Hmm… but at the same time, I don’t think that social forces can be completely ignored. They are just too powerful.
I don’t think doing something for it’s cultural meaning is ignoring social forces. Saying things shouldn’t be done for their cultural meaning looks to me much more like ignoring social forces.
Commitments to strategies and cultural values an be useful.
On the personal level having clear values helps reduce akrasia. On the organisational level cultural values lead organisations to use shared heuristics for decision making.
If a new employee sees the Amazon door desk and ask other employees about it, they will get a speech about frugality and see that Amazon is serious about frugality.
Making symbolic decisions like that is best practice of how startups create company culture that’s more than a strategy document that nobody reads.
It’s actually much easier for people who aren’t as good at thinking for themselves to declare themselves in favour of always saying the truth no matter the cost
That wasn’t what we were talking about. We weren’t talking about declaring being in favor of truth but about actually fighting it.
There are people who profess to have values and that don’t follow those values. Seeing being skeptical as a value and then acting skeptical is a simple expression of living one’s values.
We can argue about whether being skeptical or fighting for truth are good values to have and that might be different for different people but there’s no a priori reason for arguing that holding either of those values isn’t rational.
I don’t think doing something for it’s cultural meaning is ignoring social forces. Saying things shouldn’t be done for their cultural meaning looks to me much more like ignoring social forces.
Commitments to strategies and cultural values an be useful.
On the personal level having clear values helps reduce akrasia. On the organisational level cultural values lead organisations to use shared heuristics for decision making.
If a new employee sees the Amazon door desk and ask other employees about it, they will get a speech about frugality and see that Amazon is serious about frugality.
Making symbolic decisions like that is best practice of how startups create company culture that’s more than a strategy document that nobody reads.
That wasn’t what we were talking about. We weren’t talking about declaring being in favor of truth but about actually fighting it.
There are people who profess to have values and that don’t follow those values. Seeing being skeptical as a value and then acting skeptical is a simple expression of living one’s values.
We can argue about whether being skeptical or fighting for truth are good values to have and that might be different for different people but there’s no a priori reason for arguing that holding either of those values isn’t rational.