I think it’s mostly from thinking about it in terms of means instead of ends. Like, my read of “narrative syncing” is that it is information transfer, but about ‘social reality’ instead of ‘physical reality’; it’s intersubjective instead of objective.
There’s also something going on here where I think most in-the-moment examples of this aren’t backchained, and are instead something like ‘people mimicking familiar patterns’? That can make it ambiguous whether or not a pattern is backchained, if it’s sometimes done for explicitly backchainy reasons and is sometimes others copying that behavior.
Do you agree that the social pressure in the pineapple and nose-picking examples isn’t backchained from something like “don’t spoil our game, we need everyone in this space to think/speak a certain way about this or our game will break”?
Suppose some people are allergic to peanuts, and so a space decides to not allow peanuts; I think the “[normatively]: peanuts aren’t allowed here” is an example of narrative syncing. Is this backchained from “allowing peanuts will spoil our game”? Ehhh… maybe? Maybe the anti-peanut faction ended up wanting the norm more than the pro-peanut faction, and so it’s backchained but not in the way you’re pointing at. Maybe being a space that was anti-peanut ended up advantaging this space over adjacent competitive spaces, such that it is connected with “or our game will break” but it’s indirect.
Also, I predict a lot of this is the result of ‘play’ or ‘cognitive immaturity’, or something? Like, there might be high-stakes issues that you need to enforce conformity on or the game breaks, and low-stakes issues that you don’t need to enforce conformity on, but which are useful for training how to do conformity-enforcement (and perhaps evade enemy conformity-enforcement). Or it may be that someone is not doing map-territory distinctions or subjective-objective distinctions when it comes to preferences; Alice saying “I like pineapple on pizza” is heard by Bob in a way that doesn’t cash it out to “Alice prefers pizza with pineapple” but instead something like “pineapple on pizza is good” or “Bob prefers pizza with pineapple”, both of which should be fought.
I think it’s mostly from thinking about it in terms of means instead of ends. Like, my read of “narrative syncing” is that it is information transfer, but about ‘social reality’ instead of ‘physical reality’; it’s intersubjective instead of objective.
There’s also something going on here where I think most in-the-moment examples of this aren’t backchained, and are instead something like ‘people mimicking familiar patterns’? That can make it ambiguous whether or not a pattern is backchained, if it’s sometimes done for explicitly backchainy reasons and is sometimes others copying that behavior.
Suppose some people are allergic to peanuts, and so a space decides to not allow peanuts; I think the “[normatively]: peanuts aren’t allowed here” is an example of narrative syncing. Is this backchained from “allowing peanuts will spoil our game”? Ehhh… maybe? Maybe the anti-peanut faction ended up wanting the norm more than the pro-peanut faction, and so it’s backchained but not in the way you’re pointing at. Maybe being a space that was anti-peanut ended up advantaging this space over adjacent competitive spaces, such that it is connected with “or our game will break” but it’s indirect.
Also, I predict a lot of this is the result of ‘play’ or ‘cognitive immaturity’, or something? Like, there might be high-stakes issues that you need to enforce conformity on or the game breaks, and low-stakes issues that you don’t need to enforce conformity on, but which are useful for training how to do conformity-enforcement (and perhaps evade enemy conformity-enforcement). Or it may be that someone is not doing map-territory distinctions or subjective-objective distinctions when it comes to preferences; Alice saying “I like pineapple on pizza” is heard by Bob in a way that doesn’t cash it out to “Alice prefers pizza with pineapple” but instead something like “pineapple on pizza is good” or “Bob prefers pizza with pineapple”, both of which should be fought.