Geeks, MOPs, and sociopaths in subculture evolution | Meaningness

Geeks, MOPs, and sociopaths in subculture evolution (2015) | Hacker News

Any marginally successful group attracts sociopaths. The more power available to someone installing themselves at the centre of an elite clique that runs the organisation, the more attractive it is. No-one ever sees it fully until they get on the wrong end of one of these toxic power dynamics, there is so much subtle BS working against anyone trying to face this stuff down that it's almost pointless wasting your life trying.

Reality Roundtable #19 — Dark Triad Personality Traits: How Psychopathy, Narcissism, and Machiavellianism Impact Our Cultures & Social Systems - The Great Simplification

Psychopathy is often portrayed as a rare and distant phenomenon – something confined to movie villains or prison cells. Yet when psychopathy is combined with narcissism and Machiavellianism to form what psychologists call the Dark Triad, its impact becomes far more immediate. Individuals with these traits can wield disproportionate influence over our culture, institutions, and daily lives. What goes on inside their minds, and how do they shape the world around us?

Real signals or artificial stereotypes?

Adventures with a cultural Copilot

Punk subculture

The punk subculture includes a diverse and widely known array of music, ideologies, fashion, and other forms of expression, visual art, dance, literature, and film. Largely characterised by anti-establishment views, the promotion of individual freedom, and DIY ethics. The culture originated from punk rock.

The Psychopathic Selection Hypothesis Guide for Readers

Major Theoretical Contributions and Implications for Evolution, Game Theory, and Institutional Analysis

Technopoly: The Surrender of Culture to Technology

A witty, often terrifying that chronicles our transform…

Rethinking Norm Psychology

Norms permeate human life. Most of people’s activities can be characterized by rules about what is appropriate, allowed, required, or forbidden—rules that are crucial in making people hyper-cooperative animals. In this article, I examine the current cognitive-evolutionary account of “norm psychology” and propose an alternative that is better supported by evidence and better placed to promote interdisciplinary dialogue. The incumbent theory focuses on rules and claims that humans genetically inherit cognitive and motivational mechanisms specialized for processing these rules. The cultural-evolutionary alternative defines normativity in relation to behavior—compliance, enforcement, and commentary—and suggests that it depends on implicit and explicit processes. The implicit processes are genetically inherited and domain-general; rather than being specialized for normativity, they do many jobs in many species. The explicit processes are culturally inherited and domain-specific; they are constructed from mentalizing and reasoning by social interaction in childhood. The cultural-evolutionary, or “cognitive gadget,” perspective suggests that people alive today—parents, educators, elders, politicians, lawyers—have more responsibility for sustaining normativity than the nativist view implies. People’s actions not only shape and transmit the rules, but they also create in each new generation mental processes that can grasp the rules and put them into action.

Fascist femboys, autogynephilia, and flattering narratives

Among those who believe [autogynephilia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blanchard'stranssexualismtypology) is real and the primary explanation for many or mo...

How social norms emerge: The interindividual actor–critic.

The Safety Levers

A framework to move your subculture from the Anxiety Zone to the Learning Zone

Everyone is a Strategist and No One is a Writer

From politics to culture, we face a crisis of cleverness and a society addicted to marketing

how to be anti-social - n8

a guide to incoherent and isolating social experiences

Learning how to behave: cognitive learning processes account for asymmetries in adaptation to social norms

Changes to social settings caused by migration, cultural change or pandemics force us to adapt to new social norms. Social norms provide groups of individuals with behavioural prescriptions and therefore can be inferred by observing their behaviour. This work aims to examine how cognitive learning processes affect adaptation and learning of new social norms. Using a multiplayer game, I found that participants initially complied with various social norms exhibited by the behaviour of bot-players. After gaining experience with one norm, adaptation to a new norm was observed in all cases but one, where an active-harm norm was resistant to adaptation. Using computational learning models, I found that active behaviours were learned faster than omissions, and harmful behaviours were more readily attributed to all group members than beneficial behaviours. These results provide a cognitive foundation for learning and adaptation to descriptive norms and can inform future investigations of group-level learning and cross-cultural adaptation.