any skepticism towards claims that they want to believe.

* The post still talks about political issue, but in such a way to try avoiding setting off arguments.