I am aware of ironclad arguments that it is incorrect to dislike and fear certain groups. These arguments are not fully general—they do not apply to all groups.
a.These groups are genetically almost identical to me. In the same situation as me, they would behave no worse than me.
b. Most of my cultural differences from these groups are morally insignificant. For instance, I would prefer that they speak my language so that I can more easily understand them, but from an objective perspective it makes just as much sense to demand that I speak their languages.
c. The other differences are memetically weak. Take the example of women’s rights. Some developing countries have attitudes towards women’s rights worse than any developed country, but they are not worse than past attitudes in developed countries. The same cultural changes that enabled us to free ourselves from these bad memes will enable them to free themselves as well.
Therefore, these people, if given resources, will put them to a use no worse than people from my culture would.
The Amish rejection of modern technology meme appears to me to be: 1, morally significant—leads to badstuff, and 2, memetically strong, having won its founding battle with Post-Enlightenment memes and showing no signs of losing any others.
I do not understand why it is obvious to the apparent majority here that my views are unreasonable. I have not seen any strong arguments why the Amish meme does not lead to badstuff or why it is memetically weak.
Instead it is argued that they are happy and nice—but happy and nice aren’t all the good in the world—and that I am biased—but I already know that I am biased.
Hopefully my arguments above are clear enough that people will be able to provide me with helpful counterarguments.
I sometimes feel like there is a shadowy half-underground group of LWers that is intelligent enough to stay away from bad signalling and has altruistic intentions, but has to deal every now and then with a slight twitch, reading something knowing they can’t really state a proper response. It feels like there is almost a court nod when we read and comment each other’s posts and hope inferential distance keeps disturbances away. It so tempting some times, it is almost like I just have to say out loud the unspeakable and a few will contact me and I’ll be sure.
Other times I’m just afraid I’m sitting in a room having tea with the socoioeconomic Eldrich abominations teasing me with a wicked grin as everyone else moves obliviously to them, asking me if I’m certain that I haven’t lost it.
Suppose this is a test, anyone who knows what I’m talking about please PM the right answer.
I sometimes feel like there is a shadowy half-underground group of LWers that is intelligent enough to stay away from bad signalling and has altruistic intentions, but has to deal every now and then with a slight twitch, reading something knowing they can’t really state a proper response.
(linked comment) Delusions that are truly widely held and not merely believed to be widely held are far too dangerous to attack. There are sociopolitical Eldritch Abominations that it would serve LW well to stay well clear of and perhaps even pretend they don’t exist for the time being.
The next time you feel that way, make yourself another identity, and use it to say the things you wouldn’t otherwise. It really is quite liberating. It’s very rare for a delusion to really be too strong to attack, especially here; it is only that you fear backlash.
As for the discussion this appeared in, let me get the unpleasant truths out of the way so we can stay meta: Intelligence is mostly heritable! Knowing someone’s race conveys nonzero information about their their social status, suitability for jobs, wealth, and criminality! The gender imbalances in many professions are the result of innate differences, not discrimination! When groups with bad values and lower intelligence breed too much, it harms the future! These are all truths that any sufficiently advanced rationalist will recognize. And if you disagree with any of these, please direct your complaints to no one in particular.
All the ‘unpleasant truths’ you list seem to be facets of a single underlying issue of genetics. I consider none of them particularly shocking, especially in the weak forms you use there. Damn near any observable fact related to a given person will ’convey nonzero information about their their [sic] social status,” so if you’re going to use this persona to say what you otherwise couldn’t get away with, how about you fill out your theory with some policy suggestions, or at least more specific predictions?
Careful; LW doesn’t seem to scandalize easily, as this thread hilariously demonstrates as people try to discuss shocking things, and everyone fails to be shocked, so people up the ante by combining cannibalism and pedophilia, and so on, in a positive feedback loop.
Actually, don’t be careful. That was a fun thread.
That is an outright brilliant idea, and the next time LW does one of these ridiculous “Everyone post your ever-so-supposedly controversial but rational opinions that actually just amount to outright misanthropy” threads, I’m going to do it.
What? No, it’s not brilliant, it’s nonsensical. “It’s very rare for a delusion to really be too strong to attack, especially here; it is only that you fear backlash.” Umm… that’s what “too strong to attack” means. It doesn’t mean that the arguments for it are intellectually devastating—it means that if you attack them, you will get in trouble. In other words, backlash.
