Heaping scorn on everyone and seeing who sticks around is a selection process; the condition for surviving is being able to accept scorn, whether or not such scorn is warranted by the value system of the society. This is somewhat similar to hazing.
Heaping scorn on a specific group of people for their unwillingness to adopt the values of the society (or, rather, some powerful subset of the society which has enough clout to control how things are run) is a selection process based on something of value to the society, and is more like punishment or selective admissions: people with the valued trait are encouraged, those without are allowed to leave.
It would appear that there are very different implications, as the former selects those who can take unjustified scorn (a quality of dubious value), and the latter selects for any demonstrable quantity desired by the society (in this case, a specific attitude towards problem-solving).
This is a good argument for the claim that MixedNuts’s hyperbolic version, read literally, misses something important. (Your argument convinces me, anyway.)
It is not clear to me that your argument addresses the “steel man” version in which “everyone” is replaced by “people who are unwilling to adopt that ‘git’r’done’ attitude”.
I don’t believe that it does, and here’s why.
Heaping scorn on everyone and seeing who sticks around is a selection process; the condition for surviving is being able to accept scorn, whether or not such scorn is warranted by the value system of the society. This is somewhat similar to hazing.
Heaping scorn on a specific group of people for their unwillingness to adopt the values of the society (or, rather, some powerful subset of the society which has enough clout to control how things are run) is a selection process based on something of value to the society, and is more like punishment or selective admissions: people with the valued trait are encouraged, those without are allowed to leave.
It would appear that there are very different implications, as the former selects those who can take unjustified scorn (a quality of dubious value), and the latter selects for any demonstrable quantity desired by the society (in this case, a specific attitude towards problem-solving).
This is a good argument for the claim that MixedNuts’s hyperbolic version, read literally, misses something important. (Your argument convinces me, anyway.)
It is not clear to me that your argument addresses the “steel man” version in which “everyone” is replaced by “people who are unwilling to adopt that ‘git’r’done’ attitude”.