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

Geeks, MOPs, and sociopaths in subculture evolution (2015)

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99 pointsbglusman42 comments

This is the basic problem of all social organisations, not just 'subcultures', whatever they are.

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.

The only answer to the problem I've ever thought up is to burn it to the ground and start again, not very helpful but what else can you do? apart from walking away and leaving them to it.

Also, this 'Geeks,fanatics etc.' narrative will be part of the arsenal deployed against anyone trying to expose a sociopath at the centre of one of these organisations. The levels of fuckery you come up against with this stuff are so unbelievably frustrating.

One answer is to be braver about calling out people you think are sociopaths (maybe not using that word). Presumably some non-mops are in the sweet spot of having enough social skills to do this but not so much that they find it uncomfortable.

I get that doing this is difficult and draining, but if you're thinking about burning it down any way you may as well try this first, no?

It only works if everyone does it, or if you're really well prepared and have irrefutable evidence of something. If you're the only one (or even part of a small group) calling them out you just get buried. You're basically a naive amateur working against someone who has spent their life focused on getting and exploiting power. It's literally what they live for.

Imagine a random guy wandering into an MMA cage and punching Connor Mcgregor in the face. Calling out sociopaths is the social version of doing that.

They're prepared, they'll have pawns that do all their dirty work, they'll have built up a network of obligations around themselves, they'll have taken control of whatever channels of information dissemination exist within the group and be actively shaping the narrative within the organisation. Standing up and pointing them out will get the whole apparatus focused on steamrolling you. It's nasty business.

Maybe it is better to try before walking away but there's a pretty big personal cost. I've done it and wasted huge amounts of time and energy and i have no idea whether it really made any difference in the end. I think there is an endless sea of problems and you only have a finite life and aren't responsible for everyone else's decisions. If everyone else is going to tolerate BS then who am I to try to change it? There are so many people, so many organisations that you could find a hill to die on every day of the week and probably make no difference to anything. I've come to the conclusion that I'm better off just dodging that stuff when it comes up and focusing on building up healthy, loving relationships among my community rather than trying to tilt against windmills in these hierarchical social organisations.

I think my motto is basically 'eh, fuck it, I'm off' when it comes to this stuff now. I think that's how you really beat it, don't play the game.

Your comment has expanded my thinking about this issue. It's one thing to learn to identify sociopaths, but the next step is even tricker: Identifying their networks in the organization. You're absolutely right that sociopaths immediately surround themselves with a web of hangers-on, toadies, enforcers, and adoring fans which make them very difficult to take out. If you're the CEO charged with healing a toxic organization, it requires not only ejecting the sociopath, but also most of his or her entire support network probably needs to be ejected at the same time.

Very few people are really able to spot people with even quite blatant sociopathic/anti-social behaviours, they just fit too well into the stereotype of the able, charismatic, and successful.

In general, you will be the one in ten, or even a hundred that tend to pick up on these things.

It appears to be better to not call them out in public immediately, but build a trusted base of people who compare notes of their interactions, so that you can clearly expose the lies and all that comes with it. At least that is what has worked out in the few cases of really destructive/power hungry of this particular kind of bent I've heard about.

The way to avoid them seems to point in the direction of having all decisions and all dialogue regarding decisions within an organisation completely open. Not because it necessarily would reveal them, but because it's less fertile ground.

>In general, you will be the one in ten, or even a hundred that tend to pick up on these things.

Being raised by one, dating one, then obsessively reading about personality disorders for a few days after learning about them helps a lot with this.

>It appears to be better to not call them out in public immediately, but build a trusted base of people who compare notes of their interactions, so that you can clearly expose the lies and all that comes with it. At least that is what has worked out in the few cases of really destructive/power hungry of this particular kind of bent I've heard about.

Absolutely. The scary thing is that even this isn't guaranteed to end in your favor.

I would go so far as to say that only 1 in 10 people are really even prepared to acknowledge/grapple with the existence of sociopaths, let alone spot them. Most social systems/relationships are designed around levels of implicit trust that are extremely vulnerable to exploitation by sociopaths, so the default behavior is a kind of willing denial of their existence.

