35 Comments

What could be more inner-directed than "authentic" behavior, which RH analyzes as a compromise formation born of status-seeking and regularity-seeking (which serves affiliation).

I think folks who are governed by either status drives or affiliation drives (exclusive of the other) are perceived as other-directed. Those who appear autonomous gain that appearance because their affiliation and status drives conflict.

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I was talking about artificial alignments in fashion, not artificial alignments in general.

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So, if governments "try to change the trend, with a defined goal in sight" we shouldn't bother discussing it?

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Artificial is when people consciously try to change the trend, with a defined goal in sight. Non-artificial is just viral effects competing for consensus with the end result usually being some sort of unspoken compromis that's different from what any of the participants had in mind. Low-hanging pants might be an example of the latter.

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What's the difference between artificial and non-artificial alignments?

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Fashion taste has been artificially realigned by making fur a taboo (of course wearing fur was also an artificial realignment of an earlier fashion). But on the whole it's not like there is much to be gained through further artificial realignments, so why bother discussing that in detail?

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I'm surprised you don't mention fashion. How does, fashion in clothes, art, lit., etc., affect taste and how does taste affect fashion? I don't understand what "belief accuracy" or efficiency has to do with taste since tastes change.

Hitler initiated a group of art shows deriding "modernism" called Entartatete Kunst, degenerate art. If Picasso is bad taste because Hitler, an artist himself, thought so is it belief accuracy and efficient to have similar taste? For a time it was okay but Hitler lost so now it's not okay. Picasso is good taste.

The winners thought Dada is good taste. So, Jeff Koons sells for $50 million and Jamie Wyeth might sell for $100,000.

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People seem to vary considerably in the extent to which they form their beliefs and tastes "according to which things seem high status, make us look good, are endorsed by our community, etc." At one extreme are the almost exclusively "other-directed" types; at the other extreme are "individualists" (in Mill's sense), such as . . . Robin Hanson. Your theorizing about this topic fits the other-directed people much better than it fits those of your own type.

By the way, forming beliefs in this other-directed fashion is objectionable in a way that the similar formation of tastes is not. Beliefs are *supposed to* be formed rationally, on the basis of evidence, and ideally they will be *true*; there is no such objective standard for assessing the formation of tastes, or the tastes themselves. (This point would be easy to overstate; still, there *is* a contrast.)

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How can something common seem high status? It can't.

What would be required is taking the status out of possessions--as would occur in an egalitarian society.

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"why not encourage a taste for common products, instead of for massive product variety?"

You answer that question in the last sentence of the previous product "it seems that we are designed to acquire tastes according to which things seem high status".

How can something common seem high status? It can't. Acquiring expensive goods, or even expensive tastes (such as developing an affinity for a musical genre that takes 'work' to appreciate) signals you've got resources to spare. Anyone can afford cheap crap and understand/consume low-brow culture. There's no status/signaling value in having easy or common tastes.

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How does cryonics "fit the bill" as a secular religion? It does not. Religions emphasize belief, certainty, authority, paradise, and so on -- in the complete absence of any evidence. None of this is true of cryonics.

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You've picked two examples where the part that can be influenced arguably doesn't have big effects, but that's a very weak argument that few shared-environment taste has big effects. Expensive versus cheap hobbies (or expensive versus cheap food, etc.) are probably extremely dependent on shared environment.

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low-religiosity societies have actually substituted 'secular religions

I don't much doubt that secular religions exist, since cryonics and singularitism seem to fit the bill.

But the existence of secular religions doesn't justify gwern's conclusion, "You can affect Catholic vs Protestant, but why would anyone care about being able to change surface dressing like that? Certainly it does not yield 'big gains...in happiness'."

The difference between a Swedish atheist and a Saudi Salafist is hard to describe as "surface dressing" and as being irrelevant to happiness. [If gwern needs a tighter argument, does it not matter to "happiness" if a religion promotes suicide to gain salvation?]

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where are the shared-environmental estimates consistent with TV having any meaningful impact?

Hard evidence for the effects of tv isn't hard to find. On "viciousness": "Our data suggest that there is indeed a strong and stable relationship between television-viewing and patterns of aggressive behavior in preschool children." ( http://tinyurl.com/lzyknqy )

I haven't reviewed the evidence of late, but it's not like the issue has been ignored empirically.

[Let me suggest that the reason people want to believe tv has harmful effects (which isn't to judge the net effect) is that it's completely obvious.]

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OK, I changed the word "happiness" to "efficiency" in the last paragraph, as that gets more clearly at what I have in mind. These changes can have some effects on happiness, but I'm mainly focused on other effects.

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The obvious response is that low-religiosity societies have actually substituted 'secular religions,' i.e. belief complexes that aren't literally about gods but fulfill similar roles in their believers' lives. I despair of ever measuring this objectively.

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