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ZorbaTHut  2yr ago (text post)   Edited 2yr ago   38751 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of September 12, 2022

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there are a lot of psychological traits that are worthwhile besides just intelligence - honesty, conscientiousness, perseverance, a sense for fairness, and so forth.

These are all fluid in a way that intelligence is not. I can practice radical honesty, I can force my self to be more conscientious, etc. Intelligence is a hard limit on potential, and no such thing exists for how many lies I tell.

These are all fluid in a way that intelligence is not.

Well, maybe - but what's the evidence for that? How much more fluid are they? Is this something measurable, or does a relative paucity of measurement allow wishful thinking to fill in the gaps? I'm reminded of naraburns' review of The Cult of Smart ( https://old.reddit.com/r/TheMotte/comments/joopge/disappointed_by_the_cult_of_smart/ )

His criticism of American public education seems basically cogent, if occasionally incomplete or, perhaps, symptomatic of motivated reasoning. But when he observes that

We sink vast sums of money into quixotic efforts to make all of our students equal

it does not seem to occur to him, at all, that we could therefore choose to stop doing that. Instead, bizarrely, he recommends we continue doing that--indeed, he thinks we should pay teachers even more money to keep doing that. Only instead of trying to make students equal by teaching them math, we should make them equal by teaching them to care about one another, to be compassionate, to work to the best of their abilities and be grateful to receive from others in accordance with their needs. Why deBoer thinks schools will be any better at teaching children these things, than they are at teaching children math, is never expressed or explored. Why deBoer fails to notice that there is no reason, in principle, to think that people's dispositions are any less governed by their DNA than are their capabilities, I can only guess, but it is an absolutely glaring oversight. What do we do, in his perfect world, with children who are predisposed to be bad at caring? What do we do with teachers who are bad at teaching it? DeBoer seems to be laboring under the delusion that teaching people to behave is substantially less quixotic than teaching them algebra.

If evidence exists that it is substantially less quixotic, then that would be wonderful news (provided the evidence is good.) But considering how much something like this is desired to be true, I think the lack of some well-known solid evidence is probably not an encouraging sign.

You theoretically can, but probably won't do it in any way that matters; if you are inherently dishonest, you'll see specifics of the case justifying another deceit or swindle, your barrier for excusing transgressions is lower than in people with strict moral code. And it probably does not even have the pronounced negative component. In my experience, archetypal WEIRD/Hajnal-born people genuinely feel terrible when they are «forced to cheat» against the consensus morality. By the same token they don't experience exhilaration at discovering a clever hack there (even when they love to hack and tinker in the abstract or in mediums that are not morally laden).

Now, in a sense you're right. With large-scale intrusive social engineering, it should be possible to nudge the whole society towards greater effective cooperation and conscientiousness, in a way no education and nutrition beyond the basic can do for intelligence.

A year and a half ago, on reddit, I quoted::

A commenter in Steven Hsu's blog wrote 2 years ago on his recent visit to China:

I also took a trip to China recently. Had not been back since 2007. The infrastructure is certainly impressive. The airports and train stations are quite amazing. The biggest change had been the behavior of the people. Much more orderly. Traffic in Guangzhou and Shanghai could pass for any U.S. city. Beijing is still more chaotic. I think mainly due to the massive overload of the roads. In the tourist places, there were just throngs of people. If the driver needs to get through, he has no choice but to cut in front of pedestrians.

There are no longer any pick pockets. People have better manner than I expected in the subways. No one toss trash on the streets. The roads, even high traffic areas like the Bund in Shanghai, are quite clean compared to the U.S. big cities.

All this should be credit to the omnipresent cameras and the fact that people don't carry a wallet anymore. However, I went to a bank to exchange some currency and left my umbrella there for a couple of hours, It was still sitting in the same place after I return. This would not have happened in 2007.

Effective punishment also helps. People are not sent to jail when they violate the rules, they are barred from riding the subway. All the entrances of the subways now have check points to correlate the picture taken there against the file picture from the ID. Not being able to ride the subways is a major drag in a big city like Beijing.

I believe underneath, people are still basically the same animal. There were reports of a park losing all of its lotus flowers (acres and acres of them) to looters who scale the fence at night to steal the flowers. Camera caught them to be mostly women and older men. However, the high probability of getting caught and the effective punishment changed at least the behavior. This is the start of the march toward the Singaporean model. When the older people die off, the younger generation will take the law and order to their heart as they are brought up that way.

What struck me about the Chinese government is their ability to get things done. Try something, does not work, try a different approach until one works. replicate nation wide. In the U.S., our government has lost this ability and has become a hindrance to progress.

Isn't it wonderful?

But this is just pleb stuff. The Chinese are still cheating horribly in governance, in crucial business and in science. It seems to require specific pressures for every single strand of the social fabric.

That's a ton of friction. Conscientious societies, in contrast, are almost frictionless – to the extent that your worst roadblock there is some moral busybody or a worrywart with red tape.

I don't think so. There's a reason for the aphorism "A leopard cannot change its spots". I suspect some people are basically dishonest in the same way others are basically stupid.

The thing about quoting aphorisms is that there's usually one that says the opposite.

Ok this isn't an aphorism, but quoting Shakespeare comes close:

Assume a virtue, if you have it not.

That monster, custom, who all sense doth eat,

Of habits devil, is angel yet in this,

That to the use of actions fair and good

He likewise gives a frock or livery

That aptly is put on. Refrain tonight,

And that shall lend a kind of easiness

To the next abstinence; the next more easy;

For use almost can change the stamp of nature.

For use almost can change the stamp of nature.

"Almost"?

(And Hamlet may have said it, but Gertrude did not take his advice)

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