Welcome to LessWrong! I wouldn’t comment if I didn’t like your post and think it was worth responding to, so please don’t interpret my disagreement as negative feedback. I appreciate your post, and it got me thinking. That said. I disagree with you.
The real point I’m making here is that however we categorize personal happiness, goodness belongs in the same category, because in practice, all other goals seem to stem from one or both of these concepts.
Your claims are probably much closer to true for some people than they are for me, but they are far from accurate for characterizing me or the people who come most readily to mind for me.
Depending on what you mean by goals, either happiness doesn’t really affect my goals, or the force of habit is one of the primary drivers of my goals. Happiness is a major influence on my ordinary behavior, but is seldom something that I think about very much when making long term plans. (I have thought about thinking about happiness in my long term plans, and decided against doing so because striving after personal happiness in my long term plans does not fit with my personal sense of identity even though it is reasonably consistent with my personal sense of ethics.) Like happiness/enjoyment, routine is a major driver of my everyday behavior, and while it is somewhat motivated by happiness, it comes more from conditioning, much of which was done to me by other people, and much of which I chose for myself. Most of the things I do are simply the things I do out of habit.
When I choose things for myself and make long term plans, virtue/goodness is something that I consider, but I also consider things that are far from being virtue/goodness as you used the term and as most other people use the term. The two things that immediately spring to mind as part of my considerations are my sense of identity/self-image and my desire to be significant.
I was an anglophile in my teenage years, and one of the lasting consequences of that phase of my life is that I Do Not Drink Coffee. This isn’t because I don’t think I should drink coffee. This isn’t because I think drinking coffee would make me less happy. It is simply because drinking coffee is one of the things that I do not do. I drink tea. I would be less myself, from my own perspective, if I started drinking coffee than I am by continuing to not drink coffee and by sometimes drinking tea. Not drinking coffee is part of what it means to me to be me.
My dad is a lifelong Cubs fan. I have sometimes joked to him that one of the things he could do to immediately make his life happier is to quit being a Cubs fan and become a Yankees fan. My dad cares about sports. He would be happier if he was a Yankees fan but he is not a Yankees fan. (You could argue that this is loyalty, but I would disagree… My dad’s from the Midwest but he lives on the East Coast now. When other people move from one part of the country to another and their sports allegiances change he doesn’t find that surprising, upsetting, or in any way reprehensible. There are other aspects of life where he does believe people are morally obligated to be loyal, and he finds it reprehensible when other people violate family loyalty and other forms of loyalty that he believes are morally obligatory.)
In terms of strength of terminal values, a sense of personal identity is, in most of the cases that I can think of, stronger than a desire for happiness and weaker than a desire to be good. Sort of. Not really. That’s just what I want to say and believe about myself but it’s not true. It’s easier for me to give an example having to do with sports than one having to do with tea. (Sorry, I grew up with them… and they spring to mind as vivid examples much more so than other subjects, at least for me.)
I’m a very fickle sports fan by most standards. I don’t really have a sport I enjoy watching in particular, and I don’t really have a team that a cheer for, but every once in a while, I will decide to watch sports… usually a tournament. And then I’ll look at a bunch of stats and read a bunch of commentary, and pick what team I think deserves to win, and cheer for that team, for that tournament. Once I pick a team, I can’t change my mind until the tournament is over… It’s not that I don’t want to or think I shouldn’t. It’s that even when I think that I ought to change my mind, I still keep cheering for the same team as I did before...
