been a thing since early internet forums. anywhere groups can gather and do the in-group out-group thing, you always have to be aware of this. will also note it's also the inverted experience of 'the double empathy problem' where the autistic lens can get socially shut out due to lack of social affirmation in the face of non-autistic interpretations being socialized.

here is a good breakdown by someone else

although to expand around it,

as the 5'th species of ape, we really like to do in-group out-group competition, even when you're just socially confabulating your own excuses to look down on others and dismiss their experience to boost inner group cohesion. the best perspectives are able to make sense of the experiences in groups without completely ignoring the experiences of other groups.

similarly why progressive groups can't successfully scale their efforts. local group tribalism tends to be toxic as hell, and a lot of money being put into divide and conquer that makes it really hard for progressives to work together.

there's also a whole essay to be had around what intelligence is, which is why the group confabulations can often result in main-character syndrome that you see in the 'star children.' similarly someone less robust in their thinking can be affirmed into some confabulation or psychosis through an LLM. we are highly confabulatory, and highly social.

sooo we're very socially vulnerable creatures. even the autistic people when they are allowed to collect in groups larger than they usually see, (yay internet!) they can find affirmation that people who do not comprehend their experience could never affirm. like in collective affirmation being able to get past the double empathy barrier. could also spiral into pathological supremacist behaviour cause monkey brain. this interaction also gives us tools like the double empathy problem, which can be applied as a function to much more broad systems interactions than just the neuro-developmental attempt at communication struggling against an overly rigid neurotypical social bubble affirming itself to save energy. in simple terms, inertia of group beliefs can accidentally overwrite important signals from smaller groups/individuals.

there's also a good framing for rigidity(through inertia) vs plasticity and elasticity in predictive processing/active inference in how systems are shaped.

which i believe will also be very valuable in framing and shaping pathology on the 'individual' level as well. quotations because an individual is still a lot of systems interacting.

that one's definitely a bit technical, but i recommend any of her work generally in communicating some of the complexity within social systems.

if you've read all of this you are appreciated. world is complicated, and holding all of the tools to not be whisked into some simplification or another is very energy expensive, and we are blind to our blindspots. and a lot of opportunists intentionally add noise and misinformation/divisive rhetoric because informed group coordination scares them for some reason.

usually frame most of the sense-making here as clearing up blindspots you didn't know you had.

if you've never tested your literal blindspots, look up the test, you just need two horizontal dots on a paper and to move it until the one not-centered vanishes. i'd say escaping information bubbles is the same kind of experience of finding something you didn't know was there, because our brains make sense of the world regardless of the things we don't know we aren't seeing.

easy to get silo'd into some local-eco-niche or another, and apes going to do ape brain fighting cause we refuse to recognize how bad our ape brains generally are in how we define and grow into ourselves along with those around us. the actual complexity i'm skipping over feels like an ocean, but i feel like people need a new 'basic education' around systems and framing specifically, just because most of our experience is defined by these complex dynamics and interactions. although i think a lot of this unsettles some people because we're very hackable as a species.

when life grows into a shape that defines other life as something other than itself, often something to be exploited. either you get parasites that lay eggs in living creatures as part of a stable system, or cancer that refuses to recognize that the environment it is exploiting is necessary for the continued survival of the cells that became it. there's a reason that communicating past scales and group identities is actually very important as a big large ecosystem full of different varied local ecosystems, even if it's an online chat group.

hope this all makes sense!