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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   34966 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of March 6, 2023

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I bet you've heard the phrase "living well is the best revenge." I think it's also the best argument. There are so many ideas, or larger schemas, that are alluring in abstract. See: every teenager's politics. But far fewer paradigms are actually effective in practice. (Granted, which ones work does vary somewhat based on the local circumstances / environment.)

Living out one's ideals is a costly signal of sincerity, and achieving success and happiness by doing so is the least refutable argument. This is a big reason why religion is so persistent despite sounding batshit crazy from the outside — and I say this as a religious person. The philosophy makes sense once you fit yourself inside of it, but the incentive to attempt that in the first place, despite the context of a secular overculture, is that religious people are more likely to thrive.

Anyway, my question is, why don't more culture warriors pursue this path, of exemplifying why their chosen philosophy is good? Am I wrong that it's the most convincing way to advocate for one's ideals? Or maybe everyone is indeed trying to do this, and most just don't seem very effective from my particular vantage point / vis-a-vis my conception of the good life? Perhaps it's a selection effect where people who deeply care about what everyone else is doing are less likely to be happy, point blank, so anyone discernible as a culture warrior is already precluded from "living well is the best argument" unless they learn to give less of a shit in general.

Edit: Apologies for not responding individually, this ended up getting more responses than I expected. But I appreciate you all and am pondering your points!

Living out one's ideals is a costly signal of sincerity, and achieving success and happiness by doing so is the least refutable argument. This is a big reason why religion is so persistent despite sounding batshit crazy from the outside — and I say this as a religious person.

Is it? AFAIK religion is negatively correlated with most measures of success before you correct for income and education and such. Now, it might be that those corrections are necessary to find the true causal effect, but its clearly not just "follow what the successful people are doing" any more.

In fact I think this works against religion. Far more people avoid religion because its associated with low-status people then would ever care about whats objectively reasonable.

Anyway, my question is, why don't more culture warriors pursue this path, of exemplifying why their chosen philosophy is good? Am I wrong that it's the most convincing way to advocate for one's ideals?

I think you are wrong that it is the most convincing. Notably, public bullying seems more effective. On top of that, I doubt most real culture warriors really have faith in their who advocated world view. The classic insult "keyboard warrior" reflects this. I can espouse equality from behind the webcam all I want, but is it really going to turn out well for me when I give 90% of my income away and live in a tent.

I’m surprised no one has pointed out the mental health gap between liberals and conservatives- conservatives as a whole are much happier and saner than liberals as a whole. It seems like right wing culture warriors point this out a lot too- that’s what the ‘feminist alcoholic cat lady’ trope is about. Why you don’t have liberal culture warriors claiming to be happier than conservatives is thus fairly obvious and why you don’t have conservative culture warriors claiming to be happier than liberals is ‘they do, just in terms of normal people vs neurotic wine aunts, because contentment seems normal when you have it’.

Is it clear that the mental health gap is actually real? I fully believe that left wingers are more likely to performatively talk about their poor mental health. On the other hand, aren't actual "deaths of despair" - which have no consistent definition across different studies, but are stereotypically suicide, drug overdose and alcohol abuse - typically happening to red-coded men?

Recently thezvi noted a similar effect in the gender distribution of actual suicide vs suicide attempts, and how it gets reflected in the popular portrayal:

It is kind of stunning, or at least it should be, to have five boys die for every girl that dies, and for newspapers and experts to make it sound like girls have it worse here.

https://thezvi.wordpress.com/2023/03/08/the-kids-are-not-okay/

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Living out one's ideals is a costly signal of sincerity, and achieving success and happiness by doing so is the least refutable argument

I can think of one line of reasoning to refute this argument: what if your success is owed far more to factors other than your ideals? If you were born smart, handsome and wealthy, you're probably going to be succesful even with the most vapid ideals. If you were born poor, ugly and sick then the path to success and happiness is going to be a hard one even if you're guided by the best ideals.

Or maybe everyone is indeed trying to do this, and most just don't seem very effective from my particular vantage point / vis-a-vis my conception of the good life?

While the majority of people are just not consistent and don't explicitly follow ideals, I think this is a large part of the problem. There are plenty of strict vegans and Muslims out there exemplifying their ideals, but are you persuaded? If you don't share the core moral religious belief in the first place then the discipline someone exemplifies in following a religious rule isn't more impressive than any other type of discipline, it's just odd.

For example you say that religious people are more likely to thrive, but do they thrive in a sense that say a feminist could agree on? Both sides exemplify their ideals, neither side sees something they want to imitate. Outside of the stuff most people agree on like health and wealth, persuading people that an example of your values being adhered to is an example of something good means grappling directly with the moral question.

They do, and that's why they aren't hanging around trolling forums.

