Sometimes people really don’t know any better. Other times they’re playing dumb because of a guilty conscience. Nearly everyone is motivated not to acknowledge the when someone’s playing dumb, because they share the aforementioned guilty conscience, so many cases of playing dumb are commonly misattributed to really not knowing better.
In cases where I had a strong preexisting relationship with people, they’ve sometimes admitted, after initially claiming not to be able to understand me when I asked them to do something differently (with my child or otherwise), that they were just being defensive because they felt judged and attacked by the request, and upon a moment’s relaxed reflection it’s easy for them to see what the problem was.
Seems like we’ve now established that we largely agree on the explicit propositions we’ve stated all through this thread. Given that, your initial response feels to me like a bit of a non-sequitur.
As I understand it, your response argued against a universal claim that social pressure always inverts genuine preferences, while I had explicitly made the narrower claim that this sometimes happens and is worth watching out for. Does that seem like a fair characterization? If so, can you help me understand why your initial response felt important and relevant to you in context?
No, that does not sound like a fair characterization. My claims are cover a lot more than “it doesn’t always happen” and yours sure don’t seem limited to “it doesn’t never happen”.
Here’s the motivating question for this whole essay:
You asked why people who “believe in” avoiding nonmarital sex so frequently engage in and report badly regretting it
and here’s part of your conclusion
At this point the behavior you describe should no longer be perplexing.
You’re talking about this as if it needs falsification of preferences to explain and my stance is that no, this is default. Any time people have to face anything as complex as sexuality, even if people are doing their best to pro-socially guide people this is necessarily what’s going to happen. Perversions can sneak in too, and I don’t deny that they exist, but postulating perversions is absolutely not needed in order to explain the data you’re seeking to explain.
To narrow things down a bit, we can return to the original comment:
Sometimes people profess or try to reveal a preference for X, as a response to coercive pressures that are specifically motivated by prior underlying preferences for anti-X. This is what I’m calling preference inversion.
I don’t disagree with this.
My intuition is that generally, upon reflection, people would prefer to satisfy their and others’ preferences as calculated prior to such influences. I don’t know whether there are other sorts of analogous distorting factors nearly all reasonable people would not like to satisfy upon reflection, but in general, I’m using the term “intrinsic preferences” to refer to whatever’s left over after all such generally appealing adjustments.
It’s this second part I was taking issue with.
Here, you’re talking about what generally happens, not what “sometimes” happens, and I don’t think “intrinsic preferences” is defined well enough to do what you want it to do here. I don’t think it can be, unless you introduce more concepts, because I don’t think “external vs intrinsic” can do justice to this multidimensional space no matter how you cleave it.
Part of this is because what counts as “external” cannot be well defined. If daddy yells at me to not drink, that sounds external, and my revealed preferences are likely to revert when he’s not looking. But maybe being a reasonable person, upon reflection I’d agree with him. Does that make it “not a preference inversion”? If my boss threatens to fire me if I show up drunk, that sounds external too. But that’s not very different than my boss reminding me that he can only afford to hire productive people—and that’s starting to sound like “just reality”. Certainly if a doctor tells me that my liver is failing, that sounds like “just reality” and “internal”. But it’s external to my brain, and maybe if someone offers me an artificial liver I’d revert to my “intrinsic preferences”?
Our preferences necessarily depend on the reality we find ourselves embedded in, and cannot exist in isolation except perhaps in the highest abstraction (e.g. “I prefer to continue existing” or something), so the concept of “intrinsic preferences” for concrete things necessarily falls apart. What doesn’t fall apart is the structure of incoherence in our own preferences.
We’re constantly trying to shape and reshape the reality that others live in such that their revealed preferences given this reality satisfy our own. Part of this is making laws forbidding theft, how we indoctrinate in church, our hiring and firing decisions, how we inform our friends, etc. Some of these actions are purely cooperative, others are pure defections, and many are somewhere in between. Often we have fairly superficial pressure applied which results in fairly superficial changes in revealed preferences which easily revert, but that superficiality is fundamentally a property of the person containing the preferences not the person applying the pressures. There is indeed skill in facilitating deeper shifts in preferences to better match reality, and this is indeed a good thing to pursue, but the “intrinsic vs external” binary obscures the interplay between shifting reality, shifting perceptions of reality, and shifting preferences—and therefore most of what is going on.
To use your example, the positive value of marital intimacy is inherently intertwined with the power of sexuality, the importance of getting sexuality right, and therefore the badness of sexuality done inappropriately. There is all sorts of room for this guidance to be given skillfully or clumsily, purely or corruptly, for it to be received coherently or superficially, in concordance with reality or not, and everywhere in between. Like you’ve noticed, there isn’t always a legible distinction between the conventional conservative Christians who pull this off well and those that do more poorly.
My own perception, is that almost none of our preferences can be cleanly described as “intrinsic” or “externally pressured”, or as “valid” or “invalid”. There’s just differing degrees of coherence and differing degrees of fit to reality. The average case of conventional conservative Christians pushing against non-marital sex, and the average case of the person “believing in” and regretting not living by their “beliefs”, is in between the picture Christianity portrays, and the one you portray of falsified preferences. Because the ground truth is in between “nonmarital sex is always bad” and “nonmarital sex is always as good as it seems”.
