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Contempt of court penalties for noncompliance with an investigative process is a mainstream example of 1.
Burning Man has some aspects of the second, as do some camping trips, or simply living in a relatively harsh climate. Compare measured levels of corruption in southern vs northern Europe, for instance. When modern democracies fight big wars, the first year involves learning which parts of their warfighting institutions are corrupt and incompetent, & repairing or replacing them.
Your proposal is well-structured and interesting but has a fundamental flaw that needs to be addressed. Interest keyword-based filtering will primarily encourage politics-as-identity, which is actively harmful - it directs attention towards zero-sum thinking and performative identities, rather than creative problem solving. As Bryan Caplan demonstrates in The Myth of the Rational Voter, people already tend to vote to express identities and affiliations rather than to achieve better outcomes. We shouldn't build tools that further entrench this destructive pattern.
Instead, imagine a tool that:
- Has users journal daily about their life - activities, hopes, problems, and worries
- Uses AI to identify where their constraints are plausibly caused by or could be alleviated by government action, especially local government
- Maps them to specific opportunities for formal recourse, with guidance on process, likely outcomes, and practical assistance (like drafting letters or legal documents)
- For issues requiring collective action, connects users facing similar constraints and helps coordinate through mechanisms like dominant assurance contracts where appropriate
This approach would ground political participation in the solving of one's own problems rather than identity expression. While technically more challenging to implement than interest-based filtering, it would generate higher-quality engagement that expands our collective problem-solving capacity rather than just reallocating political power between existing interest groups.
The patterns emerging from aggregated user experiences would naturally reveal systemic issues and preventive opportunities, especially in how regulations and policies interact to shape people's choices and planning horizons. While building reliable AI judgment about political causation is challenging, it's better to attempt something hard that would be beneficial if feasible, than to facilitate the destructive forces of identity-based politics simply because they're easier to implement.
I agree that even if the book turned out to be entirely accurate we should not assume that this case is representative of the average development project, but we could still learn from it. Many hours from highly trained and well-paid people are allocated to planning and evaluating such projects, which expenditure is ostensibly to ensure quality. Even looking at worst cases helps us see what sort of quality is or is not being ensured.
Wow, thanks for doing the legwork on this - seems like quite possibly I'm analyzing fiction? Annoying if true.
Google's AI response to my search for the Thaba-Tseka Development Project says:
According to available World Bank documentation, the "Thaba-Tseka development project" is primarily referenced within the context of the "Lesotho Integrated Transport, Trade and Logistics Project," which focuses on improving the road corridor connecting Katse to Thaba-Tseka, aiming to enhance regional connectivity and reduce trade costs at Lesotho's borders with South Africa; key documents to reference would be those related to this project, particularly those detailing the road infrastructure development component between Katse and Thaba-Tseka.
Key points about the documentation:
- Project Title: "Lesotho Integrated Transport, Trade and Logistics Project"
- Focus Area: Upgrading the Katse to Thaba-Tseka road corridor
- Objectives: Improve climate resilient regional connectivity, reduce trade costs at Lesotho's borders
- Relevant documents to explore: Project Appraisal Documents, Procurement documents related to road construction and improvement on the Katse-Thaba-Tseka stretch
There's a good chance this is an AI hallucination, though; a cursory search of the main documents didn't yield any references to a "Thaba-Tseka development project," or the wood or ponies. I'm not familiar with World Bank documentation, though, and likely the right followup would involve looking at exactly what's cited in the book.
However, the other lead funder, the Canadian International Development Agency, does seem to have at least one publicly referenced document about a "Thaba-Tseka rural development program": Evaluation, the Kingdom of Lesotho rural development : evaluation design for phase 1, the Thaba Tseka project
Initially, you argued that societal pressure often reflects genuine wisdom, using examples where a 'society who aggressively shames overconsumption of sweets' might be wiser than a child's raw preferences. You suggested that what I was calling 'intrinsic preferences' might just be 'shallow preferences' that hadn't yet been trained to reflect reality.
Now you're making a different and more sophisticated argument - that the whole framework of 'intrinsic' versus 'external' preferences is problematic because preferences necessarily develop within and respond to reality, including social reality. While this is an interesting perspective that deserves consideration, it seems substantially different from your initial defense of social restrictions as transmitting wisdom.
