I had to decide whether I would send my sister to prison for a year or let her keep using IV drugs. I chose to send her to prison, but this was not the intuitive choice. I very much performed a utilitarian calculation. This leads me to remark on socioeconomic class: My station has certainly improved since childhood, but I would still say that I’m very much working class, and I dare say that the reliability of one’s moral and memetic heuristics and inputs are very dependent on class.
In my personal experience, though I take a risk in fully generalizing, the working class is permeated with toxic memes. The most common and general is probably anti-intellectualism, but there are other more specific ones that are better communicated in phrase: “It is better to be thrilled than it is to be safe”; “It is more important to conform to working-class social norms than to obey the law”; “Physical, verbal, and emotional abuse are tolerable so long as the abuser loves me”; “Physical exercise and healthy diet merely confer bonus points”; “Regrettable actions committed on emotional impulse are entirely excusable, even with this maxim in mind”; and perhaps most ironically, “One should follow one’s heart,” without the caveat that one should not follow it over the edge of a suspension bridge.
This is not to say that the other classes are entirely nontoxic, but I would say that they are less toxic. You can see in the other classes, being safety-conscious, physically exercising and eating healthy food, not tolerating abuse, and at the very least making the appearance of deliberation, are acts that actually confer social status. When I spend time around people in a higher socioeconomic class it seems that they on average have healthier thoughts than me, if we’re talking about gut reactions and intuitions, as we are, even if they have not deliberately sought out and acquired their memes. In one sense, we would expect them to seem healthier, and in another more objective sense, we would also expect them to seem healthier, because socioeconomic class, mental and physical health, and all of those other enumerable things correlate with one another; it is social and so it is a causal shooting gallery, but the correlation is there.
And likewise, LessWrong is skewed heavily towards white, male, very well-educated first-worlders. We might expect that an average LW user simply relying on the memes that they’ve acquired and not applying a moral calculus at all would not be a terribly worse alternative to applying the calculus, or perhaps an even better alternative, if they would apply the calculus selectively and in the pursuit of justification.
And so in my everyday life I find that I am surrounded by people with unhealthy memes and that I myself have some curled up in the various corners of my mind, and it is, more often than one might think, safer and very useful to consciously deliberate as opposed to following intuition. Virtue ethicists who consider virtuous danger, thrill-seeking, impulse and anti-intellectualism, do not live very long on average.
And furthermore, though I am technically twisting your words to my own end, I do not think that it is such a crazy hypothesis to say that higher classes lead more ‘morally inert’ lives, because many healthier memes allow you to ‘skip’ the moral dilemmas altogether; e.g. contraceptive use, abiding the law, taking care of your health, surrounding yourself with people who do all of these things and have all of these healthy memes, etc.
But of course, neither am I a human utility calculator.
An interesting comment. To what extent, do you think, the memes you’ve mentioned apply mostly to young people, in particular young males? I have the impression that the older generation suffers much less from the “Hold mah beer and watch this” syndrome. This may be because they’re just older (which means both that they managed not to kill themselves and that their biochemistry makes them less aggressive and rash), or this may be because it’s just a different generation which grew up in different conditions.
I would say that, considering that much of what I’ve mentioned has to do with a lack of risk aversion, it would be skewed at least somewhat towards young people. But simultaneously and counterintuitively, I would say that it applies to young women more than one would initially suspect; my just-so story for this is that greater society-wide gender equality manifests in the minds of many working-class young women as “Do what the boys are doing because I can now,” which amounts to pronking. I’ve noticed that my sister in the past has done dangerous things for the sake of social status. But I also think that all of my words should be taken in context, because I am myself only one relatively uneducated, working-class, young male, which holistically is simultaneously a source of authority and bias.
But of course, not everything that I’ve said has to do with a lack of risk aversion, so if we were to dissolve this slightly and examine some of the individual memes that I’ve discussed, some may apply to older people as well, such as a greater tolerance for abuse, heart-following, and of course anti-intellectualism. Also, I do have some rural relatives who suffer from the aforementioned syndrome despite their age.
