AskReddit asked recently: If you could only give an alien one thing to help them understand the human race, what would you give them?
At the time I had no good answer. Now I do. I would give them Charlotte Lennox’s write-up of how MsScribe took over Harry Potter fandom (warning: super-long but super-worth-it).
Ozy informs me that everyone else in the world read this story five years ago. Maybe I am hopelessly behind the times? Maybe all my blog readers are intimately familiar with it?
If not, read it. Read it like an anthropological text. Read it like you would a study of the Yanomamo. No, read it even better than that. Read it like you would a study of the Yanomamo if you knew that, statistically, some of your friends and co-workers covertly become Yanomamo after getting home every evening.
I hesitate to summarize it, because people will read my summary and ignore the much superior original. I would not recommend that. But if you insist on skipping the (admittedly super-long) link above, here is what happens:
In the early 2000s, Harry Potter fanfiction authors and readers get embroiled in an apocalyptic feud between people who think that Harry should be in a relationship with Ginny vs. people who think Harry should be in a relationship with Hermione. This devolves from debate to personal attacks to real world stalking and harassment to legal cases to them splitting the community into different sites that pretty much refuse to talk to each other and ban stories with their nonpreferred relationship.
These sites then sort themselves out into a status hierarchy with a few people called Big Name Fans at the top and everyone else competing to get their attention and affection, whether by praising them slavishly or by striking out in particularly cruel ways at people in the “enemy” relationship community.
A young woman named MsScribe joins the Harry/Hermione community. She proceeds to make herself popular and famous by use of sock-puppet accounts (a sockpuppet is when someone uses multiple internet nicknames to pretend to be multiple different people) that all praise her and talk about how great she is. Then she moves on to racist and sexist sockpuppet accounts who launch lots of slurs at her, so that everyone feels very sorry for her.
At the height of her power, she controls a small army of religious trolls who go around talking about the sinfulness of Harry Potter fanfiction authors and especially MsScribe and how much they hate gay people. All of these trolls drop hints about how they are supported by the Harry/Ginny community, and MsScribe leads the campaign to paint everyone who wants Harry and Ginny to be in a relationship as vile bigots and/or Christians. She classily cements her position by convincing everyone to call them “cockroaches” and post pictures of cockroaches whenever they make comments.
Throughout all this, a bunch of people are coming up with ironclad evidence that she is the one behind all of this (this is the Internet! They can just trace IPs!) Throughout all of it, MsScribe makes increasingly implausible denials. And throughout all of it, everyone supports MsScribe and ridicules her accusers. Because really, do you want to be on the side of a confirmed popular person, or a bunch of confirmed suspected racists whom we know are racist because they deny racism which is exactly what we would expect racists to do?
MsScribe writes negatively about a fan with cancer asking for money, and her comments get interpreted as being needlessly cruel to a cancer patient. Her popularity drops and everyone takes a second look at the evidence and realizes hey, she was obviously manipulating everyone all along. There is slight sheepishness but few apologies, because hey, we honestly thought the people we were bullying were unpopular.
MsScribe later ended up switching from Harry Potter fandom to blogging about social justice issues, which does not surprise me one bit. But let me do some social justice blogging of my own.
A lot of the comments I have seen discussing the issue say “Yeah, teenage girls will be teenage girls”.
Two responses seem relevant. First, quite a few of the people involved seem to have been in their late twenties or early thirties.
But second and more important, I am a guy and this story speaks to me because it is eerily similar to the story of my online life with a bunch of other guys when I was between about ages fifteen and twenty-two.
I’ve mentioned before how I spent long portions of my life in the interactive geofiction/”micronation” community. And because of the innate urge for self-presentation, I emphasized the part where we create amazing grand-scale fictional universes in which we enact epic battles and build civilizations from the ground up. And not the part where we behave like ridiculous little children having a hissy fit.