“It’s very rare for a delusion to really be too strong to attack, especially here; it is only that you fear backlash.” Umm… that’s what “too strong to attack” means. It doesn’t mean that the arguments for it are intellectually devastating—it means that if you attack them, you will get in trouble.
Yes, that’s why having a trollacter account mock the whole thing by “playing evil” is funny. It helps that many of these so-called ever-so-controversial “beliefs” are actually evaluative statements wrapped in wannabe-factual trappings.
I think the most common socially acceptable thing that is best correlated with being a member of that group is being pro-PUA. What’s the best shibboleth we can think of, analogous to asking if someone likes the taste of beer?
a.These groups are genetically almost identical to me. In the same situation as me, they would behave no worse than me.
Depending on which groups you’re talking about this isn’t completely obvious.
c. The other differences are memetically weak. Take the example of women’s rights. Some developing countries have attitudes towards women’s rights worse than any developed country, but they are not worse than past attitudes in developed countries. The same cultural changes that enabled us to free ourselves from these bad memes will enable them to free themselves as well.
I think you’re looking only at the superficial memes. It’s entirely possible that there are more subtly cultural factors, e.g., belief in progress, openness to new ideas, that are responsible for both our development of modern technology and our adoption of different attitudes toward women. Of course, now that the technology has been invented, they can import it without necessarily importing the memetic baggage.
Also, as Eliezer pointed out here even the most liberal person from the 18th century, say Ben Franklin, if transported to today would be so shocked by all the changes to prevailing morality that he might even conclude that the monarchists were right about man not being fit to govern himself. Well, Franklin didn’t get to see the future so we live in a democracy today. However, the people in developing countries can see where our path leads, and they may very well choose not to follow it.
[E]ven the most liberal person from the 18th century, say Ben Franklin, if transported to today would be so shocked by all the changes to prevailing morality that he might even conclude that the monarchists were right about man not being fit to govern himself.
Well, that is basically the modern prevailing doctrine, though of course it’s never spelled out so bluntly. The contemporary respectable opinion pays lip service to the idea of democracy in the abstract, but as soon as any really important issues are raised, it is considered incontrovertible that policy should be crafted by professional bureaucracies under the gentle and enlightened guidance of accredited experts. In fact, one of the surest paths to being scorned as a low-status extremist or troglodyte is to argue that an expression of popular will should override the decisions favored by the expert/bureaucratic establishment in some particular case.
Generally speaking, it is even more true of other countries that are commonly recognized as democratic, though in some places that have authentic local democratic traditions there are still strong holdovers (e.g. in Switzerland). In Europe, in particular, the EU institutions are almost completely insulated from any real popular input.
Not that this is a wholly bad thing, of course. Democracy works only in very specific cultural conditions that can’t be established and reproduced at will, and arguably only on small scales. Otherwise, it usually produces a rapid and often bloody disaster. Thus, I’d say that the present standard of having a bureaucratic oligarchy with a veneer of democratic institutions is almost everywhere less bad than authentic democracy would be. (Though I’m not too terribly optimistic about its prospects either.)
This kind of tendency in the US is connected to a desire for bipartisanship
which comes from a veto-point-ridden legislative system
which is not a common feature in Europe
In Europe I understand that it’s accepted that the people put a party in power and the party decides what happens, vs. in America people think that a grand bargain between the elites of both parties is necessary—but that is not necessarily what you’re talking about.
From what I’ve seen here in France, you’d have something like what Vladimir_M describes without bipartisanship. I prefer the French system with runoff elections, which means that “minor parties” have a real chance, because it brings bigger diversity of positions to public debates, which seems healthy for political and intellectual life (and it may make politics less polarized than in the US, though they are still quite polarized).
But despite those aspects, I don’t think it changes much for the relationship between the bureaucracy and elected officials.
Most European countries have multi-party systems, which have an even greater need for negotiations and compromise. Also Europe has the EU whose bureaucratic institutions are far more developed than its democratic ones.
I don’t think so at all. Many become ex-Amish. Yet during the 18th century it wasn’t an option to become ex-18th century. Likewise, no matter how innately conservative an American is, very few will be monarchist, and will instead espouse positions that were once only espoused by those with contrarian or radical natures. See also evaporative cooling of group beliefs.
Not to mention the Amish at least know of so many modern things.
Would you agree that all of the people who are still Amish take a Ben Franklin—like stance?
