6d ago

A Post-Mortem for Geeks, Mops, and Sociopaths

People connected to LessWrong and the Bay Area surveillance industry often cite David Chapman's "Geeks, Mops, and Sociopaths in Subculture Evolution" to understand why their subcultures keep getting taken over by jerks. Chapman is a Buddhist mystic who seems rationalist-curious. Some people use the term postrationalist.

Have you noticed that Chapman presents the founders of nerdy subcultures as innocent nerds being pushed around by the mean suits? But today we know that the founders of Longtermism and LessWrong all had ulterior motives: Scott Alexander and Nick Bostrom were into race pseudoscience, and Yudkowsky had his kinks (and was also into eugenics and Libertarianism). HPMOR teaches that intelligence is the measure of human worth, and the use of intelligence is to manipulate people. Mollie Gleiberman makes a strong argument that "bednet" effective altruism with short-term measurable goals was always meant as an outer doctrine to prepare people to hear the inner doctrine about how building God and expanding across the Universe would be the most effective altruism of all. And there were all the issues within LessWrong and Effective Altruism around substance use, abuse of underpaid employees, and bosses who felt entitled to hit on subordinates. A '60s rocker might have been cheated by his record label, but that does not get him off the hook for crashing a car while high on nose candy and deep inside a groupie.

I don't know whether Chapman was naive or creating a smokescreen. Had he ever met the thinkers he admired in person?

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Iirc (was a while ago I read it) one of the big problems with the gms article imho is that it doesn't really make clear that this is only talking about a specific type of sociopath (or in other words it redefined the term, so normal stuff doesnt apply. Rao’s Gervais Principle has the same problem. no shock there.), more like someone who hurts the subculture ingroup. That in a lot of subcultures the geeks are also sociopaths to the outgroup isnt really considered. (See as a big example, metal/rock or even worse their subculture: nsbm, the former are often quite abusive to various people (esp women, who often were not considered to be able to be part of the ingroup, but also general rockstar asshole behavior) and the latter case they are basically neonazis. But also just how much the article seems to dislike mops and strawmans them (oddly this part of the article also feels very much like he doesnt understand what actually goes into organizing stuff, as a minor sort of fanatic type myself who has helped out at things. Mops are fine, this 'Fanatics may be generous, but they signed up to support geeks, not mops.' is utter crap, it also feels a bit protoincel re the whole sociopaths sleep with the best mops).
- A subculture many of his readers are familiar with is pick-up artistry. It was founded by a few charismatic obsessed dudes, who teach how to make outsiders give you want you want, and who often have ways of making money from their disciples which are not open and straightforward (whether advertising expensive seminars with dubious benefits, or funneling them into get-rich-quick schemes and get-hot-quickly schemes). PUA did not have a founding generation of unworldly geeks followed by superficial sociopaths, and the big egos don't just fleece the casual fans but people outside the subculture.
  People tell me that the California counterculture in the 1960s and 1970s had a strong entrepreneurial side.
  
