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.
I agree that there is a meaningful difference, but I disagree that they’re so cleanly separable that we can say that it is one or the other.
I don’t teach my kid that sugar is evil and I give her the chance to learn how much sugar she wants for herself. I try to minimize coercion because it impairs learning, and I want my kid to actually integrate the information so that she can make coherent rather than fractured decisions.
At the same time, I want to protect her from things that are beyond her capability to handle and learn from. We don’t want our children to grow up with sexual shame that continues into marriage, but if the kindergarten teacher starts teaching kids about how great sex is and offering to show them, then do you take a stance of “well, I don’t want my five year old to think sex is bad...” or do you say “Absolutely not.”?
Information sharing and force are both useful tools, and while it’s better to lean on the former as much as possible it is important to be able to fall back on the latter. People just don’t have a good idea of how to do the former (and are kinda ‘sinful’ themselves) so they over-rely on the latter.
Using force (including social shame) is a symmetric weapon so it is more easily (even unintentionally) corrupted into serving less pure motivations, but it also serves pure motivations when necessary.
The question of “Does the pressure help people better achieve their other goals, or create persistent internal conflicts?” is important, but messy.
Which people? Which pressure? If I know two people who grew up in Christian households, and one of them grew up in a strict household, married a virgin and is happy and without sexual shame, and another grew up in a less strict household and had premarital sex but felt bad about it, then how do we judge Christianities “anti sex” norms here?
I’d say we can notice which are more effective at bringing about good outcomes, and which have more pure intent and are heavier on the information to pressure ratio. But we cannot separate them. I know some people who absolutely reject the pressure—and then come to learn on their own the value it was pointing at—and other people who are handled delicately with pure information and then shame themselves for not learning to like sweets in the optimal way instantly.
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.
I agree that there is a meaningful difference, but I disagree that they’re so cleanly separable that we can say that it is one or the other.
I don’t teach my kid that sugar is evil and I give her the chance to learn how much sugar she wants for herself. I try to minimize coercion because it impairs learning, and I want my kid to actually integrate the information so that she can make coherent rather than fractured decisions.
At the same time, I want to protect her from things that are beyond her capability to handle and learn from. We don’t want our children to grow up with sexual shame that continues into marriage, but if the kindergarten teacher starts teaching kids about how great sex is and offering to show them, then do you take a stance of “well, I don’t want my five year old to think sex is bad...” or do you say “Absolutely not.”?
Information sharing and force are both useful tools, and while it’s better to lean on the former as much as possible it is important to be able to fall back on the latter. People just don’t have a good idea of how to do the former (and are kinda ‘sinful’ themselves) so they over-rely on the latter.
Using force (including social shame) is a symmetric weapon so it is more easily (even unintentionally) corrupted into serving less pure motivations, but it also serves pure motivations when necessary.
The question of “Does the pressure help people better achieve their other goals, or create persistent internal conflicts?” is important, but messy.
Which people? Which pressure? If I know two people who grew up in Christian households, and one of them grew up in a strict household, married a virgin and is happy and without sexual shame, and another grew up in a less strict household and had premarital sex but felt bad about it, then how do we judge Christianities “anti sex” norms here?
I’d say we can notice which are more effective at bringing about good outcomes, and which have more pure intent and are heavier on the information to pressure ratio. But we cannot separate them. I know some people who absolutely reject the pressure—and then come to learn on their own the value it was pointing at—and other people who are handled delicately with pure information and then shame themselves for not learning to like sweets in the optimal way instantly.
It’s kinda a mess.