Siderea

Sorry, I learned the term from this essay (https://siderea.livejournal.com/1159765.html) and assumed it was a correct usage.

To be clear, though, while moving to a new society will cause quite gradual, passive assimilation, I wasn’t really talking about that case. In such cases, you still tend to think of your old community as “your community”, and might e.g. seek out an association of expats from your old society to hang out with, since you still share their mores.

But moving to a university, or joining the military, or joining a cult, or going to prison, or marrying into money—these are communities, not societies. They actively “digest” you. In all these cases, you are given new connections who serve as both direct role-models for, and judges of, your current degree of assimilation; and, further, you are usually striving to assimilate as quickly as possible (whether you’re there voluntarily or not) because your lack of cultural awareness is one of the things keeping you back from having status and power in your new community.

Would you not call what any/all of these entities do—one of the major roles they perform for their members—enculturation? If not, then it seems that I have misunderstood the term.

(Tangent/side note: I didn’t make the connection of prison-as-community-that-assimilates until I was writing this. Isn’t the whole goal of reducing recidivism better expressed as “reducing the potential for prison to serve as an enculturating/assimilating force upon…

This "theory of jerkodynamics" as you call it was actually fleshed out in this great post: http://siderea.livejournal.com/1230660.html

> ...If you unwittingly have been repelling non-assholes, you will get the impression that everyone is an asshole, because you're still surrounded by plenty of people, but everyone left – that is everyone you come into contact with – is, in fact, an asshole.

> ...An asshole filter is a situation one creates that causes non-assholes to reduce contact with you at a disproportionate rate (like at all) than assholes...

> ...An asshole filter happens when you publicly promulgate a straitened contact boundary and then don't enforce it; or worse, reward the people who transgress it...

It goes on to frame "jerk-ness" in terms of "transgressiveness":

> The concept of transgressiveness is one of the most powerful lenses I know with which to look at people's behavior – possibly because it is is a perspective so absent from our culture. It is a phenomenon that is real, but for which we have no words – except "asshole". When we call someone an asshole, pragmatically speaking what we're usually trying to express is that that person transgresses others' boundaries. We might also say, if asked to explain, that the person so described is selfish, in that they want to get their way even (or especially) at the expense of others; we might describe them as rude or disrespectful, meaning that their conduct shows contempt for others' boundaries.

It's entertaining how far we in the states go in denying we have classes. Some years back a blogger tried to cook up a taxonomy of our class system. Since we don't have words to describe them he adopted archaic Indian terms instead. Brahmins are the NY/CA elite, Vaisyas are the Trump voting worker caste, etc.

https://unqualified-reservations.blogspot.com/2007/05/castes-of-united-states.html

Other writers have recognized and described it too: http://siderea.livejournal.com/1260265.html

Even our very own Michael O. Church: https://www.meetup.com/Philadelphia-Political-Agnostics/messages/boards/thread/49570124

I'm with Mz on this - we should start explicitly recognizing our caste system.

It's been helpful to me; once I figured out our castes and where I live in it, suddenly a lot of things clicked into place. For example, why do so many people not recognize me as white? It's because I don't give off the cultural signals of being upper caste (Brahmin in Moldbug's taxonomy) but I'm solidly within Brahim professional and social circles. Given these mismatched signals, Kashmiri or Argentinian seems like the most plausible hypothesis.

This post on social mobility. It really made me think about where I came from and how different it is from my wife and why we are comfortable in different situations.

More specifically, the post explains the difference in Social Class and Working Class and how we often conflate those two things when in discussion. We often talk about “lower”, “middle” and “upper” classes, but the author proposes that those are actually Working Classes and not necessarily related to Social classes. We often migrate one or maybe two social classes higher or lower in our lifetime, but movements more than two rungs is prohibitively difficult.

It is an interesting way to look at society.

https://siderea.livejournal.com/1260265.html?format=light&fbclid=IwAR2fv67G9mR017huARy5Xi_J3ggeqLUapGTSWIe5flvdpEe4rESDKsmdSZc

I'm reminded of Siderea's excellent essay: "What Software is Made Of" https://siderea.livejournal.com/1241996.html

> A computer program is a specification of the behaviors of an inanimate object. And since inanimate objects, definitionally, do not have behaviors of their own, every single one of those behaviors specified in a computer program – and every single aspect of every one of those behaviors – has to be deliberately chosen and imbued into the object by code. Every single behavior, at every level of abstraction, represents a decision as to what the program is to do in that moment being described.

(Yes, the page is ugly. The words are worth it, or copy-paste into your favorite editor).

It puts a damper on attention in general, but the attention that is less dampened is precisely the unwanted attention.

Think about it. A considerate well intentioned person might mistakenly overcompensate and give too little attention to female colleagues, while an inconsiderate person who doesn't care about gender politics will keep doing what they were doing all along. The result is that the ratio of unwanted/wanted attention goes up, even as total attention goes down.

This general principle is called "the asshole filter"[1] and it applies to all sorts of social interactions, not just sexual harassment.

[1]http://siderea.livejournal.com/1230660.html