Our caveman/cavewomen brains think that we will only ever interact with a very small number of people, and losing the respect of anyone could materially worsen our chances of survival in a crisis.
Determining for how many people that caveperson assumption is valid is difficult, since their lack of support network-building ability also makes them easy to overlook. Such people do exist, however, and I would not be surprised if they appear at higher frequencies among marginalized demographics, especially the sort that would otherwise have interest in communities such as LessWrong.
I doubt that the author of the linked article is in such a situation, however; when a blog post directed at one individual gets linked at a larger community blog and receives >70 comments discussing it and its message, my prior probability for “someone with an unstable social network and an inability to repair damage to said network” is adjusted way downward.
I don’t think laboring under ancestral-style social assumptions necessarily implies a weak or unstable social support network, or problems maintaining social links. Particularly not the latter; if you’re working with a set of unremediated instincts telling you that losing rapport with anyone in your ingroup is a disaster, then it follows that you should invest heavily in repairing any damage to it.
It does suggest some failure modes that wouldn’t be present in the network of someone more willing to burn bridges, but we’re talking differences in style and overall optimization, not being strictly worse at everything social.
Determining for how many people that caveperson assumption is valid is difficult, since their lack of support network-building ability also makes them easy to overlook. Such people do exist, however, and I would not be surprised if they appear at higher frequencies among marginalized demographics, especially the sort that would otherwise have interest in communities such as LessWrong.
I doubt that the author of the linked article is in such a situation, however; when a blog post directed at one individual gets linked at a larger community blog and receives >70 comments discussing it and its message, my prior probability for “someone with an unstable social network and an inability to repair damage to said network” is adjusted way downward.
I don’t think laboring under ancestral-style social assumptions necessarily implies a weak or unstable social support network, or problems maintaining social links. Particularly not the latter; if you’re working with a set of unremediated instincts telling you that losing rapport with anyone in your ingroup is a disaster, then it follows that you should invest heavily in repairing any damage to it.
It does suggest some failure modes that wouldn’t be present in the network of someone more willing to burn bridges, but we’re talking differences in style and overall optimization, not being strictly worse at everything social.