I think this is a pretty flawed heuristic, though. It's noisy; sometimes the wrong choices get rewarded and the right ones get punished. It's also nonspecific in that it doesn't distinguish between very different roads to success. Consider the prosperity gospel: materially, having massive real estate, private jets, and attentive followers is good, right? But those outcomes are achievable via getting popular in secular entertainment, getting lucky in the stock market, or getting a suicide cult of personality. Which of those are truly good?

Conversely, we have vegans. People who emotionally or rationally concluded that eating animals is bad and followed through. Are they seen as particularly convincing?

Hmm, all the other posters have a lot of good points for why it falls apart in theory. Let me think up some examples in practice...

There are a lot of anti-copywrite advocates, and I'm sure they'll be happy to show you how happy their infinite collection of pirated media and jailbroken software makes them- It doesn't seem to have had an effect on copyright law yet though. If anything it just decreases the pressure to change it and maintains a double standard where consumers ignore it and noone cares but creators are still stifled. And- it doesn't really address the counterarguments that frame this happiness as being derived from theft.

There are a lot of trans individuals living idyllic lives straight out of romance novels on the west coast. And let me tell you it works. I've seen a lot of young adults decide they want to transition after talking to one of them. It turns out this form of activism makes lots of people very angry, to the point that it's become a whole thing.

Whether or not something can produce a good life, does not always address the principles underlying its opposition.

No, you're not wrong at all. In my experience the best way - sometimes the only way - to convince someone of your way of life is to just quietly live a good life being a good person. Sooner or later people start asking questions like "what makes him so happy", or "I was taught that X are bad people, so why is he seemingly such a good person?". That doesn't itself convince them, but it gets them to open their minds, and can lead to opportunities for further persuasion.

The culture warriors don't do this because they aren't actually prioritizing convincing people of their ideals. They want to enforce their ideals on people, convincing is simply gravy if they can get it. So they act accordingly. They use power to enforce their vision with an iron fist, all while driving people further and further away from them.

To cheat is to gain an advantage over others by violating the rules. If most of your classmates were "cheating", it is no longer "cheating", because there is no advantage being gained. You should have done it too, without feeling that you were compromising your integrity.

It is the responsibility of the rule-setters to enforce the rules. If they do not, to the extent that many people are violating the rules, then there emerges a de facto ruleset which differs from the nominal rules. In this ruleset, the violations are permitted.

That's exactly what I said in my reply to @Fruck, it's just Moloch all over again.

I'm a fucking idiot for falling for the lie and I will pay a price for it.

I disagree. Because at the end of the day, your integrity is one of the few things you can actually control. You are proposing that you would give that up, for what? Some stupid grad school? Seriously, who the fuck cares? You aren't going to be actually worse off because of it, you aren't going to have opportunities denied because of it, it just plain and simple doesn't matter in the end.

Some stupid grad school, You aren't going to be actually worse off because of it

Huh? So an "integrity" is real, but the whole of your future career - which isn't just something that gets you money, but is most of your concrete impact on the lives of others - "who the fuck cares"? If you (competent) don't get into med school but cheater (incompetent) does, isn't that bad? That's just plainly false. Even for grad school specifically, some opportunities that are both useful to you and to society are gated by it. Lying might be bad not because "you can control it" (??), but because it harms the people you lie to, and the success of projects you and they are invested in (such as 'doctors being competent' or 'efficient administration of justice'). This is a common idea, but it's really not coherent.

It's perfectly coherent. Don't confuse "I disagree with it" for "it's not coherent". If you don't value moral actions for their own sake, or don't value them higher than material things, that's fine. But I do, and that is the whole crux of the thing. There's nothing incoherent about having a position that follows from fundamental values you disagree with.

Both you and @f3zinker appear to me to have gotten positive utility out of your integrity, namely a source of pride - otherwise you never would have employed it in the first place and you wouldn't feel so upset about it. The bitterness you feel is because you don't want to give up that source of pride, but feel it necessary in this fallen world. I get the impression Zinker's post is convincing himself as much as anyone else.

And are you economically struggling because of your integrity, or are you struggling because of envy? Do you need a 6 or 7 figure salary? Because the vast majority of people manage just fine on much less. Even with all these price hikes you can still live comfortably on a five figure salary, especially if you have cheap hobbies.

I'm sorry to say this but, abandoning integrity is the path of the mediocre narcissist. I don't think either of you are mediocre, I think you are venting - I have done it before too. It hurts to watch someone move forward without merit, which is why the idpol nepotists scream in fury at the idea of meritocracy. Giving up on integrity at this point is giving up on society, because without people with integrity everything will just be a race to the bottom. Maybe that's where you are at at the moment, but I think if you were going to be there permanently you would just do it instead of bemoaning (not meant derogatorily, just can't think of a better word for it) having to do it.

Fake edit: So a lot of this @SubstantialFrivolity already said more betterer, but I have been writing it all day in breaks at work so I am just going to post it. In pseudo-reply to @DaseIndustriesLtd my worldview is definitely non-materialist, or - if I can be a bit obnoxious - maybe better described as platonic materialist - things exist, and matter matters, but we filter it all through our mind, and so our perception of reality is idealist, it has to be. I never considered that that might be why I favour deontology though.

