One thing that’s seemed striking to me in this Dragon Army discussion is the priors on different people’s threat assessments.

I remember when I was younger, I used to want to meet my friends from the Internet, and my parents were horrified, and had all of these objections like “What if they’re pedophiles who befriended you so they could molest you?” or “What if they’re kidnappers who befriended you so they could kidnap you?”, or less lurid possibilities like “What if they’re creepy drug people and they insist on bringing you along to their creepy drug abuse sessions and won’t let you say no?”

And I never developed a good plan that countered their concerns, like “I will bring pepper spray so I can defend myself”. It was more about rolling my eyes and telling them that never happened in real life. I’ve now met hundreds of Internet friends, and I was absolutely right - it’s never happened, and any effort I put into developing a plan would have been effort wasted.

I’m not claiming there are no Internet pedophiles or kidnappers. I’m saying that based on my own Internet communities, and my threat-detection abilities, and the base rate, I was pretty sure it was more in the realm of terrorism (the kind of stuff you hear about on the news) than the realm of car accidents (the stuff that happens to real people and that you must be guarding yourself against at every moment).

This is also how I think of people turning out to be abusers. It’s possible that anyone I date could turn out to be an abuser, just like it’s possible I could be killed by a terrorist, but it’s not something likely enough that I’m going to take strong precautions against it. This is obviously a function of my personal situations, but it’s a real function of my personal situation, which like my Internet-friend-meeting has consistently been confirmed over a bunch of different situations.

(Please don’t give me the “that’s just male privilege!” speech; men and women get abused at roughly similar rates. I do think that probably women are socialized to fear abuse much more, and that’s a big part of this, and probably other axes of marginalization contribute more)

One interesting thing about Tumblr and the SJ-sphere in particular is that because it comes disproportionately from marginalized communities, it has this sort of natural prior of “people often turn out to be abusers, every situation has to be made abuser-proof or else it will be a catastrophe”. I once dated someone I knew on Tumblr who did a weird test on me where (sorry, won’t give more details) they deliberately put me in a situation where I could have abused them to see what I would do. When they told me about this months later, I was pretty offended - did I really seem so potentially-abusive that I had to be specifically cleared by some procedure? And people explained to me that there’s this whole other culture where somebody being an abuser is, if not the *norm*, at least high enough to worry about with everyone.

I’m not sure what percent of the population is more like me vs. more like my date. But I think there’s a failure mode where someone from a high-trust culture starts what they think is a perfectly reasonable institution, and someone from a low-trust culture says “that’s awful, you didn’t make any effort to guard against abusers!”.

And then the person from the high-trust culture gets angry, because they’re being accused of being a potential abuser, which to them sounds as silly as being accused of being a potential terrorist. If you told your Muslim friend you wouldn’t hang out with him without some safeguards in case he turned out to be a terrorist, my guess is he’d get pretty upset. At the very least it would engender the “stop wasting my time” reaction I had when my parents made me develop anti-pedophile plans before meeting my Internet friends.

And then the person from the low-trust culture gets angry, because the person has just dismissed out of hand (or even gotten angry about) a common-sense attempt to avoid abuse, and who but an abuser would do something like that?

I think it’s interesting that the Dragon Army idea received more positive feedback or constructive criticism on LW (where it was pitched to, and which is probably culturally more similar to me) and more strongly negative feedback on Tumblr (which is more full of marginalized people and SJ-aligned people, and also maybe more full of abusers as judged by the number who get called out all the time).

The other night I attempted to stop S from leaving to his room by lying on top of him, intending for this to delay him for about five minutes. Somewhere in the ensuing discussion he realized that I didn’t know anything about the Californian Missions, or actually almost anything else in world history. And he thought I might like history, since it helps organize and make sense of many things about the world (contrary to my impression that it is a whole bunch of unorganized statements about names killing other names and random anecdotes and dates attached to names, which sounded bad for knowledge compression). So he told me about it. It only took about six hours. Here is what I remember of the story (after a few more shorter discussions, but before looking anything up now, so probably false in many ways—I want to see what I remember):

History (of civilizations) can arguably be divided into three eras (or maybe this is just Western civilizations? Definitely something happened in China in all this time, but we didn’t discuss it, so I’m not sure if it coincides era-wise). 

The first era stretched from about 4000BC to 1200BC and is fairly hazily understood. It started around when agriculture did. It is hard to know exactly when agriculture started, but we can actually pinpoint where very well, because genetics tells us that many modern agricultural species come from the same tiny part of the world. There are also the ruins of an extremely old city there. 

The writing around these ruins is in a strange pointy looking alphabet that is also used briefly on the front page of EconLog, and was apparently big in this first Era, and it’s sort of surprising that I haven’t come across it. Its letters somewhat correspond to ours and recognizably resemble them, and similarly for some other important alphabets. Wikipedia shows a table of these, and also the words from which the letters were derived. The original letters represent simplified pictures of the words. For instance R is a head. I am pretty sure that I have drawn the letter R as a head on shoulders before, when it needed decoration, which somehow makes me feel closer to my very distant ancestors—that we independently make the same mental connections reminds me that they were people with very specific familiar internal experiences.

There were a bunch of smallish empires (or whatever you call units of political control at that scale) in the general vicinity of Greece and the Middle East. They all sort of fell apart in around 1200 though it’s not entirely clear why. There was a massive volcano eruption which might have caused it. There is also some lasting reference to sea-men appearing, but nobody is sure what that is about. There were also some other things. Anyway, everything sort of fell apart for a bit, and there weren’t large units of political organization.

Incidentally, the mega-volcano is quite beautiful now. It is the one in the photo you often see of white buildings with domed blue roofs overlooking the sea. Actually there is a massive cliff leading down to the sea, and the sea is actually in the middle of the volcano, which is a terrifying circle big enough to nearly meet the horizon. If we ever want to go to a really pretty place, maybe we will visit.

When things regathered themselves at the start of the second era, some of the new empires roughly corresponded to ones that had been in similar places in the past. For instance, I think Greece did. At any rate, many of their stories came from that earlier time.

Sometime pretty early on in Greece’s history, Persia was a large and militarily successful empire to their East, which had never lost a war. It was run by Cyrus, then Darius, then Xerxes, but I’m not sure which one we were up to when they decided to attack Greece. 

(Darius was not the son of Cyrus, but upon Cyrus’ death apparently he suggested they decide who should be in charge by having a horse race, where the rider of the first horse to neigh got to be ruler, and then he fairly predictably set out to teach his horse to neigh on command, and got leadership. I get the impression that many of these early stories are pretty much made up, though this one at least sounds physically possible.)

Actually, history is long, that’s enough for now. Maybe there’ll be Part II another time, if everyone can hold out on telling me how much I have embarrassed myself so far.

do you want to know something?? I always wondered what the hell kind of hairstyle the Ancient Egyptians were trying to portray with depictions like these

and this

until I did my hair this morning and 

oh

welp

you can take the noses off our statues but until you find a way to take Egypt out of Africa we’re still going to find ourselves