The Ben Franklins we are discussing no of modern things. Ben Franklin himself, who did not know of modern things, brought us closer to modernity because he thought 1800 was better than 1750.
If Ben Franklin knew about 2000, it is theorized, he might be so horrified that he would reject 1800 as leading to (gasp!) 2000, and so not invent fire departments and electricity and democracy, hyperbolically speaking.
Those who choose to remain Amish make this same choice.
The correct response to our Amish is more-or-less the correct response to developing country holdouts or to time-traveling Ben Franklins. This could include:
Developing better arguments to convince them to join modernity.
Improving conditions for ourselves until our awesomeness convinces them to join modernity.
Letting them take up more and more land.
Letting them take up the same amount of land but not allowing them to get additional land (through an increased price of land due to increased population density?)
Leaving them be but preventing them from raising children to think the same way.
Improving conditions for ourselves until our awesomeness convinces them to join modernity.
Letting them take up more and more land.
I’d go for a combination of these two. To the extent that their way works better, let them reap the economic rewards for such; to the extent that our way works better, let them either recognize and emulate or drown in their own willful ignorance.
If a given population is expanding and buying up a particular sort of real estate, my first guess is that they have a comparative advantage at making use of that sort of real estate and are more-or-less rationally taking advantage of that. People using comparative advantages to produce gains from trade is one of the cornerstones of the modern economy, from which everyone involved tends to benefit. Are you advocating taking resources away from those who could demonstrably make better use of them, for ideological reasons, and if so under what conditions?
So suppose group A has a rule of never taking loans from outside, and never selling capital or real estate to outside. It seems like they should be able to slowly grow in size even if they are very inefficient, no?
Essentially the problem is if the Amish discount the future less than we do, they win the future.
So maybe the problem is that we’re discounting the future more than is morally appropriate? Can we fix that?
It seems like they should be able to slowly grow in size even if they are very inefficient, no?
Not really. Without some edge over other potential uses for that land, they’d eventually overstretch and collapse (if they loan to each other, even in hopeless cases), or reach an equilibrium where they’re losing land to things like property taxes, probate, and adverse possession as fast as they’re buying it up.
I can imagine a future scenario where Amish people own all arable land on Earth and everybody else lives in skyscrapers, arcologies, space stations, or some combination thereof. It seems weird, sure, but 1) I would take that as strong evidence that they’re simply better at making use of arable land, since they’d still be selling food to everyone else and competing with e.g. terrain-independent hydroponics, and 2) they seem to have little or no interest in expanding beyond the agriculture and specialty-manufacturing industries, and that’s the kind of thing where who does it isn’t as important as how well it gets done.
Shortsightedness has a well-known tendency to lead to longterm losses, yes. This goes back to basic rationality: if someone else is doing what you claim to want to do, and doing it better than you are, you’d better either start doing it their way, or figure out what you really want.
I think that those are basically, pretty much, a way of us unfairly stealing their land.
I usually model taxes as payment for various services, like police and fire department coverage and roads. If they had to handle those things themselves, that would take money that they could otherwise use for expansion, and could in some cases result in them being unable to use land because they can’t afford the relevant infrastructure, or having to sell land in one place to pay for infrastructure in another.
It is plausible that it would be more efficient for them to handle those things themselves, but not immediately obvious that that’s the case, at least. The economy of scale involved in having the government handle those things might outweigh any corruption or inefficiency or tendency to reallocate funds to programs that don’t benefit the group in question.
The Amish rejection of modern technology meme appears to me to be: 1, morally significant—leads to badstuff, and 2, memetically strong, having won its founding battle with Post-Enlightenment memes and showing no signs of losing any others.
I do not understand why it is obvious to the apparent majority here that my views are unreasonable. I have not seen any strong arguments why the Amish meme does not lead to badstuff or why it is memetically weak.
I haven’t studied the Amish in very much detail, but I mostly have a positive impression of them—the impression I get is not that they reject technology as much as they value community over technology, and will reject innovation that risks disrupting the community. What I read of their views some years ago seemed quite reasonable.
Modernity can be quite disruptive (look at Africa), and lot of people claim that some things are fundamentally wrong in modern American society (though they might disagree about what exactly, and arguably people have been saying similar things since the start of Civilization), so it makes sense to be cautious. I don’t see that as leading to badstuff, especially if it stays a minority.
Should we become Amish? If you were teleported into an Amish person’s life, would you leave?
