The point of that label is that for someone who already has the status-sense of “my ideas are probably dumb”, any intake point that doesn’t explicitly say “yeah, dumb stuff accepted here” will act as an emotional barrier. If you think what you’re carrying is trash, you’ll only throw it in the bin and not show it to anyone. If someone puts a brightly-colored bin right in front of you instead with “All Ideas Recycling! Two Cents Per Idea”, maybe you’ll toss it in there instead.
In the more general population, I believe the underlying sense to be a very common phenomenon, and easily triggered. Unless there is some other social context propping up a sense of equality, people will regularly feel dumb around you because you used a single long-and-classy-sounding word they didn’t know, or other similar grades of experience. Then they will stop telling you things. Including important things! If someone else who’s aligned can very overtly look less intimidating to step up and catch them, especially if they’re also volunteering some of the filtering effort that might otherwise make a broad net difficult to handle, that’s a huge win, especially because when people stop telling you things they often also stop listening and stop giving you the feedback you need to preserve alliances, much less try to convince them of anything “for real” rather than them walking away and feeling a sense of relief and throwing everything you said in the “that’s not for people like me” zone and never thinking about it again.
Notice what Aryeh Englander emphasized near the beginning of each of these secondary posts: “I noticed that while I had several points I wanted to ask about, I was reluctant to actually ask them”, “I don’t want to spam the group with half-thought-through posts, but I also want to post these ideas”. Beyond their truth value, these act as status-hedges (or anti-hedges, if you want to think of it in the sense of a hedge maze). They connect the idea of “I am feeling the same intimidation as you; I feel as dumb as you feel right now” with “I am acting like it’s okay to be open about this and giving you implicit permission to do the same”, thus helping puncture the bubble. (There is potentially some discussion to be had around the Sequences link I just edited in and what that implies for what can be expected socially, but I don’t want to dig too far unless people are interested and will only say that I don’t think relying on people putting that principle into practice most of the time is realistic in this context.)
The point of that label is that for someone who already has the status-sense of “my ideas are probably dumb”, any intake point that doesn’t explicitly say “yeah, dumb stuff accepted here” will act as an emotional barrier. If you think what you’re carrying is trash, you’ll only throw it in the bin and not show it to anyone. If someone puts a brightly-colored bin right in front of you instead with “All Ideas Recycling! Two Cents Per Idea”, maybe you’ll toss it in there instead.
In the more general population, I believe the underlying sense to be a very common phenomenon, and easily triggered. Unless there is some other social context propping up a sense of equality, people will regularly feel dumb around you because you used a single long-and-classy-sounding word they didn’t know, or other similar grades of experience. Then they will stop telling you things. Including important things! If someone else who’s aligned can very overtly look less intimidating to step up and catch them, especially if they’re also volunteering some of the filtering effort that might otherwise make a broad net difficult to handle, that’s a huge win, especially because when people stop telling you things they often also stop listening and stop giving you the feedback you need to preserve alliances, much less try to convince them of anything “for real” rather than them walking away and feeling a sense of relief and throwing everything you said in the “that’s not for people like me” zone and never thinking about it again.
Notice what Aryeh Englander emphasized near the beginning of each of these secondary posts: “I noticed that while I had several points I wanted to ask about, I was reluctant to actually ask them”, “I don’t want to spam the group with half-thought-through posts, but I also want to post these ideas”. Beyond their truth value, these act as status-hedges (or anti-hedges, if you want to think of it in the sense of a hedge maze). They connect the idea of “I am feeling the same intimidation as you; I feel as dumb as you feel right now” with “I am acting like it’s okay to be open about this and giving you implicit permission to do the same”, thus helping puncture the bubble. (There is potentially some discussion to be had around the Sequences link I just edited in and what that implies for what can be expected socially, but I don’t want to dig too far unless people are interested and will only say that I don’t think relying on people putting that principle into practice most of the time is realistic in this context.)