the positive examples all have the form: a group of people enthusiastically decide to change or disregard a social norm (at least within some magic circle).
the negative examples all have the form: a single person decides to covertly ignore social taboo, in order to selfishly benefit.
these do not seem at all the same thing to me. what do we gain by giving them a common label? why should our treatment of one have anything to do with our treatment of the other?
Huh, yeah, I hadn't consciously noticed that clustering. Hrm, can I come up with counterexamples?
Positive example that's a single person ignoring social taboo: covert but responsible substance use maybe? I know a couple people who use phenibut or microdoses of LSD because they think it helps participate better in social situations, and as far as I've noticed it does, but there is a social taboo against using drugs.
(Not unambigiously positive, I think there's a somewhat reasonable preference other people might have to know if the folks around them are on some kind of mind-altering substance. And yet my intuition is that's reasonable for normal doses of LSD but not for normal doses of antidepressants or antianxiety meds.)
Negative example that's a group of people enthusiastically deciding to change or disregard social norms: Conspiracy to commit fraud. FTX, Enron, Bernie Madoff's associates, all of these are a small group of people deciding to change or disregard a social norm (don't lie) optimizing for something (lots of money) and that's bad. Likewise harmful cults like the People's Temple, Heaven's Gate, the Branch Davidians (even before the siege) seem to be doing something like optimizing hard for some kind of spiritual lifestyle that winds up sacrificing some important protective elements. The fraudsters fit the selfish description[1] but I don't think that's quite what's going on with the cults?
At least in my head, both the positive and negative versions feel like similar mental motions. I can sort of poke my brain to step outside social scripts, look around, and optimize for something, and get interesting and creative answers back. It's sometimes a useful skill, and also, some of the interesting and creative ideas I come up with would make people worse off, blow up in my face if people find out, or otherwise would be unethical, so I don't do them. In the other direction, there's some ideas I've encountered I thought were morally fine, but broke social norms in a way I didn't want to do, and I'm glad I figured out the source of my objection.
I think FTX/SBF claims it wasn't for selfish ends. I don't have a position on whether that's true or not, just noting it.
I think the point is not one person/group distinction, but directed to participants/directed to outsiders distinction.
In your first example the person in some sense ignores taboo in their interaction with themselves. I don't even think it's right to call this taboo social one in relevant sense.
In your second example members of the groups ignored social taboo in their interactions with people not in this group. If they decided "Hey, in out company we can lie to each other any time we want without any punishment" it would probably not end well for them, but it wouldn't be morally bad.
So, like, social munchkinry is good if you have consent and bad if you haven't.
This has two variants: either the person who proposed to ignore X already planned to achieve Z; or it was no one's plan, just a natural consequence of human psychology that the participants were not aware of.
It is even possible that in one group, ignoring X leads to Y, but in another group, ignoring X leads to (Y and) Z. The difference could be that the people are smarter, lucky, or didn't accidentally include a bad actor.
There could be an unspoken assumption that we will ignore X but follow some subset X0. The assumption is unspoken because under usual circumstances everyone follows X, which implies the subset X0. Then someone ignores X including X0 and people get hurt/disappointed.
Or it could be that people explicitly agree to follow X0, but compared to X, X0 is more difficult to verify, or easier to violate with pretended ignorance, so violations of X0 will be more frequent than violations of X. Or the problem is that enforcement of X requires support of outsiders who are familiar with the norm "X", but the norm "no X, but still X0" sounds confusing or wrong to them, so they won't help enforce it.
Examples:
If we choose to skip small talk, do all people have an easy way to avoid topics that they consider unpleasant?
If we keep hugging and cuddling, is it okay to e.g. touch each other's genitals? Let's suppose no; what are we going to do if it happens by accident? What if it keeps happening "by accident" repeatedly?
How do we politely refuse hugs and cuddles from smelly people?
If someone abuses "transparent feedback" to bully people, is there a realistic way to stop them?
Gold diggers seem like a decent female analog of male pickup artists. Both are intentional optimizers.
Your dig against pick-up artists as it's stated doesn't seem to amount to much more than "these guys feel icky", which is most likely just reflecting it being low status. (There's also separately a bunch of toxic behavior related to the pick-up mindset one could rightfully criticize.)
This is less me expounding on a thesis and more me musing about a topic where I have conflicting intuitions. Epistemic status: exploratory.
One thing: What do I mean by munchkin?