I read a great write-up about this effect that you're describing, sadly I can't find it right now. There's an implicit social contract that sociopaths/narcissists/borderlines circumvent. People expect other people to behave decently, albeit with their own best interests in mind.

It's not so jarring when these unwritten rules are broken by actions that have clear and direct consequences, or when they're broken by people who are not high-functioning.

When it's someone that they see as a trusted peer or a superior, it's like their mind just shuts down and refuses to acknowledge that there's anything wrong. Maybe because they see themselves in the other person, and it'd be like admitting that there's something wrong with them too.

There's no clear way to deal with someone spreading lies about you through office gossip. There's no polite way to call out things like pettiness, gaslighting, or passive-aggressiveness. Worst of all, there's nothing you can do if you're in an environment where all figures of authority are Cluster B. It happens often, and I don't understand why that surprises anyone. They're drawn to positions of power. They'll do anything within the scope of the law and polite society to get that power, and they're just as ruthless when it comes to keeping it.

Always listen to your gut when evaluating people. If they fit in too perfectly but something still seems a little off or others speak about them too reverently, tread very carefully and keep your eyes open. In the absence of direct proof of wrong doing, most people doubt their own valid perceptions.

The sociopaths, now forged in the hell-fires of Something Awful and 4chan, have gotten good. Since the mops are the source of value to extract for the sociopaths, the geeks are uninteresting to them, and may be a threat because they defend their obsessions with the vigor and loyalty of a Revolutionary-era patriot. But you can turn that threat into and advantage -- by turning the mops against the geeks. And the best way (so far) to do this is to use some sort of political posturing that appeals to the mops' innate sense of goodness. For example, by writing or videoing a long-form critique that makes the case that, say, My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic carries a hidden intrinsic subtext of racism and misogyny. This will anger the geeks, but a substantial fraction of mops will believe you. And in their anger the geeks will play straight into your hands by writing you angry emails, which you can then post on Twitter to prove your point that Something Must Be Done to fix My Little Pony and its fandom (which something must invariably include systematically excluding and ostracizing the original fan base), because look at these awful people. My Little Pony is why Trump happened. That will get you con appearances, and maybe even phone calls from Hasbro to offer you a job as a consultant/script doctor to make sure that future MLP episodes are not so offensive.

And if anybody calls you on it, you can simply declare them part of the problem, and turn the entire righteous outrage of the now mostly mop fandom against them. When it comes to harassment, the only standard necessary to establish guilt is that the victim feel harassed. So all you need to do is tell Twitter or Tumblr about how Joe Geek's point-by-point takedown critique of your critique of My Little Pony makes you feel threatened or triggered. Or how he is "stalking" you by reading all your public twitter posts. With the right tone of righteous indignation and enough mop followers willing to give you the benefit of the doubt, hell, maybe even Twitter will step in and ban Joe Geek from their platform for life as part of their newfound commitment to stop trolling and harassment. Depending on the jurisdiction, you could get him jailed for hate speech.

So sure, by all means, call out these people. And enjoy becoming the star of your own #metoo story -- as the perpetrator, not the victim.

The only people that should be using the word sociopath to describe the behavior of others are people in the field of mental health care. Why diagnose people? Call them out on behavior that pisses you off, deal with it in an assertive manner. Calling a sociopath a sociopath in a non clinical context would only give them more power.

A real sociopath doesn't care if you call them that. It just give the purported sociopath more information about the social environments expectations of their behavior. If they are in the social group, they are accepted, and if they are labeled a sociopath, as long as they continue to be accepted they will see their behavior as acceptable. If it's not confronted head on, one doesn't give 'the purported sociopath' the opportunity to prove either or.

>The only people that should be using the word sociopath to describe the behavior of others are people in the field of mental health care. Why diagnose people? Call them out on behavior that pisses you off, deal with it in an assertive manner. Calling a sociopath a sociopath in a non clinical context would only give them more power.

