Dark, Gray, and Light Lore

The text discusses three types of lore: dark, gray, and light. Gray lore is useful and attracts diverse people, offering some value while allowing for open exploration. Light lore fosters significant positive outcomes and supports exceptional individuals without being centered on any single system.

You can craft lore from scratch, and it is easiest to do so if you’re up to no good. This is dark lore, and it points to how you might approach what we actually want: light lore, by way of something in-between which I call gray lore.

Cultish subcultures of true believers can be created by planting the right kind of seeds, and they will then go on to generate vast dreamscapes of self-delusion on their own, congruent with the original suggestive seeds and the agendas driving them. This is the dark lore.

The “tell” of dark lorecraft is that if you actually “do your own research” following the starting points and cues suggested, you’ll reach predictable conclusions useful to the lorecrafter — a conjuring trick that produces an illusion that resembles a popular cargo-cult view of how scientific discovery is supposed to work.

You could replace “do your own research” with “pick a card.”

As with Nigerian Prince scam emails, only the most vulnerable marks get through the gatekeeping.

People who gravitate to gray lore are typically looking for new and improved methods to manage their own psyches better, but are typically not desperate for such methods. They are not being actively traumatized by lack of such methods. They are doing okay, and looking to do better.

Typically, the mark of gray lore is that it attracts a much wider variety of people than dark lore.

Gray lore obviously includes things like astrology, Myers-Briggs, the diet and exercise industry, productivity porn, management ideas, and so forth. Less obviously, it also includes things with a veneer of statistical legitimacy, like the Big 5 personality test, large swathes of social psychology, survey research, and many genres of “technical analysis” in trading. Notably, gray lore rarely reaches for mathematics beyond basic college-level statistics, or takes root in domains that require going beyond, which makes it depth-limited.

Gray lore, in other words, is usable bullshit, where the risk of being exploited by dark lorecrafters is manageable, the signal/noise filter problem is tractable, the traditions of disputation are real (even if midwit-grade), and approaches to cross-checking are available to suit a variety of tastes.

You could say dark lore typically features a rule-by-law epistemology, where crucial ways of knowing are handed down by one or more figures who are “above” the law and lay it down for others, while gray lore typically features a rule-of-law epistemology, where the only source of authority is the core system which all are subject to.

Lore is light lore if it fosters a non-trivial probability of truly significant, non-accidental, high-impact developments

crucially these outcomes are not central to the lore itself, merely a measure (but not a metric) of the lightness of the lore.

Goodhart’s Law (“when a measure becomes a metric, it ceases to be a good measure”).

The trick is to encourage genuine variety in objectives on a sufficiently rich frontier, regardless of whether or not they serve your purposes as lorecrafter. When people are trying to actually do a variety of different things, there is a limit to how much value there is in sharing systems of thought (gray lore) or starting beliefs (dark lore).

What makes dark lore dark is that it grows around the singular objectives established by the lorecrafters. You choose the path, but the start and end points are chosen for you. What makes gray lore gray is the singular “system” established by lorecrafters. You choose the path, and the start points, but the vehicle is prescribed for you, which limits the range of end points you might reach. What makes light lore light is that you have to choose your own objectives, and build your own systems for trying to get to them, but you get a rich supply of bits and pieces to build with, significantly improving your odds.