I found this response very insightful. It ties in with a variety of other things I’ve been thinking about recently, and has given me a great deal of food for thought. Thank you for sharing it, and you have my sympathies regarding your sister.
Thank you as well; I didn’t mention it because the decision rather than the ultimate outcome was the relevant part of this discussion, but she ended up with a deal in which she would receive six months in jail and live at a dual-diagnosis (she has generalized anxiety disorder) halfway house for some time after that, so the outcome has been quite positive compared to alternatives.
Yes, it’s relevant, though I have to confess I don’t understand his point. As far as I can see all he is saying is that preferences and attitudes (“tastes”) matter for the outcomes which is trivially true and doesn’t seem to be insightful. Parents have been trying to instill “proper values” in their children since times immemorial.
And furthermore, though I am technically twisting your words to my own end, I do not think that it is such a crazy hypothesis to say that higher classes lead more ‘morally inert’ lives, because many healthier memes allow you to ‘skip’ the moral dilemmas altogether; e.g. contraceptive use, abiding the law, taking care of your health, surrounding yourself with people who do all of these things and have all of these healthy memes, etc.
Many of the world’s greatest moral improvements rested precisely on using some material means to transform some choice people just aren’t very good at making from Highly Morally Significant to Mostly Morally Inert. Contraception and universal education are probably the easiest examples here: we all know that people are going to have irresponsible sex and that most people aren’t very intellectual. Making otherwise irresponsible sex and otherwise irresponsible anti-intellectualism increasingly harmless has done way, way, waaaaaaay more for overall well-being than literally centuries of haranguing people to become more chaste and learned.
I have found that the working class is living as sane or saner in Eastern Europe as the middle class. I think the difference is that you are used to a working class that 1) feels less and less needed, there are less and less simple jobs 2) similarly they cannot utilize their skills outside their jobs, they don’t live in villages, cannot build stuff for themselves 3) welfare society protects them from some of the consequences. The people I talk about feel the opposite, they are still needed for jobs as they are cheaper paid than machines, they often live in villages and spend the weekends building each other garages, and they receive hardly any welfare net, they often have to bribe doctors to get any semblance of serious medical care.
So it is seems it is the toxic combination of being superfluous / aimless / futureless and being protected by an actually well finance welfare state that is killing the Western working class.
I don’t know, esr seems to be stretching the point here. His two “good” types of anti-intellectualism, Hayek and Sowell, I would probably call internecine warfare. Both his examples were intellectuals and I doubt they would object to more intellectuals like themselves.
One handy definition of intellectuals is that people who expect their opinions taken seriously in field X based on prestige built in an unrelated field Y. A classic example is Einstein writing about socialism based on the prestige he acquired in physics. More general example is writers, people-of-letters, literature and poetry folks engaging in politics. If we would accept it, Hayek and Sowell were not intellectuals, they never wandered too far from the field they actually had expertise in.
But why accept such a quirky definition? They logic behind is: when you are, say, an economist, and pontificate about economics, you are acting actually as an economist. When you are a physicist or writer and pontificate about politics or economics, you are obviously not acting as a writer or physicist but as a Generic Smart Person. Being a good writer or physicist proves you are smart (roughly: true enough), and you expect people to accept your opinion because you are smart. The unspoken assumption is that smartness matters more than expertise in forming correct opinions. Thus people who expect people to accept their opinions about economics because of their expertise are called economists, and people who expect people who accept their opinions about economics (or anything) because they are smart are called intellectuals: people whose defining (social) feature is the intellect, not the expertise.
On a more broader view, ideally, people should expect their opinions to be accepted because they are actually well evidenced and argued, not based on authority. But the “masses” tend to accept views based on authority. So the expert uses the authority of expertise and the intellectual uses the authority of generic smartness (which is proven by success in an unrelated field.)
A very vague one. Bold is a bit stronger than italics, plus italics are overloaded, they are used to signify other things than emphasis, too. In the grandparent post there are both italics and bold because the emphasis is somewhat different so I wanted two different ways to emphasize.