There's also an important point about my own position that I should clarify. When I said 'generally, upon reflection, people would prefer to satisfy their and others' preferences as calculated prior to such influences,' I wasn't making a claim about how often admonitions reflect preference inversions. Rather, I was suggesting that if people were to reflect explicitly on cases of preference inversion, they typically wouldn't want those inverted preferences to count; they would recognize these as preferences shaped by forces systematically opposed to their interests.
This connects to what I see as the core distinction: I'm not just talking about external influences or errors in the transmission of wisdom. I'm specifically pointing to cases where restrictions are moralized for the purpose of restriction itself - where the system is systematically deprecating the evolutionarily fit preferences of the person being restricted. This isn't just clumsy teaching or social pressure - it's adversarial. The system works by first making people feel guilty about their natural inclinations, then betting that they won't fully succeed at suppressing those inclinations despite earnestly trying to adopt the system's restrictions.
Consider the survival of variants of Christianity that 'do poorly' at helping people develop healthy attitudes toward sexuality. Their persistence suggests this poor performance is actually functional - they are able to exploit their members precisely because they create a system where most people must be 'bad' by design, where hypocrisy isn't a bug but a feature. When dessert companies can successfully market their products as 'sinfully delicious,' they're exploiting a system of moral restrictions that creates the very compulsive relationship to sweets it claims to prevent.
Different example - I said "instead"
If you look back, you'll see I was specifically responding to the hypothetical scenario about public admission in that comment. For your points about private shame, you might want to check my other comment replying to you where I addressed how internal shame and self-image maintenance connect to social dynamics.
I notice you're attributing positions to me that I haven't taken and expressing confusion about points I've already addressed in detail. It would be helpful if you could engage more carefully with what I've carefully written.
so if the musician openly admits and apologize for only being average they are ashamed because they are afraid of the reaction of the fan who clearly loved their performance (not their failure to abstain from what they believe is the cause of their average performance?)
You're introducing new elements that weren't in your original scenario. But more importantly: you described the show as "a hit" where "everyone loves them." Calling this performance "only average" isn't accurately revealing adverse information - it's a lie.
but if they don't mention it to anyone (therefore are committing neither a dominance nor submission gesture) they are also ashamed?
In my other reply to you, I explained how private shame often involves maintaining conflicting mental models - one that enables confident performance and another that tracks specific flaws for improvement. Even when no one would directly know or care about staying up late drinking, the performer may feel shame because they've invested in an identity as a "professional musician" or "disciplined performer" - an identity that others care about and grant certain privileges to. The shame comes from violating the requirements of this identity, which serves as a proxy for social approval and professional opportunities. This creates internal pressure toward shame even without a specific idea of someone else who would directly condemn the behavior or trait in question.
Are you telling me there is no conceivable circumstance where any human being feels shame for something which is totally alone, none at all?
What I'm suggesting is that shame inherently involves at least a tacit social component - some imagined perspective by which we are condemned. This is consistent with Smith's and Hume's moral sentiments theory, where moral judgments fundamentally involve taking up imagined perspectives of others. This doesn't mean the shame isn't genuinely felt or that any specific others would actually condemn us. But in my experience people can frequently unravel particular cases of such shame by honestly examining what specific others would actually think if they knew, which is some experimental validation for this view.
Except frequently I think people who are ashamed don't expect this.
That’s why I distinguished explicitly between shame and depravity in the OP.
In this example?
Except frequently I think people who are ashamed don't expect this. Imagine that instead of concealing they openly admit and apologize for being only average: then what? Aren't they still ashamed?
I'm thinking of cases like Eliezer's Politics is the Mind-Killer, which makes the relatively narrow claim that politically loaded examples are bad examples for illustrating principles of rationality in the context of learning and teaching those principles, so they should be avoided when a less politicized alternative is available. I think this falsely assumes that it's feasible under current circumstances for some facts to be apolitical in the absence of an active, political defense of the possibility of apolitical speech. But that's a basically reasonable and sane mistake to make. Then I see LessWrongers proceed as though Politics is the Mind-Killer established canonically that it is bad to mention when someone is saying or doing something politically loaded or discuss recognized-as-political precedents, which interferes with the sort of defense that Politics is the Mind-Killer implicitly assumed was a solved problem.