Generally, when I interact with people on the topic of sexuality, I see people who don’t know what their preferences resolve to with regards to non-marital sex—and whose genuine preferences would resolve in different ways depending on the culture they’re embedded within and the opportunities they have. I could sell either picture, and make it look “intrinsic”, if I’m willing to sweep the right things under the rug in order to do so. Most people’s belief structures surrounding sex (and most things) are shoddily built. I could argue for their destruction, and destroy them. I could argue for their utility, and preserve them. The optimal solution necessarily involves seeing both the utility and imperfections, both a degree of destruction and of reconstruction.
Like you said, this isn’t just theoretical. This is a thing I’ve actually done when it has come up. I can give examples if it’d help
Initially, you argued that societal pressure often reflects genuine wisdom, using examples where a ‘society who aggressively shames overconsumption of sweets’ might be wiser than a child’s raw preferences. You suggested that what I was calling ‘intrinsic preferences’ might just be ‘shallow preferences’ that hadn’t yet been trained to reflect reality.
Now you’re making a different and more sophisticated argument—that the whole framework of ‘intrinsic’ versus ‘external’ preferences is problematic because preferences necessarily develop within and respond to reality, including social reality. While this is an interesting perspective that deserves consideration, it seems substantially different from your initial defense of social restrictions as transmitting wisdom.
There’s also an important point about my own position that I should clarify. When I said ‘generally, upon reflection, people would prefer to satisfy their and others’ preferences as calculated prior to such influences,′ I wasn’t making a claim about how often admonitions reflect preference inversions. Rather, I was suggesting that if people were to reflect explicitly on cases of preference inversion, they typically wouldn’t want those inverted preferences to count; they would recognize these as preferences shaped by forces systematically opposed to their interests.
This connects to what I see as the core distinction: I’m not just talking about external influences or errors in the transmission of wisdom. I’m specifically pointing to cases where restrictions are moralized for the purpose of restriction itself—where the system is systematically deprecating the evolutionarily fit preferences of the person being restricted. This isn’t just clumsy teaching or social pressure—it’s adversarial. The system works by first making people feel guilty about their natural inclinations, then betting that they won’t fully succeed at suppressing those inclinations despite earnestly trying to adopt the system’s restrictions.
Consider the survival of variants of Christianity that ‘do poorly’ at helping people develop healthy attitudes toward sexuality. Their persistence suggests this poor performance is actually functional—they are able to exploit their members precisely because they create a system where most people must be ‘bad’ by design, where hypocrisy isn’t a bug but a feature. When dessert companies can successfully market their products as ‘sinfully delicious,’ they’re exploiting a system of moral restrictions that creates the very compulsive relationship to sweets it claims to prevent.
Sometimes people really don’t know any better. Other times they’re playing dumb because of a guilty conscience. Nearly everyone is motivated not to acknowledge the when someone’s playing dumb, because they share the aforementioned guilty conscience, so many cases of playing dumb are commonly misattributed to really not knowing better.
In cases where I had a strong preexisting relationship with people, they’ve sometimes admitted, after initially claiming not to be able to understand me when I asked them to do something differently (with my child or otherwise), that they were just being defensive because they felt judged and attacked by the request, and upon a moment’s relaxed reflection it’s easy for them to see what the problem was.
Agreed in full
Seems like we’ve now established that we largely agree on the explicit propositions we’ve stated all through this thread. Given that, your initial response feels to me like a bit of a non-sequitur.
As I understand it, your response argued against a universal claim that social pressure always inverts genuine preferences, while I had explicitly made the narrower claim that this sometimes happens and is worth watching out for. Does that seem like a fair characterization? If so, can you help me understand why your initial response felt important and relevant to you in context?
No, that does not sound like a fair characterization. My claims are cover a lot more than “it doesn’t always happen” and yours sure don’t seem limited to “it doesn’t never happen”.
Here’s the motivating question for this whole essay:
and here’s part of your conclusion
You’re talking about this as if it needs falsification of preferences to explain and my stance is that no, this is default. Any time people have to face anything as complex as sexuality, even if people are doing their best to pro-socially guide people this is necessarily what’s going to happen. Perversions can sneak in too, and I don’t deny that they exist, but postulating perversions is absolutely not needed in order to explain the data you’re seeking to explain.
To narrow things down a bit, we can return to the original comment:
I don’t disagree with this.
It’s this second part I was taking issue with.
Here, you’re talking about what generally happens, not what “sometimes” happens, and I don’t think “intrinsic preferences” is defined well enough to do what you want it to do here. I don’t think it can be, unless you introduce more concepts, because I don’t think “external vs intrinsic” can do justice to this multidimensional space no matter how you cleave it.
