Before you start talking about a system of values, try to actually understand the values of that system as believed by its practitioners.
Dubious advice. Better advice: try to actually understand the values of that system as practiced, and look at the behaviors that are rewarded or punished by practitioners.
This creates some reference-class problems. You say "X is bad, look how Y is practicing it", and then I say "what Y does is not really X; in fact nobody has tried X yet; I am the first person who will try it, so please don't compare me with people who did something else".
In other words, if you can successfully claim that your system is original, you automatically receive "get out of the jail, free" card. On the other hand, some systems really are original... or at least modified enough to possibly work differently from their o...
Today's post, Traditional Capitalist Values was originally published on 17 October 2008. A summary (taken from the LW wiki):
Discuss the post here (rather than in the comments to the original post).
This post is part of the Rerunning the Sequences series, where we'll be going through Eliezer Yudkowsky's old posts in order so that people who are interested can (re-)read and discuss them. The previous post was Entangled Truths, Contagious Lies, and you can use the sequence_reruns tag or rss feed to follow the rest of the series.
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