Being free to the student (although of course the French overall still pay taxes to fund the real costs) makes it less toxic, but it also means you have that much less excuse if you don’t go. So my guess is this makes it maybe 25% less bad?
Zvi
Simulacra Levels Summary
Covid 1/26/23: Case Count Crash
Movie Review: Megan
Covid 1/19/23: Flipped Numbers
On AI and Interest Rates
On Cooking With Gas
Covid 1/12/23: Unexpected Spike in Deaths
Thank you. I agree that the phrasing here wasn’t as clear as it could be and I’ll watch out for similar things in the future (I won’t be fixing this instance because I don’t generally edit posts after the first few days unless they are intended to be linked to a lot in the future, given how traffic works these days.)
If it’s still confusing, I meant: I would not say that making my parents proud is one of my main goals in life. I would expect [people I know] to mostly also not see this as one of their main goals. I think that the percentage of people answering yes is a proxy that correlates to virtues that it is possible to have too much or too little of individually or as a society, a type of respect for family and tradition and accomplishment and other neat (but possible to overdo) stuff like that. A number like 25.6% indicates a terrifyingly low amount of such virtues, such that I would worry about the future of such a country, the same way 99% is terrifyingly high.
Or that you can’t actually fully get rid of your 1st thing without also getting rid of the 2nd thing, not in practice—you don’t want too many people basing too much of their self worth on (especially solely on) their parents judgment of them, but you also don’t want them disregarding such preferences either.
I’ve been editing the post at the Substack version (https://thezvi.substack.com/p/how-to-bounded-distrust) but I don’t see the option to switch back to the usual non-HTML editor on this one, so mods please reimport and let me know what I’m missing.
OK, I’ll do housing as well, no problem. Or top tier jobs.