How People Get Socially Conditioned
On Mar 28, 2019, at 5:50 PM, Elliot Temple <[email protected]> wrote:
> How can someone be as dishonest, evasive, and socially manipulative as Kate? And as unaware of what she’s doing as Kate is? It seems kinda strange and implausible, yet actually it’s very common. I think over 99% of females are like that and over 95% of males. (Numbers are very loose but I do think there is a significant gender gap. At least in the West. Maybe e.g. Muslim females being so oppressed changes things in their culture. I’m not familiar enough with that.)
>
> Here’s what happens:
>
> Kate goes to school. Imagine around 1st grade (6-7 years old). People socialize. Kate finds when she behaves in some ways she’s mocked, embarrassed, harassed, disliked, not invited to play, left out, etc. When she behaves in other ways, people tell her secrets, seek her out, want her attention, look up to her, follow her lead, listen to her ideas, and so on. This is *social status* but she doesn’t know the term. She just knows some of her actions get good results and others get bad results. She sees the consequences.
>
> Sometimes it’s pretty hard to connect an action – like wearing a particular piece of clothing – with a result like gaining or losing social status. Over the years, with many examples, Kate gets better at understanding how to behave when dealing with people, both in the more straightforward cases (like don’t say things that get immediate, overt negative reactions) and in much more subtle cases.
>
> Kate forms habits. She doesn’t know, conceptually, what all the social rules are. Her concepts and explanations are vague, incomplete and inaccurate. She keeps trying out different behavior and doing more of what works. She does a lot of learning by trial and error. Lots of her knowledge is fragile: she knows X works and Y doesn’t work, but she doesn’t know why, so trying out Z is risky (it’s hard for her to predict if Z would work or fail). This leads to living conservatively: being risk adverse, being bland and focusing on fitting in. Only a minority are skilled enough, or willing to risk downsides enough, that they can take the lead on new behaviors, innovate and be trend setters. Most people aren’t leaders because they don’t want to risk an error and they are having a hard enough time just trying to do OK and not suffer too much.
>
> Kate doesn’t just learn from her own trials and errors. She spends a lot of her life observing other people and trying to understand what they are doing, and whether it gains or loses social status. It’s safer to be the second person to do something, after seeing if the first person gets viewed positively or negatively. It’s even safer to wait for 25-75% of people to do it before joining in. And note that the vast majority of all possible changes are errors.
>
> So Kate ends up with habits based on rules of thumb and based on partial, vague explanations. And the years go by and she doesn’t remember most of the evidence she used to create her habits. It’s just how she lives now. It feels natural to her. It’s automatic and intuitive.
>
> Her habits are highly adapted and hard to change. They're social conditioning. They're static memes. They're entrenched. They're irrational. She has very little ability to introspect about them *and doesn’t want to*. Introspecting about her habits is dangerous. During childhood she tried, thousands of times, to introspect and understand herself and improve herself. And she got punished for it most of the time. When she tried to use reason to improve things, the results were painful – over and over and over. She learned it’s better to just accept nonsense, and it’s harder to follow it if you try to rationally analyze it. It’s better if you have intuitive habits instead of second-guessing yourself. It’s better if you only have one voice in your head – the voice of social conditioning – which you follow enthusiastically, rather than if you have a second voice confusing you and giving contrary advice.
>
> To deal with the pain of rejecting reason, child-Kate rationalized her worldview. She came up with excuses to help her feel OK with not questioning her habits and approach to life. This was a defense against suffering which merits sympathy. That’s not the only thing that was going on and she’s wasn’t just an innocent victim, but it’s a substantial part of what happens. Kids do have lots of innocence and are victims in big ways. Now she’s hostile to introspection, examining her life, and so on. She’s attached to her long-held reasons for avoiding that and has convinced herself that *not* thinking is more rational and makes more sense.
