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Dennis Horte
Karma: 14
Leaving a comment because it apparently helps. I’ve been occasionally involved with the Berkeley area rationality community since 2010, enjoyed re-reading the sequences last year, and continue to find interesting and valuable posts today. I hope to be more involved with the community again in the coming years. Thank you, Lightcone.
Status hierarchies and loss aversion probably explain a large part of what you observe in people who aren’t onboard with the principles you’ve outlined. For most people, ancestral environment status matters a lot, which means what other people think is a top priority because the ancestral environment was mostly small groups who all knew you and whose opinions determined how good your life would be. Loss aversion means that rocking the boat just isn’t something most people are willing to do.
Starting from this, your points 1, 2, and 3 are all in obvious contrast to the default. People want to do what they’re told and avoid causing trouble that might impact their social standing in the eyes of their peers.
Points 4 and 5 seem quite contradictory to my experience of general human nature. Everyone loves to hate successful people, and especially people who are commercially successful. Success upsets status hierarchies, and so it is in the interest of most people to try to reduce the status of the newly successful in order to minimize loss of status to themselves and to their in-groups. Someone with an honorable purpose who doesn’t achieve success, though, is generally thought quite well of.
Point 6 is directly contradictory to human nature and the desire to support the in-group and keep down the out-group.
In the broader rationalist community, the norms described by the OP are probably more obvious than not. Even in a higher education setting, they will be more prevalent than in the general population. But within the general population, “don’t rock the boat” is the rule of thumb. Most people find this way of living comfortable. A very few chafe against it until they happen upon a community where the norms you outlined exist and finally feel like they’ve come home. People who have been fortunate enough to grow up isolated from the norms of broader society often seem to be confused by just how “non-agentic, unambitious, and obsessed with social approval” the average person is. Setting this as your baseline and realizing that you we need to overcome it every step of the way, in others and sometimes in ourselves, is an important step in making a difference in the world.