Sometimes, I don’t realize that I’ll be invited over to someone else’s house for one of the games. Sometimes, when this happens, I’m cheering for a different team than everyone else, and I feel extremely silly for doing this and a little embarrassed about it because I’m not really a fan of that team. They’re just the team I picked for this tournament. So I’ll go over to someone’s house, and I’ll try to root for the same team as everyone else, and it just won’t work. The home team is ahead, and I’ll smile along with everyone else. I won’t get upset that my team is losing. People won’t realize that my team is losing; they’ll just think I don’t care that much about the game… but then, if my team starts to make a comeback, I suddenly get way more interested in the game. I’ll start to reflexively move in certain ways. I’ll pump my fist a little when they score. I’ll try to keep my gestures and vocalization subtle and under control; I’m still embarrassed about rooting for that team… But I’m doing it anyways, because that’s my team, at least for today. Then when the home team comes back again and wins it, I’m disappointed, and I’m even a little more embarrassed about rooting against them than I would have been if they’d lost. This wouldn’t change even if I had some ethical reason for wanting the other team to win. If (after the tournament had begun and I’d picked what team I was cheering for) some wealthy donor announced that he was going to make some big gift to a charity that I believe in if and only if his team won, and his team didn’t happen to be my team… I would start to feel like I should want his team to win. I know who I cheer for doesn’t affect the outcome of the game, but I still feel like it would be more ethical to cheer for the team that would help this philanthropic cause if it won. I’d try to root for them just like I’d try to cheer for the home team if I got invited over to a friend’s house to watch the game. But I wouldn’t actually want that team to win. When the game started and the teams started pulling ahead of and falling behind each other as so often happens in games, my enthusiasm for the game would keep increasing as my team was pulling ahead and keep falling off again when they started losing ground. It’s just what happens when I watch sports.
My sense of identity also affects my life choices and long term plans. For example, many of my career choices have had as much to do with what roles I can see myself in, as they have they have had to do with what I think would make me happy, what I do well, and what impact I want to have on the world. I think most people can identify with this particular feeling and this comment is long enough already, so I won’t expand on it for now...
By far, the biggest motivator of my personal goals, however, is significance. I want to matter. I don’t want to be evil, but mattering is more important to me than being good… The easiest way for me to explain my moral feelings about significance, is to say that, in practice, I am far more of a deontologist than I am in theory. Karl Marx is an example of someone who matters, but was not what I would call good. He dramatically impacted the world and his net impact has probably been negative, but he didn’t behave in any way that would lead me to consider him evil, so he’s not evil. I would rather become someone who matters and is someone who I would consider good. Norman Borlaug is a significant person whose contributions to the world are pretty much unambiguously good. (Though organic food movement people and other Luddites would erroneously disagree.) Bach, Picasso, and Nabokov are all examples of other people who are extremely significant without necessarily have done anything I would call good. They’ve had a lasting impact on this world.
I want to do that… I don’t want to be the sort of person who would do that. I don’t want to have the traits that allowed Bach to write the sort of music in his time that would be remembered in our time. I want to carve the words “Austin was here” so deep into the world that they can never be erased. (Metaphorically, of course.) I want to matter.
...and not just in that “everybody is important, everybody matters” sort of way...
I would much rather be happy, good, and significant than any two of the three. If I can only be two, I would want to be good and significant. And if I can only be one, I would want to be significant. I don’t want to be evil… there are some things I wouldn’t do even if doing them guaranteed that I would become significant. A few lines I would not cross: I wouldn’t rape or torture anyone. I wouldn’t murder someone I deemed to be innocent. But if the devil and souls were real, I might sell my soul.
Interestingly, the lines I wouldn’t cross for the greater good are different from the lines I wouldn’t cross to obtain significance. I would kill somebody I deemed to be innocent to save the lives of a hundred innocent people… but not to save just two or three innocent people. On the other hand, if the devil and souls were real and he came to me with the offer, I wouldn’t sell my soul to save the lives of a hundred or even a thousand people I deemed to be innocent though I would seriously consider selling my soul to obtain significance. Whatever my values are, they are not well-ordered. (Which is not quite the same as saying they are illogical, though many would interpret it that way.)
Hi, thanks for your reply! I’m not yet sure that we actually disagree. What do you think of with the word happiness? If you’re thinking of happiness simply as “pleasure” then I would agree, that pleasure and goodness alone are not the only psychological motivators. I used happiness to describe someone’s preferred mind-state, the mind-state in which someone would feel the most content. So it’s different for everyone. Some people are happy just to follow their impulses and live in the moment, but other personality types are happier when they have a strong sense of identity, which seems to be what you’re describing.
