"Be careful" is another good example of an instruction that doesn't really help. The default interpretation seems to be "move slowly and with intense concentration," which can lead to tunnel vision or a failure to act decisively. How to better cash it out depends on the task, but it's often an improvement to promote situational awareness by frequently asking what you expect to happen next and how it will go wrong. For example, "drive defensively" rather than "drive carefully."

I'm not sure if I agree with this characterization of the current political climate; in any case, that's not the point I'm interested in. I'm also not interested in moral relativism.

As an aside, then, if anyone is interested in the sort of thing Stephenson is possibly referring to, David Foster Wallace's essay E. Unibus Pluram: Television and U.S. Fiction (1993, two years before The Diamond Age) is a classic. In DFW's version, hypocrisy was the monarch of vices for a time, although discourse was not a matter of simply pointing it out (which still required the kind of positive statement untenable to a jaded relativist) so much as satirizing it. But that kind of irony was co-opted, leaving people not only unable to take a positive moral stand but now also ineffectual in the only critique remaining. He suggested a return to sincere, positive values:

And the rebellious irony in the best postmodern fiction wasn't only credible as art; it seemed downright socially useful in its capacity for what counterculture critics call "a critical negation that would make it self-evident to everyone that the world is not as it seems." [...] Irony in sixties art and culture started out the same way youthful rebellion did. It was difficult and painful, and productive—a grim diagnosis of a long-denied disease. The assumptions behind this early postmodern irony, on the other hand, were still frankly idealistic: that etiology and diagnosis pointed toward cure; that revelation of imprisonment yielded freedom.

[...]

Rebels are great at exposing and overthrowing corrupt hypocritical regimes, but seem noticeably less great at the mundane, non-negative tasks of then establishing a superior governing alternative. Victorious rebels, in fact, seem best at using their tough cynical rebel skills to avoid being rebelled against themselves—in other words they just become better tyrants.

And make no mistake: irony tyrannizes us.

[...]

The next real literary "rebels" in this country might well emerge as some weird bunch of "anti-rebels," born oglers who dare to back away from ironic watching, who have the childish gall to endorse single-entendre values. [...] The new rebels might be the ones willing to risk the yawn, the rolled eyes, the cool smile, the nudged ribs, the parody of gifted ironists, the "How banal." Accusations of sentimentality, melodrama. Credulity. Willingness to be suckered by a world of lurkers and starers who fear gaze and ridicule above imprisonment without law. Who knows.

Is there a consensus on the account of unemployment and inflation F. A. Hayek provides in his Nobel Lecture (1974)? I'm sympathetic to the abstract philosophy-of-science considerations he argues there, but I don't know enough (anything) about economics to say whether he's using that account to substantiate those considerations, or he's using those considerations to obliquely promote a controversial account. Here's an excerpt:

The theory which has been guiding monetary and financial policy during the last thirty years, and which I contend is largely the product of such a mistaken conception of the proper scientific procedure, consists in the assertion that there exists a simple positive correlation between total employment and the size of the aggregate demand for goods and services; it leads to the belief that we can permanently assure full employment by maintaining total money expenditure at an appropriate level. Among the various theories advanced to account for extensive unemployment, this is probably the only one in support of which strong quantitative evidence can be adduced. I nevertheless regard it as fundamentally false, and to act upon it, as we now experience, as very harmful.

[...]

Let me illustrate this by a brief sketch of what I regard as the chief actual cause of extensive unemployment - an account which will also explain why such unemployment cannot be lastingly cured by the inflationary policies recommended by the now fashionable theory. This correct explanation appears to me to be the existence of discrepancies between the distribution of demand among the different goods and services and the allocation of labour and other resources among the production of those outputs...

He said:

When you play bridge with beginners—when you try to help them out—you give them some general rules to go by. Then they follow the rule and something goes wrong. But if you'd had their hand you wouldn't have played the thing you told them to play, because you'd have seen all the reasons the rule did not apply.

from The Last Samurai by Helen DeWitt

Fiction Books Thread

First, you're focusing on visible achievements.

