Overall I agree with this post, and was about to write a kinda boring comment saying “whelp, that all seemed correctly caveated such that I think I basically agree with it completely.” Then I reread this last line, which I don’t disagree with, but I feel somewhat confused about:
But if you’re looking for ways to be more moral than the culture that raised you, developing a prosocial distaste for overconfidence (above and beyond the self-serving one that’s already in fashion) is one small thing you might do.
There’s a post I have brewing called “When Should You Cultivate Disgust?”. I haven’t written it yet in part because I don’t know the answer. I think cultivating distaste, disgust, aversion, are probably important tools to have you one’s toolkit, but they locally seem fairly costly if you don’t actually have the ability to do anything about an ugly thing that you suddenly gain the ability to see everywhere. It seems prosocial to learn to see bad things affecting society, but I’m not sure how strongly I’d recommend gaining that distaste faster than you gain useful things to do with it.
This seems highly variable person-to-person; Nate Soares and Anna Salamon each seem to pay fairly low costs/no costs for many kinds of disgust, and are also notably each doing very different things than each other. I also find that a majority of my experiences of disgust are not costly for me, and instead convert themselves by default into various fuels or resolutions or reinforcement-rewards. There may be discoverable and exportable mental tech re: relating productively to disgust-that-isn’t-particularly-actionable.
Overall I agree with this post, and was about to write a kinda boring comment saying “whelp, that all seemed correctly caveated such that I think I basically agree with it completely.” Then I reread this last line, which I don’t disagree with, but I feel somewhat confused about:
There’s a post I have brewing called “When Should You Cultivate Disgust?”. I haven’t written it yet in part because I don’t know the answer. I think cultivating distaste, disgust, aversion, are probably important tools to have you one’s toolkit, but they locally seem fairly costly if you don’t actually have the ability to do anything about an ugly thing that you suddenly gain the ability to see everywhere. It seems prosocial to learn to see bad things affecting society, but I’m not sure how strongly I’d recommend gaining that distaste faster than you gain useful things to do with it.
This seems highly variable person-to-person; Nate Soares and Anna Salamon each seem to pay fairly low costs/no costs for many kinds of disgust, and are also notably each doing very different things than each other. I also find that a majority of my experiences of disgust are not costly for me, and instead convert themselves by default into various fuels or resolutions or reinforcement-rewards. There may be discoverable and exportable mental tech re: relating productively to disgust-that-isn’t-particularly-actionable.