Or how Eliezer both explicitly wrote at length against treating intellectual authorities as specially entitled to opinions AND played with themes of being an incomprehensibly powerful optimization process, but the LessWrong community ended up crystallizing around an exaggerated version of the latter while mostly ignoring his explicit warnings against authority-based reasoning. Eliezer's personally commented on this (higher-context link that may take longer to load):
"How dare you think that you're better at meta-rationality than Eliezer Yudkowsky, do you think you're special" - is somebody trolling? Have they never read anything I've written in my entire life? Do they have no sense, even, of irony? Yeah, sure, it's harder to be better at some things than me, sure, somebody might be skeptical about that, but then you ask for evidence or say "Good luck proving that to us all eventually!" You don't be like, "Do you think you're special?" What kind of bystander-killing argumentative superweapon is that? What else would it prove?
I really don't know how I could make this any clearer. I wrote a small book whose second half was about not doing exactly this. I am left with a sense that I really went to some lengths to prevent this, I did what society demands of a person plus over 10,000% (most people never write any extended arguments against bad epistemology at all, and society doesn't hold that against them), I was not subtle. At some point I have to acknowledge that other human beings are their own people and I cannot control everything they do - and I hope that others will also acknowledge that I cannot avert all the wrong thoughts that other people think, even if I try, because I sure did try. A lot. Over many years. Aimed at that specific exact way of thinking. People have their own wills, they are not my puppets, they are still not my puppets even if they have read some blog posts of mine or heard summaries from somebody else who once did; I have put in at least one hundred times the amount of effort that would be required, if any effort were required at all, to wash my hands of this way of thinking.
Or how Eliezer wrote about how modern knowledge work has become harmfully disembodied and dissociated from physical reality - going into detail about how running from a tiger engages your whole sensorimotor system in a way that staring at a computer screen doesn't - but lots of Lesswrongers seem to endorse and even celebrate this very dissociation from physical reality in practice.
I agree.
When applied to object-level behavior like stealing cookies, this kind of norm internalization is ethically neutral. But when applied to protocols and coordination mechanisms, this becomes part of how shame-based coordination infiltrates and subverts communities doing something more interesting - people who recognize and try to leave bad communities end up recreating those same dysfunctional behaviors in the better communities they seek out.
In my reply to CstineSublime on pecking orders I explored how this works through specific social mechanisms like using self-deprecation to derail accountability.
Admitting and apologizing for being 'only average' often functions as a submission move in dominance hierarchies, i.e. pecking orders.
This move derails attempts to enact more naïve, descriptive-language accountability. When someone has a specific grievance, it corresponds to a claim about the relation between facts and commitments that can be evaluated as true or false. Responding with self-deprecation transforms their concrete complaint into a mere opportunity to either accept or reject the display of submission. This disrupts the sort of language in which object-level accounting can happen, since the original specific issues are neither addressed nor refuted. Rather, they are displaced by the lower-dimensional social dynamics of dominance and submission.
So viewed systemically, such moves are part of a distributed strategy by which pecking orders disrupt and displace descriptive language communities by coordinating to invalidate them. And viewed locally, they erase the specific grievance from common knowledge, preserving the motivating shame.
We conceal some facts about ourselves from ourselves to maintain a self-image because such self-images affect how we present ourselves to others and thus what we can be socially entitled to. This is similar to what psychologist Carol Dweck called a "fixed mindset," in contrast with a "growth mindset" where the self-image more explicitly includes the possibility of intentional improvement.
In the singer-songwriter example, creating a good vibe with the audience generally involves projecting confidence. This confidence can connect to an identity as a competent performer, which maintains entitlement to the audience's approval as well as other perks like booking future shows and charging higher rates. We might think of the performer as implicitly reasoning, "I must have audience approval in order to maintain my identity. I get audience approval by being a good performer. Therefore I must be a good performer. Good performers perform flawlessly. Therefore I must have performed flawlessly. Staying out late would cause flaws in my performance. Therefore I must not have stayed out late."
Meanwhile, improving as a performer requires honestly evaluating weaknesses in one's performance - noticing timing issues, pitch problems, or moments where energy flagged. This evaluation process works best with immediate, specific feedback while memories are fresh. Or, in the specific example you gave, the performer's process of improvement needs to include the specific factual memory that they stayed out late, which likely impaired their performance.
