This weekly roundup thread is intended for all culture war posts. 'Culture war' is vaguely defined, but it basically means controversial issues that fall along set tribal lines. Arguments over culture war issues generate a lot of heat and little light, and few deeply entrenched people ever change their minds. This thread is for voicing opinions and analyzing the state of the discussion while trying to optimize for light over heat.
Optimistically, we think that engaging with people you disagree with is worth your time, and so is being nice! Pessimistically, there are many dynamics that can lead discussions on Culture War topics to become unproductive. There's a human tendency to divide along tribal lines, praising your ingroup and vilifying your outgroup - and if you think you find it easy to criticize your ingroup, then it may be that your outgroup is not who you think it is. Extremists with opposing positions can feed off each other, highlighting each other's worst points to justify their own angry rhetoric, which becomes in turn a new example of bad behavior for the other side to highlight.
We would like to avoid these negative dynamics. Accordingly, we ask that you do not use this thread for waging the Culture War. Examples of waging the Culture War:
-
Shaming.
-
Attempting to 'build consensus' or enforce ideological conformity.
-
Making sweeping generalizations to vilify a group you dislike.
-
Recruiting for a cause.
-
Posting links that could be summarized as 'Boo outgroup!' Basically, if your content is 'Can you believe what Those People did this week?' then you should either refrain from posting, or do some very patient work to contextualize and/or steel-man the relevant viewpoint.
In general, you should argue to understand, not to win. This thread is not territory to be claimed by one group or another; indeed, the aim is to have many different viewpoints represented here. Thus, we also ask that you follow some guidelines:
-
Speak plainly. Avoid sarcasm and mockery. When disagreeing with someone, state your objections explicitly.
-
Be as precise and charitable as you can. Don't paraphrase unflatteringly.
-
Don't imply that someone said something they did not say, even if you think it follows from what they said.
-
Write like everyone is reading and you want them to be included in the discussion.
On an ad hoc basis, the mods will try to compile a list of the best posts/comments from the previous week, posted in Quality Contribution threads and archived at /r/TheThread. You may nominate a comment for this list by clicking on 'report' at the bottom of the post and typing 'Actually a quality contribution' as the report reason.
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
Notes -
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.
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.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
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.
DaseindustriesLtd not DaseIndustriesLtd. Lowercase i
More options
Context Copy link
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?
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
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.
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.
That could be the case, but is it that you were wrong about your past actions and the future actually balanced out or you just didn't care for the lack of whatsoever you were lamenting?
Because of a lack of integrity?
Disagree.
I'm not sure this statement is empirically true. There is a strong coping aspect to believing this, so I am somewhat skeptical on those grounds to begin with.
This is good to hear. What do you think was the change the resulted in change of mindset? As in be descriptive about the change.
It definitely is as per my own experience shared in another post. But the whole thing left a very strong taste in my mouth, I am not entirely sure if I will ever get rid of it, or that I should get rid of it. Knowing the bad helps you appreciate the good.
God fucking damn it I always do this, I spend so much time chopping and changing a post up that I forget the point of the post, here being what the hell integrity has to do with any of this. Sorry dude.
So basically when I was metooed my friends and family stuck by me because they knew I didn't do anything, but many acquaintances - professional and casual - dropped away. Most of them wouldn't even talk to me, but those who would explained that they wanted to believe me, but I had given them reason not to, specifically I had lied or cheated in their presence, so they didn't know if they could trust me now. It wasn't that I had lied once and was now untrustworthy of course, but I introduced a reason for them to doubt me, and given the social dynamics in place (hyper progressive at least cosmetically, and I basically represented the old guard of 'true' liberal/left libertarians and closeted conservatives while she represented the new front of identity politics and Marxism) there was limited value in believing me, so since I gave them a reason not to, they had to take it.
So after I fell I was pretty down on myself and everyone/thing else for a while. It wasn't fair that I lose everything over a lie, I never got anyone fired with my lies. Which is true, but after a while I came to discover it is also beside the point. There's no balancing out of the universe, but I deserved what I got because I made it happen. If I had maintained my integrity I wouldn't have been in a position to be metooed, there would be no angle.
I can't remember the specific moment I decided I had to change, it was never like an epiphany - "why don't you try not cheating and lying?" It was more like I knew what I was doing wrong the whole time and I just had to admit it to myself. I guess what opened my eyes was when my former boss told me that he thought it wasn't impossible I had been there. I had thought we were closer than that. So maybe I just massaged everything in my head to make it seem like integrity was the issue because I wanted integrity to be the issue.
But it was definitely embracing integrity (not just integrity of course, the conclusion I came to was basically the right is right, you fix things starting with yourself and working outwards, fixing society won't fix you (side note: although as someone raised by television I fought so hard to try and figure out a way to still call it left wing - I didn't want to be uncool) that turned me back around. There weren't YouTube tutorials or wikihows on how to rebuild your life after hitting the bottom back then (there probably are now), so I let my conscience and philosophy guide me. I started reading Scott and TLP and I focused on improving myself. I still get bitter about it sometimes, and I have black moods where I think it's the only way to get ahead, but I think you are better off with it than without it.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
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.
