i think the way in which our social world is most obviously failing to be object level is that everyone thinks that everything is a status signalling thing
if taste is defined as “knows how to make things nicer for people” then the world in which everyone has taste is obviously one you’d prefer to live in!
more thoughts on this later but the answer to “why don’t more people just ‘do things’” IMO is “most people only ‘do things’ at all insofar as they are instrumental to a more instrumental goal of getting money or placing higher in a status competition”
just doing things historically often blocked by “oh you have to make this whole more complicated social apparatus work in order for the just done thing to pay off” but less so now, therefore more rationalisty “actually do the thing for the things sake” norm is increasingly empowered
lighthaven is good at modeling this, optimize the everloving muck out of random small things for ingroup social cred; but there are diminishing average returns to further work in almost all fields of enterprise, and in most fields prizes outlast impact
or maybe that’s good (it’s a form of retrofunding?)
braindump
https://x.com/juliarturc/status/2067304288226066442 “”taste is a zero-sum game” is such a good way to put it. there is no universe in which everybody has taste, because then nobody has taste—ugh i hate takes like this
i think the way in which our social world is most obviously failing to be object level is that everyone thinks that everything is a status signalling thing
if taste is defined as “knows how to make things nicer for people” then the world in which everyone has taste is obviously one you’d prefer to live in!
more thoughts on this later but the answer to “why don’t more people just ‘do things’” IMO is “most people only ‘do things’ at all insofar as they are instrumental to a more instrumental goal of getting money or placing higher in a status competition”
just doing things historically often blocked by “oh you have to make this whole more complicated social apparatus work in order for the just done thing to pay off” but less so now, therefore more rationalisty “actually do the thing for the things sake” norm is increasingly empowered
lighthaven is good at modeling this, optimize the everloving muck out of random small things for ingroup social cred; but there are diminishing average returns to further work in almost all fields of enterprise, and in most fields prizes outlast impact
or maybe that’s good (it’s a form of retrofunding?)