I had to decide whether I would send my sister to prison for a year or let her keep using IV drugs. I chose to send her to prison, but this was not the intuitive choice. I very much performed a utilitarian calculation. This leads me to remark on socioeconomic class: My station has certainly improved since childhood, but I would still say that I’m very much working class, and I dare say that the reliability of one’s moral and memetic heuristics and inputs are very dependent on class.
In my personal experience, though I take a risk in fully generalizing, the working class is permeated with toxic memes. The most common and general is probably anti-intellectualism, but there are other more specific ones that are better communicated in phrase: “It is better to be thrilled than it is to be safe”; “It is more important to conform to working-class social norms than to obey the law”; “Physical, verbal, and emotional abuse are tolerable so long as the abuser loves me”; “Physical exercise and healthy diet merely confer bonus points”; “Regrettable actions committed on emotional impulse are entirely excusable, even with this maxim in mind”; and perhaps most ironically, “One should follow one’s heart,” without the caveat that one should not follow it over the edge of a suspension bridge.
This is not to say that the other classes are entirely nontoxic, but I would say that they are less toxic. You can see in the other classes, being safety-conscious, physically exercising and eating healthy food, not tolerating abuse, and at the very least making the appearance of deliberation, are acts that actually confer social status. When I spend time around people in a higher socioeconomic class it seems that they on average have healthier thoughts than me, if we’re talking about gut reactions and intuitions, as we are, even if they have not deliberately sought out and acquired their memes. In one sense, we would expect them to seem healthier, and in another more objective sense, we would also expect them to seem healthier, because socioeconomic class, mental and physical health, and all of those other enumerable things correlate with one another; it is social and so it is a causal shooting gallery, but the correlation is there.
And likewise, LessWrong is skewed heavily towards white, male, very well-educated first-worlders. We might expect that an average LW user simply relying on the memes that they’ve acquired and not applying a moral calculus at all would not be a terribly worse alternative to applying the calculus, or perhaps an even better alternative, if they would apply the calculus selectively and in the pursuit of justification.
And so in my everyday life I find that I am surrounded by people with unhealthy memes and that I myself have some curled up in the various corners of my mind, and it is, more often than one might think, safer and very useful to consciously deliberate as opposed to following intuition. Virtue ethicists who consider virtuous danger, thrill-seeking, impulse and anti-intellectualism, do not live very long on average.
And furthermore, though I am technically twisting your words to my own end, I do not think that it is such a crazy hypothesis to say that higher classes lead more ‘morally inert’ lives, because many healthier memes allow you to ‘skip’ the moral dilemmas altogether; e.g. contraceptive use, abiding the law, taking care of your health, surrounding yourself with people who do all of these things and have all of these healthy memes, etc.
But of course, neither am I a human utility calculator.
An interesting comment. To what extent, do you think, the memes you’ve mentioned apply mostly to young people, in particular young males? I have the impression that the older generation suffers much less from the “Hold mah beer and watch this” syndrome. This may be because they’re just older (which means both that they managed not to kill themselves and that their biochemistry makes them less aggressive and rash), or this may be because it’s just a different generation which grew up in different conditions.
I would say that, considering that much of what I’ve mentioned has to do with a lack of risk aversion, it would be skewed at least somewhat towards young people. But simultaneously and counterintuitively, I would say that it applies to young women more than one would initially suspect; my just-so story for this is that greater society-wide gender equality manifests in the minds of many working-class young women as “Do what the boys are doing because I can now,” which amounts to pronking. I’ve noticed that my sister in the past has done dangerous things for the sake of social status. But I also think that all of my words should be taken in context, because I am myself only one relatively uneducated, working-class, young male, which holistically is simultaneously a source of authority and bias.
But of course, not everything that I’ve said has to do with a lack of risk aversion, so if we were to dissolve this slightly and examine some of the individual memes that I’ve discussed, some may apply to older people as well, such as a greater tolerance for abuse, heart-following, and of course anti-intellectualism. Also, I do have some rural relatives who suffer from the aforementioned syndrome despite their age.
