🧵 View Thread
🧵 Thread (29 tweets)
i've previously observed that the way i normally interact with new groups is to very quietly participate and observe, not let much of "me" leak out, and only after understanding a lot of the group structure, and what my "niche" could be, do I really start interacting with people
i have always been acutely tracking "who looks down on who", even if I wasn't aware. this shows in the things that i cringe at or feel a "get that away from me!" vibe https://t.co/zfyI9baGOv
for much of my life I thought of myself as an outsider weirdo. what i didn't realize till much later was that I had worked very hard to have the role of "outsider weirdo that everyone still likes an is cool" i have an allergic reaction to ACTUAL weirdos https://t.co/CXqHi3s18p
a thing that I think i'm don't have, which others seem to, is that I can't/don't feel safe/good/okay if there's another group that knows about my group and has beef with them. others seem to be chill and just take solace in the group. "we got you, fuck them"
okay, so back to what's so scary and awful and bad about someone not liking me, or wanting to sneer at me... the at-hand answer is "then i can't execute my needs-meeting-strategy of [be so impressive people just give you attention]"
LOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOL, so i think that often, the nagging feeling of "what if they're right?" that i feel when i do get criticized or sneered at, ACTUALLY derefences to the nagging worry of "what if they'd win?" as in what if others would agree with them
hypoth: many expressions of "ugh, not people talking about rats vs post-rats again" are results of a strat that sees it as dangerous for group labels to be visible enough for wide audiences to form opinions about, and tries to shut down convo via being angry/exasperated
yeah, how bad I feel about someone talking shit about me defs feels like its tracking "would they be able to convince others?" like, if i was hanging with a group that I knew others would see as kinda lame, I didn't feel as concerned with if they liked me
ah, this also feels related to how, when someone did piss me off via being mean at me, the immediate next mental motion would be constructing a story about why they're shit hmmm, so this is like 1-2 steps removed from the object level of the implied strategy
as in, presumably the fully explicated logic is something like "have a story about them being shit that could be used to get people on my side against them" though considerations of other people don't really enter my mind when this is happening
it's like... on top of this behavior being rooted in a social strategy, it's also wireheaded itself???? the stories that I'd use to dismiss people were never optimized for public consumption. they normally used v private knowledge and frames that my peers didn't always share
claim: semi-arbitrary behavior can be "programmed" into someone via trauma the behavior is brittle though, because of the nature of trauma. @ben_r_hoffman this feels like what you were mentioning about certain parts have no defense against "being tricked"
if you have a sufficiently traumatizing institution, you can sorta imprint behavior as governed by the incentives the institution creates. the incentives can be v complex, and so the behavior can look very complex, even though its all trigger-action and not "full intelligence"
and you get shit like "i'm clearly have behavior that's inspired by the goal of [make sure i'm on the winning coalition if there's a fight], but the actual behavior is [feel bad until i find a story about why they suck and then i feel good]"