Humans seem to have something like an “acceptable target slot” or slots.
Acquiring control over this concept, by any means, gives a person or group incredible leeway to steer individuals, societies, and cultures. These capabilities are sufficiently flexible and powerful that the importance of immunity has often already been built up, especially because historical record overuse is prevalent; this means that methods of taking control include expensive strategies or strategies that are sufficiently complicated as to be hard to track, like changing the behavior of a targeted individual or demographic or type-of-person in order to more easily depict them as acceptable targets, noticing and selecting the best option for acceptable targets, and/or cleverly chaining acceptable targethood from one established type-of-person to another by drawing attention to similarities to similarities that were actually carefully selected for this (or even deliberately induced in one or both of them).
9/11 and Gaza are obvious potential-examples, and most wars in the last century feature this to some extent, but acceptable-target-slot-exploitation is much broader than that; on a more local scale, most interpersonal conflict involves DARVO to some extent, especially when the human brain’s ended up pretty wired to lean heavily into that without consciously noticing.
A solution is to take an agent perspective, and pay closer attention (specifically more than the amount that’s expected or default) any time a person or institution uses reasoning to justify harming or coercing other people or institutions, and to assume that such situations might have been structured to be cognitively difficult to navigate and should generally be avoided or mitigated if possible. If anyone says that some kind of harm is inevitable, notice if someone is being rewarded for gaining access to the slot; many things that seem inevitable are actually a skill issue and only persist because insufficient optimization power has been pointed at them; the human race is currently pushing the frontier for creating non-toxic spaces which are robust to both internal and external factors and actors.
Base rates of harmful tendencies are high among humans (e.g. easily noticing or justifying opportunities to weaken or harm others, or the mind coming alive while doing so), but higher base rates (of any dynamic, not just things that impact various people’s acceptable target slots) also increase the proportion of profoundly strategic people on earth who find that dynamic cognitively available and hold it as a gear in their models and plots.
More like a bin than heuristics, and just attacking/harming (particularly a mutually understood schelling point for attacking, with partial success being more common and more complicated due to the people adversarially aiming for that) rather than dehumanizing which is a loaded term.
My apologies, this post was pointing/grasping in a general direction and I didn’t put much trouble into editing it, there was a typo at the beginning where I seem to have used the wrong word to refer to the slot concept. I just fixed it:
Humans seem to have something like an “acceptable target slot” or slots.
Acquiring control over this conceptslot, by any means, gives a person or group incredible leeway to steer individuals, societies, and cultures.
Humans seem to have something like an “acceptable target slot” or slots.
Acquiring control over this concept, by any means, gives a person or group incredible leeway to steer individuals, societies, and cultures. These capabilities are sufficiently flexible and powerful that the importance of immunity has often already been built up, especially because historical record overuse is prevalent; this means that methods of taking control include expensive strategies or strategies that are sufficiently complicated as to be hard to track, like changing the behavior of a targeted individual or demographic or type-of-person in order to more easily depict them as acceptable targets, noticing and selecting the best option for acceptable targets, and/or cleverly chaining acceptable targethood from one established type-of-person to another by drawing attention to similarities to similarities that were actually carefully selected for this (or even deliberately induced in one or both of them).
9/11 and Gaza are obvious potential-examples, and most wars in the last century feature this to some extent, but acceptable-target-slot-exploitation is much broader than that; on a more local scale, most interpersonal conflict involves DARVO to some extent, especially when the human brain’s ended up pretty wired to lean heavily into that without consciously noticing.
A solution is to take an agent perspective, and pay closer attention (specifically more than the amount that’s expected or default) any time a person or institution uses reasoning to justify harming or coercing other people or institutions, and to assume that such situations might have been structured to be cognitively difficult to navigate and should generally be avoided or mitigated if possible. If anyone says that some kind of harm is inevitable, notice if someone is being rewarded for gaining access to the slot; many things that seem inevitable are actually a skill issue and only persist because insufficient optimization power has been pointed at them; the human race is currently pushing the frontier for creating non-toxic spaces which are robust to both internal and external factors and actors.
Base rates of harmful tendencies are high among humans (e.g. easily noticing or justifying opportunities to weaken or harm others, or the mind coming alive while doing so), but higher base rates (of any dynamic, not just things that impact various people’s acceptable target slots) also increase the proportion of profoundly strategic people on earth who find that dynamic cognitively available and hold it as a gear in their models and plots.
I read this and still don’t understand what an acceptable target slot is.
I think they mean heuristics for who is ok to dehumanize / treat as “other” or harm
More like a bin than heuristics, and just attacking/harming (particularly a mutually understood schelling point for attacking, with partial success being more common and more complicated due to the people adversarially aiming for that) rather than dehumanizing which is a loaded term.
My apologies, this post was pointing/grasping in a general direction and I didn’t put much trouble into editing it, there was a typo at the beginning where I seem to have used the wrong word to refer to the slot concept. I just fixed it:
Did that help?