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PaperclipPerfector  7mo ago (text post)   3598 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for May 5, 2024

Do you have a dumb question that you're kind of embarrassed to ask in the main thread? Is there something you're just not sure about?

This is your opportunity to ask questions. No question too simple or too silly.

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I recall a blogpost on how most people's views on X issue aren't hard-set but contingent on how much of society is pro-X vs. anti-X, and how for certain shapes of the "what percentile of pro-X is needed to flip a given percentile of people to pro-X" curve this can lead to large, rapid changes in societal attitudes.

The blogger I've read the most of is Scott, of course; I'm pretty sure this post predates ACX, and I've searched SSC quite thoroughly for words I think might have been in it. Might have been from squid314; searching that is really hard and tiresome, so I haven't yet done it. Could also have been from someone else, probably in the Ratsphere. So I'm asking to see if anyone knows offhand the post I'm talking about, so as to save myself the trouble of digging through Actual Everything I Might Have At Some Point Read. Even knowing where to look would help a lot.

Given the timeframe you're looking at, it's probably not this ACX article, "Give Up Seventy Percent Of The Way Through The Hyperstitious Slur Cascade", but that has a link to "Respectability Cascades", which might be it?

I found "Respectability Cascades" in my initial searching (as I said, I searched SSC quite thoroughly), but that's not it. And indeed, it's not "Seventy Percent".

Respectability cascade was the one I thought he might be talking about, but I couldn't remember the name, thanks.

This probably isn't the exact post that you were looking for, but I think you will find it interesting and related to what you asked about. It is about how people's views on X becomes distorted by taboos and shift when the taboo is lifted.

https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/KpMNqA5BiCRozCwM3/social-dark-matter

[Social Dark Matter is] anything that people are strongly incentivized to hide from each other, and which therefore appears to be rare. And given that our society disapproves-of and disincentivizes a wide variety of things, there is a lot of it out there.

By the Law of Prevalence, any given type of social dark matter is going to be much more common than your evidence would suggest, and by the Law of Extremity, instances of that dark matter are going to tend to be much less extreme than you would naively guess.

No, it's not what I'm looking for. As I said to KingOfTheBailey, I'm not looking for "lots of people were already pro-X, but were hiding until it became cool". I'm looking for "people actually became pro-X when it became cool".

Of course, it is easy to mistake one for the other, in either direction, and this may become emotionally charged because most people don't want to admit (even to themselves) that they're part of the latter.

Thanks for trying, though.

I've heard this called a "preference cascade", and I think I first heard it on the Timur Kuran episode of The Portal podcast.

Searching up that term suggests that it's about people hiding their pro-X views until they feel pro-X is safe enough to say. This doesn't seem to be the same phenomenon as the more troubling one I'm talking about, where people actually aren't pro-X until being pro-X seems popular enough.

True. California, for example, was actually against gay marriage in 2008 when they had a secret ballot vote to make it illegal statewide.

People's actual opinions changed rapidly, not just their stated opinions.

May have been increased turnout from a specific demographic group that were supporting Obama.

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