Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: Social Dark Matter, published by [DEACTIVATED] Duncan Sabien on November 16, 2023 on LessWrong.

You know it must be out there, but you mostly never see it.

Author's Note 1: In something like 75% of possible futures, this will be the last essay that I publish on LessWrong. Future content will be available on my substack, where I'm hoping people will be willing to chip in a little commensurate with the value of the writing, and (after a delay) on my personal site (not yet live). I decided to post this final essay here rather than silently switching over because many LessWrong readers would otherwise never find out that they could still get new Duncanthoughts elsewhere.

Author's Note 2: This essay is not intended to be revelatory. Instead, it's attempting to get the consequences of a few very obvious things lodged into your brain, such that they actually occur to you from time to time as opposed to occurring to you approximately never.

Most people could tell you that 17 + 26 = 43 after a few seconds of thought or figuring, and it would be silly to write an essay about 17 + 26 equaling 43 and pretend that it was somehow groundbreaking or non-obvious.

But! If the point was to get you to see the relationship between 17, 26, and 43 very, very clearly, and to remember it sufficiently well that you would reflexively think "43" any time you saw 17 and 26 together in the wild, it might be worth taking the time to go slowly and say a bunch of obvious things over and over until it started to stick.

Thanks to Karim Alaa for the concept title. If you seek tl;dr, read the outline on the left and then skip to IX.

I. #MeToo

In September of 2017, if you had asked men in the United States "what percentage of the women that you personally know have experienced sexual assault?" most of them would have likely said a fairly low number.

In October of 2017, the hashtag #MeToo went viral.

In November of 2017, if you had asked men in the United States "what percentage of the women that you personally know have experienced sexual assault?" most of them would have given a much higher number than before.

(It's difficult, for many people, to remember that they would have said a number that we now know to be outrageously low; by default most of us tend to project our present knowledge back onto our past selves. But the #MeToo movement was sufficiently recent, and the collective shock sufficiently well-documented, that we can, with a little bit of conscientious effort, resist the mass memory rewrite. Most of us were wrong. That's true even if you specifically were, in fact, right.)

Talking about sexual assault is not quite as taboo, in the United States, as it is in certain other cultures. There are places in the world where, if a woman is raped, she might well be murdered by her own family, or forcibly married off to the rapist, or any number of other horrible things, because the shame and stigma is so great that people will do almost anything to escape it.

(There are places in the world where, if a man is raped - what are you talking about? Men can't be raped!)

The U.S. is not quite that bad. But nevertheless, especially prior to October of 2017, sexual assault was still a thing that you Don't Ever Talk About At The Dinner Table, and Don't Bring Up At Work. It wasn't the sort of thing you spoke of in polite company

(or even in many cases with friends and confidants, because the subject is so charged and people are deeply uncomfortable with it and there are often entanglements when both parties know the perpetrator)

and since there was pressure to avoid discussing it, people tended not to discuss it.

(Like I said, a lot of this will be obvious.)

And because people didn't discuss it, a lot of people (especially though not always men) were genuinely shocked at just how common, prevalent, pervasive it ...