When the good vibe with the audience is based on a rigidly maintained self-image, this creates an internal conflict: The same performance needs to be confidently good for maintaining entitlement and specifically flawed to enable improvement. This conflict creates pressure toward shame - the performer must maintain a persona that cannot acknowledge certain facts, while those facts are still actively used to make decisions.
Some other prior work on this topic:
- Robin Hanson:
- Paul Christiano:
Seems like we've now established that we largely agree on the explicit propositions we've stated all through this thread. Given that, your initial response feels to me like a bit of a non-sequitur.
As I understand it, your response argued against a universal claim that social pressure always inverts genuine preferences, while I had explicitly made the narrower claim that this sometimes happens and is worth watching out for. Does that seem like a fair characterization? If so, can you help me understand why your initial response felt important and relevant to you in context?
Many historical battles have a large component well modeled as a game of chicken, where whichever side's morale breaks first loses. You can get a locally cheap boost to morale if your soldiers have internalized a cultural imperative to seek death in honorable combat, because they'll be less deterrable. There's plenty of credible literary evidence that many soldiers in cultures connected to ours were so acculturated. I am not claiming that it is a human universal, merely that it happens often enough to be an important example of preference inversion.
This seems like a reasonable argument for some premodern fighting. I meant mainly the way of fighting developed in the Napoleonic wars, the American Civil War, and especially WWI. There's a bit in Mein Kampf about how WWI was a major transition in character for Hitler because he switched from fearing danger to intending to move towards danger. Worth reading carefully. The sort of fatalistic stories where people with foreknowledge of their doom keep moving towards it in old warrior-culture texts like the Eddas also seem relevant here. These very much do not seem like human universals; for instance, by my reading it's an attitude entirely foreign to the perspective of the Bible, both the Hebrew Bible and the New Testament.
Sometimes people really don't know any better. Other times they're playing dumb because of a guilty conscience. Nearly everyone is motivated not to acknowledge the when someone's playing dumb, because they share the aforementioned guilty conscience, so many cases of playing dumb are commonly misattributed to really not knowing better.
In cases where I had a strong preexisting relationship with people, they've sometimes admitted, after initially claiming not to be able to understand me when I asked them to do something differently (with my child or otherwise), that they were just being defensive because they felt judged and attacked by the request, and upon a moment's relaxed reflection it's easy for them to see what the problem was.
You don't think an exceptional magnitude of recognition for doing useful things is evidence for exceptional capacity and willingness to make that capacity useful to others? Why not?
The assumption that value simply multiplies without reference to underlying mechanisms treats money as magical. While this description often matches observed behavior, I think this apparent match requires explanation. Some people become very wealthy precisely by finding or creating exceptions to this pattern.
I try to decompose apparently irreducible trends into physical configurations and social agents' decisions. When apparent magic persists, I look for the magician - someone intentionally working to make the magic appear true.
Sometimes people are directly targeting a trendline in underlying reality that would support a corresponding high-level economic trend. For exampke, Intel worked for a long time fairly explicitly with the goal of keeping up with Moore's law). Other times they're cooking the books. For example, economist Scott Sumner proposed making smooth nominal GDP growth the explicit Fed target, since it's already the implied target).
Cooking the books causes the nominal trend to diverge over time from what we originally might have wanted to measure with it. So, since we've been cooking the books to make financial investment smoothly profitable outside the original context where that trend emerged, this corresponds to some sort of decline in the purchasing power of money, as the set of goods and services we care about increasingly diverges from the ones for which we transact in dollars.
Fair point about localized heterogeneity. But simply having different optimal interventions in different places doesn't itself justify splitting resources across them. That would require either:
- Steeply diminishing returns up to the relevant margin for each intervention (making diversification optimal), or
- Having more resources than we can deploy in all plausibly effective interventions.
Either claim would be surprising and worth investigating explicitly. I intended this piece as a call for such investigation.
Moreover, if we take your example - productive wealth inequality in the US vs extractive in Uganda - this actually strengthens the case against portfolio diversification. Under this model, returns to investment in Uganda would be systematically captured by extractive institutions. The efficient response might be to focus on systemic changes that reduce extraction (like charter cities or immigration reform) rather than direct aid or cash transfers. This illustrates why we need explicit models of how these systems interact.
