not so opposite after all

[Elliot Temple]

Most people who do "friends with benefits" or casual sex later get married.

But they don't change their mind. They say things like, "When I was 25, I was at one place in my life. Now that I'm 30, I'm at different place in my life."

They're right. Same values, same principles, same life policies, different situation.

It's like how someone doesn't want to have kids (now) when he's 25, but then when he's 30 he wants them at that time. He didn't change his mind, his situation changed.

Some people don't get to another place in regards to some issue. Some never want kids. Some never want to marry. This still doesn't mean they have different ideas, values, principles, etc, than the people who do end up getting married. Anyone who does marry would not have married if they'd had the wrong situations all their lives. People want to get married if the find certain sorts of opportunities which they don't necessarily find (they usually do, but sometimes some other stuff gets in the way).

What is the point? It's all connected. The people who define (part of) themselves by their marriage, their lack of marriage, their being married at one age and unmarried at another age ... it's all essentially the same thing. It's all the same memes, all the same problem situation.

What questions and problems you care about can define you more than your (current) answers to them. Especially when they are issues for which people commonly "change sides" as their situation changes (but it's not really even a change of sides).

Another example is those atheists who attach great importance to denying the Christian god exists, attach great importance to not going to church, attach great importance to how much more smart and rational they are than theists in particular (due to their claimed lead on one single issue, which they mistakenly regard as more defining than it is).

Another example is all those people who say, at age 20, that profanity is awesome, and more. Rage against the machine, fight the power, fuck the police. Fuck the rules, we're not going to be little conformists in neat little boxes. We're going to symbolically break a few superficial customs like not swearing!!! Then at age 30, those same people avoid swearing in front of their kids, tell the kids not to swear, watch "family friendly" G movies, and put parental controls on the computer. Apparently they changed their mind. But they really didn't. It's just different manifestations for different situations of the same meme.

There was never any time where they learned why swearing is bad and being a conformist prude is good. They never learned a new argument. People who changed from casual sex to marriage never learned a new argument. They didn't discover some key point they hadn't known. If you asked them why they changed their mind, they can't tell you a good intellectual reason their old position is false and new one is true. The reason they can't do that is it never happened. They never changed their mind in any rational or intellectual sense. Some superficially contrary ideas are part of the same thing.

-- Elliot Temple
http://elliottemple.com/

[Rami Rustom]

Is this another example?

In sexist societies, men are possessive of women (and children) and
women want those possessive behaviors from men. I think a young boy
and girl growing up in a society like this and sees the behavior of
their dad to their mom are learning the same meme when they are young,
and then they use this meme and apply it differently in adulthood
(since they fill different roles, i.e. they are in different
situations) and so the man wants to be possessive and the women wants
men to be possessive of her.

Maybe the memes they learn are a mostly different. In sexist
societies, fathers are possessive of their children, but they do treat
boys differently then girls, e.g. girls will be required to do
traditional wife activities like cleaning while boys will be required
to do traditional husband activities like going with dad to change the
tire on their car. (Also, in some families girls are required to take
orders from their brothers.)

This is the traditional master/slave relationship. I think that the
male/master meme and the female/slave meme are mostly separate, and
the separate parts are symbiotic (meaning they evolved symbiotically).

So what do you think? Is there any part of these memes (the
male/master meme and the female/slave meme) that are identical (shared
between them)?

-- Rami

[Elliot Temple]

On Feb 16, 2013, at 6:31 AM, Rami Rustom <rom...@gmail.com> wrote:

> On Feb 15, 2013 10:10 PM, "Elliot Temple" <cu...@curi.us> wrote:
>>
>> Most people who do "friends with benefits" or casual sex later get married.
>>
>> But they don't change their mind. They say things like, "When I was 25, I was at one place in my life. Now that I'm 30, I'm at different place in my life."
>>
>> They're right. Same values, same principles, same life policies, different situation.
>>
>> It's like how someone doesn't want to have kids (now) when he's 25, but then when he's 30 he wants them at that time. He didn't change his mind, his situation changed.
>>
>> Some people don't get to another place in regards to some issue. Some never want kids. Some never want to marry. This still doesn't mean they have different ideas, values, principles, etc, than the people who do end up getting married. Anyone who does marry would not have married if they'd had the wrong situations all their lives. People want to get married if the find certain sorts of opportunities which they don't necessarily find (they usually do, but sometimes some other stuff gets in the way).
>>
>> What is the point? It's all connected. The people who define (part of) themselves by their marriage, their lack of marriage, their being married at one age and unmarried at another age ... it's all essentially the same thing. It's all the same memes, all the same problem situation.
>>
>> What questions and problems you care about can define you more than your (current) answers to them. Especially when they are issues for which people commonly "change sides" as their situation changes (but it's not really even a change of sides).
>>
>> Another example is those atheists who attach great importance to denying the Christian god exists, attach great importance to not going to church, attach great importance to how much more smart and rational they are than theists in particular (due to their claimed lead on one single issue, which they mistakenly regard as more defining than it is).
>>
>> Another example is all those people who say, at age 20, that profanity is awesome, and more. Rage against the machine, fight the power, fuck the police. Fuck the rules, we're not going to be little conformists in neat little boxes. We're going to symbolically break a few superficial customs like not swearing!!! Then at age 30, those same people avoid swearing in front of their kids, tell the kids not to swear, watch "family friendly" G movies, and put parental controls on the computer. Apparently they changed their mind. But they really didn't. It's just different manifestations for different situations of the same meme.
>>
>> There was never any time where they learned why swearing is bad and being a conformist prude is good. They never learned a new argument. People who changed from casual sex to marriage never learned a new argument. They didn't discover some key point they hadn't known. If you asked them why they changed their mind, they can't tell you a good intellectual reason their old position is false and new one is true. The reason they can't do that is it never happened. They never changed their mind in any rational or intellectual sense. Some superficially contrary ideas are part of the same thing.
>
> Is this another example?