This is a good rule of thumb, calling out a high-functioning Cluster B will almost always just make you look crazy unless you have completely damning evidence. Even then you're probably running afoul of laws or policies, coupled with the general stigma of discussing mental health in any way.

The real issue is dealing with the barrage of lies and manipulation that they'll use to defend themselves. There's that saying that disproving bullshit requires an order of magnitude more effort than the bullshit itself. You will never win against one of them unless you go down to their level, and most people aren't capable of doing that. It takes a wolf to catch a wolf.

I think that more and more people are becoming aware of Cluster B personality disorders, and how high-functioning narcissists, sociopaths, and borderlines act in a professional setting. In many cases, this involves the realization that one's self and/or one's loved ones display significant traits, perhaps even enough for a diagnosis.

If you recognize it in others and you don't have the power or means to stop them, the best thing to do is to just leave if you think they're going to ruin things or individually place you at risk.

replace "narcissists, sociopaths, and borderlines" with "Leos, Tauruses, and Pisces" and you'll realize you're assigning arbitrary labels to people you don't like without actually knowing anything about them.

No. These people exploit loopholes in social trust contracts to gain personal power. It's not about liking them or disliking them. Recognizing their techniques is a learnable skill. Such people really are quite different from the norm, but without training you won't spot them because they're very good at blending in.

Sociopaths, narcissists, and borderlines are real, they are of a particular kind, and their differentness is not bullshit like astrological star signs.

How can you know what a sociopath is without being one?

How can you know what an alcoholic is without being one?

Empathy?

How can you recognize evil if you are not evil?

I don't think I'd be able to, honestly. Evil is a loaded word, millennia of oversimplification to explain a process that's much more complicated.

Is a lion evil when it tears apart an antelope and eats it alive, or is that just it's instinct, it's nature, without higher cognition?

Again, evil, loaded term. People do terrible things, but I'm not a psychologist, and honestly, I'm not a sociopath, so why would I decide to act like a sociopath to sociopaths (lack empathy), and allow myself to be convinced that that somehow fixes the problem?

That's like believing killing is going to get rid of war. Clearly I'm privileged to never have experienced such things directly, but I can understand why some Buddhist monks self immolate as a form of protest.

Thank you for your comment. I like Zen Buddhism because the meaning of 'the inherent emptiness of all things' means to me 'stop thinking about how other people think, and let them think on their own'. Accept things at face value and be responsible for your own direction, if you don't like the people you are surrounded with, surround yourself with different people.

Too often I think we become complacent, trying to change what we can't change. Haters gonna hate? Hate just leads to self hate, whether it stays internalized, or leaks out, comes back to the self through another self.

I wish there was less of it. Trying to fix the problem independently... How? Finding like minded people, and so the wheel turns...

You can call them whatever you want to. Judge them based on their actions and behavior. It's not about liking or disliking anyone.

Stop diagnosing people. Sometimes people do careless things. You don't have to affix a label to them in your mind in order to deal with the problem, because what do you think is going to happen to that person's mind if everyone affixes a label to that person's mind without having the education to actually diagnose the problem, nor the intent to medically heal?

Culture has gotten idiotic when it decided sociopathy and psychopathy equate to some form of superpower.

>Any marginally successful group attracts sociopaths

Not just sociopaths, all of the Cluster B personality disorders.

“All revolutions are conceived by idealists, implemented by fanatics, and its fruits are stolen by scoundrels.” -Thomas Carlyle

Perhaps this should be adapted: Subcultures are conceived by geek idealists, run by geek fanatics, overrun by mops, and then stolen by sociopaths.

I think there is an impedance mismatch between the market nature of the Internet as a whole, versus the centrally controlled nature of subsections of it. Let's say that your allegiance isn't to one particular scene, but you're in a scene, and it becomes overrun by sociopaths. Well, in that case, you can just choose a different scene. The "free market of ideas" has worked. That's good for mops, which is to say it's good for most consumers and most people.