You also say you want to matter. I think the belief that we will be remembered after our deaths is a one that would lead to happiness, too, so we want to act in such a way that would encourage this belief in ourselves.
I identify with a lot of what you’re saying. I’m less identity-driven than most people, but there are still certain things about myself (being frugal, for example) that, even if I knew changing them would bring me pleasure, I wouldn’t want to simply because I consider them part of my identity. Although it doesn’t make complete sense to me, I think that this small sense of identity contributes to my happy mind-state.
So I’m guessing that your idea of happiness was just a bit more narrow than mine was? But we probably still agree?
I’m just reading this for random reasons either for the first time or for the first time that I have a response. I think what I see differently from you is not happiness but motivation. And that at the time I wrote this, I believe your process of making decisions was more future-oriented than mine was. (I believe I have converged towards you in how my motivation works in the ten years since I wrote this.) When I wrote the above, my past was clinging to me in many ways that were adverse to happiness. (Trauma) What I wasn’t quite saying in my previous comment, is that I was at the time (like many other people I know) holding onto trauma in stupid ways because I needed to hold onto it to make it feel like that part of my life had a reason to have happened that wasn’t purely just worthless-badness happens. Holding onto trauma was a core part of my identity and was a core part of many other people’s identities. On the silliest extreme of people holding onto trauma are the people who keep playing games that they expect to keep losing with the hope of eventually winning in a way that makes all their past losses up to them. (Before 2016, being a Cubs fan was a particularly lighthearted example of people behaving this way; whereas, gambling addictions are a much less lighthearted one. Many gambling addicts are deeply aware that their hope to one day recover all they’ve lost through continuing to gamble is not founded in reality. I’ve never been a gambling addict. But I’ve had several relationships where I was holding onto the baseless hope that someone would change or that someone’s true colors were never the colors that actually came out, etc. and I think that’s more or less psychologically the same thing as a very potent gambling addiction. I think the psychological mechanism of staying in an abusive relationship is almost exactly the same as the psychological mechanism of being addicted to playing slots, but much, much stronger because abusive people are like intelligent slot machines that are studying you to make you maximally addicted to interacting with them. My overall thesis is that the brain has an enormous number of traits that I would say seem more like bugs to me than like features and that I believe your article is a much more accurate description of how human motivation should work than an accurarate explanation of how human motivation does work.) And I used silly examples to express this because I didn’t want to talk about any of the real ones.
Someone probably does. I believe that the cultural practice of preferring coffee to tea began in the British colonies at the time the United States started to cease to be part of the British Empire as a side effect of boycotting tea to avoid paying a tea tax. (This is a pretty well-known episode of American history within the United States.) I was boycotting the boycott. Refusing to drink tea is a signaling thing in the United States to let people know that you are not in agreement with the government of the United States as to which side constitutes the actual enemy in most wars the United States fights. It more less means “I was an anglophile on my route to becoming a Bob Dylan fan, and I make a point of singing, at least, the first verse of “Chimes of Freedom” loudly and publicly every May 1, July 4, and September 2.” By “more or less,” I mean, I’m a musician so that’s how I now express some of the same things that I used to express by refusing to drink coffee before I had enough confidence to just sing “flashing for the warrior, whose strength is not to fight; flashing for the refugee on the unarmed road of flight” whenever I see someone wearing a uniform that I deem offensive. Relatedly, refusing to drink coffee while still drinking caffeine is a fairly radical refusal to participate in mainstream culture that an enormous number of second-and-third-tier trendsetters recognize as a common signal used by first-tier trend-setters. For instance, most hipsters are at least vaguely aware that many of the most influential people who call the shots and set the trends in their subculture are some subset of the people who are not actually hipsters but who interact with the fringes of hipster culture and who have also spent at least a few years saying, “I DO NOT DRINK COFFEE. i drink tea.” (“No