Here’s how I use the terms “(natural) reality” and “social reality”:
Natural reality is “that which doesn’t go away if you stop believing in it” (P. K. Dick).
Social reality is that which doesn’t go away when you alone stop believing in it, but it does go away proportionally to how many people stop believing in it (weighted, it seems, by something like “social belief negotiating power”, or what pick-up artists would call “the strength of one’s frame”, I think). Example: “Bob is the highest-status person in this social group.”
Why call it “reality”?
Eliezer said about reality in general: “I need different names for the thingies that determine my predictions and the thingy that determines my experimental results. I call the former thingies ‘belief’, and the latter thingy ‘reality’” (from The Simple Truth).
From your individual point of view, social reality behaves exactly like that—it is given; you are a price-taker; you can run experiments against it and it will determine the results.
The scope of what falls under natural reality, i.e. what doesn’t go away when person X stops believing in it, is the same for every X; it is objective.
The funny thing about social reality is that it’s not objective in this sense. For someone with a very strong frame, the scope of social reality (i.e. what doesn’t go away when they stop believing in it, or more interestingly put, what doesn’t materialize as soon as they start believing in it) is very small, and vice versa. (“Funny” mostly for the strong-frame people, because their life seems almost magically easier from the POV of someone who happens to have a combination of a much weaker frame and very low status. I assume it’s not very funny for the latter person.)
Things can also fall in and out of the scope of your social reality (e.g. when you move to go to college, you can reinvent your social role, but then it slowly ossifies around you and becomes inescapable reality).
(I wanted to link Valentine Smith’s post on the Intelligent Social Web as a more in-depth explanation, but I noticed you commented on it, so I could’ve saved myself the trouble and just said “yeah, that”. Well, nevermind.)
Here’s how I use the terms “(natural) reality” and “social reality”:
Natural reality is “that which doesn’t go away if you stop believing in it” (P. K. Dick).
Social reality is that which doesn’t go away when you alone stop believing in it, but it does go away proportionally to how many people stop believing in it (weighted, it seems, by something like “social belief negotiating power”, or what pick-up artists would call “the strength of one’s frame”, I think). Example: “Bob is the highest-status person in this social group.”
Why call it “reality”?
Eliezer said about reality in general: “I need different names for the thingies that determine my predictions and the thingy that determines my experimental results. I call the former thingies ‘belief’, and the latter thingy ‘reality’” (from The Simple Truth).
From your individual point of view, social reality behaves exactly like that—it is given; you are a price-taker; you can run experiments against it and it will determine the results.
The scope of what falls under natural reality, i.e. what doesn’t go away when person X stops believing in it, is the same for every X; it is objective.
The funny thing about social reality is that it’s not objective in this sense. For someone with a very strong frame, the scope of social reality (i.e. what doesn’t go away when they stop believing in it, or more interestingly put, what doesn’t materialize as soon as they start believing in it) is very small, and vice versa. (“Funny” mostly for the strong-frame people, because their life seems almost magically easier from the POV of someone who happens to have a combination of a much weaker frame and very low status. I assume it’s not very funny for the latter person.)
Things can also fall in and out of the scope of your social reality (e.g. when you move to go to college, you can reinvent your social role, but then it slowly ossifies around you and becomes inescapable reality).
(I wanted to link Valentine Smith’s post on the Intelligent Social Web as a more in-depth explanation, but I noticed you commented on it, so I could’ve saved myself the trouble and just said “yeah, that”. Well, nevermind.)