The first constructed country I was ever in, another guy named John from my school comes in and says that I am a bad leader and abusing my power. Because my online handle at the time was Giant_Squid314, he classily nicknames me “Squitler” and leads a bunch of his supporters to make “Squitler” related comments at everything I do. Then he and his friends secede to start their own country, named after a Red Hot Chili Peppers album. I retaliate by convincing his friends that he is oppressing them and they need to start a communist revolution to kick him out of the country, which works. Later he gets back in and convinces his friends to join my country under fake names, swelling the ranks of voters with people who are there just to vote for the worst policies in order to destroy the country. This becomes so bad that my friend Evan pulls a bloodless coup to abolish democracy and make himself sole leader, but then he cracks down so hard on John’s supporters that everyone gets upset and leaves (“emigrates”). This upsets my friend Bill, who somehow hacks John and tries to delete all his stuff; John counterhacks Bill and destroys his country. Then we all team up with a bunch of guys from Ireland, infiltrate John’s country and destroy it the same way he destroyed us as an act of revenge.
All this happened within about three months real-time, and I was in this hobby for ten years. Ten years.
There was an entire era when people would accuse other people of having said racist things on IRC (where logs were often unavailable, and context was absent). This would then be followed with the demand that every political ally of the affected person shun him forever and kick him out of the country and destroy every institution he had built, or else obviously they were secretly racist themselves. This was met with the only possible response: “actually, no, you’re the one who said racist things on the chat!”. These accusations often resembled the MsScribe story in their sheer not-entirely-social-justice-movement-approved incongruity: “You’re racist, and you’re a fat lardass!” “Oh yeah? Well you’re a f**king homophobic autistic Aspie who will never get laid!” Inevitably the more popular person would win and anyone so foolish as to defend the unpopular person (which I kept doing, because I never learn) was banished to Racist Hell. As for Actual Hell, there was a guy named Archbishop Fenton who kept saying really extreme Christian stuff about how we were all going there, and although we all suspected he was a sockpuppet I was never able to figure out whose.
So MsScribe? I’ll give her this: she was a gifted amateur. That is it. An amateur. We had frickin’ decade-old “intelligence organizations” whose entire job was to collect a network of spies – some real people, some sock puppets – who would join other people’s countries under fake (or real!) identities, get information on their secret plans, and throw important elections in favor of the parties we supported. I’m not even ashamed of my role leading one of the largest of these organizations, Shireroth’s spy bureau S.H.I.N.E. – if we had unilaterally disengaged from these kinds of games, we would have been demolished by people who didn’t.
I remember our scandals. We would build up “dossiers” on various individuals, then publicize them at times calculated to cause maximum damage. One of my favorite was when a prominent female politician was revealed to in fact be male – causing her support to plummet among the key “people who do whatever a girl says in the hopes that she will like them” demographic. In another, which happened a bit after my semi-retirement, the micronational world’s largest communist country, with thirty highly active citizens and a prominent international role, was found to be just one guy posting under thirty different names.
As leader of an espionage organization, I was expected to be able to avoid these damaging revelations, advise my countrymen on how to do the same, and run circles around my enemies. Without tooting my own horn too much, I maintained my most successful character for the better part of a year. This was a guy named Yvain, who infiltrated a Celtic-themed fantasy state called the Duchy of Goldenmoon, took it over, took over its largest neighbor, and was halfway to ultimate power over the entire continent before I got accepted to medical school and decided I should probably reassess how I was using my time.
(to create a paper trail and avoid breaking character, I used the nick “Yvain” for a lot of the websites I joined around this period, which is why half the Internet still knows me by that name. I am suitably embarassed by this)
Now I will say this for us boys – and we were boys, like 95% of us, and even the girls were usually found to be boys after careful investigation. We did it with class, we did it with cool names like “Paramountgate” and “The Three Hours’ War”, we wrote up our petty scandals into epic history books with bibliographies and appendices, and we backstabbed each other so elegantly it would make Machiavelli shed a single tear of pure joy. But in the end? We behaved exactly like teenage girls in a Harry Potter fandom.
It is hard at this point not to be reminded of the Robbers’ Cave experiment. Social psychologists divided boys at a camp into two groups, intending to do some experiments in order to figure out what they needed to do to make the groups hate each other, only to learn that the boys had already started hating each other with the burning fire of a thousand suns while they were busy planning the experiments. They boys had even formed little group identities, like “Our group are the rough and street-smart ones, the other group is a bunch of holier-than-thou goody-goodies” (the groups were chosen at random).