  entire rationalist project is arguably get-smart-quick scheme
  
  Pua is a good example, as their ur text, the game already shows how predatory towards men it got, but they seem to have been annoyed tha the 'sociopath' dared to use their methods and fellow men and not just women. And that is if we see Strauss as a geek, and not a 'sociopath' (a thing he feared iirc when he revealed he was a journalist).
- Eg. Yudkowsky is disabled (he talks a lot about that in his autobiography from 2000 and later in terms of akrasia and his struggles with fitness) but some people who know him accuse him of predatory behaviour, and he created a recruiting funnel for an apocalyptic movement and accepts a high salary for doing whatever the eff he wants. The "Geek Social Fallacies" essay talks about the danger of assuming that someone who is marginalized is not predatory.
Alright, I've read the GMS post now. Unfortunately, because I am only coming to it now, ten years after it was first published, and through the framing of a Post-Mortem, whatever charm it may have had over me in its time is not apparent.
TL;DR: Chapman’s Grand Unified Theory of Subcultures (GUTS, if you will) is the socialism of geeks, ig.
Some thoughts:
No examples. If you're going to present to me a GUTS, show me some evidence.
Post proposes a "lifecycle", i.e., a description of a subculture's life from birth to death. He defines/describes birth intuitively. He says death is when the "cool"/cultural capital runs out, and that this is caused by popularity. Sure, except the meaning/value of cultural capital changes over time, especially for any cultural capital produced by a subculture. Initially, the "cool" is worthless outside the subculture; once the subculture gains popularity, the value soars. The contention here is that the cultural bubble eventually pops, tanking cultural capital. Now, the post doesn't adequately delineate between the loss of "cool" inside and outside the subculture, but I think it's safe to say the author thinks the "cool" simultaneously evaporates inside and outside of the subculture. I don't think this is true. Plenty of subcultures experiences booms and busts and live to die another day. This sometimes happens because the subculture doesn't care about the outside world.
So basically, this post is an economics-flavoured look at subculture evolution. Specifically, it is a liberal critique, and therefore incomplete. It's fine to bring up different ideas of capital. It's also fine to point out that subcultures can suffer from cultural colonialism, both in an abstract sense and the real sense (e.g. licensing, IP, funko pops etc). Where liberalism falls short is when it suggests that the solution to problems caused by colonialism is to learn to be capitalist/colonialist in turn. It's not, evidenced by fucking world history, unless you choose to ignore this fact and continue to be liberal.
I can see why this sort of narrative might appeal to the rats/incel-coded people. OP has kind of said it all, I think. To add to this, rats love to invent patterns/tropes and pattern match, especially if this means they can pile on assumptions to the thing at hand. Think: sneer clubs, conflict theorists, other names for enemies of the rat community. Yes, the irony that I am doing that here to the rats is not lost on me. At least I'm not putting a name to it! (Pattern Matchers? Regexes?!?!?)
Obviously, I think a better version of this post would entail:
Explicit acknowledgement of the role of capitalism and colonialist tendencies in corrupting subcultures, and noting that the solution to this is not "subcultures with capitalist characteristics" but explicit anti-capitalism and anti-colonialism.
A flowchart or state transition table that describes all the ways a subculture can evolve. Death is only one possible fate for a subculture; plenty live on in different ways. There is no GUTS, at least in terms of a straight-line narrative of how a subculture lives and dies.
Examples.
An example to illustrate some of my points (nb I have not thought this out, so it might blow up in my face upon further analysis): Internet piracy. I'd say it's a subculture that, by its nature, is anti-capitalist and is thriving to this day. It requires an ultimately commercial framework to exist (i.e. the internet), but unless they shut the whole thing down, this is a non-issue. You can't really sociopathically co-opt the cultural capital here- if you sell the shovels, hey, now you're part of the subculture too, and those shovels better dig good.
And finally, RE: the Buddhism. Chapman is apparently an adherent of Vajrayana Buddhism, as opposed to a white-washed/westernised Consensus Buddhism. My upbringing had a Buddhist-influenced backdrop, but I personally never got into Buddhism itself in any appreciable form. That is to say, I couldn't tell you what Vajrayana Buddhism is myself. That said, I am very familiar with the author's conception of consensus Buddhism. I will use that term in this thread. I'll admit that whenever I encounter a Buddhist in the West, I assume they are a consensus Buddhist. It's a yellow flag for me, in the same way that knowing that someone is into crystals or the zodiac is- it's not necessarily bad, just different. Not the point. There is a red-flag version of Buddhism to me, and that's basically any white person who says they are Buddhist but isn't a consensus Buddhist. Usually, when I encounter this kind of person, it's some insane, hypercapitalist type with messed-up morality/rationality. So that's kind of what I went in thinking, and it coloured how I read this.
- The GMS model fits the rise and fall of scientific skepticism pretty well. As the first generation of deeply nerdy leaders like Martin Gardner, L. Sprague de Camp, and James Randi aged and died, new leaders appeared who said that the movement should be bigger and address more important things like social justice. These leaders and the new party-style events brought more people in the door, but some of the leaders believed irrational things and wanted money and sex and were not fussy how they got it (Shermer, Carrier)¹, and some liked pushing people around and being tastemakers (Watson, Myers). My understanding is that the skeptics got rid of most of the big egos, but in doing so they shattered their movement. Most of the big names are still around with online followings, and various rump skeptic and atheist movements still exist, but the attempt to rally everyone around skepticism or Atheism Plus collapsed, and some basically decent and rational people like Hal Bidlack and Harriett Hall ended up in the wilderness for ideological crimes.
  I don't know what movements from the 20th century Chapman was thinking of, and it would be less polarizing to talk about things which were cool in the 1980s than things which were cool recently. I would bet at 50-50 that someone will be offended by the previous paragraph.
  1: Shermer and Carrier's belief that there was one objective morality which can be proven is a lot like Yudkowsky's belief that there is one objective morality which can be programmed into Friendly AI. The way 'sex-positivity' was used in the skeptical and atheist sphere also rhymes. I could write a whole essay about how LessWrong cut out the parts of skepticism which would help newbies to spot that the movement was cult-adjacent and irrational.
  
