kky
11hr ago
For what it’s worth, there is good historical (and contemporary) evidence that people have always learned cultural practices from one another, instead of it being purely transmitted by conquest or force. A fairly elementary example is the extremely rapid spread of crops in the Columbian Exchange, a slightly deeper cut is Japan’s conscious and discerning importation of Western norms post-Meiji Restoration, and a perhaps controversial take is that cargo cults were (are?) an ineffective attempt to learn Western practices.
This would roughly be your “virus” case of horizontal transmission. But what I think your model misses is how and why people transmit cultural knowledge, and how the selection effects work mechanically. I believe that this is through conscious recognition of tangible outcomes that can be hypothetically correlated with the practice for positive selection, and implicit comprehension of norms on their own terms for retention of behavior. In plain language, you pick a practice up either because it’s doing something good for someone else or because it’s just the way things are done. Let’s call the first case adaptation and the second retention.
Every practice has its price. There’s a cost for following it instead of doing something else, including doing nothing at all. It also has a certain legibility to it. Using a certain spice in one’s cooking obviously and visibly changes the flavor, but increasingly complex crop rotation schemes will only show their merit on the order of years. Superior military practice can only demonstrate its worth in the event of a war. Finally, there is a magnitude to what the practice will do for you. Diminishing returns are always an issue.
So for adaptation to occur, you need the perceived advantage of a new practice, inclusive of how confident you are that the practice causes the advantage, to significantly exceed the cost of adapting the new practice.
Meanwhile, retention just works like any old social pressure. If you don’t do this, you aren’t cool. The power of retention is in proportion to the power and influence of the normative group over you.
Back to the actual meat of the subject. Right now, I would argue that the following propositions obtain:
- Our economic system, bolstered by explicit and implicit welfare schemes, is so powerful that most immediate needs are filled without any real effort.
- The worst risks of sex and solitary lifestyles have been massively mitigated by birth control and welfare.
- There is an ascendant class of tastemakers with historically unparalleled reach, influence, and power. They have displaced most of the small local tastemakers that preceded them.
- Points 1-3 have only been in effect for a very short period of time.
Back to adaptation. What people these days see is not a minefield of viscerally bad outcomes with cultural guardrails, or obviously superior external groups to learn from if one is not to fall behind. Instead, they see a more-or-less flat floor of outcomes with a huge amount of outdated rules that are visibly being broken to the pleasure and advantage of the rulebreakers. Cultural norms around how to get the most visible pleasure spread like wildfire, and there are clear reasons given for why the old ways are outdated. Nothing immediately and unignorably bad happens to the people who adopt these practices, so the change keeps spreading. Debt, drugs, sexual liberation, obsessive hobbies, and so on.
Meanwhile, a massive proportion of cultural practices are exported as part of a social-political program by the cultured urban elite. These have some basis in people’s preferences, but their spread is almost totally disconnected from these preferences, and is instead based in political maneuvering within this class. It’s effectively fashionable beliefs.
And finally, and most critically, most of the bad outcomes from these practices only manifest on a multigenerational basis. The fertility crisis will only really come to a head as the older people keeping the lights on retire or lose the capacity to handle their work. A life of solitude or sexual misconduct only really comes calling when you get old with no younger family to take care of you. Unproductive behavior only starts incurring costs when it spreads so far that bare minimum upkeep becomes infeasible and the pre-existing infrastructure crumbles - like an ill-cared-for house.
So my analysis would be, at this very moment we are coming down the tail end of a very unrepresentative and culturally dysgenic era. The selective pressures were encouraging bad behavior for around sixty years, and have incurred some major costs. Some of those bills are already coming for repayment, and the younger generations are starting to flail around for superior cultural practices. Some will likely not come fully due for decades to come, and will cause their own crises. But there is some intelligence behind this, and it can be directed. People are already trying to direct it. The problem is just that the outcomes we need to see are another sixty years away. So until then, the best we can do is proceed with discernment, wisdom, and most of all, faith.
I’m going to ignore most of your comment, which I agree with and have nothing to add to, and focus on the part that deserves elaboration.
I’m a white collar worker, and a member of a specific skilled trade - namely, a programmer. And it is a craft, or trade, for what it’s worth. There’s a huge amount of trouble in learning to program the right way, where “right” goes from the seemingly-trivial “works without bugs” and “runs pretty quickly and cheaply” out to the trickier “can be easily maintained and extended” and “can be deployed without taking out double digit percentages of the world’s Windows servers.” That’s what I do, and what I aim to be good at. If I do my job right, nobody notices a thing, and their systems run as smoothly as sci-fi.
The reason I bring this up is to add some context on white-collar work and why what you say is so.
The biggest costs to cutting yourself out of white collar work are:
Going through these in turn.
White-collar work - the real stuff, not lesser clerical roles, usually called email jobs - is knowledge work. And that means your job involves a hell of a lot of learning and recitation. Obviously a skilled craftsman also needs to know his stuff, but the amount of specialist, company-specific, novel, or downright esoteric knowledge you are expected to have in a white-collar role is massive.
This is the table of contents for the Arch Linux wiki. Scroll up and down - pretty long list. Now note a little number in parentheses by most of those - this is the number of subpages aggregated under one of those keywords. And while Arch’s wiki is known to be pretty exceptional, it is not exhaustive of Linux knowledge, and Linux knowledge is not exhaustive of computer science or IT skills.
So dropping out of that world for a time means you will concretely be missing skills when you come back. The longer you’re gone, the worse it will be. In the best case you’re simply going to be making the same money as before you left. Worst-case, you’ll be making less. Some of this, in software, is honestly just dumb churn. I’ll admit to that. But it’s the
Moving on. Analyzing a white-collar worker on the merits, especially in a large (bureaucratic) organization, is challenging. It usually doesn’t have obvious and measurable parameters, and if it does, those are guaranteed to be gamed and inefficient elements will rise to the top. So your ability will be in no small part judged by superiors with good reputations. Is this potentially cliquey? Can it keep good workers who are bad at networking down? Hell yes. But it’s roughly the best of a bad set of options. So if you drop out, you have to spend X amount of time proving yourself when you get back and giving some concrete evidence that your superiors can use to support you when you’ve won their trust.
Lastly, and this is probably the most important. Learning to be really good at a trade takes a lot of time and focus. You need talent, and then you need to put effort into it daily. This is doubly true for anything with poor feedback cycles, and the feedback cycles in white-collar work are typically slow and lossy. There’s a long, long way from the choices I make to my company’s revenue, and so telling the difference from a good solution and a bad will take some abstract reasoning and really good evidence. This usually boils down to time in the industry deeply engaged. And if you want to rise above a certain position, this effort and growth is required. On top of that, the vaunted “soft skills” are indeed quite important, since your average white-collar worker is navigating a human-dense and political environment. Dealing with them effectively is just another part of the job, and you only get better at it with time.
I’m aware none of this really undermines your central point. In fact, in a sense I’m supporting it. None of these points are actually fun things about white-collar work, at least the high-skill variants. And the low-skill variants aren’t much different, they just tune down all the knowledge about real things in favor of trends and politics. But the problem of returning to work isn’t just getting past the HR screen, and I wanted to convey a little about my own vocation.
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