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Culture War Roundup for the week of June 26, 2023

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I think "learning", "becoming" and "education" are describing a directed process in which the subject is an active participant, which make them therefore distinct concepts from the other terms, which portray the subject as weak and impressionable for falling victim to it. This may just be a matter of emphasis (or even a Russell conjugation). I take your point.

I can see the connotation you're pointing at but I don't think it alone makes for a fine line that really cleaves reality at the joints. You can 'just say no' to drugs in the prototypical peer pressure case. Doing a cigarette with your friends requires you to take the cigarette and ask your friend how you smoke it. (Or watch and learn.) You can't always 'just say no' to education. Most children end up in school whether they want to be or not. So Peer Pressure is also Learning, Education is also Indoctrination.

I think the affect is actually doing a lot more work than that. 'Kids are smoking cigarettes because of peer pressure' is literal, but you wouldn't say 'education is indoctrination' unless you're being edgy, because the affect is also shorthand. In this case a shorthand for- 'we shouldn't let kids smoke cigarettes but they are, and its spreading.'

I think how we use affect in 2 dimensional ways really can be quite important, because its holding information. In order to figure out whether we should let kids smoke you have to think about a whole bunch of questions. "Is the person wise enough to discern the good from the bad? Are they being exploited? Will this actually help them? Is this actually necessary to society? Will they retroactively endorse it after they're done? Does the fact that they want to do it matter?"

But you don't need to do all that math every time smoking comes up, you can cache the optimal policy result dynamic programming style as a single affect bit. Letting kids smoke=bad.

And this saves a ton of processing power.

... I feel like I've dipped a toe into a whole other world of implications just now, where thinking through your beliefs can be a cost and asking you to examine your beliefs can be enemy action. It's a tangential insight that just occurred to me that I need to think about so I don't want to go off on it but... this model feels like it sticks to a lot of things that happen in human culture war.