Real edit: nfi why it won't tag ilforte properly.

Real edit: nfi why it won't tag ilforte properly.

DaseindustriesLtd not DaseIndustriesLtd. Lowercase i

The only difference between you and me is that I already think we are well on the race to the bottom, not that it can be set off if the moral fabric is crimped any further.

To me the vast majority cheating is already a sign we are past the point of no return, its the moral fabric being anal raped with a broomstick all the way up to the intestines.

We aren't anywhere close to the bottom yet man, although I won't deny we are much much closer than we used to be and on a rapid descent at the moment. Although I think if people like you abandon integrity it would accelerate significantly. Admittedly this is a bit personal for me - I respect you a lot and I have learned a lot from your posts, and I don't want that to stop. But I think my reasoning is sound, and it's clear you haven't committed to this new path yet, so I remain optimistic.

Edit: grammar

It's been very amusing for me to see this collision of worlds.

I recommend you meditate on illustrations here to perhaps understand @f3zinker's perspective better.

There are different equilibria for these things. Most are inadequate. The «Hajnalbrain cooperatebot» one is abnormal and unstable, particularly under conditions of globalized post-Christian liberalism. What he is saying will become more universally correct in the future, except for domains rigidly controlled by some Social Credit Score variant.

Sorry man, what's a hajnalbrain cooperatebot? Someone raised in the European memeplex maybe?

I appreciate the words of kindness. It's surprising that my shitty posting has any impact at all, but well take that.

As for how far gone society is, I think I need to work towards a model of integrity and its utility. Given I am not a hard deontologist, I don't think integrity is infinitely valuable. I do think it is very valuable, purely from a game theoretic point of view at the very least. And of course there is some value in sleeping at night knowing you are not a fraud, or at least didn't actively work towards becoming one.

However, I think in modern society we run into some failure modes of assigning it far too much weight. Integrity is something that can be accumulated, this is great because you can leverage it in the long term and incentivizes good citizenry. In modern society, there are just so many people that you might be able to live like a "psychopath" without ever needing to play enough iterated games where people can catch up to your tricks. Think of this thought experiment, why even drive politely at all? These are all strangers and you defecting only yields you benefits at their cost, the mechanism to punish you by tarnishing your trust lever is nonexistent, you will always get to your destination faster, given so many people exist it effectively just resets all the time. It's straightforwardly Molochian, but with a prolonged early adopter advantage. (Which is why I think given enough time large sufficiently large cities will always converge to being terrible places to live if you are not psychopathic)

Similarly, imagine I studied for the exam AND cheated. This is the nash equilibrium. Because everyone is defecting. At one point post-critical mass, you just need to defect to survive. Personally, I don't need to defect to survive, but I do think I need to defect to thrive, in the short term. So why wouldn't be defecting your way and securing a future trajectory and then stopping the defecting once you enter iterated game territory not the best option?

I think the meme of integrity is a beautiful meme, it's literally convincing people to not fall for multi-polar traps to people who can't even comprehend what a payoff matrix is without breaking their head. But being a lagged copycat is the universal optimal game theoretic strategy, I just don't need the need to cooperate when everyone is choosing defect against me. I get cut off in roads repeatedly, I lose my line in the grocery checkout if I move 6 feet to the left, I have to compete with people who cheated for graduate school spots, I have to compete with people who lie on their CV's or list programming languages they know how to say hello word in their CV or claim credit for group projects where they contributed nothing; Why should I have any sympathy for these bastards? Why should I make society good for them?

Literally, not a single person I know told me my insistence to not cheat online was a good call, and these are "good people", maybe if I go to a temple and ask the priest he might say otherwise, but priests don't drive BMW's. I'm here for a good time there is no afterlife, and I don't see why I shouldn't get that BMW. Should I feel bad for wanting to take a potential girlfriend to a high-end restaurant, to buy my mom vacations, to one day buy my dad his dream car? To not have to split the bill when eating out with my younger bro and just cover his bill because that's what big bro does? And all of these without thinking twice about it? All those things would be possible 10 years sooner with a little bit of lying. Why do the lairs and cheaters get to experience those beautiful things earlier than me? What's my reward or not doing it? Peace at the deathbed? I can't sleep peacefully at night anyways.

It's a value divergence at its core. But I think post knowing what I know, I really wouldn't lose any sleep at all for having lied or cheated, the job of society is to do everything it can to make sure no one ever finds out that you can actually lie and cheat to win, it's the entire point of religion. But once God is dead, I don't see any reason to pretend he is still alive when no one else is.

In my estimation, once society has failed at that task, it has sealed its fate, now its time to make right with might and eat the cake before it runs out.