thanks, I drink tea,” is completely different.) To become a first-tier trend-setter in hipster culture, you have to be a non-hipster who has learned how to do a super-hipster thing for the right reasons, and one of the most obvious and easy ways you can do that is to express a disdain for Starbucks that is more menacing/intimidating than it is merely contemptuous (but is also at least as contemptuous as the typical hipsters’ ability to express disdain). Hipsters are not formidable people, but they respect formidable people; and they disrespect people’s whose power is derived from social structures. There is at least one venue that I used to go primarily to consume tea, where hipsters still go primarily to consume Jazz. The comment that you responded mostly consisted of me cryptically calling a few shots. The comments I’ve posted today consist of cryptically taking victory laps for all the shots called in that comment ten years ago; while calling some shots for the next ten years. I occasionally interact with hipster culture to inform hipsters about what types of aesthetic preferences they are going to help spread in the next few years. All the minor celebrities I interact with respond to all the comments I direct towards them and ignore all the comments I make about them. For instance, Scott Siskind always replies to the comments I post on his blogs that I want him to respond to. And when I go to less wrong meetups I figure out whose worth talking to by saying, “I learned Scott’s last name from the blog that I sort of vaguely remember as being named after an octopus long before I confirmed it by asking ’how many Jazz pianists who performed in Carnegie Hall can possibly have a brother named Scott who has practiced psychiatry in Michigan.”
Coffee culture in America doesn’t have much to do with the Revolutionary War. The rise of coffee is much later than the American Revolution. The brief boycott didn’t last (after all, Americans—infamous smugglers in general—were smuggling plenty of tea because of the taxes, so sourcing tea was not a problem) and there was enormous consumption of tea consistently throughout: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_tea_culture#Colonial_and_Revolutionary_eras In fact, I was surprised to learn recently that American tea was overwhelmingly green tea in the 1800s, and one of the biggest export markets for green tea worldwide.
(This was really surprising to me, because if you look around the 1900s, even as late as the 1990s, black tea is the standard American tea; all iced tea is of course black tea, and your local grocery store would be full of mostly just black teas with a few token green teas, and exactly one oolong tea if you were lucky—as I found out the hard way when I became interested in non-black teas.)
Welcome to LessWrong! I wouldn’t comment if I didn’t like your post and think it was worth responding to, so please don’t interpret my disagreement as negative feedback. I appreciate your post, and it got me thinking. That said. I disagree with you.
Your claims are probably much closer to true for some people than they are for me, but they are far from accurate for characterizing me or the people who come most readily to mind for me.
Depending on what you mean by goals, either happiness doesn’t really affect my goals, or the force of habit is one of the primary drivers of my goals. Happiness is a major influence on my ordinary behavior, but is seldom something that I think about very much when making long term plans. (I have thought about thinking about happiness in my long term plans, and decided against doing so because striving after personal happiness in my long term plans does not fit with my personal sense of identity even though it is reasonably consistent with my personal sense of ethics.) Like happiness/enjoyment, routine is a major driver of my everyday behavior, and while it is somewhat motivated by happiness, it comes more from conditioning, much of which was done to me by other people, and much of which I chose for myself. Most of the things I do are simply the things I do out of habit.
When I choose things for myself and make long term plans, virtue/goodness is something that I consider, but I also consider things that are far from being virtue/goodness as you used the term and as most other people use the term. The two things that immediately spring to mind as part of my considerations are my sense of identity/self-image and my desire to be significant.
I was an anglophile in my teenage years, and one of the lasting consequences of that phase of my life is that I Do Not Drink Coffee. This isn’t because I don’t think I should drink coffee. This isn’t because I think drinking coffee would make me less happy. It is simply because drinking coffee is one of the things that I do not do. I drink tea. I would be less myself, from my own perspective, if I started drinking coffee than I am by continuing to not drink coffee and by sometimes drinking tea. Not drinking coffee is part of what it means to me to be me.
