I don’t have a clear hypothesis, so I will instead write down a few pretty disparate observations that feel related.
One thing I was surprised by around the Petrov Day Red Button was people saying they could not imagine that someone would actually care about the ritual. This felt like it was relevant to understanding why culture is hard to build and maintain.
I was fairly unhappy with my graduation ceremony at University. All of our families were sat above each other in a tall circular room, while a man in formal robes said that the students had grown into adults through their work at the university. I feel like the parents and university staff were coordinating around a world where this narrative was true, and that people would respect us because we had a degree. But I didn’t grow because of my university, I grew in spite of it, and people no longer trust that a degree means much. I feel like the parents and the man in the centre of the room all thought it did, and I imagine once they were correct.
I’ve been thinking about internet subcultures other than LessWrong and Effective Altruism, and thinking about how to help them out more. I think one thing that’s common is that the people trying to lead in building the infrastructure are not the people who started the culture but just people who are mood-affiliated and like the initial people. I also feel like such people are much more scared to act out what’s distinctive about their subculture, and thus normalize it a lot more.
Robin had a good recent post about how basically every country in the world coordinated to execute the same regulations around COVID – no experiments, no variolation, etc. This feels really alarming to me, like this fact should be central in my understanding of the world, whereas at the minute it feels like a thing I’m ignoring (whilst nonetheless continuing to anticipate).
I have an anticipation whereby if you want to be part of the popular discourse yet not simply ‘play your role’, you have to walk through fields of people saying awful things about you. I felt like OpenAI did it with their work on release practices, where most of the public dialogue was not ’staggered release versus open science’ but was more like ‘is OpenAI fundamentally immoral for doing this or not‘. I feel like Musk does it constantly, and I think that Musk not letting this get to him this is part of what allows his basic successes with Tesla and SpaceX to be part of the discussion.
Dave Chappelle has been very successful and given respect and prestige while nonetheless ignoring all the pressures on him to bend the knee, and instead just being funny. Which is strange. It stands out to me that he lives in the same small town in Ohio that he grew up in, raises his family there and knows everyone there, rather than having moved to one of the major coastal cities for his work like LA or New York.
If I were to try to make things up this minute. I’d say I feel like there aren’t enough heroes, and that the main times most of my heroes are brought up in popular culture is to attack and destroy their reputation, and that the internet makes things very contextless and ignores people’s history and positive reputation. So I feel like the internet has made people think there are no good people to look up to, and this makes it harder to trust new people.
Sounds like internet increased our ability to coordinate on destroying things and people. (Also to coordinate on doing useful things, but not that much, because we already had some mechanisms for that.)
An example for the light side of online coordination would be Kickstarter, and the obvious example for the dark side would be Twitter. Twitter can probably destroy orders of magnitude faster than Kickstarter can build.
So I feel like the internet has made people think there are no good people to look up to, and this makes it harder to trust new people.
This strongly clicked for me. It feels like there is more to say around this (and I don’t know what / don’t know how to say it yet), but this feels like part of the puzzle.
[Added:] Actually, perhaps it seems even more central to me that it feels like the same thing that has made people think there are no good people to look up to also has made have a decreased sense of looking up to institutional cultures. Like, my inner simulator imagines that people joining the NYT look up less to the existing institutional culture than in previous generations, in ways that are bound up with looking up less to the existing staff.
I have an anticipation whereby if you want to be part of the popular discourse yet not simply ‘play your role’, you have to walk through fields of people saying awful things about you. [...] I feel like Musk does it constantly, and I think that Musk not letting this get to him this is part of what allows his basic successes with Tesla and SpaceX to be part of the discussion.
By contrast, this feels to me like a different question: I don’t think the stable, cooperative institutions of old were all that good at “not simply playing your role”. It would be great to have a new kind of institution that is good at both of these, and it seems conceivable that this is part of the puzzle about how to build stable cooperative institutions at all in our times, but my guess is that it’s not a big part of the answer to where these institutions used to come from.
I feel like the parents and the man in the centre of the room all thought it did, and I imagine once they were correct.
I feel this too.
About many traditions.
Let me posit some statements:
people exist in plurality-relevant numbers who feel very strongly that we should Have Traditions(tm) to reinforce what we value.
historical groups valued what they valued. when they didn’t, they tend to war about it. they took actions which made sense at the time to support their values, and the common useful ones solidified into traditions.
borders between communities start to dissolve. Every culture bleeds into the others, and this shifts values. Not entirely, and not uniformly. A bunch of traditions now almost fit, or only fit part of the community.
