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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   35016 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of April 3, 2023

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Thanks for this reply. I started to compose a response that basically argued that "ackshually, feels > reals". Basically, I was going to say that governments need cater to people's fallacy-addled appraisals of their life circumstances instead of the objective reality of those circumstances, because the way that people feel is what actually determines how they act (although, to be fair, any policy that affects one is very likely also to affect the other, so even by optimizing for "feels", "reals" would sometimes incidentally improve). Thus I was going to say that things like murders--being very potent insults to people's felt reality--are more important than things like air pollution. I was going to argue that despite vast improvements in material conditions, people are today either no happier or perhaps much less happy than they were 70 years ago, so it seems like as a society we've been optimizing for the wrong things.

But I realized that that response is garbage for at least one major reason, and possibly many others. The one major reason is that such a reply is a full-throated, shouting endorsement of a lot of "woke" claims that I strongly deny. As such it represents a very deep contradiction that encroaches into my foundational beliefs, so I'll need to do some thinking on that.

I appreciate your open-minded and transparent response!

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