@metaLulie There are many different kinds of people. We hear about and from suburban middle-class people ("normies") a lot because a lot of our shared stories about what is going on are about them.
@metaLulie Microeconomically rational agents with similar beliefs and preferences will usually act similarly, and a statistical normal can emerge from this. But sometimes the details of a situation mean that the best thing to do looks very unusual.
@metaLulie Normies aren't microeconomically rational. Their main motivation is that they feel safe if they resemble some shared idea of normality, and scared otherwise. This is a cybernetic perceptual-control process.
@metaLulie Normies will often justify their own actions, and reward and punish others', on the basis of what is normal. This leads to ganging up on people who aren't trying to follow the herd, even if they aren't hurting anyone.
@metaLulie If you're holding onto an autonomous perspective, you're alienated from opposition to autonomous perspectives. That doesn't mean you're doing something wrong. It just means you're in a conflict.
@metaLulie It's helpful to be able to understand and predict the actions of people who are trying to hurt you, but it's not helpful to misinterpret a conflict as a disagreement you ought to try to reconcile.
@metaLulie Normies claim to be a larger and more powerful coalition than they actually are by conflating their conformity target with statistical normality. This can make it seem more dangerous or surprising than it is to be out of sync with normies.
@metaLulie You included "nothing that looks like a mental illness" and "steady job" in your definition of normal. 1 in 5 Americans have a diagnosable mental illness, and 2 in 5 do not participate in the labor force at all.
@metaLulie Accurately modeling this situation can make your story about what's going on deviate a lot from the normie narrative.
@metaLulie But most people are excluded from the normie narrative. So being deviant by normie standards can bring you closer to the statistical average and help you relate to more people than a normie can!
@metaLulie I don't think this hits the standard of "like I'm 8," please let me know which parts of this need to be unpacked further.
@metaLulie Here's why I said postwar:
https://twitter.com/ben_r_hoffman/status/1390185943538208770
@metaLulie Another way to say all this is that there's a conflict in the West between the mode of life in which Aspies are normal (because they are what children expect to grow up to be) and the one in which Anti-Semites are normal (because they coordinate around the idea of normality).
@metaLulie @threadreaderapp unroll
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