So why wouldn't be defecting your way and securing a future trajectory and then stopping the defecting once you enter iterated game territory not the best option?

It is, 100% the most rational option. And I don't think it's always unprincipled to cheat - tit for tat is also sensible strategy. The caveat is that I'm coming at it from the other direction - knowing what I now know, I lost way too much sleep for little real gain.

I ditched integrity as a young adult for my job, and I only started reading Scott after rediscovering my principles, having abandoned them on the basis of game theory, my belief that we had hit bottom and the idea that I could do a lot more good from a position of power.

But when I fell (got metooed, although it wasn't called that back then), I fell hard. On one hand, it either triggered or was accompanied by the onset of hereditary mental illness (which is to say not depression, although I got that too naturally) so it probably wouldn't be as hard on you as it was on me. But on the other hand, you are smarter than me, and the smarter you are the stronger your conscience. Note that all of our current "elites" seem to have clinical depression and imposter syndrome, if not n/bpd - none of them can live with themselves. And most of them aren't even particularly bright.

However, even though I have only gotten more pessimistic about the world over the past two years, I am nothing but optimistic about my life now. It took a while, but I have bounced back, and because I did it without compromising my principles I don't feel imposter syndrome, I am proud of my achievements (and wish I could brag about them without revealing too much of my identity, because I have a feeling some people interpreted my previous post about envy as saying give up on ambition) and I am surrounded by people I would trust with my life. For example I was very concerned for society when the covid vax mandates were gaining momentum (I live in Australia these days), but I was never afraid for my own livelihood, my job was always secure even though it requires interaction with the public and I made it clear I wouldn't get the vaccine. If I didn't have any friends or family I would be uncancellable.

Then again, maybe I just didn't have what it takes to succeed at it and you'll be alright. Just whatever you do, don't forget that it's temporary.

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Doesn’t look to me like you think integrity is valuable, most of your examples provide trivial advantages, like driving aggressively (and that increases the chance of an incident, too). Even the test, the real dilemma is not terrible grade vs cheating, it’s a few hours to learn the material vs cheating. So we’re talking 200 dollars here. Or the classic wallet test, how often does that happen.

So by my calculations total lifetime earnings from having no small-i integrity has a present value of about 1000 dollars. Of course if you go work for the mob, we're talking about something else.

And for that measly sum, you break the covenant and lose the friendship of the good. You can never again say ‘when no one’s looking, I do the right thing’. Which is not only nice, but saves time you would have spent asking yourself what the correct course is, in trivial matters.

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It's fucking savage watching people get ahead by acting immoral. And it just gets more and more depressing as you watch the time horizon for when it finally catches up to them stretch out, and out, and out.

Maybe some Kids in the Hall can cheer you up.

Bro, if you're miserable and struggling in life I don't know why you think cheating in school would have changed that. You realize that most people who don't cheat in school prosper just fine, right? Maybe you got dealt a bad hand in other ways, maybe you just haven't correctly capitalized on the opportunities you have had, IDK. But it's almost certainly not the case that if you had cheated in school things would magically have worked out better for you.

Also, you're asking the wrong question. Even if you had somehow prospered by cheating (unlikely), and even if you had gotten all the things you think it would've gotten you, that would be a horrible outcome. Because then you would have compromised your integrity, which is far more valuable than any material gains ever could be. So the real question is, and what would those material things have brought you? Nothing worth having, if it comes at the cost of your integrity.

Bro, if you're miserable and struggling in life I don't know why you think cheating in school would have changed that.

There's plenty of potential reasons?

The most obvious being that he might have been on the bubble in his degree and cheating could have given him the marginal boost he needed..

But it's almost certainly not the case that if you had cheated in school things would magically have worked out better for you.

"Things" in some totalizing sense, maybe not. Central life moments? Maybe yes.

Because then you would have compromised your integrity, which is far more valuable than any material gains ever could be.

I mean, for someone who criticizes the OP for making bad or unbacked claims about how things would work out...you seem to be making one yourself.

I find this far more unintuitive and convenient than OP's assumptions.

People violate ethics all the time and prosper. There's no evidence that pristine integrity is actually of some overriding practical value (or morality would just be pragmatism)

In fact, if anything, life is about knowing which ethical lapses to accept (often those that burden strangers rather than the in-group)

There's no evidence that pristine integrity is actually of some overriding practical value

Nobody ever said it was. But it is valuable, and it's more valuable than anything practical can offer. Your character is the one thing that nothing can ever take away from you. Material possessions come and go, social status comes and goes, even health comes and goes. But your moral character is always exactly what you make of it, nothing more or less. That makes it far more valuable than those other things.

I don't disdain "things", because they are indeed pleasant. But I don't trade my character for them either, because that would be a very poor trade.

This is core Stoic philosophy. It has an ancient pedigree and I suspect it is wisdom.

Yeah, basically. I would say it's also rooted in Christian morality too, but Stoicism has been a big influence on me the last couple of years. I think that their ethics make a lot of sense and am trying to live up to them.

