A model I picked up from Eric Schwitzgebel.
The humanities used to be highest-status in the intellectual world!
But then, scientists quite visibly exploded fission weapons and put someone on the moon. It’s easy to coordinate to ignore some unwelcome evidence, but not evidence that blatant. So, begrudgingly, science has been steadily accorded more and more status, from the postwar period on.
This post crystallized some thoughts that have been floating in my head, inchoate, since I read Zvi’s stuff on slack and Valentine’s “Here’s the Exit.”
Part of the reason that it’s so hard to update on these ‘creative slack’ ideas is that we make deals among our momentary mindsets to work hard when it’s work-time. (And when it’s literally the end of the world at stake, it’s always work-time.) “Being lazy” is our label for someone who hasn’t established that internal deal between their varying mindsets, and so is flighty and hasn’t precommitted to getting stuff done even if they currently aren’t excited about work.
Once you’ve installed that internal flinch away from not working/precommitment to work anyways, though, it’s hard to accept that hard work is ever a mistake, because that seems like your current mindset trying to rationalize its way out of cooperating today!
I think I finally got past this flinch/got out of running that one particular internal status race, thanks to this and the aforementioned posts.