You raise an important distinction I should engage with more directly. Just as there’s a difference between teaching ‘sugar is evil and eating it makes you bad’ versus teaching healthy eating habits, there’s clearly a difference between social pressure that helps people learn from others’ accumulated wisdom (like warning children about drug addiction) versus pressure that creates persistent dysfunction (like sexual shame that continues in marriage).”
Looking at outcomes could help distinguish these:
Does the pressure help people better achieve their other goals, or create persistent internal conflicts?
Do people who successfully internalize the norm show better life outcomes in relevant domains?
Does violating the norm lead to open criticism and constructive learning, or cycles of shame and indulgence?
Is hypocrisy necessary for the system to function, or just an implementation failure?
My post focused on identifying a specific harmful pattern of preference inversion. But you’re right that not all restrictive social pressure fits this pattern. Some pressure genuinely helps people align behavior with their other goals through learning from collective wisdom.
The challenge is that preference-inverting systems often justify themselves by pointing to genuine wisdom they preserve. The question isn’t whether society has useful things to teach us (it clearly does), but how to distinguish wisdom-transmission from control mechanisms that create persistent dysfunction.
You raise an important distinction I should engage with more directly. Just as there’s a difference between teaching ‘sugar is evil and eating it makes you bad’ versus teaching healthy eating habits, there’s clearly a difference between social pressure that helps people learn from others’ accumulated wisdom (like warning children about drug addiction) versus pressure that creates persistent dysfunction (like sexual shame that continues in marriage).”
Looking at outcomes could help distinguish these:
Does the pressure help people better achieve their other goals, or create persistent internal conflicts?
Do people who successfully internalize the norm show better life outcomes in relevant domains?
Does violating the norm lead to open criticism and constructive learning, or cycles of shame and indulgence?
Is hypocrisy necessary for the system to function, or just an implementation failure?
My post focused on identifying a specific harmful pattern of preference inversion. But you’re right that not all restrictive social pressure fits this pattern. Some pressure genuinely helps people align behavior with their other goals through learning from collective wisdom.
The challenge is that preference-inverting systems often justify themselves by pointing to genuine wisdom they preserve. The question isn’t whether society has useful things to teach us (it clearly does), but how to distinguish wisdom-transmission from control mechanisms that create persistent dysfunction.