mdurak
9mo ago
Ah, given your repeated emphasis on how democrats need to apologize, I interpreted you as meaning they stole that one too
mdurak
9mo ago
I see. Thank you for the informative discussion! I have much to research now
mdurak
9mo ago
You mean this case where the investigation found no wrongdoing? Or do you think the FBI are in on it too?
mdurak
9mo ago
It is actually surprisingly hard to create an ideology that is not esoteric in this way
It would appear so, by this definition. Why do you emphasize “esoteric” traditions, then, rather than just traditions if nearly all of them will involve some amount of jargon or deeper meaning?
Stole it from a Naturalist who stole them from Quine. The criteria are staples of epistemology that all have theories of truth constructed around them, I just use my own words here but there's many reformulations of them.
I see. What are the usual ways of referring to these criteria? Searching for epistemological coherence, for example, leads me to the coherentism versus foundationalism debate, which doesn’t quite appear to be what you were mentioning with coherence as a desirable property of all models.
mdurak
9mo ago
And the problem is that ordering those insights into a coherent framework only does one thing: it creates a new esoteric tradition.
Interesting. What do you consider an “esoteric tradition”?
And the more a model follows the following criteria, the better it is:
How did you come up with this list of four criteria? As far as I can tell, they don’t appear to be a standardized part of the field of conceptual modeling.
Thanks for the continued book recommendations. I have started on Maps of Meaning, and intend to visit the other ones you mention about traditionalism and social cycles as well.
mdurak
9mo ago
Maps of Meaning looks very promising. I will give that a read, thank you for the recommendation.
The problem here is that the sort of insight that I'm calling for here represents precisely the sort of knowledge that spiritual traditions such as religions and esoteric orders exist to preserve.
See, I’m skeptical that delving into the specific rituals of different arcane traditions, which often contain conflicting rules anyways, will give me much wisdom. What I want are the insights, not the surface level admonishments you mention. I can learn that Jews have their holy day on Saturday, Christians on Sunday, and Muslims on Friday without ever realizing that the point of all this is that
The invocation of the divine and the standardization that goes with it allows all of society to gather around a stable game theoretic equilibrium where not engaging in rest can be punished without discouraging dilligence in general
But how do I learn the actual wisdom latent in such traditions when no esoteric ancient text will explicitly come out and say something like, “We taboo this behavior in order to maintain its signaling value”? Instead, they always put forth some silly reason for it (“It is immoral to desecrate the body your parents gave you!”) that is easily dissolved by postmodernism due to its arbitrariness.
That’s what I’m interested in learning more about. Not about whether or not this or that culture banned cutting hair, but about why there was such a continual need for signaling through different forms across different ages, and about what exactly it is we’ve lost with the breakdown in meaning. About the need for Schelling points of rest, and what we lose out on when those Schelling points are commercialized or weakened. And about any other traditional phenomena that have much richer reasons behind them than their surface level justifications would imply.
But what even is this subject? I don’t know how to even Google for it.
But this goes back to one of my original points, traditionalism is not a more radical conservatism, it is in fact palingenetic and interested in rebirth.
I have not heard of traditionalism as a separate political concept from conservatism. Is there a coherent narrative for how this rebirth is supposed to happen? I don’t believe I see much of that in the modern American political discourse; MAGA certainly doesn’t appear to me to have much more vision beyond “Tariff China to bring back American manufacturing!” or “Fire Deep State bureaucrats who are standing in the way of change!” (My neoliberal bias may be showing.)
This is almost too vast a topic for me to approach. The general issue of codified dress is already quite vast but gender roles and their implications dwarfs it.
Sorry, I only brought it up as an example of one case where we appeared to have loosened our grip on a form of expression without any seemingly deleterious effects. With so many different taboos, any single one appears rather redundant, no? Why a ban on both women wearing pants, and tattoos, instead of just one?
mdurak
9mo ago
I have encountered perennialism, but in the context of woo spirituality and religion. What makes your thesis interesting is that you apply it to social norms and taboos, which I have not seen before. Is there a handy name for this argument, or are there any readings you recommend on it?