Would you make that same choice in a brutal job market and with an uncertain future? It's easy to talk lofty words with food on the table.

I don't even disagree with you but I really don't see how integrity is worth the heavy price of stagnated career growth or closing some doors permanently when no one else gives two flying fucks.

@SubstantialFrivolity has blocked me for suggesting that his worldview is rigidly deontological because it is essentially non-materialist. He has denied my conjecture but did not elaborate. I maintain that under the assumption that the material reality is merely testing grounds for «character», his model is optimal and rational.

your moral character is always exactly what you make of it, nothing more or less. That makes it far more valuable than those other things.

…under materialist(ic) assumptions I provisionally share, not so much.

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I mean, yeah I would. I value my honor above having a job, even if it means I am going hungry.

But part of my point here is that @SaruchBinoza is most likely wrong in his assessment that he has paid such a heavy price for not cheating. Most people who don't cheat do just fine. Therefore, if you're struggling odds are that it's something else that caused your struggle. Saying "if I had cheated I wouldn't be suffering now" is comforting I'm sure, but I don't for a moment think it's true.

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UC school? Even when I was in school in the mid 00's, I heard stories about how terrible the cheating was in the UC schools. And who was doing it.

Over on the east coast, in a technical degree, cheating really didn't get you that far. There were tons of projects you could ostensibly cheat on. But you'd flunk all the test, and thus the class. I never cheated, and regularly broke the curve on tests, so I can't say how much other cheating was going on. I will say I did notice lots of people constantly grappling with an ever growing intellectual debt they never payed off. Turns out you can't cheat all the way from the equivalent of addition and subtraction to calculus. There comes a point where you don't even recognize the material well enough to cheat anymore.

Only thing that hurt my prospects in school was my own laziness towards non-technical required courses I had. As well as one professor that literally told me the wrong date/time for the final exams, and when I showed up and nobody was there, gave me a big fat 0 for the final exam. It was something like 20% of my grade, and I still got a C for the course, so I passed. Complained to the dean and they also didn't give a fuck because I passed anyways.

Not in the US, but keep in mind this was when Universities went online during covid. I would say base rates of cheating are not that high during normal times but online you would have had to go through the haystack to find someone not cheating.

Yeah, everything about education during the COVID era seemed a twist on that old Soviet joke. "They pretend to pay us teach and we pretend to work learn.".

There was only one subject where I encountered widespread cheating and that was programming/computer science.

It was easy to cheat and a lot of people hated programming and didn't imagine that they would work doing actual programming when they started working. Only, this was the worst subject to cheat in because like 70% ended up doing some kind of programming work after school and this was one of the subjects that actually had real world use, unlike multivariate calculus or smth.

Fascinating. I'm curious how the classes were structured in terms of how homework, projects and exams were weighted. Also exactly how these people were cheating. Cheating on projects was common, and people would regularly copy each others work wholesale, making only minor tweaks to defeat the "cheating detection" programs. Exams were far harder to cheat at, as they were not multiple choice, were rarely rote memorization, and frequently required you to write out pseudocode to solve slightly more novel problems than you'd already encountered. I can imagine someone cheating getting up to a passing grade in these classes. I cannot imagine them outperforming me.

There was a fad (?) in the 90s (and presumably going forward from there) to weight projects in general CS/SE very highly because "we need to train people to work in a team so they are ready for the workplace environment".

Even when there wasn't outright cheating this resulted in the one or two competent people involved in any group project essentially doing all the work because everyone else was actively harmful -- so, pretty much like the workplace environment I guess.

"Individual" assignments were often treated similarly -- this wasn't such a problem for competent people because the assignments were pretty easy, but sometimes the sheer volume could be a bit much for those not in the cheating ring.

Yeah, now that you mention, I had 2 or 3 classes in my bachelors program that would fit that bill. I hit on them by accident because of a frustrating series of events. I have no idea what the total proportion of classes were like that, but I suppose someone forewarned could maximize the number of "group work" classes they had.

Here's a funny story. During one of my group work, do all the actual work sessions, my lazy good for nothing group mate showed up to "help", even though all that was left to do was a single task which could not be broken up and which he said he didn't know how to do. He's sitting around making mouth sounds about "I wish there was something I could do" and I tell him "Get me a beer". He laughs. "No, I'm serious, get me a beer from the fridge."

"Can I have one too?" And like the little bitch I was at 20 I said "Yes".

Living well is the best revenge against the future felon who stuffed you into the locker in highschool. In a relatively well adjusted community where their actions result in them finding no succor against their shitty antisocial choices, it can be fun to watch them seethe and cope. It works less well when that future felon finds a society rich in other felons, who then show up at your house to loot it, kick the shit out of you, and rape your wife and/or daughter.

Don't read anything into that particular home invasion/rape I posted. I just googled "home invasion rape" and picked the punchiest result. There were ample.

