“Hippy” is an aesthetic, not a specific idea, and an aesthetic can apply to both true ideas and false ideas. This post names the aesthetic and stops there; it doesn’t name any specific hippy idea. This creates distance between evaluating the aesthetic, and any specific idea that could be true or false. And if there’s nothing to judge as false, then everything is okay, right? The post then provides a supposed reason for objecting to (unspecified things within) the aesthetic: blind demand for a specific sort of rigor, applied inappropriately.
It feels unfair to negatively judge an aesthetic, since aesthetics can be false. So it’s tempting to null out the judgement and its associated heuristics.
The problem is, the “hippy” aesthetic includes elements that are genuine red flags for stupid ideas, a historical demographic correlation with groups that invented stupid ideas prolifically, and a collection of jargon corresponding to malformed concepts that will damage your ability to think if you internalize them.
“Hippy” is an aesthetic, not a specific idea, and an aesthetic can apply to both true ideas and false ideas. This post names the aesthetic and stops there; it doesn’t name any specific hippy idea. This creates distance between evaluating the aesthetic, and any specific idea that could be true or false. And if there’s nothing to judge as false, then everything is okay, right? The post then provides a supposed reason for objecting to (unspecified things within) the aesthetic: blind demand for a specific sort of rigor, applied inappropriately.
It feels unfair to negatively judge an aesthetic, since aesthetics can be false. So it’s tempting to null out the judgement and its associated heuristics.
The problem is, the “hippy” aesthetic includes elements that are genuine red flags for stupid ideas, a historical demographic correlation with groups that invented stupid ideas prolifically, and a collection of jargon corresponding to malformed concepts that will damage your ability to think if you internalize them.