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Like I said in my post:
I'm not looking for individualized explanations of these events. I'm looking for a grand overarching theory of society mind changes that can simultaneously explain all of them.
I was grasping at this in my original response, but I think this is the closest to a grand overarching theory:
You're a supporter of a sports team. You win some, you lose some. Then a fellow supporter of your sports team reveals themselves to be someone who fingerpaints artworks with his own shit. This is then levied as ammunition against fans of the sports team. To avoid being considered someone who fingerpaints artwork with their own shit, you disavow ever being a fan of the sports team, to avoid being perceived as someone who fingerpaints with their own shit.
I believe this dynamic plays out everywhere, over everything. Hipsters always get there first, and then are hated, and then what they like becomes the norm as people realize hipsters are there first and want to be seen as one of the first and not into the old thing. Then hipsters move on. 9/11 happens, America supports war in the Middle East, then they realize the people who want war in the Middle East are incompetent and/or abhorrent, then they pretend they never supported it in the first place. Social justice waves are kind of like this; everyone supported it until they realized this put them in company with lunatics, and the purity tests of standing with lunatics drove away people who didn't want to be associated with them. "Passing" is an understood phenomenon from older African-Americans, decades later people attempted to pass for black.
For related phenomena: gold on the leper colony, TLP narcissism theory.
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As someone who saw the shift in attitudes towards gay marriage play out I suspect it had a lot to do with the dominant culture shifting.
It wasn't that long ago that the evangelical religious right were an extremely powerful political force in America, with their own champions, cultural icons, shibboleths, set of not-entirely-related-beliefs-that-served-as-tribe-signals and bespoke rituals.
Then they got old, set their own credibility on fire by conducting unpopular wars, spent the federal budget to the bone, and nosedived their political causes into the ground.
So signaling that they weren't part of the evangelical religious right became more important than any sincerely held belief. Gay marriage is also easy to move the needle on because the political and actual costs aren't high, and it benefits marriage/divorce lawyers.
I wasnt there back then, but wasnt this kinda how Britney Spears started out, from what I heard?
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Explainability/Interpretability in modelling is often directly anti-correlated with predictability. Modern AI/ML is a very good example of this. Highly flexible models often gain predictive power by learning complex, distributed, nonlinear structure that is hard for humans to summarize cleanly.
Societal Genetic Algorithms and Multi-Agent Game theory is probably your best starting point. Assume the fitness function is the resilience of such a system to survive + the desire of participants to propagate it/adopt it/live in it. Develop the theory from there.
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