I think of power as distinct from wealth, though both are often signaled through privileged access to scarce resources. Someone standing next to, or even physically possessing, a big hunk of gold, is not necessarily understood to be rich. We think someone’s rich when we think they own a lot of scarce resources, i.e. have some recognized right to it that they can reasonably expect others to defer to. The relation of Scrooge McDuck to his gigantic vault of gold is not the same as the relation of the current winner of “King of the Mountain” to whatever sort of hill they’re standing on; the latter has to be much more actively defended by the possessor, so there’s less of an abstract, recognized relation to the possession itself, and more of a direct relation to the other people around, which can sometimes be parlayed into compelling them to guard treasures or territory.
In other words, wealth is the sort of thing that’s at least potentially rationally adjudicable by a neutral third party, while power involves being inside someone else’s OODA loop. Related: Civil Law and Political Drama
Benquo
Oppression and production are competing explanations for wealth inequality.
Thanks for the recommendation, I’ll check out that book. I was aware secondhand of the expression “preference falsification” and its meaning—related to what Bryan Caplas calles “social desirability bias.”
By coining the term “preference inversion” I’m trying to call attention to an important special case of preference falsification, where the fact that a preference has been inverted (and corresponding construction of a hypocritical or ‘bad’ majority) is part of the core mechanism, rather than an accidental cost. This is why Jessica’s idea of antinormativity is relevant; a certain sort of preference falsification has the primary function of creating a guilty conscience, rather than compelling object-level prosocial behavior.
Parkinson’s Law and the Ideology of Statistics
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.
This doesn’t seem to engage with the content of the post at all, or with my multiple corrections to your implausible misunderstandings, so I think this is a motivated pattern of misunderstanding and I’m done with your comments on this post.
“As calculated prior” is not quite correct, “reflectively stable absent coercive pressure” is a better formulation.
OK, so we’ve got something like a factual disagreement. Here are some observations that would change my mind substantially:
Credible testimony from someone who’d previously been documented claiming that their variant of Christianity had inculcated in them an anti-sex attitude, that they’d been lying to normalize their non-culturally-conditioned aversion to sex.
An exposé demonstrating that many such prominently documented testimonies were fake and did not correspond to actual people making those claims.Examples of the sort of thing I mean:
I try to find the Christian bible passages saying it’s better never to marry or have sex (e.g. Matthew 19:9-12, 1 Corinthians 7), and persistently fail to find them. Or someone persuasively explains that I’m idiosyncratically misinterpreting them, and I can’t find evidence of many people agreeing with me (e.g. those verses showing up when I do a Google search for “bible passages saying it’s better never to marry or have sex”).
A methodologically careful cross-cultural survey demonstrates that this sort of well-attested sex-aversion isn’t more common in people raised in high-commitment Christian communities, than in people in other cultures with no such messages.
What would change your mind?
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.
Successful religions don’t suppress reproduction in practice. But many do maintain an explicit approval hierarchy that ranks celibacy and sexual restraint above typical sexual behavior, sometimes expressing overt disgust with sexuality. This creates a gradient of social rewards that aids group cohesion, but requires most people to be “imperfect” by design. An important failure mode is that some conscientious people try to fully internalize the explicit values, ending up with clinical symptoms of sexual aversion that persist even when officially sanctioned (e.g. in marriage).
I don’t think I made those claims. I did say that clerics are often supposed to be celibate, and warriors are generally supposed to move towards danger, in a single sentence, so I see how those claims might have been confused.
The general pattern I’m pointing out is that some scarce resources, or the approval which is a social proxy for such resources, are allocated preferentially to people who adopt an otherwise perverse preference. These systems are only sustainable with large amounts of hypocrisy, where people are on the whole “bad” rather than “good” according to the approval criteria. (Elite overproduction is when societies fail to preserve this proportion.)
The plausibility of such inversions is demonstrated by their presence in other sorts of apes where they’re more clearly motivated by local incentives, as they may also have been in humans’ precivilized ancestral environment. Precivilized people didn’t have “peasants,” but in many contexts nondominant male apes may have persistent reproductive disadvantages, i.e. some territorial apes may have tournament-style mating for males.
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. 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.
Preference Inversion
Expanded this reply here: https://benjaminrosshoffman.com/the-drama-of-the-hegelian-dialectic/
X and Y are cooperating to contain people who object-level care about A and B, and recruit them into the dialectic drama. X is getting A wrong on purpose, and Y is getting B wrong on purpose, as a loyalty test. Trying to join the big visible org doing something about A leads to accepting escalating conditioning to develop the blind spot around B, and vice versa.
X and Y use the conflict as a pretext to expropriate resources from the relatively uncommitted. For instance, one way to interpret political polarization in the US is as a scam for the benefit of people who profit from campaign spending. War can be an excuse to subsidize armies. Etc.
I wrote about this here: http://benjaminrosshoffman.com/discursive-warfare-and-faction-formation/
I can’t tell quite what you think you’re saying because “worse” and “morality” are such overloaded terms that the context doesn’t disambiguate well.
Seems to me like people calling it “evil” or “awful” are taking an adversarial frame where good vs evil is roughly orthogonal to strong vs weak, and classifying the crime as an impressive evil-aligned act that increases the prestige of evil, while people calling it disgusting are taking a mental-health frame where the crime is disordered behavior that doesn’t help the criminal. Which one is a more helpful or true perspective depends on what the crime is! I expect people who are disgusted to be less tempted to cooperate with the criminal or scapegoat a rando than people who are awed.
Possessing a home also imposes costs on everyone else—it costs scarce materials and labor to build, equip, and electrify/warm/cool/water a home, and it uses up scarce space in a way that excludes others. It’s not obvious that a homeless person who works & is taxed, and is thus contributing to collective capacity to build and maintain the amenities they take advantage of, is a free rider; you’d need to actually do the math to demonstrate that.
Reality is sufficiently high-dimensional and heterogeneous that if it doesn’t seem like there’s a meaningful “explore/investigate” option with unbounded potential upside, you’re applying a VERY lossy dimensional reduction to your perception.
There’s a common fear response, as though disapproval = death or exile, not a mild diminution in opportunities for advancement. Fear is the body’s stereotyped configuration optimized to prevent or mitigate imminent bodily damage. Most such social threats do not correspond to a danger that is either imminent or severe, but are instead more like moves in a dance that trigger the same interpretive response.
I agree that the situation is complex, which means that a true explanation would have to posit some specific way in which these explanations are interacting.