"Munchkin" is a term from the tabletop roleplaying game community. It's talking about the kind of person who treats the game as a system to optimize, doing weird or unexpected things that aren't against the letter of the rules but often are against the spirit in order to gain some advantage. It's a term that usually has negative valence, though once in a while it'll be spoken with a kind of grudging respect.
Lately I've had the idea of social munchkinry in mind. But let me talk a little more about tabletops first.[1]
Munchkinry is kinda fun in isolation. Looking at the myriad rules in a dozen rulebooks to try and come up with some overpowered combination is a neat mental exercise that combines the surprise of comedy with the fun mental stimulation of a good math puzzle. I've had hours of entertainment trying to get the most out of a third-level wizard.
One good strategy for getting good munchkinry is to figure out if there's some aspect of the game you're willing to completely neglect. Like, if normally you want your character in a game to be competent at fighting enemies, surviving enemies trying to fight you, and socializing with other characters, what happens if you totally ignore surviving and socializing?
In tabletops, the place where munchkinry gets its negative valence is how they interact with everyone else playing the game. It's not very fun to show up for an emotional story about the tragedy of fantasy knights only to have someone do something weird with a bag of rats or the sale of ten-foot poles and argue that achieves world domination. The exception to that tends to be if everyone else is in on it and thinks that's fun.
(Suggestion if you're in on it and think it's fun: The tabletop RPG Lancer is built to stand up to a lot more munchkin play than most, and gives a lot of room to have fun tinkering with character builds trying to do powerful combinations. I love Lancer, ask me sometime about my Metalmark burn build.)
I highly recommend the fanfic Harry Potter and the Natural Twenty for some insight into this kind of play, but remember that Natural Twenty is massaging away a lot of the annoying bits by being written as engaging fiction, not an intractable argument delaying a good speech about the fall of the kingdom.
What's the social version of this?
A lot of social norms that aren't really rules so much as conventions. Most people mostly stick to the conventions. Some people look at those conventions and ask, well, is that a rule really, what happens if I do this other thing instead?
It's kinda nice
So that's an idea what munchkinry is. Now to ramble about what I see as the positives. This is an unordered list:
Skip the small talk. There's a lot of slow social escalations normally. You ask about the weather, I ask about your weekend, you ask about my family, I ask about your school days, you ask about philosophy of life, I ask about your long dark nights of the soul. Doing that over the course of a month would generally be considered pretty fast social escalation! And yet talks about the long dark nights of the soul can be wonderful conversations. So some people say, hey, why bother with the early stuff? There's a meetup group I'm aware of that's literally called "Skip the Small Talk" but Askhole and authentic relating games and circling all feel similar in spirit.
"I want the uncommon, deeply personal parts of conversation. Why not munchkin and optimize for those?"
Asking for hugs or platonic cuddles. There was a tradition at my university around finals week. People would write "Free hugs" on a piece of cardboard and hang around in the academic quads, giving hugs to basically anyone who asked. Some people did this enough they decided to get t-shirts with "free hugs" written in big letters. I liked giving and getting hugs, and wholeheartedly supported this tradition.
One of the big surprises at my first rationalist meetup was a pile of people draped over each other on a giant bean bag chair. Despite me being a newcomer and stranger, someone waved me over and asked if I wanted to join the cuddle. That's a bit of social munchkinry!
"I want more physical touch than I expect to get if I follow the norms of only touching family and very close friends. Why not munchkin and optimize for that?"
Efficient feedback. Bridgewater Associates is a financial firm that's infamous for very direct and frequent feedback. Transparently ranking a manager in last place after a meeting, a special tool to give rapid assessments of whether each other's views make sense or are agreed with, and other habits give them the dubious distinction of having the phrase "has been likened to a cult" on their Wikipedia page, but it works for them.
Meanwhile, two of my favourite people to work with came up to me within a day of starting to collaborate seriously together and unprompted asked 'what's the worst thing about working with me right now?' [2] It's not a coincidence that they're some of my preferred colleagues either; the first time it happened I was a little sleep deprived and had just pulled twelve hours of work and gave a list of issues, and then the next day two of the issues were fixed. By the end of the project, I was asking variations on 'what's the area I can most improve at?' and excited about getting direct feedback so I could improve.
"I want to get clearer and faster information about what I'm doing wrong and where I can improve. Why not munchkin and optimize for that?"
You can just do things. The story of Vibecamp is great. Brooke is just kind of going along, minding her business on Twitter, one of hundreds of people enjoying the vibe, and then she suggests doing some kind of Twitter hangout. That leads to Vibecamp, which is great. And again Raemon creates Secular Solstice, which is not helping the cult aspersions but is one of the most meaningful nights of my year.
