Initially, you argued that societal pressure often reflects genuine wisdom, using examples where a ‘society who aggressively shames overconsumption of sweets’ might be wiser than a child’s raw preferences. You suggested that what I was calling ‘intrinsic preferences’ might just be ‘shallow preferences’ that hadn’t yet been trained to reflect reality.
Now you’re making a different and more sophisticated argument—that the whole framework of ‘intrinsic’ versus ‘external’ preferences is problematic because preferences necessarily develop within and respond to reality, including social reality. While this is an interesting perspective that deserves consideration, it seems substantially different from your initial defense of social restrictions as transmitting wisdom.
There’s also an important point about my own position that I should clarify. When I said ‘generally, upon reflection, people would prefer to satisfy their and others’ preferences as calculated prior to such influences,′ I wasn’t making a claim about how often admonitions reflect preference inversions. Rather, I was suggesting that if people were to reflect explicitly on cases of preference inversion, they typically wouldn’t want those inverted preferences to count; they would recognize these as preferences shaped by forces systematically opposed to their interests.
This connects to what I see as the core distinction: I’m not just talking about external influences or errors in the transmission of wisdom. I’m specifically pointing to cases where restrictions are moralized for the purpose of restriction itself—where the system is systematically deprecating the evolutionarily fit preferences of the person being restricted. This isn’t just clumsy teaching or social pressure—it’s adversarial. The system works by first making people feel guilty about their natural inclinations, then betting that they won’t fully succeed at suppressing those inclinations despite earnestly trying to adopt the system’s restrictions.
Consider the survival of variants of Christianity that ‘do poorly’ at helping people develop healthy attitudes toward sexuality. Their persistence suggests this poor performance is actually functional—they are able to exploit their members precisely because they create a system where most people must be ‘bad’ by design, where hypocrisy isn’t a bug but a feature. When dessert companies can successfully market their products as ‘sinfully delicious,’ they’re exploiting a system of moral restrictions that creates the very compulsive relationship to sweets it claims to prevent.
Initially, you argued that societal pressure often reflects genuine wisdom, using examples where a ‘society who aggressively shames overconsumption of sweets’ might be wiser than a child’s raw preferences. You suggested that what I was calling ‘intrinsic preferences’ might just be ‘shallow preferences’ that hadn’t yet been trained to reflect reality.
Now you’re making a different and more sophisticated argument—that the whole framework of ‘intrinsic’ versus ‘external’ preferences is problematic because preferences necessarily develop within and respond to reality, including social reality. While this is an interesting perspective that deserves consideration, it seems substantially different from your initial defense of social restrictions as transmitting wisdom.
There’s also an important point about my own position that I should clarify. When I said ‘generally, upon reflection, people would prefer to satisfy their and others’ preferences as calculated prior to such influences,′ I wasn’t making a claim about how often admonitions reflect preference inversions. Rather, I was suggesting that if people were to reflect explicitly on cases of preference inversion, they typically wouldn’t want those inverted preferences to count; they would recognize these as preferences shaped by forces systematically opposed to their interests.
This connects to what I see as the core distinction: I’m not just talking about external influences or errors in the transmission of wisdom. I’m specifically pointing to cases where restrictions are moralized for the purpose of restriction itself—where the system is systematically deprecating the evolutionarily fit preferences of the person being restricted. This isn’t just clumsy teaching or social pressure—it’s adversarial. The system works by first making people feel guilty about their natural inclinations, then betting that they won’t fully succeed at suppressing those inclinations despite earnestly trying to adopt the system’s restrictions.
Consider the survival of variants of Christianity that ‘do poorly’ at helping people develop healthy attitudes toward sexuality. Their persistence suggests this poor performance is actually functional—they are able to exploit their members precisely because they create a system where most people must be ‘bad’ by design, where hypocrisy isn’t a bug but a feature. When dessert companies can successfully market their products as ‘sinfully delicious,’ they’re exploiting a system of moral restrictions that creates the very compulsive relationship to sweets it claims to prevent.