But what if you can't/won't leave a particular scene? That particular scene is probably of the size where a small number of online groups (perhaps 1) dominates 90% of the communications, power, and resources in that scene. In that case, there is no "free market of ideas." From that point of view, there is only a centralized totalitarianism to face. (You can see this embodied in miniature in Reddit. Want to discus media/stories? Reddit provides a whole lot of choices, then! Want to discuss superhero comics? You'd better hew to particular politics, and the mere asking questions about certain topics will get you perma-banned.)

The organizing/media power of tools available to Geeks and Sociopaths both has increased to the point where sociopaths can control viable city/states/islands of culture. The available tools unwittingly fit and facilitate the centrally controlled authoritarian tendencies of sociopaths.

Is there a technological/game-theoretic solution?

In recent years, YouTube, Discord, and other online tools/sites have become a technological/game-theoretic solution. If a particular scene has been overrun by sociopaths, who then become drunk on power and start going too far, people have started to speak out against the authoritarianism on YouTube. Unfortunately, in recent years, this has led to the urging for and attempts at censorship on those platforms.

> Is there a technological/game-theoretic solution?

exit via the nascent wave of decentralizing tech holds some promise

Game theoretical, I don't have a solution, but for the scoundrels they tend to have a different set of truths for everyone they talk to.

I think it should be possible to use this to at least limit the space the scoundrels can act within, maybe even limit it enough that the actions they inevitably does take become a net positive.

Would probably need a very tolerant user-base though, especially in the bug fixing phase!

> The optimal mop:geek ratio is maybe 6:1. At that ratio, the mops provide more energy than they consume. A ratio above about 10:1 becomes unworkable; it’s a recipe for burnout among supporting fanatics.

Obviously, the correct ratio is 7.56, from the evidence presented (that is, there is none). ;)

A fun read, in the same way the Gervais principle is, but stay away from hard numbers. This is all hand-wavey pseudo-science, which doesn't really detract from the entertainment value at all, but once you start throwing out concrete numbers without any basis, the suspension of disbelief bubble will pop for some.

Pretty much accurate. I think it's noteworthy that HN consciously discourages mops, by remaining text-only, slowing down hot-button discussions, downvoting injokes and the like. As compared to (specifically) Reddit.

I'm very interested in hearing about other specific scenes which have survived, in the author's estimation.

Getting enough people in a group to read the late Pieter Hintjens' 'Psychopath Code'[0] helps cerate awareness and builds heard immunity.

[0]https://legacy.gitbook.com/book/hintjens/psychopathcode/deta...

Written by a mop that thinks hes a fanatic and that was likely exploited by a sociopath.

He went off the rails before he even got started:

"One reason—among several—is that as soon as subcultures start getting really interesting, they get invaded by muggles, who ruin them."

Many of these subcultures come into being when people working from an unusual set of values and perceptions find each other. We're all mainlining the same Netflix/Facebook/Twitter/etc now. How much harder must it be to end up that unusual in a global web-based monoculture?

I guess we still have subcultures in some sense... it's just that they now have world-wide membership and the populations of small countries.

That, and year 2000 was just around the time most westerners plugged into the matrix.

"One reason—among several—is that as soon as subcultures start getting really interesting, they get invaded by muggles, who ruin them."

Yes. Nothing is worse than when normal people ruin your quirky, exclusive niche thing by liking the same thing you like, contributing to it and making a part of mainstream culture.

I'm going to go watch anime on the web and work on Unity projects now.

Reeeeee.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Narcissism_of_small_difference...

The article makes a lot of hard claims, but contains very few examples to back them up.

What are well known scenes, subcultures that have died like this?

This story fits bitcoin pretty much exactly

It kind-of also fits Linux, it's not that far gone, but it's moving towards that sociopath stage.

Though, would it be wrong to bring social rights movements as examples too?

Previous discussion from when the article was published: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9632751

Discussed in 2015: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9632751.

This article might just explain why HN is not Reddit (yet?).

The article title is "Geeks, MOPs, and sociopaths in subculture evolution".

At minimum, the title should probably include the commas.

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Also, the site appears to be being hugged to death.

Title fixed now.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com