I think the meetups example is fairly closely related to the alien example (i.e. people are often actively deciding not to advertise publicly to make it hard for random people to find the private meetup so they don’t need to have an awkward conversation about rejecting them. From the inside, this just feels like “having friends that you invite to small private get-togethers”. i.e.
people build friendship and relationship networks that become more appealing than even a good meetup
is an example of the phenomenon I’m talking about. You don’t advertise your small friend group events because they’re for your friends, not strangers. But that doesn’t change the fact that from the perspective of the stranger, it’s a dark matter event they probably can only infer.
I don’t think this is a universal trait among meetups (I think it’s more common in Berkeley than other cities for rationalist meetups at least, for reasons outlined in The Relationship Between the Village and the Mission). And it’s not about defending the group from rival meetups, but from random individuals.
My impression is this is still true-in-some-fashion in other communities—like, I think in dance communities, there are often public dance classes and private parties, which tend to feature people who are more hardcore dancers. (I think the dance community is more explicitly oriented around classes such that that the public events are well supported, but there’s still a phenomenon of there being more exclusive things you only find out about if someone invites you)
This becomes particularly noteworthy only if the public meetups in an area are noticeably low in quality (because the community is at a stage in it’s lifecycle when the organizers with the most passion/drive have gotten tired of running things for newcomers, and the people who step up to replace them don’t have the quite the same vision, or the thing becomes a bit stagnant becomes stagnant because no one’s putting in as much work)
That makes some sense to me. The most salient feature of the Dark Forest scenario, to me, is the one in which we’re in a bad prisoner’s game dilemma with something like the following payoff matrix:
Cooperate/cooperate gets some finite positive utility for both players
Defect/cooperate means ruin for the cooperator with equal or greater utility for the defector
Defect/defect ruins one player with 50% probability
Of course, real-world decisions to participate in private events don’t resemble this payoff matrix, which is why, for me, the Dark Forest scenario feels somehow too dramatic, or like it’s too paranoid an account of the feeling of anxiety or boredom that comes with trying to connect with people in a new social setting full of strangers.
Or maybe I’d take that further and say that newcomers at parties often seem to operate as if they were in a Dark Forest scenario (“careful not to embarrass yourself, people will laugh at you if you say something dumb, probably everybody’s mean here, or else annoying and foolish which is why they’re at this public gathering, your feelings of anxiety and alienation are warranted!”). And it’s much better if you realize that’s not in fact the case. People there are like you—wanting to connect, pretty interesting, kind of anxious, just waiting for someone else to make the first move. There are all kinds of perfectly normal reasons people are choosing to hang out at a public gathering place rather than with their close friends, and if public gatherings seem “terrible,” it’s usually because of the instrinsic awkwardness of strangers trying to break the ice. They’d almost all be interesting and fun if they got to know each other and felt more comfortable.
But I do see the connection with the desire to avoid unpleasant strangers and the need to infer the existence of all these private get-togethers and communities.
Yeah, I agree that the full narrative force of the metaphor is pretty extreme here, I first thought of it in this context sort of as a joke, but then found that a) the phrasing “dark forest” kinda makes sense as a “things are generally dark and you don’t know who’s out there” sort of way, without the galactic omnicidal premise. I also agree that your game theory summary is a reasonable formalism of the original situation, and yeah, not what I meant
The aspect of the metaphor I found most helpful was just “you don’t see X out there, and that is because the people who make X have an interest in you not seeing X, not because it’s not happening.”
I do think that visualizing the social world as a bright network of lively, private social connections with these relatively bland public outlets is a useful and probably neglected one. And the idea that a certain inaccessibility or privacy is key for their survival is important too. I visualize it more as a sort of faerie forest. To many, it seems like there’s nothing there. In fact there’s a whole faerie realm of private society, but you need to seek out or luck into access, and it’s not always easy to navigate and connections don’t always lead you where you expect.
I think the meetups example is fairly closely related to the alien example (i.e. people are often actively deciding not to advertise publicly to make it hard for random people to find the private meetup so they don’t need to have an awkward conversation about rejecting them. From the inside, this just feels like “having friends that you invite to small private get-togethers”. i.e.
is an example of the phenomenon I’m talking about. You don’t advertise your small friend group events because they’re for your friends, not strangers. But that doesn’t change the fact that from the perspective of the stranger, it’s a dark matter event they probably can only infer.
I don’t think this is a universal trait among meetups (I think it’s more common in Berkeley than other cities for rationalist meetups at least, for reasons outlined in The Relationship Between the Village and the Mission). And it’s not about defending the group from rival meetups, but from random individuals.
My impression is this is still true-in-some-fashion in other communities—like, I think in dance communities, there are often public dance classes and private parties, which tend to feature people who are more hardcore dancers. (I think the dance community is more explicitly oriented around classes such that that the public events are well supported, but there’s still a phenomenon of there being more exclusive things you only find out about if someone invites you)
This becomes particularly noteworthy only if the public meetups in an area are noticeably low in quality (because the community is at a stage in it’s lifecycle when the organizers with the most passion/drive have gotten tired of running things for newcomers, and the people who step up to replace them don’t have the quite the same vision, or the thing becomes a bit stagnant becomes stagnant because no one’s putting in as much work)
That makes some sense to me. The most salient feature of the Dark Forest scenario, to me, is the one in which we’re in a bad prisoner’s game dilemma with something like the following payoff matrix:
Cooperate/cooperate gets some finite positive utility for both players
Defect/cooperate means ruin for the cooperator with equal or greater utility for the defector
Defect/defect ruins one player with 50% probability
Of course, real-world decisions to participate in private events don’t resemble this payoff matrix, which is why, for me, the Dark Forest scenario feels somehow too dramatic, or like it’s too paranoid an account of the feeling of anxiety or boredom that comes with trying to connect with people in a new social setting full of strangers.
Or maybe I’d take that further and say that newcomers at parties often seem to operate as if they were in a Dark Forest scenario (“careful not to embarrass yourself, people will laugh at you if you say something dumb, probably everybody’s mean here, or else annoying and foolish which is why they’re at this public gathering, your feelings of anxiety and alienation are warranted!”). And it’s much better if you realize that’s not in fact the case. People there are like you—wanting to connect, pretty interesting, kind of anxious, just waiting for someone else to make the first move. There are all kinds of perfectly normal reasons people are choosing to hang out at a public gathering place rather than with their close friends, and if public gatherings seem “terrible,” it’s usually because of the instrinsic awkwardness of strangers trying to break the ice. They’d almost all be interesting and fun if they got to know each other and felt more comfortable.
But I do see the connection with the desire to avoid unpleasant strangers and the need to infer the existence of all these private get-togethers and communities.
Yeah, I agree that the full narrative force of the metaphor is pretty extreme here, I first thought of it in this context sort of as a joke, but then found that a) the phrasing “dark forest” kinda makes sense as a “things are generally dark and you don’t know who’s out there” sort of way, without the galactic omnicidal premise. I also agree that your game theory summary is a reasonable formalism of the original situation, and yeah, not what I meant
The aspect of the metaphor I found most helpful was just “you don’t see X out there, and that is because the people who make X have an interest in you not seeing X, not because it’s not happening.”
I do think that visualizing the social world as a bright network of lively, private social connections with these relatively bland public outlets is a useful and probably neglected one. And the idea that a certain inaccessibility or privacy is key for their survival is important too. I visualize it more as a sort of faerie forest. To many, it seems like there’s nothing there. In fact there’s a whole faerie realm of private society, but you need to seek out or luck into access, and it’s not always easy to navigate and connections don’t always lead you where you expect.