I really loved reading this, it resonated quite deeply. I’ve felt much the same, though for me the biggest thing that made me misanthropic was reading about EA and all the implied ways that most people are arguably monstrous by omission and conformity. After that, reading Nietzsche didn’t make it much worse.
In recent years I’ve been feeling somewhat less misanthropic, so wanted to quickly say a bit about how that’s happened, in case it’s useful. Probably the biggest influence was reading Joseph Henrich’s The Secret of Our Success. The core thesis of the book might be summarized as arguing that humans are mostly implementing an algorithm that isn’t really “observe evidence, build causal models, reason about optimal action” but rather something closer to “look around, identify individuals and groups that are high status (rich, popular) and then blindly copy whatever they’re doing, because apparently it’s working”. This in itself may not seem so revolutionary, but the more interesting bit is that Henrich argues that people do this because it has, at least historically, mostly worked better than the “rational”, nullius in verba approach. Henrich describes a bunch of examples where sophisticated European explorers went to strange places and tried to use Reason and Evidence instead of listening to the superstitious locals, and died horrible deaths of exposure, starvation, and poisoning as a result.
Anyway, this is roughly my sympathetic perspective on the common man: They’re mostly doing conformity rather than real reasoning, but they’re often better off for it! My guess is that the current world rewards reason more, and conformity less, than the ancestral environment, so probably most normies would be better off being less conformist. But I suspect intense exposure to LW might be net bad for the average person, because they would mess up the implementation. But conformity does have a good track record, and it rarely goes badly wrong.
Bonus note: I’ve also found the way that Tolkien writes about hobbits, and the way that e.g. Gandalf relates to hobbits, to be another useful model for how to relate to the common man in a way that is realistic but not misanthropic.
I really loved reading this, it resonated quite deeply. I’ve felt much the same, though for me the biggest thing that made me misanthropic was reading about EA and all the implied ways that most people are arguably monstrous by omission and conformity. After that, reading Nietzsche didn’t make it much worse.
In recent years I’ve been feeling somewhat less misanthropic, so wanted to quickly say a bit about how that’s happened, in case it’s useful. Probably the biggest influence was reading Joseph Henrich’s The Secret of Our Success. The core thesis of the book might be summarized as arguing that humans are mostly implementing an algorithm that isn’t really “observe evidence, build causal models, reason about optimal action” but rather something closer to “look around, identify individuals and groups that are high status (rich, popular) and then blindly copy whatever they’re doing, because apparently it’s working”. This in itself may not seem so revolutionary, but the more interesting bit is that Henrich argues that people do this because it has, at least historically, mostly worked better than the “rational”, nullius in verba approach. Henrich describes a bunch of examples where sophisticated European explorers went to strange places and tried to use Reason and Evidence instead of listening to the superstitious locals, and died horrible deaths of exposure, starvation, and poisoning as a result.
Anyway, this is roughly my sympathetic perspective on the common man: They’re mostly doing conformity rather than real reasoning, but they’re often better off for it! My guess is that the current world rewards reason more, and conformity less, than the ancestral environment, so probably most normies would be better off being less conformist. But I suspect intense exposure to LW might be net bad for the average person, because they would mess up the implementation. But conformity does have a good track record, and it rarely goes badly wrong.
Bonus note: I’ve also found the way that Tolkien writes about hobbits, and the way that e.g. Gandalf relates to hobbits, to be another useful model for how to relate to the common man in a way that is realistic but not misanthropic.