My visceral fear is created not by their existence, but by the potential that they will not remain a minority. Could you see badstuff resulting from them becoming a much larger percentage of the population?
Should we become Amish? Probably not. If I were teleported into an Amish person’s life, would I leave? No, I think I would stay. In some ways I think it would suit my personality better than the life I currently live.
Really, I’m skeptical. Can we hear them?
The argument is one of symmetry.
a.These groups are genetically almost identical to me. In the same situation as me, they would behave no worse than me.
b. Most of my cultural differences from these groups are morally insignificant. For instance, I would prefer that they speak my language so that I can more easily understand them, but from an objective perspective it makes just as much sense to demand that I speak their languages.
c. The other differences are memetically weak. Take the example of women’s rights. Some developing countries have attitudes towards women’s rights worse than any developed country, but they are not worse than past attitudes in developed countries. The same cultural changes that enabled us to free ourselves from these bad memes will enable them to free themselves as well.
Therefore, these people, if given resources, will put them to a use no worse than people from my culture would.
The Amish rejection of modern technology meme appears to me to be: 1, morally significant—leads to badstuff, and 2, memetically strong, having won its founding battle with Post-Enlightenment memes and showing no signs of losing any others.
I do not understand why it is obvious to the apparent majority here that my views are unreasonable. I have not seen any strong arguments why the Amish meme does not lead to badstuff or why it is memetically weak.
Instead it is argued that they are happy and nice—but happy and nice aren’t all the good in the world—and that I am biased—but I already know that I am biased.
Hopefully my arguments above are clear enough that people will be able to provide me with helpful counterarguments.
I sometimes feel like there is a shadowy half-underground group of LWers that is intelligent enough to stay away from bad signalling and has altruistic intentions, but has to deal every now and then with a slight twitch, reading something knowing they can’t really state a proper response. It feels like there is almost a court nod when we read and comment each other’s posts and hope inferential distance keeps disturbances away. It so tempting some times, it is almost like I just have to say out loud the unspeakable and a few will contact me and I’ll be sure.
Other times I’m just afraid I’m sitting in a room having tea with the socoioeconomic Eldrich abominations teasing me with a wicked grin as everyone else moves obliviously to them, asking me if I’m certain that I haven’t lost it.
Suppose this is a test, anyone who knows what I’m talking about please PM the right answer.
The next time you feel that way, make yourself another identity, and use it to say the things you wouldn’t otherwise. It really is quite liberating. It’s very rare for a delusion to really be too strong to attack, especially here; it is only that you fear backlash.
As for the discussion this appeared in, let me get the unpleasant truths out of the way so we can stay meta: Intelligence is mostly heritable! Knowing someone’s race conveys nonzero information about their their social status, suitability for jobs, wealth, and criminality! The gender imbalances in many professions are the result of innate differences, not discrimination! When groups with bad values and lower intelligence breed too much, it harms the future! These are all truths that any sufficiently advanced rationalist will recognize. And if you disagree with any of these, please direct your complaints to no one in particular.
All the ‘unpleasant truths’ you list seem to be facets of a single underlying issue of genetics. I consider none of them particularly shocking, especially in the weak forms you use there. Damn near any observable fact related to a given person will ’convey nonzero information about their their [sic] social status,” so if you’re going to use this persona to say what you otherwise couldn’t get away with, how about you fill out your theory with some policy suggestions, or at least more specific predictions?
Careful; LW doesn’t seem to scandalize easily, as this thread hilariously demonstrates as people try to discuss shocking things, and everyone fails to be shocked, so people up the ante by combining cannibalism and pedophilia, and so on, in a positive feedback loop.
Actually, don’t be careful. That was a fun thread.
That is an outright brilliant idea, and the next time LW does one of these ridiculous “Everyone post your ever-so-supposedly controversial but rational opinions that actually just amount to outright misanthropy” threads, I’m going to do it.
What? No, it’s not brilliant, it’s nonsensical. “It’s very rare for a delusion to really be too strong to attack, especially here; it is only that you fear backlash.” Umm… that’s what “too strong to attack” means. It doesn’t mean that the arguments for it are intellectually devastating—it means that if you attack them, you will get in trouble. In other words, backlash.
Yes, that’s why having a trollacter account mock the whole thing by “playing evil” is funny. It helps that many of these so-called ever-so-controversial “beliefs” are actually evaluative statements wrapped in wannabe-factual trappings.
