Guilt over immutable or nearly immutable urges seems like a net loss unless those urges are both proportionally destructive and susceptible to conditioned reduction in the average case.
In my experience, feelings of guilt coupled with the attitude that it is “immutable”, can be an effective excuse not to fix harmful behavior. It’s a sort of ugh field. When the consequences of the behavior become sufficiently intolerable, one is eventually tempted to hang the guilt and test that supposed immutability.
Sure, that’s a failure mode, and it’s one which—stepping down a level of abstraction—seems prevalent in gender discussions (“I’m $gender, I can’t help it!”). From the inside, it can be pretty hard to distinguish between the motivations you can and can’t change with enough reflection. There’s a loose cultural consensus as to what counts, but at the same time that varies between subcultures and can lead to conflict in its own right: consider the “ex-gay” phenomenon in fundamentalist Christian spheres.
Maybe I shouldn’t have mentioned it in context; in my estimation it’s not directly relevant to what we’re discussing upthread. But at the same time I think it’s a mistake to consider our wants entirely plastic; for the time being we’re working with a certain set of hardware, and software changes can only do so much.
In my experience, feelings of guilt coupled with the attitude that it is “immutable”, can be an effective excuse not to fix harmful behavior. It’s a sort of ugh field. When the consequences of the behavior become sufficiently intolerable, one is eventually tempted to hang the guilt and test that supposed immutability.
Sure, that’s a failure mode, and it’s one which—stepping down a level of abstraction—seems prevalent in gender discussions (“I’m $gender, I can’t help it!”). From the inside, it can be pretty hard to distinguish between the motivations you can and can’t change with enough reflection. There’s a loose cultural consensus as to what counts, but at the same time that varies between subcultures and can lead to conflict in its own right: consider the “ex-gay” phenomenon in fundamentalist Christian spheres.
Maybe I shouldn’t have mentioned it in context; in my estimation it’s not directly relevant to what we’re discussing upthread. But at the same time I think it’s a mistake to consider our wants entirely plastic; for the time being we’re working with a certain set of hardware, and software changes can only do so much.