My dad is a lifelong Cubs fan. I have sometimes joked to him that one of the things he could do to immediately make his life happier is to quit being a Cubs fan and become a Yankees fan. My dad cares about sports. He would be happier if he was a Yankees fan but he is not a Yankees fan. (You could argue that this is loyalty, but I would disagree… My dad’s from the Midwest but he lives on the East Coast now. When other people move from one part of the country to another and their sports allegiances change he doesn’t find that surprising, upsetting, or in any way reprehensible. There are other aspects of life where he does believe people are morally obligated to be loyal, and he finds it reprehensible when other people violate family loyalty and other forms of loyalty that he believes are morally obligatory.)
In terms of strength of terminal values, a sense of personal identity is, in most of the cases that I can think of, stronger than a desire for happiness and weaker than a desire to be good. Sort of. Not really. That’s just what I want to say and believe about myself but it’s not true. It’s easier for me to give an example having to do with sports than one having to do with tea. (Sorry, I grew up with them… and they spring to mind as vivid examples much more so than other subjects, at least for me.)
I’m a very fickle sports fan by most standards. I don’t really have a sport I enjoy watching in particular, and I don’t really have a team that a cheer for, but every once in a while, I will decide to watch sports… usually a tournament. And then I’ll look at a bunch of stats and read a bunch of commentary, and pick what team I think deserves to win, and cheer for that team, for that tournament. Once I pick a team, I can’t change my mind until the tournament is over… It’s not that I don’t want to or think I shouldn’t. It’s that even when I think that I ought to change my mind, I still keep cheering for the same team as I did before...
Sometimes, I don’t realize that I’ll be invited over to someone else’s house for one of the games. Sometimes, when this happens, I’m cheering for a different team than everyone else, and I feel extremely silly for doing this and a little embarrassed about it because I’m not really a fan of that team. They’re just the team I picked for this tournament. So I’ll go over to someone’s house, and I’ll try to root for the same team as everyone else, and it just won’t work. The home team is ahead, and I’ll smile along with everyone else. I won’t get upset that my team is losing. People won’t realize that my team is losing; they’ll just think I don’t care that much about the game… but then, if my team starts to make a comeback, I suddenly get way more interested in the game. I’ll start to reflexively move in certain ways. I’ll pump my fist a little when they score. I’ll try to keep my gestures and vocalization subtle and under control; I’m still embarrassed about rooting for that team… But I’m doing it anyways, because that’s my team, at least for today. Then when the home team comes back again and wins it, I’m disappointed, and I’m even a little more embarrassed about rooting against them than I would have been if they’d lost. This wouldn’t change even if I had some ethical reason for wanting the other team to win. If (after the tournament had begun and I’d picked what team I was cheering for) some wealthy donor announced that he was going to make some big gift to a charity that I believe in if and only if his team won, and his team didn’t happen to be my team… I would start to feel like I should want his team to win. I know who I cheer for doesn’t affect the outcome of the game, but I still feel like it would be more ethical to cheer for the team that would help this philanthropic cause if it won. I’d try to root for them just like I’d try to cheer for the home team if I got invited over to a friend’s house to watch the game. But I wouldn’t actually want that team to win. When the game started and the teams started pulling ahead of and falling behind each other as so often happens in games, my enthusiasm for the game would keep increasing as my team was pulling ahead and keep falling off again when they started losing ground. It’s just what happens when I watch sports.
My sense of identity also affects my life choices and long term plans. For example, many of my career choices have had as much to do with what roles I can see myself in, as they have they have had to do with what I think would make me happy, what I do well, and what impact I want to have on the world. I think most people can identify with this particular feeling and this comment is long enough already, so I won’t expand on it for now...
By far, the biggest motivator of my personal goals, however, is significance. I want to matter. I don’t want to be evil, but mattering is more important to me than being good… The easiest way for me to explain my moral feelings about significance, is to say that, in practice, I am far more of a deontologist than I am in theory. Karl Marx is an example of someone who matters, but was not what I would call good. He dramatically impacted the world and his net impact has probably been negative, but he didn’t behave in any way that would lead me to consider him evil, so he’s not evil. I would rather become someone who matters and is someone who I would consider good. Norman Borlaug is a significant person whose contributions to the world are pretty much unambiguously good. (Though organic food movement people and other Luddites would erroneously disagree.) Bach, Picasso, and Nabokov are all examples of other people who are extremely significant without necessarily have done anything I would call good. They’ve had a lasting impact on this world.
