First of all, this is an excellent and important post. I wanted to add some thoughts:
I think the core issue that is described here is a malevolent attempt for dominance via subtle manipulation. The problem with this is that this is anti-inductive, e.g., when manipulative techniques become common knowledge, clever perpetrators stop using them and switch to other methods. It’s a bit similar to defender-attacker dynamics in cyber-security. Attackers find weaknesses, and these get patched, so attackers find new weaknesses. An example would be the PUA community “negs” that once became common knowledge lost all effectiveness.
In social dynamics, the problem happens when predators are more sophisticated than their prey and thus can be later in logical time, e.g., an intelligent predator that reads this post can understand that it’s vital for him to show some fake submissive behaviors (See Benquo comment) to avoid clueing in others of his nefarious nature. So he can avoid being “checklisted” and continue manipulating his unsuspecting victims.
But even though this entire social dynamics situation has an anti-inductive illegible nightmarish background, there is still value in listing red flags and checklists because it will make manipulation harder and more expensive for the attacker. Sociopaths hate/are unable sometimes to be submissive. Hence, they need to pay a higher cost to fake this behavior than benevolent actors, which is a good thing! But still, you always need to consider that a sophisticated enough sociopath can always fool you. The only thing you can do is increase the level of sophistication required by being more sophisticated yourself, and for practical purposes, it’s usually good enough.
One of the reasons we’re not already totally dominated by psychopaths is that the vast majority of them have impulse control/time horizon issues that make their behavior incoherent on longer time scales than saying whatever they think is optimal to the target in the present moment. Simply delaying the short feedback loops psychopaths use to get inside your OODA loop is often enough for them to move on to easier targets.
I have an extremely visceral reaction to time pressure and seeing it always updates me strongly in the direction of the person being unsafe.
First of all, this is an excellent and important post. I wanted to add some thoughts:
I think the core issue that is described here is a malevolent attempt for dominance via subtle manipulation. The problem with this is that this is anti-inductive, e.g., when manipulative techniques become common knowledge, clever perpetrators stop using them and switch to other methods. It’s a bit similar to defender-attacker dynamics in cyber-security. Attackers find weaknesses, and these get patched, so attackers find new weaknesses. An example would be the PUA community “negs” that once became common knowledge lost all effectiveness.
In social dynamics, the problem happens when predators are more sophisticated than their prey and thus can be later in logical time, e.g., an intelligent predator that reads this post can understand that it’s vital for him to show some fake submissive behaviors (See Benquo comment) to avoid clueing in others of his nefarious nature. So he can avoid being “checklisted” and continue manipulating his unsuspecting victims.
But even though this entire social dynamics situation has an anti-inductive illegible nightmarish background, there is still value in listing red flags and checklists because it will make manipulation harder and more expensive for the attacker. Sociopaths hate/are unable sometimes to be submissive. Hence, they need to pay a higher cost to fake this behavior than benevolent actors, which is a good thing! But still, you always need to consider that a sophisticated enough sociopath can always fool you. The only thing you can do is increase the level of sophistication required by being more sophisticated yourself, and for practical purposes, it’s usually good enough.
One of the reasons we’re not already totally dominated by psychopaths is that the vast majority of them have impulse control/time horizon issues that make their behavior incoherent on longer time scales than saying whatever they think is optimal to the target in the present moment. Simply delaying the short feedback loops psychopaths use to get inside your OODA loop is often enough for them to move on to easier targets.
I have an extremely visceral reaction to time pressure and seeing it always updates me strongly in the direction of the person being unsafe.