>
> Remember, again, that this is the story of approximately everyone. And, btw, scarily, most of the exceptions are now called “autistic” or “diagnosed” with another “mental illness”, and experts (in conformity and conventionality, called psychiatrists and psychologists) are brought in to make them conform. If someone’s parents, peers, priests, teachers and culture (Facebook, TV, magazines, instagram, twitter, etc.) aren't enough to make a child conform, the war against the individual child will usually be escalated. First the parents usually try to escalate by themselves: they get stricter, read books with advice, etc. If that doesn’t work, a *lot* of parents will now get “experts” involved. (And even if parents don't want “experts” or drugs involved, often a teacher will push for it, often successfully.) And the support for “expert” meddling in the raising of children has been trending upward. It wasn’t that long ago that parents expected far more control over their children and teachers played a much smaller role, and now government teachers do a massive part of raising most children and psychiatrists and psychologists are doing more and more too.
>
> This is how Kate can write a very dishonest reply, which is carefully designed to have a misleading framing and to apply social pressure to other people in the conversation. And she doesn’t realize what she’s doing. She learned how in childhood and it’s all automatic now. She lost conscious control over most of her actions long ago. And her stories about what kind of person she is have been highly inaccurate for many years.
>
> Her posts clearly have *design* in them. It’s not random error. And it’s not just confusion or screwing up. She has and uses *skill* at being manipulative. It’s highly adapted to the purpose of social status competitions. Many examples of the social status competition design have been discussed in other posts so I won’t go into those details here.
>
> One could fill in the details of the story with particular times particular individuals or groups said particular mean things to Kate during her childhood. And times they frowned. And times they were friendly but slightly less friendly than Kate would have preferred. And times they smiled and were more friendly than Kate expected and she liked it (friendly in a specific way or ways). The point is the exact details always exist. While I speak in high level generalities, it all boils down to individual events in a person’s life experienced from their first-hand perspective (through their eyes, not through the eyes of an observer. When we read books or tell stories, normally it’s from the perspective of an imaginary narrator and the book includes information that the main character doesn’t have at the time. So we’re used to that. But in our personal lives everything has to get in through our senses somehow. If someone else observed something relevant, it only affects us if they tell us, or they tell someone who tells us, or they behave differently and we notice, etc.)
>
> This is everyone’s life and it’s so sad. Most people hide it more than Kate by means of staying away from people capable of seeing what’s going on and analyzing it. Kate has, for whatever unusual reasons, spent years giving more info and examples about her irrationality (by actually doing it, not by sharing examples) without leaving even though she hasn’t been making progress. (She made some progress early on which impressed her, but then she ran into some parts that were hard for her, got stuck, and has stayed stuck and become very dishonest about her situation. BTW it’s somewhat common for people to make some progress initially until they reach some part that is hard for them and then get stuck. That’s the standard pattern for people who make any progress at all. But people usually leave much sooner after getting stuck.)
Social rules are *needed* to govern how people interact with each other. We have a government with laws for dealing with violence. Within that context, it’s very important that people be able to interact with each other in a reasonably smooth, cooperative, coordinated way. This is what politeness norms help with – they help prevent people from getting offended, they help prevent touchy people from being triggered and wanting to defend their honor, and so on. Polite interactions are interactions that everyone can accept, which can be worth the effort of being polite.
People have improved morally. Today if you insult someone in America, they’ll probably just walk away instead of wanting to escalate a conflict. Being polite is much less needed than before, and people have noticed. Society has gotten so orderly, and people so friendly and peaceful and forgiving and tolerant, that people can violate some politeness norms without creating disasters. Some people push or pass the limits on this, which is unwise even if they are doing it in the name of “reason” (they think they’re smarter than politeness norms).
A major factor, besides moral improvement, is people have become wealthier. People are more tolerant both because they have more to live for (a nice life they don’t want to risk in a conflict over something minor) and because they aren’t anywhere near the edge of survival – they can lose out in small ways and it isn’t threatening to their life, they have resources to spare.
Politeness rules are very overt and ritualized compared to most social dynamics. The more subtle stuff still plays a large role in people’s lives. It has faded away less. Violations between strangers in public are typically ignored (people don’t like it, but they just leave). It’s a bigger deal with people you interact with repeatedly (schoolmates, family, coworkers, etc).