I think you have it backward. The small inconveniences point to a larger rot. The rot works its way down the incentive/reward ratio chain. The lie is that "if you cheat the small things, you will cheat the big ones", it's like no wheres the incentive to cheat in the small things? There big cheating is already happening you just don't see it.
I've already explained in detail why "doing the right thing" is not so appealing to me right now. So I'll hold out until I get more criticism before amending this comment further.
I just find it interesting that the small invisible defections people get into in daily life generally do not pay off at all. When I was 12 I stole a trading card from a friend and commited various other pecadillos without getting caught, I can’t say they’ve improved my life more than an infinitesimal amount, even at the time. Net negative outcome on those decisions. Maybe I just suck at crime.
Bottom line, I don’t think there’s two kinds of people in the world; the assholes with great lives and bmws, and the schmucks who believe in integrity. Reality points more the other way, as in germans (hallo, bmws!) vs greeks, or the correlation between criminality and poverty.
For sure, it’s more complicated than that, like when you declare that others defected, and therefore you can. Which in theory is valid, one must punish defectors, so cooperating alone, or past a certain point of general defection, is not just poor strategy, but immoral. I dispute that we are past that point of general defection. And people will take the opportunity to be evil-dumb far too early, as the low-stakes examples show.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
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.
More options
Context Copy link
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.
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..
"Things" in some totalizing sense, maybe not. Central life moments? Maybe yes.
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)
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.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
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.
…under materialist(ic) assumptions I provisionally share, not so much.
Does not conclude. You can logically accept all the following:
1/ There are no gods and no devils, there is no judgement, no heaven, no hell, no reincarnation and no nirvana, when you are dead you will decompose and be forgotten (at least until AI reconstructs your brain in order to torture it forever).
This world is all what there is.
2/ This world is dirty, muddy and bloody rat cage, always had been and always will be. To live long and prosper you need to learn how to lie, cheat, steal and scam, how to snoop, snitch and denounce, how to plot, intrique and backstab. You have to be total and complete rat to get ahead.
3/Regardless, I do not want to live like this, I do not want to be a rat.
Grim and hopeless mindset that would appeal to few people, but 100% scientific and materialist.
I do not believe behavior that is incentivized by no plausible promise and not even an intuitive expectation of payback is a major part of human behavioral repertoire. People expect good to come from good, else they do not do it at a noteworthy scale.
More importantly, endorsing it is an irresponsible advice to give. There are costs to integrity, as this subthread shows well enough. Costs have to be justified. When Neoreactionaries cheerfully try to sell people on the Eternal Social Darwinist Hell, they say that the other option is worse in any way that could matter – more suffused with impotence and suffering, more tyrannical, more derivative and limited and ugly. How, specifically, is lacking integrity worse? SubstantialFrivolity speaks of the value of integrity trumping material benefits:
The argument, inasmuch as he makes one, is that integrity is all-important because the character is «the one thing you can control». This, at least, is an ethos. But one can ask then: why optimize for «good» character? Why not express your self-control in building a prideful, cunning, power-seeking character? A character befitting a king or a Khan, rather than a law-abiding serf who rationalizes his self-denial! Possessions come and go, sure, but so does the fruit of good deeds. The argument seems to hold inasmuch as you rein in your urges and act in accordance with a set of abstract principles. Objectivism, Laveyian Satanism, Thelema, weird personal religions, anything goes. Yet it's not the case that anything goes, is it.
So it's clear he does not believe integrity is valuable because of the arbitrary rule that only things an agent controls are truly valuable. And if your logic is applied, neither is it due to any supernatural metaphysical returns to integrity. We are thus left with the claim that integrity is valuable because it is valuable period, it being the only way in which control over oneself is meaningful. This is not an argument but an assertion, a personal moral deontological axiom, a Categorical Imperative that cannot be proven as true to anyone who doesn't feel the charm of having integrity to begin with. I posit that the insistence on this opinion as a somehow true measure of value makes him an archetypal Hajnalbrain Cooperatebot, a member of a neurotype to which @f3zinker or @SaruchBinoza apparently do not belong.
For the record, I understand the allure of of justice, and the tears of tiger in this picture. It's just obvious that myopic self-satisfied Integrity Play is insufficient to actually make the world a more just place. So I can't help but look down on people extolling the virtue of cooperation even with defectors.
/images/16786512482051687.webp
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
Good for him that he can afford (financially and psychologically) to be a deontologist to a fault. Reminds me of that old meme
Unfortunately my ancestors left behind a slightly more cutthroat enviorment.
And cutting others throats literally or otherwise is not virtous but it does make certain things easier in this godless material world
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
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.
Have you done that before?
And yes in the case of SaruchBinoza, it's not over unless he is literally on the edge, but I do understand where he is coming from because that line is a lot thinner than places outside the US.
I am fortunate enough to have never been forced to choose between cheating on something or having a job. However, I remain committed to my principles and I resent when people say "well you'll change your tune when X happens" (because it's both patronizing and has always proved wrong before). So I hope that isn't what you were getting at.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link