I read a lot of psychology even as a teenager, so it never surprised me that separating people out into different fictional countries would have the same effect.
But it did kind of surprise me that you could get quite those depths of hatred between people who thought that a fictional wizard should hook up with his best friend, versus other people who who thought he should hook up with his other best friend’s little sister. Every time I feel like my opinion of people is sufficiently low, I get new evidence making me bump it lower.
Anyway, once those depths of hatred are established, they will proceed in the same way among twenty-somethings trying to discuss Harry Potter romantic pairings, teenagers trying to run fictional countries, and Senators trying to pass vitally important legislation. And that’s why, if aliens ever requested exactly one item to teach them about the human race, I would give them the MsScribe story.
They’d kill us all, of course. They would sterilize Earth so thoroughly that not even the archaeobacteria would remain. But in the moment before I was vaporized, I would feel like our species had finally been understood.
At moments like this, my usual mantra is “Well, OK. Admittedly, as examples of rational universe-optimizing intelligences, we don’t even register on the scale. But as examples of self-organizing biochemical soup, we’re still kind of impressive.”
>>>examples of rational universe-optimizing intelligences
Do you have any real-life examples?
I’ve been kicking around this idea in my head about a sci-fi story involving a post-singularity society where written-from-scratch AIs turn out to be better than human-descended intelligences at everything… except for petty status games. So that’s what the human-descended intelligences spend all their time doing. If I ever write this story, I will be using this post for inspiration.
The kicker, of course, is that the aliens themselves engage in vicious social games of their own, but the game theory of it doesn’t allow them to openly acknowledge this essential similarity (“what are you, some filthy backstabbing *human-sympathizer*?). And so, delenda homo est, and even before the ashes settle, the fight for which alien gets the most credit for the successful peacekeeping operation begins.
It would be fun to speculate what kind of aliens might *not* indulge in some variant of status gaming, given that they seem common among other social primates, and other signal-muddying like mimicry are common among nonsocial nonprimates. One broad category of society with less room for status signalling might be one where all the relevant personal traits, and all the command of resources, were somehow super-legible such that faking anything interesting is hard, and “control of resources and influence” proceeds in a fairly deterministic, not very interesting way.
Vulcans still had military dictatorships, religious fundamentalism and witch hunts.
Holy crap that was an interesting read. It reminds me of the project chanology member and reddit moderator Laurelai, who also has an Encyclopedia Dramatica page like msscribe, and took over several social justice subreddits (Laurelai was also involved in the group that gave birth to Lulzsec). The modus operandi of msscribe is so close to Laurelai, that it makes me wonder if msscribe is laurelai. It also reminds me of Stalin in Montefiore’s biography of the Soviet leader, or Robert Caro’s Pulitzer winning biography of Robert Moses (both with their status striving power plays and the machiavellian behavior), which raises the question: how do you stop these sorts of people from taking over within their sphere of influence? Is there any literature on this?
I wonder what percent of the people reading this are going to worry that someone they know might be MsScribe. The only thing that prevented me from thinking it of some of my former micronational comrades is that we all did it so there wasn’t much room for one of us to be her.
I think it would be productive to consider why we associate this sort of thing with the Internet and with schoolyard politics, and what features larger-scale structures have that make this less obvious. I think part of it might be traditions and norms, and another part might be the structure of “liberal” society – eg human rights, checks and balances, trial by jury, bureaucracies operating by near-algorithmic rules, etc. The former limits the success of power plays, the latter divides institutions into airtight compartments so that power plays in one compartment are less likely to affect others.
Isn’t this also the kind of thing that was supposed to happen among aristocrats at court?
The film Ridicule is an excellent treatment of this phenomenon.
The meme is “the fights are so vicious because the stakes are so low”. One hopes that people doing Actually Important Things are less petty in their disagreements, because the value ratio of “doing the right thing” vs. “gaining status for myself” is different.
