. . . a public demonstration of a willingness to violate the norm gives people who privately disagreed with it to publicly oppose it, and if enough do this then you get a preference cascade away from the old equilibrium that quietly rotted away.
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(Naturally, new norms can be created if you demonstrate publicly that you can fuck someone up for violating what was previously acceptable behavior, and people who disagree with the new norm are cowed into silence, generating a different preference cascade.)
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Some technological developments that seem likely to have facilitated this: 1. Mass media. One person can violate a norm and be seen very broadly very quickly. Mass media is usually seen as a homogenizing force but it's not necessarily a stable homogeny
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2. Discoveries that undermined the practical underpinning rationale for many old norms (eg, the pill) all at once; with many such changes, discarding norms became a norm itself 3. Refinement of norm violation as a political tool. Eg, lunch protests in the segregated South
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4. Related to (2) and (3), norm violation as a subcultural norm itself. Curiously . . .
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. . .in the Before Time, left-leaning groups were the main practitioners of norm violation as a tool or lifestyle, while conservatives (almost by definition) were custodians of existing norms. I see this situation as reversed today.
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Replying to @eigenrobot
I like your model of social norm creation and destruction but I don’t see the creation and destruction of norms as so separate. How do you destroy the norm of black ppl not sitting @ the front without creating the norm of not attacking black ppl for sitting @ the front
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Replying to @cuniiform
I think the second is just part of a (meta)norm of "people who egregiously violate norms can be attacked, otherwise no"
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Replying to @eigenrobot
the problem with separating the creation and the destruction tho is that that implies that you can objectively determine a ground state with no norms (or at least a gradient of progressively less norms) and I don't think that's possible
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Replying to @cuniiform @eigenrobot
what does a society with no norms about racism look like? is the norm "think + act like black people are inferior" vs "think + act like black people are equal"?
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oh I dunno I mean what happened is we went from "explicit racism is within bounds" to "nope that's a special paddling" But you can imagine differences across people (eg, connected vs unconnected earlobes) where there are no norms beyond a baseline that applies to everyone
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