But there’s a problem that seems harder to me, which is how to change my mind about aesthetics. Sarah Constantin first brought this up in Naming the Nameless, and I’ve been thinking about it ever since.
I know this isn’t exactly what this post is about (and I support having more nuanced understandings of other people’s aesthetics) however...
Please be careful about changing your mind about aesthetics! Especially you currently value the aesthetic as important! And if you do choose to change your mind about aesthetics, remember to preemptively build-up a Schelling Fence to protect yourself!
Changing aesthetics in general isn’t that hard—I’ve done it myself (more explicitly, one of my core values “ate” another one of my cores values through sustained psychological warefare). Results of this process include
Accidentally modifying aesthetics you didn’t intend to modify (since aesthetics exist as a fuzzy network of associations in a feedback loop, changing one aesthetic may interfer with the feedback loops in other aesthetic systems in unpredictable ways)
Accidentally modifying meta-level aesthetics you didn’t intend to modify. This encomposses a number of possibilities including
Rendering yourself meta-level incorrigible to manage the horrifying knowledge that you can, in principle, will yourself out of existence at any time with relative ease (psychological modification doesn’t trigger the same visceral response that literal death does)
Or rendering yourself meta-level incorrigible by becoming intellectually indifferent to whether things actually satisfy your core values (and just having whatever core values you have at the time your brain decides to do this
Having really weird object-level core values because your meta-level core values and object-level core values are fuzzily interlinked
IDK, in my case, modifying my aesthetic was a good decision and you may only be psychologically capable of modifying your aesthetics in situations where it’s really necessary. But I’m uncertain about whether this is true in general.
I know this isn’t exactly what this post is about (and I support having more nuanced understandings of other people’s aesthetics) however...
Please be careful about changing your mind about aesthetics! Especially you currently value the aesthetic as important! And if you do choose to change your mind about aesthetics, remember to preemptively build-up a Schelling Fence to protect yourself!
Changing aesthetics in general isn’t that hard—I’ve done it myself (more explicitly, one of my core values “ate” another one of my cores values through sustained psychological warefare). Results of this process include
Accidentally modifying aesthetics you didn’t intend to modify (since aesthetics exist as a fuzzy network of associations in a feedback loop, changing one aesthetic may interfer with the feedback loops in other aesthetic systems in unpredictable ways)
Accidentally modifying meta-level aesthetics you didn’t intend to modify. This encomposses a number of possibilities including
Rendering yourself meta-level incorrigible to manage the horrifying knowledge that you can, in principle, will yourself out of existence at any time with relative ease (psychological modification doesn’t trigger the same visceral response that literal death does)
Or rendering yourself meta-level incorrigible by becoming intellectually indifferent to whether things actually satisfy your core values (and just having whatever core values you have at the time your brain decides to do this
Having really weird object-level core values because your meta-level core values and object-level core values are fuzzily interlinked
IDK, in my case, modifying my aesthetic was a good decision and you may only be psychologically capable of modifying your aesthetics in situations where it’s really necessary. But I’m uncertain about whether this is true in general.
I endorse this (albeit mostly from a position of general caution that clear experience)