Anyway, social dynamics are, at the same time, useful and oppressive. This is typical. Bringing order to the chaotic default is good. But order is limiting and is not the only possible order that would work. Most possibilities are chaotic and bad, but there are other ones that would work if society were different, and there are even some that could work in current society if people didn’t actively suppress them.
If people interacted with each other randomly, it’d be chaotic. If people interacted with each other in the way they each individually thought made sense, it’d be chaotic *even if* most people were very smart. If people are trying to interact in two different ways, it generally won’t work even if either way would be fine. People need to understand what the other guy is doing and act in a compatible way.
People overestimate how much they communicate with others. They think they get along with others by communication (“communication” is the #1 tip for how to make a romantic relationship or marriage work). Actually people suck at communicating. They can communicate simple things (like which restaurant to meet at, and at what time). But most of the time people “communicate” primarily by referring to stuff the other guy already understands, not by explaining any significant new knowledge. In social interactions, people use the pre-existing shared knowledge that ~everyone has, rather than being able to actually communicate some alternative way of coordinating human interaction.
Since you can’t communicate much to other people – even with your spouse, over many years, that’s quite hard – they have to rely on traditions. Since I can’t tell you a new idea and be understood, I have to pick something our culture understands, that you already know, and refer to that. Social rules are valuable in this way even apart from the useful content of the rules. Having random social rules which everyone understands would create far more human coordination than no rules. The actual rules are useful both as widely known rules and because they have some decent ideas in them (and they have been adjusted over the centuries to remove some parts that people found especially oppressive).
Nevertheless, being a slave to social rules will prevent your life from mattering much. It makes it almost impossible to have big accomplishments, which is why “genius” is so rare. It’s incompatible with thinking outside the box, thinking rationally, and doing philosophical analysis.
Fortunately we live in a sufficiently open and tolerant society that you don’t have to interact with people a lot, and it’s pretty easy to get through many interactions without fighting even with only very minimal knowledge of social rules. (E.g. a highly rational non-conformist can still successfully deal with the social rules of how grocery stores work. Those rules are both pretty reasonable and also pretty simple. You don’t need to be a master social manipulator to interact with a grocery store cashier, to navigate the aisles without collisions with other people, etc. Note that avoiding collisions is not just a matter of going around obstacles that don’t move. It’s very helpful to communicate a little bit and have some understanding of whether the other person is going to move or wait for you to move.) But anyway the point is you can get by today with a fairly limited knowledge of social rules. But children are raised to be extremely indoctrinated in social rules, anyway, even though it’s not needed in adult life.
Yes, lots of jobs have “office politics” and social rules play a big role in dating and most roommates would be hard to live with if you aren’t socially skilled. But there are ways to navigate life without needing to conform so extremely well. There are options open. You can find “nerdy” roommates or never have a roommate. You can date someone who is less social. There are jobs where you work from home or do a lot of work alone. Not all jobs are very social, and you generally only need to find a few jobs in your life. Lots of people have fewer than ten different jobs.
Social rules are pushed on children far more than makes sense given the world situation today. Why? Blind, unthinking repetition of past behaviors. Static memes, social conditioning, unquestioning adherence to tradition, etc. The nasty things being done to children were done to their parents and their grand parents and their great grand parents – generally in even worse, harsher ways – and that’s why those parents and grandparents conformed. There is a recurring pattern where people’s spirits and rationality are broken during childhood, and they become social conformers who stop questioning it, and then they push that on their own children because it’s all they see in life anymore.
To have a better life, it’s important to get an understanding of social rules. Begin with a focus on learning what they are, not on changing or judging. You should need to know what you’re doing before you change a bunch of this stuff. Plus most people who try to change it just fool themselves – it takes a lot of skill to actually change in the ways you think you should.
As you learn about social rules, you can begin to analyze and evaluate them and move towards reaching some judgments about which are very dangerous to change, which are pretty easy and useful (like the social rules governing grocery store shopping), which are most dangerous to rapid, rational learning, which sabotage discussions, which cause dishonesty, etc. And you can start learning about what sort of changes do and don’t work, and why, and what it takes to actually make changes. And you can make small changes and do experiments. And eventually you can make big changes. (This advice is aimed at adults. It’s different for children who haven’t yet learned and automated so many social rules.)
