A possible example in humans is the boob. Other primates don’t have boobs – they are flat most of the time and only swell for lactation. Maybe, at the beginning, swollen boobs was a sign of fitness, then human males got really into swollen boobs, then human females started padding them with fat to appeal to the males’ instincts, leading to the persistent round boobs we witness today – even if the pad of fat isn’t actually very useful for lactation.
It seems odd that humans have such extensive female ornamentation, something which is barely ever seen among other species. This goes beyond boobs. Why is it women who wear makeup and not men? It’s an invariant across different cultures that women are the ones who care and put more effort into their appearance.
What’s the state of the field’s thinking on this? Is it an open mystery with some crackpot theories, similar to the mystery of the existence of gay people?
Flattering rationalists, yes. Willingness to allow disagreements is just a simple baseline indicator. I’d say my criticism of Rationalists’ culture is the tendency to create theories instead of going out and getting data, as crafting and reading about theories is more entertaining than looking at spreadsheets. My own post is a perfect example of being guilty of this. It would be a much better post with a bunch of statistics and studies attached, but I have a day job.
Contrarianism as an identity: I don’t think so.. it’s not a major piece anyway.
“woke” as an outgroup to attack: yes, it’s an outgroup for me, and if I was inventing concepts that only applied to one ideology I didn’t like, that would be suspicious. But I’ve genuinely found that thinking about “ideocultures” has helped me keep a healthy skeptical distance and disentagle a bit from a couple of different ones. The concept came from trying to describe Reddit’s diverse groupthinks across subs rather than something to attack “wokeness” with in particular. I think it’s a nice deradicalizing concept in general for politics for any side, especially the question “what have you been conditioned to pay special attention to, and what have you been conditioned to ignore?”
Nonetheless, there has also been discussion that “wokeness” is difficult to define, as well as the idea that it’s “like a religion” in some way. The “ideoculture” concept helps to clarify things there.