Adelene’s response strikes me as a similar experience. I should also admit that I’m having a lot of trouble actually getting a concrete description of the experience, as it’s primarily emotional/subconscious, but here’s my own go at it:
I suppose the short version is that while I have the social/emotional response of “belonging and acceptance”, I don’t actually feel safe relaxing and letting down my guard around those groups, which produces a secondary emotional response of feeling alienated and uncomfortable that I have to keep those defenses up.
There are various social behaviors that groups will exhibit to build a very strong “sense of belonging”, and it’s more an emotional evaluation than an intellectual one—although the other part is that I often 99% fit with a group, am clearly a valuable member of the group, and risk getting expelled if I reveal that other 1% of myself.
More specifically, I belong to a few groups where revealing one’s status can still result in fairly sharp social ostracization . Thus, once I’ve found a group where I “belong”, I run in to the choice of risking all of that to be accepted “for who I really am”, or just shutting up and keeping quiet about things that almost never come up anyways.
In the case of LessWrong, I feel safe because the community strikes me as much more likely to be tolerant of these things, because an online community has much less power to hurt me, and because these things are extremely unlikely to come up here to begin with (and, being an online forum, I can devote time to carefully crafting posts not to reveal anything; that’s still annoying, but gets written off as “I don’t want to post publicly about this” rather than “LessWrong is unsafe”)
The other aspect is simply that a lot of standard recruitment/retention techniques trigger a visceral aversion to me, even if I don’t view the group as a threat and genuinely do want to be a member.
Adelene’s response strikes me as a similar experience. I should also admit that I’m having a lot of trouble actually getting a concrete description of the experience, as it’s primarily emotional/subconscious, but here’s my own go at it:
I suppose the short version is that while I have the social/emotional response of “belonging and acceptance”, I don’t actually feel safe relaxing and letting down my guard around those groups, which produces a secondary emotional response of feeling alienated and uncomfortable that I have to keep those defenses up.
There are various social behaviors that groups will exhibit to build a very strong “sense of belonging”, and it’s more an emotional evaluation than an intellectual one—although the other part is that I often 99% fit with a group, am clearly a valuable member of the group, and risk getting expelled if I reveal that other 1% of myself.
More specifically, I belong to a few groups where revealing one’s status can still result in fairly sharp social ostracization . Thus, once I’ve found a group where I “belong”, I run in to the choice of risking all of that to be accepted “for who I really am”, or just shutting up and keeping quiet about things that almost never come up anyways.
In the case of LessWrong, I feel safe because the community strikes me as much more likely to be tolerant of these things, because an online community has much less power to hurt me, and because these things are extremely unlikely to come up here to begin with (and, being an online forum, I can devote time to carefully crafting posts not to reveal anything; that’s still annoying, but gets written off as “I don’t want to post publicly about this” rather than “LessWrong is unsafe”)
The other aspect is simply that a lot of standard recruitment/retention techniques trigger a visceral aversion to me, even if I don’t view the group as a threat and genuinely do want to be a member.