If you categorically don’t pay people who are a purveyor of values, then you are declaring that you want that nobody is a purveyor of values as their full-time job.
Would this really be a bad thing? The current situation seems like a defect/defect equilibrium—I want there to be full-time advocates for Good Values, but only to counteract all the other full-time advocates for Bad Values. It would be better if we could just agree to ratchet down the ideological arms race so that we can spend our time on more productive, non-zero-sum activities.
But unlike soldiers in a literal arms race, value-purveyors (“preachers” for short) only have what power we give them. A world where full-time preachers are ipso facto regarded as untrustworthy seems more achievable than one in which we all magically agree to dismantle our militaries.
I think there could be a lot of value generated by having more people organize valuable events and take money for them.
Perhaps, but this positive value will be more than counteracted by the negative value generated by Bad-Values-havers also organizing more events.
This intuitively seems true to me, but may not be obvious. It’s based on the assumption that some attributes of an ideology (e.g. the presence of sincere advocates) are relatively more truth-correlated than other attributes (e.g. the profitability of events). Therefore, increasing the weight with which these more-truth-correlated attributes contribute to swaying public opinion, and decreasing the weight of less-truth-correlated attributes, will tend to promote the truth winning out.
(I have more points to add, but I’ll do that in another comment.)
If ideologies would be just about I’m for the blue tribe or I’m for the red tribe, then there would be a zero-sum.
I do believe that progress often arises dialectically. For that, it’s useful if both sides develop deep arguments.
For both the rationality community and the new agey community where a lot of different ideas are developed I find it strange to think in terms of zero-sum because rationality is a lot more than just self-identifying as belonging to the rationality tribe. I like the new agey people who deeply practice some skill a lot more than new agey people for whom it’s just shallow tribe membership.
Agreed. People trying to purvey values don’t only spread values; they also make factual claims, and in so doing help bring light to facts that people holding different values would like to ignore or minimize as inconvenient for their claims.
Would this really be a bad thing? The current situation seems like a defect/defect equilibrium—I want there to be full-time advocates for Good Values, but only to counteract all the other full-time advocates for Bad Values. It would be better if we could just agree to ratchet down the ideological arms race so that we can spend our time on more productive, non-zero-sum activities.
But unlike soldiers in a literal arms race, value-purveyors (“preachers” for short) only have what power we give them. A world where full-time preachers are ipso facto regarded as untrustworthy seems more achievable than one in which we all magically agree to dismantle our militaries.
Perhaps, but this positive value will be more than counteracted by the negative value generated by Bad-Values-havers also organizing more events.
This intuitively seems true to me, but may not be obvious. It’s based on the assumption that some attributes of an ideology (e.g. the presence of sincere advocates) are relatively more truth-correlated than other attributes (e.g. the profitability of events). Therefore, increasing the weight with which these more-truth-correlated attributes contribute to swaying public opinion, and decreasing the weight of less-truth-correlated attributes, will tend to promote the truth winning out.
(I have more points to add, but I’ll do that in another comment.)
If ideologies would be just about I’m for the blue tribe or I’m for the red tribe, then there would be a zero-sum.
I do believe that progress often arises dialectically. For that, it’s useful if both sides develop deep arguments.
For both the rationality community and the new agey community where a lot of different ideas are developed I find it strange to think in terms of zero-sum because rationality is a lot more than just self-identifying as belonging to the rationality tribe. I like the new agey people who deeply practice some skill a lot more than new agey people for whom it’s just shallow tribe membership.
Agreed. People trying to purvey values don’t only spread values; they also make factual claims, and in so doing help bring light to facts that people holding different values would like to ignore or minimize as inconvenient for their claims.