I found this response very insightful. It ties in with a variety of other things I’ve been thinking about recently, and has given me a great deal of food for thought. Thank you for sharing it, and you have my sympathies regarding your sister.
Thank you as well; I didn’t mention it because the decision rather than the ultimate outcome was the relevant part of this discussion, but she ended up with a deal in which she would receive six months in jail and live at a dual-diagnosis (she has generalized anxiety disorder) halfway house for some time after that, so the outcome has been quite positive compared to alternatives.
Interesting post!
I just noticed that Robin Hanson posted something somewhat relevant to this topic this morning.
Yes, it’s relevant, though I have to confess I don’t understand his point. As far as I can see all he is saying is that preferences and attitudes (“tastes”) matter for the outcomes which is trivially true and doesn’t seem to be insightful. Parents have been trying to instill “proper values” in their children since times immemorial.
Many of the world’s greatest moral improvements rested precisely on using some material means to transform some choice people just aren’t very good at making from Highly Morally Significant to Mostly Morally Inert. Contraception and universal education are probably the easiest examples here: we all know that people are going to have irresponsible sex and that most people aren’t very intellectual. Making otherwise irresponsible sex and otherwise irresponsible anti-intellectualism increasingly harmless has done way, way, waaaaaaay more for overall well-being than literally centuries of haranguing people to become more chaste and learned.
I have found that the working class is living as sane or saner in Eastern Europe as the middle class. I think the difference is that you are used to a working class that 1) feels less and less needed, there are less and less simple jobs 2) similarly they cannot utilize their skills outside their jobs, they don’t live in villages, cannot build stuff for themselves 3) welfare society protects them from some of the consequences. The people I talk about feel the opposite, they are still needed for jobs as they are cheaper paid than machines, they often live in villages and spend the weekends building each other garages, and they receive hardly any welfare net, they often have to bribe doctors to get any semblance of serious medical care.
So it is seems it is the toxic combination of being superfluous / aimless / futureless and being protected by an actually well finance welfare state that is killing the Western working class.
Anti-intellectualism may or may not be a bad thing depending on the type.
I don’t know, esr seems to be stretching the point here. His two “good” types of anti-intellectualism, Hayek and Sowell, I would probably call internecine warfare. Both his examples were intellectuals and I doubt they would object to more intellectuals like themselves.
One handy definition of intellectuals is that people who expect their opinions taken seriously in field X based on prestige built in an unrelated field Y. A classic example is Einstein writing about socialism based on the prestige he acquired in physics. More general example is writers, people-of-letters, literature and poetry folks engaging in politics. If we would accept it, Hayek and Sowell were not intellectuals, they never wandered too far from the field they actually had expertise in.
But why accept such a quirky definition? They logic behind is: when you are, say, an economist, and pontificate about economics, you are acting actually as an economist. When you are a physicist or writer and pontificate about politics or economics, you are obviously not acting as a writer or physicist but as a Generic Smart Person. Being a good writer or physicist proves you are smart (roughly: true enough), and you expect people to accept your opinion because you are smart. The unspoken assumption is that smartness matters more than expertise in forming correct opinions. Thus people who expect people to accept their opinions about economics because of their expertise are called economists, and people who expect people who accept their opinions about economics (or anything) because they are smart are called intellectuals: people whose defining (social) feature is the intellect, not the expertise.
On a more broader view, ideally, people should expect their opinions to be accepted because they are actually well evidenced and argued, not based on authority. But the “masses” tend to accept views based on authority. So the expert uses the authority of expertise and the intellectual uses the authority of generic smartness (which is proven by success in an unrelated field.)
Completely off-topic, but do you have a policy for when you emphasise with italics and when you emphasise with bold?
A very vague one. Bold is a bit stronger than italics, plus italics are overloaded, they are used to signify other things than emphasis, too. In the grandparent post there are both italics and bold because the emphasis is somewhat different so I wanted two different ways to emphasize.
He is talking about how the phrase “anti-intellectualism” is actually used in practice.
Don’t think I’ve seen it used in practice much and those times it was clearly derogatory.
In particular, it’s used in a way that intentionally conflates the various meanings.