Any space to be human in all this?

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When did this "apocalypse" happen, in your experience?


Not something I've ever tried to do. And I would be very surprised if indeed the majority of single women these days are seriously hoping to marry a celebrity.


Really? Have you tried a local adult autism support group, for example?

(Admittedly, adult autism support groups tend to be predominantly male, so probably not a likely place to find a girlfriend, but at least you might find some non-superficial new friends.)


I don't understand the above paragraph.

(1) How does "very late secular humanism" border on Scientology?

(2) How does "the idea that we're these little Greek philosophers looking for truth, reason, and to learn, grow, and become better people for it's own sake" turn into "throw that pesky thing called a personality overboard and just let the genes do all the work"?

It seems to me that the kinds of people who pursue relationships with nothing in mind except for their partner's looks and/or money would not be "philosophers" in the first place, and would have no idea what secular humanism is, "very late" or otherwise.


What? Where on Earth do you get the idea that personality doesn't matter, much less that it can't matter? Maybe to very superficial people it doesn't matter, but do you really think everyone is that superficial?

A while back, there were discussions about how the rise of mass-market dating apps has resulted in a much more competitive and much more superficial mainstream dating culture. The rise of Facebook and other major social media may also encourage superficiality. But I think it's still possible for those of us who aren't so superficial to find each other.


What's "the 6 6's"? Is this a pop-culture reference I'm not getting?


Surely it's still possible to find some people who aren't quite so superficial, at least within the autistic community if nowhere else? Also, surely it should still be possible, even outside of the autistic community, to find groups of people who share your interests?

I really started to notice it somewhere after 2015 but before that I think it was probably starting to kick in by the 2010's as a decade. Following on with what Boo was saying about birthdays, there was a time where even if you - as a status object - had all kinds of interesting ideas but your presence wasn't going to directly aid another person's odds of getting laid or getting more money they'd still want to chat about interesting things and/or hear about them, now that only seems to exist with the closest of long-term friends and some relatives that still value this kind of conversation with me.


Also admittedly I'm as picky as anyone else on romantic relationships, not just whether I'm into them but whether they could be into me (ie. with no shared interests I don't see a basis). Also I haven't been in this folder in a while so I don't know if the nested assumption about any pessimistic post being bellyache about not finding partners - I put it here because it's actually a situation where everyone else's search for partners seems to be vampirizing the social commons. It's a bit like if you aren't running fast in the reproduction/status market then no one has any reason to be interested in you on any level - even as an acquaintance. That last sentence is what I meant by personality ceasing to matter.



In the form I described it? It's a wish list - a bunch of things we 'wish' were true about human beings that generally aren't. It then ends up being a punishment for anyone who takes it seriously - they become the few 'cooperative' types in a culture where not defecting is seen as a sign that you're not all there which then means you're someone no one wants to be around at best (if you show signs that you still believe people are fundamentally good but just ignorant you kind of haven't gotten the memo) and then even a mark (someone to take advantage of) at worst. That's not my suggestion that everyone should lick their finger, stick it in the air, and become a sociopath if that's where culture is heading - it's just really dangerous to expect that people around you will hold your values if your values don't align with sociopathy and the culture OTOH does.


Absolutely nothing and that's not a conjunction I made. The first item is what we 'wish' people were. The later is what people seem to be aggressively doing - ie. trying cut every bit of weight out of their vehicle that doesn't help them win a quarter mile race faster, just that in this case it's status rather than racing.


Forget relationships - think any meaningful social interaction at all.

There's no room for human imperfection in dating!

I understand your frustration dealing with others when they become idiots. In my department, I work with a group of chemistry PhDs that basically act like middle school kids when together. I have two allies that do not behave this way and they are as disgusted with those behaviors as much as I am. The majority of the department looks down on us because we do not try to fit into their group thinking because we are older and definitely wiser.

We (my allies and I) have seriously questioned how some of them got their doctorate, as they sure the hell did not earn it through intelligence and hard work from what we can see. I even picked apart one of their postdoctoral mentors in a departmental lecture session as they had said some incorrect information in my area of study, as they should have known better than to do that. It is dragging the department towards the educational drain, so I am looking to leave as soon as I can. Sometimes it is better to move on than to deal with them for years to come. They will never change.

I'm really enjoying a podcast that Lex Friedman had in the last day or so with Eric Weinstein (#134) and they're getting into the trolls, hecklers, the various behavior patterns you get from people who realize that they just don't have it in them to do anything great (which turns them to jealousy and cynicism, then needing everyone else around them to be just as cynical, then what refuses to cave and be cynical gets roundly punished, etc.).

One of the traps we're in is that at any immediate threat of violence, whether physical or reputation, speaks much louder at any given moment than longer term implications and consequences, and then the goal of this sort of game theory is to then lever the heck out of the immediate. It's part of where obsessive short-termism has come from but it's also how many of the best and brightest either disappear from or never show up where they should be by their merits - ie. quite often in proportion to what skills they have they don't have all sorts of redundancies for eating trolls or being comeback kings or queens, part of the problem is they spent their time actually doing useful things and incredibly rare to be great at all of them. The game theory is then something like what... if you aren't something like the best of the best of the best to be taken down by people who really don't want you to succeed you get eaten or stalled out by the bucket of crabs?

