found LW as a child, found it 10 years later through a fortunate series of coincidences :)
say hi from LW: @halina_eth on X
halinaeth
Karma: 46
Even things like biological limits which turned out to be mental (the idea a 4 minute mile was impossible, for instance).
I wonder if we just told people the problem was solved, and ask them to find the solution, would the mere fact of confidence there is a solution lead to greater chances of finding a solution? I remember the story of the mathematician to which this exact thing happened (he accidentally was assigned a famous unsolved problem as homework, and solved it).
Someone feel free to correct if that was a myth or a real incident.
Reminds me of how @visakanv (on X) said he’s very happy with a day’s work if he got in 3-4 hours of good solid work. And how over the timescale of years, it compounds much more than anyone would believe.
Definitely gives me optimism, and appreciate the two definitions of “impossible” you’ve outlined too.
Fascinating post, like a version of prions on an orthogonal axis, but with way more possibility to expand.
Wonder if other fields have a version of this, where by inverting or adjusting a basic principle you unlock a whole field as rich and diverse as the original. Perhaps imaginary numbers are analogous?
I’d love to, would you be open to being a “beta reader” for my post? Appreciate the encouragement!
Loved reading this! Suspected the premise based on title, but nevertheless great to see the premise fleshed out in a short story. And the pov “plot twist” was really fun, thanks for the thought experiment!
Comments have great nuance i.e. “systems/processes greatly expand word count”.
But I’d say assuming lack of system & a randomly selected audience, the author’s point stands. After all, in media there’s a reason they value “sound bites” so much- and those are more like 5 syllables.
Think, “grab em by the ****” and “nasty woman” from the 2016 election.
Would love to be corrected though!
Makes me think of the concept of “reality distortion fields” as it applies to overconfidence in leaders (I read about this applied to Steve Jobs specifically- his ability to get people to also believe in & work towards the impossible).
Does anyone have the link to what I’m referring to? But overall, I do believe charisma has a lot to do with letting go of the need to have an accurate “map” of yourself and your strengths/shortcomings.
Excellent summary! Would be interested in a list of corollaries to this, i.e.:
a) If “condemned” X is necessary for “prestigious” Y, people with Y will mislead and lie to the public about how they achieved Y, despite wanting others to attain success at Y too. Furthermore, the narrative of their path to achieving Y without anything to do with X will be extremely uniform & coordinated despite any huge differences amongst people with Y. For example, some Y people have X, some don’t, some hope for others to attain Y, some don’t- but the “public narrative” all with Y tell will still end up extremely uniform.
This corollary was extremely unintuitive to me- outlined my experience in a “condemned X” which was often needed for “prestigious Y” if anyone is curious of how the corollary plays out in practice (in my direct comment to this post).
Jimmy phrased it really well- the “lizardmen” don’t want to let anyone know precisely because they won’t be perceived by you as rational/moral humans as you would’ve without knowing, but rather “lizardmen”.
“how one might ever become justifiably confident a particular piece of dark matter really doesn’t exist or is as rare as you’d suspect it is”—as someone in a “lizardman” community myself (commented regarding my own experience), probably one of the only ways to know for sure is to join as a lizardman. Any other way, you’ll be inundated with misinformation, speculation, and even red herrings directed at distorting the “map” as much as possible for anyone trying to understand lizardmen.
For my part, after joining the lizardman community, I did realize the prevalance was about 100x what I’d previously assumed, just as OP predicted.
As for trading action for knowledge, I personally wouldn’t share my “membership” with anyone in my close social circle unless they gave me something equally taboo. I wouldn’t believe anyone’s commitment to not be upset, because often disgust or horror is a gut reaction and uncontrollable. Never mind trusting others to keep any secret without a counterweight.
Okay hopefully the layering worked to hide the answer-
The X I was talking about is being extremely thin- model thin. And the social dark matter is “anorexia”.
I’ve always wanted to be model-thin, and slender women online would say to eat healthy, moderate portions, exercise, drink water, don’t starve or be unhealthy, etc. And emphasize to avoid eating disorder behaviors (putting big red stop signs around even the borders of ED territory!) because during the height of the “fat acceptance” movement anyone even giving weight loss advice would get ED accusations thrown at them- which would then often get them deplatformed, demonetized, etc.
It’s only once I got fed up never reaching my goal weight, that I decided “eff it” and crossed the huge red stop signs into ED forums to see what they spoke about. And since then I’ve made rapid progress & easily broke past barriers I’d never been able to in 10+ years to listening to “mainstream” advice. In this “social dark matter” community, everyone talks about doing everything they can to hide the truth from their friends & family, and plan what lies they can say to maintain the image of natural or effortless thinness. I’ve never suspected anyone I knew of EDs in the past, but now I see several people who say things straight out of the “playbook”- it’s like a united “public narrative” of what people can say if accused of EDs or anorexia.
As with your “law of extremity”, people immediately think “eating disorder” means you look like a wartime victim on the brink of death. But really most women in that community have society’s “perfect” body type.
(I have so much to say on how my mindset and understanding of the “map” of weight loss changed after unlocking the secret community I was told to avoid at all costs, but unsure if anyone would be interested given this forum’s likely male majority.)
Anyways, this experience made me rather skeptical of instances where all people of X prestigious trait claim the same story about how they attained X. For example, how so many Silicon Valley VCs say they got where they are through being good people, honest, and never shady, because anyone who backstabbed or was dishonest would be kicked out of the industry through not receiving deal flow. Of course the logic makes sense to me on initial inspection and I’d like to believe it, but the incentive structure for adhering strictly to that “public narrative” regardless of if you’re honest or a “backstabber” is self evident.
