> We boomers treated these norms of politeness as at best unnecessary and at worst hypocritical. We threw out the whole concept.
Indeed. Was it purely a youth phenomenon, though, or were there specific elite milieus - perhaps small and relatively isolated ones? - where this attitude flourished? Might these have had the opportunity, for the first time, to short-circuit the conventional status hierarchy - perhaps by means of mass communications - to appeal directly to the status antennae of boomer adolescents?
> young people seem to want to re-introduce some norms of restraint into sexual conduct
Into straight men's sexual conduct, perhaps. From the messaging around monkeypox (see CDC's communications guidelines published just the other day, or this WaPo opinion and comments thereto https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/07/18/monkeypox-gay-men-deserve-unvarnished-truth/) we see that gay men's sexual conduct is sacred and the thought of asking them to restrain it, much less the thought of restraining it by threat of law and force as was done with much non-sexual conduct on account of coronavirus, is almost sacrilegious. Women's sexual conduct is sacred too. I challenge readers to find any recent message from a mainstream source urging women to restrain their sexual conduct.
I've read Albion's seed. In terms of usefulness in helping one understand American history and attitudes, it's very good for colonial and founding era into the early 19th century, fades gradually into the fat tail of the Reagan era, and then falls even faster in the 21st century to the point where today the owl of Minerva is flying at dusk. With a few outlier exceptions of communities that are like living fossils, there's been too much water under the bridge and "fundamental transformation" of America along multiple dimensions, and so it's explanatory power has faded away.
I presume it was Postrel, not Kling, that called the descendants of the Scotch-Irish Borderers the "leave me alone" type alleged to be "nasty." This is a bigoted wholesale smear. I am surprised Kling would repeat it without qualification.
"Calling people by their preferred pronouns and avoiding micro-aggressions can be seen as an attempt to be polite."
That from Postrel is just ridiculousness. The attempts to enforce new pronoun usage is nothing but a power play and is, in fact, a macro-aggression, and it won't stop at pronouns either. If I know you are a male, you will be talked about by me to others as "he"; if you are a female it will be she; and if we are talking to each other, it will be "you". What comes out of my mouth is under my control, not anyone elses. My only concession is that I will use your chosen name, but that isn't a concession at all since it is what I have always done.
I am inclined to agree. Demanding how people refer to you to other people, e.g. in conversations you are probably not involved in, strikes me as a power move or signaling tactic, not politeness. I can see telling someone your pronouns if you are very androgynous in order to avoid embarrassment as polite, but not demanding that people use non-pronouns such as "zhe". That's just flexing over the fact that your tribe's norms can be enforced by punishment.
Part of me thinks the real answer here is to just do it harder. Insist on pronouns that are bizarre and hard to pronounce.
"My pronouns are ichythl/coxythl, and YOU HAD BETTER GODDAMNED USE THEM"
It might be possible to beat them at their own game :P
Then I remember that they have no principles, and wouldn't feel compelled to play by their own rules of "call people by what pronouns they ask you to."
Well, agreed it wouldn't work, but I think Yarvin is very wrong in his battered spouse metaphor. In general I think he is very wrong, in the sense that he is just another would be authoritarian.
Pronouns are essential parts of language. It is not polite for a minority to attempt to change the meanings of these bedrock words for a whole society, and to do so by coercion. Politeness is not the first word that comes to mind in regard to these weird attacks from the social and psychological margin.
Yeah, the kind of wokeness we are all concerned about has nothing to do with politeness. I am all in favor of politeness, but it is not polite to try to force people to say things that are not true (e.g., trans women are women, the implication being there is really no difference between them). Our civil rights movements have gone beyond asking for equal treatment to insisting on better treatment (e.g., all white people are racist, implying that black people are better than white people; that's just the old racism turned around).
Anecdotes without control groups: I observe a cultural shift to be more empathetic as well as an undercurrent of seething rage that may be part of growing up. Being self righteous feels good, especially when the world is more civilized and you can't go to war to rape and pillage (for example, the Middle Ages had its fun for some, "thanks" to the Crusades). Pronouns may be today's battlefield.