Our culture needs to figure out something that can be done differently with that, and at present we're not sure what. The only thing I can think of is finding ways to build chains of communication with right of refusal baked back in so that if nine people are having a productive conversation a tenth can't easily show up with the social equivalent of a bomb vest on. Similarly as people are getting worse at dealing with each other in work places (or at least - and I share this experience with you - leveling just about totalitarian level demands for social and even internal conformity)
we need to figure out how many of these people really need to be jammed together, what kinds of social dynamics are negatively corrosive enough that they do enough damage to a company's bottom line that they should want to prevent it just for the sake of making money, it's like all kinds of things in human social behavior are flying a bit out of control and so much of it is because we've erased too many boundaries and the trick seems to be finding judicious places to put them back in.

I tend to think otherwise since social media is a government funded experiment in controlling people's thought patterns. It's sort of a matter of endless-scroll window shopping through our entire existence, save for information junkies like myself.

In what kinds of contexts have you been trying to socialize with people, formerly successfully, now unsuccessfully?

Also, have there been any other significant demographic and/or economic changes to the specific locale(s) where you have been trying to socialize?

Perhaps another problem you might be running into is just plain ageism?


In other words, the people you've been running into lately are getting to be more and more cliquish, and are just not interested in making new friends unless there's an obvious material benefit to taking the time to get to know the specific person?

Here in NYC, a lot of people have been like that for a very long time. I remember encountering this phenomenon in my early twenties, even in places where I thought the people ought to know better, and I found it extremely frustrating.

What I did about it was to persist in looking for fellow oddballs who would appreciate me. I also have a longstanding habit of creating situations where I am a natural center of attention, e.g. by starting my own little groups devoted to whatever my main interest happened to be at the moment.

Cummulatively a lot of places whether work, online, etc. but I wouldn't say it's anything strikingly overt where I can say 'x place'. A few particularly souring experiences were a local charity ball I got invited to where someone I knew was in a ballroom competition, another where my boss had a charity dinner - the later I walked in confident and walked out feeling defeated because outside of my boss and a few other people the whole room pretty much set the tone that garishness, conformity, and outward image is literally everything. The charity ball before it maybe was partly my fault because I just hadn't been to these kinds of events much and what I got to see is it's really an excuse for a social arms race for all the power families in a given county.

The far more generally discouraging thing I'll save for my response below:


Yes.

Here's what's been the really sort of black-pill realization. Almost anyone whose not running in the race of total conformity and status seeking is someone who was forcefully split off from it.

What I mean is that I've noticed that almost anyone in any side groups of sorts that I join is neuro-atypical in some way, has a disability, etc.. It's a bit like if certain people weren't force-failed out of that race that race would consume everything. That tells me truly dismal things about the basis of human personality, and really it shatters any hopes I might have had in the past that mismanagement of the world was somehow a knowledge gap, mistakes being made, 'ignorance', IMHO it's nothing of the kind - it's really a matter of status and claims to reproductive capacity and great genes (opted or otherwise) being the be-all-end-all.

It's probably always been like this to some degree but what I think is really smashing us is the sort of monoculture we have. To have a monoculture of corporatist capitalism where everything is commodified and for sale and to then have that reach into every nook and cranny such as it does with the online commons being things like Facebook and Twitter where the profit is gained by user information, I think Rene Girard's memetic theories explain why it starts looking like this - ie. most people build their identities by imitation, it's so common that to actually do such a strange thing as build your personality from first principles (really self-authorship) is often taken as a sign that there's something genetically wrong with you that you're trying to compensate and it then only appears to be mid to high value if it's someone who happens to be a professor, CEO, etc. to offset the strangeness of such a self-inquiry habit. This perpetual compound imitation of how people build a web of natural social shibboleths where making sense simply isn't enough - you have conform first, make sense second, and not make sense where the shibboleth basis of conformity supersedes making sense.

That last bit is where you can really get to the point of saying about humanity that problems aren't meant to be solved - they're meant to be kept around as a sorting mechanism for genes.

It also tells me that what people are actually doing is completely, miles and miles away, from anything I was taught by my education, by my parents, by my community, institutions, etc.. It's a perpetual lying machine. That's sort of where I get into people not being people but something more like genetic algorithms with clever press secretaries.

I'm not the least bit surprised that you had this kind of experience at a "charity ball" -- a type of event that is notorious for attracting social climbers.


Yep. And this is one of the reasons why those of us who WERE "force-failed out of that race" NEED to organize our own communities. And we need to think of ourselves as different, not defective. We, as a better-organized community, could do a lot of good, both for ourselves and for the world in general. We need to figure out how to organize to improve our lives, rather than either (1) struggling in vain to fit in with the mainstream or (2) wallowing in self-pity and resentment.


