# Rationalism in an Age of Egregores

Political tribes work by allowing people to emit costly signals of fealty to a tribe, where that signal of fealty ties your social status to the tribe's social status. So joining a political tribe is a status bet: you're hoping[^mswiy7g416] that the tribe will gain in group status, relative to rival political tribes. If you called it well, you'll rise in social status with your tribe. Social status is a matter of *relative* position in a prestige order, so these group-status competitions are zero-sum.

Political tribes are *horrifyingly* successful in the social media age. Certainly, monotheistic faiths and the 20th-century political ideologies and nationalism were similarly effective phenomena. But living in the [post-scarcity](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/W9rm2xkFxpYCxm5PS/we-live-in-a-post-scarcity-society) First World, people seem to want to spend a lot of their wealth on playing the zero-sum game about prestige ordering, online and otherwise.

People who have never really understood any other way to *use* words and arguments will sometimes say things like, "everything is political." I think this means something like: "there are no interesting, purely predictive uses of language that avoid signaling in some group-status relevant manner; anyone claiming so is *actually* making a status move [by trying to arrogate the title of 'neutral.'](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/KGLJeeF6psTzHiuiR/david-udell-s-shortform?commentId=hyXB3fhHmWqjvjNG3#bAEizFr35xbDHKbLG)"

This is *just* *false.* Beyond being motivated, though, it's epistemically evil!  It's just plain *wrong* that we have to live in an adversarial communicative environment where we can't just take claims at face value without considering political-tribe-maneuvering implications. This is not a satisfactory equilibrium! *In a mindkilled age, when egregores propagate freely in the medium of human psychology and bash in our ability to think, **it's especially important to state directly: being "political" is unequivocally epistemically bad.*** And being epistemically weak is in turn bad for your goals, whatever they are. Raising the instrumental-rationality waterline is the common instrumental interest of many final causes.

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There's no real contradiction in explicitly joining the anti-tribe tribe. It's just false that you can't get better at being a better-calibrated observer by *trying hard at it*. One of the most basic rationalist insights is that the best way to accomplish your goals, whatever those goals are, is to *try directly.* If you want to be less political, *try directly first.*

I bet that a core tenet of the Neo-Enlightenment project we're trying to carry out will be building a culture inimical to egregores. I bet a big part of that is simply avowing that, [in my  culture,](https://medium.com/@ThingMaker/in-my-culture-29c6464072b2) I'm anti-political-tribe. I'm not secretly banking social status to later pledge to some political tribe's maneuvering; I just actually want to make apolitical predictions. I'd sign a commitment to that effect, if I could.

[^mswiy7g416]: "Hoping" and "betting" here can be largely unconscious, strategically-hidden-from-yourself-and-then-retroactively-completely-memory-holed mental motions. Unusually elaborate mental motions like these are typical for social status games; we were fine tuned for those tasks in our ancestral environment, and so have a lot of relevant purpose-build psychological hardware.