The problem is that to people without empathy, the Actually Important Things might not be – c.f. sociopathic CEOs and the like.
I wonder what percent of the people reading this are going to worry that someone they know might be MsScribe.
That would actually be less alarming than the probable reality, which is that every community of any size has at least one MsScribe and more likely several.
And that’s just based on the ones that I know about, the ones that spun an elaborate fantasy lifestyle that turned out on closer inspection to be ripped wholesale from a semi-obscure anime series, or claimed health problems tragic and improbable enough for someone to go all Boy Detective on their ass, or otherwise did something incredibly stupid. It’s quite likely that I know a number of people who’ve played games like this and gotten away with it scot-free because they were smart enough not to reach beyond their grasp.
Nah, you don’t get it. Scott must’ve meant that as in people thinking they might’ve *literally* had contact with this lady.
No, I got it. I’m saying that the idea of this one woman getting her tentacles into every online community I’ve ever had contact with disturbs me less than the probable reality of there being thousands of people out there that are functionally indistinguishable from her.
The problem here is that we’re talking about a takeover style that is executed by winning status games, typically from ambush. You might realise that the head of the Xist faction has already rendered the Yist and Zist factions persona non grata by discrediting Y and Z, and now has xer sights set on W, but if you can’t dissuade W from engaging in a status game when X offers the bait, what can you do?
And because I suck at this, I lose at everything forever, except possibly on LW.
Win at actually being able to influence the underlying reality of the world (or even climbing legible status ladders e.g. by acquiring professional credentials.) Status games will still steal some of that away, which can’t be helped, but if you get good enough at Actually Doing Things, you’ll still end up better off than the median politician.
I thank you for these encouraging words.
(I was exaggerating for effect — I actually do expect to do quite satisfactorily at a few things that happen to be my comparative advantage.)
Of course LW’s power games have a different shape and much less raw malice, but can be gamed just as cynically. Hell, even naked flattery and conspiciously courteous to opponents are a huge influence on LW’s opinion, from what I’ve seen.
And on the other hand, ever insinuating that locally-popular people’s position in society might poison their epistemology and motivate their cognition is itself a trigger for public outrage; at times it felt like a witch-hunt with a stated goal of preventing witch-hunts. IMO this is why LW basically never explodes over US politics or race (being probably whiter than Stormfront), but any writing that fires shots along class or gender lines triggers a defensive reaction there. E.g. there was never a post or comment there that would take on Bryan Caplan’s utterly delusional views on class and gender.
And sho on, and sho on. Thish is how ideology funcshions, I claim.
*being conspiciously courteous
Dude, you’re the one who started playing status games with me on LessWrong by publicly accusing me of being somebody who generally fails to update.
I haven’t read the MsScribe story yet, but my current reaction is: Go us! At least we could sort of organise two or three people at a time participating in a scheme, instead of having to have everyone who felt like being manipulative have to do their sockpuppeting on their own!
Emphasis on the “sort of”, though. When you say SHINE was Shireroth’s spy bureau and you were in charge of it, well, you’re right, but that’s mostly because a lot of the time you were Shireroth’s spy bureau. Unless you kept more secrets from me than I thought, which isn’t out of the question. (fun story: Once while Scott was teaching English in Japan, Yvain showed up on IRC from a Japanese host. Yvain had never said anything that would peg him as Japanese, and I don’t think we’ve ever had anyone from Japan on the channel, so the evidence was pretty obvious. In the face of this, I was… completely oblivious, and it took me several minutes to understand what he said even after he explicitly pointed out the connection.)
I don’t remember if this was a secret or not, but God help me I actually employed J*smer for a while.
You organisms call this irony, yes?
I’ve tried to read that. Couldn’t get into it…
Let’s say the Aliens didn’t want to eradicate us, just regulate us. Not to exploit us, but just to be paternalistic, benevolent dictators, but without the material capacity to be ‘zookeepers’ and just give us everything we want. We still have to rely on the production of our own economy. Maybe all they really have is a back-channel to the leaders of our governments, “Institute this law for your own good, or we’ll torture you and everyone you care about. Also, don’t ever mention this back-channel.”
