The Nonlinear Library LW - On "Geeks, MOPs, and Sociopaths" by alkjash
Jan 22, 2024
12:33
Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: On "Geeks, MOPs, and Sociopaths", published by alkjash on January 22, 2024 on LessWrong.
Hey, alkjash! I'm excited to talk about some of David Chapman's work with you. Full disclosure, I'm a big fan of Chapman's in general and also a creator within the meta/post-rationality scene with him (to use some jargon to be introduced very shortly).
You mentioned being superficially convinced of a post he wrote a while ago about how subcultures collapse called "Geeks, MOPs, and sociopaths in subculture evolution". In it he makes a few key claims that, together, give a model of how subcultures grow and decline:
Subcultures come into existence when a small group of creators start a scene (people making things for each other) and then draw a group of fanatics who support the scene. Creators and fanatics are the "geeks".
A subculture comes into existence around the scene when it gets big and popular enough to attract MOPs (members of the public). These people are fans but not fanatics. They don't contribute much other than showing up and having a good time.
If a subculture persists long enough, it attracts sociopaths who prey on the MOPs to exploit them for money, sex, etc.
Although MOPs sometimes accidentally destroy subcultures by diluting the scene too much, sociopaths reliably kill subcultures by converting what was cool about the scene into something that can be packaged to sold to MOPs as a commodity that is devoid of everything that made it unique and meaningful.
The main way to fight this pattern is to defend against too many MOPs overwhelming the geeks (Chapman suggests a 6:1 MOP to geek ratio) and to aggressively keep out the sociopaths.
There's also a 6th claim that we can skip for now, which is about what Chapman calls the fluid mode and the complete stance, as talking about it would require importing a lot of concepts from his hypertext book Meaningness.
To get us started, I'd be interested to know what you find convincing about his claims, and what, if anything, makes you think other models may better explain how subcultures evolve.
In my head I'm running this model against these examples: academic subfields, gaming subreddits and discords, fandoms, internet communities, and startups. Do tell me which of these count as "subcultures" in Chapman's framing. Let me start with the parts of the model I find convincing.
When subcultures grow (too) rapidly, there is an influx of casual members that dilutes the culture and some tension between the old guard and the new fans. This agrees with what I know about startups, gaming subcultures, and fandoms. It does explain the longevity of academic cultures known for our extreme gatekeeping.
In Chinese there is a saying/meme 有人的地方就是江湖, which I would loosely translate as "where there are people there is politics." It seems obvious to me that in the initial stage a subculture will be focused on object reality (e.g. a fandom focused on an anime, a subreddit focused on a video game, etc.), but as people join, politics and social reality will play a larger and larger role (competition over leadership positions, over power and influence, over abstractions like community values not directly tied to the original thing).
As the low-hanging fruits of innovation in object reality (e.g. geeks coming up with new build orders in starcraft, bloggers coming up with new rationality techniques) dry up, there is a tendency for those good at playing social reality games to gain progressively more influence.
Here are some parts that I'm not sure about, or find suspicious, or disagree with:
At least on a superficial reading there seems to be an essentialist pigeonholing of people into the Geek/Mop/Sociopath trichotomy. It seems to me more persuasive that all members of a scene have the capacity for all 3 roles, and on average the "meta" shifts as the ev...
Hey, alkjash! I'm excited to talk about some of David Chapman's work with you. Full disclosure, I'm a big fan of Chapman's in general and also a creator within the meta/post-rationality scene with him (to use some jargon to be introduced very shortly).
You mentioned being superficially convinced of a post he wrote a while ago about how subcultures collapse called "Geeks, MOPs, and sociopaths in subculture evolution". In it he makes a few key claims that, together, give a model of how subcultures grow and decline:
Subcultures come into existence when a small group of creators start a scene (people making things for each other) and then draw a group of fanatics who support the scene. Creators and fanatics are the "geeks".
A subculture comes into existence around the scene when it gets big and popular enough to attract MOPs (members of the public). These people are fans but not fanatics. They don't contribute much other than showing up and having a good time.
If a subculture persists long enough, it attracts sociopaths who prey on the MOPs to exploit them for money, sex, etc.
Although MOPs sometimes accidentally destroy subcultures by diluting the scene too much, sociopaths reliably kill subcultures by converting what was cool about the scene into something that can be packaged to sold to MOPs as a commodity that is devoid of everything that made it unique and meaningful.
The main way to fight this pattern is to defend against too many MOPs overwhelming the geeks (Chapman suggests a 6:1 MOP to geek ratio) and to aggressively keep out the sociopaths.
There's also a 6th claim that we can skip for now, which is about what Chapman calls the fluid mode and the complete stance, as talking about it would require importing a lot of concepts from his hypertext book Meaningness.
To get us started, I'd be interested to know what you find convincing about his claims, and what, if anything, makes you think other models may better explain how subcultures evolve.
In my head I'm running this model against these examples: academic subfields, gaming subreddits and discords, fandoms, internet communities, and startups. Do tell me which of these count as "subcultures" in Chapman's framing. Let me start with the parts of the model I find convincing.
When subcultures grow (too) rapidly, there is an influx of casual members that dilutes the culture and some tension between the old guard and the new fans. This agrees with what I know about startups, gaming subcultures, and fandoms. It does explain the longevity of academic cultures known for our extreme gatekeeping.
In Chinese there is a saying/meme 有人的地方就是江湖, which I would loosely translate as "where there are people there is politics." It seems obvious to me that in the initial stage a subculture will be focused on object reality (e.g. a fandom focused on an anime, a subreddit focused on a video game, etc.), but as people join, politics and social reality will play a larger and larger role (competition over leadership positions, over power and influence, over abstractions like community values not directly tied to the original thing).
As the low-hanging fruits of innovation in object reality (e.g. geeks coming up with new build orders in starcraft, bloggers coming up with new rationality techniques) dry up, there is a tendency for those good at playing social reality games to gain progressively more influence.
Here are some parts that I'm not sure about, or find suspicious, or disagree with:
At least on a superficial reading there seems to be an essentialist pigeonholing of people into the Geek/Mop/Sociopath trichotomy. It seems to me more persuasive that all members of a scene have the capacity for all 3 roles, and on average the "meta" shifts as the ev...