I suspect that you may be used to dealing with groups where an individual who associates with a disvalued individual is themselves disvalued and cut off, which can totally swamp any contribution that the disvalued individual might make to the individual who might otherwise associate with them.
The easiest solution to this problem is to avoid such groups—the heuristic “don’t go where you aren’t welcome” addresses this reasonably well, though for best results you’ll flip it to “do go where you are welcome”. (You’ll also need to learn what being welcome somewhere looks like, but that’s not as intractable as I expect you’re assuming.)
I’m not sure if it’s a matter of “learning what being welcome somewhere looks like”, as much as “learning to tell the difference between being welcome somewhere, and being groomed as a mark/patsy/omega”. Right now, I tend to assume that the best detector suite that I have for telling the difference produces so many false positives (falsely detecting legitimate invitations as traps) and false negatives (falsely detecting traps as legitimate invitations), that it’s simply not energy-effective to bother with groups at all, unless I know that I possess enough raw power and leverage to maintain my position through pure realpolitik.
I have good reason to believe that my detector produces false negatives, because when it tells me that there’s a trap and I ignore it, I sometimes meet genuine friends. I have good reason to believe that my detector produces false positives, because the ratio of positives that I detect is far, far more than the ratio of positives that others declare that they detect, and far, far more than the ratio of positives that others declare that I should be detecting. The two competing hypotheses are that I am paranoid (i.e., producing too many false positives), or that most people are lying about whether most people are lying—which, even if it were true, would not be a pragmatically useful belief to entertain.
Cases of ‘being groomed as an omega’ are incredibly rare, in my experience—like, I’ve heard of it happening between individuals, and my model supports a couple of cases where it could look like a group thing because the individual who’s decided to do that has followers who will go along with them (aka bullying), but for the most part when it comes to social groups that aren’t built entirely around a particular leader (which is usually fairly obvious), they’re either broken enough to shit on most everybody in them to one degree or another, or cases of abuse are the unintended result of personality conflicts or fairly predictable responses by group members to the abused party’s behavior. (This is only intended to cover cases of keeping someone around to have them be an omega, though—trying to drive an unwanted interloper out by making them uncomfortable also happens, and I think it’s fairly common but I’m not sure of the frequency—how I select for groups to interact with biases me too much to comment on the issue.)
I suspect from your description of things that that last thing is the case for you—that you’re making it easier for people to treat you poorly than to treat you well, which ends badly unless you’re dealing with people who refuse to treat people poorly even in the face of that situation. If that’s the case, it’s a problem with a few different solutions; ‘strongly select for people who refuse to abuse others’ seems likely to be the most viable one for you in the short to medium term. (Possibly in the long term, too, though I suspect that if it works, you’ll end up learning enough to be able to relax your selection criteria some.)
Cases of ‘being groomed as an omega’ are incredibly rare, in my experience—like, I’ve heard of it happening between individuals, and my model supports a couple of cases where it could look like a group thing because the individual who’s decided to do that has followers who will go along with them (aka bullying), but for the most part when it comes to social groups that aren’t built entirely around a particular leader (which is usually fairly obvious), they’re either broken enough to shit on most everybody in them to one degree or another, or cases of abuse are the unintended result of personality conflicts or fairly predictable responses by group members to the abused party’s behavior. (This is only intended to cover cases of keeping someone around to have them be an omega, though—trying to drive an unwanted interloper out by making them uncomfortable also happens, and I think it’s fairly common but I’m not sure of the frequency—how I select for groups to interact with biases me too much to comment on the issue.)
I think your conception of intentionality is causing you to see a nuanced distinction between “grooming X as an omega” and “abuse as an unintended result of personality conflicts/fairly predictable responses to behavior”.
I don’t have a real concept of ‘intentionality’ to fall back on, so I may not be capable of perceiving that nuance.
Disregarding the ‘personality conflict’ situation for the moment, the predictive difference between the other two mostly has to do with what happens when you stop acting like an easy victim in social interactions: In the grooming case, you’ll most likely just be ignored; in the response-to-behavior case, you’ll start seeing an uptick in positive interactions.
