(2021-11-14) Chapin Your Intelligent Conscientious Ingroup Has Bad Social Norms Too

Sasha Chapin: Your Intelligent, Conscientious In-group Has Bad Social Norms Too. I’ve noticed that a significant number of my friends in the Rationalist and Effective Altruist communities seem to stumble into pits of despair, generally when they structure their lives too rigidly around the in-group’s principles. Like, the Rationalists become miserable by trying to govern their entire lives through nothing but rationality, and the EAs feel bad by holding themselves to an impossible standard of ethics.

I also notice that this happens in all kinds of other nerdy purpose-oriented communities

nobody enforces them explicitly

people confer status depending on level of apparent adherence to values.

I realized that it’s generally much simpler than I thought previously. Most of it is just toxic social norms. These groups develop toxic social norms. In the Rationalist community, one toxic norm is something like, “you must reject beliefs that you can’t justify, sentiments that don’t seem rational, and woo things.” In the EA community, one toxic norm is something like, “don’t ever indulge in Epicurean style, and never, ever stop thinking about your impact on the world.”

And then the second, more sinister stage occurs—the point at which these toxic norms are internalized such that they apply to you when you’re in a room alone.

Sometimes—often—these forbidden thoughts/actions aren’t even contrary to the explicit values. They just don’t fit in with the implied group aesthetic

I think a toxic norm is any rule where following it makes you feel like large parts of you are bad.

One sign of toxic social norms is if your behavior does deviate from the standard, you feel that the only way of saving face is through explaining your behavior via the group values.

I’m not mentioning these communities because I think they’re extra toxic or anything, by the way. They’re probably less toxic than the average group, and a lot of their principles are great. Any set of principles, if followed too strictly and assigned too much social value, can become a weird evil super-ego that creeps into the deepest crevices of your psyche.

This is, perhaps, an inevitable danger for nerdy people. For lots of intellectual weird people that don’t fit in, their first social stage is rejection from society in general, and then, later on, their second social stage is finding understanding in a tightly-knit subculture. And they cling to this subculture like a life-raft and are willing—happy, even—to initially reject any parts of themselves that don’t fit within this new community.

I don’t know whether all of this can be avoided entirely. Part of it is just growing up. It’s regular Kegan Stage 4 stuff

Eventually, you notice the flaws in that lens, and then you become your own thing

By the way, Eliezer Yudkowsky, this is what post-Rationalists are, it’s not that complicated—they don’t have explicit principles because they’ve moved on from thinking that life is entirely about explicit principles. Perhaps you don’t intuitively grasp this because you don’t see the social group you’ve founded as a social group.

Try to develop some collective social/emotional intelligence. Look for signs of weariness and self-hatred among your peers. If you notice signs of emotional decay, try to not diagnose them exclusively through your favorite epistemic lens. Try, instead, to be curious about whether some of their human requirements are not being met by the local milieu.