Anyway, my question is, why don't more culture warriors pursue this path, of exemplifying why their chosen philosophy is good? Am I wrong that it's the most convincing way to advocate for one's ideals?

In a word, yes. Woke culture warring is a competing meme to "living well is the best revenge", and it dominates it. It exploits the complacency of the masses who just want to live well (or "grill" as the meme goes). "Living well" is proof of immorality in their philosophy; it makes you the oppressor. And once they have that established, they can turn your success into guilt and convert people. (and to be fair, Christianity itself did this thousands of years ago)

In "Man's Search for Meaning", Viktor Frankl argues that a person can weather adversity--even thrive--so long as one's experience is deeply meaningful. In contrast, a person can be living an objectively pleasant life, yet be miserable if meaning is absent.

Frankl's framework fits some of the more successful activists that I personally know, be their cause a strain of social justice or Christian prothelytizing. They are tired and frustrated, their schedule is hectic, but their life is full of meaning. And because of that, they attract others to their cause.

I have recently watched the ["Navalny"](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Navalny_(film)) documentary. That guy is not living the good life by my definition--he's in a Russian high-security penal colony, an outcome he knew was highly likely when he chose to go back to Russia--but I don't deny that his life is deeply meaningful to him. That's a powerful draw.

Anyway, my question is, why don't more culture warriors pursue this path, of exemplifying why their chosen philosophy is good? Am I wrong that it's the most convincing way to advocate for one's ideals? Or maybe everyone is indeed trying to do this, and most just don't seem very effective from my particular vantage point / vis-a-vis my conception of the good life?

Out of everyone that have met me, I wonder what a sample would think with regards to how well I am exemplifying my philosophy (and, whether they can even identify it)?

Living a ”model” life does not do anything toward solving complex problems, at all, and its influence on the behavior of other people is slim. For instance, let’s say I wanted to be the best model mathematician. I wear math shirts every day and I talk to everyone I meet about the beauty of mathematics. My influence on the lives of others would be less than had I spent my time working toward getting better math classes in school. We live in an organization-centric world, and in a sense it has always been like that. Opting out of any care beyond “being a good person to others and being joyful” is not enough in a world where your life is dictated by political ideas downstream from culture. Even the most joyful and caring parent may have children who get their behavior from bad peers or Tik Tok. Francis of Assisi lived a model life, but more importantly he created organizations and produced culture. Organization and culture are the only ways to make the world better which underlies your ideas about “living a good life”.

As an example of the concerns here, there are many Afrikaners in South Africa who are living a good life, and maybe they are even Saints. But as a people they are doomed because of political and cultural reasons. Unless they develop a form of sovereignty, they will be overrun in every city and town that they founded. Hence the importance of organization and culture. Another example: Afghans were able to resist American imperialism not because any individual was “good” or “skilled”, but because they had intense cultural practices and organization that gave them the ability to defend their homeland.

There are no shortage of Christian communities today that practice insane levels of self-sacrificial charity, truly loving the moral life, but all it takes is a biased news report and propaganda in media to make the average person instinctively hate Christians. And indeed, the early Christians did not focus on living a moral life. They focused on creating organization (centered around the eucharist) and culture (art, stories).

Am I wrong that it's the most convincing way to advocate for one's ideals?

Well, you could probably live pretty well as an owner of hundreds of slaves in ancient Rome, Medieval Arabia or the early US, but I don't think that would be great proof of your political, cultural or religious ideals being all that great. Especially considering that people from all these places would probably heavily disagree with each other on what society's values should be.

"living well is the best revenge."

It's a nice sounding cope and maybe a good rule to follow if you want to be happy and/or avoid sullying your soul with the rot of politics.

But it is also absolutely terrible strategic advice.

The people who obsess over winning at politics at the expense of everything (including their principles) are the people who will inherit power. And they will not leave you alone. Because they need more power to sustain power itself.

This may be disgusting but it is the true nature of power, in its complete and naked Machiavellian form. The ring only obeys to Sauron. Wearing it only slowly makes you Sauron or destroys you. But if you refuse to wear it and destroy yourself thus, you have to accept the woe that befalls the weak.

Of course in the heroic tale of anarchomonarchist propaganda, we campaign for the ring to be destroyed. And this is a different path from blind confrontation with Mordor using its own weapons. But it is also not living the best Hobbit life waiting around in the Shire to be sacked by Orcs.

If living a good and moral life sufficed, the Mormon wars would not have been necessary.

Anyway, my question is, why don't more culture warriors pursue this path, of exemplifying why their chosen philosophy is good? Am I wrong that it's the most convincing way to advocate for one's ideals?

Yes. No ideology is going to free you from stress at work, or trouble with your kids. It might offer some protection against common pitfalls - I've heard there are studies showing religion actually protects you against depression and other problems - but it's not going to grant you blissful happiness turning you into a walking commercial for your ideology. In fact, if you run into someone acting this way, you're most likely dealing with someone in a cult.