Overall, it’s just fascinating and unintuitive to me. Before, I’d have guessed, “maybe they’re lying because they don’t want me to attain X too!”. But in reality there’s so many reasons people mislead & distort the map despite wanting others to also attain X.
(did you guess & comment X?)
(open if you’ve guessed X already)
Love how you named this “Social Dark Matter”, I recently came across an instance of this that you didn’t mention!
It came in the form of “group of people prestigious in X way”. I really wanted to join that group with X trait, and so studied what “X people” had to say about how they got that way & their journey, advice, pitfalls to avoid, etc. Only after 10+ years did I stumble across the fact that almost all people with the highest X actually attained it through going deep into the very “pitfall” they advised to steer clear of. But because of the “law of extremity” you mentioned, none of them could share the true way to attain X without being socially ostracized and likely banned from their respective platforms. So they all lie and say untrue or exaggerated things about their journey to obtaining X.
Overall, this dynamic is severely detrimental and even actively sabotaging to anyone attempting to attain X. And while everyone involved has good intentions, this “social dark matter” likely contributes heavily to the “lack of X” epidemic in the world.
I’d love for anyone reading to guess what “X” I’m referring to and comment below before revealing the answer!
(I’ll hide it a few layers down in the replies to this comment)
Wow, this part really resonated with me:
This is why “build a 10% better mousetrap” is a legitimate goal, but “build a 10% better web portal for artists” is not. The 10% improvement means nothing if the community accuses you of being a greedy selfish bastard who only cares about money and not about art, and they blacklist you and everyone who cooperates with you. And yes, if you understand how the game is played, the initiators of the backlash are those who profit from the existing system. But you can’t say this out loud; it would only prove that you care about the money. So both sides will keep arguing complete bullshit, trying to get the confused people on their side. The important thing is to get confused high-status people on your side, because then the rest will follow.
Certainly have noticed a similar dynamic where people take pride in & applaud blind faith in the project & founders, and those who profess to be in it for love of community & not money are rewarded socially. Very cult like behavior, which of course is perfect for the leaders & ideal for that startup’s “customer base”, so I definitely applaud the founders for doing their job exceptionally.
Lately I’ve been fascinated by these group dynamics, and how power & influence lie among any given “scene”. Joined 3 vastly different scenes lately, which have vastly different norms, nearly 0 overlap, and norms/status symbols that aren’t even on the same axes- it’s been fascinating on my end to constantly context switch & pick up on what the differences vs commonalities are in these totally different communities.
I bet there’s many axioms or essays out there about navigating the rules of social scenes, but so far only one leaps to mind for me.
This is so fascinating! Your “competent villain” example definitely resonates with me- I also had to learn the hard way to be assertive when it comes to tiny things like domain ownership which could have huge power dynamic impacts down the line.
Yeah. To your founder point, it’s very very possible as they are VC backed and even the VCs’ interests aren’t very well aligned with the community.
In terms of coup, given VC backed nature + other factors it’s nearly impossible to take over. But a ideological split/fork might certainly be possible!
Now I’m curious as to history of successful coups. Would the leader usually have to be a prominent member of the old faction as well? Or is it possible for someone with minor power/influence in the old regime to lead a successful coup as well?
I definitely need to study my history, thanks for the food for thought.
Ah, good point! Over a long enough time period, not promising anything denies you the opportunity to showcase that you have a low “breaking promises” rate- hadn’t factored that into the false negative/positive scenarios.
I see, these are great examples “destruction paths”, thank you! What I’m hearing is essentially:
- in communities which gain prestige, infighting which causes collapse
- members dying out over time
I think these are different than what I’m observing in my community. Thinking about it, two patterns jump to mind:
- as our community gained prestige, members would start tearing down or attacking “rival” communities to gain in-group points. But this gives us a bad reputation & deters new members from wanting to join, so community doesn’t gain “new blood” and calcifies. (seems parallel to the prestige > infighting problem you described!)
- our community has clearly delineated founders, and as it’s a financially-based community (crypto community), people who criticize founders’ choices are ostracized for creating “FUD” and ridiculed. Thus, now no one wants to criticize publicly for fear of being eaten alive, and I only hear people express discontent 1:1, never in public. (only once the community’s performed much worse financially, did more people start expressing discontent publicly, but by then it was too late to give founders actionable feedback as they’d invested significant resources)
I wonder if communities that are financially based like crypto communities would tend to fall into the “tribalism > bad reputation > no newcomers” & “attack anyone who criticizes leadership” more often? For example is this failure mode more common in startups too?
Would love to know if anyone’s written on dynamics like this- would love any links.
Yes to both! The lying model is great to have especially on the internet where everyone trolls for fun. But to Nathan’s point especially as cost of intellectual labor goes to zero, the net benefits of investigating these cases would keep increasing. Seems worth a try to find some obscure low hanging fruit!
True or not, wouldn’t you say the idea it illustrates is sound? No matter how small a percentage of the time, a nonzero number of people claiming ridiculous things are telling the truth (just framing it in a ridiculous way with wrong correlations).
If as a society we investigated these cases more often instead of dismissing them, would it lead to a net positive for humanity? For example, if everyone heard “drinking mud soup in this specific part of the world consistently cures X affliction”, and dismissed it- wouldn’t most pharmaceutical companies not have found their star compounds used in bestselling drugs?
To be clear, I agree that majority of these wild tales lead nowhere, but I wonder if it’s worth investigating even for the minority of cases which lead somewhere unexpected.
So grateful to Ben, Aella, and Ronny for hosting and for all the people with whom I had lively debates with this past Saturday! Like Matt it was my first in person rat event, and I really enjoyed meeting everyone and seeing how open everyone is to friendly debate and probing questions.
I really hope these meetups continue- happy to help & support to help make it possible.
Thanks again everyone, cheers to many fun connections to come in 2025!