Huh, yeah, I hadn’t consciously noticed that clustering. Hrm, can I come up with counterexamples?
Positive example that’s a single person ignoring social taboo: covert but responsible substance use maybe? I know a couple people who use phenibut or microdoses of LSD because they think it helps participate better in social situations, and as far as I’ve noticed it does, but there is a social taboo against using drugs.
(Not unambigiously positive, I think there’s a somewhat reasonable preference other people might have to know if the folks around them are on some kind of mind-altering substance. And yet my intuition is that’s reasonable for normal doses of LSD but not for normal doses of antidepressants or antianxiety meds.)
Negative example that’s a group of people enthusiastically deciding to change or disregard social norms: Conspiracy to commit fraud. FTX, Enron, Bernie Madoff’s associates, all of these are a small group of people deciding to change or disregard a social norm (don’t lie) optimizing for something (lots of money) and that’s bad. Likewise harmful cults like the People’s Temple, Heaven’s Gate, the Branch Davidians (even before the siege) seem to be doing something like optimizing hard for some kind of spiritual lifestyle that winds up sacrificing some important protective elements. The fraudsters fit the selfish description[1] but I don’t think that’s quite what’s going on with the cults?
At least in my head, both the positive and negative versions feel like similar mental motions. I can sort of poke my brain to step outside social scripts, look around, and optimize for something, and get interesting and creative answers back. It’s sometimes a useful skill, and also, some of the interesting and creative ideas I come up with would make people worse off, blow up in my face if people find out, or otherwise would be unethical, so I don’t do them. In the other direction, there’s some ideas I’ve encountered I thought were morally fine, but broke social norms in a way I didn’t want to do, and I’m glad I figured out the source of my objection.
I think the point is not one person/group distinction, but directed to participants/directed to outsiders distinction.
In your first example the person in some sense ignores taboo in their interaction with themselves. I don’t even think it’s right to call this taboo social one in relevant sense.
In your second example members of the groups ignored social taboo in their interactions with people not in this group. If they decided “Hey, in out company we can lie to each other any time we want without any punishment” it would probably not end well for them, but it wouldn’t be morally bad.
So, like, social munchkinry is good if you have consent and bad if you haven’t.
Huh, yeah, I hadn’t consciously noticed that clustering. Hrm, can I come up with counterexamples?
Positive example that’s a single person ignoring social taboo: covert but responsible substance use maybe? I know a couple people who use phenibut or microdoses of LSD because they think it helps participate better in social situations, and as far as I’ve noticed it does, but there is a social taboo against using drugs.
(Not unambigiously positive, I think there’s a somewhat reasonable preference other people might have to know if the folks around them are on some kind of mind-altering substance. And yet my intuition is that’s reasonable for normal doses of LSD but not for normal doses of antidepressants or antianxiety meds.)
Negative example that’s a group of people enthusiastically deciding to change or disregard social norms: Conspiracy to commit fraud. FTX, Enron, Bernie Madoff’s associates, all of these are a small group of people deciding to change or disregard a social norm (don’t lie) optimizing for something (lots of money) and that’s bad. Likewise harmful cults like the People’s Temple, Heaven’s Gate, the Branch Davidians (even before the siege) seem to be doing something like optimizing hard for some kind of spiritual lifestyle that winds up sacrificing some important protective elements. The fraudsters fit the selfish description[1] but I don’t think that’s quite what’s going on with the cults?
At least in my head, both the positive and negative versions feel like similar mental motions. I can sort of poke my brain to step outside social scripts, look around, and optimize for something, and get interesting and creative answers back. It’s sometimes a useful skill, and also, some of the interesting and creative ideas I come up with would make people worse off, blow up in my face if people find out, or otherwise would be unethical, so I don’t do them. In the other direction, there’s some ideas I’ve encountered I thought were morally fine, but broke social norms in a way I didn’t want to do, and I’m glad I figured out the source of my objection.
I think FTX/SBF claims it wasn’t for selfish ends. I don’t have a position on whether that’s true or not, just noting it.
I think the point is not one person/group distinction, but directed to participants/directed to outsiders distinction.
In your first example the person in some sense ignores taboo in their interaction with themselves. I don’t even think it’s right to call this taboo social one in relevant sense.
In your second example members of the groups ignored social taboo in their interactions with people not in this group. If they decided “Hey, in out company we can lie to each other any time we want without any punishment” it would probably not end well for them, but it wouldn’t be morally bad.
So, like, social munchkinry is good if you have consent and bad if you haven’t.