But people in general don’t want to do this. They’d rather pretend to do it in order to gain “rationality” social status points. But they’d hate themselves if they introspected honestly and critically, and they’d hate all the time they wasted in the past, the sunk costs, the ways they already mistreated themselves and others that they can’t take back, and so on. They’ve committed to a socially conventional life in many huge ways. They’ve made big bets on that being the right way to live. They’d be, to some extent, starting over if they tried to change.
---
Kate, of course, is doing this (social conforming teaching) to her own kid, and has been doing it to her own kid for years, and has refused to ever engage with TCS much. We told her what would happen to her kid if she kept doing what she was doing and she chose to do it anyway. She just pretended to learn about Objectivism, and some other stuff, rather than actually deal with the problem. In the occasional thread where she actually discussed parenting, she got criticism and then didn’t want to think about the criticism or lose social status, so she dishonestly stopped discussing. (I have in mind, offhand, 2 examples relating to video games, neither of which were posted under the name “Kate”, so I won’t state them.) The bulk of Kate’s way of dealing with parenting philosophy has been *omission*, and focusing on other topics of lesser importance, rather than by doing it badly. When Kate first came here her kid was young enough to maybe have a chance, and it’s probably basically too late now unless Kate was one of the best people in the world, which she really isn’t (or if her kid was one of the most resilient kids in the world – some kids keep some of their reason in tact even with below average parents and below average life situations, so you never know when a kid might mentally survive, although it’s extremely rare).
Kate is not the only person here who has done this a lot. It’s much more common elsewhere. Most people leave FI rather than stick around at a forum which believes they are torturing their children, continuously for years, in order to make their children into irrational conformists. At first people just assume that’s an exaggeration or joke. But when they find out that philosophy says that kid are being *literally tortured*, and that they are torturers – when they find out we mean what we say and have extensive reasons they cannot answer – they usually just leave. Kate seems to have been able to stay longer due to being exceptionally dishonest.
Elliot Temple
www.curi.us
> How can someone be as dishonest, evasive, and socially manipulative as Kate? And as unaware of what she’s doing as Kate is? It seems kinda strange and implausible, yet actually it’s very common. I think over 99% of females are like that and over 95% of males. (Numbers are very loose but I do think there is a significant gender gap. At least in the West. Maybe e.g. Muslim females being so oppressed changes things in their culture. I’m not familiar enough with that.)
>
> Here’s what happens:
>
> Kate goes to school. Imagine around 1st grade (6-7 years old). People socialize. Kate finds when she behaves in some ways she’s mocked, embarrassed, harassed, disliked, not invited to play, left out, etc. When she behaves in other ways, people tell her secrets, seek her out, want her attention, look up to her, follow her lead, listen to her ideas, and so on. This is *social status* but she doesn’t know the term. She just knows some of her actions get good results and others get bad results. She sees the consequences.
>
> Sometimes it’s pretty hard to connect an action – like wearing a particular piece of clothing – with a result like gaining or losing social status. Over the years, with many examples, Kate gets better at understanding how to behave when dealing with people, both in the more straightforward cases (like don’t say things that get immediate, overt negative reactions) and in much more subtle cases.
>
> Kate forms habits. She doesn’t know, conceptually, what all the social rules are. Her concepts and explanations are vague, incomplete and inaccurate. She keeps trying out different behavior and doing more of what works. She does a lot of learning by trial and error. Lots of her knowledge is fragile: she knows X works and Y doesn’t work, but she doesn’t know why, so trying out Z is risky (it’s hard for her to predict if Z would work or fail). This leads to living conservatively: being risk adverse, being bland and focusing on fitting in. Only a minority are skilled enough, or willing to risk downsides enough, that they can take the lead on new behaviors, innovate and be trend setters. Most people aren’t leaders because they don’t want to risk an error and they are having a hard enough time just trying to do OK and not suffer too much.