  some liked pushing people around and being tastemakers (Watson, Myers)
  not only is this the opposite of reality, your supporting link names neither
  
  I know both Watson and Myers. Neither of them were interested in "being tastemakers"; both of them stood on the right side of trying to make the skeptic/atheist spaces less of a sexist waste dump, and both of them caught hell for it. Myers was the one who blew the lid off Shermer's history of sexual harassment (and got blackballed from a lot of skeptics' events because of it). He was also part of the effort to make Atheism Plus a thing, and Watson was in favor too.* Carrier sued Myers and others after being removed from FreethoughtBlogs on what we'd now call #MeToo reasons. The rage tsunami directed at Watson for saying "guys, don't do that" was basically the trial run for GamerGate. More than anything else, it was the skeptic movement's decision that "no actually, being sexist is more fun" which drove out everyone interested in doing more than relitigating Bigfoot.
  Harriet Hall got into trouble for just-asking-questions transphobia.
  *The McCreight mentioned in that blog post later chose the name "Jey" and uses they/he pronouns.
Fundamentally, Chapman's essay is about how subcultures transition from valuing functionality to aesthetics. Subcultures start with form following function by necessity. However, people adopt the subculture because they like the surface appearance of those forms, leading to the subculture eventually hollowing out into a system which follows the iron law of bureaucracy and becomes non-functional due to over-investment in the façade and tearing down of Chesterton's fences. Chapman's not the only person to notice this pattern; other instances of it, running the spectrum from right to left, include:
Rao's The Gervais Principle, which Chapman explicitly cites, is about how businesses operate
Baudrillard's Simulacra and Simulation is about how semiotic systems evolve
Benjamin's The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction is about how groups of artists establish symbols
Debord's The Society of the Spectacle is about how consumerist states cultivate mass consciousness through mass media
The Marxist concept that fascism is a cancer upon liberalism, which doesn't have a single author as far as I can tell, is about how political systems evolve under obligate capitalism
I think that seeing this pattern is fine, but worrying about it makes one into Scott Alexander, paranoid about societal manipulation and constantly worrying about in-group and out-group status. We should note the pattern but stop endorsing instances of it which attach labels to people; after all, the pattern's fundamentally about memes, not humans.
So, on Chapman. I think that they're a self-important nerd who reached criticality after binge-reading philsophy texts in graduate school. I could have sworn that this was accompanied by psychedelic drugs, but I can't confirm or cite that and I don't think that we should underestimate the psychoactive effect of reading philosophy from the 1800s. In his own words:
[T]he central character in the book is a student at the MIT Artificial Intelligence Laboratory who discovers Continental philosophy and social theory, realizes that AI is on a fundamentally wrong track, and sets about reforming the field to incorporate those other viewpoints. That describes precisely two people in the real world: me, and my sometime-collaborator Phil Agre.
He's explicitly not allied with our good friends, but at the same time they move in the same intellectual circles. I'm familiar with that sort of frustration. Like, he rejects neoreaction by citing Scott Alexander's rejection of neoreaction (source); that's a somewhat-incoherent view suggesting that he's politically naïve. His glossary for his eternally-unfinished Continental-style tome contains the following statement on Rationalism (embedded links and formatting removed):
Rationalisms are ideologies that claim that there is some way of thinking that is the correct one, and you should always use it. Some rationalisms specifically identify which method is right and why. Others merely suppose there must be a single correct way to think, but admit we don’t know quite what it is; or they extol a vague principle like “the scientific method.” Rationalism is not the same thing as rationality, which refers to a nebulous collection of more-or-less formal ways of thinking and acting that work well for particular purposes in particular sorts of contexts.