Think "rebels without a cause" - seeking out injustices and feeling certain that yours is the first generation to care. There have been horrible injustices throughout the history of humankind, and throughout the animal kingdom. Many people are ignorant of history (20th century wars, genocides, Middle East complexities, the realities of the horrors of slavery in the US as well as other places and other times, the list is endless). Yet they don't or can't think through negative implications of overly progressive policies that ignore human nature, history, economics, and grammar.
To the comment below "I challenge readers to find any recent message from a mainstream source urging women to restrain their sexual conduct," my guess is that data on rapes shows the vast majority are men raping women. Women could wear burkas, but they're stuffy and not part of the executive-suite dress code. Please be careful out there to avoid attack by sexually crazed women. Oh, maybe you didn't mean the issue was violence, you meant "if I have to wear a mask you have to..."? Sorry, that was snarky but I just couldn't resist. :-)
Thanks for arranging the fascinating interview of Virginia Postrel.
Re: The new politeness as a component of wokeness.
The new politeness involves also new conceptions of “coercion” and “violence.”
Traditional concepts of coercion and violence involve physical force or threats.
By contrast, polite society now believes that a choice isn't free if the chooser's alternatives are lousy. For example, the new polite posit that a market for kidneys for transplantation would intrinsically involve coercion, because only a very needy person would sell a kidney. They believe this would be the case, even if a legal kidney market would have paternalistic safeguards — e.g., counseling sessions and waiting periods — to prevent ill-informed and rash decisions.
Similarly, they have a broad concept of violence, which encompasses also offensive speech and murky sexual interactions.
An irony is that the new polite don't hesitate to apply strong pressure and institutional rules to make everyone conform.
I have always viewed system dynamics as time dependent and a way to describe how systems behave over time (often using complex mathematics -- √-1 ). It does cover supply/demand feedback system, but the delays between printing money and inflation have disappeared from the discussions I see in the popular press. In dynamic systems, delays can cause instabilities resulting in failures.
By that definition we have had a lot of dynamism, but like for me I had to provide my technology as a consultant outside the country. Couldn't get "permissions" in this country. Aquaculture is now about a 300 billion dollar business outside the US and we were a technological leader in the '80s but we had a zero commercial growth rate and the rest of the world was double digits growth. That is why today we import 90% of our seafood, the majority of which is aquaculture produce from outside the US.
By the way, aquaculture can move the needle on the feeding 3 billion more people on a finite planet issue. Seafood doesn't have to stand up or keep warm, which makes it much more efficient in converting food into meat on the plate. The difference in efficiency is large enough to allow feeding the 3 billion and the existing 2 billion poor people meat on the plate using the same amount of land area we are now using to feed pigs and chickens. That Atlantic salmon you eat uses 1 kg of feed (mainly soy bean meal) to produce 1 kg of live salmon with a much higher meat yield than chicken or pigs. Shifting from land animals to aquatic animals for a meat sources is significant and it will put the cattle, pig, and chicken farmer out of business. Schumpeter would say it will be disruptive.
Note that the biofloc technology that is used for a lot of the tilapia and shrimp production was developed by Steve Surfling in Ca back in the '70s. His firm was Solar Aquafarms that was forced out of business by the Calif. Dept. of Fish and Game (now wildlife) rules on which tilapia species can be sold in the live markets in Ca. Their scientific justification is pure nonsense. They only allowed the species they were using for weed control, which doesn't do that well in biofloc systems. All the modern production tilapia are hybrids and all the "species" can be interbreed. The term species has been expanded to gain power under the "endangered species act" and California rules.
Innovation in specific areas is more sigmoidal over long times than arithmetic or exponential. You do have a short exponential phase that then hits some market or physical limit. To obtain an overall exponential in economic growth from a sum of sigmoidal functions you need some other rate limiting step outside the innovation system.
That's a good example. Politeness often comes easiest to those who are confident, and nastiness to those who feel weak, and it often seems to have little to do with education or social status, or even mannerisms. No matter the words one uses, the intent to be courteous and nice seems to do a lot of the work, much more than the outward appearance of politeness.
> We boomers treated these norms of politeness as at best unnecessary and at worst hypocritical. We threw out the whole concept.
