Yeah I should have phrased that better. It goes hand-in-hand with your last sentence. Lots of our impulses and feelings are based on a cultural programming that encourages us to build outcomes that’s best for society.
I have a close friend for example who just finished his MD/PhD. He makes less money than all his peers who he went to Stanford (much less money) and works way harder hours. While his friends get piles of money and free lunches at Google, he sleeps on a cot in an old hospital with a broken AC unit doing 20 hour shifts. Why?!
Well, it’s indisputable that his job is more prestigious. An MD/PhD at a top hospital in the world doing cancer research? That’s about as high as you can go in terms of societal respect and prestige. We all were raised to understand his sacrifice, and as a result by entering that field he gets this ‘bonus payment.’ That bonus payment encourages our best and brightest to do really shitty things. Here we are able to decompose and understand why that’s happening. Still, when he made the choice to get his MD/PhD I suspect he felt it was an individual choice, and it was, but it was also guided by this greater way society rewards him.
So why do women (and families) not want to go into or encourage prostitution? Surely they will get some benefit from it, but they avoid it because society places a huge cost in terms of shame/disappointment/self-hate. Now, maybe this is an outdated societal cost we’re building, and it’s time to try to get rid of it. That could totally be the case. But it could also be the case that this cost is serving a purpose that isn’t obvious to us. You give one example that it could lead to more objectification, which societally we decide is bad.
If you abstract more you can see it as a case of selling a form of snake oil.
Should rationalists win at the expense of solidifying the irrationality of others?
On your point, I’m not sure I get what you mean by .
I think I would be more worried about solidifying the objectification of women in society as a whole.
Yeah I should have phrased that better. It goes hand-in-hand with your last sentence. Lots of our impulses and feelings are based on a cultural programming that encourages us to build outcomes that’s best for society.
I have a close friend for example who just finished his MD/PhD. He makes less money than all his peers who he went to Stanford (much less money) and works way harder hours. While his friends get piles of money and free lunches at Google, he sleeps on a cot in an old hospital with a broken AC unit doing 20 hour shifts. Why?!
Well, it’s indisputable that his job is more prestigious. An MD/PhD at a top hospital in the world doing cancer research? That’s about as high as you can go in terms of societal respect and prestige. We all were raised to understand his sacrifice, and as a result by entering that field he gets this ‘bonus payment.’ That bonus payment encourages our best and brightest to do really shitty things. Here we are able to decompose and understand why that’s happening. Still, when he made the choice to get his MD/PhD I suspect he felt it was an individual choice, and it was, but it was also guided by this greater way society rewards him.
So why do women (and families) not want to go into or encourage prostitution? Surely they will get some benefit from it, but they avoid it because society places a huge cost in terms of shame/disappointment/self-hate. Now, maybe this is an outdated societal cost we’re building, and it’s time to try to get rid of it. That could totally be the case. But it could also be the case that this cost is serving a purpose that isn’t obvious to us. You give one example that it could lead to more objectification, which societally we decide is bad.