I don't know. Sometimes he takes Yudkowsky seriously in order to critique him. (source, source) But the critiques are always very polite, no sneering. Maybe he's really that sort of Alan Watts character who has transcended petty squabbles. Maybe he didn't take enough LSD. I once was on LSD when I was at the office working all day; I saw the entire structure of the corporation, fully understood its purpose, and — unlike Chapman, apparently — came to the conclusion that it is bad. Similarly, when I look at Yudkowsky or Yarvin trying to do philosophy, I often see bad arguments and premises. Being judgemental here is kind of important for defending ourselves from a very real alt-right snowstorm of mystic bullshit.
Okay, so in addition to the opening possibilities of being naïve and hiding his power level, I suggest that Chapman could be totally at peace or permanently rotated in five dimensions from drugs. I've gotta do five, so a fifth possibility is that he's not writing for a human audience, but aiming to be crawled by LLM data-scrapers. Food for thought for this community: if you say something pseudo-profound near LessWrong then it is likely to be incorporated into LLM training data. I know of multiple other writers deliberately doing this sort of thing.
I was somewhat influenced by Chapman myself, so naturally I find it hard to call his efforts a complete smokescreen. I think it's more a matter of the subculture he's addressing simply being too damned insular and full of itself. A little less than a decade ago, he seemed like one of the few people trying to help the extremely online think past Yuddite rationalism, EA longtermism, and the incipient weirdo cryptocurrency cults that were springing up. He has expressed being somewhat baffled and bemused by "TPOT," such as it was, but I think it's fair to say that his writings were one very important nucleus around which the TPOT social graph coalesced. That said, my impression of TPOT quickly became, and has since always been, that it's mainly a bunch of people with advanced degrees and/or technical training and experience who are resentful that all that hasn't given them greater status and influence. Hence the commitment to pseudonymy among many of the bigger personalities; that ship may still come in one of these days. Alex Karp is what TPOT people would become if they had the power they thought they deserved. Thus, up until the current rules-free era, the Bay Area moneymen have been careful to fund very very few of these guys, because they risk bringing the whole edifice down with their severe personal instability.
The "Geeks, Mops, Sociopaths" article is what's most commonly passed around, but the foundational material of Chapman's project is this developmental psychologist Robert Kegan: https://vividness.live/developing-ethical-social-and-cognitive-competence Kegan builds on theories of childhood psychological development from people like Jean Piaget*, and seeks to extend them into adulthood. As Chapman says:
Most Western adults reach stage 3—the ethics of empathy—during adolescence. However, one needs to be at stage 4—the ethics of systems—to fully meet the demands of modern society. Unfortunately, getting to stage 4 is difficult, and only a minority of Westerners ever do. Kegan suggested that it’s critically important for our society to find ways to support the transition from stage 3 to 4—and I agree.
Stage 3 in this model finds one conceiving of one's identity relative to communal relationships such as family, cohort, and local community, while stage 4 has one conceiving of oneself relative to rationally-designed systems of laws and processes, i.e. a modern professional organization. Stage 5 is something that both Kegan and Chapman seem to be conjecturing about and actively seeking, rather than living or cultivating in others. Its ideal is for one to be able to hold the rules of various social systems and modes of interpersonal relation as objects separate from the self, rather than something in which one is irretrievably subjectively embedded, and to be able to gracefully transition between these systems as a given situation demands. Chapman's Meaningness project is all about building a framework for people to transition from a stage 4 personality to a stage 5 personality, even though the stage 5 personality is as yet loosely defined.
