Often those people are innocent. The blinking-innocently isn’t a pretense. But it’s grounded in naïveté.
Or in neurodivergence. It seems to me that certain mind architectures just really struggle with these dynamics, and reliably delving even one layer deep, never mind multiple, is far beyond their abilities. If so, it would make sense to me that there should be some cultural spaces where this limitation is accommodated. Whether any particular space needs to be that is another question, but one that should be explicitly addressed.
1
1I’m still not sure what Zack or Said think of the Royal Society example; Zack talks about it a bit in another comment on that page but not in a way that feels connected to the question of how to balance virtues against each other, and what virtues cultures should strive towards. (Said, in an email, strongly rejects my claim that there’s a difference between his culture of commenting and the Royal Society culture of commenting that I describe.)
This seems to be by far the most important crux, nothing else could've substantially changed attitudes on either side. Do environments widely recognized for excellence and intellectual progress generally have cultures of harsh and blunt criticism, and to what degree its presence/absence is a load-bearing part? This question also looks pretty important on its own, and the apparent lack of interest/attention is confusing.
1awakening is more valuable than ~all kinds of material wealth
This general sort of claim has never made sense to me. Is there an accessible to outsiders attempt to justify it in a way not obviously contradictory with the materialist scientific understanding of the world? In particular, I'm confused about why we would evolve with a capacity for extremely valuable "awakening", when presumably not a single of our distant enough ancestors had ever "awoke", and very few contemporaries ostensibly do.
There are a few, but it doesn't seem to be the consensus? In any case, I agree with you that it's "more egalitarian", but probably not to a large extent due to the aforementioned unreasonable effort.
Do they disagree in principle, or just think that it would take an unreasonable amount of effort that most genetically lucky but still "normal" women couldn't be expected to spend? I can understand their resentment that men get constantly bombarded with those superstimuli and go on to have unrealistic expectations in their daily lives.
A big problem with debating these things is that our culture does not have a good way to talk about mental states.
I'm not sure that the Eastern cultures whence the idea of "enlightenment" came are much better about this. Sure, they have jhanas and such, but AFAICT every sect has its own classification, and the notion of what the ultimate attainment consists of, if anything. There's also the issue of "not-self", "non-duality", "impermanence" etc, which everybody agrees is tremendously important, but nobody agrees on what it really means.
in the case of string theory, the fact that it predicts
Hmm, my outsider impression is that there's in fact a myriad "string theories", all of them predicting everything we observe, but with no way to experimentally discern the correct one among them for the foreseeable future, which I have understood to be the main criticism. Is this broad-strokes picture fundamentally mistaken?
“just want to want stuff” does not seem actionable to me
I mean, you already do want all sorts of stuff I imagine. The non-trick is to just figure out which you want more and how capable are you of achieving it.
Duh, but what are some candidate* concrete steps* for constructing these temporary assemblages that aren’t trivial? Isn’t that begging the original question?
Like I said, I don't think I'll be able to help. I'm seemingly lucky enough to never having had significant problems of this sort, and I've been reading him mostly for enjoyment and intellectual stimulation. He's active on Substack these days though, so you can try contacting him there for pointers.
And yet Trump-like figures have obtained power outside of the United States as well. I think the demand for Trumpism goes beyond just the personal allure of the man himself, even though that has also been a critical part of uplifting the Republicans’ electoral success.
I'm claiming that Trump mainly channels the protest against the "respectable" elite consensus, and sure, people are fed up with it not only in the US.
Trump has remade the Republican party in his image.
Yep, because it was brain dead already, he pushed and the corpse toppled over. This is a blessing and a curse for the Dems - neither Trump nor anybody else on the right seems likely to offer any positive vision any time soon, so all the Dems have to do is to just be slightly less repulsive, something they impressively managed to bungle twice already!
Has any of this happened?
Yes. They aren't in (complete) power, therefore some of the agenda has been slowed down.
It seems to me the wokeness craze of 2019-2022 was in large part caused by Trump
And Trump in 2016 was in large part caused by what was then called the SJW craze of 2008-2015. So it goes.
Trump obtaining political power doesn’t seem to have made the left or the elites any more sane, in my estimation. Quite the opposite.
Yeah, I'm not optimistic. Maybe benevolent robot overlords will swoop in to the rescue against all odds after all?
Do they believe that they have a say in civilization's direction? It's all well and good to have cozy little enclaves under the wing of the US hegemony while it lasts, but if it falters, something relevant beyond local political obstacles may just emerge. Of course, all in all, their position is still more enviable than most.