very tired and demoralized at work so heres something ive been thinking about an interesting thing that may have happened in the 20th century is that deliberately or not people got really good at wrecking norms
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it seems like you break a norm by having an individual violate it in a very public manner as a way of testing the strength of a consensus--that is, you force enforcers of the norm to make good on threats against violations, or show that they no longer can, because . . .
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. . . 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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Replying to @polisisti
Thank you
The repression strategy is very risky tho--the cascades that erupt after being dammed for ages are pretty potent stuff
@timurkuran wrote about this much more coherently in _Private Truths, Public Lies_. Worth a read if you haven't already2 replies 1 retweet 2 likes -
"Risky" tweaks me a bit here. (Perhaps "strategy" should as well.) The subjects - movements - are not really agents. To the degree that they can reason or strategize or optimize at all, their thought processes must happen out in the open, and are subject to self-regulation.
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Heh Do you think the Beijing government lacks agency? (it's arguable but I think you're left with a pretty boneless word at that point)
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The point there is conceded, you are completely correct re: Beijing and I wasn't paying attention to the context even one tweet up. My bad.
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^^
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