The implications of destroying traditions that we, by construction, do not rationally understand, are unclear and can range from entirely inconsequential to catastrophic.
And yet, in adapting to an increasingly rapidly changing world, we have no choice but to remove some of the fences which we have lost all original documentation for. Japan was able to modernize with its Meiji restoration, but Qing dynasty China clung on to its traditions either too hard or in the wrong ways. How can a proper debate about tradition take place when we don’t even understand the purpose of tradition, and yet find ourselves needing to choose some to give up because what we have right now isn’t working out?
Positivism has totally failed even in its mildest incarnations, so now all that is left is raw post-modern games of power.
What was there before, but power games dressed up in the garb of religion or ideology? What difference does it make whether these power games are dressed up or raw?
I’ve not read Durkheim, so I don’t see how his book on different reasons for suicide plays into this.
But consider the advantages of doing this to yourself if you are about that rebel life
I had not considered them, and that is eye opening. The bourgeois framing, whether in support of or against tattoos, is all I’ve known. I want more of this eye-openingness, but don’t know how to ask for it or where to find it.
The former are the staple of traditional institutions, whose phenomenal goal is to compress as much meaning as possible into anodyne symbolism.
What are traditional institutions, the family and the church? What meaning are they compressing other than continually hammering on the same theme of “These are what honest upstanding citizens look like versus no-gooders?”
In the old days in the US, women wearing pants were controversial. In terms of meaning, that particular requirement seems rather redundant even for its time, what with all the other norms needed to remain in good standing with polite society. I don’t see how retaining a no-female-trousers norm would’ve helped save the comprehensibility of modern society, and nowadays the only places where there’s still institutional backing for such a norm are backwater states like Afghanistan.
mdurak
9mo ago
For an actual prisoner’s dilemma situation where I’m staring down years to decades in prison? Man, you have way more faith in the average American rando than me, because I’m defecting for sure. I would most likely defect on the friend too unless they were one of my closest, most trusted friends.
For a metaphorical one where the stakes are much lower and it’s much more likely to be an iterated prisoner’s dilemma? There’s no way I’m defecting first, even with the Haitian. I just don’t see any real life situations where the rewards are big enough that I could justify acting in such a petty manner. Can you think of any?
I see that you’ve edited your previous comment too, because I don’t think I read this paragraph when I last replied:
That the cultural mores change and the signals with them is not a failure of tradition. It is in fact how tradition works and how it is eternal, despite the specific instantiations of it being ephemeral.
This is an argument I have never heard before. I have only questions, as many as you’re willing to field, please:
- What information does society need to function that it can only obtain by the costly closing off of an entire avenue of expression? What disasters have occurred by the loss of these signals? (Sure, adult children are much more empowered to stand up to their parents these days, but in and of itself I don’t see that as a disaster despite how much it offends conservative sensibilities around familial loyalty.)
- How many avenues of expression need to be sacrificed for such information? How would we know that it is not enough/too much?
- By the atomization of life, I presume that you mean that individuals are isolated from each other instead of forming healthy communities. But how would closing off a form of expression help individuals connect? (Eg I have seen many strangers with tattoos get to first know each other by appreciating each other’s tattoos and the meaning behind them)
- Is the aforementioned atomization what you mean by “fungible shapeless good”? And when you say that traditional institutions must not reduce individuals to this, do you mean that they should not (but sometimes do), or that liberal values prevent them from doing so (and therefore it’s impossible for them to continue to exist)?
- What are some good previous discussions on the effects of sex segregated spaces on mental health?
