Malleability

The most salient characteristic of normies, AKA women and other non-autistics, is their ability to sense their best interests in any social situation and frame the truth with the most serviceable connotations possible, and to believe what they’re saying with full sincerity as they say it. Vox Day used to say on the old Alpha Game blog that anytime a woman says something you should mentally add the preface “Right now I feel like…” to what she actually said (good advice). For example, “I will love you forever and nothing could ever change that” becomes “Right now I feel like I will love you forever and nothing could ever change that.” Children start putting a spin on the truth at a very young age to get what they want, so it’s buried deep in the developing brain.

This personality trait resides on a spectrum, which I’ve decided to refer to as malleability. A 99th percentile malleable person is able to be a racist in one social context and an egalitarian in another social context and be entirely sincere the entire time, because the weight she placed on different things she genuinely values temporarily shifted to match the audience in each context. She wants both good things for white people (tribalism) and good things for black people (egalitarianism), she just tapped into these desires differently based on the audience. This value-matching could be referred to as “empathy,” “vibing,” or “chemistry” because its subjective experience provides a sense of warmth and meaningful connection with others. It is extremely useful for social intelligence because it enables a type of mind-reading that’s based on shared assumptions.

Most people say the opposite of what they’re actually thinking as often as not because they’re leaning on these shared assumptions to provide the foundation for nuanced communication. For example, a common joke is to say something incorrect on purpose, like when I say “disirregardless”, where the assumption is that both people know “irregardless” is a common solecism and know the other person knows it. If either assumption were untrue, the joke would fail to land. The majority of communication bandwidth is lost when two people put very different weights on different values, which is at least as crippling as the absence of body language, vocal tone, and first language-level fluency. This is why highly intelligent people report the same feeling as autists that it seems like everyone else received a manual for life that they didn’t get: it’s because intelligent people have the capacity and tendency to value the future and contingencies, and dumb people put no weight on anything beyond present pleasure.

When you value the future, and other things smart people care about, as differently as this then people can become mutually incomprehensible to each other.

Our minds contain a big ledger of things we value and how much weight we put on each one: personal autonomy, social order, sex, money, chaotic bacchanalia, the economic opinions of Nassim Nicholas Taleb, the opinions of your mom about how far you could have gone in school if you’d really applied yourself, and on and on. Unless they’re autistic, people keep these weights under lock and key and only share them with the people they trust the most, because these weights are the fulcrum by which people are manipulated. 80% of social intelligence is developing the skill of discerning these values in other people, and 80% of charisma is sticking a lever in those fulcrums and applying just a touch of force. (Again, we immediately think of the sociopath who said he perceived of people as having “handles” that he could use to turn them this way or that.) Similarly, I’ve described the art of interpreting geopolitics as depending entirely on knowing what the “sides” of a conflict are and empathizing with what they actually want.

Therefore, you’d expect people who go into intelligence work to be of the theater kid temperament, comfortable with trying on different value systems (different weightings) along with donning different costumes. There’s no appreciable difference between method acting and going undercover.

Malleability also correlates with tribalism and emotional range (AKA neuroticism) because it serves a similar purpose for navigating complex social dynamics. I suspect it’s half the reason psychopaths target narcissists, who are exceedingly sensitive to expressions of social approval and disapproval. (The other half would be the lack of tribalism, because tribally inclined, instinctive people don’t turn on their people easily and just shut down and do nothing if their instincts were pitted against their need for social approval. Autists lack tribalism but also lack malleability.) It’s orthogonal to stubbornness, which can be triggered to manipulate stubborn people who are also highly malleable.

The simplest and easiest way to detect how malleable a person is is to observe the different levels of emotion with which they express social disapproval, depending on how safe they feel expressing their opinions in different social contexts. This is a good indication of how much effortful control they’re exerting to regulate their emotions to socially appropriate levels, which isn’t quite the same thing as feeling different emotions entirely but closely related (also related: levels of belief). It’s also strongly related to fantasies about bullying/torturing people to reinforce social values, because highly malleable people recognize malleability in others, possibly overestimating its influence on on other people’s opinions via projection. The connection between false confessions and brainwashing as outcomes of torture could be explained by the human tendency to believe our own bullshit, even the bullshit we say under duress, and then stick to it stubbornly. As you might guess, malleability would also be the cause of Stockholm Syndrome–and probably also fibromyalgia, which is caused by misinterpretation of pain sensations and a false belief in what “normal” should feel like–and would explain why these are almost exclusively female phenomena.

Related: https://sigmagame.substack.com/p/the-cognitive-dissonance-challenge/comment/51917336