You raise an important distinction I should engage with more directly. Just as there's a difference between teaching 'sugar is evil and eating it makes you bad' versus teaching healthy eating habits, there's clearly a difference between social pressure that helps people learn from others' accumulated wisdom (like warning children about drug addiction) versus pressure that creates persistent dysfunction (like sexual shame that continues in marriage)."
Looking at outcomes could help distinguish these:
- Does the pressure help people better achieve their other goals, or create persistent internal conflicts?
- Do people who successfully internalize the norm show better life outcomes in relevant domains?
- Does violating the norm lead to open criticism and constructive learning, or cycles of shame and indulgence?
- Is hypocrisy necessary for the system to function, or just an implementation failure?
My post focused on identifying a specific harmful pattern of preference inversion. But you're right that not all restrictive social pressure fits this pattern. Some pressure genuinely helps people align behavior with their other goals through learning from collective wisdom.
The challenge is that preference-inverting systems often justify themselves by pointing to genuine wisdom they preserve. The question isn't whether society has useful things to teach us (it clearly does), but how to distinguish wisdom-transmission from control mechanisms that create persistent dysfunction.
Actually, I don't think anti-candy messaging originates as a good-faith attempt to teach dietary wisdom; instead, it exemplifies preference inversion through moralized restriction. Rather than providing actionable information about metabolic effects, it constructs an idea of candy as a moral temptation, creating the very compulsive relationship to sweets it claims to prevent.
Take sugar. The standard message is "sugar is bad, candy will rot your teeth and make you fat." But instead of preventing candy consumption, this attitude turns candy into forbidden fruit - literally, in the case of those chocolate-covered strawberries advertised as "sinfully delicious." When dessert companies advertise their products as "decadent" or "sinful," they're not trying to warn you away - they're banking on the fact that labeling some things as bad, or wrong makes them more appealing, by giving them the erotic charge of the forbidden.
(Many successful profit-seeking firms expect such descriptions to cause demand to increase rather than decrease. I've written elsewhere about flaws with the assumption that businesses are profit-seeking in the relevant sense, but I don't think that advertising a dessert as "sinful" is intended as a voluntary equivalent to the Surgeon General's warning on cigarettes.)
The question of preference inversion through moralization isn't just theoretical for me, but a live practical problem. I tried to avoid offering my first child sweets for as long as I could, but when my toddler started becoming interested in sweets, mostly they served as appetizers that helped him become hungry for more substantive foods, the exact opposite of what anti-sweets propaganda had predicted. Even if he's specifically excited about a sweet or other food I'd rather he wouldn't choose, frequently he won't finish it. I think this is at least partly because my reproductive partner and I have been careful to try not to force our food neuroses on him, even when this means he's eating things we don't think are the best.
There are exceptions, but they prove the rule. Sometimes when he's stressed, candy becomes more appealing - but that's less about the candy itself and more about needing quick calories to regulate emotions. Similarly, when he's seeking comfort or trying to keep himself awake for longer at night, he might fixate on sweets. But notice how in each case, the "problematic" relationship with sugar emerges from external stressors, not from sugar itself. I do withhold sweets (and television) when I have the intuition that he's asking for them for the wrong reasons, in a confused way, and won't either get what he wants from them or learn efficiently from the experience.
I don't think sweet-seeking starts out perverted; growing children need lots of calories. This turns into a maladaptive obsession with sweets when they are made into perverse fetishes by "healthy eating" propaganda. Likewise, children need a lot of loving touch, which should inform their later sexual development. Sex becomes a fetish when it's a forbidden gateway to that missing love and touch. Cf Jessica Taylor's All Primates Need Grooming, and Moshe Feldenkrais's The Potent Self.
In both cases there's enough work to be done learning contingent self-restraint without the distorting influence of a negative moral valence.
If you start with the conclusion that sex is great, and anti-premarital sex campaigns are really just anti-you-procreating campaigns and therefore oppressive and bad, then sure. I don't think that's a fair assumption across the board (e.g. Amish as an existence proof of "something more"), but it certainly doesn't work for all preferences and it's generally not so clear.
Religions that regulate sexuality comprise a heterogeneous category. I wouldn't describe Amish regulation of sex as a case of preference inversion; the Amish try to make sure people consider leaving the community if they don't on balance like living under its standards. But it seems like some variants of Christianity do in effect adopt a generalized anti-sex posture. Since some of these groups depend for reproductive viability on people failing to comply with the anti-sex posture, this guarantees that the anti-sex groups that survive intergenerationally are populated mainly by people who want to have sex.