I've spent a bunch of time earlier in my life reading and watching documentaries about cults, odd religions and people that engage in conspiracies. I find it fascinating that it isn't brought up more on how the fanatics are actually miserable people. They constantly live in fear of the "enemy" outsider who doesn't think like them. The most vocal participants of the culture war are fanatics that either sees bigots everywhere or see wokeness in everything, but aren't living well because they have distorted their world view to search out the "enemy". Living well is not being a fanatic and disengaging with the culture war, which is the conclusion that you came to.

I can't *really* disagree with it, because it's just vague enough to give you an out no matter what objection is raised (if they're not miserable, then that means they're not a fanatic), but yeah, I disagree with this. Most culture warriors are normies. They can't be more miserable than average, because they are the average. They're not "disengaged from the culture war", they'll happily shit on you if you're unvaxxed, hold unorthodox opinions, or don't participate in the latest current thing. They are capable of doing mental gymnastics that let them pretend they're not really responsible for any of it, so maybe that's where the impression of disengagement is coming from.

As for people who are "engaged with the culture war", they're just like everyone else. Some are miserable, some are happy, most have their ups and downs.

P.S.:

I've spent a bunch of time earlier in my life reading and watching documentaries about cults, odd religions and people that engage in conspiracies. I find it fascinating that it isn't brought up more on how the fanatics are actually miserable people.

It's ironic you say that, because what sonya is talking about is a common cult recruitment tactic.

It is vague by the simple fact that I didn't have the time to write it more precisely. I try to draw the distinction on the culture warrior fanatic and the regular normies that participate casually because they think that something is wrong. So there is room for the cause and effect thing here also. Are the culture war fanatics created because they are miserable and not well adjusted from the beginning, thus more susceptible to becoming fanatics? The point I'm trying to make is that if you made the culture war a part of your identity it becomes an issue of that you see the enemy tribe everywhere and you are miserable because of it because you are surrounded by them. Living a better life is not an option in that milieu you live in at that time.

It's ironic you say that, because what sonya is talking about is a common cult recruitment tactic.

It is the whole point I'm trying to make. The fanatic warriors are in the cult and the normies just leave and don't demonstrate to the world that they live a better life than the miserable people living in the tribal stand-off that is the culture war.

I try to draw the distinction on the culture warrior fanatic and the regular normies that participate casually because they think that something is wrong.

Ah, ok. In that case I guess could agree, though you'd have give some indication of where the threshold for a fanatic is. Otherwise we're in danger of turning this into a tautology like "a fanatic is anyone who is miserable"

It is the whole point I'm trying to make. The fanatic warriors are in the cult and the normies just leave and don't demonstrate to the world that they live a better life than the miserable people living in the tribal stand-off that is the culture war.

I don't get it. Sonya was asking why don't more culture warriors try to live a good life, and use that as an argument to convince others. I understood your original comment as "that's not gonna work for them, because they're all miserable", and even "living well is in direct contradiction with being a CW fanatic". I'm saying saying something else - that the whole idea of demonstrating how good your life is, in order to persuade someone of your worldview, is a cult recruitment tactic.

Ah, ok. In that case I guess could agree, though you'd have give some indication of where the threshold for a fanatic is.

Sure, their "cultural warrior identity" makes them cut out problematic real life friends and relatives out of their lives. i.e. it isolates them from people that might contradict them.

I'm saying saying something else - that the whole idea of demonstrating how good your life is, in order to persuade someone of your worldview, is a cult recruitment tactic.

Well this is the actual thing that in my view is that people that get recruited to cults have a void which they try to fill. They don't persaude you to a better worldview, they give you a reason why you feel the void and try to give you something to fill that with. So the performative better way of living is usually inauthentic unless you see yourself filling that void. So I'm just pointing out that CWs found something to fill that void with so they are self selecting out of living "better lives" in a cult or actually meaningful lives outside of cults. Those who found an alternative to CW issues living out a "better life"(within a cult or not) doesn't involve narcissistic virtua signaling online.

But at the end of the day, I'm not a cult psychologist. My interest in cults has been a source of entertainment that has saved me money, time and sanity since I had void once which I knew not to fill with cults that I orbited around in my twenties. So full disclosure I could be talking out of my ass and could be wrong...

This is another example of "utilitarianism doesn't handle blissful ignorance well". You're probably going to he happier if you don't know that you're facing any threats, even if the threats are real. But I would hesitate to say that therefore, it's better to remain ignorant of threats.

Not magnifying the importance threats that aren't really relevant is not blissful ignorance. Malaria is a real threat to my health but given that I see a foot of snow outside of my window it is not something that I worry about. I'm not being ignorant, it is just not a part of my current threat landscape.

The issue I'm trying to bring across here is that people lead miserable lives when they magnify importance of the conflicts in the culture war to the end of civilization, and what books are in the school libraries in Florida is not going to decide the faith of civilization.

