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CAE_Jones comments on [LINK] Why I'm not on the Rationalist Masterlist - Less Wrong Discussion
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Our caveman/cavewomen brains think that we will only ever interact with a very small number of people, and losing the respect of anyone could materially worsen our chances of survival in a crisis. Consequently, many are terrified of public speaking or even of contributing to Internet debates such as on LessWrong. I suspect that the lower you perceive your status to be in the tribe, the greater the fear you will have of further weakening your position by saying something that others criticize.
Some communities go out of their way to create "safe spaces" that limit criticism to attract participants who would otherwise be too fearful to join discussions. LW's implicit philosophy (which I don't disagree with) is that a cost of participating is that you are fair game for blunt criticism. Alas, such a philosophy probably repels some potential participants who would otherwise make intelligent comments.
I face a similar trade-off in my classes. (I teach at a women's college.) Giving honest/blunt feedback during class discussions or on papers can cause a very negative emotional reaction in some students. Interestingly, students who went to high school in Asia are much better (on average) than Americans at handling criticism because they got so much more of it in high school than their American counterparts did, but my Asian students are (on average) far more fearful of public speaking than Americans, because they did so much less of it.
Determining for how many people that caveperson assumption is valid is difficult, since their lack of support network-building ability also makes them easy to overlook. Such people do exist, however, and I would not be surprised if they appear at higher frequencies among marginalized demographics, especially the sort that would otherwise have interest in communities such as LessWrong.
I doubt that the author of the linked article is in such a situation, however; when a blog post directed at one individual gets linked at a larger community blog and receives \>70 comments discussing it and its message, my prior probability for "someone with an unstable social network and an inability to repair damage to said network" is adjusted way downward.
I don't think laboring under ancestral-style social assumptions necessarily implies a weak or unstable social support network, or problems maintaining social links. Particularly not the latter; if you're working with a set of unremediated instincts telling you that losing rapport with anyone in your ingroup is a disaster, then it follows that you should invest heavily in repairing any damage to it.
It does suggest some failure modes that wouldn't be present in the network of someone more willing to burn bridges, but we're talking differences in style and overall optimization, not being strictly worse at everything social.