"This creates a pressure for all people to always notify their friends whenever there’s been a dangerous event near them, even if the odds of them being involved were miniscule. This is a clear waste of time and attention, and the feature was removed the feature continues to be a piece of security theatre in our lives."

that's not how it was solved to equilibrium in my social environment. most people ignore those. from time to time someone use it and i think it's weird and wonder why. 


"In my life, even if 90% of the people around have the idea, when I’m not confident that 100% do then I often explain the basic idea for everyone. This often costs a lot of time"

when i started to read this post, it start with very basic things, that i expect anyone who read it already to know. and i thought - do the author plan to link it outside of LessWrong? why else would he start with such waste of time? then i come to this part of the post, and saw the explanation.

i think the calculation here is obviously on the side of "don't explain, it's net-negative". even in real life it's look to me like it better to go forward and explain only if someone ask or signal they didn't understand some other way. but in the interment? when you can just link? i really don't understand - what calculation produce the result that it's better to write all the things, including things i learned when i was 10 years old? it is costing a lot of time, indeed. so why?

also, i'm not sure about the wrongness of the feeling that it should be simple. are you sure it never was simple? we had the shared news thing and broke it, but, it wasn't created with great and delivered effort. i don't have model here, and i think there is at least two possible interpretations here, and in one of them, it's possible for it to be easy. (i plan to think of that more, probably after i will read inadequate equilibrium)

Inner Rings definitely exists, and sometimes they even allow to have nicer environment. but this is very different from martial arts class or undergraduate program. there are number of differences. the first is, that one is place that dedicated to learning something, and the other not. the second is legible standards. and the third is... I'm not sure how to pint at it. existence? legible existence?  

maybe my book club have inner ring, and maybe they are even nicer then the general members - but maybe not, maybe their are more mean-girls then the other. inner ring is not well-kept garden, it just some people that locally have more status.  

in most random social scenes, there is some culture, but it's sort of random. result from what sort of people come first and some random things.  there are two book groups with different culture, and it's mostly not because they decided that, and there is no greyspace and no well guarded gardens in the inner rings.

your description take guess-culture approach to greyspaces and subcultures, and i am pessimistic about it viability outside of small communities.  there is only so much you can have without saying. with guessing only. people will be wrong, and if you never fix them, a lot of them will remain wrong.

i don't know if we become worst, and i do think there are various cultural threads to pull here. fie example. Woke allow only some sorts of subcultures and pretty hostile to most. but also... i don't see a lot of places that actually trying. a lot of things are on the internet now, and social networks destroyed a lot of cultural knowledge on how to create and moderate groups. 

also, i'm not in USA, and things come here slower. i hope the woke wave will subside, though i'm not sure how much subcultures thing connected to it. I'm not even sure there are less subcultures now then there was 30 years ago. how you even measure that? 

I agree about most, but disagree about the first part - the trust-levels tend to cluster, but there is more then two worlds. much, much more. also, the last years i made the opposite move, of learning to see the dark world and not only the light one, and think that the inability of people and society do that is very bad and causing a lot of problems now. i wrote in length about the first thing in my recent blog post (in Hebrew, alas) and plan to write in more length about the second some day. 

https://hadoveretharishona.wordpress.com/2025/07/28/%d7%a2%d7%9c-%d7%97%d7%91%d7%a8%d7%95%d7%aa-%d7%a2%d7%9d-%d7%9b%d7%9e%d7%95%d7%aa-%d7%90%d7%9e%d7%95%d7%9f-%d7%92%d7%91%d7%95%d7%94-%d7%95%d7%97%d7%91%d7%a8%d7%95%d7%aa-%d7%a2%d7%9d-%d7%9b%d7%9e%d7%95/

I saw people mentioned Eternal September on the internet, not frequently, but  over years. and currently my model of this even (That happened before my time and i didn't witnessed) is that it's exactly instance of "the separation of the space's culture and outside culture can break if too many new people enter at once, of if someone too incompatible person joins, but despite this such spaces can still exit for years."

people had nice culture, people was joining every September and at first was disruptive, and it took time to acculturate, but the ratio of old timers- new timers was good enough, and the number small enough, so the culture persisted. then, The General Public got access to the internet, and the culture broke, and was never rebuilt again. 

edit in reply to gears of ascension asking for source: the "never rebuilt again" is the opinion of people who was there, and i encountered lamenting the days of old. i take them at their word that it wasn't build again. my own opinion of why is that the internet have pockets of nice places, but there is vast, vast difference between place when the default is nice, that everyone or almost everyone cooperate, and place when the default is defection, and there are small pockets of cooperators. those are very different dynamics, very different worlds to live in. ( i don't have links to the random places when i encountered that, sorry.)

I had similar problem with planecrash and abandoned itma dn them read interesting experts, mostly anything i could find about dath ilan. 

but then i went to read other glowfic, and read a lot of them, and enjoy a lot. and now my two main hypotheses is that i don't like enough the characters to enjoy so many time in their presence - there are other characters that i would like to read planecrash-length story, for the experience of being in their head and see how they think about things and react to things. and that planecrash, specifically, is not dense enough. 

but i'm very happy i encountered it - most of the things i read the last years are glowfics, and i wouldn't discover them otherwise, and i generally find them much more enjoyable then regular books. 

very interesting to read! i'm blogging in Hebrew, and i chose different strategy -  i write what i want, and i link t to English sources a lot. i don't get huge audience like you, though, and don't even try - i still surprised i got hundreds of readers!

Interesting read, and very weird. my first associations when reading was to Lawfulness - in the GlowFic-Golarion meaning. and for me, this is the essence of responsibility, exactly the opposite of the claim of the post. 

the people who responsible to the outcomes look on all possible situations, and choose their own trade-offs. they look on the cost of the trade off, and say they are willing to pay that cost, because the alternative is worst. 

what is the opposite of that? culture in which acknowledging cost of policy is political suicide, when all political debates must appear one-sided, when person that say that they willing to pay price x to achieve outcome y is heartless and cruel.

blameless postmortems (or retrospectives, like we do at work after every sprint in agile programming) are part of the process, are the place where we should look on the trade offs and chose them. it doesn't always happen, but mostly, from my point of view, it's lack if processes, not excessive amount of processes, that is the problem. 

I think the main part here is, i see process as ultimate form of responsibility. the people who choose it bear it. and you... don't? for some reason?

practically, power buy distance from crime, and people who want to avoid accountability can use the distance for that aim. but i find the whole idea that process absolve from responsibility, instead of transfer and concentrate it in the hands of people who design the process, very weird. 

Voluntarily deciding "I don't want social skills" is a surrender that seriously harms you.

citation needed. my own experience is the opposite of that. refusing to play the game let you take the role of the local nerd, and it's not a bad role. and it's much much better then trying to play the game and failing. 

I wrote (in Hebrew, alas) two years ago, about locally-useful methods that doesn't have stopping condition. I'm sure there are people out there that will benefit from exposure. the attitude you described come from them, and from people whose bubble includes mostly them.

the problem is the luck of stopping condition. who many tries before you decide this method doesn't work? before stopping and re-evaluating? before trying something else instead?

also, what Scott Alexander wrote about exposure, and Trapped Priors. 

I think you make the same mistake the exposure people do? you. are in a bubble when insight is what needed, so you advocate insight without stopping condition.

the interesting question, to me, is when, in for who long, try either. 

It should be possible BOTH avoid denying reality AND not accepting magical explanation. it's even not that hard! but people fail at that  ALL THE TIME! the "this thing happen as you described, but i don't accept your interpretation of what happened" is very underutilized option. probably a bucket error.