I agree these mechanisms can coexist. But to test and improve our models and ultimately make better decisions, we need specific hypotheses about how they interact.
The OP was limited in scope because it's trying to explain why more detailed analyses like the ones I offer in The Debtors' Revolt or Calvinism as a Theory of Recovered High-Trust Agency are decision-relevant. Overall my impression is that while the situation is complex, it's frequently explicable as an interaction between a relatively small and enumerable number of "types of guy" (e.g. debtor vs creditor, depraved vs self-interested).
I think of power as distinct from wealth, though both are often signaled through privileged access to scarce resources. Someone standing next to, or even physically possessing, a big hunk of gold, is not necessarily understood to be rich; Scrooge McDuck does not have the same relationship to the gold coins he comes into contact with as a museum curator handling a gold artifact, a gold miner actively extracting gold, or a security guard transporting gold. We think someone's rich when they own a lot of scarce resources, i.e. have some recognized right to it that they can reasonably expect others to defer to.
The relation of Scrooge McDuck to his gigantic vault of gold also differs fundamentally from the relation of the current winner of "King of the Mountain" to whatever sort of hill they're standing on. The latter must constantly defend their position, and has no claim on it aside from the efficacy of that defense, so there's less of an abstract, recognized relation to the possession itself, and more of a direct relation to the other people around, which can sometimes be parlayed into compelling them to guard treasures or territory.
In other words, wealth is the sort of thing that's at least potentially a convergent solution to the problems of multiple independent agents, rationally adjudicable by a neutral third party, while power involves being inside someone else's OODA loop and subverting their independent agency. Related: Civil Law and Political Drama
Thanks for the recommendation, I’ll check out that book. I was aware secondhand of the expression “preference falsification” and its meaning - related to what Bryan Caplan calls “social desirability bias.”
By coining the term “preference inversion” I’m trying to call attention to an important special case of preference falsification, where the fact that a preference has been inverted (and corresponding construction of a hypocritical or ‘bad’ majority) is part of the core mechanism, rather than an accidental cost. This is why Jessica’s idea of antinormativity is relevant; a certain sort of preference falsification has the primary function of creating a guilty conscience, rather than compelling object-level prosocial behavior.
When one preference is expressed only because its holders are extracting resources from people or mindparts with the opposite preference, that seems to me to justify assigning the self-sustaining one priority of some kind.
This doesn’t seem to engage with the content of the post at all, or with my multiple corrections to your implausible misunderstandings, so I think this is a motivated pattern of misunderstanding and I’m done with your comments on this post.
"As calculated prior" is not quite correct, "reflectively stable absent coercive pressure" is a better formulation.
OK, so we've got something like a factual disagreement. Here are some observations that would change my mind substantially:
Credible testimony from someone who'd previously been documented claiming that their variant of Christianity had inculcated in them an anti-sex attitude, that they'd been lying to normalize their non-culturally-conditioned aversion to sex.
An exposé demonstrating that many such prominently documented testimonies were fake and did not correspond to actual people making those claims.
Examples of the sort of thing I mean:
- I Took a Christian Virginity Pledge As a Child And It Nearly Destroyed My Life
- Growing Up Evangelical Ruined Sex for Me
- Overcoming Religious Sexual Shame
I try to find the Christian bible passages saying it's better never to marry or have sex (e.g. Matthew 19:9-12, 1 Corinthians 7), and persistently fail to find them. Or someone persuasively explains that I'm idiosyncratically misinterpreting them, and I can't find evidence of many people agreeing with me (e.g. those verses showing up when I do a Google search for "bible passages saying it's better never to marry or have sex").
A methodologically careful cross-cultural survey demonstrates that this sort of well-attested sex-aversion isn't more common in people raised in high-commitment Christian communities, than in people in other cultures with no such messages.
What would change your mind?
Consider two different contexts in which one might negotiate tradeoffs around work. When discussing work-life balance, you can openly weigh tradeoffs between career and personal time. But when asked 'Why do you want to work at MegaCorp?' in an interview, acknowledging you're trading anything for a paycheck marks you as deviantly uncommitted. The system requires both pretense of pure dedication and practical compromises, while making that pattern itself unspeakable.