>
> Kate doesn’t just learn from her own trials and errors. She spends a lot of her life observing other people and trying to understand what they are doing, and whether it gains or loses social status. It’s safer to be the second person to do something, after seeing if the first person gets viewed positively or negatively. It’s even safer to wait for 25-75% of people to do it before joining in. And note that the vast majority of all possible changes are errors.
>
> So Kate ends up with habits based on rules of thumb and based on partial, vague explanations. And the years go by and she doesn’t remember most of the evidence she used to create her habits. It’s just how she lives now. It feels natural to her. It’s automatic and intuitive.
>
> Her habits are highly adapted and hard to change. They're social conditioning. They're static memes. They're entrenched. They're irrational. She has very little ability to introspect about them *and doesn’t want to*. Introspecting about her habits is dangerous. During childhood she tried, thousands of times, to introspect and understand herself and improve herself. And she got punished for it most of the time. When she tried to use reason to improve things, the results were painful – over and over and over. She learned it’s better to just accept nonsense, and it’s harder to follow it if you try to rationally analyze it. It’s better if you have intuitive habits instead of second-guessing yourself. It’s better if you only have one voice in your head – the voice of social conditioning – which you follow enthusiastically, rather than if you have a second voice confusing you and giving contrary advice.
>
> To deal with the pain of rejecting reason, child-Kate rationalized her worldview. She came up with excuses to help her feel OK with not questioning her habits and approach to life. This was a defense against suffering which merits sympathy. That’s not the only thing that was going on and she’s wasn’t just an innocent victim, but it’s a substantial part of what happens. Kids do have lots of innocence and are victims in big ways. Now she’s hostile to introspection, examining her life, and so on. She’s attached to her long-held reasons for avoiding that and has convinced herself that *not* thinking is more rational and makes more sense.
>
> Remember, again, that this is the story of approximately everyone. And, btw, scarily, most of the exceptions are now called “autistic” or “diagnosed” with another “mental illness”, and experts (in conformity and conventionality, called psychiatrists and psychologists) are brought in to make them conform. If someone’s parents, peers, priests, teachers and culture (Facebook, TV, magazines, instagram, twitter, etc.) aren't enough to make a child conform, the war against the individual child will usually be escalated. First the parents usually try to escalate by themselves: they get stricter, read books with advice, etc. If that doesn’t work, a *lot* of parents will now get “experts” involved. (And even if parents don't want “experts” or drugs involved, often a teacher will push for it, often successfully.) And the support for “expert” meddling in the raising of children has been trending upward. It wasn’t that long ago that parents expected far more control over their children and teachers played a much smaller role, and now government teachers do a massive part of raising most children and psychiatrists and psychologists are doing more and more too.
>
> This is how Kate can write a very dishonest reply, which is carefully designed to have a misleading framing and to apply social pressure to other people in the conversation. And she doesn’t realize what she’s doing. She learned how in childhood and it’s all automatic now. She lost conscious control over most of her actions long ago. And her stories about what kind of person she is have been highly inaccurate for many years.
>
> Her posts clearly have *design* in them. It’s not random error. And it’s not just confusion or screwing up. She has and uses *skill* at being manipulative. It’s highly adapted to the purpose of social status competitions. Many examples of the social status competition design have been discussed in other posts so I won’t go into those details here.
>
> One could fill in the details of the story with particular times particular individuals or groups said particular mean things to Kate during her childhood. And times they frowned. And times they were friendly but slightly less friendly than Kate would have preferred. And times they smiled and were more friendly than Kate expected and she liked it (friendly in a specific way or ways). The point is the exact details always exist. While I speak in high level generalities, it all boils down to individual events in a person’s life experienced from their first-hand perspective (through their eyes, not through the eyes of an observer. When we read books or tell stories, normally it’s from the perspective of an imaginary narrator and the book includes information that the main character doesn’t have at the time. So we’re used to that. But in our personal lives everything has to get in through our senses somehow. If someone else observed something relevant, it only affects us if they tell us, or they tell someone who tells us, or they behave differently and we notice, etc.)