Not sure I would say "great genes" here. Different genetic traits can be advantageous or disadvantageous in different kinds of environments. But, yes, most people are conformist status-seekers, to a large degree.

I've never felt that I could fit into the social mainstream, and I never really wanted to. I find most people boring. I've always sought out fellow oddballs.


Actually the modern Western world isn't quite a "monoculture"; we have lots of subcultures, some of which have gotten stronger in recent decades.


I think Rene Girard's theory of "mimetic desire" is true to an extent, but I think a lot of people also have genuine desires of their own. (Were that not true, no one would be gay, for example. Most gays grew up under tremendous social pressure to be heterosexual.) Personally, I've always made a point of associating with people who had highly idiosyncratic desires and interests of one kind or another.


Well, yes, a lot of people are like that. However....


This doesn't really quite follow from the other things you've said.


How would you describe the community you grew up in, and what were its values?


In some places at least, a lot of people are actually pretty overt about status-seeking; no need to lie about it.

As far as I can tell I'm totally divorced from the human ideal of basically amy social interaction, I just put things together as I go along instead of leaning on unwritten rules I can't follow until I drop.

Fortunately that act of splitting off the black sheep brings to mind for everyone how juvenile this system is. People aren't dealing with another high schooler when they talk to me, I dropped out & learned.

Some good news at least, I'm watching Joe Rogan #1558 with Tristan Harris - it sounds at least like if there's a 'we' and it's some fusion of neuroatypicals and neurotypals who are more on the thoughtful side - it sounds like 'we' are winning in some senses. For one Tristan Harris got 'The Social Dillema' out and it sounds like 38 million families watched it in the first month. It also sounds like the Google anti-trust hearings might not have been as well-spirited as they could have been but the overall environment is moving in the direction of 'Yes we have a problem and a big cause of it is x', and x happens to be the way social media algorithms are fracturing us.

Well yes that's important in the short term but if this whole thing blows up it blows up, just like if so many people are defecating in the pool that the water is changing color it's tough be too sunny about finding the least polluted corner of the pool. IMHO it's not enough.



The biggest thing we need to stop is the idea that such people get to optimize who has a right to live. It feels like we've been getting dangerously close to veering in that direction, really sort of like a wild west neofeudalism. Covid may have stopped sort of the slow boil of the frog, I'm hoping that's enough to get people thinking about what it is we're doing and going concern of western democracy and the things we at least, out loud, cherish.



Maybe an elucidating question back to that - if one is in zero sum competition with another people which way is easier to win? Trying to stab them while they're healthy and at full wind or stabbing them after having run through such an obstacle course that they've got 20% left by the time they get to where you are? It seems like a lot of people have been great at building those sorts of obstacle courses, if someone does it at work or in their department (weave artificial complexity to keep their job) people joke about them 'building castles'. We have a lot of this these days, it's probably the slow-down of growth but regardless that's a place where problems are assets so long as you're on the right side of them and can just weaponize them against people who aren't you or yours.


Depends which part of my life. Early childhood - great parents, wonderful neighbors, some problems at school but mostly when I got home it felt like I was with family. Around age eight I moved to a new area, things were more cliquish, and I got to see more of how things worked on that level.


One of the really odd things in my life, especially after high school, it seems like I was weaving in and out of situations where the stories I'd been told back in school of 'They're immature, they'll grow up' was actually vetted, and for the most part it was people I went to local college with that set this whereas I'd had several really bad work experiences where people clearly weren't growing out of it. I've spent the past few years at work dealing with some blend of normal people, Machiavellian coworkers, and Machiavellian customers, and it seems like for much of that time I've watched the world get more Machiavellian.

That's the strange thing about this, while I'm glad I haven't known nothing but crap times and crap people that also delayed me really getting my head around this properly until my mid to late 30's. The other odd thing to add too - having my reductive materialism shattered around age 32/33 and coming to have experiences with deities, spirits, and the like momentarily also gave me a shot in the arm of thinking there was a 'bigger' purpose to what we're here doing but even there I saw wider and wider gaps between the way that world supposedly functions vs. the way this one does - I could get into that more but suffice to say my spirituality is also shifting more in Darwinian directions and it's partly because I feel like I have an obligation to not only understand what's happening with a lot of this but also to really see what can be done about having wider playing fields hold their own against each other rather than having everything, down to the wire, about power and the exercise of it in short-term interactions.

If there's any good news - if your whole personality or the bulk of it hasn't been wired up by sheer imitation, if you're self-made in any way, you're already out and you'll be breaking shibboleth every time you so much as ask for directions or even pick up a fork from the table. When it's that weak/pitiful it's hardly worth caring, and on a personal level I don't care except that I feel like I'm watching the social incentive structures around me get worse as more people jump on board with that game.

Darwinian thought certainly didn't apply to social life when it came about.

Well... it's in the doing though with or without a name for it. Some combination of having competition for resources between conscious agents and the 'victors bias' encoded into us from being the survivors of a long chain of people who've procreated - which then prioritized the fight for status, etc., etc..