You don’t think an exceptional magnitude of recognition for doing useful things is evidence for exceptional capacity and willingness to make that capacity useful to others? Why not?
Benquo
Karma: 11,386
Guilt, Shame, and Depravity
The assumption that value simply multiplies without reference to underlying mechanisms treats money as magical. While this description often matches observed behavior, I think this apparent match requires explanation. Some people become very wealthy precisely by finding or creating exceptions to this pattern.
I try to decompose apparently irreducible trends into physical configurations and social agents’ decisions. When apparent magic persists, I look for the magician—someone intentionally working to make the magic appear true.
Sometimes people are directly targeting a trendline in underlying reality that would support a corresponding high-level economic trend. For exampke, Intel worked for a long time fairly explicitly with the goal of keeping up with Moore’s law). Other times they’re cooking the books. For example, economist Scott Sumner proposed making smooth nominal GDP growth the explicit Fed target, since it’s already the implied target).
Cooking the books causes the nominal trend to diverge over time from what we originally might have wanted to measure with it. So, since we’ve been cooking the books to make financial investment smoothly profitable outside the original context where that trend emerged, this corresponds to some sort of decline in the purchasing power of money, as the set of goods and services we care about increasingly diverges from the ones for which we transact in dollars.
Fair point about localized heterogeneity. But simply having different optimal interventions in different places doesn’t itself justify splitting resources across them. That would require either:
Steeply diminishing returns up to the relevant margin for each intervention (making diversification optimal), or
Having more resources than we can deploy in all plausibly effective interventions.
Either claim would be surprising and worth investigating explicitly. I intended this piece as a call for such investigation.
Moreover, if we take your example—productive wealth inequality in the US vs extractive in Uganda—this actually strengthens the case against portfolio diversification. Under this model, returns to investment in Uganda would be systematically captured by extractive institutions. The efficient response might be to focus on systemic changes that reduce extraction (like charter cities or immigration reform) rather than direct aid or cash transfers. This illustrates why we need explicit models of how these systems interact.
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.
Actually, I don’t think anti-candy messaging originates as a good-faith attempt to teach dietary wisdom; instead, it exemplifies preference inversion through moralized restriction. Rather than providing actionable information about metabolic effects, it constructs an idea of candy as a moral temptation, creating the very compulsive relationship to sweets it claims to prevent.
Take sugar. The standard message is “sugar is bad, candy will rot your teeth and make you fat.” But instead of preventing candy consumption, this attitude turns candy into forbidden fruit—literally, in the case of those chocolate-covered strawberries advertised as “sinfully delicious.” When dessert companies advertise their products as “decadent” or “sinful,” they’re not trying to warn you away—they’re banking on the fact that labeling some things as bad, or wrong makes them more appealing, by giving them the erotic charge of the forbidden.
(Many successful profit-seeking firms expect such descriptions to cause demand to increase rather than decrease. I’ve written elsewhere about flaws with the assumption that businesses are profit-seeking in the relevant sense, but I don’t think that advertising a dessert as “sinful” is intended as a voluntary equivalent to the Surgeon General’s warning on cigarettes.)
The question of preference inversion through moralization isn’t just theoretical for me, but a live practical problem. I tried to avoid offering my first child sweets for as long as I could, but when my toddler started becoming interested in sweets, mostly they served as appetizers that helped him become hungry for more substantive foods, the exact opposite of what anti-sweets propaganda had predicted. Even if he’s specifically excited about a sweet or other food I’d rather he wouldn’t choose, frequently he won’t finish it. I think this is at least partly because my reproductive partner and I have been careful to try not to force our food neuroses on him, even when this means he’s eating things we don’t think are the best.
There are exceptions, but they prove the rule. Sometimes when he’s stressed, candy becomes more appealing—but that’s less about the candy itself and more about needing quick calories to regulate emotions. Similarly, when he’s seeking comfort or trying to keep himself awake for longer at night, he might fixate on sweets. But notice how in each case, the “problematic” relationship with sugar emerges from external stressors, not from sugar itself. I do withhold sweets (and television) when I have the intuition that he’s asking for them for the wrong reasons, in a confused way, and won’t either get what he wants from them or learn efficiently from the experience.
I don’t think sweet-seeking starts out perverted; growing children need lots of calories. This turns into a maladaptive obsession with sweets when they are made into perverse fetishes by “healthy eating” propaganda. Likewise, children need a lot of loving touch, which should inform their later sexual development. Sex becomes a fetish when it’s a forbidden gateway to that missing love and touch. Cf Jessica Taylor’s All Primates Need Grooming, and Moshe Feldenkrais’s The Potent Self.
In both cases there’s enough work to be done learning contingent self-restraint without the distorting influence of a negative moral valence.
If you start with the conclusion that sex is great, and anti-premarital sex campaigns are really just anti-you-procreating campaigns and therefore oppressive and bad, then sure. I don’t think that’s a fair assumption across the board (e.g. Amish as an existence proof of “something more”), but it certainly doesn’t work for all preferences and it’s generally not so clear.
Religions that regulate sexuality comprise a heterogeneous category. I wouldn’t describe Amish regulation of sex as a case of preference inversion; the Amish try to make sure people consider leaving the community if they don’t on balance like living under its standards. But it seems like some variants of Christianity do in effect adopt a generalized anti-sex posture. Since some of these groups depend for reproductive viability on people failing to comply with the anti-sex posture, this guarantees that the anti-sex groups that survive intergenerationally are populated mainly by people who want to have sex.
I agree these mechanisms can coexist. But to test and improve our models and ultimately make better decisions, we need specific hypotheses about how they interact.
The OP was limited in scope because it’s trying to explain why more detailed analyses like the ones I offer in The Debtors’ Revolt or Calvinism as a Theory of Recovered High-Trust Agency are decision-relevant. Overall my impression is that while the situation is complex, it’s frequently explicable as an interaction between a relatively small and enumerable number of “types of guy” (e.g. debtor vs creditor, depraved vs self-interested).
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; Scrooge McDuck does not have the same relationship to the gold coins he comes into contact with as a museum curator handling a gold artifact, a gold miner actively extracting gold, or a security guard transporting gold. We think someone’s rich when 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 also differs fundamentally from the relation of the current winner of “King of the Mountain” to whatever sort of hill they’re standing on. The latter must constantly defend their position, and has no claim on it aside from the efficacy of that defense, 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 a convergent solution to the problems of multiple independent agents, rationally adjudicable by a neutral third party, while power involves being inside someone else’s OODA loop and subverting their independent agency. Related: Civil Law and Political Drama
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 Caplan calls “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 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.