You won’t get far if you try to create new traditions now; you can’t maintain distance from the rest of the mishmash long enough for differences approaches to evolve and solidify.
I don’t have a clear hypothesis, so I will instead write down a few pretty disparate observations that feel related.
One thing I was surprised by around the Petrov Day Red Button was people saying they could not imagine that someone would actually care about the ritual. This felt like it was relevant to understanding why culture is hard to build and maintain.
I was fairly unhappy with my graduation ceremony at University. All of our families were sat above each other in a tall circular room, while a man in formal robes said that the students had grown into adults through their work at the university. I feel like the parents and university staff were coordinating around a world where this narrative was true, and that people would respect us because we had a degree. But I didn’t grow because of my university, I grew in spite of it, and people no longer trust that a degree means much. I feel like the parents and the man in the centre of the room all thought it did, and I imagine once they were correct.
I’ve been thinking about internet subcultures other than LessWrong and Effective Altruism, and thinking about how to help them out more. I think one thing that’s common is that the people trying to lead in building the infrastructure are not the people who started the culture but just people who are mood-affiliated and like the initial people. I also feel like such people are much more scared to act out what’s distinctive about their subculture, and thus normalize it a lot more.
Robin had a good recent post about how basically every country in the world coordinated to execute the same regulations around COVID – no experiments, no variolation, etc. This feels really alarming to me, like this fact should be central in my understanding of the world, whereas at the minute it feels like a thing I’m ignoring (whilst nonetheless continuing to anticipate).
I have an anticipation whereby if you want to be part of the popular discourse yet not simply ‘play your role’, you have to walk through fields of people saying awful things about you. I felt like OpenAI did it with their work on release practices, where most of the public dialogue was not ’staggered release versus open science’ but was more like ‘is OpenAI fundamentally immoral for doing this or not‘. I feel like Musk does it constantly, and I think that Musk not letting this get to him this is part of what allows his basic successes with Tesla and SpaceX to be part of the discussion.
Dave Chappelle has been very successful and given respect and prestige while nonetheless ignoring all the pressures on him to bend the knee, and instead just being funny. Which is strange. It stands out to me that he lives in the same small town in Ohio that he grew up in, raises his family there and knows everyone there, rather than having moved to one of the major coastal cities for his work like LA or New York.
If I were to try to make things up this minute. I’d say I feel like there aren’t enough heroes, and that the main times most of my heroes are brought up in popular culture is to attack and destroy their reputation, and that the internet makes things very contextless and ignores people’s history and positive reputation. So I feel like the internet has made people think there are no good people to look up to, and this makes it harder to trust new people.
Sounds like internet increased our ability to coordinate on destroying things and people. (Also to coordinate on doing useful things, but not that much, because we already had some mechanisms for that.)
An example for the light side of online coordination would be Kickstarter, and the obvious example for the dark side would be Twitter. Twitter can probably destroy orders of magnitude faster than Kickstarter can build.
This strongly clicked for me. It feels like there is more to say around this (and I don’t know what / don’t know how to say it yet), but this feels like part of the puzzle.
[Added:] Actually, perhaps it seems even more central to me that it feels like the same thing that has made people think there are no good people to look up to also has made have a decreased sense of looking up to institutional cultures. Like, my inner simulator imagines that people joining the NYT look up less to the existing institutional culture than in previous generations, in ways that are bound up with looking up less to the existing staff.
jsalvatier’s answer also clicks and feels relevant.
By contrast, this feels to me like a different question: I don’t think the stable, cooperative institutions of old were all that good at “not simply playing your role”. It would be great to have a new kind of institution that is good at both of these, and it seems conceivable that this is part of the puzzle about how to build stable cooperative institutions at all in our times, but my guess is that it’s not a big part of the answer to where these institutions used to come from.
Thank you for letting me know :)
(I will move my comment to an answer, given that it’s seemed to be helpful.)
I feel this too.
About many traditions.
Let me posit some statements:
people exist in plurality-relevant numbers who feel very strongly that we should Have Traditions(tm) to reinforce what we value.
historical groups valued what they valued. when they didn’t, they tend to war about it. they took actions which made sense at the time to support their values, and the common useful ones solidified into traditions.
borders between communities start to dissolve. Every culture bleeds into the others, and this shifts values. Not entirely, and not uniformly. A bunch of traditions now almost fit, or only fit part of the community.
You won’t get far if you try to create new traditions now; you can’t maintain distance from the rest of the mishmash long enough for differences approaches to evolve and solidify.