Anyone who has decided to strike off the mainstream path has experienced this: Strong admonitions and warnings against what they were doing, and pressures not do it.
It doesn’t really matter what it is you’re trying to change. If you’re trying to become a nondrinker in a drinking culture, if you’re trying to quit eating junk food, if you’re trying to become a vegetarian or otherwise have a different diet, this will have happened to you.
If you decide to pursue a nontraditional career path (artist, entrepreneur, etc), you will have experienced this.
If you try to live a different lifestyle than the people around you – for instance, rising each day at 4:30AM and sleeping early instead of partying, you will have experienced this.
People will pressure and cajole you in many different ways to keep doing it the old way. Almost always, it will be phrased as though they’re looking after your best interest.
The specifics will vary. It could be phrased as cautious prudence – “What if your business doesn’t succeed and you don’t have a college degree? That could be really bad for you.”
It could be phrased as desiring for you to have the best way in life – “Go on, live a little, a beer won’t kill you.”
It could be encouraging you to do whatever you’ve set out to change without any specific reasoning at all.
I used to wonder why this is so common. Are people stupid? Or malicious? They must be one of those two.
If someone has a preference that has an expected value of a better life for them and they really want to live that preference, then why would someone that’s in their peer group or family want to discourage them? Is it because they have different calculations of what’s valuable, even when pursuing obvious no-brainer decisions like quitting the lowest quality junk foods? Is it because they’re malicious and want to hold you back and tear you down?
I think now – neither. Rather, I think it’s an uncritical, unexamined form of desire for equality.
The egalitarian instinct is strong in humans. Most people want others to do and act broadly similar to them. It’s almost an affront if you don’t live the normal way – do you think you’re better than them? No matter how subtle, gracious, or modest you try to be about it, it makes people feel bad if you’re breaking from the egalitarian way.
There’s plenty of research on this. High performers getting punished or shunned.
The French in the title is probably wrong (you’re welcome to correct it if you’re fluent), but I think it has a nice ring to it – Egalite Irréfléchi. Unthinking egalitarianism.
There’s a place for some egalitarianism in the world. A desire to bring others up, to open opportunities for others, to decentralize knowledge, to make resources available for people who want to use them.
But that’s a thoughtful egalitarianism, that examines how we can get everyone to be better. An unthinking egalitarianism generally promotes the status quo and punishes people who strive to do better.
But it’s not stupid or malicious. Stupidity implies poor judgment and malice implies poor motivations. Rather, the egalitarian instinct appears to be natural to most people. Pressures on you to conform (even when conforming is bad for your health and life) are not made out of stupidity or malicious intent, but rather from a natural instinctual drive towards equality that was never carefully examined.
I had neglected this important consideration and I will retract my downvote until I have thought about this more. I still think this post shows off some bad cognitive habits, and I'm afraid that it getting many upvotes would both incentivize bad cognitive habits and reflect poorly on Less Wrong. Thus currently my policy is "downvote if it gets above 15, upvote if it gets below 0, else do nothing".
I didn't mean to imply that. I was trying to say "this is not how one should generally go about constructing a model of any aspect or set of aspects of human psychology" but thought that sounded too clunky.
I agree that a <1000 word post shouldn't go into lots of details, but if you're trying to keep it short then I think it's a bad idea to put forth a hypothesis unless it's sufficiently clear that it's a particularly good or interesting one. I think you could have spent the words you did on your hypothesis much more effectively by proposing some plausible hypotheses and then explicitly asking Less Wrong what they thought. I would consider upvoting the post if you did this, sexy title be damned, but I realize that would be a fair bit of work for you even if you agreed it would be better.
Interesting. Okay, thank you for the feedback. One thing I'm going to think about is signal-to-noise ratio vs. putting ideas out there.
My first inclination is that putting out a larger volume of potentially correct work and letting it go through trial-by-fire and be discussed is superior to waiting until an argument is fully bulletproofed, caveat'ed, and so on. But there's probably some tuneups I could have made to write it more strongly - I'll sleep on it tonight, re-read your comments tomorrow, and give it more thought. Thanks for your replies.