I want to do that… I don’t want to be the sort of person who would do that. I don’t want to have the traits that allowed Bach to write the sort of music in his time that would be remembered in our time. I want to carve the words “Austin was here” so deep into the world that they can never be erased. (Metaphorically, of course.) I want to matter.
...and not just in that “everybody is important, everybody matters” sort of way...
I would much rather be happy, good, and significant than any two of the three. If I can only be two, I would want to be good and significant. And if I can only be one, I would want to be significant. I don’t want to be evil… there are some things I wouldn’t do even if doing them guaranteed that I would become significant. A few lines I would not cross: I wouldn’t rape or torture anyone. I wouldn’t murder someone I deemed to be innocent. But if the devil and souls were real, I might sell my soul.
Interestingly, the lines I wouldn’t cross for the greater good are different from the lines I wouldn’t cross to obtain significance. I would kill somebody I deemed to be innocent to save the lives of a hundred innocent people… but not to save just two or three innocent people. On the other hand, if the devil and souls were real and he came to me with the offer, I wouldn’t sell my soul to save the lives of a hundred or even a thousand people I deemed to be innocent though I would seriously consider selling my soul to obtain significance. Whatever my values are, they are not well-ordered. (Which is not quite the same as saying they are illogical, though many would interpret it that way.)
Hi, thanks for your reply! I’m not yet sure that we actually disagree. What do you think of with the word happiness? If you’re thinking of happiness simply as “pleasure” then I would agree, that pleasure and goodness alone are not the only psychological motivators. I used happiness to describe someone’s preferred mind-state, the mind-state in which someone would feel the most content. So it’s different for everyone. Some people are happy just to follow their impulses and live in the moment, but other personality types are happier when they have a strong sense of identity, which seems to be what you’re describing.
You also say you want to matter. I think the belief that we will be remembered after our deaths is a one that would lead to happiness, too, so we want to act in such a way that would encourage this belief in ourselves.
I identify with a lot of what you’re saying. I’m less identity-driven than most people, but there are still certain things about myself (being frugal, for example) that, even if I knew changing them would bring me pleasure, I wouldn’t want to simply because I consider them part of my identity. Although it doesn’t make complete sense to me, I think that this small sense of identity contributes to my happy mind-state.
So I’m guessing that your idea of happiness was just a bit more narrow than mine was? But we probably still agree?
I’m just reading this for random reasons either for the first time or for the first time that I have a response. I think what I see differently from you is not happiness but motivation. And that at the time I wrote this, I believe your process of making decisions was more future-oriented than mine was. (I believe I have converged towards you in how my motivation works in the ten years since I wrote this.) When I wrote the above, my past was clinging to me in many ways that were adverse to happiness. (Trauma) What I wasn’t quite saying in my previous comment, is that I was at the time (like many other people I know) holding onto trauma in stupid ways because I needed to hold onto it to make it feel like that part of my life had a reason to have happened that wasn’t purely just worthless-badness happens. Holding onto trauma was a core part of my identity and was a core part of many other people’s identities. On the silliest extreme of people holding onto trauma are the people who keep playing games that they expect to keep losing with the hope of eventually winning in a way that makes all their past losses up to them. (Before 2016, being a Cubs fan was a particularly lighthearted example of people behaving this way; whereas, gambling addictions are a much less lighthearted one. Many gambling addicts are deeply aware that their hope to one day recover all they’ve lost through continuing to gamble is not founded in reality. I’ve never been a gambling addict. But I’ve had several relationships where I was holding onto the baseless hope that someone would change or that someone’s true colors were never the colors that actually came out, etc. and I think that’s more or less psychologically the same thing as a very potent gambling addiction. I think the psychological mechanism of staying in an abusive relationship is almost exactly the same as the psychological mechanism of being addicted to playing slots, but much, much stronger because abusive people are like intelligent slot machines that are studying you to make you maximally addicted to interacting with them. My overall thesis is that the brain has an enormous number of traits that I would say seem more like bugs to me than like features and that I believe your article is a much more accurate description of how human motivation should work than an accurarate explanation of how human motivation does work.) And I used silly examples to express this because I didn’t want to talk about any of the real ones.
