Hmm. By “coercion”, you include societal and individual judgements, not just actual direct threats. It’s still hard for me to separate (and even harder for me to privilege) “innate” preferences, over “holistic” preferences which acknowledge that there is a real advantage to existing smoothly in the current society, and include the contradictory sub-desires of thriving in a society, getting along well with allies, having fewer enemies, etc. and for the biological urges for (super)stimuli.
Consider two different contexts in which one might negotiate tradeoffs around work. When discussing work-life balance, you can openly weigh tradeoffs between career and personal time. But when asked ‘Why do you want to work at MegaCorp?’ in an interview, acknowledging you’re trading anything for a paycheck marks you as deviantly uncommitted. The system requires both pretense of pure dedication and practical compromises, while making that pattern itself unspeakable.
My post was about how this dynamic creates internalized preference inversion—where people become unable to even model certain tradeoffs to themselves, not just discuss them. And this isn’t just social pressure—you can actually be killed or imprisoned by cops or psychiatrists for ill-defined deviancy, with much conformity driven by vaguely intuited threats to construe you as the relevant sort of deviant.
Thanks for the discussion. I think I understand what you’re pointing at, but I don’t model it as an inverted preference hierarchy, or even a distinct type of preference. Human preferences are very complicated graphs of long- and short-term intents, both rational, reflective goals and … illegible desires. These desires are intertwined and correlated, and change weights (and even composition) over time—sometimes intentionally, often environmentally.
Calling it an “inversion” implies that one set is more correct or desirable than another, AND that the correct one is subverted. I disagree with both of these things philosophically and generally, though there are specific cases where I agree for myself, and for most in the current environment. My intuitions are specific and contextual for those cases, not generalizable.
When one preference is expressed only because its holders are extracting resources from people or mindparts with the opposite preference, that seems to me to justify assigning the self-sustaining one priority of some kind.
Hmm. By “coercion”, you include societal and individual judgements, not just actual direct threats. It’s still hard for me to separate (and even harder for me to privilege) “innate” preferences, over “holistic” preferences which acknowledge that there is a real advantage to existing smoothly in the current society, and include the contradictory sub-desires of thriving in a society, getting along well with allies, having fewer enemies, etc. and for the biological urges for (super)stimuli.
Consider two different contexts in which one might negotiate tradeoffs around work. When discussing work-life balance, you can openly weigh tradeoffs between career and personal time. But when asked ‘Why do you want to work at MegaCorp?’ in an interview, acknowledging you’re trading anything for a paycheck marks you as deviantly uncommitted. The system requires both pretense of pure dedication and practical compromises, while making that pattern itself unspeakable.
My post was about how this dynamic creates internalized preference inversion—where people become unable to even model certain tradeoffs to themselves, not just discuss them. And this isn’t just social pressure—you can actually be killed or imprisoned by cops or psychiatrists for ill-defined deviancy, with much conformity driven by vaguely intuited threats to construe you as the relevant sort of deviant.
Thanks for the discussion. I think I understand what you’re pointing at, but I don’t model it as an inverted preference hierarchy, or even a distinct type of preference. Human preferences are very complicated graphs of long- and short-term intents, both rational, reflective goals and … illegible desires. These desires are intertwined and correlated, and change weights (and even composition) over time—sometimes intentionally, often environmentally.
Calling it an “inversion” implies that one set is more correct or desirable than another, AND that the correct one is subverted. I disagree with both of these things philosophically and generally, though there are specific cases where I agree for myself, and for most in the current environment. My intuitions are specific and contextual for those cases, not generalizable.
When one preference is expressed only because its holders are extracting resources from people or mindparts with the opposite preference, that seems to me to justify assigning the self-sustaining one priority of some kind.