Indeed. Was it purely a youth phenomenon, though, or were there specific elite milieus - perhaps small and relatively isolated ones? - where this attitude flourished? Might these have had the opportunity, for the first time, to short-circuit the conventional status hierarchy - perhaps by means of mass communications - to appeal directly to the status antennae of boomer adolescents?
> young people seem to want to re-introduce some norms of restraint into sexual conduct
Into straight men's sexual conduct, perhaps. From the messaging around monkeypox (see CDC's communications guidelines published just the other day, or this WaPo opinion and comments thereto https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/07/18/monkeypox-gay-men-deserve-unvarnished-truth/) we see that gay men's sexual conduct is sacred and the thought of asking them to restrain it, much less the thought of restraining it by threat of law and force as was done with much non-sexual conduct on account of coronavirus, is almost sacrilegious. Women's sexual conduct is sacred too. I challenge readers to find any recent message from a mainstream source urging women to restrain their sexual conduct.
Would totally support a discussion of Albion's Seed.
I've read Albion's seed. In terms of usefulness in helping one understand American history and attitudes, it's very good for colonial and founding era into the early 19th century, fades gradually into the fat tail of the Reagan era, and then falls even faster in the 21st century to the point where today the owl of Minerva is flying at dusk. With a few outlier exceptions of communities that are like living fossils, there's been too much water under the bridge and "fundamental transformation" of America along multiple dimensions, and so it's explanatory power has faded away.
I presume it was Postrel, not Kling, that called the descendants of the Scotch-Irish Borderers the "leave me alone" type alleged to be "nasty." This is a bigoted wholesale smear. I am surprised Kling would repeat it without qualification.
"Calling people by their preferred pronouns and avoiding micro-aggressions can be seen as an attempt to be polite."
That from Postrel is just ridiculousness. The attempts to enforce new pronoun usage is nothing but a power play and is, in fact, a macro-aggression, and it won't stop at pronouns either. If I know you are a male, you will be talked about by me to others as "he"; if you are a female it will be she; and if we are talking to each other, it will be "you". What comes out of my mouth is under my control, not anyone elses. My only concession is that I will use your chosen name, but that isn't a concession at all since it is what I have always done.
I am inclined to agree. Demanding how people refer to you to other people, e.g. in conversations you are probably not involved in, strikes me as a power move or signaling tactic, not politeness. I can see telling someone your pronouns if you are very androgynous in order to avoid embarrassment as polite, but not demanding that people use non-pronouns such as "zhe". That's just flexing over the fact that your tribe's norms can be enforced by punishment.
Part of me thinks the real answer here is to just do it harder. Insist on pronouns that are bizarre and hard to pronounce.
"My pronouns are ichythl/coxythl, and YOU HAD BETTER GODDAMNED USE THEM"
It might be possible to beat them at their own game :P
Then I remember that they have no principles, and wouldn't feel compelled to play by their own rules of "call people by what pronouns they ask you to."
Well, agreed it wouldn't work, but I think Yarvin is very wrong in his battered spouse metaphor. In general I think he is very wrong, in the sense that he is just another would be authoritarian.
Con-men can read you. They know what you need. If you need to
be thought of as the smart one or the nice one, they know. They
use that to herd you in. You can give them money, but every
other option gets framed as a challenge. It seems mean to say
something that sounds like you're calling them liars and theives.
Most people have relatively easy lives. They haven't needed to
develop street smarts. So they get conned by these people into
doing what they're told while believing they're just being nice.
Pronouns are essential parts of language. It is not polite for a minority to attempt to change the meanings of these bedrock words for a whole society, and to do so by coercion. Politeness is not the first word that comes to mind in regard to these weird attacks from the social and psychological margin.
Yeah, the kind of wokeness we are all concerned about has nothing to do with politeness. I am all in favor of politeness, but it is not polite to try to force people to say things that are not true (e.g., trans women are women, the implication being there is really no difference between them). Our civil rights movements have gone beyond asking for equal treatment to insisting on better treatment (e.g., all white people are racist, implying that black people are better than white people; that's just the old racism turned around).
Anecdotes without control groups: I observe a cultural shift to be more empathetic as well as an undercurrent of seething rage that may be part of growing up. Being self righteous feels good, especially when the world is more civilized and you can't go to war to rape and pillage (for example, the Middle Ages had its fun for some, "thanks" to the Crusades). Pronouns may be today's battlefield.