Two more examples I forgot to mention are:

crypto-inductivists are disappointed inductivists, who attach great importance to induction not working. (see The Fabric of Reality)

skeptics are disappointed justificationists, who attach great importance to justificationism not working.

in both cases there are a lot of similarities.

>
> In sexist societies, men are possessive of women (and children) and
> women want those possessive behaviors from men. I think a young boy
> and girl growing up in a society like this and sees the behavior of
> their dad to their mom are learning the same meme when they are young,
> and then they use this meme and apply it differently in adulthood
> (since they fill different roles, i.e. they are in different
> situations) and so the man wants to be possessive and the women wants
> men to be possessive of her.

yeah.

you can't act like a drunken abusive husband (for example) very well when you're 8. but you can be preparing to be one later. you can be learning some of the values of that lifestyle.

>
> Maybe the memes they learn are a mostly different. In sexist
> societies, fathers are possessive of their children, but they do treat
> boys differently then girls, e.g. girls will be required to do
> traditional wife activities like cleaning while boys will be required
> to do traditional husband activities like going with dad to change the
> tire on their car. (Also, in some families girls are required to take
> orders from their brothers.)

yeah boys and girls get some meme differences. girls in general never learn how to be abusive husbands or whatever, they learn how to play the complement role.

> This is the traditional master/slave relationship. I think that the
> male/master meme and the female/slave meme are mostly separate, and
> the separate parts are symbiotic (meaning they evolved symbiotically).
>
> So what do you think? Is there any part of these memes (the
> male/master meme and the female/slave meme) that are identical (shared
> between them)?

lots of stuff is shared like both are aware of the same sort of relationships and have a way of dealing with that situation and accepting it.


-- Elliot Temple
http://fallibleideas.com/

[Elliot Temple]

VoS by AR:

> Just as there is no such thing as a collective or racial mind, so there is no such thing as a collective or racial achievement. There are only individual minds and individual achievements—and a culture is not the anonymous product of undifferentiated masses, but the sum of the intellectual achievements of individual men.
> Even if it were proved—which it is not—that the incidence of men of potentially superior brain power is greater among the members of certain races than among the members of others, it would still tell us nothing about any given individual and it would be irrelevant to one’s judgment of him. A genius is a genius, regardless of the number of morons who belong to the same race—and a moron is a moron, regardless of the number of geniuses who share his racial origin. It is hard to say which is the more outrageous injustice: the claim of Southern racists that a Negro genius should be treated as an inferior because his race has “produced” some brutes—or the claim of a German brute to the status of a superior because his race has “produced” Goethe, Schiller and Brahms.
> These are not two different claims, of course, but two applications of the same basic premise. The question of whether one alleges the superiority or the inferiority of any given race is irrelevant; racism has only one psychological root: the racist’s sense of his own inferiority.

Note in particular the relevant part: "These are not two different claims, of course, but two applications of the same basic premise."

VoS has a lot more relevant ideas. One more example in particular stood out to me but I didn't write it down and forgot.

And altruism and pragmatism are superficially contradictory, but actually go together. (One cannot live under altruism. To live, one must contradict it. That is part of how it can fit well with pragmatism.)

[Elliot Temple]

On Feb 15, 2013, at 8:10 PM, Elliot Temple <cu...@curi.us> wrote:

Another example:

http://juliefredrickson.tumblr.com/post/43321974630/the-it-crowd-doesnt-like-me-and-i-finally-dont-care

> I have a confession to make. I’ve recently become obsessed with being liked by a certain crowd. “Tech.” As a woman generally unconcerned with being palatable to others, making this admission is really painful for me.
>
> I’ve always been contrarian, sometimes deliberately, even going so far as naming my first blog after the premise that I was always “almost” appropriate for a given situation. But the truth is that I have always been a profoundly non normative person.

She thinks she didn't seek approval and fit in (only "almost" fitting in, presumably at minimum, lol). She thinks she was a "contrarian" and "profoundly non normative".

And yet here she is "obsessed with being liked by a certain crowd".

She had strong approval-seeking thinking and behavior ready to use the whole time (if she wasn't using it already -- I'm skeptical her story is much more than self-image. But that illustrates another point: having a self image as anti-X doesn't mean one really is anti-X).

-- Elliot Temple
http://beginningofinfinity.com/