My post was about how this dynamic creates internalized preference inversion - where people become unable to even model certain tradeoffs to themselves, not just discuss them. And this isn't just social pressure - you can actually be killed or imprisoned by cops or psychiatrists for ill-defined deviancy, with much conformity driven by vaguely intuited threats to construe you as the relevant sort of deviant.
Successful religions don't suppress reproduction in practice. But many do maintain an explicit approval hierarchy that ranks celibacy and sexual restraint above typical sexual behavior, sometimes expressing overt disgust with sexuality. This creates a gradient of social rewards that aids group cohesion, but requires most people to be "imperfect" by design. An important failure mode is that some conscientious people try to fully internalize the explicit values, ending up with clinical symptoms of sexual aversion that persist even when officially sanctioned (e.g. in marriage).
I don't think I made those claims. I did say that clerics are often supposed to be celibate, and warriors are generally supposed to move towards danger, in a single sentence, so I see how those claims might have been confused.
The general pattern I'm pointing out is that some scarce resources, or the approval which is a social proxy for such resources, are allocated preferentially to people who adopt an otherwise perverse preference. These systems are only sustainable with large amounts of hypocrisy, where people are on the whole "bad" rather than "good" according to the approval criteria. (Elite overproduction is when societies fail to preserve this proportion.)
The plausibility of such inversions is demonstrated by their presence in other sorts of apes where they're more clearly motivated by local incentives, as they may also have been in humans' precivilized ancestral environment. Precivilized people didn't have "peasants," but in many contexts nondominant male apes may have persistent reproductive disadvantages, i.e. some territorial apes may have tournament-style mating for males.
Sometimes people profess or try to reveal a preference for X, as a response to coercive pressures that are specifically motivated by prior underlying preferences for anti-X. This is what I'm calling preference inversion. My intuition is that generally, upon reflection, people would prefer to satisfy their and others' preferences as calculated prior to such influences. I don't know whether there are other sorts of analogous distorting factors nearly all reasonable people would not like to satisfy upon reflection, but in general, I'm using the term "intrinsic preferences" to refer to whatever's left over after all such generally appealing adjustments.
Expanded this reply here: https://benjaminrosshoffman.com/the-drama-of-the-hegelian-dialectic/
X and Y are cooperating to contain people who object-level care about A and B, and recruit them into the dialectic drama. X is getting A wrong on purpose, and Y is getting B wrong on purpose, as a loyalty test. Trying to join the big visible org doing something about A leads to accepting escalating conditioning to develop the blind spot around B, and vice versa.
X and Y use the conflict as a pretext to expropriate resources from the relatively uncommitted. For instance, one way to interpret political polarization in the US is as a scam for the benefit of people who profit from campaign spending. War can be an excuse to subsidize armies. Etc.
I wrote about this here: http://benjaminrosshoffman.com/discursive-warfare-and-faction-formation/
I can’t tell quite what you think you’re saying because “worse” and “morality” are such overloaded terms that the context doesn’t disambiguate well.
Seems to me like people calling it “evil” or “awful” are taking an adversarial frame where good vs evil is roughly orthogonal to strong vs weak, and classifying the crime as an impressive evil-aligned act that increases the prestige of evil, while people calling it disgusting are taking a mental-health frame where the crime is disordered behavior that doesn’t help the criminal. Which one is a more helpful or true perspective depends on what the crime is! I expect people who are disgusted to be less tempted to cooperate with the criminal or scapegoat a rando than people who are awed.
Possessing a home also imposes costs on everyone else - it costs scarce materials and labor to build, equip, and electrify/warm/cool/water a home, and it uses up scarce space in a way that excludes others. It’s not obvious that a homeless person who works & is taxed, and is thus contributing to collective capacity to build and maintain the amenities they take advantage of, is a free rider; you’d need to actually do the math to demonstrate that.
Reality is sufficiently high-dimensional and heterogeneous that if it doesn’t seem like there’s a meaningful “explore/investigate” option with unbounded potential upside, you’re applying a VERY lossy dimensional reduction to your perception.
There’s a common fear response, as though disapproval = death or exile, not a mild diminution in opportunities for advancement. Fear is the body’s stereotyped configuration optimized to prevent or mitigate imminent bodily damage. Most such social threats do not correspond to a danger that is either imminent or severe, but are instead more like moves in a dance that trigger the same interpretive response.