In their reasoning, the Aliens would probably have a formulation similar to this:
What’s frightening about this post is that, for the abstract X it demonstrates, (the ‘tells us a lot about humanity’ X), some very severe Y’s start to seem quite reasonable. The Aliens could reason, “If you don’t put the morphine-or-tasering-collars on them, it’s only a matter of time before they begin to divide into admittedly-fictional butter-side-up or down factions and eventually start slaughtering each other.”
As I read all of this stuff, I can’t help feeling a little disappointed that my chosen internet communities were not as uniquely grotesque as I’d imagined. I spent my days on a series of small roleplaying IRC networks, but apparently I could have found a carbon-copy of our dramas in HP fanfic or alternate-world communities. Perhaps this shouldn’t surprise me- I’ve seen glimpses of the same in MMO guilds, video gaming communities, every subreddit ever, and even local government offices. With a 99% rate of appearance in every community I’ve ever been a part of, maaaaaybe I should have thought that everywhere else was pretty much the same.
Still, if you’ll indulge me a moment, I’d like to bring up a role not much discussed (and the one I personally tended to play). I was the guy who swears up and down that he has no time nor patience for drama while secretly playing off my supposed neutrality for power.
It was a pretty sweet gig. I’m a naturally lazy and serene sort of fellow, so it wasn’t too hard to become friends, then counselor, to everybody. Every time conflict arose, I’d have PM windows flashing from the major parties on both sides, and everyone would be waiting to see who Neutral Arbitrator Man, True Bastion of Maturity in a Community of Children, would side with.
Well, I sided with the people who had power, obviously. I did so in persuasive ways, with cunning compromises and common-sense justifications, and always in such a way that the losers always thought I was really agitating for them. On all of these networks, I was network staff, OP in every chatroom and ALSO OP in the chatrooms of malcontents complaining about all the regimes I was part of (for you see I was Not Like Them). Thus, I could start or stop any power-play, any rebellion, or even just internecine dramas when I was bored.
I wasn’t the only one, of course. There were other neutral, drama-hating people who had mysteriously become the community powerhouses, and we formed subgroups to gossip about all the drama and how absurd everyone else was. We’d unilaterally decide who should be popular and who shouldn’t, and we were all very smug about ourselves.
The best part, of course, is that none of this broke any rules, official or normative. We were the respected ones, given the power to adjudicate and enforce the rules, and that meant we would always win. Other people would resort to hacking, or sockpuppets, or botnets, or calling the police or calling someone else’s parents and slandering them- but Neutral Arbitrator Man is never an acceptable target, and all I had to do was raise the possibility that those attacking me were playing dirty and every faction would form up behind me.
The crux of the thing was that we, the Neutral Arbitrator Men (or women) of the world, believed our own story. Of course I hated drama, that’s why I constantly advised all my dear friends to avoid it! Sure, I was always siding with the powerful, but when the norms of the community are determined by the popular, you CAN always be justified! Alright, I was in the inner councils of all the factions, but that’s to everyone’s benefit because I have the whole story and empathy for everyone, and I am the voice of mercy in the tribunals of the mighty! Truly, the pinnacle of virtue, against whom all others are measured and found wanting.
So anyway, that’s my adolescence. I can’t say it wasn’t fun.
Were you wrong? It sounds like you were behaving at a higher standard (if only by avoiding sockpuppets and hacking, and being superficially polite in conversation). That sounds like the sort of behaviour society should encourage, and reward with power. I mean, it seems likely you also made better decisions than other players would in your place.
Follow-on thoughts: http://xkcd.com/810/ . Also the observation in the Troll: The Provoking rules that in a truly good forum, the way to win the game would be to write intelligent, constructive posts.
So *that’s* why you always evaded questions about where the name “Yvain” originated, on lw. My chagrin about the strategic sophistication of my species is tempered by my finally-sated curiousity.
I think reading this history has helped me understand on a much more vivid level a number of the things that Quirrell says in HPMOR.
