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ZorbaTHut  2yr ago (text post)   31616 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of October 17, 2022

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Anyone find it difficult to "work hard" for reasons that essentially boil down to disbelief?

In my case, not really, but that's largely because I am one of those strangely obsessive people who will spend hours per day on sometimes obscure endeavours to the detriment of my own health and sanity and wellbeing.

That being said, I think your overall point is pretty compelling that most people might have a bias in favour of ordinariness, since most people obviously cluster closer to the mean than those who occupy the extremes of achievement. The people in the top 1% of anything are not representative of the general population and it's likely that you can't expect most people to be able to predict their behaviour all too well - people are susceptible to the typical mind fallacy even when trying to model the behaviour of very atypical people. Though obviously the question of whether there are a significant amount of actual high-level conspiracies that people dismiss out of hand due to their extrapolation of their own behaviour onto people that simply don't act like them probably can't be answered with much certainty.

In my case, not really, but that's largely because I am one of those strangely obsessive people who will spend hours per day on sometimes obscure endeavours to the detriment of my own health and sanity and wellbeing.

Yeah, I guess that was mostly a rhetorical question of sorts than an actual one. I mean, I have these doubts because I'm not used to working hard. It's a weird process to work more than you're used to in the sense of voluntarily doing not just more volume, but inventing new tasks for yourself to do. Like, is it normal to write a short story using every word you looked up that day? I don't think many people at all do that, but I can't deny that my own experience has shown me that merely looking up words does not cement their meanings in my memory and merely remembering their definitions does not then put them into my active vocabulary. So it all checks out logically, but it just feels like I shouldn't do it because what I think of as normal people wouldn't do it and it's probably too tryhard.

Though obviously the question of whether there are a significant amount of actual high-level conspiracies that people dismiss out of hand due to their extrapolation of their own behaviour onto people that simply don't act like them probably can't be answered with much certainty.

True, we don't have access to the underlying information that would help prove it one way or the other. But there's this gnawing sense that most reasonably thought-through conspiracies would work.

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