No; I’ve been having a lot of trouble figuring out how to access PMs in a way that doesn’t get lost in the stream of the site. Is there some way to filter PMs from discussion comments?
nod it’s happened to me continuously since grade school, which I believe is part of a feedback loop—the first incidents all trained me (justifiably) to only interact with people in ways that reinforce the loop, because situations which tried to escape or quell the feedback loop led to inflictions of physical and emotional torment.
I suspect that you may be used to dealing with groups where an individual who associates with a disvalued individual is themselves disvalued and cut off, which can totally swamp any contribution that the disvalued individual might make to the individual who might otherwise associate with them.
The easiest solution to this problem is to avoid such groups—the heuristic “don’t go where you aren’t welcome” addresses this reasonably well, though for best results you’ll flip it to “do go where you are welcome”. (You’ll also need to learn what being welcome somewhere looks like, but that’s not as intractable as I expect you’re assuming.)
I’m not sure if it’s a matter of “learning what being welcome somewhere looks like”, as much as “learning to tell the difference between being welcome somewhere, and being groomed as a mark/patsy/omega”. Right now, I tend to assume that the best detector suite that I have for telling the difference produces so many false positives (falsely detecting legitimate invitations as traps) and false negatives (falsely detecting traps as legitimate invitations), that it’s simply not energy-effective to bother with groups at all, unless I know that I possess enough raw power and leverage to maintain my position through pure realpolitik.
I have good reason to believe that my detector produces false negatives, because when it tells me that there’s a trap and I ignore it, I sometimes meet genuine friends. I have good reason to believe that my detector produces false positives, because the ratio of positives that I detect is far, far more than the ratio of positives that others declare that they detect, and far, far more than the ratio of positives that others declare that I should be detecting. The two competing hypotheses are that I am paranoid (i.e., producing too many false positives), or that most people are lying about whether most people are lying—which, even if it were true, would not be a pragmatically useful belief to entertain.
Cases of ‘being groomed as an omega’ are incredibly rare, in my experience—like, I’ve heard of it happening between individuals, and my model supports a couple of cases where it could look like a group thing because the individual who’s decided to do that has followers who will go along with them (aka bullying), but for the most part when it comes to social groups that aren’t built entirely around a particular leader (which is usually fairly obvious), they’re either broken enough to shit on most everybody in them to one degree or another, or cases of abuse are the unintended result of personality conflicts or fairly predictable responses by group members to the abused party’s behavior. (This is only intended to cover cases of keeping someone around to have them be an omega, though—trying to drive an unwanted interloper out by making them uncomfortable also happens, and I think it’s fairly common but I’m not sure of the frequency—how I select for groups to interact with biases me too much to comment on the issue.)
I suspect from your description of things that that last thing is the case for you—that you’re making it easier for people to treat you poorly than to treat you well, which ends badly unless you’re dealing with people who refuse to treat people poorly even in the face of that situation. If that’s the case, it’s a problem with a few different solutions; ‘strongly select for people who refuse to abuse others’ seems likely to be the most viable one for you in the short to medium term. (Possibly in the long term, too, though I suspect that if it works, you’ll end up learning enough to be able to relax your selection criteria some.)
I think your conception of intentionality is causing you to see a nuanced distinction between “grooming X as an omega” and “abuse as an unintended result of personality conflicts/fairly predictable responses to behavior”.
I don’t have a real concept of ‘intentionality’ to fall back on, so I may not be capable of perceiving that nuance.
Sure.
Disregarding the ‘personality conflict’ situation for the moment, the predictive difference between the other two mostly has to do with what happens when you stop acting like an easy victim in social interactions: In the grooming case, you’ll most likely just be ignored; in the response-to-behavior case, you’ll start seeing an uptick in positive interactions.
Sure, but that relies on having accurate models and implementation strategies of “not acting like an easy victim”.
Yep. The latter is really hard to convey in this kind of format, though.
You did see that I PM’d you my skype username?
No; I’ve been having a lot of trouble figuring out how to access PMs in a way that doesn’t get lost in the stream of the site. Is there some way to filter PMs from discussion comments?
It’s happened to me in grade school, and not at all since even though I was still otherwise bullied.
nod it’s happened to me continuously since grade school, which I believe is part of a feedback loop—the first incidents all trained me (justifiably) to only interact with people in ways that reinforce the loop, because situations which tried to escape or quell the feedback loop led to inflictions of physical and emotional torment.