If there is a group of lesswrongers who covers up their true opinions like so, I am not in it, and my post was not an example of that.
This response made me feel like I should be twirling my moustache and letting out an evil laugh as my fiendishly clever scheme comes to fruition.
I fear there are not enough of Professor Quirrell’s virtues in me to live up to such a standard. :)
Will, I hope I haven’t intruded on the conversation too much.
I think the most common socially acceptable thing that is best correlated with being a member of that group is being pro-PUA. What’s the best shibboleth we can think of, analogous to asking if someone likes the taste of beer?
Depending on which groups you’re talking about this isn’t completely obvious.
I think you’re looking only at the superficial memes. It’s entirely possible that there are more subtly cultural factors, e.g., belief in progress, openness to new ideas, that are responsible for both our development of modern technology and our adoption of different attitudes toward women. Of course, now that the technology has been invented, they can import it without necessarily importing the memetic baggage.
Also, as Eliezer pointed out here even the most liberal person from the 18th century, say Ben Franklin, if transported to today would be so shocked by all the changes to prevailing morality that he might even conclude that the monarchists were right about man not being fit to govern himself. Well, Franklin didn’t get to see the future so we live in a democracy today. However, the people in developing countries can see where our path leads, and they may very well choose not to follow it.
Well, that is basically the modern prevailing doctrine, though of course it’s never spelled out so bluntly. The contemporary respectable opinion pays lip service to the idea of democracy in the abstract, but as soon as any really important issues are raised, it is considered incontrovertible that policy should be crafted by professional bureaucracies under the gentle and enlightened guidance of accredited experts. In fact, one of the surest paths to being scorned as a low-status extremist or troglodyte is to argue that an expression of popular will should override the decisions favored by the expert/bureaucratic establishment in some particular case.
Is this as true in non-US countries at is true in the US?
Generally speaking, it is even more true of other countries that are commonly recognized as democratic, though in some places that have authentic local democratic traditions there are still strong holdovers (e.g. in Switzerland). In Europe, in particular, the EU institutions are almost completely insulated from any real popular input.
Not that this is a wholly bad thing, of course. Democracy works only in very specific cultural conditions that can’t be established and reproduced at will, and arguably only on small scales. Otherwise, it usually produces a rapid and often bloody disaster. Thus, I’d say that the present standard of having a bureaucratic oligarchy with a veneer of democratic institutions is almost everywhere less bad than authentic democracy would be. (Though I’m not too terribly optimistic about its prospects either.)
I get the impression that it’s even worse in Europe.
So my impression was based on this data:
This kind of tendency in the US is connected to a desire for bipartisanship
which comes from a veto-point-ridden legislative system
which is not a common feature in Europe
In Europe I understand that it’s accepted that the people put a party in power and the party decides what happens, vs. in America people think that a grand bargain between the elites of both parties is necessary—but that is not necessarily what you’re talking about.
From what I’ve seen here in France, you’d have something like what Vladimir_M describes without bipartisanship. I prefer the French system with runoff elections, which means that “minor parties” have a real chance, because it brings bigger diversity of positions to public debates, which seems healthy for political and intellectual life (and it may make politics less polarized than in the US, though they are still quite polarized).
But despite those aspects, I don’t think it changes much for the relationship between the bureaucracy and elected officials.
OK, I am thinking of something different.
Most European countries have multi-party systems, which have an even greater need for negotiations and compromise. Also Europe has the EU whose bureaucratic institutions are far more developed than its democratic ones.
This is an extremely good comment.
Well we may all be well and truly doomed. Or we may not be.
We don’t have a lot of evidence one way or another in this regard.
I THINK our memes are strong enough that we can incrementally lift people out of the shadows.
I think that a belief in progress in European culture was the result, not the cause, of progress.
But I don’t know.
& aren’t Amish people exactly those Ben Franklins?
I don’t think so at all. Many become ex-Amish. Yet during the 18th century it wasn’t an option to become ex-18th century. Likewise, no matter how innately conservative an American is, very few will be monarchist, and will instead espouse positions that were once only espoused by those with contrarian or radical natures. See also evaporative cooling of group beliefs.
Not to mention the Amish at least know of so many modern things.
Except perhaps for those who lived long enough, and hung out in the right circles, to become 19th century?
Would you agree that all of the people who are still Amish take a Ben Franklin—like stance?