Do people actually believe that no one in England drinks coffee at all?
Someone probably does. I believe that the cultural practice of preferring coffee to tea began in the British colonies at the time the United States started to cease to be part of the British Empire as a side effect of boycotting tea to avoid paying a tea tax. (This is a pretty well-known episode of American history within the United States.) I was boycotting the boycott. Refusing to drink tea is a signaling thing in the United States to let people know that you are not in agreement with the government of the United States as to which side constitutes the actual enemy in most wars the United States fights. It more less means “I was an anglophile on my route to becoming a Bob Dylan fan, and I make a point of singing, at least, the first verse of “Chimes of Freedom” loudly and publicly every May 1, July 4, and September 2.” By “more or less,” I mean, I’m a musician so that’s how I now express some of the same things that I used to express by refusing to drink coffee before I had enough confidence to just sing “flashing for the warrior, whose strength is not to fight; flashing for the refugee on the unarmed road of flight” whenever I see someone wearing a uniform that I deem offensive. Relatedly, refusing to drink coffee while still drinking caffeine is a fairly radical refusal to participate in mainstream culture that an enormous number of second-and-third-tier trendsetters recognize as a common signal used by first-tier trend-setters. For instance, most hipsters are at least vaguely aware that many of the most influential people who call the shots and set the trends in their subculture are some subset of the people who are not actually hipsters but who interact with the fringes of hipster culture and who have also spent at least a few years saying, “I DO NOT DRINK COFFEE. i drink tea.” (“No thanks, I drink tea,” is completely different.) To become a first-tier trend-setter in hipster culture, you have to be a non-hipster who has learned how to do a super-hipster thing for the right reasons, and one of the most obvious and easy ways you can do that is to express a disdain for Starbucks that is more menacing/intimidating than it is merely contemptuous (but is also at least as contemptuous as the typical hipsters’ ability to express disdain). Hipsters are not formidable people, but they respect formidable people; and they disrespect people’s whose power is derived from social structures. There is at least one venue that I used to go primarily to consume tea, where hipsters still go primarily to consume Jazz. The comment that you responded mostly consisted of me cryptically calling a few shots. The comments I’ve posted today consist of cryptically taking victory laps for all the shots called in that comment ten years ago; while calling some shots for the next ten years. I occasionally interact with hipster culture to inform hipsters about what types of aesthetic preferences they are going to help spread in the next few years. All the minor celebrities I interact with respond to all the comments I direct towards them and ignore all the comments I make about them. For instance, Scott Siskind always replies to the comments I post on his blogs that I want him to respond to. And when I go to less wrong meetups I figure out whose worth talking to by saying, “I learned Scott’s last name from the blog that I sort of vaguely remember as being named after an octopus long before I confirmed it by asking ’how many Jazz pianists who performed in Carnegie Hall can possibly have a brother named Scott who has practiced psychiatry in Michigan.”
Coffee culture in America doesn’t have much to do with the Revolutionary War. The rise of coffee is much later than the American Revolution. The brief boycott didn’t last (after all, Americans—infamous smugglers in general—were smuggling plenty of tea because of the taxes, so sourcing tea was not a problem) and there was enormous consumption of tea consistently throughout: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_tea_culture#Colonial_and_Revolutionary_eras In fact, I was surprised to learn recently that American tea was overwhelmingly green tea in the 1800s, and one of the biggest export markets for green tea worldwide.
(This was really surprising to me, because if you look around the 1900s, even as late as the 1990s, black tea is the standard American tea; all iced tea is of course black tea, and your local grocery store would be full of mostly just black teas with a few token green teas, and exactly one oolong tea if you were lucky—as I found out the hard way when I became interested in non-black teas.)
Well, they have something they claim is coffee here...