It's true that people who ask for "collaborative truth-seeking" are lying, but false that no one does it. Some things someone might do to try to collaborate on seeking the truth instead of pushing a thesis are:
- Active listening (e.g. trying to restate someone's claims and arguments in one's own words, especially where they seem most unclear or surprising.)
- Extending interpretive labor to try to infer the cause of a disagreement.
- Offering various considerations for how to think about a question instead of pushing a party line - and clarifying the underlying model in general terms even when one does have a clear thesis.
IME people are perfectly able to distinguish this from less collaborative behavior, though some are more likely to respond strongly positively, and others are more likely to complain that the first two are "judgmental," "accusatory," or "mind-reading," and that the third is "unclear" because it doesn't include a command to endorse some particular conclusion. The second group seems like it overlaps a lot with the sorts of people who ask for the sort of "epistemic charity" you're complaining about.
People who are engaged in collaborative truth-seeking are more likely to talk about or simply demonstrate specific ways to accomplish particular component truth-seeking tasks better together, which is collaborative, and less likely to complain vaguely about how you should be more "collaborative," which is not.
https://www.theonion.com/why-do-all-these-homosexuals-keep-sucking-my-cock-1819583529 https://www.theonion.com/why-cant-anyone-tell-im-wearing-this-business-suit-iron-1819584239
I’m complying with Sinclair’s explicit preference to be treated as someone who might possibly do crimes, by not censoring the flow of credence from “people who don’t expect me to do crimes to them are making a mistake” to “I have done crimes to such people.” You are asking me to do exactly what Sinclair complained about and assume that they’re necessarily harmless, or to pretend to do this.
Wouldn’t that imply more upside than downside in staying over?
Huh, I notice I casually used male pronouns here when I previously wasn’t especially inclined to. I guess this happened because I dropped politeness constraints to free up working memory for modeling the causal structure of the problem.
If this had been a lower-latency conversation with the implied greater capacity to make it awkward to ignore a legitimate question, my first reply would have been something like, “well, did you actually assault them? Seems like an important bit of information when assessing whether they made a mistake.” And instead of the most recent comment I’d have asked, “You identify as a woman. Do you think you are being naïve, or devaluing your sexualness or cleverness or agency? If so, why? If not, why?”
Examples of info she might have had:
- She was hoping to have sex with Sinclair, so theit sexual advances would not have been unwelcome.
- Harassment from acquaintances of her social class is more common than stranger assault but much less likely to be severely bad - acquaintance assault is socially constrained and thin-tailed, stranger assault is deviant and fat-tailed - which is not adequately captured by the statistics.
- She’s not the sort of person who can be easily traumatized by, or would have a hard time rejecting, unwanted advances.
- Sinclair is in fact discernibly unlikely to assault her because they’re obviously nonaggressive, sex-repulsed, or something else one can pick up from a vibe.
- Sinclair’s very small and she could just break Sinclair if she needed to.
Yes. It seems like RobertM is trying to appeal to some idea about fair play, by saying that people shouldn’t make even disjunctive hypothetical accusations because they wouldn’t like it if someone did that to them. But it seems relevant to evaluating that fairness claim that some accusations are discernibly more justified than others, and in this case RobertM seems not to have been able to think of any plausible crimes to disjunctively accuse me of. I am perplexed as to how “true accusations are better than false ones and you can discover by thinking and investigating which statements are more likely to be true and which are more likely to be wrong” seems to have almost fallen out of the Overton window for some important subset of cases on less wrong dot com, but that seems to be where we are.
Which unspecified but grossly immoral act did the plain text of my comment seem like it implied a confession of?
They imply irrationality via failure to investigate a confusion, so I thought it was within scope on a rationality improvement forum to point that out. Since there exists an alternative coherent construal I thought it was good practice to acknowledge that as well.
The comment reported a trend of accurate appraisals characterized as mistakes, with an illustrative anecdote, not an isolated event. Other parts of the comment, like the bit about how not treating them as a likely assailant is "devaluing my sexualness or cleverness or agency" implies an identification of agency with unprovoked assault. This is not ambiguous at all. It seems like on balance people think that politeness calls for pretending not to understand when someone says very overtly that they mean people ill, want to be perceived as violent and aggressive, etc, up until it's time to scapegoat them.