Sure, those are the ones that I know about :-)

If some person at big company X streamlined Process Y by Z amount, they could be contributing dramatically to that company, and depending on that company their contribution could be passed on in a way that positively impacts society by a large amount.

Yes, though it seems harder to tell whether one can get into such a position ahead of time, with less transparency.

In other words, I think there's some bias in your judgment of impact.

We're interested in impact in other contexts as well, but we know less about the subject. We're interested in learning more.

Second, it's pretty easy to pick out the thread of unconventionality you've favored with your examples: Founders of non-profits and bloggers or other successful mass communicators.

What are some other categories? (I can think of others, like tech entrepreneurship, but I'm wondering if there are ones that haven't occurred to me.)

You can encourage either of these by respectively:

Yes, these are good suggestions. The latter two are things that we've been thinking about, but the first one hadn't yet occurred to me.

I think that attempting to come up with a verbal formalization of our underlying logic and then doing what that formalization dictates is akin to "playing baseball with verbal probabilities"...

I wonder if the extent to which one thinks in words is anti-correlated with sharing that intuition.

I'm a mostly non-verbal thinker and strongly in favor of your arguments. On the other hand, I once dismissed the idea of emotional vocabulary, feeling that it was superfluous at best, and more likely caused problems via reductive, cookie-cutter introspection. Why use someone else's fixed terminology for my emotional states, when I have perfectly good nonverbal handles on them? I figured out later that some people have trouble distinguishing between various versions of "feeling bad" (for example), and that linguistic handles can be really helpful for them in understanding and responding to those states. (That also moved me favorably towards supplementing my own introspection with verbal labels.)

I don't think that kind of difference really bears on your arguments here, but I wouldn't be surprised if there were a typical-mind thing going on in the distribution of underlying intuitions.

I made a related argument recently:

A theory that doesn’t account for detailed behavior is an approximation, and even in scientific domains, you can find conflicting approximations. When that happens—and if you’re not doing science, it’s “when,” not “if”—if you want to keep using your approximation, you have to use the details of the situation to explain why your approximation is valid. Your best defense against reductio ad absurdum, against Proving Too Much, is casuistry. Expect things to be complex, expect details to matter. Don’t ascribe intention or agency to abstract concepts and institutions. Look for chains of cause and effect. Look at individual moving parts and the forces acting on them. Make empirical predictions, and look for unintended empirical predictions. Ask what the opposite principle explains, and find the details that make those explanations compatible.

I've been writing more, and posting some of it online since January, hoping to get broader feedback. The four articles I posted here seemed well-received, although they didn't generate much discussion. More have gone up on my personal site, including some self-indulgent fiction. Think Star Maker fanfiction, but only of the pedantic, moralizing parts, not of the wonder-and-terror-inspiring parts.

Most recently, I gathered some thoughts I'd scattered into recent comments and tweets for an essay on "principled" reasoning. It's probably relevant to LW interests, but I'm not cross-posting it here because I'm not sure LW needs more of that kind of meta-discourse. (I've aimed to make top-level posts only based on things I've actually done, for that reason.)

You come to what is more or less the right consequentialist answer in the end, but it seems to me that your path is needlessly convoluted. Why are we judging past actions? Generally, the reason is to give us insight into and perhaps influence future decisions. So we don't judge the lottery purchase to have been good, because it wouldn't be a good idea to imitate it (we have no way to successfully imitate "buy a winning lottery ticket" behavior, and imitating "buy a lottery ticket" behavior has poor expected utility, and similarly for many broader or narrower classes of similar actions), and so we want to discourage people from imitating it, not encourage them. If we're being good consequentialists, what other means could it possibly be appropriate to use in deciding how to judge other than basing it on the consequences of judging in that way?