>
> This is everyone’s life and it’s so sad. Most people hide it more than Kate by means of staying away from people capable of seeing what’s going on and analyzing it. Kate has, for whatever unusual reasons, spent years giving more info and examples about her irrationality (by actually doing it, not by sharing examples) without leaving even though she hasn’t been making progress. (She made some progress early on which impressed her, but then she ran into some parts that were hard for her, got stuck, and has stayed stuck and become very dishonest about her situation. BTW it’s somewhat common for people to make some progress initially until they reach some part that is hard for them and then get stuck. That’s the standard pattern for people who make any progress at all. But people usually leave much sooner after getting stuck.)
Social rules are *needed* to govern how people interact with each other. We have a government with laws for dealing with violence. Within that context, it’s very important that people be able to interact with each other in a reasonably smooth, cooperative, coordinated way. This is what politeness norms help with – they help prevent people from getting offended, they help prevent touchy people from being triggered and wanting to defend their honor, and so on. Polite interactions are interactions that everyone can accept, which can be worth the effort of being polite.
People have improved morally. Today if you insult someone in America, they’ll probably just walk away instead of wanting to escalate a conflict. Being polite is much less needed than before, and people have noticed. Society has gotten so orderly, and people so friendly and peaceful and forgiving and tolerant, that people can violate some politeness norms without creating disasters. Some people push or pass the limits on this, which is unwise even if they are doing it in the name of “reason” (they think they’re smarter than politeness norms).
A major factor, besides moral improvement, is people have become wealthier. People are more tolerant both because they have more to live for (a nice life they don’t want to risk in a conflict over something minor) and because they aren’t anywhere near the edge of survival – they can lose out in small ways and it isn’t threatening to their life, they have resources to spare.
Politeness rules are very overt and ritualized compared to most social dynamics. The more subtle stuff still plays a large role in people’s lives. It has faded away less. Violations between strangers in public are typically ignored (people don’t like it, but they just leave). It’s a bigger deal with people you interact with repeatedly (schoolmates, family, coworkers, etc).
Anyway, social dynamics are, at the same time, useful and oppressive. This is typical. Bringing order to the chaotic default is good. But order is limiting and is not the only possible order that would work. Most possibilities are chaotic and bad, but there are other ones that would work if society were different, and there are even some that could work in current society if people didn’t actively suppress them.
If people interacted with each other randomly, it’d be chaotic. If people interacted with each other in the way they each individually thought made sense, it’d be chaotic *even if* most people were very smart. If people are trying to interact in two different ways, it generally won’t work even if either way would be fine. People need to understand what the other guy is doing and act in a compatible way.
People overestimate how much they communicate with others. They think they get along with others by communication (“communication” is the #1 tip for how to make a romantic relationship or marriage work). Actually people suck at communicating. They can communicate simple things (like which restaurant to meet at, and at what time). But most of the time people “communicate” primarily by referring to stuff the other guy already understands, not by explaining any significant new knowledge. In social interactions, people use the pre-existing shared knowledge that ~everyone has, rather than being able to actually communicate some alternative way of coordinating human interaction.
Since you can’t communicate much to other people – even with your spouse, over many years, that’s quite hard – they have to rely on traditions. Since I can’t tell you a new idea and be understood, I have to pick something our culture understands, that you already know, and refer to that. Social rules are valuable in this way even apart from the useful content of the rules. Having random social rules which everyone understands would create far more human coordination than no rules. The actual rules are useful both as widely known rules and because they have some decent ideas in them (and they have been adjusted over the centuries to remove some parts that people found especially oppressive).
Nevertheless, being a slave to social rules will prevent your life from mattering much. It makes it almost impossible to have big accomplishments, which is why “genius” is so rare. It’s incompatible with thinking outside the box, thinking rationally, and doing philosophical analysis.