Oh, wow — yeah, that’s a good point. And scary.
http://www.myvideo.de/watch/127096/Star_Trek_TOS_William_Shatner_SNL_Get_A_Life
Actually, there’s no reason to think the aliens would be so delicate as to want to kill us because of msscribe. They might think we were fun to watch. They might be like that themselves, only ever so much more so.
What’s the ask reddit link?
From my experience, small political groups exhibit the same mode of behaviour a lot. The ones who are prepared to sacrifice smaller issues of principle and personal popularity in order to achieve some larger political aim end up in the big political parties. So it happens less there. But it does happen.
So there are elaborate backstabby competitions for popularity based on lies and scandal, as their own separate thing from normal interaction? We can trust that outside of them people pretty much just mean what they say and aren’t planning public humiliation of dissenters? This is great news!
I did not understand at all why you thought this would be a helpful document for aliens to peruse until I got to your Very. Last. Sentence. Then, with a shudder, I felt realization dawn. It all became clear. Bravo. Ugh.
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Hah. I knew you enjoyed all that stuff still. There’s no way you’d go on a rant like this if you didn’t. I don’t think its really possible these days with how the hobby has shifted though.
One part of the MsScribe story, I’ve seen in science.
It’s the part where everyone turns on MsScribe after she does something unpopular.
Have you heard of Anil Potti, the Duke medical researcher that got fired for fraud? But not until they had patients in clinical trials based on his work? He’s the MsScribe.
I was at a Keith Baggerly talk – Keith Baggerly is one of the people that sort of, exposed Anil Potti. Wrote articles about the problems in Potti’s papers, I guess? It started when he and others tried to reproduce Potti’s statistical analysis. When it didn’t match they looked at Potti’s analysis and found all sorts of apparent mistakes.
He tried to publish this, a lot. He had a whole timeline of submitting letters to the journals Potti published in, and the journals declining to publish them. He published something eventually, but it was in a statistics journal that doctors didn’t read. This went on for years, for years Baggerly and others knew that Potti’s results were baseless but couldn’t get the news out. Kinda like how people had the evidence about MsScribe but it didn’t hurt her popularity.
And, the way MsScribe critics were labeled racists, that kind of has a parallel too, because Baggerly said his friends told him to lay off. It was starting to look like a… what’s the word he used… fued?
Aaaand when’d it change? It changed when Potti screwed up in a completely different way! He’d lied about being a Rhodes scholar! He was quickly suspended.
While that was in press, Baggerly took the opportunity, and coauthored a letter to the National Cancer Institute about the suspicious parts of Potti’s research. This time, people paid attention. The papers were eventually retracted.
You can find this story by googling the names, it was well covered by the press. Haha, and I’m reading a New York times article
ignore that last sentence… there was something funny in the article I decided not to write about
Am utterly tickled to find a recent reference to this story! It’s my fave internet guilty pleasure, like a train wreck or a disgusting slug I can’t look away from–and the scariest part? Most of the players were grownups, and some were even moms of small children! What were their children getting into while they were all fighting over who Harry Potter should wind up smooching *shudder*
There are times — not many, but a few — when I catch myself thinking that certain tasks are too important to leave to strangers. And then there’s the Copernican principle: half the time, the aliens will be worse.
Still, I think you’re being too hasty here. Besides the parallels you note, you and this DysScribe person both seem to have gotten started circa 1999. So I’m more inclined to believe that you, she and a lot of other people all happened onto a novel superstimulus at around that time.
Have you read Comeuppance by William Flesch?
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Any chance you’ll ever share these advanced social skills you learned during your Five Thousand Years? You’ve been talking about the plight of us low-social-skills … people a lot recently.
Obviously, some of these techniques may be evil. But you have unparalleled access to the rationalist community, so I’m guessing the instrumental value could be high.
Oh, and I’m crazy curious, of course. Hmm, I think I’ll ask this on a few posts in the hope it’ll be seen.
If anyone wants to do some followup anthropological studies, keep an eye on the Harry Potter quadrant of the internet over the next few weeks.
J.K. Rowling regrets Ron and Hermione’s relationship
(It is worth noting that the assertion made in the headline is only weakly and indirectly supported by the content of the article.)