I’m in the military and have strict standards of appearance with regards to hair, uniform, etc. I’ve spent most of my life believing that spending any time at all on your appearance is a waste of time, as it has no effect on your ability to get stuff done. I’ve played along with Army regs because that’s the rules, but I half-assed it a lot, because I really didn’t see the point.
Then I realized (after thinking about it for 2,000 miles of driving) that “society expects it” is actually a really good reason for doing something. A lot of social norms seem stupid and contrived, and I still kind of resent doing stupid things just because everyone else does it, but there are benefits to not being an arrogant prick who’s always fighting the standard.
Now I’m going to go spend 10 minutes preparing my uniform, and I don’t feel bitter about it at all.
Also, I got tired of packing everything up and then not being able to find anything for a couple weeks. So I wrote down where I packed everything. Why did it take me an entire year to think of that?
his point is that it shouldn’t matter not that it doesn’t matter. Did you until that moment think other people didn’t do that sort of thing because you hadn’t noticed yourself doing it?
Not that you thought that sort of thing is unfair or silly? In which case it kind of sounds like you suddenly upped your estimate of the rewards of conforming to the shitty standard (due to what could be an unusually high tendency to respect people based on their clothing) and decided to call your abandoning the principle “not pretending that stuff doesn’t matter.” Now obviously I think this is a shitty way to be and I’m not going to expand on why but what is simply false is the idea that people who dissaprove of the practice of wearing e.g. suits to impress are pretending stuff like that doesn’t matter.
I’m completing the pattern here: I’m not sure if that’s what you meant. But other people might read it like that and a lot of people would use those words to express that sentiment and I really don’t like that sentiment. Hence the comment.
There probably are people who pretend stuff like that doesn’t matter but i assume it would have to be just as a soldier argument against people judging people for wearing businessman (or other) costumes or respecting others for doing so. Because, obviously it does matter, right? People discuss these kinds of judgements openly and without shame to the point of internalisation. The only other way that comes immediately to mind to not think it mattered would be to not come across people like that in positions of power (edit: over you) which I’m pretty sure is really rare.
same-edit: but in any case they could notice that this effected other people.
Not sure what you’re getting at. My comment looks to me like it was voicing agreement to his conclusion from my experience. I have no feelings of “that’s as it should be” or “that’s stupid” wrt to the fashion thing, it’s just how it is.
Before I had that experience, I didn’t think dress mattered all that much. Now I do. Looking back at my cognitive state and justification for believing what I believed, it looks like I was pretending it didn’t matter, at least on some level.
I spent today reading Dyson’s Turing’s Cathedral. One point he made in passing a number of times, but which I had generally ignored, was that the socialite Von Neumann almost always wore a suit. I also learned he managed to marry an heiress before correctly cutting all ties with Europe well before 1939, and Dyson seems to imply he arranged for no patents to be taken out on his computer work due to his hefty consulting contracts with IBM.
Epistemic & instrumental rationality: Von Neumann has it.
(Except for his wife reporting that he was superstitious about closing drawers and turning on lights but that sounded like OCD-like tendencies to me, and there is his dying conversion to Catholicism—but his son argues that it was a Pascalian move on his part, so...)
Fighting standards, especially shitty ones does not make you an arrogant prick. Are those your words or are you just repeating someone else’s bullshit way of labelling anyone who resists their standard? You can play along without selling your soul you know. You can even take all pride in the careful preperation, the niceness of the diligence and the cleanliness and discipline, the oppurtunity to meditate etc etc whatever people like about cleaning uniforms, without hating people (like yourself very slightly previously) who think its silly. Why swallow the negative with the positive?>
I’m in the military and have strict standards of appearance with regards to hair, uniform, etc. I’ve spent most of my life believing that spending any time at all on your appearance is a waste of time, as it has no effect on your ability to get stuff done. I’ve played along with Army regs because that’s the rules, but I half-assed it a lot, because I really didn’t see the point.
Then I realized (after thinking about it for 2,000 miles of driving) that “society expects it” is actually a really good reason for doing something. A lot of social norms seem stupid and contrived, and I still kind of resent doing stupid things just because everyone else does it, but there are benefits to not being an arrogant prick who’s always fighting the standard.
Now I’m going to go spend 10 minutes preparing my uniform, and I don’t feel bitter about it at all.
Also, I got tired of packing everything up and then not being able to find anything for a couple weeks. So I wrote down where I packed everything. Why did it take me an entire year to think of that?
I realized the importance of dress when I noticed how much more I respected a man because he was wearing a suit.
We can try to pretend like that stuff doesn’t matter, but it does.
his point is that it shouldn’t matter not that it doesn’t matter. Did you until that moment think other people didn’t do that sort of thing because you hadn’t noticed yourself doing it?
Not that you thought that sort of thing is unfair or silly? In which case it kind of sounds like you suddenly upped your estimate of the rewards of conforming to the shitty standard (due to what could be an unusually high tendency to respect people based on their clothing) and decided to call your abandoning the principle “not pretending that stuff doesn’t matter.” Now obviously I think this is a shitty way to be and I’m not going to expand on why but what is simply false is the idea that people who dissaprove of the practice of wearing e.g. suits to impress are pretending stuff like that doesn’t matter.
I’m completing the pattern here: I’m not sure if that’s what you meant. But other people might read it like that and a lot of people would use those words to express that sentiment and I really don’t like that sentiment. Hence the comment.
There probably are people who pretend stuff like that doesn’t matter but i assume it would have to be just as a soldier argument against people judging people for wearing businessman (or other) costumes or respecting others for doing so. Because, obviously it does matter, right? People discuss these kinds of judgements openly and without shame to the point of internalisation. The only other way that comes immediately to mind to not think it mattered would be to not come across people like that in positions of power (edit: over you) which I’m pretty sure is really rare.
same-edit: but in any case they could notice that this effected other people.
Not sure what you’re getting at. My comment looks to me like it was voicing agreement to his conclusion from my experience. I have no feelings of “that’s as it should be” or “that’s stupid” wrt to the fashion thing, it’s just how it is.
Before I had that experience, I didn’t think dress mattered all that much. Now I do. Looking back at my cognitive state and justification for believing what I believed, it looks like I was pretending it didn’t matter, at least on some level.
I spent today reading Dyson’s Turing’s Cathedral. One point he made in passing a number of times, but which I had generally ignored, was that the socialite Von Neumann almost always wore a suit. I also learned he managed to marry an heiress before correctly cutting all ties with Europe well before 1939, and Dyson seems to imply he arranged for no patents to be taken out on his computer work due to his hefty consulting contracts with IBM.
Epistemic & instrumental rationality: Von Neumann has it.
(Except for his wife reporting that he was superstitious about closing drawers and turning on lights but that sounded like OCD-like tendencies to me, and there is his dying conversion to Catholicism—but his son argues that it was a Pascalian move on his part, so...)
Brigid (I assume also a military man) posted in the “Useful maxims” thread that the Marines have a maxim:
I think it applies beautifully in this case.
Fighting standards, especially shitty ones does not make you an arrogant prick. Are those your words or are you just repeating someone else’s bullshit way of labelling anyone who resists their standard? You can play along without selling your soul you know. You can even take all pride in the careful preperation, the niceness of the diligence and the cleanliness and discipline, the oppurtunity to meditate etc etc whatever people like about cleaning uniforms, without hating people (like yourself very slightly previously) who think its silly. Why swallow the negative with the positive?>