Different people have different creepiness tolerances.
Creepiness is significantly associated with mainstream social status (as opposed to status within the LW group).
Most people, including most LWers, find it stressful to be around very creepy people.
Therefore, I propose the following system to reduce the stress of creepiness in LW groups while still maintaining a “big tent.”
In every city large enough to support a large LW meetup population, there will be multiple tiers of LW groups. (Use common sense in determining optimal group size. I doubt any city beyond SF/NY has enough people to implement this right now)
These groups will be explicitly ranked by status (or more precisely, degree of tolerance—with high status groups having the lowest tolerance for creepy behaviors)
Membership in the lowest-tier group is automatic; membership in all higher-tier groups is conducted through an interview/probation process. This review process involves observers from the immediately higher- and lower-tier groups.
Membership in a higher-tier group automatically grants membership all lower-tier groups.
In this way, we’ll have a series of meetup groups that accommodate people of all creepiness tolerances. People who dislike dealing with creepy people can choose groups that exclude them, but the automatic membership in lower-tiered system avoids the problem of losing the interesting-but-creepy people. The only people who miss out are creepy people with low creepy tolerances, but we probably don’t want them anyway.
LessWrong readers are about the only group of humans on the planet that I can see explicitly describing such rules and then making them work. It is far more common to end up with this kind of arrangements but put up some façade to save face.
Yup. Really, I did nothing more than describe elements of the old-fashioned class system and the timeless informal status system, with a few bells and whistles.
Nah. Many creepy behaviors, like boxing people in and ignoring reluctance, convey “I have high enough status not to fear the social cost of this behavior; if you try to punish me for it, everyone will be on my side”. This is high-status. Some creepy behaviors, like the creepy monotone, convey “I am unable to conform to many social norms”, which causes and signals low status.
It’s complicated—my impression is that there are a lot of low status people (including most low status men) aren’t seen as creepy. There’s something additional—body language? postural?-- and I’ve never seen it adequately defined or described.
I think it’s clear that:
Different people have different creepiness tolerances.
Creepiness is significantly associated with mainstream social status (as opposed to status within the LW group).
Most people, including most LWers, find it stressful to be around very creepy people.
Therefore, I propose the following system to reduce the stress of creepiness in LW groups while still maintaining a “big tent.”
In every city large enough to support a large LW meetup population, there will be multiple tiers of LW groups. (Use common sense in determining optimal group size. I doubt any city beyond SF/NY has enough people to implement this right now)
These groups will be explicitly ranked by status (or more precisely, degree of tolerance—with high status groups having the lowest tolerance for creepy behaviors)
Membership in the lowest-tier group is automatic; membership in all higher-tier groups is conducted through an interview/probation process. This review process involves observers from the immediately higher- and lower-tier groups.
Membership in a higher-tier group automatically grants membership all lower-tier groups.
In this way, we’ll have a series of meetup groups that accommodate people of all creepiness tolerances. People who dislike dealing with creepy people can choose groups that exclude them, but the automatic membership in lower-tiered system avoids the problem of losing the interesting-but-creepy people. The only people who miss out are creepy people with low creepy tolerances, but we probably don’t want them anyway.
LessWrong readers are about the only group of humans on the planet that I can see explicitly describing such rules and then making them work. It is far more common to end up with this kind of arrangements but put up some façade to save face.
Yup. Really, I did nothing more than describe elements of the old-fashioned class system and the timeless informal status system, with a few bells and whistles.
Except that in mainstream caste systems, behaviors considered ‘creepy’ because they signal low status, not the other way around.
Nah. Many creepy behaviors, like boxing people in and ignoring reluctance, convey “I have high enough status not to fear the social cost of this behavior; if you try to punish me for it, everyone will be on my side”. This is high-status. Some creepy behaviors, like the creepy monotone, convey “I am unable to conform to many social norms”, which causes and signals low status.
It’s complicated—my impression is that there are a lot of low status people (including most low status men) aren’t seen as creepy. There’s something additional—body language? postural?-- and I’ve never seen it adequately defined or described.
More like “I have high enough status that you will actually want this”.
Creepy is when it turns out the person doing this actually didn’t have high enough status.
That might cover a fair portion of the autistic spectrum.