A way that I characterized this (in my feedback) is that ‘high control’ is, from the perspective of the users, often the point! Lots of people will do things like join the military because the military will seize control of their life and turn them into a different sort of person, and they would rather be that kind of person than the person they are now (or that they expect to turn into under their own control).
And so the core questions are: ok, but do you want to be shaped by this person or by this system? It is often hard to tell this from inside the system—if it weren’t self-recommending it would have already collapsed—but I think this is nevertheless the core question. From my (somewhat distant) vantage point, MAPLE doesn’t look great on this front.
So I think the objection that our mutual friend there would make, is that the perspectives/worldviews that are both like, conveyed by modern culture, and which are say “psychologically sustainable” from within modern culture, make most of the “true” good qualities of a Mapler/Soryu under-salient or invisible, and laud qualities which are “”“truly””” in fact harmful, reprehensible etc.
So I expect they would cite factory farming, climate change, obviously x-risk, but also social media, maybe something like “social degeneration”, in this case meaning something like communities fracturing or dissolving, networks becoming sparser and less meaningfully bonded, etc. (tbc not that I endorse all of these as real, but as what they would cite.)
And the claim there is like, you can’t be a normal guy and hold a normal job and have friends and raise your kids, with all of the above around, unless you hold a perspective that normalizes it or ignores it, and that whatever the costs of uh “becoming a Mapler”, they are much smaller in comparison.
A way that I characterized this (in my feedback) is that ‘high control’ is, from the perspective of the users, often the point! Lots of people will do things like join the military because the military will seize control of their life and turn them into a different sort of person, and they would rather be that kind of person than the person they are now (or that they expect to turn into under their own control).
And so the core questions are: ok, but do you want to be shaped by this person or by this system? It is often hard to tell this from inside the system—if it weren’t self-recommending it would have already collapsed—but I think this is nevertheless the core question. From my (somewhat distant) vantage point, MAPLE doesn’t look great on this front.
Yeah this feels closer, thanks.
So I think the objection that our mutual friend there would make, is that the perspectives/worldviews that are both like, conveyed by modern culture, and which are say “psychologically sustainable” from within modern culture, make most of the “true” good qualities of a Mapler/Soryu under-salient or invisible, and laud qualities which are “”“truly””” in fact harmful, reprehensible etc.
So I expect they would cite factory farming, climate change, obviously x-risk, but also social media, maybe something like “social degeneration”, in this case meaning something like communities fracturing or dissolving, networks becoming sparser and less meaningfully bonded, etc. (tbc not that I endorse all of these as real, but as what they would cite.)
And the claim there is like, you can’t be a normal guy and hold a normal job and have friends and raise your kids, with all of the above around, unless you hold a perspective that normalizes it or ignores it, and that whatever the costs of uh “becoming a Mapler”, they are much smaller in comparison.