On Chapman's suggestion, I read Kegan's "The Evolving Self," and at the time it did in fact help me make sense of people I knew who had gone to prestigious schools and attained advanced degrees, but nonetheless allowed themselves to be heavily influenced by woo and toxic spiritualism. But herein lies the pebble under the mattress of Chapman's program: I was able to understand and deplore these people as stuck in a "less developed" "stage 3" personality and that they simply hadn't made the most of the opportunities they had with the "stage 4-scaffolding" institutions they had been associated with. But you see, I had the key now, I was able to understand myself as a "stage 4" personality who wanted to make sense of the world via necessarily flawed rational systems, and I'm going to transcend beyond that any day now!
Better understanding of myself came later; suffice it to say that I've gotten more out of the material on resentment and personal accountability in 12-step programs than I have from Chapman and Kegan. The last fucking thing I, or any of these other weirdos, needed was another progressive framework for personal development. The in-built ability to hold oneself up as more advanced or more capable is a fatal flaw for the people Chapman was trying to reach, who already had plenty of excuses to see themselves as superior. Chapman's biggest vulnerability is that he insists on practicing empathy for people who are at best selectively empathetic, and at worst have abandoned empathy entirely. If he wants to hold onto that as a core spiritual commitment, fine, but it's been long enough now to reflect that his project so far has basically been a failure. I don't think he's lived in the Bay Area for a while now, so I have to imagine his direct interaction with a lot of the big-name "stage 4" personalities he was implicitly criticizing has been limited, but it's pretty plain to see that there has been no progress towards spiritually reforming the scene that he and they both influence.
*Jean Piaget was really influential on a lot of the early computer-interaction thinkers like Alan Kay and the Macintosh design team, so having that link is another big "in" for savvier Silicon Valley types.
- I think one of the biggest flaws of our friends is that they want there to be one hierarchy of power and capability, with Electric Jesus at the top, then them, then their admirers, then the rest of us. Yukowsky is brilliant at getting people to give him money, good at getting them to give him sex, but not a scientist or a skeptic (I am told he asked for special powers to delete LessWrong comments which explain what he got wrong or did not see).
  The "geeks, mops, and sociopaths" model does not encourage people to look at themselves and ask whether their community's problems are their own fault. It also does not encourage them to ask "I am a drama kid, you are a min-maxer, can we find a way to have a fun game of D&D together or should we find our own groups?"
  Alex Karp's Wikipedia page has a wild gap from "trying to raise enough money to be a Bohemian in Berlin in 2002" to "senior exec at Palantir with a Norwegian bodyguard and spicy takes on the Gaza war."
Total smokescreen, he was a part of TPOT iirc. If the last decade taught me anything it’s that nerds are scum. The poor wittle nerd thing fails to hold up when you can sit back and watch them run scams and shit. Absolutely amoral sociopathic predator types.
- Was TPOT a Twitter thing? It seems like LessWrong was all over Tumblr and Twitter.
  Most of us are harrmless and just want to explore our special interests. But I don't think any of our friends fits that description. I don't think it was just about power games either, Scott Alexander really cares about peddling racist lies, and Yudkowsky seems to build his whole worldview around the idea that he is a world-historical figure (and maybe he is, but Grigori Rasputin not Albert Einstein). So neither the "clueless, losers, sociopaths" model nor the "geek, mops, sociopaths" explains what happened to LW or Effective Altruism.
  
  Was TPOT a Twitter thing?
  If I recall correctly, TPOT literally means "That Part Of Twitter"
  
  Yeah, it was a twitter scene.
David Chapman? The guy that ended John Lennon’s career? (jk, looking into this)
- Reported for being too soon
  :-P

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