Part of this is because what counts as “external” cannot be well defined. If daddy yells at me to not drink, that sounds external, and my revealed preferences are likely to revert when he’s not looking. But maybe being a reasonable person, upon reflection I’d agree with him. Does that make it “not a preference inversion”? If my boss threatens to fire me if I show up drunk, that sounds external too. But that’s not very different than my boss reminding me that he can only afford to hire productive people—and that’s starting to sound like “just reality”. Certainly if a doctor tells me that my liver is failing, that sounds like “just reality” and “internal”. But it’s external to my brain, and maybe if someone offers me an artificial liver I’d revert to my “intrinsic preferences”?
Our preferences necessarily depend on the reality we find ourselves embedded in, and cannot exist in isolation except perhaps in the highest abstraction (e.g. “I prefer to continue existing” or something), so the concept of “intrinsic preferences” for concrete things necessarily falls apart. What doesn’t fall apart is the structure of incoherence in our own preferences.
We’re constantly trying to shape and reshape the reality that others live in such that their revealed preferences given this reality satisfy our own. Part of this is making laws forbidding theft, how we indoctrinate in church, our hiring and firing decisions, how we inform our friends, etc. Some of these actions are purely cooperative, others are pure defections, and many are somewhere in between. Often we have fairly superficial pressure applied which results in fairly superficial changes in revealed preferences which easily revert, but that superficiality is fundamentally a property of the person containing the preferences not the person applying the pressures. There is indeed skill in facilitating deeper shifts in preferences to better match reality, and this is indeed a good thing to pursue, but the “intrinsic vs external” binary obscures the interplay between shifting reality, shifting perceptions of reality, and shifting preferences—and therefore most of what is going on.
To use your example, the positive value of marital intimacy is inherently intertwined with the power of sexuality, the importance of getting sexuality right, and therefore the badness of sexuality done inappropriately. There is all sorts of room for this guidance to be given skillfully or clumsily, purely or corruptly, for it to be received coherently or superficially, in concordance with reality or not, and everywhere in between. Like you’ve noticed, there isn’t always a legible distinction between the conventional conservative Christians who pull this off well and those that do more poorly.
My own perception, is that almost none of our preferences can be cleanly described as “intrinsic” or “externally pressured”, or as “valid” or “invalid”. There’s just differing degrees of coherence and differing degrees of fit to reality. The average case of conventional conservative Christians pushing against non-marital sex, and the average case of the person “believing in” and regretting not living by their “beliefs”, is in between the picture Christianity portrays, and the one you portray of falsified preferences. Because the ground truth is in between “nonmarital sex is always bad” and “nonmarital sex is always as good as it seems”.
Generally, when I interact with people on the topic of sexuality, I see people who don’t know what their preferences resolve to with regards to non-marital sex—and whose genuine preferences would resolve in different ways depending on the culture they’re embedded within and the opportunities they have. I could sell either picture, and make it look “intrinsic”, if I’m willing to sweep the right things under the rug in order to do so. Most people’s belief structures surrounding sex (and most things) are shoddily built. I could argue for their destruction, and destroy them. I could argue for their utility, and preserve them. The optimal solution necessarily involves seeing both the utility and imperfections, both a degree of destruction and of reconstruction.
Like you said, this isn’t just theoretical. This is a thing I’ve actually done when it has come up. I can give examples if it’d help
Initially, you argued that societal pressure often reflects genuine wisdom, using examples where a ‘society who aggressively shames overconsumption of sweets’ might be wiser than a child’s raw preferences. You suggested that what I was calling ‘intrinsic preferences’ might just be ‘shallow preferences’ that hadn’t yet been trained to reflect reality.
Now you’re making a different and more sophisticated argument—that the whole framework of ‘intrinsic’ versus ‘external’ preferences is problematic because preferences necessarily develop within and respond to reality, including social reality. While this is an interesting perspective that deserves consideration, it seems substantially different from your initial defense of social restrictions as transmitting wisdom.
There’s also an important point about my own position that I should clarify. When I said ‘generally, upon reflection, people would prefer to satisfy their and others’ preferences as calculated prior to such influences,′ I wasn’t making a claim about how often admonitions reflect preference inversions. Rather, I was suggesting that if people were to reflect explicitly on cases of preference inversion, they typically wouldn’t want those inverted preferences to count; they would recognize these as preferences shaped by forces systematically opposed to their interests.
This connects to what I see as the core distinction: I’m not just talking about external influences or errors in the transmission of wisdom. I’m specifically pointing to cases where restrictions are moralized for the purpose of restriction itself—where the system is systematically deprecating the evolutionarily fit preferences of the person being restricted. This isn’t just clumsy teaching or social pressure—it’s adversarial. The system works by first making people feel guilty about their natural inclinations, then betting that they won’t fully succeed at suppressing those inclinations despite earnestly trying to adopt the system’s restrictions.
Consider the survival of variants of Christianity that ‘do poorly’ at helping people develop healthy attitudes toward sexuality. Their persistence suggests this poor performance is actually functional—they are able to exploit their members precisely because they create a system where most people must be ‘bad’ by design, where hypocrisy isn’t a bug but a feature. When dessert companies can successfully market their products as ‘sinfully delicious,’ they’re exploiting a system of moral restrictions that creates the very compulsive relationship to sweets it claims to prevent.