Fortunately we live in a sufficiently open and tolerant society that you don’t have to interact with people a lot, and it’s pretty easy to get through many interactions without fighting even with only very minimal knowledge of social rules. (E.g. a highly rational non-conformist can still successfully deal with the social rules of how grocery stores work. Those rules are both pretty reasonable and also pretty simple. You don’t need to be a master social manipulator to interact with a grocery store cashier, to navigate the aisles without collisions with other people, etc. Note that avoiding collisions is not just a matter of going around obstacles that don’t move. It’s very helpful to communicate a little bit and have some understanding of whether the other person is going to move or wait for you to move.) But anyway the point is you can get by today with a fairly limited knowledge of social rules. But children are raised to be extremely indoctrinated in social rules, anyway, even though it’s not needed in adult life.
Yes, lots of jobs have “office politics” and social rules play a big role in dating and most roommates would be hard to live with if you aren’t socially skilled. But there are ways to navigate life without needing to conform so extremely well. There are options open. You can find “nerdy” roommates or never have a roommate. You can date someone who is less social. There are jobs where you work from home or do a lot of work alone. Not all jobs are very social, and you generally only need to find a few jobs in your life. Lots of people have fewer than ten different jobs.
Social rules are pushed on children far more than makes sense given the world situation today. Why? Blind, unthinking repetition of past behaviors. Static memes, social conditioning, unquestioning adherence to tradition, etc. The nasty things being done to children were done to their parents and their grand parents and their great grand parents – generally in even worse, harsher ways – and that’s why those parents and grandparents conformed. There is a recurring pattern where people’s spirits and rationality are broken during childhood, and they become social conformers who stop questioning it, and then they push that on their own children because it’s all they see in life anymore.
To have a better life, it’s important to get an understanding of social rules. Begin with a focus on learning what they are, not on changing or judging. You should need to know what you’re doing before you change a bunch of this stuff. Plus most people who try to change it just fool themselves – it takes a lot of skill to actually change in the ways you think you should.
As you learn about social rules, you can begin to analyze and evaluate them and move towards reaching some judgments about which are very dangerous to change, which are pretty easy and useful (like the social rules governing grocery store shopping), which are most dangerous to rapid, rational learning, which sabotage discussions, which cause dishonesty, etc. And you can start learning about what sort of changes do and don’t work, and why, and what it takes to actually make changes. And you can make small changes and do experiments. And eventually you can make big changes. (This advice is aimed at adults. It’s different for children who haven’t yet learned and automated so many social rules.)
But people in general don’t want to do this. They’d rather pretend to do it in order to gain “rationality” social status points. But they’d hate themselves if they introspected honestly and critically, and they’d hate all the time they wasted in the past, the sunk costs, the ways they already mistreated themselves and others that they can’t take back, and so on. They’ve committed to a socially conventional life in many huge ways. They’ve made big bets on that being the right way to live. They’d be, to some extent, starting over if they tried to change.
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Kate, of course, is doing this (social conforming teaching) to her own kid, and has been doing it to her own kid for years, and has refused to ever engage with TCS much. We told her what would happen to her kid if she kept doing what she was doing and she chose to do it anyway. She just pretended to learn about Objectivism, and some other stuff, rather than actually deal with the problem. In the occasional thread where she actually discussed parenting, she got criticism and then didn’t want to think about the criticism or lose social status, so she dishonestly stopped discussing. (I have in mind, offhand, 2 examples relating to video games, neither of which were posted under the name “Kate”, so I won’t state them.) The bulk of Kate’s way of dealing with parenting philosophy has been *omission*, and focusing on other topics of lesser importance, rather than by doing it badly. When Kate first came here her kid was young enough to maybe have a chance, and it’s probably basically too late now unless Kate was one of the best people in the world, which she really isn’t (or if her kid was one of the most resilient kids in the world – some kids keep some of their reason in tact even with below average parents and below average life situations, so you never know when a kid might mentally survive, although it’s extremely rare).
Kate is not the only person here who has done this a lot. It’s much more common elsewhere. Most people leave FI rather than stick around at a forum which believes they are torturing their children, continuously for years, in order to make their children into irrational conformists. At first people just assume that’s an exaggeration or joke. But when they find out that philosophy says that kid are being *literally tortured*, and that they are torturers – when they find out we mean what we say and have extensive reasons they cannot answer – they usually just leave. Kate seems to have been able to stay longer due to being exceptionally dishonest.
Elliot Temple
www.curi.us