It's kinda not
Now to ramble about what I see as negative examples. Have another unordered list:
Pickup artistry. Some people look at dating and think, man, this could be better if I got to sleep with more hot people. Pickup artists will ask dozens of women out in one night, moving from location to location so as not to be obviously just asking one woman out after another.[3] With tighter feedback loops they can practice lots of approaches and figure out what gets further in seductions. Some of the techniques they come up with are kinda dubious even if they worked; "negging" is one such that I've heard of, where you say negative things about people you want to seduce.
There's not a fixed rule on how many people you can ask out. There's not really a hard and fast list of what words you can and can't say when flirting. Nevertheless, this feels seedy, and my impression is that collectively the people being approached don't like being attempt #27 of the day.
"I want to sleep with more attractive people. Why not munchkin and optimize for that?"
Reputation cascades. Habryka makes this point better than I will in a paragraph. The idea here is that some people are optimizing for trustworthiness, so they get a little trust, use that as a kind of down payment on a loan for more trust, and keep doing that over and over again.
This works pretty well actually! I've seen people make as few as three quick hops on the ladder of promotion sometimes. Usually it works out fine, because most people are basically honest, but it always gives me the willies to watch in action. Whenever I notice someone is deliberately strategizing for their public perception, suppressing negative commentary or artificially inducing vocal positive support, I get a touch paranoid.
"I want to be trusted. Why not munchkin and optimize for that?"
Boundary pushing. Sometimes someone sets a boundary. "If you're going to smoke, you can't be in my house." "If you touch me like that again, I'm going to break up with you." "Dude if you keep playing Meta Knight, I'm going to stop playing Smash Bros Brawl with you."
For the moment, take the boundary as being fine; acceptable reach, clearly communicated, all that.
Sometimes someone looks at that rule and moves to juuuust outside the threshold.
This is not great? Like, if you finally switch off Meta Knight (the most powerful character in Smash Bros Brawl) only to play Snake (the second most powerful[4]) for the next five matches I might throw a pillow at your head next game. For a more serious example, Adam moving his hand to juuust above the boundary line is unlikely to make Bella feel like he's cooperating with her on making this a good experience for them both.[5]
"I want to technically follow the rule so I don't get the consequence. Why not munchkin and optimize for as much of what I wanted?"
You can just do things. [redacted]
So where am I at?
I have mixed feelings.
To paraphrase the inestimable Noah Sweat:
If when you say social munchkinry you mean the devil's loophole, the easy path, the insidious breakdown of the social order, that inspires fights, creates misery and drama, yea, literally is as bad a behavior as it can possibly get and not be against the rules; if you mean the evil optimization process that topples the Rationalist man and woman and non-binary and genderflux from the pinnacle of virtuous, gracious living into the bottomless pit of disdain, and despair, and lack of shame, then certainly I am against it.
But, if when you say social munchkinry you mean the lubrication of deep friendships, the philosophic thought experiment, the instigation of Solstice songs on their lips and laughter in their hearts, and the warm glow of satisfaction in their eyes; if you mean the spark of creativity; if you mean the stimulating optimization that puts a spring in the new organizer's step on a frosty, crispy morning; if you mean the lens which enables a man to magnify his joy, and his happiness, and to ignore, if only for a little while, his great shortcomings, and heartaches, and dump stats; if you mean that munchkinry, the satisfaction of which pours into our treasuries untold millions of QALYs, which are used to provide happiness batteries and ladders up for our depressed, our lonely, our isolated, our young and un-agenty; to build reputation networks and hits-based success stories, then certainly I am for it.
This is my stand. I have left myself a line of retreat from it. I don't even know what compromise would mean here.
In the words of Scott Alexander, "I have always found these fascinating and just remembered that nobody can stop me from talking about them."
Quote not exact because I'm away from my usual index card stack and instead of memorizing the exact line I put my effort into incorporating the general technique into my habits.
I never hear about pickup artists who are trying to sleep with men, though I assume there's some gay guys and at least a few straight women out there employing the same fundamental mindset.
C'mon LessWrong. I know you want to bring up Ice Climbers. The desire for the theoretical optimal option is strong in you, I can sense it. Do it and then 1v1 me, I'll kick your butt with Ganondorf.
This does not only apply to this specific gender dynamic. I admit I'm using this one because it's the more obvious salient example.