I agree that the signals send important information. I would say that:
- It is the signaling, not body sanctity, that truly matters here
- The receivers don’t always infer the correct information from the signal. Perhaps once upon a time cutting your hair/getting a tattoo meant that you were a person of low morals and no respect for others, but nowadays the younger generation largely cuts their hair/tattoos their bodies to express themselves
- It is fair for those operating off of new signaling patterns to complain about those who haven’t updated to the latest communication protocols yet
- It is fair for those whose avenues of expression are unfairly closed off because society happened to converge on that avenue of expression as an important signaling game, to complain about the state of affairs. I would greatly sympathize with someone in Ancient China who strongly desired to cut their hair in spite of the silly signaling that their society imposed on that act. Y’all can find some other way of signaling familial loyalty, thank you very much.
mdurak
9mo ago
Ah, you meant the sidebar of Jaymans’s blog, not TheMotte. Great resources indeed.
Have there been previous Motte discussions on this topic that are particularly noteworthy?
mdurak
9mo ago
Thanks! What’s the sidebar? The closest thing I see in the drop-down are the rules.
What would a higher effort request for more information look like?
mdurak
9mo ago
THIRTY YEARS OF RESEARCH ON RACE DIFFERENCES IN COGNITIVE ABILITY is a pretty comprehensive survey (60 pages!) in favor of the hereditarian view on intelligence. I found it to be a good read.
However, it was published in 2005. Does anyone know the current status of that survey? Are its findings still up-to-date with our understanding of race and genetics, or have the evidence its based on since shown to be inaccurate?
Have there been other surveys of similar scope and comprehensiveness since then, whether for or against the hereditarian view?
mdurak
9mo ago
In that they do not hold their body's form to be sacred. Which itself is correlated to other things.
And what correlated negative moral judgments might that be?
Once upon a time in ancient China, it was forbidden to cut your hair because that would be violating the sanctity of the body your parents gave you. Obviously, we find this to be a rather silly judgment nowadays. In fact, conservative Chinese people these days look down upon long haired males.
mdurak
9mo ago
But really, even the most mild, inoffensive tattoos imaginable still provide information about the individual with them.
Yes, but isn’t it reasonable to complain when someone reads way too much into a mild and inoffensive tattoo?
mdurak
9mo ago
What is the point of all the navel gazing about what Eismann specifically said, if you're not going to change your mind about anything substantial then?
Not the person you’re responding to, but the entire discussion is pointless if its main outrageous premise turns out to be completely false. You’re not going to convince me on points 2 through 4 either, but if Eismann did in fact explicitly say he wants to inflict psychic harm, then we can have an interesting discussion about why such cartoonish levels of villainy are allowed to exist in society.
Instead, it appears that Eismann only talked about creating artistic disharmony, and then you equivocate artistic disharmony with psychic harm. The original question of “How is that possible?” is answered with “Because the scenario presented simply wasn’t true.”
mdurak
9mo ago
Generally speaking, your body’s “whims” are its way of telling you what’s missing. Granted, its need are adapted to an ancestral environment that no longer exists and therefore may be maladaptive, but I don’t see the point of this ubermenschian will to power. Does it make you feel good to run roughshod over your body’s desires?
mdurak
9mo ago
As someone who’s never interacted with people like that, would you care to give some concrete examples of common trashy behavior?
mdurak
9mo ago
The title is usually accurate
This does not appear to be the case, if you’re judging someone’s moral character based on the mere presence of tattoos.
mdurak
9mo ago
Person B’s answer is worse than useless; if taken seriously you would probably come to a conclusion further from the truth than Person A’s answer.
Huh, that’s a good point. Thanks, you’ve changed my perspective on this.
mdurak
9mo ago
I interpreted “under control” of the government as “forcefully.” How else would the government bring something under its control?
I looked up the Cathedral. Interesting idea, but how does “the regime” (by this do they mean Democrats specifically, or the federal government regardless of who holds the executive?) select for an academia and journalism that reinforces regime viewpoints as opposed to viewpoints that increase the power of academia/journalism (the “dominant” ideas)? I don’t see how the mentioned examples of race war or tolerating crime are dominant ideas for the regime — if anything, you’d expect a “regime” to tamp down on internal conflict and use a crackdown on crime as an excuse to expand internal security forces.
Then aren’t we all going to simply choose to believe what we’re going to believe?
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