Think "rebels without a cause" - seeking out injustices and feeling certain that yours is the first generation to care. There have been horrible injustices throughout the history of humankind, and throughout the animal kingdom. Many people are ignorant of history (20th century wars, genocides, Middle East complexities, the realities of the horrors of slavery in the US as well as other places and other times, the list is endless). Yet they don't or can't think through negative implications of overly progressive policies that ignore human nature, history, economics, and grammar.
To the comment below "I challenge readers to find any recent message from a mainstream source urging women to restrain their sexual conduct," my guess is that data on rapes shows the vast majority are men raping women. Women could wear burkas, but they're stuffy and not part of the executive-suite dress code. Please be careful out there to avoid attack by sexually crazed women. Oh, maybe you didn't mean the issue was violence, you meant "if I have to wear a mask you have to..."? Sorry, that was snarky but I just couldn't resist. :-)
Thanks for arranging the fascinating interview of Virginia Postrel.
Re: The new politeness as a component of wokeness.
The new politeness involves also new conceptions of “coercion” and “violence.”
Traditional concepts of coercion and violence involve physical force or threats.
By contrast, polite society now believes that a choice isn't free if the chooser's alternatives are lousy. For example, the new polite posit that a market for kidneys for transplantation would intrinsically involve coercion, because only a very needy person would sell a kidney. They believe this would be the case, even if a legal kidney market would have paternalistic safeguards — e.g., counseling sessions and waiting periods — to prevent ill-informed and rash decisions.
Similarly, they have a broad concept of violence, which encompasses also offensive speech and murky sexual interactions.
An irony is that the new polite don't hesitate to apply strong pressure and institutional rules to make everyone conform.
Not sure what you mean by: "dynamists"
I have always viewed system dynamics as time dependent and a way to describe how systems behave over time (often using complex mathematics -- √-1 ). It does cover supply/demand feedback system, but the delays between printing money and inflation have disappeared from the discussions I see in the popular press. In dynamic systems, delays can cause instabilities resulting in failures.
By that definition we have had a lot of dynamism, but like for me I had to provide my technology as a consultant outside the country. Couldn't get "permissions" in this country. Aquaculture is now about a 300 billion dollar business outside the US and we were a technological leader in the '80s but we had a zero commercial growth rate and the rest of the world was double digits growth. That is why today we import 90% of our seafood, the majority of which is aquaculture produce from outside the US.
A great victory for activist and bureaucrats.
By the way, aquaculture can move the needle on the feeding 3 billion more people on a finite planet issue. Seafood doesn't have to stand up or keep warm, which makes it much more efficient in converting food into meat on the plate. The difference in efficiency is large enough to allow feeding the 3 billion and the existing 2 billion poor people meat on the plate using the same amount of land area we are now using to feed pigs and chickens. That Atlantic salmon you eat uses 1 kg of feed (mainly soy bean meal) to produce 1 kg of live salmon with a much higher meat yield than chicken or pigs. Shifting from land animals to aquatic animals for a meat sources is significant and it will put the cattle, pig, and chicken farmer out of business. Schumpeter would say it will be disruptive.
Note that the biofloc technology that is used for a lot of the tilapia and shrimp production was developed by Steve Surfling in Ca back in the '70s. His firm was Solar Aquafarms that was forced out of business by the Calif. Dept. of Fish and Game (now wildlife) rules on which tilapia species can be sold in the live markets in Ca. Their scientific justification is pure nonsense. They only allowed the species they were using for weed control, which doesn't do that well in biofloc systems. All the modern production tilapia are hybrids and all the "species" can be interbreed. The term species has been expanded to gain power under the "endangered species act" and California rules.
Innovation in specific areas is more sigmoidal over long times than arithmetic or exponential. You do have a short exponential phase that then hits some market or physical limit. To obtain an overall exponential in economic growth from a sum of sigmoidal functions you need some other rate limiting step outside the innovation system.
That's a good example. Politeness often comes easiest to those who are confident, and nastiness to those who feel weak, and it often seems to have little to do with education or social status, or even mannerisms. No matter the words one uses, the intent to be courteous and nice seems to do a lot of the work, much more than the outward appearance of politeness.