The Ben Franklins we are discussing no of modern things. Ben Franklin himself, who did not know of modern things, brought us closer to modernity because he thought 1800 was better than 1750.
If Ben Franklin knew about 2000, it is theorized, he might be so horrified that he would reject 1800 as leading to (gasp!) 2000, and so not invent fire departments and electricity and democracy, hyperbolically speaking.
Those who choose to remain Amish make this same choice.
The correct response to our Amish is more-or-less the correct response to developing country holdouts or to time-traveling Ben Franklins. This could include:
Developing better arguments to convince them to join modernity.
Improving conditions for ourselves until our awesomeness convinces them to join modernity.
Letting them take up more and more land.
Letting them take up the same amount of land but not allowing them to get additional land (through an increased price of land due to increased population density?)
Leaving them be but preventing them from raising children to think the same way.
Something more radical and ethically dubious.
Something different but no more radical.
I’d go for a combination of these two. To the extent that their way works better, let them reap the economic rewards for such; to the extent that our way works better, let them either recognize and emulate or drown in their own willful ignorance.
The best strategy is not the strategy that maximizes long-term resource ownership.
If a given population is expanding and buying up a particular sort of real estate, my first guess is that they have a comparative advantage at making use of that sort of real estate and are more-or-less rationally taking advantage of that. People using comparative advantages to produce gains from trade is one of the cornerstones of the modern economy, from which everyone involved tends to benefit. Are you advocating taking resources away from those who could demonstrably make better use of them, for ideological reasons, and if so under what conditions?
So suppose group A has a rule of never taking loans from outside, and never selling capital or real estate to outside. It seems like they should be able to slowly grow in size even if they are very inefficient, no?
Essentially the problem is if the Amish discount the future less than we do, they win the future.
So maybe the problem is that we’re discounting the future more than is morally appropriate? Can we fix that?
Not really. Without some edge over other potential uses for that land, they’d eventually overstretch and collapse (if they loan to each other, even in hopeless cases), or reach an equilibrium where they’re losing land to things like property taxes, probate, and adverse possession as fast as they’re buying it up.
I can imagine a future scenario where Amish people own all arable land on Earth and everybody else lives in skyscrapers, arcologies, space stations, or some combination thereof. It seems weird, sure, but 1) I would take that as strong evidence that they’re simply better at making use of arable land, since they’d still be selling food to everyone else and competing with e.g. terrain-independent hydroponics, and 2) they seem to have little or no interest in expanding beyond the agriculture and specialty-manufacturing industries, and that’s the kind of thing where who does it isn’t as important as how well it gets done.
Shortsightedness has a well-known tendency to lead to longterm losses, yes. This goes back to basic rationality: if someone else is doing what you claim to want to do, and doing it better than you are, you’d better either start doing it their way, or figure out what you really want.
I forgot about property-taxes and things.
I think that those are basically, pretty much, a way of us unfairly stealing their land.
However there are no ethical issues with it—so I think that makes sense.
As we become more awesome, property values + property taxes will rise until low-tech agriculture cannot compete.
I usually model taxes as payment for various services, like police and fire department coverage and roads. If they had to handle those things themselves, that would take money that they could otherwise use for expansion, and could in some cases result in them being unable to use land because they can’t afford the relevant infrastructure, or having to sell land in one place to pay for infrastructure in another.
It is plausible that it would be more efficient for them to handle those things themselves, but not immediately obvious that that’s the case, at least. The economy of scale involved in having the government handle those things might outweigh any corruption or inefficiency or tendency to reallocate funds to programs that don’t benefit the group in question.
I haven’t studied the Amish in very much detail, but I mostly have a positive impression of them—the impression I get is not that they reject technology as much as they value community over technology, and will reject innovation that risks disrupting the community. What I read of their views some years ago seemed quite reasonable.
Modernity can be quite disruptive (look at Africa), and lot of people claim that some things are fundamentally wrong in modern American society (though they might disagree about what exactly, and arguably people have been saying similar things since the start of Civilization), so it makes sense to be cautious. I don’t see that as leading to badstuff, especially if it stays a minority.
Should we become Amish? If you were teleported into an Amish person’s life, would you leave?
My visceral fear is created not by their existence, but by the potential that they will not remain a minority. Could you see badstuff resulting from them becoming a much larger percentage of the population?
Should we become Amish? Probably not. If I were teleported into an Amish person’s life, would I leave? No, I think I would stay. In some ways I think it would suit my personality better than the life I currently live.