I think the 'culture warrior' part is relevant. Culture warriors optimise for waging culture war, not living well. If their focus was on the latter, you probably wouldn't know who they were and they probably wouldn't care about culture warring.

The best example is probably a group like the Amish. They seem to be a very contented, rapidly growing group. And yet they have no interest in spreading their ways to others.

Anyway, my question is, why don't more culture warriors pursue this path, of exemplifying why their chosen philosophy is good? Am I wrong that it's the most convincing way to advocate for one's ideals? Or maybe everyone is indeed trying to do this, and most just don't seem very effective from my particular vantage point / vis-a-vis my conception of the good life? Perhaps it's a selection effect where people who deeply care about what everyone else is doing are less likely to be happy, point blank, so anyone discernible as a culture warrior is already precluded from "living well is the best argument" unless they learn to give less of a shit in general.

In my view you've already touched upon the salient points. So I'll probably just rehash it, but here are my thoughts anyways.

I think this is made somewhat more complicated in practice by

  1. the inherent difficulty of living well regardless of philosophy, by

  2. some philosophies being not self-sufficient but requiring the correct the correct external conditions to live a good life by their own metrics, and finally by

  3. a good life not being an objective standard.

Now,

  1. In our age of large populations with low mortality and the illusion of egalitarianism and a great deal of wishful thinking, many are led to believe that a good life should be theirs. But a large subset of the many are not suited for a good life, or unable to life well except under very favorable circumstances that are unlikely to come about for them. By biological or psychological or social or economic problems, they will be unhappy or unsuccessful or otherwise unfit to lead by example. Philosophy needn't even come into it.

  2. Should be obvious. If a philosophy demands that in the extreme the eschaton be immanentized or more moderately that society's egregious problem X should be resolved prior to the good life, and given that this is presented credibly enough and signal-boosted enough, then that philosophy can appear valid and attractive even though its adherents are not living well, or are living well by covertly utilizing some other philosophy.

  3. Is directly related to the previous point and is illustrated by @Butlerian. One may see a life as good and others will still manage to take issue with it. This is prevalent enough to be a substantial obstacle to setting philosophical examples by good living.

None of this is new or original of course.

Anyway, my question is, why don't more culture warriors pursue this path, of exemplifying why their chosen philosophy is good?

Because your opponents will claim that you're only happy because you're oppressing somebody else, and the suffering you're causing is utalitarian-ly greater than the happiness you're experiencing. See: all the anticolonialism theorists who attack the visible prosperity / happiness of the west be claiming that Westerners are only happier / more prosperous than non-Westerners because they stole all the latter's resources. Or all the anti-Christians who insist that the spiritual harmony of monoreligious Europe only worked because they were constantly squeezing Jews / witches / gays / scapegoats to serve as the Two Minutes Hate foundation of community cohesion.

I bet you've heard the phrase "living well is the best revenge." I think it's also the best argument.

I confess that I've never been able to take Yudkowsky seriously since he announced his separation. "If you're so smart, how come your marriage failed?"

I confess that I've never been able to take Yudkowsky seriously since he announced his separation. "If you're so smart, how come your marriage failed?"

That one's a bit unfair. I hold no brief for Yudkowsky, and yes it's very enticing to have a laugh about his weight struggles and marriage failure, but that just goes to show that the human heart is unfathomable and being smart is not enough to solve all problems (yes, Rationalists should have known this already, but they tended/tend to be young when they caught the bug, and youth is the time of idealism and overblown ambition and passionate conviction that previous generations knew nothing but this time we all know the secret to success is X and once we implement that, it will all work out!)

So yeah - his marriage broke up, like a lot of ordinary people undergo. You can try to make things work, but in the end if you're incompatible, or you both want different things, or one party feels beyond reason that they've fallen out of love and what remains isn't a good enough reason to stay, then there's not much can be done save to keep the split as amicable as possible.

He's an ordinary guy, after all, it turns out! The philosophy may still be sound, we don't judge the art by the artist in most cases after all, so if we're older and a bit more mature we can go "yeah, emotions are complicated, who knew?" and argue for/against his views on their merits, not on "ha-ha, you're a romantic failure!"

Does he now claim that he acted irrationally with respect to gaining weight? Or does he claim that because of physics and metabolism it's just impossible for him to lose weight? There's a difference between "he recognizes that it's a failure of rationality" and "he uses rationality in a nonsensical way".

The philosophy may still be sound, we don't judge the art by the artist

An important part of the philosophy here is the claim that you can improve rationality in a domain-general way. That you could learn to avoid e.g. motivated reasoning in a way that would work on all topics simultanuously, so that your preformance in even the weakest field that a critic might adversarially pick will be ok (and that he has done this, obviously). Claiming to have a metabolic defect that would be lethal in the ancestral environment is strong evidence against that.

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