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PaperclipPerfector  10d ago (text post)   33693 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of November 11, 2024

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I wrote a comment expressing some confusion about what point you're trying to make. Then I deleted it and read Yudkowsky's Tweet and things are much clearer. I only say that to point that your comment is very confusing out of context and I don't think you've done a good job of summarizing his argument.

His actual argument is that modern society is lacking in something poor people in the past had in abundance and therefore, despite the 100-fold increase in material wealth, some modern people are still quite poor in a way ancient people would recognize because they're lacking something they had in abundance. He specifically mentions people having to grovel and smile all day at work.

What I think this gets wrong is that people do have the power to avoid those jobs. If you don't like faking a smile at a customer, you can work in a warehouse or on a construction site. If you don't like having a boss, you can freelance in many different fields. You can work as a taxi driver. You can find a nicer boss.

These jobs are also not that different than how people lived in the past. Most people didn't live on their own farms, working for themselves. They usually worked on a farm owned by someone else, or they worked as a servant. Some people even worked in towns and dealt with customers.

So we can observe how people trade off these things and see how much they value them. And it turns out that most people put up with a lot of stuff that seems awful so that they can live in bigger houses and own nicer cars. Not everyone does this. Lots of people value their freedom enough to work low-paying jobs that offer flexibility.

As for your argument that NIMBYism prevents more poverty, I don't agree. When given the choice, people tend to move to really big densely populated cities. They have a choice, so if their quality of life were worse in the city, they wouldn't move there. Yes, some things are worse there. We are not yet so rich that you don't have to make your life worse in some way that poor people in the past didn't have to deal with, but it's still an overall increase in the quality of life, despite the traffic congestion and annoying people.

Consider that you can at any time go join an Amish community and live like you're in the 18th century, but with a few conveniences of the modern world. But almost no one chooses to do this.

you can at any time go join an Amish community

I don't believe that this is in fact true; they don't take converts.

Really? I assumed that they would.

Why? They don't need converts, their communities are growing just fine on their own, incorporating an outsider would be a pain-in-the-ass years-long process with a huge dropout rate, and taking them in would expose them to the possibility of having hostile values smuggled in, either deliberately or subconsciously. Literally, what would be the upside for them?

They have health problems resulting from inbreeding. I don't think they have a problem with hostile values being smuggled in. They practise rumspringa.

It is unusual for a Christian group to not let someone join them, since they usually believe that their way is the only path to salvation.

From what I've seen of the Amish, they could probably use some more people in the community who don't share DNA with them. But that's not realistically something people would think about. I agree with the rest of your points.

The Amish don’t believe that they are the only ones who will be saved, though. Also, perhaps unexpectedly, many of the Amish are very much into genetic testing and diversifying their gene pool. Even though they have historically been careful not to allow marriages between remotely close relatives, enough generations of marrying their fourth and fifth cousins have resulted in a noticeably higher birth defect rate.

IIRC they do, but it's rare and takes a substantial time commitment

Also some communities are substantially more open to it than others. What I'd be curious to know is what marriage prospects look like for converts.

I think that’s a bit obtuse. While you can’t go join the Amish church, you can in fact quite easily band together with likeminded people and build a homestead in some rural area.

To me I think a lot of what’s missing is the community. Being poor in the modern world to me sucks a bit more because you’re an atomized individual with much less support in a world that rubs the lifestyle of your betters in your face through the media.

There are people who’ve joined the Amish, they tend to already be mennonites (and there are Mennonite groups that are easier to join / open to concerts), then they move to Amish country, slowly integrate themselves with the community, and are then part of it within a couple of generations.

It’s not a choice people make from a position of detachment. People are habituated to their societies by adulthood, so that altering their lifestyles by jumping into a different sort of society would constitute a major cost. Everything they had lived for and adapted to up until that point of change would be gone. And it works both ways, the Amish would be apprehensive about forsaking their native societies as well. Crossing the threshold comes with a hefty toll, and so it doesn’t indicate ‘natural’ predilections.

I mean it’s not for everyone because it requires major lifestyle changes. But for the right set of individuals, major lifestyle changes are possible. People do it all the time. Immigrants leave their homes and businesses and families behind and move to places with alien cultures. People join the military which is a huge change from civilian life. Such major changes aren’t for everyone, but even modest changes can be accessible to most people. It’s harder than most people think, but it’s perfectly doable.

I mean that it's not indicative of whether people prefer modern life to Amish life, since the 'switch' doesn't happen without a significant cost. The fact that most people don't join Amish communes might simply signify peoples' preference for the familiar, or for environments they've already made significant investments in that they don't want to abandon.

His actual argument is that modern society is lacking in something poor people in the past had in abundance and therefore, despite the 100-fold increase in material wealth, some modern people are still quite poor in a way ancient people would recognize because they're lacking something they had in abundance.

Not at all - he points out that in the past it was even worse. But somehow there are still some people in something the ancients would still recognise as a kind of poverty, which is really weird considering how rich we are.

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